Mozel Sanders Dinner

My friend says its Biblical
when I say “I gave less, but
its all I have, so it means more”
Is it biblical? – The Eucharist.

Sure. The family tradition
passed on from father to son.
But in Fellowship Hall I eat
a sandwich and am not sure

if there is any meat to it
Not just an unleaven bread
with some sad-sogged cran
sauce, the whole wheat

stuck between my teeth like
my uncles racism, or the pilgrims
coughing into quilts, or Judas
giving his gold to the priest.

Extended Ennui

It is midday. I am still lying in bed. I twist the curtain and black sheet so the lying sky is all that I see for several hours. Within this frame I hear an old timey plane. The propeller; I cannot see it. And so now the loading and unloading of semi-interested work thunders across Lynhurst from the industrial park.  It creates a force field over my house, like a heavy depression in the clouds, or a net cast.

Wildlife

A red fox, known always moving, stripes in the bushes and slips over the steps to sit in front of me. It stares thin and narrow cleaning its black paws. Swift lash of tongue. She lowers her head to the ground and pauses for an exaggerated moment taking two breathes before turning and vanishing into the bushes.  And now, as I bask in the heat of a red autumn wash, I hear a faint call warping through the trees – the integral yelp of an empty stomach.

Man Carrying Sofa – Tony Hoagland

Whatever happened to Cindy Morrison, that nice young lesbian?
I heard she moved to the city and got serious.
Traded in her work boots for high heels and a power suit.
Got a healthcare plan and an attorney girlfriend.

Myself, I don’t want to change.
It’s January and I’m still dating my checks November.
I don’t want to step through the doorway of the year.
I’m afraid of something falling off behind me.
I’m afraid my own past will start forgetting me.

Now the sunsets are like cranberry sauce
poured over the yellow hills, and yes,
that beauty is so strong it hurts –
it hurts because it isn’t personal.

But we look anyway, we sit upon our stoops
and stare, — fierce,
like we were tossing down a shot of vodka, straight,
and afterwards, we feel purified and sad and rather Russian.

When David was in town last week,
I made a big show to him of how unhappy I was
because I wanted him to go back and tell Susan
that I was suffering without her –

but then he left and I discovered
I really was miserable
– which made me feel better about myself –
because, after all, I don’t want to go through time untouched.

What a great journey this is,
this ordinary life of ants and sandwich wrappers,
of x-rated sunsets and drive-through funerals.

And this particular complex pain inside your chest;
this damaged longing
like a heavy piece of furniture inside you;
you carry it, it burdens you, it drags you down –
then you stop, and rest on top of it.

 

from What Narcissism Means to Me

Here Is Some Heft

Summer is nice. That said,

I’ve been thinking a lot. I’ve been meta-thinking a lot. I’ve been pretty meta. <- It took me 3 times to write that sentence. Metal. I am also pretty metal.

The alarms are cyrin’ out for their big-bird mommy, the dirty cotton in the sky, the big deal that blind people in Indiana really don’t see that often, but we often feel the need to say

hey, we’re in the bible belt. I mean tornado alley. But at the same time I do not. That is how this works. Thats why sometimes people don’t get poetry in other languages. I am a bat. pitcher. tent. Things that are penises.

People who are dicks: Fuckin, fuckin, that reverend or guy, or jim jones, that dude-where is he, I dunno.  People who are Dick Wadz: friends.  (Question: Is this dick-ish?: I sold my iPhone/case/charger, wrote the guy/girl an email explaining that I’m shipping said iPhone/case/charger in a Motorola box. Guy/girl writes back: “hi the phone why the come moterla box  i bought aplie iphone the have to come the same box ok.” And I’ve decided to not respond, and send the damn phone like I said.) I actually just finished erasing the hell out of my phone. And took a trip to bummersville.

A POEM THAT HA ah, I just took a two hour break to watch the wind go “wippady-doo I’m a big smelly fart”

A POEM NOW

I am no other among slumber,

turning into the cool attraction

from eyelids stinging low-exposure

hallucinations. A de-humidifier for

the basement, where was found between

ceiling panels the arachnid ghost skeleton.

Glowing open, alive with its shed air.

Down the walls I dream free

from house centipede necking

In the running blue and still warm

antique vapors. Turn into my pores.

Soused and with a waking cramp

I am paralysis until midday. Weighing a profile

or fetal shadow soaked into the sheets.

Here is what I am doing at 7:45am

1Putting time stamps on fucking everything I’m writing this morning

2Thinking of all the ideas I’ve had for blog posts

3Looking around my room for motivation (where is it?!)

4Listening to Bon Iver, and hating it. Not in the mooooood.

5But not changing it, because I respect that I like these songs on occasion.

Is that what is wrong with this generation. Of course,

I mean the time stamps. and what is it with postal stamps?

Whose idea was it to tax conversation?  If I were you I would

get it all back, sell it. Because I can’t even pay rent. Because I’m lazy?

Can you read this blog post from a source that you haven’t somehow paid for?

Is this redundant? because we can stop reading.  Of course,

the mood may strike you dull and mugged like the past 20-something hours

but if there’s one thing we can all agree on

its that 1. I am no good at math and 2.

I know good music when I’ve listened to it.

666 Saturday May 14, 2011 7:59:301234567891000000000000000000(so on and onward)

PETER DAVIS RULEZ

Read a LETTER FROM THE PAST and feel reassured about something,

anything, heck

everything.

If you feel

that is.

Time and Space

gravity grants spatial inevitability

right foot dropping the left into bed

with tight skin and the gulping darkness to firm

the curves of my spine like every old else waking

with sour lips and a taste for discomfort at its finest

 

Heroes

And here’s this kid on my porch

three sheets to the toga’d solo cup

toting a holler so loud and going on

about his hero Walt Disney.

so I said everyone knows Walt Disney

was an anti-semi who feasted on young Cuban boys.

and could you believe it, he tells ME to fuck off.

on my porch. — “Debatable.” — NO BRO.

you see: I pay rent here. and I have been

to the happiest place on Earth.

and it rained.

My Place

In a field traced with 3 barbed wires, exiling me to a mound of Johnson plots, a brown horse and white goat graze around an abandoned sun-bleached dresser. The procession was long, pulling us over the interstate and into gravel roads with green looming branches – in my backseat I tunneled into a song, muting the bickering in front of me. As the singer’s voice swooned regret over a miscarriage, I thought about the last time I had stood among the country sweat bees and lowered a coffin into its vault.  I gripped my side of the nylon strap, near my Aunt’s head, and took a strong stance along the cliff of her grave. After sealing her fate, cousins wondered around the ridged field, saying hello to relatives whose names I never bothered to learn. All condolences due, and done, I took to myself – as I would again, and will again – and from under the shaded pit I walked to the edge of my Mother’s family name and lit a cigarette. Through my smoky sighs I could hear tear choked laughter – a common occurrence at these funerals: my Aunt’s two daughters and young son are reanimating the sarcastic spirit of a body deteriorated by violent cancer. “She’d get so mad about all the hairspray I’d use,” and “Dad was the one to tell. Mom would give you a verbal beat down.”  The listening kin still gathered around the grave and smiled in admiration for their strong-willed blood.

Guilty that I had known my Aunt, but never fulfilled any nephew’s regiment, I footed over the great burial mound to blur the mourning orphans, careful not to step on any residual memory, to arrive at my current place, along the barbed wire fence. There in the field ahead of me, like now, the dresser stood with its infinitely empty drawers sticking out at different lengths, only there was no white goat or brown horse chewing overgrown grass. There was nothing more than a pale piece of furniture, paint chipped and handles rusted.

I had felt a hollow that day, in my chest, as deep as the dresser drawers were empty and the drought orange field was inhabited. Colder than the soil pressed beneath 650 pounds of my Aunt’s dead weight and afforded tomb.  Closing my eyes I summoned every hope a young man could have at the beginning of summer – but did not pray – for a black horse hidden by optical illusion to prance from behind an empty statue, thus inheriting the dead-guarded dead field as his own. It’s side glaring from the sun, bright like holy wings, that only darken its armored muscle further. Of course, I knew that upon opening eyes there would be only this monument to my inability to join a family in their grief. So I steadied my blind body by cupping the barbed boundaries, gently first, as to keep my balance, then a stiffer grip, prodding into my skin, as the desperation swayed my mind and body into feeling a dark omniscient neigh about the earth. The words of the song tremor my memory: fetal horses gallop in the womb; seeding courses in an empty room.

Today we buried my Aunt’s mother 15 feet from the freshest grave. Everything was back in its place: the canopy, the cousins, the bees, the dresser – the dialogue the same, only from a different generation.  And I, having done the pallbearer things to do, have returned to the post where I tried to paint Golgotha with the blood from my hands. Where I now find the old rugged dresser being gnawed by an empty-eyed goat and my plea for a dark reaper replaced by a stunted horse of the dullest brown shaking flies from its neck. Before I have the time to digest my disappointment I am met with hands coming around my shoulders and stomach. The grandchildren of the deceased are at my side: two women crying, and a very silent man. The man holds his hand out past the fence and motions for the horse to come. The women laugh at the goat, still eating paint chips, and remind each other of the time spent in the old family cabin, and the goats that would get into the trash. The man pulls his arm over the fence – the horse as stubborn as ugly – and says that those damn goats ate a hole right through his front bike tire and he racked himself trying to get a running jump (I picture a just outlaw jumping off the second story of a ghost-town saloon onto his noble white steed). His broken vow of silence rumbles in my throat as the four of us burst with laughter. When the chuckles shrivel back into nasal whimpers, and the man attends to his eager daughter (wanting a tour of the ole place), I am left again with a field and its permanent resident, holding out arms as if to welcome – a place for my shirts and pants. The two animals are lying in the shade of an overgrown mulberry tree. Behind me I hear the jostle of elders climbing into big trucks and the scream of a little girl who has been stung; it is time to leave. Incapable of turning the horse black, I want to make one last attempt to inspire fate. I’ll jaunt over the fence, ignoring the calls of those whose names I do not know, and make a b-line for the dresser, shouldering its dense weight into the goat and horse manure.

But what then, as I am standing over its wreckage, do I make of the field? It is empty: empty drawers, empty animals, – empty because I am outside with my hands gripping barbs. It is not the dreamt gallop of a winged reaper that paralyzes me in fear, it is the voices of those, whose names I do not know, calling my name, my color, as if to welcome me – a path for my life; a place for my body.