THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The flesh yet obeyed, struggling anew -
skin bulging with fire and steel.
Her iron of hope into crucible flew -
an ingot to cast; a work to anneal.
HAND TO MOUTH
A twenty, a forty, a shoestring budget,
a dance in an alley to the burglar alarm
a shoelace, tied like a cheap tourniquet
and
a bruise on a jaundiced arm.
MEAT
Gym showers, late parties, hang-outs, movie nights
with all the friends that love me so much
that they can't keep their hands off me
with all the friends that love me too much
and poke and prod and grope at me-
but why worry, when all my friends are here,
and I already know I am just meat.
MEANING
The young man's words
wormed their way into my brain,
and held me down with a weight
heavier than any chain.
"You have no meaning."
BEAUTY
Yesterday, I found beauty
in a rain-soaked window,
the halo of a stoplight.
Today, I returned
to the window, the stoplight
but found no beauty there.
RIGHTEOUS JUNKIE
Clean blankets, formal cups,
symbols carved along his arm.
He's quite well put together,
but the needle has such a charm.
EQUALS
Remember those days
in early January?
When we marched abreast, proclaiming
"Rifles fit for inspection, sir!"
I think we may have been
one and the same, back then,
or at least worth equally much.
CONTROL
Tempering sadness with razor control,
building up pressure, spewing out steam -
each open wound is a door to the soul
and each scar is a silent scream.
PLEASURE
The taste is familiar, painfully so,
and the dopamine comes on demand –
it's easy, so easy, you don't even know
how quickly it gets out of hand.
SHAME
Imagine your body could talk on it's own,
what stories your skin could relay...
I don't think that's something I'd want to be known –
there's already too much on display.
MOLOCH
It was
grainy and choppy and silent as death,
the soldiers like ants,
running and crawling
with their faces contorted in agony and
terror,
screaming and crying and begging for help –
pleading
for mercy from that unfeeling machine.
She was fourteen years
old when they took her,
down into the basement of her family
home,
and laughed at her tears and her terrified struggle,
taking
turns with her body before slitting her throat –
their humanity
lost to that unfeeling machine.
Half a
world away, at the end of the rainbow,
a man
sits in comfort while replaying footage
of
air-burst shells shredding boys into ribbons,
of
demoralized conscripts burning to death –
mocking
the victims of that unfeeling machine.
Walking in lockstep with
their brothers in arms,
the oldest is sixty, the youngest
fifteen,
but age is a number, and numbers don't matter –
except
the "200" painted on the sides of the trucks
of the ferrymen of that unfeeling machine.
A tearful goodbye, the
last they would share –
he wouldn't come home for Christmas this
year.
And in March she awoke to the phone and the news,
and she
sank to her knees while biting back tears –
cursing her life and
that unfeeling machine.
A SURGEON'S HANDS
"You've got hands
like a surgeon." I said with a grin,
and gave a nervous
laugh from my seat.
As those hands so unshaken, so unwavering –
like the granite statues
at the Helsinki train station –
Coaxed out crimson in a plume so sublime,
the basilic
vein giving birth to a sprout
like a rose in an hourglass, frozen
in time –
like a mushroom cloud
captured in purest amber.
He gave a crooked smile
but still didn't speak,
eyes sunken, unfocused and weary –
from
the three days awake, or the ten years a freak,
or the farewell to hope
he gave a lifetime ago.
“Loosen the strap or
your vein's gonna collapse.”
He said, off-hand, and the knot
came undone.
I gave a nod and a thumbs-up, I tried to relax,
as the flower
melted into a crimson
sea.
“Keep going.” I
said, the sanguine bloom
now barely a memory, a thought, an
abstract –
wiped clean by the taste
of chemical fumes,
and the fire that
needled
and burned in my lungs.
“I think we bought
the same shit, same source...”
– I said while taking deep,
painful breaths –
“...this shit gives me the cough as
well, same as yours.”
“Bad batch. Cunts.”
He said,
and I spat in the sink in
response.
I'd pulled down the blinds
and put him to bed,
had a breakfast of Valium,
maybe just to silence
his anguished voice that
still played in my head –
“This isn't fucking
worth it
anymore.”
SUPPOSE I WERE
suppose i were
to walk into
rush hour traffic
what a shame
CHRISTMAS IN HELSINKI/YOU CAN'T BUY A HEART
