Poetry

              Sobriety: Day 84

Driving home from outpatient, a cry from nowhere pierces the hum. It’s my own gut-shot voice trailing blood across the windshield & dash, but I’m still surprised by it. Anxiety controls my sounds and movements like a cordyceps fungus controls an insect. More cries rush the hole made by the first so my throat becomes a fountain filling the cabin with locusts that die in mid-air and pile into drifts on the passenger seat. I’m alone, but I imagine someone watching my breakdown like I was a character in a show, because I can’t seem to process my emotions without involving someone else. This observer is more human-scale than twenty years ago when my wailing would have been prayer. I think the shape of these sounds is holier. Not supplication so much as islands erupting from an ocean. They will one day be habitat. The maps will need changing.

              Sobriety: Day 90

You’re told it's a benchmark. Like a toddler
pointing. Practically developmental. 
A sign the brain is knitting together,
picking back up where it left off. 
“Maturing stops at the point of addiction,”
as if the brain had been caught and rooted in place
in a game of freeze tag, waiting for someone
to crawl through its legs. You shouldn’t be so
offended. You’re the one who would look at
your wife and tell her with solemn sincerity,
uncapped marker still in your hand,
that you didn’t draw on the wall.
And like a child, you need recognition
so you text “90 days!” and when she texts back
a single emoji—meager scrap for the gaunt street dog
your soul has become—the anger you’ve nursed
in dark rooms burns its way out. You complain
that no one is praising you for what you’re not doing,
and are caught off balance when she gives it right back,
telling you how long she’s been running,
circling your unresponsive statue,
watching for any chance to unfreeze you. 

              Sobriety: Day 146

It was supposed to happen by now.
The dopamine fields strained to collapse
were supposed to flare and blossom to life,
if only briefly, like a wildflower bloom in
Death Valley after the rarest of rainfall.
Not a sustainable harvest, but a promise
of something worthwhile. The clouds are
gunmetal gray and the field crunches under
foot but if I just keep walking the
moisture regime may eventually change.
Topography may be more forgiving. 
The coins in my pocket more lustrous.
The people I meet will still care about coins
and none will remember the things I’ve done.

The room is yours, like the house, like the sun, like 
the man you want me to call Papa.

There are hands. His. Yours. Hands that push and sting and 
choke my body. My body, also yours.

There’s a mouth. I flinch when it calls my name. Everything is so ugly 
in the mouth, especially me.

It’s all for your own good, you say with kindness; 
your kindness also a mouth.

There’s a window. It lets nothing out, not even air.
In the room in my dreams, I sit by the window and sing to the moon.

Behind me, the old fan cricks and cracks and groans like an ailing ghost. 
I sing and sing, louder and louder, so I never look at it too long.

“Poetry is a survival.”  --Paul Valéry

“Poetry is a pipe.”  -- Paul Éluard and André Breton

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”  -- René Magritte


Poetry is a pipe
and not a pipe
Poetry is music
or perhaps a polar bear

This is not a poem about a polar bear
It is a poem about a poem
and the bear too is a poem
a poem written by a bear
                 about a bear
a bear by and about a bear

the bear, a god, self-fertilizing
the bear, a bear, self-poetizing

Poetry is not a pipe
until it becomes a pipe
filled with stilted words
filled with lilting music
filled with walrus-tusk tobacco

the bear, a poem, self-ursinizing
the bear, Narcissus, self-mesmerizing
the bear, a pipe, self-smoking

The bear is a pipe
and not a pipe
The bear is opium 
The bear is music

the bear, a rhyme, self-aestheticizing
the bear, a drug, self-anesthetizing

The poem is a bear
and not a bear

The poem is a pipe
and the smoke, a forest fire
a poem to burn down the world
The poem is a bear
wearing a ranger hat 
who threatens to let you do it

the world, a pipe, self-playing
the world, a fire, self-immolating
the bear, a poem, self-saying
the bear, music, self-syncopating
the bear
self-conscious
	self-prophesying	
	self-engendered
	self-contained 
	self-referential
the bear rhymes itself with perfect rhythm
the bear rhymes itself with bear 
 

The tricolored blackbird is a native of California, and reputedly the inspiration for the electronic sounds of R2D2, for which it received no credit, no benefits, no compensation:  it is an officially threatened species.  A feather from the epaulet can be used in divination.  The blackbird is a tri-gendered subject.  It is majestic.  And economically oppressed.  It is related to the red-winged blackbird, its far more common cousin.  The tricolored blackbird of California is underprivileged; 80% of its urban population is located in federally designated food deserts.  They subsist by dumpster diving.  Those still in the wild eat their fledglings, Medea-like, in acts of vengeance against unfaithful partners.  The blackbird’s rating on the Quality of Life Index (developed by M.D. Morris) is 16 out of 100.  Its metalinguistic habits have not yet been explored.  The tricolored blackbird is asexual and aromantic.  Specimens in aviaries reproduce by IVF.  In the wild, they rely heavily on social reproduction.  A recent government grant provided $1.2 million to tag 10,000 tricolored blackbirds.  The recipient is a major R1 institution with plans to attach electrodes to the blackbird’s brain and transliterate each caw into English with the long-term goal of constructing a Franco-English-Blackbird pidgin.  No one asked the tricolored blackbird what it thinks of being tagged.  Increasingly, they are found with BP oil slicked on their wings.  Poachers have been known to kill them for a single red feather from its wing. The blackbird is itself and nothing else.  But this one here is special, No. 07115.  The blackbird is itself, but we all need some ID.