Do not stand at my grave and weep

(After Mary Elizabeth Frye's maudlin piece.)

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
Just go on home and get some sleep.
I can't hear your sobs and tears,
My rotting head no more has ears.
Wail as you will --- under your feet
Lies but a piece of rotting meat.
But even were this body whole,
There is no spirit, there is no soul.
You speak aloud, and cry, and moan,
But I've no more sentience than a stone.
Whatever now you say you feel
You should have said when I was real.
So leave me mold'ring under the loam,
Dry your tears and go on back home.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. There is no I.

Place holder haiku 3

The silvery jet
Streaks over the cirrus clouds
Carrying me east.

I sit, tranquilized,
Preternaturally alert,
Doubting Bernoulli.

Place holder haiku 2

Haiku to Republicans

You are deluded
Everything you think is wrong
And you're evil, too.

Place holder haiku 1

I'm busy learning
At a reading seminar ---
Or I may be dead.

Love Cabbage

"Enough! Enough," he cried between blows.

She paused, lowering the umbrella. "You haven’t suffered enough, you little worm," she hissed, and grabbed another implement of destruction. He turned to run, but it was too late --- she’d castrated him. Howling with laughter like a chlorine gas hurricane, she trounced out of the house, her ubiquitous cape (the red one with the quaint yellow "S" in the center) flapping behind her.

A decade later, she saw him again, this time on the street corner. He crouched amid broken glass, peep-show fliers and syringes. He was wearing a tattered American flag over his thin shoulders and his flesh was a mesh of lacerations and bruises. She stepped forward and dropped a silver bullet into his outstretched hand. "Thank you, ma’am," he whispered, his voice a cracked and haunting growl. She couldn’t bear to answer and drove her limousine in the opposite direction.

A year after that meeting, she was sitting in her mansion, swilling pine cleaner. A century of questing extremities, a thousand probing digits, had kneaded her now-pulpy, now-forgotten features. The doorbell rang. Her servant, the President of the United States, hurried to answer it. As soon as the door was open, he rushed past her servant and into her drawing room. "I live for your meandering devices," he said, unable to control himself.

She decided then that she’d had enough, and, reaching into her bureau drawer, pulled out a five-foot-long Pink Pearl eraser and rubbed him out.

Winter in springtime

Spring Break's almost done
I read some books, saw some films
And shot three squirrels

It's Easter Sunday
Let us celebrate new life
Here's an Easter post.

The message should be clear, anyway

I saw Spinal Tap
On the big screen with Epalg
Six stars out of five

In the age of chimpanzees I was a monkey

Dinner with Friar
And his (pregnant again) wife
Life has passed me by

Boy looks for something to destroy

So much depends on
A simple quick text message
On a small gray phone

William Carlos
Williams was not all that
Great of a poet

Like my head against a board

This bar smells like smoke
It's crammed with youthful morons
Why do I come here?

Hot chick wants to play
Photo match game on our dime
We win big; she leaves

Waiting for my real life to begin

While thunderstorms rage
With junk food in my belly
I watch DVDs

Those haiku in French
What could be more pretentious?
鄙人不知道.

I'm a sorry entertainer

Ne pas travailler
Toujours au lit à neuf heures
Peut-êtr' faire une course

Je n'ai pas d'envie
De passer ma vie comme ça
C'est facile mais seul

Let me fall out of the window with confetti in my hair

Spring break is this week
I'll waste it dicking around
And haiku updates

The End

I write gloomy autobiographical things. No wonder I'm so unpopular.

The End

A man’s not a man when he’s crying and pleading
When his soul is in strife and broken and bleeding
And he curses the crucified life that he’s leading

The start of the end is in every beginning
A loss is potential in what seems to be winning
The grace of the angels can save us from sinning

There’s a spark of death in each fertilized egg
A human monster makes a hurt woman beg
And a tired old man’s on his very last legs

A small bird alone is found with broken wing
A lonely girl is made sound and given a ring
The heavens resound as the angels still sing

When the bird’s body is whole away it will fly
When the girl feels secure, she’ll make her man cry
If the angels stop singing the world by fire will die

Jeffrey's Monkey Hit the Road

Lyrics to a song of loss and dependence.

Jeffrey’s Monkey Hit the Road

It seems the phone won’t stop ringing
Wasted toilet water singing
Sympathy cards, junk and bills
There’s no more room, mailbox is filled

Jeffrey’s monkey hit the road
Jeffrey’s monkey took a load off
Nothing good does this bode
Jeffrey’s monkey just lost his heart
Jeffrey’s monkey won’t do his part

Not a change of clothes for some time
The smell, the must, the awful grime ---
Where is Bobo who would dart and lunge
Here and there with his cloth and sponge?

Jeffrey’s monkey hit the road
Jeffrey’s monkey took a load off
Nothing good does this bode
Jeffrey’s monkey finally called it quits
Lazing god knows where, picking nits

Friends will find Jeff sad and alone
His little helper gone to parts unknown
They’ll bust down the door only to find
Jeffrey’s monkey left him behind

Sometimes life throws us a curve
Life hits and runs as it hits a nerve
We take what comes and hope it lasts
And try not to cling too hard to the past

Jeffrey’s monkey hit the road
Jeffrey’s monkey took a load off
Nothing good does this bode
Jeffrey’s monkey had it up to here
Wants a life of skittles and beer

Will We

Another free verse. This was written fairly recently and given to an acquaintance.

Will We

Will we meet again through the blood-rimmed eyes of ghosts
Or in some stranger’s stomach
Or will we lay side by side, paralyzed
By the biting burn of freezing metal
On our respective slabs
Where bursts of breath no longer cloud the chilled air between us?
Will you be the nails that puncture me
And will I be your cross as well?
Or will I be the rock that you push uphill
Until I mischievously slip from your exhausted fingers
And roll to the safety of the valley bellow
Cradled like a hug between looming hills?

Oregon Journal (Leavetaking)

Here's one of those free verse poems I referred to yesterday. It's probably the poem I'm proudest of (the best of a bad lot, perhaps). I wrote it many years ago when I left Portland for the first time.

Oregon Journal (Leavetaking)

The sun filtered through gray clouds
became the color of burnt orange
a rectangle of ocher on my brown tiled floor
shining slanted into the room
I went to the window to see
the imposing gray cloud
pushing back a few streaks of
brilliant pale blue
as the day ends and the sky says dusk
and dusk is the color of a bruise
slate blue, gray, smoky, burnt
But that fiery pale orange blur
and those wisps of cyan
show what the sky could be
if dusk never fell

Clear gray drops
From a pale blue gray sky
Fall to the brown gray pavement
Making little dark asterisks
And the pedestrians
Under caps, umbrellas
Work-boots plodding
Look down at the sidewalk
Always at the sidewalk
As if they were reading the sidewalk
As if the sidewalk were a text
And the answers could be found
In the footnotes from the sky

A city of books, indeed
Shelves of musty tomes
Fiction poetry cooking
Travel erotica bibles
Classics comics
Pulpy rarities with brittle pages
And scuffed leather covers
Mass market paperbacks
Shiny new crisp stiff clean
Hand me down archetypal class texts
On their seventh reincarnation
Dog-eared, scarred with wobbly underlining
Swerving inadvertently across printed lines
And tattooed with five different
Dayglo colors
Slim zines, local acid poetry
Cranked out in somebody’s basement
Stocked here as a favor to a friend
The customer scans the eight-foot shelves
And decides that sometimes
The only thing worse than no choice
Is too many choices

Quality time at Quality Pie
formica tables and bad food
and a puffy waitress
who runs a zine about her personal life
in her spare time
“Lovely Darlene” perhaps
The table of drag queens
loud and tall and glossy
and feathered like peacocks
laughing at everything and nothing
The table of students
nervous or carefree
smoking, taking it all in
trying to learn something here
or vacant and numb
The blue collars at the pinball machine
and at the counter
shaking their heads at it all
At Quality Pie, the poorer
tawdrier flashier
more adventurous younger sister
of the Hot Cake House
It vanished one day
Like an impulse to adventure
like all recalcitrant wayward girls
climbing in a stranger’s van
in the rain

“It really does smell like pine trees here,”
She observed,
Stepping out of the airport
Into the crisp wet air, and
Even standing on the pavement
Surrounded by circling cars and buses
Facing the layer cake parking lot
With the fumes and noise of jet engines
Overhead and behind us
I had to agree

Springtime at the college
The sky bluer than a picture
Clearer than any day you’ve seen before
No one can remember the rain
When they see that sky
And the emerald expanse of lawn
Between the elegant brick
Hallowed halls
Young men from another era,
Tie-dyed and long-haired and goateed
And grinning with that hippie mellow
That is so easily dispelled
And replaced with righteous ire,
Mingle with bald-headed standouts
In plaid workshirts and boots
Faces set in determination
Determined to make something
Out of something
In this place that may not be for them
And beautiful diaphanous sylphs
Long-haired brainy and nut brown
In calashes and tank tops
And thin sun dresses rippling
In the almost imperceptible
Breeze that brings this warmth
To just this side of pleasant...
For the figures in this picture
There can be no surrender
And an endless web of possibilities
Until the spring ends
And leaves turn gold, red, brown

Pioneer Square
is a city
It is a home
to the street rats
Studded, leathered, spiked
Begging smokes and change
Squatting on the bricks by the fountain
Young man, your face is
a bleak map of indifference
Masked by a forced hostility
But under that...
under that is surely fear
Fear they will take your city
Fear they will make you a new home
Fear they will make you one of them
Young man, there is no healing of your bruise
Not until you find something
The cop on his horse
who has his eye on you
(there is an eye behind that mirrored disc)
he’s found power in the law
The pinstriped suit, ramrod straight
who looks right though you
who cannot see you
who will not try
he’s found money
he’s found family
he’s found each one feeds off the other
and each one calls out for the other
and he’s trapped
but he’s striving
The filthy tottering drunk
muttering swaying muttering
till tourettic barks of insults leap out
he’s found oblivion
ahead of time
and that’s just fine with him
The bellowing fanatic with his unwieldy placard
who hands out little rectangles of salvation
twenty crudely drawn pages of warnings
a free ticket to godhead
well he’s found the supreme confidence
of being right
he’s found the arrogance of the minority
he’s found the justification
for what he’s always wanted to do
(tell people what’s wrong with them)
What will you find
in Pioneer Square
by the transit system office
by the fountains
by the cop
by the businessman
by the drunk
by the prophet
By yourself

No Denying

Readers of this blog know that ol' Chance enjoys himself a little poetry. From the title of the blog itself to quick allusions peppered throughout the posts' titles and texts, from outright quotations to my often-Googled top ten list, I have never been shy about showing mad respect for the classic wordsmiths.

But never have I shared my own execrable attempts at verse with my largely hypothetical reading public. Until now. Yes, it's 2008, the Year of the Rat, and it's time to dig through my youthful indiscretions with Calliope and revive some of the least shabby entries.

This one is called "No Denying." I wrote it around ten years ago. It's pretty much doggerel, I'm afraid, but it's deeply felt doggerel. It's a bitter description of a very bad breakup. Like almost all my poems, it rhymes; influenced heavily by the poets who worked within strict rhyme schemes (Tennyson, Keats, Houseman, Shakespeare, Dylan), I tend to agree with Garth Ennis' devil in "Hellblazer" --- "poems that don't rhyme reflect a fundamental lack of effort." That said, however, I have written a couple of free verses in my time, and I'm going to share them in future posts.

No Denying

There's no denying, I would be lying, if I said I wasn't in love
It just goes to show that you never know what happens when push comes to shove.
There's no true answer, hate spreads like cancer; I won't say that I think it's right
But nothing will last and some things end fast and love dies like switching a light.

There's no denying, I wasn't trying, I don't think that I'd call it fair
That awful sunrise you tore out my eyes --- you taught me what it meant to care.
Thought you'd drained me dry, I couldn't say why; saw myself as only a void
I felt them that dawn, and then they were gone, love's remnants you'd finally destroyed.

There's no denying, spent some time crying, once I learned it truly was dead
I know you wept too, I felt it anew: within me compassion had fled.
Yes I could have tried before our love died with some hope of finding a cure
It's almost a crime, and yet by that time our motives were no longer pure.

There's no denying, I would be lying, if I said I wasn't to blame
I am still haunted by what you wanted, but my life is only a game.
I was part wild, part little child; my love was so grounded in trust
You drifted away, then finally one day you crumbled my pride into dust.

There's no denying, I wasn't trying, my apathy guided me through
My myriad fears throughout all our years had taken a back seat to you.
So what a surprise fell from those blue skies, put to death my ignorant dream ---
Like some insane hoax, the cruelest of jokes, and rooted in low self-esteem.

There's no denying and no defying your base urges and your senses
I gave you a ring, asked only one thing, and lowered all my defenses.
Like some lovesick dog, I walked in a fog; in your heart no light of love shone.
Now hurt and afraid, I've gravely repaid the wages of being alone.

There's no denying, I wasn't spying, I was in no way suspicious
I couldn't conceive, in no way believe you could ever be that vicious.
Perhaps in your heart, that cold twisted part, those urges were too long denied
There's nothing to say, no point anyway --- I feel cold and empty inside.

There's no denying, we are all dying, we move toward our graves with each breath
We go with a debt of pain and regret to the court that we know as death.
I gave you your space, let you set the pace; me alone in our double bed
You wanted it all, the rise and the fall; now your hands are maculate red.

There's no denying, I think of dying, more than I consider my life
Taunted and hunted, every part stunted, I'm no man to take on a wife.
At least I was torn before I was born; a bad jar, but quite a fine start ---
Twisted and scarred and calloused and hardened for further assaults on my heart.