XXXVIII. Riddled With Holes

...
Where's the excited bluster
Of a dangling conversationalist
Who is only alive half the time.
Whom imagination forswore at birth,
(An uninspiring turning point.)
***Who wrote that thing about you that one time
******Who made that thing that looks like anything but you.
***More like him, in fact.

"If anybody could do it***you could."
A thriving indiscretion that has failed—
Normans storming and the Hasty drawbridge failing sort of failure
—to be born out by the evidence.

Where's the follow-through
Of a half-turned lightbulb,
Who told you from the start
Not to pin your hopes on him?
***(Lay them gently,***if you must.)
Who's not responsible
For lost or stolen items.

XLI. Under Sky So Starless

The nap of the blanket rubs against his nose.
****Shit, shit, shit
Instigating, provoking, antagonizing, evoking a sneeze that he stifles quietly
In the gulf between their pillows.
Everything in this room is so goddamned hostile,
Drawing him to open warfare
With this foreign domesticity.
Not a deliberate war,
Or one he'd chosen for himself,
****An emergent property of the wretched necessity
****Of everything that came before.

The dull, incessant
****Scratch, scratch, scratch
Of shifting sheets,
The call-to-arms creak of brass bed-posts,
And the deep yawn of stretching walls.

Please, God,
Keep it down. Please,
God, don't let her wake up.
I'm not ready**** to let go of her hand.

XL. Two to One

You Were
Captivated by all my most banal inadequacies,
Letting the truly telling and irredeemable
Limitations and imperfections
Slip through the fault lines.

I was
Searching for your blue
On moons,
***On mooted metaphors.
For that last blue⎯
That color of breath.
That chromatic drop of a heaving sigh.
That finally gives out
***To a night-long silent black.
Which is still your black.

And mine.

XXXIX. Superman

"I don't believe in Superman,"
She told me, leaning on my armrest.

The stereo was turned low,
The low hum of mumbling static,
The sort of sound you imagine
A trembling cape makes
****Trailing through the clouds.

"Well, what about me," I
Smile and turn and wink.

Her hair was losing its fight
Against itself, against its will,
To stay straight, like an hour ago.
When she had it in the iron,
****Before the curl took over,
********Spiraling down her face.

"You don't believe in Superman, either."
Leaning away, reaching for the stereo.

XXXVII. Untitled

"Hey, do you want to lick the spoon?"
"No."
"Fucking liar."

XXXIV. Thread of Continuity

I'm only me materially,
A self restrained paralytically
In the chemical bonds of a single-serving self.

Stuck in the stillness of a half-mine moment.
Half mine, half the next guise.

Lay me down in scribbled pastures,
Graveyard sheaves of requiscant in pace.
Blown about by an indistinct breeze.

Impulse haiku

Wow. Did you see that
Rhetorical question he
Used as a poem?

XXXII. Work in Progress

We saw the same moon tonight
From a different point of view.
You wrapped yourself, your distant self
Around your tired arms,
Half a hug
A late night gift
From me to you to you.
...

Fun with Conservative Emailer.

Tierra, Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:48 AM:
Hey Nick,
The College Republican National Committee is proud to announce the 2009 Biennial Convention. This year the convention will take place at the Renaissance Marriott in Washington, DC June 4th-7th. The convention serves as an excellent opportunity to meet other CRs, see a showcase of conservative speakers and vote for the next CRNC leadership!
For more information or to register for the convention, visit http://crnc.org/register-2009-convention .
Hope to see you there!
Tierra

Unsubscribe

Nick Adams, 3/26/09 12:15 PM:
Thank you for the cordial invitation, but I'm afraid I must decline. I seriously considered attending, and was beyond excited by the prospect of helping to elect the new leadership, but after consulting my schedule, I realized I have a prior commitment to godless, progressive values. Yeah, it turns out I'm hopelessly, blasphemously, and unapologetically liberal. I'm so liberal, I'd rather hang out with a homosexual, transgendered, military-deserting, atheist with a penchant for sodomizing dogs and recreational abortions than forced to sit ten minutes with a group of College Republicans.
I have voted for every liberal measure I can find to vote for, and have declared an unceasing war on Christmas, Easter, New Years, and traditional marriage. I think marriage is between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, and that the high incidence of homosexuality in nature (Here ) supports my claim. I believe in a truly absurd degree of moral relativism, and that any attempt to couch your arguments in moral terms of any kind is the sort of imperial, oppressive brow-beating that the White man has visited upon generations of brown people who behave differently. I further am against conservative sentence structure, which is simple and has a distinct distaste for alluring alliteration. Republicans made bad poets, bad artists, awful scientists, and lazy intellectuals, and I want nothing to do with you cowardly curs!

Thank you again for the invitation!
Nick Adams

Tierra, Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:58 PM:
Next time, just hit unsubscribe.

Nick Adams, Thu, Marc 26, 2009 at 1:38 PM:
This was more fun.

Nick Adams, Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:43 PM:
Subject: Apologies!
I apologize for my earlier glibness and flippancy. Your invitation was sincere, and seemed to contain strong determination towards your cause and moxie, gumption, wherewithal, spunk, pluck, and true grit in equal measure. I approve. Let's be friends!

Best,
Nick Adams

Tierra, Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 3:01 PM:
Haha, at least your emails are humorous.

Nick, Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 3:08 PM:
My emails are caffeine dreams--high-octane paragraphs contorted by the savage gravity of a dense and abderian humor! You should make liberal jokes; they're funnier, and get better mileage with the Hollywood and New England crowd. Conservative jokes are craven jabs at rabbis, priests, imams, and saloons, and I do not endorse those stereotypes!
Best,
Nick!

XXXI. Staring at the Ceiling Fan. Then Not.

Slow black blades
Electrical flicker of maybe light
Counting out, in, down,
Counting down the crawling days—
*******Does she love me?
—Before my body's breakdown.
She spoke in dactyls for me.
Slow black blades
And the electrical flicker of short-circuiting eyes.

Not a dream, just a long, slow thought.
Slow black blades
And the twitching in my nervous wrist.
Two lines today, count 'em up;
One for you, one for your whispered dactyl—
*******"I love you" doesn't mean as much unmetered.
Slow black blades
My tripped-fuse, failing eyes,
And nothing lasts forever.

XXX. Grandson of Just Playing

He shook his head slowly, trying to settle his thoughts. But he jarred one loose, a tumbling broken brick of a thought and it fell out of his mouth. "Got a cigarette," he asked me, but he didn't care about the answer. His head didn't stop shaking, and his eyes were smokey enough. A cigarette would be nice, but it was more than he'd come to expect.

XXIX. Jared

We only communicated through smoke signals.
Our words trailed on the winds,
And he expanded my vocabulary.
We only wrote for the fireflies
The pin-pricks of bated-breath time
Where our words would modify you
To your core,
To your very goddamned core.
...

XXVIII. Son of Just Playing

I lost the thread of our conversation
Somewhere around the first knot, and lost track of speed
Just as quickly.
I got distracted by the waves, and didn't count
The lengths I let slip from my mouth.
Widowed words falling into no place
Like home, like leather shoe straps
Like the last call of smoke 'em if you got 'em.
...

XXI. She Said it, So it Must be True.

I've hopped around to three houses
Offering three apologies for ruptured boundaries
Three times in three months.
I hop around.
I can give you all the greedy words you could ever want.
Others will sing your singular praises, but not me.
I can't carry a tune, but I cart around
Eight hundred synonyms for obsession.
Mine's heavier.

XX. Untitled

A lost dog casts a shadow
Lonely rejection in a Northern light.
It passes by
Cared for, but unattended.
And grappling with everything it will never understand.

XIX. Nonsense

Assailed along by righteous winds
On stormy, starless seas.
Grouped together, but leagues apart,
And held to formless ground by
harmless gravitas
Panglossian perfidy, raving
Hysterical metaphor breaks.
Tragedy giving ground to caustic recidivism.
Thrice guilty, but shy before the first bite.
A silent mediator in a palaver of
Abusive hope and broken, never-there promises.

XVIII. Old Hat

Has the brim worn thin on this old hat?
Once pristine, immaculate when new,
And worn with a swaggered glide.
Then greeted with personal creases,
And donned undaunted with a friendly pride.

I caught my old hat's brim wearing thin,
And copped to keep it fresh with gentle care
It sheltered me so well from wind that I
Would tightly darn the edges broken through
With all that glittered, gold-wrought hope could buy.

XVII. Jen

I finally found my ugliness in you.
For thirteen years, it hid behind your smile
But I never look under things
Thirteen chances I got for free,
I'll pay forever for the fourteenth.
And these forty nights of fitful sleep are my down payment.

Don't break hearts, I was told.
I never thought I was strong enough,
But I was 7 when I left,
And my hands grew this big in time.
I find I'm not that weak, you know.

XVI. Just Playing

I'm America's sweetheart, not yours
And my country is a jealous lover
He did some deep sea drilling for my body oils
Then looked North and saw my Arctic Reserve
I'm a frigid bitch, I'm told.
...

XIII. Given

I've always taken it as a given that you'd do well.
That you'd roll over your goals
And leave them lesser dreams for lesser girls to find.
I've always taken it as a given.
And expected you to appreciate
Without appreciation.
Your property value has increased
But you're still under-selling yourself.
And we've hop-scotched over your praises
But we never landed on both feet,
And just barely kept a balance.

I've always taken it for granted
The pardon you gave me
For my misdeeds, and my misfortunes.
My mistakes against Ms. Right.
We've tabulated my indiscretions,
But I always took forgiveness for given.

XV. Katy

Our lives are words apart
Highlighted by a day-to-day divergence from a shared glossary
And disagreements over definitive source material.
Our pieces don't fit together,
But the puzzle is picture perfect;
Glossy in aggregated nods to visual rhythm and gold-trimmed poetic devices
Peppering our discourse, and dying off before the denouement.

I want to learn to protect you
In the manner to which you've grown accustomed
To protecting yourself
Out of necessity
And into the frying pan.
Back to where you came from,
Before I had my marginal effects on you.
Not enough to make it into your full body
Text,
But sufficient to keep around,
At the edges.

XIV. Hannah

Much more at home as an eminence gris;
You were an off-white elephant thrust upon yourself.
Not a burden or a boon,
Just a zero-sum consequence of your decisions.
Averaged out into a neutral tone.
But you're always adding on;
You're a do-it-yourself project,
Building a payne's gray haven from gray skies
Colored by doubt.
Your third guess took you further from the mark,
But your second brought you back again.
We're counting our way down to where we started.
Watching your judgment lapse.
Watching the edges collapse.
Walking on foreign ground with no maps,
But an inerrant sense of moral North,
And a knack for burnt bridge reconstruction
Couched over the middle ranges of your values' scale.

XI. Sarah

I remember when you were still afraid of the dark,
Your clammy hands clamped closed on the blanket,
Furtive eyes and liquid lips,
holding to Brownian motion.
A flighty girl, a Brownie in motion.
The laughable notion
That I could weather you.
Though you're the one who needed a tender hand.
You shined the light on my inadequacies--
The harsh judgment of a morning hearing,
Before the coffee has done its work,
And grief given no quarter or consideration.
Short-tempered coupling,
Sparks
Flew.
You kept me on a lark,
A starboard promise that never followed through.
Because there wasn't fear enough.
To justify the expense.