Last Poem

_R(Easter morning salvia trip)

A white doorway wider than it should be – I see it
From the ground, jambs
Repainted and repainted to mimic burn-scarred skin - melted.
Door open, white white, nothing exists behind it: the
empty boom of the boom box at the feet of the man
Whose fingers are blacked at the tip like
burnt-out cigarettes, their
smokey ends limp, but gesticulating –
Over there, over there, over there,
Through that doorway.

Easter Morning

I’ve made
a life of losing.

Most recent; self.
Lubricated like
cake pans with butter,
slippery and never sticking,
fat-soluble and burning
hot. Sneezing in the
banana bread was
never a pastime of mine,
hiding my head as
breasts heave,
teeth clatter,
and screaming echos
of where’s
the fucking coke!?
Body went out
with the mind, tied
both ends to horses,
and split down the middle
at a graveled crossroads.
Mass of ripping flesh,
thrusted loose and
devolved.
Tight and sullied,
bleeding and dis-
connected,
the morning lappings-up
of frothing dogs.
And, always, hope.
The first and last thought
in the stinging crotch
of slumber, waking up
to remember
goslings all gobbled,
and passing out
without so much as an
inkling that survival
was worth it once
wrenched from the anus
of a fox.
They say,
down by the riverbed,
to go find Jesus,
and he’ll be eager
to show off his battle scars,
that if you put fingertip
to fissure,
feel around in the
wound, then there
will be a rush of
hope, overflowing.
I was never a man for
religion, and I’ve fished
around in my own spots
of emptiness. I could
run my fingers over my
lips, my tongue, my teeth
for days,
and still I won’t believe
in resurrection.

-Adam Parrow

Dropping Bombs

This is still in revision, but my poetry class liked it and so I'm posting it here. On the subject of loss...

"Dropping Bombs"

I’ve written a letter, folded it into an airplane, and I’m sending it off
to drop bombs on you.
It’s safe here in the forest. I hear the whippoorwill at night, the peeping frogs.
I still catch fireflies in the same jars you filled with sand from Desert
Storm.

It’s time to ask you again.
When I asked before I was too young to fear the answer and you
were already tired,
but you tried to protect me.
Now that you put away your uniform you don’t know what to wear.

Andy tells me stories that end with: “And that’s why they hate us,”
After the IED went off in the market,
after his gunner dropped the Iraqi family’s only TV,
after he shot a dog in the face.

You shot dogs too, in Turkey.
You picked bullets out of hostages’ pillows in Grenada.
You woke every morning in Kuwait, expecting
craters, but I’m not trying to ask you if
Andy’s right. I don’t need to know “why they hate us.”

It’s time to ask you again
—now that I am grown and you are Cochise and my fireflies have all died in their jars—
how many?

I don’t want to hear the stories about why they hate us and we hate them.
I don’t want to hear about your friend, dead on a pole with his own penis in his mouth,
how you dipped your bullets in pig fat. Revenge.

I want to know (I don’t want to know)
I need you to tell me (please don’t ever tell me)

How many lives have you ended when you told yourself you were protecting me?

It doesn’t matter.
We can still catch fireflies in jars and play our guitars together and I will still protect you, Daddy, from your monsters,
and if you listen, quiet
you can hear the whippoorwill.

~Jess d'Arbonne

March30poem: Ouch

for Adam

The thorns in my crown are my own thoughts -
I can’t get off my bed, motivation crawled out,
Leaving her black hair behind to catch around my toes,
and I’m still locked up, she had the key.

If I shower, my own reflection
denies who I knew I amiswas - my hair’s too dark, I’ve been inside too long -

My skin's transparent: a network of cyan brushstrokes
inturrupt the new bulbs of flesh, and interlaced, the artist left his
threads of cadmium, made from the crushed bodies of beetles, for the nurses
To tap, and it floods back into the tubes.

Blush-pink. The way the bedsheets are blushless white and bedsores
are hot-flashes for my hips and heels.

I don’t get out of bed.
If I must, they’ll wheel me and lie me down
elsewhere. Maybe, when they force me
out again to make room for the emergencies,
I’ll step out in front of a cab and fulfill
the requirements.



_r

Jade said...

To relearn the breath
through the heart, to notice
their consistency and rhythm
as a backdrop to all else
in the busiest of moments.

April1poem: When Someone Decided To Listen to the Answer to "How are You Feeling, Now?"

The rattling started in my chest cavity – the hollow
Clink and scrape of metal on bone: the barricade
that stopped the joy leaving, is dropping
it’s nuts and bolts though the long-bones
(they’re heavy) clattering like rats in pipes
through my femurs and out
through the stigmata bored into my soles
by my self-destruction, tourniquetting myself
on hands and knees by dragging
my spineless body over the sharp and
splintered bones of everyone I loved,
but broke – shredded - I’m trailing screws and washers
in what’s left of my footprints. The crows
are picking them up.


_rae

If my life were an orchestra, what instrument would I be today (?), asked a good man across miles and miles and miles…

…a piccolo or violin, though musically ephemeral,
depends on the rest of the orchestra the way
drums don’t. Kettle drums, snare drums, a whole caboodle of them.
Crude, but bold on their own,
the drums set foundations for the rest of the orchestra
to skirt around - they’re necessary, complementary, and
without them the orchestra would still function, nobody would point out
what's missing, though
the music may fall apart.

(notapoem, a pome, maybe)

#4

The Poets
j vogel

I get all my emotions secondhand anyway, I told them at the reading, buy
my tears from the used bookshop down the block, pickpocket
movie stars for my sniffles. Then I told them to shove it, to feel something
fresher than what I thought they’d pumped out of me.
Told them how I’d even painted my dime-store squirt gun a steely
black, held it to a homeless man’s head,
said give me your hunger—give it to me now. Told them how he
just shivered a little and didn’t do much of anything
so I shot him and he handed me his eyeglasses.
I put them on and walked away into the blur without
saying thank you.
But it was all too much for me I guess and I walked into a streetlamp.
The homeless man heard my eyeglasses break into seven
different pieces, one for each day of the week and he laughed at me.
Then I started shivering and couldn’t stop, so at the poetry
reading when I told them to cut the shit, the poets
just laughed. My friend’s watch had just stopped, the one his grandmother
had given him just before she died, before she tripped and fell over a pair
of broken eye glasses and hit her head in the street, bled out
beneath a streetlamp. So I lifted the watch from him and it brought
some tears to my eye but the poets,
the poets just kept laughing and handed me a cup of soup, something brown
with little carrot circles drowning in it. I wanted to be
one of those carrot pieces and I was about to drink it when they told me
to give it to the homeless man outside the building.
He’s blind, the poets said, the carrots might be good for him.
I took it downstairs and drank it as fast as I could. It burned my throat.
Then I took off all my clothes and tried to find that homeless man, tell him,
here, I am a carrot, maybe I can help. But by then I was
blind and couldn’t find my way out of the building.

March18poem: Horseshow

The rosettes are they
angry at me? That red.
And the horse pays no heed,
what the hell does he care he’s ferrying
the anger of my soul on his back.


_r

Nothing.

Sitting in rooms of poets on
a Monday night reminds me that I
am a low brow sit-com,
in danger of cancellation.

The booming echo of words
crystalizes in my ears. They tell me
of interludes;
how it feels to kiss a dying woman,
to stand on bridges and contemplate the fall,
to love so hard it bleeds.

After the open mic is closed,
they will go home and crash
into other bodies, nurse their habits,
and become so full they burst like overripe
tomatoes.

I will go home to switch on Gilmore Girls
and watch my breath dry over my teeth,
shared with nothing.

-adam