#1
There’s a fire in the sky I can’t
Put out.
My eyes are timid and dry -
Wading in yours,
Sinking in the colors
Or the farthest reaches.
Some nectarine sunset
Enveloped in the endless,
Incessant or day dreamed.
Like that time the night burned out;
We whispered as we parted,
So as not to disturb.
We were quenched
Like a sea inside
And a people freed.
We shall not secede.
My fingers sing of my craft –
Ink stained and swollen;
My toes tread through leaves of grass,
Dream of all the places I’ve shown them.
I’m stained by the lowly whisper of the sea –
Or a lone white speck lofting just above the waves;
I stare out and strain –
I hear each word cry out the same,
Cry out like so many before,
Dry out on the sand having just crept free to shore.
A finger or two
Crawls between me and you,
Between the deepest darkest places,
Or that gentle startling hue of the horizon
Between the sky and the water,
Between a mother and father,
Between young lovers interlocked
On the edge of the dock
Clamoring over each others bodies well after the clock strikes two.
I return to the dream
Just the way it seemed,
So plastic, so placid, so anxiously clean.
I returned to the sea,
Washed in the water,
Returned to the state,
Some predestined fate,
Some sailboat summer I find only in sleep.
So I tear to my toes,
Shiver in the sunlight,
The moon beams keep me warm as I swim through the night.
When I touch land again,
Bare feet in the sand,
I clean my fingers and wash my hands,
Yet the ink beneath my nails still lingers.
My fingers sing of my craft –
Ink stained and swollen;
My toes tread through leaves of grass,
Dream of all the places I’ve yet to show them.
The house is quiet and quaint, let's not ruin it. I stare at the wall across the room from my bed, tugging at my blankets. My eyes burrow through ground and dig a hole. I crawl down the hole and dig deeper, deeper. Five of us sit around the table and laugh. Mashed potatoes. Always mashed potatoes. We all pose for a camera, my mother holding my toddling sister. My eight year old mouth grins a bigger smile than I've known for years. Christmas cards whisk by me like a flip book. I pause at the last page and wonder why four seems so much less than five. I’ve dug my way back through the ground out the other side. I poke my head out the hole. I’m back in bed, trying to get to sleep.
I wake up to an old sofa. The living room fills with water and I sail away on my sofa to a far away place. Far away from anything that could remind me. Far away from this house called home, drowned with artifacts and anecdotes. The sofa where I watched football with Dad on Sundays, the stain on the carpet where I spilled his beer, the empty recliner in the living room he read the paper every morning, the cracks in the ceiling from the water damage he never got around to repairing. But none of it tears at me like the fake smile on my mother's face. Or the way she calls for me to eat and tears me away from my sofa on the empty, open sea. I dive in the water and swim to the kitchen.
I sit in the car and tug at the wheel. I turn up the radio to blast any thoughts from my head. I watch the music soar to the heavens and follow it. My body snakes out of the car window and flees to the sky. Everything is clearer when I sit atop the clouds. I see all the landmarks of my youth: the old school, the church, the baseball field, the DMV. He drove me to all of them when I was still sitting in the passenger seat. We rear end the car in front of me. I fall back into the driver's seat and the soft loving grasp of the airbag.
(from last semester's writing class)
The spider on the old man's beard was like a frustrated child trying to climb into the kitchen cabinets to grab some sweets his mother wouldn't let him have. Unable to get a firm grip on the long, gray, scrappy beard, the spider kept tumbling down and barely hanging on before trying again to traverse the mighty mountain hanging from the old man's face. I intensely watch the spider repeating the pattern of climbing up and tumbling back down. With every slow rise and quick fall of the spider I’m a little more at ease. The spider distracted me from the words spewing from the old man’s mouth, from my best buddy’s mother crying in the seat next to me, from the incessant ticking ticking ticking of the clock on the grey wall – grey like the man’s beard and the general feeling of gloom over all of us. My buddy’s father paces back and forth in time with the ticking of the clock, like a metronome over the old man’s voice.
The old man just kept ranting. Eventually the spider crawled into his beard and I could no longer see it. I had nothing. I couldn't focus on the spider to keep my mind off the grey and gloom that surrounded me; so I decided to listen:
That's why I singed up! I was bored and I needed money! He chuckled. And I sure knew I didn’t want to go to college. Next thing I knows I’m in a plane on my way to some country I couldn’t pronounce and – My buddy’s dad finally stops pacing and sits next to his wife and they hold each other crying – And that was it! We’re given guns and told to stand guard and – I couldn’t hold it back anymore, I started crying just as hard as my buddy’s parents. His mom handed me a tissue and put her arm around me. The old man just kept talking and his bold, black eyes and his grand grey beard and his chomping mouth seemed to get bigger and bigger and bigger and endless, swallowing the entire room as he kept rambling on and on – But we just had to do it! I tell ya, son, there was nothing else we could do. ‘Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight!’ Just like Robert W. Service said! And then – I couldn’t grasp it, my buddy had been in the service for two years. I can’t even picture him missing a leg – And we had to run, there were explosions everywhere and gunfire and – the door slowly opened and a woman pushed a boy I faintly recognized in a wheel chair. His parents stood up and ran. I looked back at the old man to see the spider had reemerged from his beard. It continued to crawl up the old man’s beard, crawling up and falling back down, until it finally crept its way into the old man’s mouth. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you! I swear to God almighty or whatever ya wanna believe – I couldn’t keep my eyes off the old man anymore. He walked towards me and fell to my knees. In an instant I had completely forgotten about my buddy and the leg he’d lost in battle. Instead I couldn’t help but stare down at the old man as he clawed at my shirt like a frustrated child trying to climb into the kitchen cabinets to grab some sweets his mother wouldn't let him have.
