in the wrong direction.
Not even in the right house—
I wandered aimless into Sheol.
Understandable for a lost Jew-
sow like myself. Abandoned,
I believed our nondescript hell.
Our father’s left us
to find it in the mind.
I try to describe
but it comes out Heil!
Sartre was wrong.
It’s not our people
but your cloudy-self
falling in big dark chunks
like a long beard sheared.
Abaddon a blank page
for scribbling staches
till the whole space is black
with a few gaps. Rabbi L. Cohen said,
There’s a crack in everything
even in my Hitler moustache
that’s how the light gets thin.
Song for a Colonoscopy
A bird’s name spoken in pain.
Turn me to a medieval futurist, an ascetic astronaut.
I fast and suck something like Tang, flavour of vomited Creamsicle or chug gallons of turned ginger ale.
Drink, Alchemist, you say, till shit metamorphoses to the rivers of …
space for your watchful eye inside me.
Intimate Stranger.
IBD is an insidious anti-Semitic-modern-American-diasporic-chronic-condition.
I fear it like my ancestors feared the czar.
I cannot flee.
The Cossacks are not coming for me—
just you, Cold Tube.
My colon gleams pink like dentist office gums.
I fast one year in three.
One day, I will time it for Yom Kippur,
arrive in Shul, first time in my life, atoned
& soiled.
God is propofol.
My people’s history to the anesthetist.
After, I stroll down the street leaking gas like it’s my birthright.
Just off the boat from that old country
as far away as health—
like I’ve come to America from Austria-Hungary in 1921.
I’m alive, which is not the same thing as being home.
The Spaz
My back spasm, guarding against pain with
more pain, reminds of my mother’s small fists
whiffling my adolescent chest. The spectacle
hurt most. Behind my back, my friends
called her The Spaz or did until the overdose.
By then the tumours had spread everywhere
like gossip. The spastic pain shoots through
the front sometimes. My mother survived
her attempts. As usual, her violence was
too gentle or she was too weak to keep
failing. I could barely lift the shovel. Dirt
pattered the casket like the sound
of someone trying to keep their voice down.
My friends who thought I was out
of earshot when they called her The Spaz,
I hoped, felt like assholes then. I remain unsure
if anyone is accountable for anything
entirely. The hurt, I’m certain, is non-
negotiable. I believe my mother would
be proud of me for how I’m lowering
myself now into a warm bath. It won’t resolve
the spasm, but the pain turns less worse.
To a Child Whose Mother Has Not Yet Died
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In a theme park that’s now a Walmart,
holding your mother’s hand, a balloon fell up
from your palm. You watched the strange red ball
lose its dimension, blemish the sun, then gone
and felt it hadn’t left, but made you small
and less. It wasn’t your fault
entirely. A bird gliding the still lake
like it were frozen in May, distracted.
You were trying to decide: a mallard
or garbage—a mangled paper crane,
folded by neglect, made you forget
to hold the balloon’s string tight.
Inventor of tears, you were the first
to experience loss. As though the rivers
of Babylon, you wept by a concrete pond.
This, your first lesson in letting go
or you learned the exact opposite
or life has nothing to teach us. You taught it
with your grief, which an older self
regards now as trivial. Wise as the day
you were born, your cry like a balloon
vanished to sky, existing all the same.
And what was your mother teaching
this unwise life when she ran
to buy you another balloon.
This one was blue. Given the circumstances,
an unacceptable replacement. Surely,
if you could go back there,
so much less wise with your years,
you would have accepted the blue balloon.
You would tell your mother, she did the best
she could. But you’re wrong—
the replacement balloon was not blue
but the same red. No, not the same.
Not the very same. That’s why you refused.
And to ensure life not misconstrue the message,
when she bought you ice cream, you threw
the waffle cone down and stomped it to the ground.
Song to the Suicides
Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.
— George Sanders
Whose reasons were reruns of rainy days.
All that grey. The disappointments too small
to count for much had started adding up.
And for a while we ask why and why
but soon turn to the song of not yourself.
You were not well, we sing. Should have been
on meds or if you were, then newer ones. Re-
uptake of x or y was too slow, we read. We know
enough to bury our fear: you thought it through
and said, Thanks, but I’d prefer not. Less theist
than Zen, you lived fully in the moment
of your pasts. And to the wisdom of our age
offered every minor Job: Hey that’s life,
my friend, it cannot be said, you disagreed.
Note
After we met I emailed you and asked if you wanted to have coffee with me and give me advice about finding an apartment in New York since you had recently moved there but you never responded because I think you assumed the apartment thing was just an excuse to see you again and this annoyed me because I thought it was presumptuous and it also annoyed me because it was mostly true. About a month later I messaged you a poem I had written which was about the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s because we had talked about it that time we met and you said you liked it. I was trying to impress you I guess like maybe I am not as beautiful as you but I can do this. I was pretty happy when you wrote back and said you liked the poem and then I asked you if you wanted to have coffee with me since we both lived in New York now and you didn’t respond and then I moved to Greenpoint and A— told me you lived there too and so I texted you and said hey we live in the same neighbourhood now so we should have coffee and you asked me if I was close to Manhattan Avenue and Clay Street and I google-mapped it and saw it was like a half hour walk from me but lied and said yes I’m right around there since I didn’t think you would meet me somewhere halfway. Halfway just didn’t seem like your style. It was a really hot d
ay and I sweated a lot as I walked towards Champion Coffee on Manhattan Ave and you were late. I wondered if you were standing me up. I was sitting there really disliking you when you walked through the door like it was the entrance to a movie set. You took off your sunglasses and your eyes were amazingly dark and you seemed precisely aware of just how beautiful you looked and it was very difficult to not like you again. After a few minutes in Champion Coffee you found it too hot or too loud or too something and said we should hang out at your place and we sat on your couch and I kept thinking I should kiss you I should just lean over and kiss you when you come back from the bathroom when you come back from the kitchen with coffee when you come back from the kitchen with water when you come back from the kitchen with wine I should kiss you. I must have sat on that couch for close to two hours and I don’t remember now what we talked about except you told me a story about how this guy invited you to his place to record a song but then just wanted to sleep with you and I wondered if you were telling me the story as a way of saying I better not try to kiss you or anything because you were tired of men pretending they wanted something other than your body when that was all they really wanted (I don’t know how that feels). Then you said you had to be somewhere and I was glad that I no longer had to worry about whether I should kiss you or not and left and then not too long after that I got involved with someone and then someone else and again someone else. It was that kind of year for me I guess but still I thought of you once in a while. And then I didn’t see you for about a year but then A— and R— came to New York and we all hung out in Williamsburg and you were talking about how you never pay for your drinks anywhere you go because men always buy them for you and then I got up to go to the bar and told you I wasn’t buying you a drink and you laughed and I said seriously I am not buying you a drink and I think those were the last words I ever said to you and that was four years ago. Everything I know about you now comes from the New York Daily News. It says you didn’t leave a note and it says we were the same age which I didn’t know and there is a picture not of you but of the window you smashed on the 24th floor with what witnesses described as a wooden object possibly a chair and it is so difficult to imagine you doing any of these things the paper said you did since you were always so composed and careful about your appearance like you anticipated that at any moment you would be photographed.
Metamorphosis
Velocity, an excuse
for the way water betrays.
Your leap embraced
with hard indifference
as though when you fell
you froze the sea.
Jumbo Elegy
Paralysed force, gesture without motion
— T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
The cement elephant plays chicken
with a train, forever up ahead. With painted eyes
he stares down the ghost
of that locomotive. Makes it vanish.
The town’s barren tracks like casket handles
holding nothing’s ceaseless progress. Jumbo,
the world’s most beloved behemoth,
still as a golem. Insides stuffed
with sky. Real hide
on the Upper West Side. Tusks
at Tufts U. Heart
left in Ithaca. His likeness
watches like a sentinel
over the Giant Tiger,
Walmart, Canadian Tire,
the forensic psych hospital,
two methadone clinics, three Timmies,
and the charred remains
of a schoolhouse photographed by Google
to a virtual eternal flame.
Some say Jumbo was a martyr,
charged the train to save young Tom Thumb.
But Fred says suicide,
and he’s not the only one. Sally
will just let you know
what everyone knows, but won’t say.
Jumbo was worth more dead.
It was convenient, is all,
when you consider Barnum
knew a lot of taxidermists. George reports
the tusks pushed up like daisies
through Jumbo’s brain. Candice claims
the train had the effect of a good poem.
Took his head right off,
so, it rolled like a deposed despot
from a guillotine. This, his gift
to the good citizens of St. Thomas,
in place of what’s been lost:
the trains, the Sterling Truck plant
and Ford factory, the jobs and the jobs
and the jobs. There are no angels
in Ontario, says the once great slave,
only a beast paralyzed, waiting
for the 8:20 to London,
arriving any minute now.
God as We Understood Him
In the summer of your recovery
we hid from the boozy breeze
in blanket forts, blasted by AC.
Carnivals were literal then.
We ate so many slushies,
we were almost happy.
In the fake horse race, I won
a stuffed animal you named
Žižek the Giraffe, declaring
he must always be referred to
by the title bestowed.
You were determined
to hold not letting go
of our silly shells, entirely.
All August, the inside jokes
fell somewhere other
than between us, lost
in our manageable lives.
We had to believe
what we didn’t. God is
dark matter, the uncertainty
principle. He is all
things I thought
necessary but not
sufficient. I’m unsure
I believed any of it
or pretended for you
and which of these
possibilities is love
as I understand it.
In the fall of your relapse
I admitted to myself
and no one else, I miss
what I once misunderstood.
After, as silly as this sounds,
Žižek the Giraffe began
to scare me. His gaze turned
sinister. Glued-eyes wide
and unrecognizing as God’s.
On Missing a Train Stop
I had fallen asleep
I said, and he asked
Late night? and I nodded
It happens, he said.
I told him I’d be late
to read some poems
in Cobourg. Isn’t this
the kind of thing
you’d expect from a poet?
He shrugged. I could
get off in Belleville and take
the way I came
he said and I wondered
if he understood much
about poetry. But he understood
what mattered: I hadn’t kept
my appointment. I looked out
as the lake drew close
and seemed made
from the manes of horses
and then receded
from the window
as quick as life might actually
pass. I had lied. I wasn’t
asleep back there but lost
in the furthest hedge
in my head, where
the beast’s grunts are near
enough, the maples shake.
As though the creature’s breath
were a light breeze.
I wa
s thinking, of course
about a woman.
How I might ask her
to live with me and how
she would say no,
how she would always say
no, though all would be fine
with us, if she would just
not fear my love so much,
which not to be too grandiose
is a bit like God’s love
for the Israelites. Jealous,
yes, but full of promise
and about as endless.
And I stood
on the platform in Belleville
and wondered what to tell you
about today, though it doesn’t matter
now. Still, I want you to know
the boxcars were splashed
an acrylic burgundy
and seemed soft as mud
under a sharp sun
which looked warm,
but wasn’t. And the sky,
for what it’s worth,
an impossible blue.
Songs from an Emergency Room
My birthdate tells the time.
The hours took my origins.
A mannequin models my name,
clipped to my wrist. I can’t read
last year’s Newsweek. All text,
a Rorschach test. The news feed
has gone quiet, but for friends
abroad. The Parisian sky
is iodine. I no longer know
how to decipher light. I live
inside an HD TV dream home
on the wall. This is the house,
they say, we want to stay forever.
The handsome brothers promise,
this is what they do: We make dreams—
Code Blue, repeats a disembodied
elegy. That poor soul, I think—
will keep me here an eternity.
My humanity grows impatient.
Hell is sicker people. Waiting,
they say, sets you free. Resuscitate
the tiles. Resurrect the den.
The emergency room is ready
to be a nursery. Forever—
their last words as the glass gates
slid behind me. I’m angelic
beneath the radiating halo.
In my veins fluids rain