Everything's An Island

And we are all adrift...

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Helots

Under bronze and over mud, a rug of flesh for those bound by honor and for greater things, bread eaters and circus goers, those who live life in thirty-minute intervals, as time goes by as gods will it on island time

Others were given shields, told to return with them or on them, carrying their coffins as their own pallbearers, marching to an unknown enemy to aide strange bedfellows, to be remembered in song and stone long past the days of Greece

We were not born to march, their helmets were polished by our ilk, better than sheep and lower than the tide, fields were our castle of ruins as the three hundred left, to fight for imagined freedom as we carried their water in chains

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Move On

The long pine floors have warped with my tears

    ceiling fans caked with dust from our stories

You know the room is empty,

     yet understand it will never be bare

Feeling me in doors and windows,

    in nooks and crannies

Our account was brief

    but it was carved into the sills

Buried deep inside us

Furniture may be moved

    clothes donated, appliances sold

Try as you might,

    you cannot pack me away

The memory will not dissipate

    there is no sweeping us away

 -Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Race Ya

We used to ride laundry baskets down the squeaking stairs. After my sister cut her wrist rollerblading in the neighbor’s garage, but before I pushed Austin through the glass door downstairs, and at about the same time as I started to suspect we were poor, would go breakneck down the stairs in a blue Rubbermaid hot rod.

The house was too small for six people, at least compared to the Mormon doctor’s place, or the family that adopted to fill their castle up the block, doors and windows in nooks and crannies. I mean, it wasn’t a yurt of hide and mud or anything.

The roof was easy to get to, a great place to hide when I got outnumbered, just up the tree, or the other one,

and then you shimmied out and jumped on to the gravel.It was hot, I was scared of heights, but it was quiet if I was.

Those three are gone, and the roof is vinyl now. No one rollerblades, and we only notice how cramped it is at Christmas. They got sprinklers and started collecting art. The stairs got new carpet, and the never creaked again.

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Two Cities

We lived in different worlds under the same skyline

I exist with the moon rise over the lake

   While your bed is bathed in the city’s neon

I dwell in the silence of the sunrise

  You’re room fills with the traffic of a downtown sunset

We meet in the middle and build our life in the open

A clearing meant only for us

  Constructing our world out of the quiet and chaos

Making it ours, creating something complete

-Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Sweating Bullets

The question was not even implied, yet it hung in the air like a red star on a barn,

not out of place or unexpected, but lacking any germaine origin.

Your eyes hiding under lavish locks, mine examining the start of your wrinkles, footpaths I hoped I would live to see become roads, if we survived the silence of the sunrise.

You had no idea I’d break from the plan, creating our family mythology in the proscenium, glow tape and ghost lights the only witnesses, for that question which we already knew was coming.

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Audience

The quiet, theater blackened hands held

Our soundtrack, a film score and a duet of laughter

We find each other’s silhouettes in the shadow of the screen

Double feature dreams, our narrative plays out in front of us

We aren’t simply an audience,

This is ritual

This is our church

We hold each other for hours in claimed respite

Escaping the chaos of a technicolor life

-Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Matinee Madness

The fabric of our lives: a polyester weave seats like a wool sweater dipped in paraffin wax a perch for a peeping tom, falling awake into double feature dreams

Curtains that never rise or fall, framing a window into disembodied souls, around more frames of mind, and other velvet trappings of make believe

An altar for matinee idols, an observatory for the birth of stars, the temple of doomed romance, my always never home

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Thaw

Winter’s retreat signaled faces exposed to the light

   covered hastily by scarves and cowlneck

Months of wool filtered air in our lungs,

  condensation soaked lips

The cold required a distinct bravery

  one not sympathetic to fashion

 Spring’s arrival was at a deliberate pace

    A military march towards sweaters

Socks traded thickness

     as green leaves overtook the brown

The ice on the river thawed

      along with the old disposition

 -Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Iconoclast

There is something rotten, something accursed As green leaves overtook the brown, only to find the tree was blighted, our wells are bubbling with hemlock we pour with lead ladles

Roads are not paved with good intentions, no street is lined with gold, highways are asphalt and concrete, so why do we wander over sand?

Why won’t someone think of the children? when hell came through hymnal, once the wine would blind, did no one think of the children?

Someone did.

like flowers to be dried and pressed and kept in perfect death upon the mantle, as a trophy to a game in name alone The children were remembered fondly by a wolf with a crook

Someone always had thought of the children no hair shirt or cat of nine or pear of anguish could clear their head and we lead the little dears into dens in every hemisphere, in every tongue, in every attempt to keep them good, we may not have slaughtered the lamb, but we sold them to the butcher

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Blizzard

My phone is dying in an unfamiliar city

  No fear of getting lost,

  that implies I had a direction

You said, let’s take the C train

   But where did that get us?

Which direction did you intend,

   what was lost in translation

As I roam the empty streets,

   Loitering near bodegas for reused heat

I see it’s beginning to snow

    and the city is muted in the white

Listening for your footsteps

  or the sounds of dawn,

I wait for a reason to move

-Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Summer on P Street

It's a smell you hate

The stank of garbage juice and chicken bones baked at 300 for four months of summer It gets in your clothes and follicles take the C train, and it's there on the tracks

Get to the Met, and it's coating the steps

But come the fall, and you’ll miss it. The acid in your eyes, the city fighting back against August

No one smell could be the stench of human struggle. Yet, the streets run red with the stuff.

Rot and renewal gnaw at the flesh, fire hydrants mask and mute it, Narragansett can shelter you, but the smell of summer in the city never dies

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Saharan Dust

Landscape painted in red

  a trajectory west brought us desert

Sand filling our lungs

   A city hidden in a haze of Sahara

Painting over the past,

  Only a recollection of blue sky

The only repite can be found

    in summer storms

When lightning strikes,

   it will rain down in shards of glass

-Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Gone

It comes in murmurs We each get told the tale out of church All are invited to attend the service The news passes like a cold Each of us carriers Everyone contagious A sniffle that hides Spanish Flu From hundreds of miles off The wake of a pebble that was a secret bolder Altering the flow of the river From the mouth to the mountain top No one is safe from the flood The landscape is eroding Rich soil should come with the tides Like the last Nile spring of Cleopatra But nothing can be planted in this new land There will be no reconstruction Time made restore the shore People will return to dwell Painting over the past in indelible inks Homes will try to be made Herds culled will again bare progeny The sickness will go dormant But no one will really live

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Summer

The heat folds into itself,

   layers engulf us

Blanket us in our damp

   and fragrant perspiration

The heat waves down a block

   foreboding record highs

We took the storms for granted

   loathing the deep puddles

   and rain soaked hair

The clouds thought us fools

    they will not save us

    there will be no forgiveness in shade

-Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

Waking Up Late

At noon, there is still some day left. Coffee doesn’t keep track of time, but the guilt of sleeping life away can’t be drowned. Not in the tar of caffeine, not even with with a cigarette to drag you down.

The heat waves down a block almost make smoke. Dancing under hydrant sprays that will never put out July, there is only so much heat blacktop can hold, and asphalt doesn’t get to go to the Hamptons.

A second butt by your feet, and somehow you’re neither cool nor collected. A third might do the trick, but quitting is harder than mornings.

-Dan Crary

[everythingsanisland-blog]

The Night Before

Cross streets barricaded

 implying the festivities only morning will see

The rain drifts like mist

  carrying the calls of boats

Hidden in the sea

   behind brick lined roads

We dare to stand on the wet pavement

   Watching street lights continue

    a colored pattern

Tonight our hair frizzes in the dampness

  While we pretend to be bold,

Guiding each other through our neighborhood

  As awnings illuminate main street

-Adair Rice

[everythingsanisland-blog]

How I Was Raised

we grew up believing lies

they laced our talks like a used mit the leather thongs wearing into the hide so worn the webbing became smooth belief and being were merged

truth had one convenient source

a line of thinking so skewed it looped crossing itself into knots of rights so wrong going around the tree and into the whole yet making a noose instead of a bow

mirrors validated this life

awnings illuminating main street shielding us from rain and other inconveniences all the colors of the rainbow shown in the mist bouncing back every shade of beige

-Dan Crary