Meet Me By The Sky | Poems
By Dana Jerman
The Lonely Essentials
Dystopia lip syncs like a spy with no tongue toward the sweeping exit covered in girls and newspapers. In the rain—a static radio tapestry of souls crack—a twilight full of knuckles. Just one pale fever. A non-event. Just as well three in the morning by the isle end cap in an abandoned supermarket. If you're in here too, somewhere, find me the honey. Bring me some honey where I'll be in line. Sugar me to unbelieving wayside- that hazy gumball panting of westward escape. Sun off a parking lot competing for mirage. Melt that accident into a marvel.
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Life Felt Like A Movie When...
Mother enters my room. I hear her coming up the steps to reprimand me for something. It's always something. I stand and wait for it. Incense is burning. She thinks I'm smoking pot. She tells my father this so they can gang up on me. Again.
We stood in the parking lot a story up along the highway. The rush of cars against the tall buildings and all their lights. For a moment it was just the cold, and our city, and us.
My friends come to the door on a night when I didn't expect them. I grabbed my guitar and we headed for the tracks. We went deep into the pitch black tunnels and followed our echoes back out to the brisk air at the town limits. Kicking at gravel and beer cans and singing songs we'd just made up, and would never sing again.
...Deep into my twentieth summer, I crept down to the lakefront. Naked, under the sleep away camp stars, I got into a boat, and paddled silently to the middle of the water, where I stopped to watch the grasp of the arm of the galaxy.
With the familiar young faces from my brownie troop, I went into my very first old-folks-home. Thru a maze of hallways, I walked into a room and placed the succulent I'd been given onto a long tray, and looked into the face of a woman I had no idea how to talk to. She was much older than even my own grandparents were at the time.
I left. I was pushed back in. I don't remember what we talked about from there. Only the blue light on her face from the single window, and afterward, the feeling as if something had just transpired for which yet I had no understanding.
It was late... We were teenagers...we got back to his parents house before they did...We were on the couch... The only light came from the hallway. In the fever of the night I was desperate to take off my shirt... Desperate to feel his skin against mine. I did. We did.
He left. Seriously. We were friends for a while in college. Just pals. We'd chat over cigarettes and TV. But when, at the end of the semester, I watched him walk down the dorm hallway and out of the south doors I knew I'd never see him again. And I didn't.
One day I got on the train, and suddenly as I looked around me, everyone seemed to look like a real-life rock star. I'm telling you. Hendrix and PJ Harvey. Nina Simone and some crusty Mick Jagger-type cat. I wondered then who I was supposed to be.
When I had my 'firsts.' All of them. First pot smoking. First drunken night. First sex. Not all at once, mind you. But in that order.
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Ocean In the Mountain
I didn't buy the tourist photo they took from the long hot trail ride. And I regret it, though I have it in my mind. The ornery horse with the dusty black mane and mouth.
Dirt pale. His hooves clopping over steep rocks down thru the stream. Me on top flushed and smiling with wavy long hair and a movie star grin. Somehow there was much quiet to be found in that unquiet time.
Ah but now at the entryway to my living room A pen sits patient on the baseboard lip Waiting to be used. Ready. I am reading one book of poems and have others stacked on my legs Where I am stretching out And the weight of them calms me Into reading only what is in my hands At this moment. It feels good to lay like an old dog. Or a horse.
A deteriorated billboard clung over with ivy on the side of a road in Indiana. To sleep and dream nothing And let the day pass thru my red curtains The hours to burn hot and slow Into an evening worth only its reminiscences.
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Before 4 A.M.
Sitting nude at my desk at my window in the barely dark hearing the first birds up lull the taxis to sleep. A breeze that is not the threat of a storm cuts the morning open. Across the street a man shakes his keys at his restaurant and it bids him an entrance. My yawn is a stale song. It is much too quiet compared to the yowl of an unidentified female up the way in a nearby somewhere. Her sound is a different brand of nothing. The trees always ask for more of this quality of silence and all the cars, dumb with speed, refuse to listen.
This poem is over. I am going back to bed.