verbigeration

last year's words belong to last year's language | and next year's words await another voice.

[thisyearswords]

I have asked her how she makes it,

When it never ever ends,

How she’s learned or not to take it

When she has or hasn’t friends,

Always playing Wheel of Fortune,

At the bottom or the top,

Never passing an equator,

Pole-to-pole biyearly drop.

I have asked her how she sees it

Coming for her every day

And still accepts the dead and flowers,

Dresses bones and brings the hay,

Takes the sun and turns it green for

All the dead beneath her feet,

Takes the gravefoods that have been for

Shades and given them to me.

But she never sees it fit to

Answer me a good reply -

Only peaches when she’s living,

Pomegranates when she dies.

[thisyearswords]

“untitled #3″ - collin isherwood

[thisyearswords]

The Drawback To Having a Banana Split Is That You Then Have To Eat the Banana

I used to love the woods to either side of the road on my commute. I don’t anymore. A dry carved earth I can hate honestly. Green sunlight stings. Sunburn. I worry for my rib cage, for the softness it used to protect, but that’s dry, too. I let the basil scorch in the Alabama sun. And there’s no coming back from that.

You see, screams the refusal to look at the trees, I’m not Hamlet. The bad dreams are outside the walnut. The walnut’s all you can hope for. Hard.

That year fed me a bowl of spaghetti and I’ve spent every hour since trying to untangle it all. I don’t know how it escaped but I can feel it in my ribcage, around bones like vines where they’ve calcified. I’m all shell inside but it still squirms, I’m all aquarium and everyone is stealing lobsters. I want to eat until I’m happy again.

There’s blood on the roads and I’m supposed to admire the sunlight? Every tree is marked for death and I’m supposed to keep smiling at them? Give me a reason.    Give me a reason.       Give me a reason.          Is there a reason?       Anymore?    Ever?

I wrote a letter to Galatea and I’d like her to read it backwards. I asked God to Pygmalion me and, respectfully: take it back. I give in. I will be the statue I was supposed to be. I was happier before I was happy. I think the word is simple.

[thisyearswords]

“ribbit” -- collin suttle

[thisyearswords]

wonder when they’ll stop pulling - where the ache sits in my back beneath the blades -  pulling the wings out of me every five twenty-two AM before the sun can spot them and let me know. I’m tired of stitching my muscles back together with pills and lifted arms right back up to the place it feels like I fell from. My face is gray. My hands are gray. My  stomach and knees are gray until the sun meets me outside, my favorite lover (don’t tell, oh don’t tell the moon); she paints me blind and gilt, my favorite falsifications of life. Kindly she pretends  I belong here; gently she bridles my complaining mouth and turns my lips in quietude, for a moment.

(When she paints my bare back, reflected on the water and the hot bright skin of my cheeks, when she blisters me without so much as an  apology, this is closer to the truth.)

My shoulders are covered and she is a gentle lover; steam the air with last night’s dew and makes no motion towards the weight of wounding on me / in me / poeticizing me -  Time to wake up, she suggests through this  window, and we pretend not to pretend.

time to wake up | x

[thisyearswords]

half finite variety

to the Cass on keyboards in a punk rainbow mirror: you can have my apathy and scream it into harder things of lengthier lifespans. to the point-eared fantasy whose name I can’t pronounce, whose hair is green because they love the trees so much: you have my tattered tennis shoes and the compound bow I never shoot anymore. to the Collin in grad school with a face shining like a hundred myths of seeing God and gods and the circle come full: you can have my perpetual panic over running out of time - and contrariwise, to the Doctorate-holder spoken to with a surname I have yet to choose, wearing patches over your elbows like I have, pettily, always dreamed of, you can have all my dread that I’ll last forever. I think you both know better. to the Cassie in another life’s Virginia, never tangled over girls and always answering to ‘Ma’am’ with an ease I’ll never get the hang of, I give the colt-legged joy of running your fingers through your own soul and accepting that the tangles will never come out, and that the only true name you own is the one in the white stone.

to the Mx. Collin in a world fifty years fast, with dust in your nose and fingernails and old, bulging shelves bastioning you in, I have to ask: Can you draw a map of this future on pages of Flannery O’Connor and Lewis? Can I find you if I follow Beloved to “The Dead” to the Pequod to Good Omens to The Martian Chronicles to the O Henry stories I never liked and finally to the blue and gray copy of The Tempest and find out if we are Miranda or Prospero or Ariel?

from the kid with the pomegranate tattoo behind a coffee shop counter, I take the courage to look a stranger in the eye. from the silent tourist drinking illicit wine on a balcony in Paris, exchanging the silence of obedience for the riotous reward of a single taken chance, I take that certain holy discomfort in seeing the world from somewhere off my accustomary rails. from the hey-Collin in an office, blue-faced with computer glow, paying through the nose for a graphics program that, in turn, pays for oil paint and cat food, I take a hardscrabble grinning strung-out willingness to not care.

to the Mx. Collin in a world fifty years too far away, tending the counter with a book in hand because we have always been too tall to drown in them, no matter how many books there may be, I have to ask: When do you meet me? Where is the station where I get off and you get on?

to the Collin in the wardrobe wedged down a rabbit hole, I give the advice I’ve always wanted to take, you lucky bastard: when they ask you what your name is, ask them for cocoa and pomegranate seeds and a good sturdy bow, and they can decide for themselves what to call you.

to the Mx. Collin in a world that may or may not be near, in a room that is familiar but clean, tall, black-tea sunny, smelling of bergamot and every kind of poem but the sonnet: of all the bookstores in all the realities in all my one-day daydreams, I had to walk into yours.

[thisyearswords]

fragments for galatea and argus

PREFACE For the purposes of the work, either everything matters, or nothing does. This is the only tightrope worth falling from.

I. What I’m about to write you will sound like a metaphor, but it’s not. I might wish it to be - I could be proud of it, as a conceit, a thing of mine instead of a thing in me - but it’s not. I took a walk and saw everything. Not the world and all its plants, creatures, rocks, fires, soft winds, bone and water; just the place I stood, the roots beneath it, the air, the clouds -  My skin - the thorns in my feet and the thorns that would grow and die which only ants and smaller hearts would ever know - The needles of the trees and every unborn cone still brown and wet on the branch -  each hair on my arm alive with the breath of everything crowding in, always crowding in, always crowding in - Green. So much of green. The lattice of rust around the garden where -  more green. Strange lines of metal wire leaned against the fence - and this did it, set my eyes frozen into  wide ultracomprehension and the air between my atoms alight - I did not know what they were but I knew

they meant something. Each rusted angle, stationary, useless, as suffuse with meaning as my own awkward lines, as me, another rusted unresistant angle outside the garden.

To stand too close to the binoculars which bad brains and bad angels tantalize with is to stand in a jigsaw wreckage, in a desert of pieces. In truth we can't put together a box’s worth, but we can hold the pieces in our hands like cards, and play them to make a rough edge.  With ourselves, with another, with a stained glass window, an amber glass, a rattle in plastic, dirt under feet, glow in our face. We cannot build a world out of the world. I cannot see the world in its pieces. I saw a piece of the world in its pieces and my breath refused to still and I know my eyes did not ache but they should have and I know my eyes did not bleed but they should have bled like a haunted Madonna’s, at least I wanted them to so it would mean something.

II.  Close my eyes and still my heart -  every wish turns into wanting a quiet you can’t find here.

III. This will sound like a metaphor, but it isn’t. I would like it to be -  the shell of words wrapped around a non-event, to make me feel wise - but it isn’t. Years younger, I sat in a chair with no cushion and opened a Bible in my lap and wept because I could not feel. I begged the one without flesh to make my heart meat. I begged to know how hot meat felt in a ribcage of my own. I forgot that meat rots.

IV. Everything matters, or nothing does. Ice and skin know equally well. Nothing matters, or everything does. To see or not are equally hell.

CODA I WILL REMOVE FROM YOU YOUR HEART OF STONE AND GIVE YOU A TONGUE OF FIRE

[thisyearswords]

the taking up

What if it was this easy, in the end? The long blink against an old wind, Seasoned by a mild winter and an oncoming bank of heavy black-cotton clouds, And then -  Without knowing how or why: Apotheosis of place. The sun, cleaner, the grass, richer, the trees with kinder fingers, and the sky going on until it buffers up against someone else’s mansion (figurative, naturally). And with the golden lace on the pencil trunks of the pine, the pine you’ve fondly lived with for decades -  the flavor of rain, come to wash your muddy shoes for you -  the sense of a cat somewhere, hidden, lazing -  Familiar, but Tidied and set right -  Would you even notice that it was good again?

[thisyearswords]

[rough draft] Dysphoria 1

I want to have another face than mine - To push my fingernails beneath the edge  of it and pull - rip - tear - the mouth away - The lips - the nose - the eyes - the bones beneath -

I want to have another face than this -  To never turn it at another mirror and see it looking back, between the me it shows me and the one I know should be

There, with less of cowardice and cold -  With more of what would bless instead of curse - Whatever that is, since I wouldn’t know - With more - more - more - than I have ever seen

Inside this one. I want another face. I want another face that means I’m not myself.

[thisyearswords]

The Lightning

Part 1 After the evening of watermelon seeds and stories, after the cleanup, the walk outside in the dark, all lights off now, goodnight. Then the fireworks.

Stay a while, barefoot in antsy grass, stay to wath the aftermath in the clouds: stay to watch and wait, wait, wait— white-limned in silence, softness sharpened with shadow, silence until the purr in the dark, felt in the feet and the teeth.

Stay a while, arm in arm, in the dark, ant-bitten, and write your poem in your head; accuse yourself of not living in the moment, of falling down a stairwell of self-awareness while fireworks are there, flickering, cottony soft, caught in night clouds.

Know, anyway, the words are your only now, your only moment. Write your poetry.

Say, “That’s how you know it’s over, when they’re brightest of all.”

After, laugh when you find out— no fireworks. Only lightning. Laugh, anyway, at your second-hand fireworks, and your pretty, bright words.

Part 2 Red-veined record player, thump the beat with thunder, sing old words with blood. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.

Scraped, moving feet, spin on concrete, spin in grass puddles. Make a tornado, that oldest of impulses, spin to scare the lightning back, spin, arms flung, to bring it in. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.

Move while the sun isn’t out. Move while you’re still allowed not to smile. Move when the words don’t work and lightning is the only poetry. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.

[thisyearswords]

that’s the joke

tw: explicit self-harm

i.

The thing is, it’s always been a little funny. That’s not a thing I could admit to anyone, there’s the solemn and unspeakable air around it that would never let me suggest that it’s anything but unthinkably serious. If it weren’t funny, I couldn’t live with it. But the air of the hysterical, the fruitless, bootless drama of the act, is funny to me.

ii. A while back, I had to do it. When the house was empty, I locked the bathroom door and laid them out: six knives, old kitchen blades whose edges I could press with the pad of my thumb and not feel a thing. They had to do, more saws than knives. That was funny.

Funnier still was that that I forgot about them, left them on the bathroom counter sandwiched between a pair of jeans and whatever shirt I discarded at night.

My brother came home and I tucked the knives away, under blankets of sleep shirts and another pair of jeans. I could taste the sitcom setup: the ever-contorting attempts to hide what could have easily been put away, the eventual reveal: “Are you - self-harming?!” And then the laugh track.

iii. One time, I used a new knife from Walmart, bought cheap for the tough-boiled cafeteria vegetables that had to be choked down somehow.

After years of using blunted scissors, weightless dollar-store knives, the new blade cut deep in my arm. There was the blood I’d been hunting for, and it scared me. Not a come-to-Jesus scare, but a down-to-earth startle, a gasp and a mild curse and a betrayed look at the knife that worked too well.

“It figures,” and I leant against the bedside, watching the blood run down to the crook of my elbow, snickering.

iv. Tonight I had the wild urge and I sat down with a pair of bathroom scissors in hand. One stroke and there it was, a smeared line of black, the ghost of the eyeliner pencil that had to be sharpened by hand, by scissor blade (pencil sharpeners never work). I kept going, had to, and there it was, the sharpest and most smudge-resistant stroke of eyeliner I have ever drawn. What’s not to smirk at? I should apply all my eyeliner with a razor’s edge.

v. For some it’s a serious thing but the last thing I need is serious. Not to laugh at a joke would be ungrateful, and nothing suggests that this is not a joke, not a merry prank gift Something handed to me which never stopped shooting itself off.

[thisyearswords]

These Days, I Listen To A Song On Repeat,

and one verse gets me every time. I think of it as apocalyptic, but in a front-porch twilit rocking-chair way. Backstage sounds of an Armageddon.

It’s because that verse  makes me think of a book ending, its pages running thinner in my fingers, the spine, precarious in my palm, disbalancing itself.

It’s because it places me at the end of the path I’m on.

Minor keys, stuttering drum, phantasmal Nowadays harmonizing in what sounds like the distance -  preceded by the firm beat and syncopation of past-tense words, is it a wonder it feels like the world dropping off into a final sunset?

Minor flaws, a stuttering set of lungs, spirits harmonizing off-key in my head and ears -  preceded by nothing, only the ghostliest sense  of a world before myself, is it a wonder I think that the apocalypse could fit into one person?

These days, I listen to a song on repeat (a spark flying upward). It makes my feet feel solidly placed in good red earth, on a path that, verily, ends.

c.a.s.

[thisyearswords]

requiem for the past 21 easter tridua

FRIDAY None of these pages hold the promise that there will be no more crucifixions. The ones on the hillside never called this day ‘good.’

Oh, by noon, the sky churns with gray and black, and there is nothing left for us to do but walk home. Some of us have endured more than others.

But all hands are heavy, sorrowful with blood, either our own or that from some neighbor’s veins. Whether from drawing or staunching is not our business.

The tearing of the veil is a B-grade horror movie effect and what is to be seen behind it is little more than a disappointment to us today. There is nothing there.

Go home, take your arms full of selfish sorrow and pride-laden guilt, take your heads full of woe and weakness and lay them down on your pillows. We are heavy and would sleep.

I am heavy and would be alone to study my wounds, which I thought I saw given from behind the clouds, nails in his grasp. I know Hamlet’s speeches too well.

The hill is littered with crossbeams and I know the faces of those lifting them high, know the bloody hands smearing clean wood with scarlet. How will I stay here with them?

SATURDAY Saturday is the cruelest day, suspended between the sun and the moon. It is far too long - a full, thick day of noon-to-three. Each thread of the veil snapped one at a time.

I slept too late. I move in order to survive - to hold my faculties in place. I am mindless and dumb and my wrists hurt.

Saturday is the cruelest day, a whole day spent holding my breath. And held breaths carry no words. As far as my lungs are concerned, there is no one to pray to.

The clouds yet hold water. My eyes are yet dry. My lips are yet faithless.

Numbness begins to feel like wellness. Suspension begins to feel like steady ground. Perhaps I will make it through today, if today never ends.

SUNDAY None of these pages hold the promise of any more resurrections - not in this particular situation - and while the crosses are propped in pride on the lawns of neighbors

(they are empty, empty, empty as an unpainted canvas, as a cup running over with air, only air), and while the closed halls of this house ring with cries

(they are not mine but, God, I wish they were), there is light streaming through these windows and puddling, unsympathetic, across my feet,

a dog that can’t be driven away in its enthusiasm, as if it can’t understand this 'no’ in the lines of my body and the gingerly flinching of my hands away from it

because the idea of warmth and hope is close to blasphemy against this exhaustion in my bones, and because I don’t want it, this resurrection meant, they say, to cheer me

or at least to keep me going through a Saturday that lingers in the shouting noon of the third day when all I want is this fourth, this next, this new day

when no one weeps but no one joys the air, either, with the overflow of unrestful happiness I can’t partake of (selfish, selfish, empty, empty, empty) -

and the golden stain creeps up over my ankles as does a tide coming in and everyone is happier or sadder or angrier than I can measure up to and so all there is to comfort me about this day, about You,

is that You made your move drained of blood and energy, pinned where You had to be, as if you had to be bound to stay there, kept down to keep You from fleeing (and how could I blame You when my feet are so fickle),

and when You finally came back to me it was after a long day of touching the souls of Hell, with their cries louder than those I have ever heard,

and something in this frame has to believe you were just as tired as it is now - more tired, weary from the rips and tatters of that place, crying out as I do for

rest, only rest, a silence, a place to lean my head against Yours, bloody fingers interlocked, and to know that it is finished.

c.a.s.

[thisyearswords]

i. These are the things I fear: God and the brush of my own skin against my own skin. ii. During winter months I’m too too solid, can hear my blood run, can feel others’ eyes through layers not warm enough, can stand out too too solid against white trees and gray skies. This is what I fear: being here. When the sun strengthens again and the night is short and sharp (a blackout unconsciousness, woken from sore and bloody-teethed) I sit in the light for hours. I want to be sure that it hits me, too (sunburn for bruises a bareknuckled promise that I’m not demoniac). This is what I fear: not being here. iii. Liminal seasons are hard for praying. Wishing to get spoken to, that’s different. Brown leaves, pink flowers, sluggish waters - seeing ravens bear bread and not seeing YOU in the firestorm. This is what I’ve learned: It’s big of YOU to love me. I don’t want it if YOU have to. I don’t want it if YOU don’t want to. I don’t want anyone’s wrists tapped with nail-heads from pity, temples rubbed out of obligatory affection. This is what I fear: footnoted love. iv. Hell is here and all the devils are empty. If the blood doesn’t pour from YOUR palms in the shape of my name I’ll take hell, every day. The patronizing hand cupped around the cheekbone, tender scripts mouthed in passing. Here and not here, hollowed souls on unhallowed business. v. This is what I fear: that I mean nothing to the sun and to the moon and even less to YOU.

[thisyearswords]

I.  I am not ungrateful for what I have and what I have had. Love is not something I lack, always something within reach, never too far away to be lost completely. I am not ungrateful for words passed gestures made hearts opened to each other's sights. All holy, all good, all for which  I am not ungrateful. II. I keep a clipping book of heaps of perfect images, tend a garden in my mind. You are there in an array of flowers, pieces of what you were to me, carefully preserved for the perusing on gray days yellow days days of green and blue. These are petty images not fit for even half-rate poetry, so I keep them locked up for shame, for shame of a Shakespearian fervor for a Doritos bag and a made-up song. Casual magical nothing I had known or have known since. III. Do I love you? Do I love you still? Do  I love your touch-in-memory for you or for its elsewhere scarcity, for high demand and low supply, a remembered delicacy the likes of which are far from me? Do I love you - still? Did I love y0u - ever? I love you I love you I miss you I miss hammer-heart and flushing face I miss you I miss your eyes on mine I miss you and me in one room Alone I miss being your favorite (that's what you told me). I miss your awareness of me, I miss the touch of your hand on my shoulder. I miss the self-conscious self-blooming self-and-self of us I'm almost at the point of missing the confused hope and the daily letdown of unspoken confession. I miss you I miss you  I miss you. IV. I am ungrateful for this, I am ungrateful. I wish you to never have happened  to me. I am ungrateful for pining I didn't ask for. I am ungrateful for my garden, filled with you, perennial after these several years, unrelenting and cruel fertility of memory, a corpse coming up from the garden in February to the day. I am ungrateful for the smiles you gave me before you took them away for good, for having yet what is no longer mine. V. I often pass by where you said you'd moved to. Are you there? I miss you. Are you there still? I wish to give you back what is still mine after these several years. I wish to express with lips my ungratitude for you to you. I miss you still.

annie cs, “two weeks into february”

[thisyearswords]

being known is a cobweb concept, easily brushed aside if you think to, easily accepted if you don’t. we are hourglasses of too much sand to count and every second means a shifting and a falling and what there is to know of us changes and changes and changes again, bits and pieces lost under bits and pieces that we forget and hide and overprioritize. we are decks of cards and we bluff. I am a deck of cards and I bluff. I spread myself out with three faces showing, pretend that they are me, hold the rest of the deck under the table’s edge, keep an ace up an empty sleeve. I pretend to let you know me and feel a sting when you do not. I blame you when I am not. What am I to you but a cliché of myself? When did I become a bouquet of drying self-parodies? I know myself by how you seem to know me. What am I to you but a cliché of myself? What am I to me but someone seen from the back at a distance, a voice at the opposite end of an echo, and a photograph that you gave me with the words, “This is who you are.” we’re hourglasses, and I am running out. I have more air than sand left in my lungs. I think I’ve lost what makes me “I.” I think I’ve lost your photograph. I think you never took it of me. I think you saw my shadow and loved it, took its portrait, gave it to me, hoped the resemblance would show. being known is a daylight concept. it’s a shadow in the noontime, lost by twilight’s end.

annie c.s., “who am I to myself”

[thisyearswords]

i. the road curves upward like an S then shoots you past a convenient store into a close corridor of branches and dusty sky. it hugs the edges of the city backwards, refusing to acknowledge proper society. driving on the road puts you on the ley line between city and forest and that’s where your tires teeter and where your arms stretch out in both   directions to hold them both in your head, hazy in their simultaneity. I drove that road once when it glittered with rain in the sunshine. on the radio I listened to a man sing “Losing My Religion” for seventeen minutes straight. It was the closest to a rapture I’ve ever been. ii. the plane didn’t come and it didn’t come and it didn’t come and i dozed my aching body on the hard blue ground on my pack under the hard white lights that glared on the hard black midnight windows and the plane didn’t come and didn’t come and she was at the desk for answers and i dozed my aching body on a hard white rocking chair in the hard white light of the hard white help center and the plane didn’t come and my aching body dozed but didn’t sleep and ants crawled through my bloodstream in the hard white lights and years crawled through my bloodstream in the hard white lights and i dozed my aching body in a hard brown hotel bed i couldn’t remember getting to but the hard blue carpet was still on my skin and the hard white lights kept me awake even with ants crawling through my bloodstream iii. once there was a metro car. once there was a man’s guitar. once there was a song i knew. once there was a seine-side view. eiffel tower, shining shower, strangers’ laughter mixed with ours, raining gently, differently, rain and light and touch like stars— iv. the evening showing wasn’t cool enough. no, not for this, not for we who had waited our lives for this moment. we went at midnight. the big screen too big for my sandy eyes, colors too bright, sound too loud, my place here in this moment in this year in this century in this timeline all concentrated into THIS NOW HERE so i could hardly breathe to take it in, struggle to believe myself real, to think myself into reality, i think therefore i am watching a real movie with my real eyes, scummy-with-spilled-Pepsi floor and rotten dropped popcorn and rough stained chair upholstery and gummy chair arm, me here, me here, me existing in this chair before this screen, sleep-deprived and overwhelmed by the line and the cold and John Williams and the beginning. between new myth and old, between beginning and end, between the emotion and the response— oh liminality isn’t a place but a time, an experience that you reach by falling headfirst where you can only get to but the once.

annie c.s., “liminal in fourths”