cryptomnesia

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Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Big & Smaller Bridges

The fabulous Tom Devaney guest edited this great online journal and included a couple of my poems.

Monday, January 15, 2007

New Yorker Poem #7

As for my place in the world, I failed
to notice I was in the wrong building.
Nothing happened quickly. I was stung
only twice by young bees who did not
know me. I was affected by his knife
and fork, the rising mist on nearby trees,
fleeting moments of friendship camouflaged
as crisis. And now there is nothing left.
Sunlight made it all much worse.
This style, seemingly interminable
sentences wending from subject
to subject without pause, hurtling
through every emotion in a matter
of minutes is the narrative embodiment
of paranoia. We’re constantly correcting
ourselves because we realize we did it
all wrong. This was not my father’s voice.
Deep inside, there is a lonely room
full of fireworks and signifiers and fear.
And I am telling you I’m not going.
As I opened the suitcase, a rebirth.
My desire to write, the most valuable tool—
the Edwardians would have called it a
ripping yarn. But nothing adds up.
Everyone says I love you like a kitten
trying to climb out of the slippysided
zinc pail it has been flung in. How strange
that I did not question my right to pry,
to barge in and break this to the surface.
You can always hear your own voice
once the symbolic violence plays out.
You did what you did, I said, my voice
the lost architecture of bones. In the
smoothing pause, the secret affair
between disgust and joy, emerged
a stable dull lesson: the tremendous
invisible pounding of my own blood
to demonstrate how wrong he was.