Move to Think

Between us
was only space
and his talk
was nothing
more than soft
fury against ivory.
I am his body
of water
in motion –
of work
in orbit
and the change
is only space
between fingers
tightly pressed,
but still weight
pushes sand through.
From across the
wooden floor
I feel him inside me
not filling me
but giving the
emptiness a purpose.
I am full of sound
and it throws shadows
on my stomach
gathered around the fire
of burning notes –
signifying the nothing
that keeps us moving.

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A Poem Hoping to Be Lyrics

Beat me.
Tight skin stretched
over aged wood
etched with clumsy
bamboo leaves.
Tanned and then
spanked by an aborigine.
Make my hollowness
a sound,
my emptiness,
percussion.
Make me an instance
in time
that separates
with empty space
the otherwise profound
wholes.
Beat me with your calloused
hands. To forge
and to forgery.
Create the soft lie
of leaving your mouth
with all the tenor
and authorial freedom
that was first beat
into man by God.
And then after the climax
let me fall.
Gently away

into nothingness.

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Going

She ran.
Pathways weaving like a seamstress needle
below and above fabric.
Under the lights of the gently bending street lamps
vision became unbearable
just long enough to be plunged back into darkness.
Alone with her thoughts
and her headphones.

Music in these times
is useless.
It makes her long for
skipping records again.
Like the scratchy heart beat
in her chest.
The way the arm claws at
a dark worn groove
only to hop back again.

If he could see her now.
Keeping beat
with a loose necklace
bouncing against her chest.
How he would laugh
as she ran
nothing but a silhouette
pressed against
the river banks.
The moonlight
catching on its
cold ink surface.
He always laughed at tragedy
and when she would cry.

She ran
until she saw the bench.
Her old dirty friend.
Falling like a fig into his arms.
Not to cry, but to laugh
and to skip stones
against the worn black
grooves of the river.

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The Highest Music

She sings
amidst artificial rain
to clean her.
Soap suds gossamer robes
and sterile acoustics.
A love song, her lover can’t hear,
it is a celebration of him,
a contemplation of their shared history
and it is for her dreams only.

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Pirate Music

He said your poetry gives you away.
He is more honest that me
That is why he says so. Sometimes
it tells me who I am today,
or was yesterday,
and sometimes I just sit in my room
and pirate music.

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Mosh Pit

Man is an impressionist movement
with clear signs
of their creator
on the tracks of there skin
every scar, stretch, and stroke
from hate and love
of self, of others;
from them.

Some for a reason
others by accident,
an untrained creator
a late night
falling asleep with
a cigarette in your mouth.
At a distance they look
right, but they’re blurry
when you are close enough
to touch. And the artist’s
eye is busy asking:
does that make it
less real
or more?

In a mass of other clearly
marked people
every man disappears,
concealed
in a sea of similar
strokes, giant fingers
gropping and shaking
the whole.
Some call it barbaric
or even pagan
but from such distances I wouldn’t
see any of them,
if I didn’t see all of them.

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We Are Able

The two drove the end of summer
with an ear to a borrowed cassette,
their sacrifice to a summer
too short and a God too hidden.
The ailing skies over our city
have been interrupted by a tower
taller than the surrounding hills.
Its concrete skin filled
with steel bones
but no heart. The construction workers
weren’t paid enough

to stay. They ride the summer,
let it take them home
when the sun comes up.
Passing signs they don’t
need to read. That they
can’t read.
Tired bones are
discarded onto a bed
as hard as an altar.
The women they know
through marriage
get up, sometimes in disgust
sometimes because they have to
in order to make the other

half of their living. Her smoke
curls into an ailing sky,
the dome that unites
the 24 hour barber shops
with the Greek Orthodox
Church, the veterans on
Park Street’s corner with
the well dressed

college students driving
in a beat up old green
car. In New England
such moments are short
lived. The jealous winter’s
sacrifice is necessary
but insufficient.
Our curled jaw bones
clutching
Lucky Strike
burnt offerings,
disposable straws,
addictive lyrics.

The two let the city
flow past open windows,
their music comingling
with the streets it
was born in. As if
it had never left.
They would reunite
again, in the mind
of their creator,
if they were able.
The best they can
do is echo off
concrete skin
and teach our city
three desperate words:
we are Able.

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Music Hall Heroes

Eighty people stir restlessly
in a pit of a basement
drinking cheap beers.
Couples pair off in the back
waiting for the main act
under a maximum occupancy forty sign.

The four live outside Worcester
but work inside its city lines
until night falls and another life begins.
The two, whose vocals are bound
like a double helix,
share a union and a child.
They work during the day
making pants you put on
one leg at a time.

The girl with the bass
writes the lyrics.
She was a philosophy major
with too much passion.
Her songs are the children
of Plath and Nietzsche,
the Peloponnesian War and Iraq.

The last man is loveless and plays
anything proficiently
but nothing great. For the four
he is a drummer.
His paint stained jeans tell
the story of his long day.
The kind that only beating
a thin layer of skin stretched
over a barrel can unwind.

Together they have had many names,
never famous ones,
but every Thursday they play
and in the chills of winter
the hills of Worcester
are lit only to lead people there
to hear pure music.
Simple, rhythmic, pure music.

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A Metaphor?

Black and white cons. Tattered jeans. The t-shirt with a band’s name. A hoodie. A cloudless yet thundering sky above. A soulless yet sacred pavement below. Amidst an elegantly constructed rubble there is an art. Sharp angular buildings carve a new sky – one determined by arithmetical precision of point A to point B – a skyline where once there was an arc and a horizon. Eyes catch a self walking beside them in the mirrored side of a headless building.

The shifting doppelganger pulls his hoodie ever over his face. It hides a pumping pocket music box the artificial heart tucked neatly into secret space. Its droning muse redefines things around by altering moods and emotions. It at least distracts one’s self from grunting street folk, yelling children, angry men, and domestic assault. Hurried people bump the ghost in street clothes as they splash by in lingering puddles – the aftermath of a deluge worthy of Noah’s arc.

Pascal outlined how distraction only served to make us forget about death. The music pumped on. Death is not nearly as scary as purposeless living some would say. To fear death would be to fear what you do not know otherwise called a phobia. So distractions might as it turns offer salvation from the natural elements that otherwise bind us in a prison of flesh. Life, after all its pretensions are stripped, would be an error without music.

A hand reached out to grab a hold of its corresponding doppelganger only to find smooth glass. Its firm skin coldly resisted touch. How sound could easily cut the infinitely regress into fragments. Destruction, it turns out, is linked to creativity. Destruction’s angel of justice, Entropy, only exists as an accident of presupposed organization. An organization that means nothing without an organizer. The difference between life and death, science teaches, is a few misplaced neurons, a couple of atoms, and timing. What brought life to that unrelated mess of parts is still unknown – but it wasn’t music.

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Why They Still Play

They’ll still play, because their human;
even though life is away
They’ll still play

With Bones as their drumstyx,
Fingernail picks for fat licks,
Because their human.

They’ll still play the blues
Even with nothing left to loose
they’ll still play

On drums made of skin,
Guitar’s with sinews stretched thin,
Because they are human.

They’ll still play for the new man
Even when he’s got nothin’ to say
They’ll still play.

They’ll take turns being the minstrel
Even though they are in hell
Because they are human.

They’ll still play bagpipes made of stomach
The lipless droning doodle sacks
They’ll still play

Each ghost wiping away the tears
From their hollow skulled peers
because their still human.

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