by trentm32 » 6/21/2007, 10:52 am
here's the edited, finished version of what i popped up a week or so ago...
“too years”
coming back to this page
so blank-- a ringing in my ears
as pen crashes into paper
and my tears fall
as thick black dots
washing this dark white in waves
and I can't remember her face
or her name--the ringing, so loud now
and I become silent
as it washes over me, through me, in ripples
so tiny so violent, as this barge tatters the sea
it could have been yesterday
or a decade ago, or never
God forbid, perhaps tomorrow—
I shudder in the cool night
as the breeze blows harder than before.
I wonder if it's harder than it ever has
this passion, or hatred, confusion
and the empty words in between
love, maybe—too soon, or too late
it's all because of time, that much I know
poetry and prose and my tired mind
all wondering if it really is all the same,
just as it seems, just as they say
I'd shatter the clock—
but a billion others would just keep ticking
I think of going back, but it wouldn't be the same
two years too late, I think,
with stars above my head, perhaps not yours,
and streetlights make this tapestry of city and night
of country and hell and heaven,
and a passing car
goodnight Rockland, goodnight Babylon
and Manhattan and Boston,
and the empty prairie that haunts me
with a bowl of stars so close I can reach out
and grab them, and hold them
as I wonder why they won't find me
sitting on my own front porch
and I miss you. It hurts to say it,
but God it's true as my tears become water
too real for thick black ink to mask
with a splash and refrain, but I can't find the words.
I'm sorry EAP. I tried but there isn't just one
that would say what a thousand pages
and a thousand screams
and a thousand salty drops couldn't say for me all this time
two years two years too years.
I tried the math a thousand times, yet it never adds up
always a little past twenty when I'm begging
and clawing for an eighteen even if it was hell,
and I wonder if I'd do it all again. I wonder.
and I hold the phone up to my ear and cry and
cry and cry over and over and over at the wonderment
I find there. the curiosity and phrases that I beg to explain themselves
but there's only cold plastic and light static
as you're asleep in your bed with a warm pillow and an afterthought
it feels good though, to touch the raw that hides itself so well
behind a smile and a joke and confidence that's so rehearsed
it costs a forest of trees and an ocean of ink to keep on going.
the ebb and flow of a thick black river begging me to dive in
as I shiver on the shore watching it wash everything away
sketches, of the raw and the bloody and the sinew that drips
and sweats between the long forms and the tip-toeing
and the martyr complex that kills every good writer
that I just read about in tightly bound books and eloquent sentences.
there never seems to be a good place to get off.
fingers bloody and this pen’s a nub but there never can be enough.
two years begging for freedom, finally devouring this,
and with enough coffee it could challenge Jack's butcher paper
magnum opus that started all of this in the first place
the clock keeps ticking. There’s thunder in my ears as I notice
that the right time has passed and I wonder if this'll ever make
it anywhere, waiting for something to pierce and shake me to the core
but all I get is silence as the still night engulfs me like the heavens
do a broken satellite that can't hold it's trail
and I wonder if it’s true that I'm just a coward with an ink pen
and never a sword, that can't find his rhyme
and I can't find my war among the dozens howling in smoke and sand
and the jungles of concrete and green that surround and engulf the earth like
leaves of grass over a matchbox burned to ashes
in a yard that hasn't been mowed since last summer
and I listen again, the last time I tell myself as I cue my finger to press play again
and again in the dark drive home from somewhere important,
and I wonder just how important as that voice I'd never forget
fills my ears and I can smell sweet cigarettes in the empty air
that's crisp with summer heat and brown grass and your grey eyes
behind hair that I've never run my fingers through
and the park was cool with it's spraying water and chilly wind
even in the dead of summer when the sun would boil it all.
The flags tickled the poles and it tickled my ears until I finally
said to hell with it and came back here to bleed it out. Thinking
and pushing just couldn't do it all. But I need this, I think. I hope.
I pray.
"When looking up there, I just felt whole, like I belonged. Like one day I too would shine my most brilliant. Sitting there also made me think about sitting through services at my little country church back home. About that never-changing congregation of the same sixty-seven people and everyone has known you since before you were born. Now, out here in the real world, everything just seemed more vivid than when I used to sit in that little pew. That pew that was now so, so far away from where I was. I feared I had somehow left God behind there, too. I feared he was somehow just sitting there, saving my seat on the fifth pew from the front row, just waiting on me to come back. I left so quickly, I worried that he may not have noticed I was gone. And, now, I’m just too far away to find. So he’s just sitting there, patiently waiting on me to come back. I closed my eyes and prayed a moment. I hoped more than anything that he could still hear me." -an excerpt from my novella, A Sea of Fallen Leaves.
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