Shorthand for Nothing

For Nigel.

I.
You were the king of dingy bathroom tile,
unafraid of
discarded towels
clustered hair
or sudden lights
and stomping feet.
You stood there, just watching,
as the world moved by
your bathroom tiles.

Your reign was silent
and brief,
your explorations
infinitely vast,
infinitely small,
infinite. The world was
yours, and you took your time.

II.
When I was a child,
I was frightened of dark places.

III.
Some things are always left unsaid,
little quiet ideas that no one
dares express,
or just no one thinks to.

And these are the things lives are made of:
quiet thoughts and inner moments,
secrets that die out
before they are born, completely unnoticed
by any who might remember them.

IV.
“You are the only person
who has ever seen this part of me.”
We all make mistakes. Not every choice
is obvious.

V.
I have trapped myself in a prison of ivory and metal,
vast beyond my comprehension. I should worry,
but everything seems at peace. I will know no escape,
but I need no escape.
I, alone among men, have known everything I desired.
The waters are rising. I will not resist.

VI.
You were the king of dingy bathroom tiles.
Your reign was silent
and brief.

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This isn’t a sentiment I normally experience. I think maybe I’d just watched a foreign language film or something.

You surround me with foreign words,
an endless stream of fluid syllables,
occasionally forming shapes I recognize,
but mostly changing, moving on,
before I can understand.
Sometimes my attention fades,
and I am aware but not aware,
and the song is lost on me.
At other times,
I sit,
enchanted by your lilting tongue,
but never quite understanding.

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I left this on a napkin once for a waitress who just looked like poetry. I don’t mean that to be weird, but she was cute on a level that made me want to leave this for her. I don’t think I ever saw her again, which is weird because I was there all the time.

She smells like quiet drives in the rain.
The weather is cold and unpleasant
but the car is warm
and the windshield wipers freshly changed
(And from the car it’s easy to imagine:
the rain is clean and renewing)

And despite the clouds blocking the sun
it’s bright out
and the colors are clearer
than the sunniest of days.
Such a day could not be called dreary.

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This one is nice.

after a shower and a shave
and generally cleaning up
for no one but myself
and maybe a dream
but mainly myself

i’m out of several things (bread
cheese
aftershave) but it’s been a long night
and i’ll still be hungry in the morning

what’s really bothering me is
(apart from everything else)
does anybody else notice
when it’s been a long night?

I think I wrote it because I wanted to write one without capital letters. Success! It is about how sometimes, when I haven’t slept well or I skipped a shower or I haven’t shaved I wonder if anyone notices. Sometimes the idea of someone saying “man, you look rough” has this weird appeal to it. I don’t know.

When I showed this one to Janie, she said that “this one would be cool to find somewhere on a dirty scrap of paper.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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This one is from a different archive: from a bunch of papers and printouts I made for a class. I believe the assignment had something to do with writing about a room from our childhood.

She used to sing every night
quiet, peaceful songs.
I’ve forgotten most of them
but I still remember her voice,
and her silhouette on the edge of the bed.
Her voice was not a siren’s,
but the call of gulls and a familiar foghorn announcing:
the ship has safely returned.
It brought us peace and guided our voyage
to the land of dreams–but dreamers often lie.

It was dark as she sang,
so we could see nothing
(not her, not my father’s chest against the wall,
filled with treasures from across the sea).
Her ship sailed by night,
so our ears were content
to hear the gulls and the waves
lull us to sleep.

One evening the sea was quiet
and the horn did not sound.
We expected shipwreck
but heard nothing
and slept uneasy that night,
no song to guide us to our dreams.

The horn we heard at sunrise was not hers.
It was light and warm and everything was wrong:
the stars were gone by day.
My father’s ship sang songs of shipwreck,
and it sounded empty and hollow.
It did not weep. I took up his ensign
and followed his course:
there was no other course to follow.

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This one is patterned on this poem by ee cummings. It is called Not A Cynic, which is kind of a thing.

Humanity, I hate you
because you laugh at misfortune
and your smiles are insincere.
I hate you because
you’re afraid,
and afraid of talking about being afraid.
I hate how you
never stay long
and don’t say goodbye.
I hate how you always remind me
how much I’ll miss you.
I hate that you
are cruel and sweet and sad and hilarious.
I hate your gentle caress
late at night,
chasing my fears away
and my worries
and all of my doubts. Humanity,
I love you.

This is probably my more successful patterned-on-another-poem poem. The other one is called Song of Myself, patterned on some random lines from the Whitman poem of the same name.

If my lovers suffocate me,
it is my own fault,
not hers,
not an accident of my creation
or upbringing,
but my fault for giving her
anything less than myself.

Listen.
If I am not I,
I am nothing,
whatever my intentions.
This is clear to me now:
I can be no other.
I hide nothing from
the searching eyes of the world.
If I sound another’s battlecry,
what is it but some barbaric yawp,
some shapeless noise
polluting the night?

I let the chilling wind
embrace me,
smiling as it stings my eyes,
freezes my flesh.
It is around me,
until ‘me’ is all there is,
my suffering, my triumph,
everything,
and I will not go quietly.

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Unlike the European explorers,
I cannot land my fleet at new worlds,
my holds laden with gifts,
and marvel at someone so different.
There are no new names
to give new wonders–
but there are no new wonders.
Everything is named and charted,
and not even by a man
desiring to find and name new things.
Even so,
I long for unfamiliar territory,
for a land to explore,
some new world to claim as home.

Sometimes I write poems about things that are historical. This one is about how much it bothers me that the new world was found by people who were mostly interested in new trade routes, and now I’m looking back at it and thinking that they were probably still just as excited to find this completely new world. Even so: the world is pretty much charted now, and sometimes that’s sad.

I’m not so keen on subjugating the natives and killing them with my diseases, but that’s not the point.

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I like this one.

So much reminds me of you,
but mostly, it’s the dark,
and the faint glow of
red numerals on a digital clock.
There was nothing to see,
no sound but your voice,
and despite the clock
I never noticed how late it was–
it was always too early for that.

In the desperate solitude of the dark
I can still hear you
telling stories I never quite understood.
I’m not sure I do, still–
it was really just you I was hanging on to,
not your every word.
Sometimes I still talk to you,
knowing you can’t hear me,
when it’s dark
and I’m reminded of you.

There are some nice lines in here! This one is about the same girl most of these ended up being about. I’d spend hours talking to her on the phone every night, just lying in the dark. My alarm clock was the only illumination. The reason this one is remarkable is it’s the most directly and honestly about her. This was deliberate. The title (which one or two people might know; I won’t repeat it here) has her name in it. It’s one of two things I’ve written which does.

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These were the first two poems I wrote in 2008. I almost gave them each their own post, but there’s a striking similarity between the two. The first one is about new year’s.

Did you kiss me at midnight
because you wanted to kiss me,
or because you wanted to start the year
on something positive?
Or does the question even matter?
If it was only the moment,
can I not recreate the moment?
Did I not give you
something positive to start the year on?

There is, I think,
a fundamental difference between you and I:
while I labor over meaning and motive,
you just act.
This is why, when looking back,
you kissed me at new year’s,
and I’m still worrying about it.

Again, I’m not sure if I had someone in mind when I wrote this, though I do know that if I did, we did not kiss at new year’s. I think I was working on New Year’s Eve. We had tacos.

This is the second one:

Mostly, I hoped that
everything would be okay.
That was two years ago.
I really thought it would,
like wishing had power–
not wishing
on childhood superstitions
(though I did that, too)
but simple hope.

I’d styled myself a realist,
which is a pessimist in denial,
but she drove that all away.
I smiled, laughed, dreamed,
hoped,
but the worst thing was
I believed it.

There’s a difference
between hope and hope:
the trick
is not to confuse the two.

This one is pretty disjointed, but it has some good lines. I like that I used the same device to end both of these poems. (I’m also really fond of starting them with questions, especially “Did you/did your” questions.) Normally this wouldn’t merit attention, but they were also right next to each other.

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Like many of my writing, this one has something of a history:

You were an ancient clock,
beautifully crafted,
carefully honed,
Roman numerals on the facing,
wound daily,
maintained carefully,
and none could deny your beauty,
your effectiveness.
I could never bring myself
to replace a part, however,
and even with loving maintenance,
painstaking repairs,
eventually your endless tick
stopped.

Only I could see it coming:
to the last you gave no sign,
no indication,
neither through arrhythmic ticking
or inaccurate timekeeping.
You kept your secrets,
and even I could scarcely tell–
I swore there would be more time.
When at length you would tell time
no more,
I felt almost cheated:
no climactic moment,
no epic time–
just one last tick, and then
silence.

I wrote an earlier poem called Like Clockwork, which was sort of about an old broken clock I had but was mostly about August of 2005, when it was written. The clock was very beautiful and that poem is one of the ones that I’ve always remembered writing. I know everything about it. It is reproduced at the end of this post. I have cleaned it up slightly; at the time of writing I did not think capital letters looked very nice.

So “Like Clockwork, Revisited” is about another relationship, and you can see how differently I viewed it. I can also perfectly see all of the problems that perspective came with, but that is another story altogether.

The original piece is here:

You were the gears,
I was the pendulum.
The clock was wound–
together, at first,
we kept perfect time.
But winding won’t last
forever.

You turned more slowly,
and I could not keep
swinging on forever–
not without you helping.
The harmony that made us tick,
so beautiful, so perfect,
slowly faded away.

Our chimes were once a symphony
sounding by the quarter hour,
announcing to the world
our perfect time.
But it’s only haunting now:
the keys are wrong,
the sound is broken.

You would not turn
and I would not tick.
We sat on the shelf for a time.
The hands did not move,
the chimes did not play.
Our music was silenced.
Wind it up–

The time was not perfect,
the chimes were not right,
and nothing was quite the same.
Your spokes were rusted,
I became arrhythmic,
never could keep going without you.
The clock stopped.

“Wind it up” is lifted directly from Radiohead.

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