not nearly as lost

not nearly as lost
as i think i am
got friends, family, handholds to catch,
a hunger, a belly, and dinner from scratch
not nearly as dark
as i think i am
got sushine, horizon, a backbone, a mind
got water ahead and sandbar behind
got distance, got mileage, got easy direction
got rhythm and patience, got meter, inflection
not nearly as gone
as i think i am
got compass and highway,
got notes to a song
got metronome, handclaps, guitars all along
not nearly as cold
as i think i am
got blankets, and coffee,
and good arms to dive in,
invitations, footbaths, a car to arrive in
not loose
not distracted
broken down or impacted
not burning, not brittle,
not invisibly little,
not monstrous, malicious
not decidedly vicious
not window not wall
between shorelines
that's all

Where did I get this

Where did I get this set jaw, these insistent bones, these spikes on my spine? Where did I get my fury, my rigor, impatience, my need? Who made this impossible architecture, these teetering whims, my faulty thoroughfares of thought? Where is the origin of my clanking messes, my indelicate dancing, my incoherence? Where did I get these cluttered affections, this fumbling artlessness, this rickety seesaw of love?

And yet, who am I without my deficits? Who am I without my untimely malfunctions, my unavoidable catastrophes? Who would touch me without my chaos, my unwieldy mistakes? Who would hold me without my clumsiness, my imperfections, my sorrow? Who would love me without my rain, my dark fog, my perilous highways, the broken arrow of my wild, disastrous heart?

fortunately

Fortunately, there's sex. That wide and lilting swimming pool. That whisper of dark, burrowing blue. That easy chaos, a tumble of limbs and bedsheets and daylight slipping. It's beautiful and strange and liquid and the opposite of your normal, waking self, which bangs into things, trips over the lips of sidewalks, careens perilously through through town on a red bicycle without a helmet. Your normal, waking self aims too much for good posture, aims too much for efficiency and speed, for thorough, synchronized tidy work. But not here. Sex offers up a kind of weakness, begs your imprecision, calls from you a deep, unfamiliar desire to topple what you know, where you're been, what you've felt and seen and touched. Sex unbuttons you, unpeels you, unmasks your disaster, your carelessness, your unstoppable mess.

Here, you are held close, folded in, hibernated and soothed and extended far away from the question mark you've been carrying. Here, your body finds its art, its consonant rhythms. Here, you are phrase, you are song, you are movement, you are the very heart of yourself, you are all heart. Something slides into the room of you, a palpable new texture - forgiveness, electricity, some palliative wash of truth - and you lose the harsher outlines of yourself, the timing, the purpose, the reason, and you become reason-less and with no purpose other than to love and be loved.

Where does a poem come from?

Where does a poem come from if you aren't sad or angry or confused or overwhelmed or even deliriously happy? If you are in a state of plain-ness, of even-ness, of level-headedness, of small steps forward and maybe one step back once in a while but basically you're just shuffling forward, unremarkably, without much splashing about or hand-wringing or fishtailing or racing to the head of the pack. Where does a poem come from when you're not quite still enough to hear it, but you aren't moving that fast either, neither here nor there, even though you're almost catching other things - words latch themselves onto you but then fall off, an image sticks and then evaporates, a phrase fuses, then disintegrates. And it's alright, of course - the thing with poems is that when they come you feel good about it, lucky, like you've plucked some great juicy bit from the ether, a needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing, and at that moment time doesn't matter, and even words don't matter much, it's just this momentum, this little thrill, what carries you, what makes you feel full to the gills with breath.

But what carries you when you're not writing? What fills your lungs, makes you feel lucky, make you feel placed in this world for a purpose, makes you understand your deep, deep longing, makes you notice your steps, makes you gather in your arms all the beautiful & frightening & luscious things that happen daily? What fills your body with oxygen, what sticks and stays, what swims and sashays, what flies through the air, what touches your skin? Love, I suppose, but even then, even then, you're looking for something else, something that's totally, utterly, substantially yours, yours and yours only, and somehow the poem delivers that to you, it's something just for you, but what happens when a poem doesn't come?

Maybe you go to the movies. Maybe you walk the dog. Check your email, make macaroni and cheese, buy another carton of milk, watch the window, straighten the desk, clean out the closet, put a photograph of your lover in a frame, finish a book, visit the doctor, pay a bill, earn a living. Maybe you revisit the action plan you wrote last year, the one with Pilates classes and tennis once a week, and sending the writing out to get published, and making more dioramas. Maybe you check things off, one by one. Maybe you don't make anything new for awhile. Maybe you let things be.

more 10-liners from readers

A Proposal
by Kevin V.

What do you say
You and I
Make love on the carpet
Bruising our knees in the process
Of coupling like lions intent on the struggle
Insisting that wildness is part of our nature
'Til panting and laughing we come disentangled
Washed off our backs with loofahs and kisses
Got dressed
And went to dinner?


Untitled
by Judi P.

She was exhausted with the effort.
that part of herself that was that was once her self
had somehow disappeared.

So she pretended, and smiled, and tried to attend,
but it was difficult

because the part of herself
that remembered her self
was screaming.

And she could no longer hear
anything but the deafening sound of the scream. Aaahhh.



Toledo for Tourists (Halloween or no Halloween)
by Mark C.

After dark they move about, the mothlike old priests flit,
Through narrow streets, red-eyed and gaunt. The Lupine edicts cross
The land, unleashed by their powdered hands, the town sleeps
Like a crocodile and though the hairy handed goldsmith buys us drinks,
Its time to go.
Your green river, your knives, your marzipan and ghosts,
Your algebra and orchards, your dusty violins
Barking from windows while the sun lights Visigothic pillars,
Your Moorish streets broke our wing mirrors.
They’re going to know.


defending yourself
by Brad Y.

Another statistic is published, another phone call
"Do you still have that motorcycle?... Do you AT LEAST wear a helmet?"

fire up the Harley, roar out of the neighborhood
the journey calls, the new roads unridden
the smells are really quite diverse, you'd never know in the car
when the miles roll on my gas-tank odometer - the stresses roll on off
Sometimes it takes 200 miles before I forget....about the duties, the chores, the mind-numbing routine
and of course, the phone calls....
"WHY do you still have that motorcycle?... Do you AT LEAST wear a helmet?"
... and I think about those poor fuckers who died eating bad spinach.