I Found In My Bed This Morning A Body Waking Up

I found at my door this morning a woman with lines under her eyes
who, for many years, had driven past my home on her way to the doctor’s office.
Who had a rare blood disease,
which made her terribly pale.
Who had a mole on the side of her neck
which made her very nervous.
Who dyed her hair a tasteful blonde,
which made her less like her mother.

I found in a drawer this morning photographs of my sister with brown eyes
who, until just recently, had taught English to Chinese girls
who never cried as a child
which made her terribly well-liked.
Who sang the national anthem at the top of her lungs
which made the Olympics very interesting.
Who wore her hair the way she woke up
which made her just like our mother.

I found in the yard this morning an entire collection of dandelions
finding purchase in the spot between the swing set and the shed
I found in my mouth just now more spit than I knew what to do with
which, in my swallowing, I must have forgotten.

A Short History Of The Way You Pronounce The Word Evening

You pronounce it like this: "even
-ing."

Endtimes Prayer

Help us not to kill ourselves
with great underwater explosions, collapsing shopping malls, destruction of capital cities and important monuments, melting faces of world leaders, with screams of the innocent, nuclear missiles, automatic weapons, dirt smeared all over our faces, our children asleep and afraid in our arms, with sweethearts making love wherever they can, with the rails overflowing with trains to New Jersey, children going home, with gnashing of teeth, with the Bible held above us like a bomb, the bottle, half-full and in our trembling hand, an appropriate soundtrack, with riots and looting, standing on the roofs of our condominiums and yelling for saving, the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen, with no time for mourning, unknown attackers, crying newscasters, stammering presidents and prime ministers, with rambling prayers from the bottom of our gut, with the knowledge that this will come anyway.
Amen.

How Does My Neighbor Live?

In the first days of autumn, commercial jets completing flight patterns above your house in the suburbs of Philadelphia,
you wait there for the Phillies to win the pennant and comb your hair, serene on the front porch, your father burning leaves out back.

Ladies, 1918-1928

When I left that old French sunlight,
bored in the buried color of the people
who sang for a man who had his own mystery,
alive, destructive, disguised—
I mean, drunken with his Muse, their angel,
shedding its grace on half-marble columns—
lukewarm blood and searches for God,
and we may have to wait for the delicate body

at dawn: impossible soft voice,
the arrival of five senses
trembling, perfected, inadequate, authentic,
with wings where, naturally, they made terrible saints
and, of our own sharp kissing, strange at the dawn
of garden processions and all the world,
in trying to love, was imprisoned by the dance
and the bullfight. The body, begging for a drive

home, makes us forget the great highways
where, motionless, she painted wind and saliva.

Seventy-Eight Words For Jules

Who was it that said: “So this is
the voice of god, out from
the man with grit in his face, out from
the bed, rose late as shit with grey eyes

to match the day. Our forms
spit smoke and brown rinds in streets

named for trees. And I’ve been lost
in my skull, woke up mad, scared,
new, born on the first floor
of a wood stove, its smell is still on me,” who was that?

Holy, Holy

We made our house into a church and lay on deep carpets admiring the gods in the ceiling cracks
and lit candles in the kitchen, singing loudly for salvation over the phone to gone friends and dying mothers.
We made murals with old paint, getting sick off the fumes, got classic rock radio coming in static over a secondhand boombox
and prayed feverishly to the bugs in our sugar, the leak in our roof, the infection in our gums.
We baptized ourselves in the bathtub, yelling over the thunder about the danger we were in,
yelling new commandments into a tape recorder until the batteries died
and fed each other snack food with our eyes closed, opening gas station wine bottles with the key to your Chevy Lumina, shit chardonnay staining our teeth.
We stared deeply into the oven for a sign until our heads were heavy with gas, dumb with visions of sex and saviors
and broke every window on the second floor for lack of stained glass, letting theleaves pile up, burning them for boredom.
We punched ourselves awake to observe the equinox, great stretches of bitter October night on the roof watching traffic,
watching the sky for new light
and weighed ourselves next to the television, thinking about the anchorwoman naked, counting our ribs.
We ran hands over each other in ritual, keeping warm under eaten afghan covers, sweat sticking to our sides
and urinated off of the fire escape as a gesture of our own holy, making a fuss over the trajectory of piss in relation to the changes in wind.
We went on pilgrimages to the corner store for sleeping pills and Reese’s cups, smiling high and tired at the woman buying five types of lottery tickets,
smiling for the way our feet were swollen inside our sneakers, stomped out too many ceremonies around the whistling furnace
and grew a beautiful beard just then, our faces sore from cheap razors and hailstorms on the way to the library, cutting out naked statue pictures from history books to put next to our sleeping heads
We spent a day in Manhattan looking for images of the messiah in Coca-Cola billboards, making eye contact with beautiful strangers in tracksuits,
making out in the back of taxis, taking pictures of each other next to monuments,
and reaching enlightenment.

Realism Cookies

You’re a nice enough guy, but so is everyone else.

The next person you meet won’t remember your name.

One man’s newspaper is another man’s cum-rag.

People wouldn’t miss you as much as you think.

Talk more about your unfortunate childhood. It’s charming.

You will never be famous or even particularly well-liked.


(apologies to Frank O'Hara)

Song From The House On West Nelson Street

The children holding themselves around the ribcage
and giving a some-toothed smile, running
until they fell,
and we were caught very much unawares,
holding the flower they gave us,
realizing age.

The only something I regret is not jumping
more into the arms of my mother,
looking through her cut glass earrings
at the passing cars.
And my grandfather would eat peanuts
with the shells and bottles around him

and a baseball game on the television.
Formerly a would-be war hero,
in the telling at least.
We ran back and forth from the kitchen
to get him another Budweiser,
slipping on the crooked floors.

To have something like this:
Little scars take parts of my face
from brother-fights. A way to see
how happy I was in a backyard,
next to the regional high school
where we could light piles of leaves on fire,

scale the brick monoliths and holler
with our power. I spent a whole day
in my closet, counting the times
I had been in love. When the door
swung open everyone was waiting for the emergency,
and I think I half-upset them by being alright.

For maybe one second
that kid heart, dizzy with excitement,
fell back to me, its owner.

Everything About Himself Is Somehow Worse Than The Way He's Imagined It

1. That new Saturday haircut is like readiness and beauty.
2. White shirts make it all look pale and sick under these lights.
3. How do teeth get that yellow?
4. See the eyes closing right in front of the face.
5. A face like that belongs on a military recruitment poster, so it was.
6. Backwards adjusting the stray eyelash out from under the eyes shot with blood.
7. Such a piercing gaze, and she’s done it.
8. The flexing and smiling for one, same as always.
9. Please read on as he evaluates himself.
10. Hear someone relieving himself, isn’t it the same water or whatever?

1. Hear: isn’t it relieving? He read “evaluates” as “please himself on.” So it, --a military face that belongs-- was on a recruitment poster. Front-right of the closing-in face, see the eyes. She’s done such piercing it, and a gaze. Stray, shot, backwards blood adjusting the eyes, the eyelash, with out-from-under. And that new haircut is beauty is like Saturday readiness. Smiling, flexing, always as for one and the same. Get that yellow, “how do?” teeth. These lights look sick, making it all under white shirts and pale.
2. Thank you.

An Image Of The Face Looking Frantically Around Itself While Becoming Defeated

Could we look more disheveled,
getting off the train
in a major American city?
Moving out from under the elevated rails
to watch the rain from
a less comfortable distance
and feel more a part
of whatever way the people that day
are holding themselves,
their crumpled bodies
just barely touching the ground
in a heavy wind. Pushing glasses
up their faces, newsprint ink running
down their arms. Strangled and rushed,
the beating body, and the body being
beaten.

Do human forms
still crash together
with alarming force and frequency, the air
thick with their sweat? On days like
this, when the end seems
nearer than usual? I’ll still kiss you
but—
It is difficult to imagine you naked when you are running late.

Thoughts On Spitting While Speaking

or
The Human Body Growing Less Useful Over Time

Begin finding the moon in the morning
Morning, how the day turns heavy
Heavy how we hang our heads
Heads we recognize from the back
Back when I lived closer to the earth
Earth is something else we named
Named you, seemed alright in the mouth
Mouth was always busy with spit
Spit carefully into the river again, but better
Better that we don’t speak now
Now lift your head and begin

(repeat as necessary)

Twelve Lines For The Crumbs And Yourself

1. I spend a day enjoying my fever.
2. The face appearing from beneath the mine.
3. Chest explodes with some small noise.
4. Her leg resting momentarily on my arm on the chair’s arm.
5. For a time I was the hot bath.
6. The edges are a gutter.
7. Your hair has become stuck in the branches.
8. The mark was left where my mouth had been.
9. I pick bugs off your back and eat them.
10. It blots the moon at the end of my arm.
11. Throwing the body, then standing very still
12. They have a good idea about where the eyes should be.

How To Stay Insane While Completely Going Asleep

And from behind my sleep-gouged eyes
I spoke in nonsense to the invisible woman
Who put a pillow over her face
Coy, disappearing
One shivering, outstretched hand
Stays shivered, stays outstretching
As my teeth grind efficiently against each other
For want of any other thing
I bathed in my own death sweat
Tonight
Like any other night
Was a series of disappointments
Broken by shallow breathing and batting mosquitoes off my body

How May I Find Love In A World That Could End At Any Second?

[note: This essay was written as the final paper for Bard College's Language and Thinking Workshop. Thanks for even considering reading it, but before you go any further you really should see Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), referenced several times throughout the paper. Here is a link: La jetée. Enjoy!]

All of us romantics are too distracted by our imminent deaths. We sit in front of the television, wringing our hands and pursing our lips. We have no time or energy for love in between all that worrying.

Some have said the “culture of fear” in the United States of America is politically paralyzing, that it leaves no room for free thinking, rationality, or dissenting opinions. This may be true, but we must also consider what fear does to love. Love, that fragile beast so well tended to by our artists of fiction, is seldom observed in modern case studies. It has been supplanted by fear and worry.

As much as we like to pretend, our world is nothing like your typical Hollywood action picture. We are not prone to meeting our soul mates during a global crisis. When the end of existence is haunting us, love tends to be the last thing on our minds. We are constantly made to feel as though we are just about to die. With my heart in my throat, it becomes increasingly difficult to breathe, let alone love.

Extinction is not regarded as a distant threat anymore. In my lifetime, I have seen large buildings full of my countrymen topple to the ground in flames. I have seen numerous school shootings. I have seen anthrax poisoning, SARs, chicken flu, and swine flu. Every day, people die at the hands of suicide bombers, gunmen, officers of the law, and other murderers. This list is by no means exhaustive and does not even mention natural disasters or accidental deaths. I can be sure there are more attacks, epidemics, murders, accidents, and catastrophes to follow. I can also be sure that someday something will bring about the end of my species. This knowledge surrounds the idealistic concept of love with a thick layer of perceived futility. By the time I find love, it may very well be too late. Do I still try?

I am eighteen years old, I have lived through two wars, and I have never been in love. It seems all I have done so far is get my affairs in order in preparation for the apocalypse. Other than the occasional one-night stand, not much thought is given to romantic pursuits. I often catch myself assuming that there will not be enough time.

I have to believe, though, that there is always enough time for love. It is one of the quickest and most unconscious actions we make as human beings. Love happens in the time it takes to look quickly over my shoulder at someone standing behind me at a concert. It happens in the time it takes to interpret the waitress’ handwriting on the check. Really, it happens independently of time. Even if the death of our species was seconds away I would still have plenty of time for love. I just need to learn to use that time for something other than indulging in neuroses and irrational fear.

The very idea of love is worrisome enough already. It offers heartbreak, frustration, betrayal, and —very rarely— happiness. We seem to crave these exciting turns of fortune; perhaps because that element of danger is familiar to us at this point. When a lover spurns my advances, treats me poorly, or leaves me for another, I can almost consciously enjoy the rush of emotion that follows. It is not preferable, of course, but it is something. I’ll take heartbreak in an age that usually deals me numbness.

Real love, though, the kind I pine after but do not see in my life, is waking up late with another person under your arm and being completely content. It is the holding of hands and the glances across the room and the telephone calls and the exchange of words and touches. Please tell me this brand of love is real.

I was born on January 16, 1991. Coincidentally, this was the day Operation Desert Storm began in Iraq. Born into war, I now live in it again. For the past six years, the United States of America has been occupying the country of Iraq. Now that I am an adult, I could realistically be dying for my country as early as next year. I am almost too old for love now. Love is something reserved for the young. Am I doing something wrong? Am I too scared? Not scared enough?

The terror comes to me when I turn on my television to check the weather but find instead ten dead in a shopping mall shooting spree and thousands dead in wars across the world. It is irrational, I suppose, to think that my death will come at the hands of one of the many television images burned into my memory, but the fear is still palpable and paralyzing.

The trouble is our entire social and political structure is built around danger and fear. In his “Movements And Migrations,” Edward Said notes that the government now uses the media as a tool to incite fear in its citizens in the name of patriotism. In one case he observes, “In the spring of 1986 the Reagan administration decided to deal “terrorism” a blow, the raid on Libya was times to occur exactly as prime-time national evening news began.” (327) Years later, when the United States dispatched a huge army to the Arabian Gulf, they commandeered the media to help carry out the operation (326). This is terrible news for a romantic like me. How many letters to my congressman will it take in order to reverse this trend? The government should be sympathetic to my plight. I am a citizen just reaching adulthood, not so much in love with my country, granted, but very much enamored with some of its inhabitants. In the interest of love, let’s put the guns and cameras down for at least a few hundred years.

Not that I haven’t tried to love. I have. I’m irrational about it, in fact. I’ve fallen in love while passing someone on a street, seeing them across from me on a train, meeting them in my dreams. So how do I navigate our culture of fear and make it work for me romantically? In Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), The Man was forced to travel back in time to before World War III in order to find love. This is not an option for me, as far as I know. No, I am already deep within the catacombs of that Parisian art gallery, awaiting my death. Is this a self-imposed feeling of imprisonment or has it been forced upon me?

The love depicted in La jetée doesn’t seem to exist in our society’s conscious except maybe as mimicry of what we are sold by popular culture. I’ve accepted the fact that the love I find on illuminated screens in dark theaters will not be the love I find in my life, but then what will I find? Have I already had love without knowing it? I may well be expecting something completely irrational.

The Man is able to travel back to this woman and love her. In that age, no one knew the war was coming, so they spent their time in gardens and museums. In one instance, there is a long montage of nude statues in “the museum of his memory,” which would seem to allude to the sexuality deprived of The Man by war and imprisonment. He sees the human body in an entirely new light, not as pornographic but as purely organic and awe-inspiring. The human body was not made for fighting. Our skin punctures very easily and our vital organs are all clustered in the upper portion of the body, making for easy targets. It stands to reason, then, that it was meant to be in love rather than at war. Even our necks, which serve many practical purposes, are shown in one of Marker’s many striking images from the film as seemingly perfect objects of adoration.

The peacetime depicted in the film fosters much better conditions for romance than today, when everyone’s eyes are to the sky waiting for the first bomb. Even our gardens and museums reek of fear at this point. People walk quickly and nervously, with their eyes to the ground. Our art is cold and terrified. Our films are about global disasters and tragedy. There is no time to wander the halls of a museum of “ageless animals” when everything in our lives asks us to be very afraid.

The Narrator’s use of the term “ageless animals” puzzled me at first. Are they ageless because their corpses are preserved in the glass boxes of museum? Are humans ageless as well? No, it seems that in our quest to stock our museum galleries full of animal bodies, we have forgotten our own. As with any other animal, human beings have an age, and with every passing day we are a step closer to the end of it.

There are those who escape this fear and lead fulfilling lives unhindered by the neuroses that weigh me down. I applaud them for their bravery, but I wish I could ask them how they do it. Are they blissfully ignorant or is there something in their character that tells them to set that fear aside and take life in with all of themselves?

True, I have worry-free days. Sometimes I forget to watch the news or forget to read the papers. Sometimes I just forget to be so afraid. How can I replicate this? It always comes at random and I never know until it is over. My mind clears itself of nerves and fear and allows me time to love and live. On these days I become The Man watching The Woman pull her hair back at the museum and revealing her neck. I stare at my potential lovers with fascination and wonder. I wish that they, as in the film, would “welcome as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor.” Lift your heads and love me back! Free yourself of worry as I have somehow unconsciously done! Because it is natural to have a clear head and an able body, to spend a free day finding love. I want more days of this.

So how do we go about freeing ourselves from our culture of fear? If everyone weren’t so nervous all the time, we’d have a much better shot at romance. It cannot be a new sensation, this fear. It must be as old as the human race itself. As a species, we have been in a state of constant war for hundreds of thousands of years. So has there ever been love? Can love exist in wartimes? Certainly not love in the way it is sold to us, as an eternal, uncompromising, all-encompassing force. Are we just fooling ourselves as to the nature of love then? Are we simply chasing after our animal lust for sex while “humanizing” it under another name?

It strikes me, though, that while our species has been at war since its inception, the supposed danger of our situation is more apparent now than ever. With the advent of mass media, we were exposed to a constant stream of tragedy and horror available to us at any time.

To draw another comparison to the catacombs of La jetée, our newsmen function as The Scientist, that “reasonable man who told him in a relaxed way that the human race was doomed.” At every turn, we are reminded of the risk we run by being human. This is no way to live for someone looking for love. Any search for romance seems futile when everything around me suggests I will die before finding it. Will I? Am I in true danger or is it only manufactured and imagined? Is the appearance of danger more paralyzing than the danger itself?

Works Cited

Marker, Chris. La jetée. 1962. DVD.

Said, Edward W. “Movements and Migrations.” Culture And Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 326-336. Print.

Shower

Those damn meteors
Always looking like bombs from the bathroom window
We are invulnerable, of course, but still terrified

And the kids
In the backyard with cheap telescopes
Pointing at Ursa Major engulfed in flames

“There it is.” They say
Demystifying that for me
The other kids broke into their dad's liquor cabinet

And they’re watching the stars too

Victory

She shut me up from the basement stairwell
It felt great to be yelled at like I was at home
I put one finger over my lips, mimicking hers
Then wanted to be her, with all that power
Perspiring in the heavy afternoon, it was so commonplace then
To know directly I was not a thing of this earth

And we all thought that was fine
Just another way of doing things here
She still looks at me with those mean eyes
Every time I climb a stair she retreats
Until we are in the kitchen
Kissing hard against the stove

“You are the only place I am,” I say into her mouth
The tea kettle lets loose a shrill howl of victory
As we have just defeated the enemy
“Yes.” I say again. We have done this together
Her mouth is salty with every other man’s taste
I went to the ocean with her an nearly drowned

Right on the shore

Gown

I went back to the place where they call me destroyer
It’s a pretty town but I wouldn’t want to stay
When I get out of there I always seem to feel lighter
Why that is I really couldn’t say

Too many times I wanted to jump in front
Of Confederate flag-waving pickup trucks
And all I do on my day off is talk myself to sleep
Kept up by the neighbor’s fights and noisy fucking dreams

I buy my brother Happy Meals with money I have found
On grubby supermarket floors or in the folds of your best gown
You keep inside your closet and dress up late at night
Look at yourself sideways to emphasize your height

We stop at a beach just to stand in the surf
I examine your bones through the holes in your shirt
The sand beneath my toes feels right cos I was born in it
A stupid, bloody animal and ready for my fits

I keep a pack of gum around for whenever we are out
Can’t stand all that fake mint myself, but I love to watch your mouth
Your eyes when you are thinking turn inside themselves
I never feel as sick as when I’m lusting after you

My unborn older brother ate my mother’s insides up
Now I have turned into him, it’s an awful thing to watch
Like any high school wrestling match or any network’s news
With kids dressed up like emperors, beheading all their fools

Every time I sleep I think that this is how I’ll go
In the same sunken mattress and still very much alone
And all this background ambiance of construction, early morning
The sky looked goddam grey today with all those storm clouds forming

These days I know every face that I see
From the gum-stained streets, from my window seat
I see the barber, and the cop, and the drunk, and the wife
At the pharmacy, looking to take her life

And someone at the corner store will sell me cigarettes
And some girl will be beautiful with bug bites on her neck
But I will say, “I’m leaving here, though I don’t know the roads.”
And they will say, “The important thing is knowing you must go.”

I used to hear Sister sing herself to sleep
Songs about changing the colors of leaves
But now she looks older and tired with life
And some stranger’s gone and made her his wife

And they fight in the home that I grew up in
Now I don’t really know where I live
The next time I lay down, that’s where I should stay
With just my body and my mind I’ll surely go insane

When the neighbors burned their house down
We watched that spectacle
Nobody was hurt much but the dog bowed like a ghost

When their daughter drank her poison
And threw herself into the gorge
We wore our best black clothing, and smoked outside the church

Walt Disney

I woke up this morning with voices in my head
I fell asleep to the sound of your breathing
Into my good ear
Lay on my chest here

From my bed the windows give me newly colored light
And muffled morning sounds and time to empathize
With the bakers who rose so early again
Like my mother when she had something to say

I found today again another unfamiliar place
Looked at the body I’ve got the rest of my life to waste
I kiss your fevered head
You take a day of rest

Just like a god I don’t pray to anymore
That little cross you kiss before you go to work
And on your forehead a holy fucking bead of sweat forms
It forms

And if you couldn’t tell
All my favorite people have killed themselves
And if you’re feeling well
Take a look around you, I’m sure you’ll come down

And if you couldn’t wait
All great men have someone good to hate
And if you couldn’t bother
Even Walt Disney just loathed his father

Second Marriage

All our stars are dead again
All that light is in your head
We waste so much time together
I have so much else to go for

Home is a place I’d like to go
O, to be a little warm
And close

Yours is a face I’d like to see
O, could you pick it out for me
For me

Nightcrawlers clog up my drain
Every night, the same refrain
My old buggy, boring town
I could be out getting killed right now

Home is a place I’d like to go
O, to be a little warm
And close

Yours is a face I’d like to see
O, could you pick it out for me
For me

At dawn, all is calm

In the morning she blinks with great effort
In the evening she thinks from her favorite chair
In the afternoon she does nothing
Every night I shut off her body with my hands