The Long Sweet Fall

Poems and Thoughts by Thomas Michael Malo

Dog Boy / Tin Soldier Publishing & The Malo Family Trust

For Zazie

RETURN to DogBoy / TinSoldier Publishing

Table Of Contents

The Secret Way

Trust

The Walk

Walking (Refrain)

The Long Sweet Fall

The Saying

The Unforgettable Faith

The Pairs

Nightbird

Where Has She Gone Now With Me?

I Could Not Smell Your Hair

Deathless Feet

'Til Our Tears Are All Gone

Unconventional

Disappearing (This Is Our Song)

The Ghost Of Priam's Daughter

All Over Again

Angel Of Death

Stone Soldiers

Crossing Indiana

Full Of Nothing

What Do I Say To Myself Now?

The Secret Way

there is a secret way that I can tell

how strong and deep my love for you has grown

when suddenly I feel that I am you

as if your body lives inside of mine

and for a moment I feel what you feel

as if I loved you 'til we joined for good

never to be lost again, but really home at last

I feel you like I'm walking as you walk

so powerfully I sometimes disappear

and move with movements only true of you

entwined entranced in everything you do

you should know you really have my soul

it's in your care abandoned to your trust

and lives in you and breaths along with you

Trust

it's not a very big word

but it's regularly heard

in matters of money and love

it should be good

but it's not often understood

it's actually something holy and unconditional

to lovers that know it

like a rose that lifts

into the smile of the sun

the dew drop slipping

down into her pink folds

the natural expecting thing

the kiss, the bliss

it is without saying

when you know it

it is simply everything that's real

you can't explain

how one person moves inside another

you just know they have

and you want them there in you

you trust them

The Walk

In the end, all actually ethical decisions are based on individual belief: that is – we choose, if we have the courage, to abandon the more comfortable syncretistic ordinary human consensus about right and wrong, finding on our own, a synderesis of our own, in our own human experience of individual dignity. It is generally a surprise to an individual believer, to discover a completely personal situation of inconsolableness so ethically constraining, that the right choice at its nascence is irreducibly clear. Such choices must be taken for what they intend: to become nothing less than ethical improvements upon the generally developing situation of human thinking and emotion – the individual experience of choice in and for the whole of humanity. When there is no guiding rote other than the situation of the universe; when there is no comfort in syncretism; then such choices are made; then such questions of ethics are settled. The empirical evidence of such choices appears after the fact in actions within the ordinary human physical causal net; and the evidence of the dilemma of loss that creates the necessity of choice is always prolegomenous to the human situation in general; so it is a certainty: that this evidence of action after the fact, and this lack of evidence prior to choice and action; combine to force ethics, because there are facts yet to be made. It has always been so: that human beings of inconsolable sorrow lead human minds and hearts outward toward the better dignity in human endeavor.

When I was a young writer; religion with its claim to primacy in matters of love loomed ahead of me like a swallowing darkness. In its imperturbable syncretistic claims, its stoic degeneracy, it was an insurmountable wall to my claims of affection. In such a situation: youth pines outside the window always unrequited. To cross my trek from then 'til now was to find the situation still fundamentally unchanged. I have often tried to write this off to many other matters; but it was truly an intensional situation – a situation of faith and fear and the comfort of falsity. Yet neither was there a darkness that could swallow me; nor any lack of self-established posterity; nor any lie embraced to any limitation of myself within me. I have become a synthetic fact, and all of my individual rational order is based on synthetic absolutes, and a literature and action in support of an inevitable choice for an uncommon causal order that must be. I walk on; and I doubt that my journey will ever change; and how I was moved to it was only ever at all – the most fantastically intimate and fabulous depth of affection for a spectacular woman and courage.

This remains the definition of all people: the walk outward – the meaning made by stepping. The ground is not solid except in the step, and so for the swallowing darkness except in the blindness. It is neither science, nor religion, that clouds our mind's eye, and blurs our recollecting establishment. It is the fascination with the reflection in the mirror. It is in all things the boundary of our vanity before others that we must surpass. We cannot choose to ignore. There is no resolution of individual human being in any functionalist logic. That is what we left for dead with our very first breath; still it hangs there like a chain and choke collar we strain against to step down on ground we know is there – there, just out of reach of our logical constraint. We consider cause and effect as if we will discover the cause of the effect that is our consideration of cause and effect. The situation of human thinking exists within the situation of being human and it cannot transcend its situation by means of itself. I think what we are is plainer. I think it is affection and courage that make the ground beneath our step; and without these two is to stop – and stare at an impenetrable darkness.

Walking (Refrain)

I never know exactly how

a walk is going to go

no matter if I plan it

here to there

here is here and there is there

is all I really know

and the steps are always going

even if I don't know where

it's an exercise in loving you

all along the way

and rain or snow or sunshine

it's all good enough for me

it finally doesn't matter now

how I pass a day

there's nowhere left to get to here

where I can wholly be

the world is like a picture now

hanging on a wall

sometimes I walk in it

sometimes I just pass by

I cannot say who painted it

or if it's real at all

it's just a place I sometimes go

to walk until I die

I don't really find my way

I just take a chance

that I might meet you on some road

back to where we both belong

I hardly give it all much more

than a passing glance

because it isn't home without you there

so I just move along

still every footfall on the way

seems to find a hold

and every road leads back to you

so I can't lose my way

I guess walking is my hope for you

out here in the cold

I know I'll see you standing there

just ahead one day

The Long Sweet Fall

I can't remember if it was snowing

or if the night was even cold

all I could see were your beautiful eyes

and that soldier sadness in your face

You looked straight at me

and I looked straight at you

like coming home for the very last time

there was nothing for us here we needed to find...

just each other

And it all went into that long sweet fall

in that half-light of love that should have always been

sighs in the shadow of heaven

filling up the last of the night

And then they lined up all around us

and just ran us straight into the ground

angry for losing their senses

hurt with that thing that they could not feel

And then the stars hung their heads

and the broken moon dropped tears

all over our holy ground

until nothing could hold back the flood

It all went into that long sweet fall

and their half-opened eyes couldn't take the light

as they ducked into the shadows of heaven

just beyond our sorrow burning there so bright

And my Zaz and I went into that long sweet fall

laying back into the arms of forever

carried up over all the shadows of heaven

to rest where worlds spin softly in unbroken skies

Now every step I take is just a long sweet fall

like the tears running down my cheeks

I know the midnight is lifting in heaven

as we rise to make a morning for our love again

I swear I heard your little feet run across the kitchen floor

but the dog still sits alone looking at the door

I swear I smelled you on the pillow, felt you next to me

but it's just the curtains sailing up on a midnight breeze

The Saying

The pain and weight of the answer in the exploding heart is unbearable. The wild random accident of life and the coincidental answer is excoriating, indelible, and indigenous, to the ordinary. The ordinary rhythmic pulse relentlessly aching, arching, pelvic thrusting, toward the truth, the rhythm, the phrase, the sweat and blood, the breath and stench, the connection of melodic dots that brings it all down to the inferno truth: is it all this death and failure to communicate? The question is brutal, primordial, succinct, and unbearable: how can the ordinary man love enough to live? Spit on a forest fire, piss on an iceberg, six billions screaming names. Blood in the throat, choked words, gutted and spewed in blisters from the holy, unclean, rolling wave of unbearable truth. It is just so hard, and they want to turn it all off, with the great big money switch, the belly hunger switch, the warmer place to sleep; and it hurts beyond words. But picking up the stone, I hear the cacophony of whispers and organized reality, like sweaty popping jazz that spiels and speaks of random coincidence organized into lovers on a back street falling into the smell and wet of real life, beyond the secret savage cowardice of control and sacrificial endings: the moan permeates the breath of the beast on its upward climb to love. Whacked out, what the fuck, woozy words, ooze from every accidental reality along the way, witness to the sound, and voice, and sense, of love. Because every single thing that is a thing speaks along the way for reason, and goodness, and love.

The big bang, down beat, solid bump and grind, spit it all out, choking in the puke of desolation and aloneness, like the shape of time and space, rest and sound; searching for phrase, and note, and melody, and bridge, and break; like waves on the beach always asking, always hissing: who the hell are you? And please, please call me. And the moon set the rhythm: die the undeath and please, please love me. And we called it, and named it, and touched it, and defiled it, and sanctified it, and filled it, and emptied it, and became it, and won it, and lost it: and it was love, the swaying, flexing, double sword in the heat of the battle for truth; and teen-agers lived it, and grown-ups died it: like life never moving towards life. We never heard the whispering thing. The noise of the unsheathing was too loud. We excreted the choices we made, and processed the remains like dust in the wind, but now that is done; because out of the ordinary, random and coincidental, comes the irrational, the unexpected, the unprepared for: the hip hop holy horrifying hellacious hoard for reality: love is the language of life, the rhythm of reality, the end of the beginning, the bang in the big, the coincidental in the random.

It doesn't matter if the bang is big, if it is one bang, a billion bangs, or a whine, whimper, hiss, shout or sigh; it was still an end and beginning, a stop and start, an implosion or explosion, a change, a bridge, a transition to a new juxtaposition, a denouement, thrown from head and heart to lips and horn, like desperation, inspiration, revelation: hey is anybody out there? From still to storm, thought and form, a long languid division of time and space toward tears and blood, and effervescent sweat and seizure, and every single thing that is, or was, or will be, is said with constant new and old and noisy saying; and says inside itself unconstrained, unrequited, unrelenting, undeterred, a saying of what, where, when, how, why, waiting on the bounce back who: the crossed void, the rippled pond, the lifted wind, the echo never previously sent, the unexpected name. And all and everything says, and says always to itself, and outward into every other saying, like water poured into water, saying poured into saying. And when the saying comes at last to love, change will not be dissolution, truth will not be correction, and saying will always be new in every single thing and word, and said will remain unchanged and never dissolute, and true and never corrected...

The Unforgettable Faith

I climbed through the forest

all tangles and brier

struggling onward, always trying to see

which way to go now

just a glimpse of the sky

a star just for reckoning, hung there for me

I pushed through the black nights

afraid and in tears

broken and aching, and torn from your arms

the branches lashed my face

the thorns tore my skin

the cold beat me down, in white howling storms

still I climbed through the forest

'til the mountains broke free

and found the cold black sky, thrown up over their heads

I pushed on through the jagged shale

and the sharp granite and ice

cut my hands and my feet, and my heart into shreds

stumbling and fainting, to my knees at the top

I heard everyone calling, it's time to stop

but there in the cold sky, a star whispered to me

the rest is just flying

and it's easy to do

just follow my light, it's here just for you

they say I'm crazy

men don't ever have wings

but I know I'm not flying away, because I came here to stay

and after I'm emptied

I know I'll be filled

with my love of this place, and the look on your face

I climb to the top

I don't fear falling down

we cannot forget us, because we are found

The Pairs

9/18/09

I have always enjoyed the first cigarette after opening a brand new pack. It's around 9:00 on a Friday night here in Bowling Green, and I haven't had a smoke since Tuesday morning, mostly for economic reasons. I have to cup the flame as I light up, as there is a mild breeze; enough to pull at the flags above the police department, and tug a few more leaves off the trees. It's around 60 degrees, a cool beautiful night, as still utterly immersed in grief I begin to walk the quieter part of old town and talk softly and mistily to Zaz, as is my habit these days in the early mornings and evenings. I am thankful for the breeze and the comfort of the smoke to my head. I make a pact with the universe and the planet, and whatever God would care to, to last in this life at least until Sunday night, and continue writing.

There has been lately a bit of free entertainment available as some local high school boys have taken to riding skateboards and attempting all manner of tricks in the Huntington Insurance Building parking lot after business hours. I think we all sense an early fall in the air lately. The boys have grown used to me wandering by, and sometimes try more difficult things when they know I am watching. Occasionally they converse with me, sometimes asking for cigarettes. Sometimes I give one up just for the conversation, other times I remind them that I am broke too. In that case we usually have a brief commiseration about the economy. They seem like an ordinarily good group to me, neither disrespectful, nor overly respectful. Tonight they just shoot me glance or two as I walk by, wishing to myself as usual that Zaz was on my arm. She would call them all honey, and remind them to be careful.

I have tried walking in the middle of the day, but the noise of the traffic is actually painful to me at times, and sometimes there are too many tears to keep me from embarrassment. Early mornings and evenings seem to work out best for me, as I have not readjusted to any meaningful engagement with the noise of everyday city life yet. The pain is fresh, and sometimes even brand new, as I emerge slowly into clearer recollections of the events at the hospital and funeral. I've lost around thirty pounds as my appetite remains unreliable. I have noticed that my appetite is somewhat better if I eat with my son in the evening after he gets home from work. During the day I can get by on coffee and cigarettes. It is still hardest on my head when I am out of smokes. I am still a long way from being able to cope with any continuous company.

I don't know which kind of grief is more intense, losing a lover, losing a child, losing a parent, losing a sibling, losing a friend, and I would not make a comparison. All I can say is: that I remain inconsolable that I cannot hold Zaz, and I am sure she feels the same. I am certain that I have become as absolutely aware of the presence of the pairs in my life as anyone could ever be. Sorrow and joy are so inextricably intertwined in me that I often cannot discern one from the other. The more sorrowful I am thinking of her, the more in love with her I am, and so the more certain I am of my love for her, and so the more joyful I am, and so the more inconsolable that I cannot hold her in my arms. This is really the motion of the whole of my being these days, a truly wearing and bonding process upon and with everything I think and feel and am.

I round the corner behind the Police Station just as the flags ripple outward on the breeze, and as the tears on my cheeks softly dry, I engage the breeze and the evening like a tender touch from her. I walk the rest of the way back to my son's apartment feeling her on my arm. When I get inside my son is playing the Killers song, When You Were Young, that Zaz used to listen to regularly. For a moment I hold better days and nights in my arms, and walk in a memory back to my empty room. I will never let her go. I will love her forever. I begin the process all over again of trying to find a way back to her. The courthouse clock outside rings 10.00 pm.

Nightbird

you're a little star

cutting through the dead black night

pouring out your light and life

in every corner of my heart

you're a whisper

so softly in the stones themselves

hinting at the buried dream

just aching for a touch from you

you're a raindrop

falling on the parched ground

thirsting there for tenderness

cooling on my dry cracked lips

you are beauty

shining like a prison break

filling up the cold barred room

with something to believe at last

you're the woman for my man

I don't need to understand

the world

you're a melody

playing in a schoolyard

dancing children everywhere

can't help but sing along

you're a nightbird

wisping through the streetlights

up above my midnight dreams

teasing me to fly away

you're a teardrop

running down my sad cheek

welling from inside of me

dying to pour out on me

you're a warm fire

lying there beside me

drawing me to hold you close

against my winter night

you're the beating of my heart

I know we can never part

we are

you're the last word

in everything I ever wrote

the poem of a dream come true

singing always in my need for you

you're the first breath

drawn in every shining world

filling up the sighs of hope

with passion for a dream of peace

you're the love that must go on

and the dream that's never gone

for me

you're a nightbird

soaring

Where Has She Gone Now With Me?

10/10/09

The last few years Zaz and I kept on the nightstand next to our bed, a little cardboard paged children's book called , If You Were My Bunny, that we found one Saturday at a rummage sale. Often when one of us was sick, or over stressed, or worried, or if we had an especially painful quarrel, we would read to each other from the book lying down next to each other on the bed. We both had occasions to find comfort at times in the other's softest spoken nurturing voice reading from the bunny book, as we came to call it. Afterwards we invariably spoke our words of peace to one another, “all right then”, as was our custom, and would kiss and find peaceful sleep. I think the little book piqued memories of our nurturing skills, as we both had comforted our own small children when we were younger. I think we knew we needed to do it for each other; to be a forgiving encouraging parent to each other; because in our darkest times, the times when we felt our failures or frailties the most deeply; what we found in each other was a wounded disapproved of child dying of embarrassment, and overwhelmed with sorrow, and personal failure; a child who could not realize the utterly precious value of the love it gave; a child inside of an adult that feared to forgive itself.

It was cold this morning in Bowling Green, around 33 degrees as I stepped outside; not quite cold enough for my big Packers jacket, but a little too chilly for just my denim. I was out of coffee, so I had no warming cup in my hands, and with only two dollars left in my pocket I decided not to go buy a cup. I began walking from the shade of the buildings heading quickly for a sunny area. It was warm last evening, almost 70 degrees, so we did not have the heat on on the apartment, and I woke this morning from sleeping on the floor with a chill already settled into me. I lit up a cigarette with my back to the brisk breeze, and hurried across the parking lot for the sunny sidewalk. Just as I turned to the right onto the sidewalk, lying about a foot in front of me, right in the middle of the sidewalk, is a dead juvenile cottontail rabbit. Its body is still soft, fur not matted, and there is no visible sign of injury to it. It is just lying there, almost pristinely clean, puffy white tail, head slightly tilted back though in no way contorted, and one utterly vacant wide open eye staring up at the sky. To look at it, is to see what by all rights should be a beautiful bunny; to study it, is to discover a combination of chemicals without any bunny life in them, still arranged as if a bunny. So much of my soul went with her. I felt it tear away inside me when she died. Where has she gone now with me?

I Could Not Smell Your Hair

the pain that you suffer

in the time you have lost

returns like a story

on the wind where you tossed

and whispers so sweetly

in your mouth full of sighs

and drains you so empty

of the tears in your eyes

tomorrow is a shadow on a road that is not there

today never happened

because I could not smell your hair

so write it up and down

cut a cross upon my chest

and make a bed of thorns

to lay my shattered heart to rest

tie my soul to heaven's gatepost

a tattered banner in the stars

to keen of love just taken

beyond hearing, beyond scars

tomorrow is a shadow in a night I cannot bear

and yesterday can't make me

because I cannot smell your hair

my time is washed behind me

and in front there is no light

I stand in my same footsteps

where you left me on that night

it's just a hollow echo of the song we used to share

and our angels all stopped singing

when I could not smell your hair

so burn my corpse at daybreak

send the smoke to heaven's air

all the angels started dying

when I could not smell your hair

Deathless Feet

11/10/09

It has been unseasonably warm here in Bowling Green the last few days, nearly 70 degrees; so early morning walks have been pleasant for me. This morning I have cut my walk short, a head troubled with frustrations. Suddenly I find myself profoundly dissatisfied with Yeats; angry with his old lovers hoping in grave heaped on grave. Zaz and I are not dancing on any deathless feet; and if we were to dance, I would like her little monkey feet with the painted nails just the way they were...

'Til Our Tears Are All Gone

Here I am with my tears and my testament

words and pain I can't get into time

out of step in a faltering sacrament

just trying to get to the end of a line

And the music's blanked out into monotone

like the people who once loved to be our friends

won't somebody just send a letter from home

I can't seem to tie up all these loose ends

Please, call out my name baby

help me find my way home

then you can hold me

'til our tears are all gone

This time the night fell so hard and fast

I just couldn't catch up to the dawn

the stars tinkled down like so much broken glass

I just turned around and you were gone

I'm trying so hard to write my way home

I just can't remember which way to go

the old words don't rhyme with being alone

and the new ones I just don't wanna know

Please, whisper my name baby

on the pillow at home

and I'll hold you

'til our tears are all gone

The hard night came crashing so fast and black

the old sky is broken all over the ground

I never left, so there's no way to find my way back

the whole world is turned upside down

I'm crying your name Zaz

dying for home

I have to hold you

'til our tears are all gone

Unconventional

10/9/09

I got up late this morning, around 8:30. My grief is so heavily on me today I'm back to having bouts of sobbing, as I take my morning walk and smoke around Bowling Green. I'm glad for the rain, because I am crying so much today, and in this later hour of the morning there is a lot of activity on the streets. It's been a while since I walked around this time of the morning, and I am still astonished at what human beings think they have to go through every day just to try and have a life. People assess reality so objectively. It is really not an improvement in human thinking to do so, and it does not improve whole human life. I think the human cost of shedding the objective method of engaging human life will be terrible in the end, as it will take oh so long to realize its futility.

Zaz and I chose to live an unconventional dream, so any sorrow of any of its failure is ours by choice. The truth is: all I can ever feel toward anyone, or anything that allowed for Zaz and I to be wholly together even for a second is overwhelming gratitude – because that we were wholly together ever at all actually required everything and everyone. When we finally were, I have no doubt that everyone and everything felt our love. Perhaps we loved human life so much that we chose all that has happened... Perhaps the essential situation was inevitable... and serendipitous.

Disappearing (This Is Our Song)

the hardest part is how the pieces fall away

and memories struggle only partly made

and little holes appear where real used to be

as toward our loving we must fade

it doesn't matter that we look across a void

into the only arms we want to know

this place can't hold me long, I'm lifting toward your light

and like a shooting star I'm gonna go

I know I'm disappearing with you

I know it won't be that long

'til the only thing left here

is this song

I used to think that tears would wash me away

now I lift my eyes for them to start

and you're reaching through me like an angel in my veins

I feel you beating in my heart

I know I'm disappearing with you

I know it won't be that long

'til the only thing left here

is this song

it doesn't matter that we cross the universe

we are the home we're bound to know

this place can't hold me now, I'm lifting toward our light

a shooting star I'm bound to go

I know I love you forever

I know our dream is that strong

and morning bells are ringing

and morning birds are singing

everywhere we are

this is our song

The Ghost Of Priam's Daughter

(November 2009)

"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?"

(Voltaire)

Perhaps the pulsing glob of doom inside my head; that bleeds at times so hot and wet like some nearly living ghost of her; that other ways and days dries up and deadens, dull and thick, the numb unhealing vacancy where she used to torture the truth of me like so much froth on good beer; has in this ongoing ending of me authenticated only meat, and classified my final flesh and philosophy - USDA. Some think so. Some once close to me.

Still I know there is authenticity, and I write from there now; but three times staring down, and leaning far out into a beckoning Siren nothing, I have seen some subtle form in that old abyss, and though I am not sure yet if it is lucky to report it, I believe it is a kiss. In any case, in the black hour of this leftover night I am here again to write in mad Heidegger's terms like the streaks the seething blistering stars have burned across my heart in an unexpected exiting from my precious secret sky - it was so unexpected that she would die. She was only 54, and so beautiful.

They say, and so do I, that guilt is only caused by recognizing what you cannot feel - an empathic gap that is usually to be filled with later justification. I have always set my terms to free the judge from judgment day, so I do not find the necessary resoluteness in guilt. I am inconsolable in my well of loss, and utterly free for death because of it. I am arguably now fitted to the station of my reporting on terms of authenticity as well as I could be, and I can state quite clearly that it is not guilt that has made me free for death - but mad deep love, and its inestimable loss. We have spilled over, and as we drain away we cannot help but seek levels of the thing like so much water running toward the sea; but it is poignant to find that it is the terrain that is confused after all, and not I. I should not be surprised; navigation would be personal.

Her mother named her Cassandra, though she was far more a Penelope in the odyssey of our ironic lives: and I; in no ways an Agamemnon, but more an unconverted Saul still living yet toward death; now wear this new corpse of Priam's daughter like some gruesome priestly robe, yet brightest promise. I can always still hear the dark little Dane in the back; ranting on in echoes of paradox, and Jesus free for death being God in time; but I am free in my own time now, authentic, led there by my own adoring Valkyrie, my fingers yearning to probe old wounds like undiscovered worlds, and even with this first unexpected death between us - there are no volunteers to be God for me or her. There is no showing of hands, or even feet.

All Over Again

sometimes the midnight hurts my eyes

with the dream that never dies

in the hole she left behind

of the love that I can't find

and the wound is bleeding still

and I can't seem to get my fill

of the hunger for our pains

her sorrow ripping through my veins

so I tear myself apart

pull her memory to my heart

and slip back into bed

but when I wake up she'll be dead

again, all over again, all over again

I want you to tell me what love means

who these days on earth will matter to

I can sure tell you what death means

the places where she touched me all died too

well there ain't no soldier's way

and there ain't no judgment day

ain't no sorrow that's complete

ain't no life that's always sweet

you can walk 'til you break down

and chase her ghost through town

on your knees at break of dawn

no matter what she'll still be gone

and when you finally find your grave

what will be there left to save?

where will the places that you touched her go

when you're no longer there to know?

I want you to tell me how love lives

when everything is taken back that gives

I need to know that death is more

than watching perfect love walk out the door

again, all over again, all over again

I just tear myself apart

pull her memory to my heart

and slip back into bed

but when I wake up she'll be dead

again, all over again, all over again

Angel Of Death

when the sky cracks to black

from a glass beaded blue

and shakes down the stars

like a hot falling dew

and tears are like diamonds

all over the ground

and mouths that are crying

just swallow the sound

when I can no longer stand

I'll reach out for your little hand

cross over that great black divide

to walk once again by your side

I give you my very last breath

you are my angel of death

when sickness and sadness

lay down on the floor

as fingers of light

reach in under the door

fallen down in the shadows

washed away in the pain

love lies bleeding out

like the last of the rain

when I can no longer write

I'll weep out our song in the night

at your feet lay my emptiness down

shadows of echoes torn from their sound

I give you my very last breath

you are my angel of death

a man steps where he steps

before and after the falls

he hears what he hears

no matter who calls

he sees what he sees

through every last tear

and he loves who he loves

without any fear

it's been such a long lonely while

since I've seen that sweet loving smile

put your lips to my lips tonight

lift me up into your loving light

take the love in my very last breath

my beautiful angel of death

Stone Soldiers

shot through the black dream

of goodness and light

sky scattered teardrops

in the hollow eyed night

we picked up the saving

in a cold falling down

through the broken-iced secret

they just watched us drown

we were stone soldiers

and masters of fate

here to help a loving

come so little, come so late

it just broke all our pieces

down onto the ground

like a trail of edgy tears

on the sad way out of town

still they died their hands clenching

little pearls of despair

finally run out of ways

to make the care they should care

and we were stone soldiers

masters of love

just like a Jesus-child

wings like a dove

just shut out the lights for now

go 'round and lock the door

those kids that used to come here

won't be back for more

we keep counsel closer now

in each other's eye

we are the thing we want to see

where angels cannot die

but we were stone soldiers

and masters of night

born to tangle tiny dreams

in giant streams of light

back then,

we were stone soldiers

and masters of the grave

holding back the dying light

with someone left to save

and now,

we're burning stone soldiers

spun around our own new stars

unmade for each other

beyond any battle scars

Crossing Indiana

the shadows filter patiently today

through the shimmers of the dawn

the soft dew lays like motherhood

on tanglewood and roadside rose alike

their yearning stretched for promises

fingering out from a kind and giving star

yet she lays like moonlight always in my arms

all silk and soft and warm and wet

she moves more finely than a last regret

as she turns to look into my eyes

and asks as gently as our sin -

do fallen angels ever fly again?

so much like kings and queens of old

we lay down dead for the getting of our children

and hoped for God; yet saving inside a secret soul

held back through the dying of having them

a private faithful knowing of the face of love

in all her virgin births, and all my songs of remembrance

I awoke so often broken to the ground

cast down in fear of flights into myself

every crashing left me living, waiting, still

for what the little song inside would make of me

and then it sang itself into the face I knew

and there my love, I gave my wings to you

now once again I'll know that glooming track

under the blasted face of the beaming moon

thrown weeping out into the broken glass pieces of sky

above the pavement drawn across the flat black Indiana night

calling out for you, and watching up ahead

for any walking angel, there to lead me home

so many times in all my comings back

I felt you pull me always on toward you

and every breath was close then to your lips

and lifted me across the night like wings

I'd steal into our dawning house, where you'd lay sleeping

and 'rouse you in my arms like resurrection

the other night my falling would not stop

waking's shock was only at the easy choice

to jump out into sky without an end in sight

I tried so hard to dream it all again that way

and to look for you in falls I fear to take

because there my love, you give your wings to me

so watch for me in another night or two

on that black and vacant highway that must end

listen for my pounding heart to stop at last

oh let my bleeding eyes look at your face once more

and lay my tired and worn out head then in your lap

angel to angel in the midnight spangled wilderness

Full Of Nothing

The dreams were devastating; the ends left raw and torn open, hanging out aching and only partly made. Thinking was like a smoke snake coiling around whatever thought appeared, crushing in on it, embracing it, and ruining it, in long writhing orgasms emptying into emptiness, the desperation of the loving. Without the disorder, there was no order to be made, no sense of meaning except the order of death that held everything, everything that it could not hold, everything that was gone now, the missing torn away substances. The fabric could not disentangle the order of the threads, could not re-spool them, could not re-weave the story. I should have known that it could only tear jaggedly apart, that the page would rip without regard to sentence structure, or punctuation, rip words themselves in random places, leaving no meaning, only spoiled torn letters unable to designate, unable to express, unable to rise from disorder. The order was here to stay. Too much was torn away.

The annihilating abyss, the end, the death, was not so entirely different from the living man who considered its obliterating facility; that it could even be properly named an end at all. It is always in a man, thinking and coiling outward, and being pressed and embraced with thinking, and pieces of it are discarded involuntarily, torn away, diminishing the man as he lives, even though it is only nothing to begin with. Death is in everyone at birth. Empty pages are as real as love poems. Love poems are two things, thinking coiled together, ends shaped and fitting randomly, purposed without knowing, never thought of, but thought as something being, made well, order forcing itself on disorder. The torn page and disenfranchised letters are nothing, and the writer is as full of nothing as anything else. The order of nothing is death, and the lover who is dead, is become order to the lover left alive, the torn poem now disorder, like the man who lives, full of nothing.

What Do I Say To Myself Now?

I tore up your picture

so what do I say to myself now?

will the lush green things and blue sky speak?

will the moon danced waters reply to more than the lapped sands?

are they my kind with my words

or do I speak for them of them

for just a little, a work of mourning

and then dissolve to their elements again?

so what do I say to myself now?

Emerson is dead with the demons and devils

no better, no worse, than a plotting ghost

for me there is only the plural

in working, in loving, only the real

my thinking cannot allow other voices

to be imitated by me into myself

long dead, long elemental and confused

long since green or blue or dry or wet

so what do I say to myself now?

there is not one thing real by itself

though many things are real together

I want words that are alive for me

said from a mouth that is not mine

from a mind I must take forever to know well

into my thinking loudly, brazenly, saying unknowns

from outside me with awakening morning sounds

I cannot make the sound of my name in your voice

so what do I say to myself now?

thinkings are twisted together abrading

ripples of distance into languages

that only turn to phantasmagoria and backwards oneness

thinking of itself across an empty other

I tire of memories made to speak in my voice

disguised inside my head as theirs

Schopenhauer rising up in grave-clothes

Nietzsche mounting Sabine after Sabine

so what do I say to myself now?

what we said and wrote together

the quickening and knowing that we had

the way your body came to life and displaced mine

how I moved sometimes and noticed it was you

surprised to find you there instead of me

overjoyed to be you in a moment of your joy

speaking for you then of how you were me and I was you

I only partly died with you, and it was my joy that vanished with your change

so what do I say to myself now?

where have I gone? spread out in worlds or dreams?

where do you move as me? the planet? the void?

I know it is not here in me where I half live now

and can only think about you in diminishing memories

like pieces of cloth tearing slowly relentlessly away

leaving holes neither patched, nor left like wounds to scar,

but only gone, absolutely gone, the fabric itself forgotten

whatever I make new now is as far less as I am

so what do I say to myself now?

a Pope once poured roses into me like a river

I once broke the shackles from my arms in a dark prison

and unlocked every cell on my way up to the light

I once took back a kingdom with a sword fitted to me alone

no angel, no demon, could resist me, only a mouse stayed my hand

all the dreams I remember, all the meanings and times

the broken bones, the Leviathan, the hard hard hard hard rhymes

I can't speak with your mouth, or see with your eyes

so what do I say to myself now?