So, little over a month to the day since my last post! Couple of factors there: getting a sense of a good work/life balance with the new job, taking a breather from story-writing to just study the craft (finally finished Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces!), and… well, who am I kidding, that Netflix queue isn’t going to empty itself.
With poems in particular, though, I realized that–for better or worse–I’d hit a dry spell of personal ponderings to get off my chest. On one hand, I wanted to keep to the “Poem of the Week” goal I’d set in the Spring, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to sit around wondering and worrying just so I’d have something meaningful to write about on schedule. But when fresh doubts, deliberations, and stirring turns of phrase arise naturally over time? Well, I’d certainly rather serve them than let them stew.
It’s in that initial mindset of wanting to take a break and figure things out (how and what, exactly, is always the question) that I slowly composed this poem. I’m feeling better than when I wrote my last handful, personally and professionally. But, am I feeling content? Well…
First, World
I need a breather, a lever
to clearly crank between work and play.
Extra time in space.
The news is tightening, see:
word spreads like wine stains
of longer hours, shorter deadlines, higher expectations.
Dark, aged anxieties redden White naiveté.
So I need a scene
that stays in the director’s cut, unbundled.
Scifi conventions by weekend.
Mangled, NSFW memes in my phone’s feeds.
Dark, droning ambient music to massage the ears
over dishwashing and staring down a hollow closet.
Secretly, I’d like having part of me that makes my colleagues uncomfortable,
an edge to sand by day and sharpen by night.
I mean, the moral turpentine of eye contact and shaky small talk
can burn as well as cleanse,
and the scars aren’t far from madness, in a vacuum.
And I need a reason to pay attention
on schedule, with minimum interest.
Like a kid to cod liver oil, I to others’ identities.
It’s humorous and horrifying to see
how high I can climb without knowing
or caring who’s right
alongside me.
But my fear of looking stupid is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just once, I want two-way understanding in a conversation
instead of this tin-can-and-string bonding
between flitted grins and the absence of a face-to-face disgrace
(If something was wrong, they’d tell me).
Responsibility respawns ability
to be concerned, concerted, and make aces out of jokers—
when the fact is I can’t tell poker from solitaire.
Because my default is deprecation:
self-, else-, just for the sake of it—
an optimist’s façade, casting over
what luck! the shadow of oh fuck.
If doubt is universal, then mine’s infinitely expanding:
A demanding unhanding of double-edged words
from the same fist that clutches, unbudging,
every off-the-cuff criticism or compliment.
Damn wrist, trembling—figurative caffeine from within,
and I’ve blinked maybe five times today.
I need weaning off the sense of winning
when I intend to succeed and do.
That’s baseline, basically.
And so I need the curvature of my life,
a hidden horizon—a point past which no sight goes.
Certain uncertainty.
With every year, another throughline grows:
pallid strands, like taut dental floss, stretch into the yon,
today to tombstone.
I need that chance, that could-still-be and there’s-hope-yet,
to pat my back like an autumn sunbeam, assuaging
ailing ambitions in thinning air.
Because either way—a 401k and vacant trophy case
or canned beans over Hollywood contracts—
the captain goes down with the shit
he keeps onboard, and mine’s not hitting port any time soon.
A hoard of hoary motivations and vague concepts, outlines
sketched in the cobwebbed corners of a mind palace
long since repo’d by the state?
Not inaccurate,
but also not positive.
I’d say I didn’t come this far by being a downer,
but then I never pulled out a history book
for rulers to measure the distance.
Maybe it’s privilege
to shelve a dream and still smile at night,
to keep a whole ‘nother life on the back burner.
It can wait, most days. It’ll have to.
But first, world, I need the hours
to know what’s ours and what’s just mine—
how to tell when time’s running out
or just getting its second wind to lap back ‘round.
Everything I do, it’s to check off a list
that exists half in my heart and half on a Word doc.
‘Cause otherwise, with pen in breast pocket,
timesheet in tow,
and notepad gathering coffee stains,
we’ll just have to wait and see
which gets deleted first.
—
Notes&Sketches 