THE ALYGATOR MAN
He drew pictures for us
of foreign streets and
Grand Canyon skies,
or the apple tree,
that he only changed
when I told him I didn't
like red apples.
On an empty wall of our
clubhouse he drew
Halloween stars and witches
and ghost moons.
He was the one that
told us alygators
lived in ditches.
One day he didn't
Come to lift our day
with pencil words.
I needed a walk
so I headed for his
painted dreamscape.
In an unheard corner
was a gravestone
etched in pale blue lines
that whispered, "don't
forget springtime buds
and green apple
days."
A PAST TO CREATE, A FUTURE TO REMEMBER
It was one of those
colorless October mornings
concocted from a mixture of
witches' hair fog, pavement,
and no-water rain.
I remember last year, how
Grandpa said goodbye forever
and waterless tears didn't run
down my cheeks
I didn't cry until later.
Waking up, I look out
the window to the telephone pole.
I still see an echo of the blood
glow of his cigarette; mom
didn't want the smoke in our house.
A memory flies by. Between
the perfection of parents and
the Seattle skies, only Grandpa
taught me the fundamentals
of blackjack.
A reflection in the street,
swirling fog, makes me think,
in fast-forward, about a year and
a decade that passed without
respect for an immature eighth grader.
If I learn from then
I may yet grow into
an evergreen that won't fall in
Halloween fog and won't fear
shadows of sunlight.
This was another entry into the Reflections contest. I seem to recall it won something, but not very much.
THE TASTE OF A HOSPITAL IS LINEN PRECISION
Reflections, what a cliché.
Reflection in the window, in the darkness -
in the stars.
I watch my reflection with a
car sliding past
or maybe it is a distant airplane
that winks and fades
into its redness,
and I realize,
my grandma is
dying.
ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE CLIFF
The sky outside is bluer than his eyes
and deeper than a philosophy student's thoughts.
The hallway is cool and summery in the dying
days of February. The bandroom
is warm and impersonal.
The fog I saw this morning
went there to hide.
My bassoon is playing an octave under the written music
while the clarinets play an octave higher,
the sound is the white clouds outside.
An empty can of Diet Coke
in the middle of the student parking lot
contrasts with dark trees and bright sky.
There is something fascinating
and repulsive
about the ant climbing the sunny screen door.
The living room chair sits alone in its dustiness
and children are calling joyfully outside.
Teardrops make louder echoes than blood,
but nobody listens to echoes.
This is, in case you hadn't guessed, a suicide poem. I wrote a great many of them in High School to try to figure out why I was so depressed. I don't think I ever did.
LEADER, FRIEND
She was the leader, I only followed.
When the horse pasture was green
with waving stalks and buttercups
we ran.
When the snow covered Hazen track
and snowballs and snowmen were reality
we played.
And summer returned, as predictable as school.
The bulldozers came to eat our playfield.
we cried.
The clock fast-forwarded, and she went
to another world
where I cannot follow.
And we said goodbye.
THE FIRST-GRADE CARPET WAS GREEN
"They're only first-graders. They don't
understand life, much less death."
-a teacher
I leaned on the desk, yellow -
graffiti free.
"You must be kind to Stefanie,"
the teacher said.
The room turned crayon-red, it
was too big for us, back when
bicycles were a story high.
That picture is clouded with
a children's song and an
obscure definition of the
adult world -
Something called "life".
We tasted it, bitter -
I muttered, too loud,
"Yea, After all, her Mom died."
The twirly maple seeds sang
down a helicopter landing.
In the end, when the book
asked, "May I Come In?"
I said yes.
I shouldn't have.
When I was in first-grade, a fellow classmate's Mother died right after Mother's day. I remember that as the time only because she had been teaching us Mother's day songs in church only a couple of weeks before. By the time the rest of the class had heard about the incident, I had known for at least a day.
When the teacher said, "We must be kind to Stefanie" I thought the rest of the class already knew, and muttered, "Yea, after all, her Mom and sister died in that accident." My classmates sitting around me had not heard this yet, and were either shocked at the thought, or mad because they thought I was joking.
I never heard the end of it, and all I'd done was tell everyone what I thought they already knew (I'd been up most of the night crying). I had to endure being called insensitive for years after, even though Stefanie had not been in the room at the time.
SYMPTOMS OF DAYMARES
My head is a pounding dream,
A yellow desk, a white pen.
A teacher talking in purple monotone.
A scribbled PeeChee, a battered Physics book.
Mornings come earlier and time stretches
between bells.
Every color is pastel.
The calendar laughs every night.
The stale radio sings a jaded song.
I watch the spider crawl up my bedroom wall,
Then close the math book
before a salt-tear can stain
It's jagged equations.
RETURN FROM THE FUNERAL
The Christmas lights hang weakly, and an old balloon
is caught in their web. The Twilight Zone poster
hangs next to MacGyver and Willow.
A band letter and a two dollar
bill balance on pins
holding "Ozymandius" and the words
to "One Lonely Night".
A Lego Knight prances bravely through
alternate mounds of books, blankets and
clothes.
The dust grows thickly here - where time does
not visit.
Morning does not exist.
Outside, the traffic prowls and a plane
passes by.
All the twilight lost
in the room is buried by the
sunshine.
This was a required poem in my poetry class in High School. The assignment was: what would someone see going into your room if you were to die today? The objective of the assignment was simply to get us to describe our rooms very clearly from the viewpoint of someone who loved us, but most of the poems, including mine, turned out a bit more morbid than that.
READING ABOUT BEIJING, JULY, 1989
The sky on Sunday morning;
Cloud forms drift
into an ice cream cone
which the little boy in the aqua-blue shirt
licks and smiles
up at the ideal father
with eyes the color of ocean
who takes his hand
and they
disappear
into a rapidly fading
sky
in the Sunday Far Side cartoon.
July, 1989, Tiananmen Square, need I say more?