{ yesterday's tweets. }

( my milkshake brings all the tweets to the yard )

LoudTwitter, innit?

{ Faiz Ahmed Faiz: You Tell Us What to Do. }

You Tell Us What to Do
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

When we launched life
on the river of grief,
how vital were our arms, how ruby our blood.
With a few strokes, it seemed,
we would cross all pain,
we would soon disembark.
That didn't happen.
In the stillness of each wave we found invisible currents.
The boatmen, too, were unskilled,
their oars untested.
Investigate the matter as you will,
blame whomever, as much as you want,
but the river hasn't changed,
the raft is still the same.
Now you suggest what's to be done,
you tell us how to come ashore.

When we saw the wounds of our country
appear on our skins,
we believed each word of the healers.
Besides, we remembered so many cures,
it seemed at any moment
all troubles would end, each wound heal completely.
That didn't happen; our ailments
were so many, so deep within us,
that all diagnoses proved false, each remedy useless.
Now do whatever, follow each clue,
accuse whomever, as much as you will,
our bodies are still the same,
our wounds still open.
Now tell us what we should do,
you tell us how to heal these wounds.

{ Catherine Pierce: This Is Not an Elegy. }

This Is Not an Elegy
by Catherine Pierce

At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant,
my fingernails chewed to half-moons.
I took off my clothes in a late March
field. I had secret car wrecks,
secret hysteria. I opened my mouth
to swallow stars. In backseats
I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust,
and distance. I was unformed and total.
I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops
stopped coming around. The heat lifted
its palms. The radio lost some teeth.

Now I see the landscape behind me
as through a Claude glass—
tinted deeper, framed just so, bits
of gilt edging the best parts.
I see my unlined face, a thousand
film stars behind the eyes. I was
every murderess, every whip-
thin alcoholic, every heroine
with the silver tongue. Always young
Paul Newman’s best girl. Always
a lightning sky behind each kiss.

Some days I watch myself
in the third person, speak to her
in the second. I say: I will
meet you in sleep. I will know you
by your stillness and your shaking.
By your second-hand gown.
By your bruises left by mouths
since forgotten. This is not
an elegy because I cannot bear
for it to be. It is only a tree branch
against the window. It is only a cherry
tomato slowly reddening in the garden.
I will put it in my mouth. It will
be sweet, and you will swallow.

--

One of the poetry blogs I'm subscribed to exploded earlier this week so I might make up for the dearth of posts by flooding you with verse spam. In other news: still waiting for the BSG finale, so no flist-surfing for me just yet.

{ John Amen: Triptych. }

Triptych
by John Amen

In ’96 I used to take Levine to the Mental Health Center
for his monthly psych appointments. I’d drive while he
told me of IRS men who were appropriating his garage,
homosexuals who had it out for his dead uncle. It’s tragic,
how someone’s pain can become chronic noise, a shtick
you learn to tune out. That last time, though, something
came over me, and I swerved into a parking lot, turned off
the car. “Do you really believe that?” I yelled. I saw it, my
words slicing through decades of fixation, a forgotten sun
rising in his arctic eyes; for three seconds he was free, whole.
Then the shadow fell again. “It’s documented in the Vatican,”
he said. Not long after that he hanged himself outside the church
he attended when he was a kid. I went to the visitation, but I don’t
remember much about his family, just that they stood there,
parents and siblings, a quartet in a perfect row, shaking hands
and saying over and over, in tones that struck me as oddly
indistinguishable, thank you thank you thank you thank you