The Trouble with Dorothy Parker

Canadian wind
come down the shoreline,
small
black jacket that smells like last years cologne hanging on the collar
the cuffs,
fits soft against my skin
as I'm sitting down to coffee
in a cafe
with Dorothy Parker in my hands and a song in my head;

I smell you,
your ghost still there on me
in the threads,
and the sun goes behind a cloud

and I taste you.

Again...

And then the sun came out.

A Song for the Dogs

All the dogs
are turned toward the door,
jumping
at the sounds the wind makes
shuffling through the trees,
their ears perked up
eyes all staring,
waiting for someone to come through...

A winter that
moves in slow,
incremental steps dialing down each day
until everything is covered in ice,
the sidewalks all cracking
like gunshots out in the night
to ward off all those ghosts hovering in the trees,
those wolves
that circle this house
calling out my name,
begging
needing to be let in....

Wine
that stains my mouth bloody
wraps itself around all my clumsy words
as they're filling the room in violet-hued inflections,
a song for the dogs,
a song for the hunters all waiting for my heart to take flight
like so many thrush taking off all at once
to fill the sky,
that night sky
with a thousand shadows drifting across the moon...

Heart
like a house,
heart like a home I'm standing inside of,
safe
and sane but a coward all the same,
too young to know the difference,
too old for it to matter;
watching
as my skin changes in fine-lined ways,
my tongue full of all the things I've said before
as I say them again and again
to paint a better picture of me...

watching
as cowards circle like wolves
and wolves circle like lovers
and lovers circle the drain,
their calls a mournful, beautiful thing
off in the distance,
growing quieter all the time until, after a while,
all the dogs lose interest and stop staring at the door
to lay back down
and fall asleep on the couch.

lux eterna

and then the whole world started wavering
like with eyes seeing from underwater,
shimmer
and halo distorting the edges of a life
held dear,
trinkets grasped at with the hungry hands
of a man too afraid to let go,
a man too soon consumed by the depths
afraid to admit to the drowning feeling
inside his lungs as they fill
as they burn
heavy with the suppressed need to draw a breath
to cry out
a name
a song
a curse
a poem in the name of god,
any god,
in the name of love and lust
and rutting like dogs in the grass
the bedroom
a seedy bathroom on a forgotten road,
all that living so much the same from one day to the next
as we're unaware of the breathing,
the expansions of muscles and sinew
all carrying on with the measured beat of life
that keeps the drowning men moving
shuffling
sighing to the rhythm of the painful,
the exhausting
the excruciating
the exquisite forms of love...

Drowning,
all the world overhead a mess of shivering light,
distortions and truths all much the same when side by side,
I would reach out with the palest hand
and touch the skin of the world,
a voyeur
a man aside:
too afraid to ever really know,
too in love to ever really see the beauty
the justice,
the wholeness
inside of me.

The Convalescent: Tell-Tale Hearts

Heart
in a box
buried in the floor
beneath oak and nail,
dust falling between the cracks
calling out my name,
somnolent syllables drifting down hallways
to fall into my ear,
that bottomless ocean
falling away into leagues and leagues
before it reaches the synapses...

Triggers
and catches,
snags a memory to the surface
like so many fighting fish caught in the dragnet,
empty-eyed;

Triggers
and catches all pulled
until I am remembering,
drowning in the open air
beneath the weight of what memory can do,
a heart discarded and so soon forgotten
beneath floorboards sent thundering,
fingertips tingling...

Funny the way it happens,
how easily a man can forget what it is
to feel the sunlight on his face,
heavy-lidded
laying in the grass while the clouds obscure the sun,
slices of light sliding through to move across the open field,
the occasional bird looking for love,
ants crawling all around...

The things we forget when all that warring is over and there are bodies on the ground, hearts locked away in safe places for safe keeping, for safe living, until we're far away from it all, the hurt and the harmed:

Survivors
all safe
but so very far away from the sunlight on our skin,
from the things that make you you,
and the things that make me me,
hearts all locked away
waiting for someone,
anyone,
to see.

The Convalescent: The Emperors New Robe...

Set
the world on fire with this song,
set the world down like it never meant
a thing at all,
that pyre climbing into the sky
towering
(my own little Babel),
so I might know the face of God
reflected in the eyes of a hundred million people,
little jewels aglow all around me;

the face of a man like any other,
but a man just the same,
full by equal measure of the self-same desire
for loving, to be known and held,
that govern the inside of me...

A flawed creature in design
reflected in eyes like projection screens
all showing the same film,
playing the same musical score,
fire raging all around us as the things we adore
all blow away,
spiraling up toward the sky
as glowing ash,
tribute to a God as crippled by doubt as I,
defined only by the things we have loved
as they drift away
into the howling night.

The Convalescent: Ghosts, Calm Down

Trapped
behind walls
behind veils,
cages that rattle with bars like hostile enemy lines
drawn in the sand,
places we always come to for the fighting,
I am left to pacing
back and forth
like so many wolves in the zoo
made to look pretty before the crowd...

Waiting
for the better parts of me to come home,
for the night-singing birds
who call in the dark
with the rising of the moon,
I can only wander these hallways
and wonder about the absurdity of empty beds,
about songs I sing into the night....

The implausibilities of love too much to know,
I can only laugh at a world gone mad,
the eerie sound filling up this house.

The Convalescent: Howl

hungry moon
heavy in the sky,
the heat of the day evaporates from the sidewalk
in radiating waves
beneath my feet...

restless ghosts
moving,
their vague shapes changing
until they resemble the better parts of me,
indefinite
soft around the edges,
I am come undone by the things they need of me,
subjugate and prone by the light of the moon...

I can only howl.

Pieces of a Sea: What Narcissus Saw When He Looked to See

We fall.

Again and again
we fall...
from the highest places,
from the mountaintops (those palisades!)
from the ledges out of windows,
from the nest
from the hearts of those who loved us best...
from me,
from you
we're falling
in love
and out
again...

The cages
and the caged:
a goat on a chain wrapped around
a stake in the ground,
chewing cud with vacant eye,
long-named chemicals drifting through these veins like
slow-swimming salmon,
my heartbeat a thunder of applause
as I'm plummeting
as I fall beneath the skin of me
into that empty sea of secret places...

Into the sea of the too-oft unknowns that lie
between the two of us,
pieces of me
spent freely on failed love and fallen friends,
mothers in hospital beds who confess that children
were never the dreams they had dreamt
for their tiny, pale frames...
secrets
again and again,
the line between us all...

Pieces
of a sea,
pieces assembled to make the dreams I dream,
walls and walls all built like cages
in a zoo
in a prison
a church
in an altar
a cell, a heart,
a crystal ball;
pieces cast like tattooed bones to form the lazy shape of me,
the dissonant,
the quiescent all begging to be spoken of
in soft, sweet breath...

The cages and
the caged....
the sirens and the call
all much the same;
how I can take you inside of me and still not know a part
of the story behind your eyes,
that soliloquy;
sons who barely know their brown-eyed mothers,
those beautiful women all humbled by age,
brought low
to see that the world is not as infinite as they had hoped,
marrow sitting in bones
passed on to children like dice

thrown
thrown
thrown
out into an endless sea
in a gambit of hope,
again and again with the dreaming
the falling into the depths of the sea:
the oceanic,
the depths of me falling away
into a yawning night
where all the unknowns sleep,
where all the secrets lie...

secrets
again and again,
secrets always just the same:
the unspoken,
the quiet embers I hold inside
that flicker
that glow,
that light all the world aflame as I'm walking,
as I'm diving
down
down into murky depths of me.


~ S. A. Warmack

Umbra

City

gone quiet all around me,

dim, shut-eyed windows all sleeping

with couples in their beds with

arms with legs

tangled hair all in a knot,

two people wrapped around cores of shining stars,

an entire universe of lovers on this quiet street...

Flicker

and glowing like lights through my

fingertips (touching fingertips),

the corona, chromosphere

expanding outwards from them in a halo of love,

like beacons

signal fires calling out to all those

like me

who are lost on city streets,

wondering why the best parts of themselves

are not enough to be loved

Their fires call

and I am not immune to the sound,

to all that glowing light

that casts me in the umbra of its impossible glow,

me,

this ghost,

wandering these city streets at night.

Clarion

I saw my shadow
backlit
against the morning sky,
a giant stretching its hands for miles
and miles,
thousands and more,
as though to say, "behold, I am born."

Cloud decks beneath me
and engine noise,
I am made of distances
that must be crossed,
I am made of silences that must be voiced:
a trumped call,
a clarion voice.

Against those palisades
I am only a man,
only me,
and yet...

the sun behind me lends wing,
and I raise my arms out wide.

Infinite Vessels: Mysterious Skin

Songbird
drifting in the night,
out there where all the monsters sleep
down in the deeps,
down in the dark water where we can not see...
beneath that skin.

Don't go into the water,
don't go into the sea,
sinking like all those wooden ships
made of ribs and steel, skin
filled with the dreams of men much like me,
full of wanting and things like hope who set them afloat
like children on the shore...
I can not swim.

I send you things like songs,
like poetry and words
over phone lines to ease the pain
of all that missing, the empty places inside
no one ever quite sees
we have been taught to be so afraid of,
chasms of yawning doubt and fear that fill the places
where hope should be, your hand in mine...
I would sing to you.

We are infinite vessels my dear,
sweet friend:
worlds inside of us spun out wildly
so worth the seeing,
if only you knew of all the things we could be
numbered like all the stars and planets and comets in the sky,
constellations of beauty right here
beneath such mysterious skin
of heart and flesh and bone,
of the things inside of us worth all that living,
of the things I write about,
of the songs I make and the songs I sing
of the ways we glow,
of the ways we glow...
fiercely.



____________________________


There is something to the idea that, in saving someone else, you save yourself... parts of this were taken from a conversation had with a friend dealing with depression; they were thinking of putting an end to it. Finite answers to temporary problems... I didn't realize, though, at the time how deeply unhappy I was myself; how far I'd sunk into the same paradigm of of empty places I was feeling all too often. We were like a mobius strip of consolation: one talking the other out of a decision that they themselves were thinking of... it's a funny, odd thing. I don't pretend to understand it all, but some of these words were what was directly said to this other person... all of these words are what I have come to say to myself. All of these words are what I'm putting out there now in a supreme act of vulnerability...

In my act of defiance.


Much.

Alone

The windows are thrown open
and the light is coming in,
bright
sunshine
all glimmering glow
filtered down through clouds too high
in a stream,
in a rivers glow,

and the air is moving
slow,
so slow,
gentle
kind
as the birds
they're singing,
God
they're singing so loudly
in a caucophony
symphony,
tympanic crash of sound
of joy,
of love and symmetry
as they're fluttering...

And the windows,
they're thrown open wide
and the world

the whole world
is coming in
an suddenly...
I am not alone.

And Then Say the Ravens,

The night sky
is hungry
swallowing the light from the stars,
and the wind is barely moving
across the face of the moon
snow white
and glowing,
the earth all laid quietly to rest
as the pregnant sky gives birth
to the empty spaces inside of me...

So like silence
and so like doubt,
vast spaces
like blackness
like pits,
the distance between
the sun, the earth, the moon,
your heart
and mine too great...

Because I am too like night-time creatures,
too like my father
afraid to be,
ready to run
as this chest
my cage
traps the thundering inside of me
of that fight,
the flight in an explosion of wings
a cry,
a scream in the dark as another animal breathes its last
and lays
in wait
for the ravens to come like they always do
in my night-time dreaming...

They float down on pitch wings
and stare with glassy eyes from tree branches
watching,
waiting for the chase that is ever inside of me,
watching
as I hide in fear
while the hungry night consumes...

And then say the ravens,
in soft voices always just the same
with staring eye,
"You are beneath my wing,
and I will see you safely home, son...",
before taking flight again,
their laughter mocking into the night
until I gather all that fear and throw it out before me
like rose petals
like benediction,
and disappear into the night.


_________________________

an homage to Poe... the one I owe my first introduction to love of poetry to.

The Art of Leaving Quietly

Uncovered
by the rising sun
I am naked
while its pouring through the windows,
making itself comfortable amongst the sheets...

Baptized
in the light,
in the name of my own flesh,
I am born again... I am new
in the ascended sun,
daylight like absolution
over this pale skin,
I could not wash it away down the shower drain like your smell

Lingering
in the pillows while I rise,
gather my things on slow feet,
and slip quietly out the door.