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