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The Fir

The fir sway in sea breeze scratching at the dense space between. From their basest, they grew and always the boughs edge one another out. In their ascent, the roots are forgot and old limbs vestigial, brown and shatter. Though fir forests from afar are vivacious and vividly verdant, the forest floor is dark, cramped and a century of death mars each tree. Skeletons of former trees creak in the dark, though evergreen crowns rise to face the Sun.

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The White Road: an Ode to the Ohio State University Men’s Glee Club.

Music is the food of love, but not for those who make it.

To sing with the heavenly chorus has always been man’s one desire,

and on Earth we fill it with rock ballads and crowded pop beats,

but we few, proud brothers in song sit at table, that black grand table,

where the old masters dined and cooked the sweet ambrosia,

and we reheat it, often burning often by microwave, much 

as in our dorm room microwaves and one-bedroom student hovels

as the sheet music rests on the dumpster table while rank tap water boils for generic pasta.

It is over these same stained coils that Verdi, Mendelssohn, Palestrina 

are reheated for the modern audience, and in our red velour dugout 

on our strand of scarred waxed wood, flanked by toneless pipe organ,

we deliver with everything we have the finest courses of entertainment,

but often times it is a paltry few: less parents than children, and peers unseen,

but that is not the cook’s care. He does not turn off his grill at a slow lunch,

surely there is nothing so frantic and beautiful when the front is full, but the same passion 

fills elementary auditoriums, as football stadiums and the thousands who have heard us sing

do not realize how constant our care is, for they glimpse but a short hour of career,

for which dozens were spent memorizing recipes, improvising menus, and prepping the kitchen.

Nor do they realize how far we’ve tread, the lengths a simple discipline can take you:

from the streets of Atlanta, to the streets of Newark, drug ourselves across rural Ohio,

carved out roosts in the noble country parishioners, and set up shop among the swank of bridal party.

But between the notes, you cannot surmise what’s passed between these men,

on every level: love, lust, camaraderie, hate admiration, jealousy, but mostly respect.

From the first moment upon entering in that chapel beneath the stained glass, in the concrete choir loft

I saw the scarlet blazed troupe bespectacled and bearded rain down upon the incoming class, the songs of alma mater,

and in those words honor the totality of theirs and every sorry child’s that passed in these gates:

every moment of genius, every day of defeat each lofty romance, and every basest lust.

In a 5 mile radius millions have tread this, and in that song they sang it all. 

But mostly, they sang their song, in the subtle slides and added harmonies and fudged chords,

in the rhythm of clapping, in the gesture of hands, and the subtle pronunciation and word changes.

They shared in a poem within a poem that no one else could hope to read, and that’s how we took

the impossibility of finding beauty from collegiate banality and interwove it with classical aesthetics.

And there was nowhere else I could be but with them, and I can only begin to sing their song.

But on that stage, so many times did the words align with the poetry I’ve written and how 

“tribulationum nostrum,” was indeed our tribulation and “alleluia” became our ironic desperation.

I see churches in upper Arlington, where pleased faces heard something that cost much more than they imagined.

We filled white and crystal chapels of the methodists in Youngstown, sang Mozart in frozen-over parking lots in greater Cincinnati.

Ad-libbed classic rock harmonies on porches in the cold Columbus night, and screamed pop anthems into the humid summer evenings.

We pounded goldschlager as was required, and drank shitty beer, did keg stands, beer bongs, pong, cups, and quarters,

we smoked pot, and cigarettes, and pipes, and cigars: God did we smoke. And some of us fucked men and others, women. 

We loved God, we sang his praises each day, though some cared only for this false idol of music,

the worship looked the same, and we all love it equally, when we walked out onto Ohio field to sing civil war anthems,

and into St. Johns to sing the alma mater and up in the lofts of the stadium where the indoctrination began. And Oh! chocolatey oval-sing,

where from the warmth of summer to the bitter cold of autumn and bitter cold of spring we sang the same set each Friday,

sometimes serenading a hotdog, sometimes to women in booths, once a baby, and once a dog, several sisters, a few mothers, and even a stranger’s wife.

We’ve filled Italian restaurants with laughter and cheer, been filled with cafeteria food in three different states,

but our sausage haus was are true haunt, where the rafters rang out in jubilation and appropriate songs sung out.

It was unbelievable the world we built, and the last time I was on that stage with them

we sang:

“It’s the white road, westward, the road I must tread, to the green grass, the cool grass, and rest for heart and head. To the violets, and the brown woods, and the thrushes song in a fine land, the west land, the land where I belong.”

And in that moment the corps blessed me to go forth and with me, cary that song, that interminable praise:

“Oh come let’s sing Ohio’s praise, and songs to alma mater raise.”

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April 30: Envoi

Through my own deception, I perverted the truth of The Word, but The Word is good.

And I was cast out in the darkness away from The Word, and there was gnashing of teeth.

And in those dark woods I wandered 30 days and 30 nights —only the trees received The Word

But walking in silence, the rocks and trees themselves sang, and The Word was in the world

I once set my own words to be read through a glass darkly, but now I set them as a lamp on a table.

In the beginning there was The Word, and The Word was good, but I began with The Fall.

Into Her arms, I commend my spirit, The Mother, The Sister, The Virgin, The Whore.

She is The Mother of The Word, and her word is law —the first being Love.

Lord, may The Word go with me into the world, and may Truth be the language of the land.

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April 29: Teeth

When I was 14, they mounted a rack to my pallet forced me to turn my own wheel and crack my own skull never letting the bones to fuse until a beautiful smile emerged.

When they told me we needed to do the same downstairs and for the first time in my life I took control of my fate when prompted, the doctors said that it was purely cosmetic, so I skipped the torture.

Ten years later standing in that Columbus staple while my companion samples every flavor not wanting my teeth to hurt I only get a shake flavored Oregon fur, those trees to heaven.

As we step over the cracked pavement telling of our mutual advancement in states apart she suddenly springs back recalling my aversion to cold, my stupid sensitive teeth.

And months later touring the halls of Giant Eagle found myself between the dental hygiene and frozen foods and taking the toothpaste for sensitive teeth —you must change your life.

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April 28: And it is Still About Sex

30 poems, each as dripping with self pity as they are with subtextual lust and as full with feints and empty advances.

Part of this poet is convinced that there was never a romantic who really played at love, rather their words were the play.

How pitiful, the heights my spirit can climb at the sight of nothing, how nerves flair just by seeing Her in my periphery. 

Making eyes without looking, I feel Her presence and figuring my posture pointedly at Her writing for Her, in the tenseness of my shoulder,

in the slope of my neck, the crook of my back sweet sonnets, laying the kingdom of God at her feat, saying with my very not looking: “I will make this all yours.”

And having sent this to Her post haste in the indeterminacy of my own delusions, I skitter off to be with myself and think how cool I just was to not even acknowledge She exists.

Or, how elated I am in Her presence, when she walks in She is the mist on the moors gently settling into the valley and I am a thicket of thistle just happy to receive Her dew.

And in that moment are eyes meet and we both say “hello,” for some reason She giggles, and in that moment, my soul is on the mountain, reaching to heaven with the trees.

And for the rest of the class, I glance at her and smile, and I imagine She blushes, or dampens, or at least is faint, and as She raises her hand to heaven, I am gone. 

Yet I go and hide in the basement, and send my words like cast lines into the world, every simile a lure, and I dangle myself with baubles and drape in patterns

because I cannot bare to face this rapture, I can not earn it. I can only just muster what humanity I have to present a self and hope that She falls for it, and does not look too deeply.

Walking that same path every day, I am surely a spectacle but a mile roundtrip and I don’t let a single person stop me or even look at me—I am lost.

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April 27: Malibu

As strangers in a strange land we share mutual distaste for the locals and how the weather is such a drag, but for them it’s that the folks are too pale and liberal where for me their just too white, and for them it’s that it rains every day and is chill, where for me it is temperate and never snows.

I know nothing of this stranger land they speak of casually: sunny sidewalks by the sea where blonde hair and tan skinned boys dance gently over the freezing sea and palm trees reach to heaven, and inland an empire of malls and stores and cars and schools and in some vale in a subdivision these women grew up.

To me it is just that: palm trees, swimming pools and movie stars. Barbies, not modern business multicultural barbie, but white, blonde, blue eyed, and impossibly proportioned Barbie, and they’re so worried that I’m judging them, but how could I? It was not their choice to grow up in the whitest neighborhood in the richest city on the West Coast, the mecca of American culture that processes the huddled masses and ships them to be consumed in the heartland.

But who am I? Where do I hail from? The sprawling metropolis of our capital, where in the bloat of government and the shadow of titans, I played on the fields where our fathers blood nourished the veins of the new cannon fodder, and maybe we grew up poorer, but no less segregated.

I am no different then these materialistic and sheltered barbies, but I have been to the heart—I fear that they won’t let themselves.

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April 26: An Elegy for a Gray Day in Maryland.

There can be no art to words on this matter there can only truth, and ah to be alive in a time when the euphemism and cliche of the nightly news is finally being matched by the truest words there are: the person on the street. Standing where they once would only step by in a moment on the way to the pharmacy, today, these alleys are the field of battle, or the chute for slaughter. But we like to think we’re on the side of history that don’t lynch black folk. Well a man was lynched yesterday. If Baltimore has to burn may DC see the smoke. And if DC burns may Richmond see the pyre and if Richmond burns may Chapel hill, Columbia, and Charleston, and the South will burn again. But I promised not to make a poem. So i will only say, shame on everyone on the wrong side of justice. It serves you now, but history will see what you did.

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April 25: The Basoonist

I gave up poetry because I was eulogizing life: I was objectifying my fellow man, and I was removing myself from the world around me.

But The Bassoonist deserves it, and that’s enough. Skinny, white boy, who claims to have changed his name to “Jamal” because he was high and “had the money.”

He worries that his fries were cooked with butter, of course because he’s vegan, though his backward-facing California Bear hat is leather.

He got a drunken tattoo on his lower lip from a heroin addict using the same needle as three others and tried to write “this is me” on his palm. But it hurt too much.

Unafraid to remove his shirt backstage at a performance, he enters early, and blows freely on a quiet stage the song: a new soul, that never knew music, is set free to sing.

The bassoonist blows artlessly, but he does it well. He has blown so loudly and freely his whole life  that he will never be the soul—that swells to the downbeat.

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April 24: Dreaming Under the Influence

I haven’t dreamed for 6 years but last night, through drink and bitter herb came to me a vision

I was in a great corridor, trying to find my way out when I came upon a large gallery: wood paneled walls and carpeted floor covered with victorian artifacts

touring the facility I find it sparse and sterile, nothing hints at art, nor does it allude to archival as I exit by the archway lies a fallen maiden with a crushed violin

she rises and leads me off to a dark side portal I missed before and within she reveals an arena where the floor is strewn with the bodies of Japanese characters of unknown origin

people dressed in felt costumes, and they rise with the light and slowly amble towards us, as if the living dead when suddenly the erupt in playful chirping 

the artist, she begins to explain the production, while I ask one of the figures I almost recognize for a picture but realizing this is art, ask the artist if it’s alright

and she then takes my cellphone to snap the picture herself I decline, I didn’t mean to make her work but the hall is empty of any other viewer, so I am her sole audience

and I exit.

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April 23: Delusions of Insignificance

Sometimes, you feel at ease with your station in life: you grow and change in a way consistent with your intended life goals. And from this build something.

Other times, you are sitting late at night pulling at strings of definitions that you can barely intuit, searching for the key to a problem you are sure is trivial, but that you barely comprehend.

And in this room, this chalky basement alcove, with white walls and tight wound carpet and furniture with decades of stains and nicks, you feel that you have gone back to that dorm room, where you began.

And in searching for the answer to that illusive homework problem you stumble onto a grading key written by the man, two years your senior who graded your freshman analysis class, and helped you off the rocks of rigor.

And in it, he dances around the notation and existence proofs as if he understands the nature of Riemannian geometry, and following that rabbit hole, you find he is at Chicago, already published in this field that you are flailing at,

and you are back in the steamy classroom on Monday nights straining through Spivak, with him seated over you and guiding seeing beyond the problems we’ve encountered to the heart of it. 

God, I knew I would often feel a child in my adult life, but take this away from me, make me not suffer the Freshman’s insignificance one more time. I have been a sub-sub-librarian all my life, and there are at least two more initiations.

But I think of cold Chicago, and how he likely sits in his lousy, overpriced flat shivering among the takeaway bins and video games, spending the bulk of his time chipping away these opaque theorems. 

While I walk in daylight among beautiful students, and trees to the heavens. Tending my garden.

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April 22: The State of Affairs

I am too nervous to ask her what the state of her affair is. I have trouble imagining why I should know, and why I should care,

but I do, because I need to start seeing life as cohabitable rather than seeing a couple and assuming there is an unknown love story.

I have no idea how people fall in love because I have no idea how people don’t fall in love. This is not a contradiction I am always fallings in love, but never once

have I fallen in love. I am to preoccupied making verse and seeing tropes building narratives and telling tales that by the time I even learn their name

I’ve experience the full raptures of love making not “making love,” but “making” “love,” and then there’s still the matter of this person who tend to get in the way of my conceits.

And now throwing myself on the thorns of tinder. I bleed. For a moment the poetics and fantasy must be reduced to: “left or right?” And for a moment

I can see a person before me, and... not objectify them as you might think for how can you objectify people when you’ve spent a life abstracting them?

But inevitably, my swiping devolves from base attraction and shared interests, from imagining convivial laughter, from light entertainment through mutual life events

to something loftier, to trying to picture this smiling and gussied individual up late sitting on their bathroom floor contemplating the inadequacies of their life,

in the fun and sporty action shots I search for a hint of higher pursuit: what are their metaphysics have they settled on an internally consistent morality? do they strive for aesthetic and poetic beauty?

And in their description full of sunshines and heights I seek for allusions towards the infinite or intimations of subtextual keys to their deepest and most truest selves. I deprive myself

of the basic human comfort of being able to admit to wanting another human being. And why? For lack of poetry? Or fear of the second coming? In my dreams we message back and forth

together creating this relationship of artifice moulding our independent artistic intentions into this spectacle that we can show the world and maybe, if lucky, we both get laid.

So I swipe right. And another name. I thought for once that my craft could be the vehicle of my tenor, but there is nothing to say beyond what there is to say. 

So I have nothing to say.

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April 21: [Omitted for privacy of individuals it involved]

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April 20: Eugene, OR 4.20.15

The first full day of sun in months: the student body emerges to meet the day.

My pupils arrive dilated, with earbuds in yet random sounds from forgotten open windows.

I deliver my sobering mathematics to a crowd of writhing faces.

And the slightest lilt in a professors step brings surprising joy to unseen classmates.

The sudden upbeat timber of previously monotone instructor, all suggests another presence.

A student arguing by analogy for tin and pop is to them windex and weed, a wry smile.

As the sun sets, crowds gathers around storefronts the tattoo parlor with daily foot traffic, the print store.

Sorority girls in sundresses and strappy sandals take the arched back walk to some unseen social.

Skaters boys smoke openly, and neckbeards travel in droves to gorge on Sy’s pizza.

A few valley girls in rompers and scalloped shorts trounce about, bubbly with the vapor within.

This is the last year, before legality and in one month, and the side eyes and giggles and quiet congregation

will all be cast into sunny days as these, and the very bean I obsess over will be no more 

then the very cause of today.

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April 19: [Incomplete & Omitted for poor quality]

This is not a poem.

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April 18: Joy

how fleeting and flighty i can go from a late night drunk and tearful full of self loathing and harm in the depths of the mire of homework to today, sunny and bright how I can smile at my sisters and have them smile back how my back is scratched a student wishes me well the baristas chat me up and my algebra professor stops to think it is not that all is right but it is that I am right with it

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April 17: Hate is a Strong Word

When people tell me I’m racist, I say, “hate’s a strong word.” I don’t hate black people; I just hate black individuals: the way they talk, and I can’t understand how they make fun of tucked shirts, how they laugh easy and sing well, and have this deep connection with any other person of color… And always with the competitive nature of dancing and spitting, I feel uneasy it’s a cliche, but it’s true. But I don’t hate black people.

When people tell me I’m homophobic I say, “hate’s a strong word.” I don’t hate gay people, I just hate this one fag I knew who came on to me because I dressed well and flirted with men, and I hate how they make petty jokes, how they flaunt themselves. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. How they find it so easy to love one another, without the shame… But I don’t hate gay people.

When people tell me I’m antisemitic I say, “hate’s a strong word.” I don’t hate jews, how could I? My best friend is Jewish it’s a cliche, but it’s true. No, Jews have done so much: produced the entertainment industry, and kept our money safe. And how they have this tribe and connection to the homeland and this covenant with God… But I do hate it when they call me “goy,” and get cold when I think they’re zionists, but how could I hate Jews?

When people tell me I’m a misogynist I say, “hate’s a strong word.” I don’t hate women, just some girls. They say they think you’re cute that they find you charming, funny yet that isn’t enough for them and they go fuck someone they’re attracted to. Christ how conceited… And you know, boys and girls we’re just from different planets: it’s a cliche, but it’s true. And God the way they dress and demand we don’t gawk, but I don’t hate women.

And when they say they hate me, I say, “hate’s a strong word.” you don’t hate me, you hate parts of me how I let my whitebread suburban upbringing instill envy for the color and community of human beings living in tradition… and you hate the way that my envy makes me feel permissive of the implicit bigotries I was raised with it’s a cliche, but it’s true but you don’t hate me… do you?

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April 16: The World Outside

When I was a child their was a world outside. Where people eked out an existence, where tired maids awoke to the black-blue dawn, and quiet faced clerks walked silent down grey streets, and this world was everything, and within it were concentric circles, descending to the cold center and in each circle, people, in the form of doctors and lawyers each equipped with their arcane trappings slouching through each sterile and cold compartment  and down long subterranean halls, either stifling with the heat and reek of body or the cold and sting of plastic.

At night, this world was vacated, and the quiet and tired for a moment did not act so, and rather than wearing the emotions of the day, over the desires of the night wore the desires of the night over the emotions of the day. And the circles and compartments that remain without form are cut deep and wide with the course of interplay: a B-line over the wide and high dance floor shaves off a stern century, an impromptu globular in the corner smooths out an indifferent architect. And the world outside is for one night: the world inside.

And now, in my time, I’ve felt the very presence of the inside leave the world around me, and wherever I tread is that exterior life. No hearth warms me, nor do any acquaintances take shape. I once dreamt of carrying that warmth with me into the waking city, but I never thought I could be the bearer of  the inner ring.