Sweet Nothings, Part 2

II
We are eyelashes lost drifting into tall grass.
We are a light bulb in the second before it burns out.
Objectivity is our native tongue, but
we translate touches into ideals and
ideals into projections. Garage-door open
the vault of your experience for me.
Do not hesitate to part your picket-fence teeth.
Hum a harmonious heartbreak with me into this backseat.
Though God will not answer us, we are not so alone.

Communication is something of a burden...

Communication is something of a burden;
words are territorial with fangs. They gnash
and scurry and bite.
You seem to assume that
they must come easily to poets,
but eloquence is a sputtering faucet,
and it rarely flows smoothly
when one needs it most.
I would like to dispel the
pesky notion you might have
that I never have trouble
concocting correct phrases.

I don’t always say the right thing.

For example, when I’m in line
at the store, buying groceries
and the clerk asks,
"Cash or card?"
I say,
"What value have your tiny paper rectangles?
My physiology is alien to your edifices.
It was wrought when foodstuffs
were earned, not purchased.
My urges remember a time
when there were no lovers,
only mates. We planted grains so that
we could embrace without
breaking to forage.
Trade me this bread for divinity."

I usually just mean, "Cash."

You must be able to hear the precision
of the engine’s cycles while I’m
spinning my wheels, pressing harder
on the accelerator.
You don’t believe me because
you feel me buckshot emotions.
Teach me,
like a doctor prescribing himself penicillin,
my own limitations. I’m sorry,
but I don’t have the right thing to say.

So when my boss says,
"Marshall, hurry up and finish.
We need you in this meeting,"
I say,
"No."

That’s wrong.

But the end is the
most important part of the story
and the most hasty are the
most unsatisfying.
I want to linger like lovers’ lips
even when I’m staring embarrassed
at my computer screen.
You are glowing on me, but
I have places to go, calling.
Your mouse cord is wrapped
around my wrist, twisted. I’m
too sadistic to leave you.
People tell you not to start things you can’t finish.
I only don’t start things I can’t
imagine finishing.
Actions are choices well-incubated,
cured slowly in isolation. I’m not
suggesting that I don’t rush in to things.
I do. Just not business meetings.

When my mother says,
"Marshall, talk to your siblings.
They need to hear from you."
I always respond, "Mom,
I’m twenty-two and broken.
I don’t have much advice, and I’m busy
trying to take the little I have myself.
It’s not easy to look into nestbird eyes or
hear their wormchirp voices
without feeling exposed.
It’s not your fault. I just
don’t know how to tell people that
I care about them
without hurting their feelings. I’m sorry."
I should tell her that I will, but I can’t.

I wish I could speak with the
magnificent subtext of a prism, everytime
combing a lightbar of words into a rainbow
of quantum meanings.
If the world is a stage,
it must be improvisational theater in the round.
I don’t always say the right thing.

Like sometimes,
when you tell me, "I love you,"
I say, "I know.
I love you, too."

Sweet Nothings, Part 1

I
You frost exotic lips with domestic gloss
then offer your demure smiles through them. You blink
eyelashes over full-moon eyes with half-moon heart.
Tell me: do you feel like a monument here?
My arms around your soft torso will hold in
your poltergeists. I will kiss belonging onto your
hesitant, snowglobe cheeks and comb assurance through
strands of black hair until you sweat out your missteps. Please,
let me be a patchwork quilt hung over your disbelief.

Screwdriver Poem @ Art Amok Finals 2009

The performance of my untitled screwdriver poem at Mocha Match Café in Decatur, GA for the Art Amok 2009 team selection slam.

Promise

I found this poem while I was cleaning up my dorm room. I have a big stack poems and rap verses that I'll probably never show anyone, but here's one that seems worth reproducing.

Promise
I have known the futility of flight,
infant wings intimidated by the overwhelming gray pinions
of assured eagles, nests that smother speckled eggs,
pellets that whistle through the most stirring mating call,
crying children who cradle cadavers that their cats left,
hallways—whitewashed and sanded—that forget holes from the talons
of the most territorial fowl who dwelled there,
the ringing squawks that each one produced.
And I have seen, too how the penguin walks,
waddles, waits, and worries, wistful atop his mound,
clumsy but dignified, unrefined, distilled,
made divine by his own plague, proper, exact,
unconfined, for he dreams not of piercing the skies.

Flower pedals are pressed...

Flower pedals are pressed

between a book's pages
like thumbs cradling them.

We breathe out,
close our eyes,
as they bleed tones,
pastel into woven sheets.

They too are forgotten;
we too are relics
living in books afterward.

People pluck pedals
to remember with wistfulness
the finality of blossoming.

Letter to President-Elect Brack Obama

Letter to President-Elect Brack Obama
November 5, 2008

Mr. Barack Obama—
     Congratulations. I imagine that you have been flooded with adulation by nearly every person to whom you spoke today, but I want to add my praises regardless.
     Congratulations.
     The disbelief, pride, and bewilderment we felt last night as a collective, as a nation, were only tiny slivers of your accomplishment, the only pieces we got to share. The freedoms upon which America was founded make its identity a flower, its stem bending toward the cyclical sun of public opinion. Last night, you made the sun stand still, forced America to reflect on its own roots. You must have realized as you accepted the endorsement of this populace that the entire world was watching you. How did you learn to steady your voice while looking into the eye of humanity itself? Do you ever doubt that our trust in you is well-placed? Don’t ever doubt yourself, Barack. Question yourself, embrace your humility, but believe that you are where you are because of who you are.
     Over the next few days, you will attend the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise you. Does that make you think of your own mortality? Of Malia and Sasha living without you? Do you pray to make your grandmother proud? How will we remember your term? We both know that struggle never ends; you will be challenged many times by issues that will cling to your consciousness like leeches. America wants you to rewrite the despondent song it is whistling as an aria. It wants you to fix everything, but you can’t. The work ahead of you is daunting, and you should not be ashamed to be afraid. Your reason and your pragmatism are two of your best qualities, but do not forget that they grow from your compassion.
     And without that compassion, they will wither. Without your immutable commitment to fairness and justice, our commitment to you will not subsist. This, perhaps more than anything else, will define how you are remembered. America is reborn, a toddler learning again to walk. Without both of your hands to steady us, we will fall back to the floor. Barack, please don’t slip.
     I don’t mean this to be demanding or condescending. I am sure that you know more than I do about the whims of the American electorate. I seek only to inform you of one cynic to whom you brought a moment of relief, a pause of unexpected optimism. There are too many of us, pessimists who need to be startled from our apathy by a figure as unyieldingly compelling as you are. We don’t want to have to say, “I told you so.”
     Again, Mr. Obama, Mr. President, congratulations.

     Sincerely,
     Marshall Gillson

That little hammock is sunken back into memory like...

That little hammock is sunken back into memory like
it was sunken into the night before the colors woke up,
like the portrait of the wavering moon was
as it resigned into the water.

The porch to which it was tethered creaked
its intimate disapproval when we moved to swat at the mosquitoes
that kissed my arms and not hers.

There was a digression
and the calling songs of the crickets in the worn-out shrubs
overcame our breathing;
the organic smells of seaweed and beachrock scared off
the thickness of our sweat.

My eyes were closed.

After that pause,
I followed her, blindfolded, through the rest of the house,
relying only on the tug of her hand for guidance,
and forgetting already the dusk on the sound.

Listen...

Listen.

Silence is the sound of asteroids colliding,
reverberations of nothing,
like the universe is holding its breath.
In it I hear the hum of
our heartbroken divisions.

I pull you toward me
like holding my ear to the ground
to hear your thoughts before you say them.
I want to travel with you
like waking up in
a moving elevator’s amnesia.
Lend me your periscope, that I might
watch the story of your landscape,
the explanation of the hills’ undulating curves
until I feel the grassblades.

Our bodies are more our possessions than
our selves.
We barter them for reassurance
that our isolation is contrived,
but our awarenesses embrace like fish would.
We gasp for breath, using our devotions
like life rafts and Teflon
but they’re more like grappling hooks, ropes
from which we swing when
the wall is impassable.
You are hesitant to trade me your twine
and we are both slipping.

I don’t want to catch you,
but plummet next to you. So
tell me what you are hiding, or
hold me close enough
to hear it inside you.
I am listening for the hum
of your heartbreak,
but all I can hear is the chortling
of your demons.
I know we can’t reach,
but try. There is
importance in the space
between fingers about to touch,
even if they never do,
like an old woman's desperate stare
into her husband’s distant eyes,
even when he can't remember her,
like gravity redirecting a comet
around a planet it won’t hit.

I'm not asking you to love me.
I'm asking you to hold me like
you're not afraid of me,
like the rest of our segmented existence
was rearranging outside of our manic clutch,
like this curb was the lip of a volcano,
like this was your last chance.
It might be.
Anchor me while this sidewalk melts.
Tell me what you are hiding.
Hum me your heartbreak.
Weave your confusion into mine
and clench until we suffocate,
until we have no choice but to float,
until we are wound together,
an inseparable spool, a cosmic collision,
our fracture across instead of between us.

Hold me.
Suffer with me.

Then pick me off like a scab.
Shudder the pink of a new scar
as you disregard this protection.
Don’t look back now.
Supernova between us; we are distant.
Goodnight.
I will miss you.
Goodbye.

All I remember is the abrupt end...

All I remember is the abrupt end,
a butcher-knife amputation of my right hand
then the sparkling fade to blackness as I hemorrhaged you.
My last thought
was, “Good fucking riddance.”
My God agrees with me
and I hope he takes from you everything you love.
I hope your convict boyfriend stabs you through the kneecap
with a screwdriver
twists it
and doesn’t get cited to his parole officer.
I hope that, when you hear this, the flesh on your face crawls
until you want to peel it off like a potato skin,
clawing long, legato gashes down your cheeks.
What? Did you think I would chase you?
Or that you could drag me along
like a reluctant poodle in the park?
Was this a chess move or a dice-roll?
Or are you just fed up with me like I am with you?

I know that I’m damaged.
You don’t have to rub it in my face.
Because even if I bathed in acceptance
of my regrets and mistakes
and you scrubbed me with a Brillo pad full of reminders
there would still be eleven steps before I’m fixed
and I’m not even willing to take the second one for you.

You want this
to weigh on me like Atlas holding up the skies
crushing my pride
to the resigned buzzing of a fly caught
in the swift plastic of a flyswatter,
its wings twitching ineffectual apologies aloud.
But pride
is far easier to maintain than intimacy.
Purposeful. Optimized.
This is a chess move, not a dice-roll.

You hacked with your pompous hedge-clippers
At the tethers that rope my inflated insecurities
to the ground,
keeping them from wafting away.
You cracked me in half like a coconut—
who I am and who I could be—
and refused to mix the milks.
We both chose ourselves over each other.
But I still miss you.

I just won’t follow you into the street, pleading.
You always wanted to know why I never
wrote a poem about you.
I know this isn’t exactly what you had in mind, but
I am admitting that you hurt me.
And you couldn’t hurt me if I didn’t care about you.
This is as vulnerable as I’m ever willing to get.
It’s a risk. A dice-roll.
I hope that, when you hear this, you’ll accept its value,
because nothing else is coming.
It’s your move.

The Fall

The Fall

You left me
with the sorts of vagaries
that I can only scribble on fast-food napkins,
a handful of adjectives with all of their paint scraped off
wrestling in a Ziploc.
You were the sketch artist
who drew my caricature and
shrunk the fracture in my life theory
instead of exaggerating the way its growling ripples played
across the skyline.
It’s high time I find my niche and you—
you dug a hole for me to hide in without
burying me alive
for a while. I
remember my childhood:
spinning in dark little circles like foreshadowing
mixed with naiveté and innocent play in
just the way that I thought I detested
then.
Maybe I’m a self-fulfilling prophecy or
consumed by sardonic justice
that blossoms in my gut like a black dandelion
as I heave my keys toward the wall
and watch them float through it
making the plaster ripple away
until the whole room stretches
from the impact. You
left me
but I forgive you
because in the lucidity that followed
I appreciated all of the ways
that you made life worse—
make life worse—
and I loved you for it.
You are a shape-shifter,
a weight-lifter,
a fantasy that reflects every contour of my perspective
perfectly, like a liquid mirror
dribbling into the acne-bump divots of my face,
smoothing my pot-bellied stomach,
and disguising my fetal penis.
You are a coat of armor,
a spacesuit.
You take root and lace through the plain moods
to cut my brain loose.
When I taste you I know I can make due,
but I hate you.
I don’t want you back, I just
can’t think of a way to
replace the missing bricks without
tearing down the whole wall and starting over.
It’s a hassle, and I’m already tired.
I can avoid it if you let me
because you left me,
but you can come back.
And I ask you
not as an appeal to your pride
or your morality or your loyalty,
but to your pity.
I don’t think I can be anything more
if I can’t have you inside of me again.

Ottava Rima for IHOP Waitresses

Ottava Rima for IHOP Waitresses
The first was closely trimmed, aloof, and meek.
A second smoked, on break, outside the door.
The third had only worked there yet a week,
and swept the scrambled eggs up from the floor.
The fourth: an actress waning from her peak,
whose lost successes made her seem unsure.
And from the kitchen he would shout their names,
their lives the only power he retained.

6/1/08

The ringing in my ears is a choir of silence.
I am immutable here,
preserved by the solitude
like the grazing animals frozen in layers of
the earth's wisest rock.
I imbibe the night with consciousness and calculation,
but leave no footprint on its soft frame
at which it might look back to remember me.
This corner is a spilled bag of marbles,
and I watch, a hapless child,
as each person spreads across the carpet,
or is lost into the vent.

4/28/08

That night, remembering took conscious effort.
The meandering, unfulfilled drive home was gentle on my stomach.
I was relieved, and focused on each new headlight as it passed,
conceiving of each's story.
Ours sat between us, straddling the gearstick,
but was quiet and respectful,
listening perhaps to the static of the air
rushing by outside.
Her face was draped with apathy;
she did not look at me.
Instead, our sparse conversation was held sidelong,
formed in swirling, confused minds,
and cast with embarrassment from the corners of dried mouths.

4/26/08

Most of the wobbly, wooden folding chairs were empty.
I picked a conservative-looking seat, three rows from the front, and sat.
The cove behind the bookshop trapped the sunlight
like an inhabitable prism,
and the evening hadn't yet acquired its defiant chill.
The show hadn't started.
No sooner had I begun to enjoy my silent, singular anticipation of the poetry
than she strode in,
coyly, and took a seat three to my right.
I must have been staring dumbly,
as though I'd never met an attractive woman,
because the angled brunette with whom she had arrived
ventured a consolatory, "Hello."
"Hi," I scrambled to respond,
and, more politely, redirected my unsettled staring to the empty podium.
The show still hadn't started.