long days

and little sleep lead to odd poems, i guess.

here's something new that i've been working on the past week or two.




The Day the Earth Stood

The world didn’t stop today.

In this city, where buildings grow tall
and cast shadows across the river like
they belong there, nobody took an awkward
half-step as filing cabinets and fax machines
strained to slow their momentum,
swaying like some underwater ballet.

No secrets were whispered to lawnmowers,
silencing the snores of their larcenous mouths.

There was no lack of fires reported today.
Accidents.
Murders.
None.

The radios and televisions didn’t cover
their eyes, their ears, their mouths.
The computers didn’t blink their sleepy
faces and turn in for the night.

No hush swept across the bridges,
shushing impatient cars, busy with the gossip
of their angry indifference.

There were no signs of a man whose smile
would probably remind you of a compound fracture,
and he wasn’t sitting on a concrete bench
in a cemetery, facing west.

Most certainly, he didn’t have a fishing pole.

Lacking, as he was, in fishing paraphernalia,
he didn’t wait, facing the sun as it slid down
the stair-rail of the sky, casting his line over
one headstone after another before reeling it back
with a slow shake of his head.

The hook didn’t clink off marble angel wings,
or clank on the smooth, bald pate of any stone
friars. It didn’t swing in a lazy Sunday afternoon
arc at the end of the line until it wrapped itself so tightly
around a cross he had to wade through the verdant
lake of stone to get it back.

He wasn’t thinking about a girl whose smile
would make you think of scars, or how she liked
to make shadow puppets with a pair of scissors
and any conveniently placed wrists.

At no point did he not imagine a tug at the line,
didn’t feel it go taut, thrumming like a guitar string
just out of tune, an awkward note spilling across the skyline
like a stone creasing the sleepy surface of a pond.

He didn’t imagine happiness as a fish swimming upstream
in this sad little river of a world, where desire was bait dangled
on the fish-hook of love, where life was a house on a hot summer evening,
where memory was a fan softly caressing your face with brush strokes
of the past, where time was a record player sitting in another room,
stuck at the end of an album whose name you can’t quite remember,
where you are a song that finished playing an hour ago,
but I can almost hear it again in the rumble of the needle’s kiss.