“Oh Well”….
Oh dear oh night
sky oh smoke and phlegm and knots of stomachs deeply entwined
Oh cold slow
fingertips and city lights
Bury your losses
and watch the waiting wash in on the foamy tips of the tides
Leave the ends
of the tops of the trees to salute the clouds in tears and sail on winds cooler
than when someone opens a door to the outside from the warm inside and lets the
rain fall down all around.
Somebody should
close the windows and doors, baton the hatches, there’s a storm a-comin in
How many have we
lost tonight? How many have we saved? Which is the better question when it all
remains the same…
Oh stale air and
breath oh dreamy dreams, loosened grips
Hail to the
emptiness of the dark that rides on the gray of the sky as it turns black and
leaves nothing in its wake and everything behind
Stallions of the
10 o’clock news are here, take a listen and take heed
Someone’s kid
killed someone else’s kid again
And there are
hostages in Iraq and 230 young women and children died in a fire down the
street from you, cloudy with a chance of rain tomorrow--
Are you glad to
hear about it? Does it help, and do you lock your doors at night, to protect
yourself from those other people, who are somehow more dangerous than you are
to yourself
The kids are
biting their nails to keep their teeth from chattering in fear, and their
parents are chattering down stairs about taxes and business and the GOP running
their mouths as they run themselves into the ground to get grounded and rise up
again as they slowly rebuild their lives over and over to achieve the best of
the best
It’s the old
American dream
So shove your
stakes deep in the ground and take a swing and miss and swing again until your
shoes are all worn out and your breath is heaving
It is time to
let go, so you pry up the stakes once again because you are creeping toward
dying
The phone rings
empty on the other side striking rhythms into your head
Three strikes
and you’re out,
The machine
picks up and you click off the line trying to try to clear your mind.
Crossing your
legs and folding you hands no longer makes you stalwart
Pull up anchor,
sail on home
Pull up anchor,
sail on home
Fill your mouth
with the salty sea water and let your indigestion rise until you vomit up
everything you’d been holding inside,
That’ll teach
you to hold your tongue
You bite it
instead, you taste blood; you won’t be able to bear your favorite kinds of
salty foods for days.
And its o.k. You
can cry, come lean upon me, but be careful and be wary because eventually I
will drop you where the walls around you are made of wood
you can burn
holes to spy through with your smoldering eyes, but you can’t quite reach past
to be freed
Around the
embankment roses are blooming but to you they are just thorns and danger,
danger!
They arise and
heave themselves out of the dirt, stretching their roots to the core like you
wish you could for a simple will to live, no questions asked
Oh fluorescent
lighting, bad beer and cigarettes, oh glitter and skin and sex and teeth
Oh television
and magazines and those purists who only trust what they read in the papers
Oh convention
and divine intervention and razor blades and garbage trucks, oh dear, oh night
sky,
Oh.