Armistice

It is nine a.m. and I am thinking about what they told me:

From the Zeppelins it looks like

 

a tremendous dragon raked his claws across this countryside.

It is the month of November, and I am reflecting:

It is different here,

 

There are those siren songs:

screaming duets told by the artillary shells

and their intended targets

Two hours to go. But:

 

It is different here.

A boquet of every sort of foulness

the tang of the poison gasses

the pools where blood and vomit form the broth of a shit stew:

complimented by the animal naked stupidities:

11/11, eleven o’clock. How clever:

 

How shall I catalogue them all?

There are men far away deaf dumb and blind

There is us here following the orders

There is me here following the orders

They thought long and hard about it, an easy way to remember the time to avoid the confusion.

 

I wait for the whistle and throw on the gas mask

I take my stance and tuck my rifle into that forever bruised space above my hip

I try to kill them before they can kill me.

I trample my dead friends where they form a bridge over the barbed wire

I celebrate the camaraderie of the warrior now.

Then: Armistace.

 

We will pull our bayonets out of our opponents’ guts

but We won’t wipe off the blades on our filthy pants legs

We won’t ignore the chunks of unspeakably-colored flesh that fall by our battered boots

We’ll turn around together

We will walk back to our homes

Broken, all of us broken

the land broken and our hearts broken

But not in vain!

This was, after all

the war

to end all wars.

Under

Bits of scalp

And lumps of flesh

Mar the reflective chrome.

 

The jolly orange-yellow

Of the long body is dented.

And strained purple-brown.

 

This

Is the bus

Which people

Are thrown under.

 

It is, of course,

An abstraction construct metaphor.

 

But nontheless.

The driver,

With his mediocre hygiene habbits…

Grins, and shows his almost white teeth.

 

As someone

Lets you down,

Turns there back,

Or stabs you there…

 

As the wheels approach

You try to not wonder what the sound of your skull being squashed will make.

Instead, your last reflection:

 

It’d be so much easier,

If you’d been simply

Hung out to dry.

At the Wall

They have gathered before this wall,

It was a nondescript wall.

In the art wing.

 

Half a world away

They are gathered by a wall

 

Now there is a piece of paper.

And an old coffee can

Into which a box of fresh, new markers was placed.

 

There was God’s dwelling

And now it is all rubble except for this.

 

Squares and trapezoids of print

In the unlikely, bright colors

Have been blossoming on the page all day.

 

Much is revieled by what it is you’d like to call this place:

Kotel;The  Wailing Wall; Waqf;  or Abu  Madiyans

 

At the top,

In purple

It says “This is what we remember.”

 

If they do not rend their garments they sa:

That which they have been told to say:

 

They have gathered before this wall.

In groups of twos and threes and fours.

They are crying, some of them.

 

“Our Holy Temple which was our glory,

 in which our forefathers praised You was burned…

 

They are holding

Each other and they are rubbing backs

And crying, some of them.

 

and all of our delights

 were destroyed.”

 

They are holding

Hands and leaning into each other

And looking up at the paper.

 

Some of them are crying and some of them with

Prayers, rolled up small and tight on scraps of paper

 

They seem to know

An instinct, perhaps, a hidden signal.

When it is time.

 

They place them in the cracks

Of what remains of the wall

 

Solemnly, ritualistically,

They approach the paper.

And they add whatever it is they had to add.

 

They walk away leaving there prayers behind them

Is there a symbolism here?

 

It is song lyrics for some of them.

It is a love letter for some of them.

It is a long, rambling attempt at constructing meaning.

 

It is a long

Rambling attempt at constructing meaning.

 

Plattitude and sincerity

Rub elbows like the jock and the goth here

Rub elbows like the messages from those  who did and did not know her.

 

In my dreams I approached the wall.  I wrote:

 “Our Holy Temple, which was our glory,

was burned and all our delights were destroyed.

Early Morning Alchemy

With a twist of my wrist

I will start that water flowing.

The sink is a magical river.

 

It will come splashing in the carafe

and though my eyes aren’t opened yet

but I know the correct volume by feel.

 

The machine drinks the water all the way up

With a quiet Gurgle gurgle swallow.

it settles in the tank.

 

I Cross the kitchen again,

 it’s extra-long in the early-morning:

I reach the fridge.  Open the top door.

 

There is the blast of cold from the freezer;

grounds are not where they are supposed to be.

I swear to myself in the dark empty morning.

Before uncovering them behind the broccoli.

 

Return to the empty table before the machine.

My silver scoop is a holy object.

Filling the filter is a sacred act.

 

I depress the button.

Red light behind it fills my eyeballs

in the predawn dusk.

 

Listen? Did you hear that.

Grumblings, snorts, almost.

A whisky-swoosh sound,

the first drips, down, down, down.

They are not just water anymore.

 

Maybe this day will be worth it after all.

The mug is a chalice in my hand?

How it did it even get there?

I pour it full before it the coffee done.

Somebody will complain, later

about the drops that burned on the plate below.

 

Just a splash of cream,

then the sugar atop:

The house is so silent it makes a sound like radio station static

the granules penetrate the liquid’s surface tension.

 

I sip it,

almost too-hot, perfect.

and I am transformed.

On Administering The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Standards to The Behaviorally Disordered Classroom, South High School

I watch them.These are my boys

and they are the dregs,

the bottom of the barrel,

those who would sooner be forgotten.

 

Truly, it can be a challenge

to find something redeeming…

To call them rough around the edges

would be to ignore the fact

that they are rough all the way through.

 

If we call them a mite lacking in refinement,

so too, should we call oil bleeding out of the ground and sticking to our shoes.

 

But they are my boys

and I watch them.

Pencils desperately bubbling, erasing, bubbling, erasing, bubbling erasing

until it does not matter

whether they are right or wrong

because the machines will not possibly discriminate

between erasures and markings, by the time they are through.

 

I can see by their wild eyes

how all my instructions

how all their work

is leaking out the deadly-sharp tips

of the yellow number 2 pencils.

 

I look over at the other student in my class.

He is not officially enrolled. And he is invisible.

He was expelled from the MacArthur School for forms of fair of Accountabality.

My secret student is not a gang member, an almost-grown crack baby, or a juvenile deliqnuent.

He is an anthromoprhism, a personification.

His problems are legion.

 

I can only hope that he has a brother, a former classmate, somebody, anybody

will graduate the school he’s been expelled from

And I can only pray

that then this will all make sense.

 

 

A Transfiguration

 

A transfiguration 

She felt the happenings deep inside of her;

Not a change but something deeper.

 

She felt lighter in a way that no scale would recognize

A sort-of evaporation.

She was turning away from who she was

into only

everyone’s idea of who she was.

 

If you could only see

the way her eyes would light up with the hope of that completion

You’d feel sad with me.

 

But atleast we would know.

No one else would know.

They would all still see her feel her touch her taste her

and no one had ever heard her, anyway, so what difference would there be?

 

She would go on, fulfilling everyone’s expectations

forever.

Perhaps it is a mercy that there’d be nothing left of herself

to know that she should have had so much more.