Schmutzie's Schmoetry

We Are the Future Factory

2009-07-18T14:38:00.003-06:00

I am going camping in the woods by some water.
There will be fishing, but not by me.
I suppose there will be some filleting of fish, but, again, not by me.
Fishing makes me struggle uncomfortably with my conscience.
I will eat the fish, though.
I am good at contradictory behaviour.

I keep thinking about that dog with his head through an on-purpose hole in the fence
who barked and barked at us as though he were vicious,
but someone had put large, wooden flower petals around the hole,
which made his head look like the centre of a flower.
The fence made him a prisoner.
The hole in the fence made the state of his confinement seem more humane.
The flower petals rendered his tough-guy posturing comic.
None of that made any essential difference.
He was just a dog barking in a yard.
We were just on the side of the fence that made it seem funny.

When my parents were children,
television and magazines told them to dream about outer space
and the wild frontier and the way of the future.
When I was a child,
the future was almost now and sat small
beneath the hulking stature of the nuclear bomb and dread viruses borne by love.
Now, armed with the gadgets we dream about,
the future is a bleak process of making babies and making money.
What was once far away in outer space,
then close and terrifying to the touch,
is now the internal machinery of the mind.
We are the future factory grinding out consumption.
Nothing else matters.

The Bog at the End of the World

2009-07-08T14:37:00.001-06:00

I left the rented cabin in a borrowed car.
Every interaction was an entreaty to behave accordingly,
and I could feel myself going mad.
That morning, a chunk of hair had fallen out at my temple.

I packed and made excuses
and stopped at all my favourite spots on the way out of town:
the breakwater from which I was never brave enough to dive,
the small square of knotted tree roots
where I sat to watch the birds freewheel in a secluded inlet,
the glacial chunk of rock that park employees had greased over
to keep kids from climbing.

I did it once,
despite broken fingernails, a bloodied knee, and stained clothing.
I still grit my teeth remembering the sound of my nails on that stone.
I stood on top, fists on hips, expecting my relatives to see,
but my eyes followed their backs disappearing around a pine.

I drove out down the old highway,
the one my father's parents drove in on when he was a kid,
and ignored the fear of surprise elk and the claustrophobic proximity of the trees,
until a sharp twist in the road took me
to the only place I've ever been sure that I'll die right there every time.

I stopped the car and stood next to the front tire,
listening to the engine parts click in the heat,
and lit a cigarette.
This place would never have me for more than a couple of minutes,
so I sopped up what I could, trying to breathe in the heady marsh
while I slapped flies away from my calves.

That was when I caught sight of a the moose staring at me.
He was at a distance, but I could feel his bullet-hole eyes
casing me from just back of some bullrushes
that were all busted open and shedding their stuffing.
I waited for my heart to stop right then.
There was no point to another breath.

His indifference to me, the marsh's indifference to either of us,
the whole damn void of a nature so full of everything
but heartless enough to steal my breath,
took me away from myself,
and my soul felt sharp as steel.
There was no point to any other thing.

I breathed deep the heavy breeze,
while the moose stared and stared,
until the heat from the car burned my feet
and I remembered the keys.

Empty Is Empty

2009-06-26T14:11:00.008-06:00

There is no empty bigger than empty.
You are empty, you are empty, you are empty.
Empty is empty.

Do you want some coffee?
It's morning. How about some toast?
No.

Hungry can fuck itself.
I barely feel it.
I would like some tea.
I won't drink.

We're done.
I'm done.
You're done.
Alone lasts as long as I can.

---------------------

I found this poem in a nearly empty journal I've been moving around with me since the mid-1990s. I must have written this after a romantic break-up. Obviously, it did not end well. The photograph is from this afternoon.

The Replacement

2009-05-05T12:43:00.001-06:00

Tell me that I don't live here.
Tell me that this broad sky doesn't suffocate low buildings
between its gross expanse and roads as empty.
Tell me that the people who built this city haven't broken spirits
with their failure at humane design.

We've bred a conservatism of the heart here,
a reservation against larger things.
I was taught to content myself with hobbies.
The pursuit of desire was for people who could afford their own airplanes.
Dreams happened before marriage.
It is a pathetic replacement for living.

I know a building that is decorated with anachronistic sculptures,
where plastic palm trees are wrapped in electric lights and mounted between floors.
They hide during the day, camouflaged by bricks,
but, at night, they light up like signs selling Los Angeles
and shine down on wooden snowmen and a sparse lawn.

I was not born to this place.
I do not owe it some allegiance by blood
or another oratory on the nature of place and the human heart.
Those apologetics are for others who feel the unaccountable grip,
the gravity, of an indifferent circumstance.

That Lie

2009-05-03T21:11:00.000-06:00

You had blond hair that you said was strawberry,
but I never saw the red in it, even when you held it up to the sun and said See?
I just didn't, and I didn't care to lie about it,
because I thought it was ridiculous when you pouted about that sort of thing.
The vanity of little girls escaped me.
I did see how the ends of your pigtails curled to little points, though,
where you had sucked them into crusted arrowheads;
they bounced against the shoulder blades that stuck out through your thin t-shirts.
All big teeth and glasses that made me sweat in the sun,
I was envious of your smallness, your swayback bum, your simpleness.
When I slept over at your house, we rolled around under tents made of bedsheets,
and later we would stare at the thin light coming through the linens
and talk in hushed breaths until your mother came to tell us to sleep.
We shook out our giggles. She didn't know about our hands under the covers.
Your mother taught you about cleaning your face and moisturizers and makeup,
and you, in turn, tried to bestow these secrets upon me
with the application of blue eyeshadow and lipgloss.
I wore these things heavily around my shoulders like a sodden blanket
and cried when I went back home to wash off the filth,
because you and your mother and everyone else could not see I wasn't like that.
You started liking boys, and we became far apart somehow;
one autumn day we walked home from school together,
and it was another year before we did it again.
Remember how we used to sit in the tree so we could talk alone? you said,
so we climbed the bigger of the two trees in your yard. Its limbs felt harder.
You shifted to separate your knees from mine. I think we'd grown.
Do you remember our sleepovers? I asked.
I don't remember what we did, you said.
Your lie winnowed its way into a point of pain behind my eye.
I climbed down from the tree and thought all the way home
about how I cried every time I saw you before when you erased me with makeup,
but how this time I cried because I wasn't a dirty, little secret anymore;
I was invisible.
I remembered how I used to sneak the ends of your braids between my lips
and break down the hardness of your dried saliva with my own wet mouth,
because some things that seemed ugly or disgusting weren't anymore
when you loved someone.

Crumbs

2009-01-27T22:04:00.000-06:00

These crumbs on the table
crunch under plates and waterglasses and cat paws.
They have been there for days, weeks possibly.
I do not know.
I cannot wipe them away.
Some have been ground to a dust
that stains the table where a cup overturned.
Some are bound together with stray hair.
I draw my finger through them and cringe.
They are like old men or dry husks or insect shells,
and I cannot get rid of them.
They fall to the floor and stick to my feet.
They are more than I can bear, and, still,
I eat toast.
I am my own curse.

Unmoored

2008-10-03T11:20:00.003-06:00

It is late at night
when the mind loses its way,
wandering in a space with fewer definitions
to tether it to its post of yes this and no that.

I believe I hear birds outside the window,
but I know they do not sing in the liquid black
of a damp October night.
They are moored to nests and the undersides of wings.

If I were brave, I would leave
and listen to the treble and hiss of sleeping city air,
watch how crisp the streetlamps render pavement
against the distant, softened, blind backdrop of stars,

but fear grips the small body
fearing phantom chirps in the middle of night.
Until then, it is tea and cigarettes at four a.m.
and a kitten who needs feeding like nobody's business.

And the Grandmother Ate the Baby

2008-07-04T12:21:00.000-06:00

There are no good things about my grandmother anymore,
or at least that I hear in conversations about her
at family suppers, weddings, and that time at Easter
when she was tired and wanted to nap,
as anyone would after nine people
pushed their way into your handicapable apartment
equipped with alarm buttons by the bed.

Today, the conversation is happening
in a minivan on a windy highway, and
grandma is old,
grandma has been to the hospital again,
grandma is depressed and wants to run away,
grandma never wants to die.
This makes me wonder what use she finds for her God
when He makes her journey to the grave
no more graceful or enlightened
than any other animal.

I rarely talk to my grandmother,
but I am told her woes in great detail.
Her life, I am given to believe, is no celebration of itself.
I told her that if she ran away, she'd have to take her body, someone said,
and she said “I know”. She just wants to start over again.
I resent the storyteller and my grandmother for this.
I don't want to know these things.
I don't want to accidentally absorb this kind of end for myself.
By blood, it feels as though this could be me.
They are giving me bad mojo.

I look out the window at a copse of trees,
the ones over there passing us by on the highway,
and I imagine myself there with a cigarette;
I am smoking it under that branch
which brushes my hair into my eyebrows.
I would smoke, cancer be damned,
because better that than be spoken of like this,
as though I were my mind, and I were being erased,
or was erasing myself, with each false memory and chronological snafu.

Someone says, She is getting so tiny. There's nothing to her.
I think, 88-year-olds are tiny, because they are.
When I volunteered in a nursing home,
all of the women had skinny little legs
with fine, long hairs camouflaged between liver spots.
Inside my head I become sarcastic.
I am my fifteen of twenty years ago;
I roll my inside eyes at obvious things said with too much feeling.
She's old, she's frail, she's going to die soon, I think.
There is little else more obvious than that.

Part of me likes to hear this, though,
that she suffers dissatisfaction and a sense of entropy.
I do not; I will be better than this at the end.
I am full of myself.
It divorces me from my blood, these pesky ties,
the wiry twists that keep showing up in my knife drawer.

I feel as though I could just float out through the window
and the 110-kilometer-an-hour wind
wouldn't batter me into the asphalt along with the gophers and porcupines.
I could just float out this window,
squeeze through the tempered glass by some magic osmosis,
and sit on a rock under those trees, smoking.
It could be like I've always been there – tree, rock, me –
the still spot played over with shadows,
breathing in the peanutbuttery aftertaste of old tobacco against my tongue.

No one can lament your sitting on a rock.
There is nothing to remember.
The line of time contracts to a point beneath a bough,
and you can be anyone.

A List of Complaints, Oh Sigh

2008-05-05T12:19:00.000-06:00

I am always hungry,
but when I eat, even if it is just a little bit,
I feel uncomfortably full,
and my belly distends.
There is this headache, too,
and sometimes it is so shrill
that I become dizzy and exhausted,
but most of the time it is dull and distant,
somewhere indistinct.
The wart on my foot defies all treatment,
and so does this seemingly permanent zit on my chin.
I am so thirsty,
and chilly water is nearly like dessert,
except then I have to pee,
which I find to be an annoyingly endless game of action and consequence.
I have popcorn husks stuck in my teeth
from a bowl of popcorn,
which was unsatisfying to eat
due to its healthful lack of enough butter.
The alarm clock's not gentle,
but then neither are dreams of loss, losing, and departure.
The warm weather is late, summer is short,
and winter is a bitter exercise in remembering to breathe.
The cirrus clouds were ugly today,
like old Halloween cobwebs with no will.
Not even the birds would go near them,
or maybe it was the unpredictable gusts of wind
which blew dust into my eyes that kept them out of the sky.

If only I could love my whining cat more
and afford a maid
and enjoy food and drink without fullness or evacuation
and never have winter or blistering August
and forget dentists
and ban household detritus
and get rid of cheap perfumes that make my eyes swell
and cure cancer
and wander around wherever I like
and get to ride trains for free
and institute three-day weekends
and lie around in a park in the shade of a tree
with a book and a pink lemonade
and watch the baby geese roll like dumplings
as their parents scuttle them away across the lawn,
then it would be that Tomorrow I keep hearing so much about.

In The Field, 1987

2008-01-11T13:34:00.001-06:00

You stand in that field
with the spring crop just reaching your knees
where your shorts end.
You have that skin,
the kind we have before we've been in car accidents
and stretched our mouths around other people
and smoked drugs in the outfield,
that kind that plumps over your bones
and takes the sun into itself.
The scrape from the rock you fell against
will taste oily and metallic when you stop to notice it,
and you will hope it will scar before fall.
I can taste it from here.

It was soundless;
at least, that is how I remember it
as I stare at this three-hole punch.
I think the grass scraped edge on edge,
and there must have been that sound of the breeze
running over the well of my ear,
but I do not remember it.
I do remember how far along the field you were
picking at seedheads.
You had forgotten about my following
and fingered yourself absently through your pocket.

I stood there once
with a toy car in my hand,
keeping my distance from the men who rolled wheat heads
and squinted against the dry air blowing off the highway.
One day I would be them, I thought,
and I plotted the cap I would wear
and whether I would chew grain
or let a thin stalk twizzle from my mouth.
That was then.

We are all three deep:
inside, outside, make-believe.
I watch your eyes go inward
while your lips move words to something there
away from the Doppler sounds of moving cars
where your shoulders are not burning
in the high sun.

The Dear Johns

2007-11-30T15:34:00.001-06:00

When I was a little kid
I thought Dear John letters were just that:
letters addressed to an imaginary person named John
that would never be sent
about things you wanted gone from your life.

I wrote a lot of them.
They said things like:
Dear John, I don't want celery in my soup anymore;
Dear John, I think the organ is tacky and want to take guitar lessons;
Dear John, I wish Leslie went to a different school;
Dear John, they call me Chiclets because of my front teeth.

When I was twelve,
I found out that Dear John letters were for leaving those once loved,
and I realized that I had forgotten love in my Dear Johns,
so I wrote my last letter:
Dear John, I love you;
and I folded the letter into a little box I buried in the yard
and then hid out at the ball diamond
to avoid my organ lessons.

With You, It's Always The Poor New-Yorkers

2007-10-26T13:46:00.001-06:00

You say, but there's death.
There is hunger and dehydration
and murder and torture.
There are carnivores and weapons.
There is fire and disease.
Cars drive over people,
and the living eat dead food.
Some kids in New York have never
seen a live cow
or walked on soil barefoot
without fear of dirty needles and broken glass.

I want to say that these are only bodies, only bodies,
that we carry them around,
that all of these will go.
In one hundred and fifty years
not one of us will be here
to recognize the face or hair or gait of another.
These bodies are the meat we antagonize,
not the things that flesh them out.
You are confused.

If anything at all,
we are not to be here.
The world despises us
as much as we do any weed,
and we should accept that fact
as much as we accept
that we will kill the mushrooms
that pop up in brief rings before we uproot them
to make way for grass
that we won't allow to grow.

The Traveller

2007-10-02T20:43:00.000-06:00

She should have sat elsewhere.
I did not like her,
that girl who squeezed herself in
between me and the bench's wooden arm,
with her faux-suede skirt gripping my thigh.
She smelled like the contents of my grandmother's purse -
crushed sucking candies and tissues and discount hand lotion -
and I thought she must be very lonely or European
to press herself so selflessly against a stranger.
Canadians do not touch each other.
She picked at something gummy stuck to her sweater
while I jiggled my leg in time to the clicks of the clerk's tapping pen.

The Terrible Twist

2007-09-11T13:31:00.001-06:00

Just now, in that mirror,
there were only her own eyes,
all of a sudden,
and she saw it, that absence,
that place where she would not be looking back at herself
through the science of procreation and DNA,
and that most of the people she knew
would do that,
and they would look at bits of themselves in another
and know the physical extent of their existence
by the colour of eyes or the peak of an upper lip;
she would not;
she could only see strangers.

There should be funerals for the deaths of possibilities,
she thought, there should be services
with slide shows to tell the possibilities
of could-have-beens to the could-nots,
and candles would be lit by everyone
to acknowledge all their futures that had just unhappened,
except that was not feasible, because things were unpossibling all the time,
and no one could ever go to work for all the funerals,
although, without them,
everyone just kept walking around and talking and going to work
and eating and putting gas in their cars and sighing
with no one so resigned to the unhappening
as her face looking back upon itself.

She closed her eyes,
and a short and desperate gesture it was,
to find the mirror that would show her
a living thing of her own making,
but she could see only strangers with wisps of curly hair,
or, in a terrible sarcastic twist,
she was an ape cradling a dead monkey daughter
that only she could see.

No Longer Other

2007-08-30T10:30:00.001-06:00

When I was little,
death did not happen to me.
It was on the list of things
that happened to other people I did not know well:
divorce, cancer, fire, torture, and virgin births.
Death happened to distant great uncles
and someone else's fish.
Death was like the Morgans' backyard pool:
they had one, and we did not.
Now death lives in that space
where they removed my uterus and sewed me shut,
forever cutting off the path
from inside me to outside me.
It presses itself over the scar I will never see,
a cat that lies on the newspaper,
drawn to it by attention.

From This End

2007-08-02T11:36:00.000-06:00

I sleep six days for every one I open my eyes.
I take pictures and then run three days from the source.
Fiction fixes place in time when fact is fleeting,
and all reality's a vanishing point
at the end of a long line of roadside poles.

At least that's how it appears
on the other end of a pen, a lens,
from behind a particular pair of binoculars,
in the news and financial reports,
on the calendar three Sundays from now
where the crow goes long.

Red Jacket

2007-07-23T14:54:00.000-06:00

At four or five or six years old,
my mother outfitted me with a red jacket
that had a hood and a double pocket on the belly
and a metal zipper that went tick-tick-tick in soft clicks
that could only be heard when you were inside it.

The fleece was on the inside where it counted,
and it had broad, soft elastic cuffs at the wrists
where my mother would stuff tissues
that I used to squash bugs
so that I could see the colour of their insides.
I knew that my insides were red,
but theirs were brown or yellow or green,
unless sometimes if they ate people, like mosquitoes.

I would find that jacket hanging in the closet in the winter,
and I would smell it and push its smooth insides into my face.
It meant things, that coat. Even then I knew.
It was the smell of rain-damp dirt with mashed in pine needles
from the trees way up north,
and my cold, chubby fingers in wet sand on grey days
when my uncle's curse kept the rain close;
it was the musky-sweet smell of rotten foliage
limping into the humic soil
and translucent snail shells snapping easy against
water-worn pebbles no bigger than my smallest fingernail.

That coat is a place.
That coat is a place even at the bottom
of the landfill it was thrown into
after my mother secreted it from the house.
Long from then, now, when I lie in bed,
older and sore and worried,
I am in that coat with fat cheeks
counting the beetle shells
that I have stashed in my sleeves.

The Easy Steal

2007-07-06T07:30:00.001-06:00

I wake,
choking on my own throat,
and hope it's from
the gas they filled me with
to make my uterus an easier steal.
I pace the hall,
waiting to fart out
the empty space they made,
wondering what it will be like,
what I will look like,
when I've not even an air pocket
to hold its place.

It Is Not About The Snail

2007-06-13T22:19:00.000-06:00

If I start with the snail shell,
you will leave,
but I promise you,
it is not about the snail.

It is about that soft, wet,
not-quite snap of an empty shell
before full dark,
and how your small fingers
push just so, as you have done before,
along the top edge of the curve
where the light shone through in green and gold at noon,
and how it gives way without breaking through
to leave an uneven mosaic
of its once logarithmic spiral.

The water laps the sand into the fine threads it does each night
once the boats have gone to dock,
and the scrape from grit under your nails
is as loud as the shell snap,
is as loud as the high treble of an intake of breath,
is as loud as the sharp, cold zipper on your stomach.

The others have all gone for evening coffee and cards,
and all the crisp things surround you.
This breath is that shell,
your coat is an interloper,
the limp minnows
in the lines that define quiet water
lie in the same space where your shoes are not.

It is a tired light that dims the shell
and pimples the skin
that the wind beat with needles from dry trees;
breathing drowns the quiet
and nightfall the shell,
and you are left with a coat
which will lead you to a home
where clarity is attenuated
by the comfort of beds and things to sleep in.

Fingers

2007-06-07T12:56:00.001-06:00

Fingers
wear rings,
pull zippers,
swear,
wipe lips,
shush,
scratch itches,
hold pens.
There are fingers on everybody;
they wiggle and push.
They squash bugs
point,
twirl hair,
flick ashes,
feel cloth,
snap,
are licked.
Each finger defines a point,
an action,
a desire;
each one is a path
upon which our eyes
embark
while my digits push half-moons
into table-gum.

The House Is On Fire

2007-05-31T08:10:00.000-06:00

This is hard, eating.
It might be better to starve,
and I am left wanting the heroin
that so pickled Burroughs.
It could be muscles and bones,
or it could be squamous cell carcinoma
that gets the goods.
To starve around it,
to tighten up and dry out,
might scare it out like a mouse from a house on fire.

There is a fire in the belly when I drink
like the one that was there when I was twenty-one
and believed in unrequited love.
So I do it now
to forget that mouse in the dark
who makes a nest of my tissues,
gnawing out a space for itself
in which to calculate its multiplication.
It must have sneaked in when I was out.

There was a boy in seventh grade
who gave me a school photo,
which I hid inside the covering of my earmuff.
It was there against my head every day at recess,
and it burned like shame or a loathsome burden
until I took it out and flushed it down the toilet.
The annual winter confession of this act
has never relieved the embarrassment.
Not knowing better
or knowing that you don't know better
will burn down your last straw.

Remember: I Am Two Things

2007-05-21T22:42:00.001-06:00

I know why you look like that
with your brows pressed down over your eyelids
in that cascade of soft flesh made hard.
The cancer is inside me,
but I cannot feel it soaking into my organs in the dark
like you imagine I must.
Your face does that
because you imagine the tumor erasing me,
fading me out into a hairless wisp,
me and my body as one thing taking leave of you.
But I do not feel those fabled fingers gripping my soft tissues;
my body is an ornament around the brain I inhabit.
You see one thing that could leave you;
I see one thing that was never mine
strung around myself, heavy and wet.
If this body must be food,
you would lose two things, I would lose one, and
this fleshly sack would miss nothing.

The Clay Pot That Emptied Itself

2007-05-06T20:47:00.001-06:00

There are few thoughts
in this empty vessel,
steeped in a chemical bath
at the cost of forty dollars a month.

I once worried over timecards
and transportation and shopping and
and where my next cigarette was
inside a dry skull with a dull thud.

Now there are the small, white pills
taken in the morning
before I've given any thought
to this or that or why I'm here;

little, white, divided pills
that smell like paint thinner
stop all the worry and consideration
that once led down endlessly forking roads.

The thoughts that were are gone:
the electric charge of hypotheses,
the rise and fall of battles won
and lost and begun and imagined.

I am left to forage for animal fulfillment
among food and drink and people
to satiate every present, terminal desire.
I am left hard-pressed at day's end

to recall a distinct impression;
There are only rapid snapshots,
soundless, thoughtless scraps of one thing or another
to which I have lost all attachment.

For Three Hours And A Lawnmower

2007-04-26T13:53:00.000-06:00

Due to fifty square feet
that denies a patio set
and a gas fireplace
that throws no heat
and a car that's broken into
twice a month,
there's suspicion that
this middle class status
is a technicality.

Particle board, cheap sealant,
neighbours who can hear every drip and cough,
driving both ways in the dark
to purchase three waking hours
in a future tenement:
these are the waking dreams of grown-ups
who brag that they bought the cheapest mower
of the highest quality.

And yet,
we all sit clean and straight through sermons
about the Good Lord that makes us possible.
We're such happy sheep aplenty
while the organ plays a hymn of praise.
We put money in the offering plate
and we nod and smile during potluck
over the Free Zone's finest plastic plates,
and we won't know
that they once passed by
six-cent workers in a row on metal chairs.

A Flight Of Children

2007-04-25T15:40:00.000-06:00

Onions justify the butter
and an expiry date on a carton justifies the too-large omelette.
Cold air pardons another day out of the sun
when there is wine in the cupboard
and beer on the floor
and magazines thick in a folding contraption,
which may or may not count as furniture.
Children, ugly as crows,
screech and belt aggressive orders in the courtyard,
their sociopathy not yet tenderized
by the salt of articulated experience in later years,
when they might sip from a mug
and worry over the placement of words,
cringing at the shriek of little girls
who work too hard to be heard over loud boys from 14E
that chase them with stinging nettle from the alley.

They beat, hurl, push, bellow, steal, and taunt.
They want, cry, shush, run, stomp, and pinch.
Their sharp eyes hunt out opportunity
while they grab what is near in fat fists,
the wringing a reflex, until they are bored.
They must not like each other;
they are jarring and murderous,
filled with volatile unpredictability,
until their weekend man calls time to go.
They run down welded stairs
to wait in the car
where they become the distant thumps of popcorn
in a hot, oiled kettle.