Schmutzie's Schmoetry

I Love You So Much That I Might Die Alone

Schmutzie — Sat, 19 May 2012 22:12:30 PDT

The thick air stuck to us in a waxy film.
It was August in New York.
We needled away our second city skins under hot water
and slid clean feet between white hotel sheets
to the damp sound of an air conditioner motoring in the wall.

I thought about your feet between those sheets,
and the feather pillow that you bunched under your neck
as I had mine,
and I moved into your skin. I was become you.
Your feet were my feet,
and I wanted to eat you bit by bit until you wore me, too,
until my feet also became your feet.

I think that's actually cannibalism, though,
and not very romantic,
and I don't think you'd like to be disassembled like that,
and we wouldn't be one with each other
so much as I'd just be really full
and going to prison where I would die alone,
because no one wants to be friends with a cannibal,
even in jail.

Mid-Circle, Half-Baked

Schmutzie — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:40:48 PDT

Sometimes it's all I can do to stay and wait.

Always it feels as though something is surfacing,
bringing itself together.
It's holding its breath just beneath the meniscus.

The flavour of it will cross my tongue soon enough.
The story will tell itself,
unfold into my oatmeal, or maybe a nice piece of ganache,
and I will know it for exactly what it is.
I can almost taste it now, here, from where I wait.

It's like the back end of a cat,
always turning corners.

Even the Syrup

Schmutzie — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:53:56 PDT

I poured syrup over pancakes this morning,
and I watched it drip in small circles,
each droplet first a sphere and then a circle on the plate,
so I would not have to look up to see that you weren't there.
You weren't at the table,
I had travelled here without you,
and even the syrup was lonelier in its circles
without you there to see it.

Adopting Wolves

Schmutzie — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:45:11 PDT

I will go out into the world today.
I will walk into it,
because I opened my front door,
and the wolves at it were puppies.
They sounded so beastly, so much like they could eat me,
but they only looked big when I peered at them sideways.
They are puppies, really,
hungry and looking for shoes to chew.

I'm adopting them now.
There are no proper channels for domestic wolf adoption,
so I'm hiding them from the veterinarians.
If they grow too unruly, though,
if they start barking too much or biting my legs,
I'll take them in to have their balls cut off,
because I won't harbour violence,
even if I've invited it in
and fed it kibble.

No One's Boot

Schmutzie — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 01:11:28 PDT

I lived in this tiny apartment
with a shower made out of a slab of cement
and bedsheets hanging from a rod.
I was starting university.
My parents were relieved.
I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels
and fed myself on ten dollars a week.
I had a cat I was afraid of
because he attacked people's eyes.
I took medication that turned my urine green,
my chest hollow, and my hands cold.

I read and re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude.
My bare walls were populated with yellow and blue bits of paper
that organized my thoughts around acculturation.
I stuck short strips of transparent tape to each of my left fingertips
to be ready for the next bit of paper.
I dreamt about the slow march of banana groves
and read essays by Mircea Eliade.

My apartment was filled with basement and dumpster salvage,
and I looked around at it all one day
and knew that when I moved in the spring
almost none of these things would come with me.
They were still garbage in my apartment.
My bed was a construction of plastic milk crates and flattened cardboard
topped by a slab of pink foam I had dragged in from an alley.

One day,
I fell through the bedsheet shower curtain and gashed my leg.
The gash kept bleeding and bleeding while I was out,
and, when I looked down,
it became clear that it wasn't my boot on my foot anymore.
I was filling someone else's boot with my blood,
and they didn't care if I did.
It had become no one's boot.

I showed my friend how strange it looked,
the blood seeming black as it congealed in my sock,
and she shuffled me home.
Stop laughing, she said,
because I was laughing now
while my foot made kissing noises in the muck in no one's boot.

She cleaned my leg and fed me aspirin while I lay on the bed ,
and I traced the milk crate waffle pattern with my shoulderblades.
Does it hurt? she asked.
Nothing felt like anything anywhere, so I shook my head no.
You have a fever, she said,
and I fell asleep and dreamt that my leg was a dead leg,
and that the blood drying in no one's boot was no longer mine.

The Tire Fire

Schmutzie — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:10:32 PDT

I rolled over and back
again and again
last night.
My heart was a tire fire.

I was seized at seventeen
when the fires raged in Ontario.
Helicopters circled black smoke fog above fourteen million tires
while reporters talked about how
no one could make this stop.
I didn't know then that some fires can't be stopped.
Some fires have to burn
until the thing that feeds them is all gone.
Some fires leave a legacy of black pollution,
and birds litter the ground for weeks and years afterward.

The fire burned during the worst part of winter,
and two-and-a-half thousand miles away
I hid under blankets in a dormitory,
watching the fire on a tiny black-and-white television
and praying for birds.
It burned for seventeen days, and I was seventeen,
and the number of tires was a biblical multiple of seven,
and the reporter had seventeen letters in his first and last names.
My eyes grew tired waiting for his name to flash on the screen
so that I could recount and more firmly establish the portent.
The math was simple, and I knew for certain:
if I saw the spring, it would be a miracle.

And that is how I rolled and rolled in my bed last night,
my dream heart a tire fire,
trying to shake off seventeen
like a bad seed.

The Future Was A Secret That Winked In Their Eye Once

Schmutzie — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:29:16 PST

I didn't really think that everybody made it when I was a kid.
I kind of did, but not really.
Still, I kind of did, though.

I used to hang out with these people,
and I had this idea that we would be quietly famous.
One day in ten or twenty or thirty years,
we would look back and write about the things we did,
like Kerouac and all the beats.
Our time together was the beginning of some kind of history.
We were each a point around a boundary
that would one day describe our movement through creation.

But we don't all make it.
This is all we get,
and that nice boy who did terrible things
died from too much junk,
and that other one who drank
ended up tied to a bed in a clinic, unable to walk,
and that one who let his seedy connections seed him with cynicism
allowed it to steal his belief.
That is it. That is all.

Maybe that's why we invent saviours.
We can think that the ones who don't make it
still make out in some way, even when they don't,
like Jesus could have done it for all of us who won't.

Some people just stop moving,
or they stop lifting their feet when they shuffle forward,
or they live like they're twenty until someone calls them mister
and there are no new places for them to go,
or the drugs eat them through,
or the girls eat them through,
or their families eat them through.
One almost made it, but her mother got old too fast,
and she gave it all away to sit indoors and tend to pills and stool.
The pills preserved nothing,
and I secretly dreamed she would smother the woman with a pillow and be free.

I'm almost forty now,
and we really don't all make it.
People fall into little holes they don't get out of.
I love you,
but we don't all get to recreate genesis as we run.
I don't know why.

There is no word for this:
what it is to look into the face of someone dear,
this person you once loved like a baby,
for we were all both mothers and babies back then,
and to see that this face has had all the quiet fame go out of it.
The future was a secret that winked in their eye once,
and now they're all edges that won't let it in.

They've forgotten,
and we are not so great.

We'll Take This Place Like We Made It

Schmutzie — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:29:45 PST

Fuck it.

Do it with your metaphorical cock,
the one you'd swing around if you knew how to find it.
You've got to fuck the thing what needs it.
Ease it onto your meat and take it.
Don't ride it.
It'll ride you just fine.
Stick yourself up inside it.
Make it be a piece of you.
Be at one with the thing.
Hold its hair and fuck it hard up against the headboard,
the dashboard, the back door, the side of your house.
Don't obfuscate the point with pretty words.

No one's interested.

Don't worry about not being pleasant and receptive.
Don't worry about being repulsive.
Throw up your skirt and show the world what you've got under there.
Scare your neighbours and scatter the children.
We've been made too kind, too complacent,
too willing to subvert all our natural menace
and call it an illness,
as though the perversion of extreme domestication is a virtue.
We eat pills when we should be fucking.
We waste the most interesting parts of ourselves
in closets and under beds and in glove compartments and laundry hampers.
We pretend we aren't the wild masters of the human race.
Even our lovers think we're nice,
and it's a goddamned shame.

Come with me.

We'll show our teeth,
and we'll stake it out
where no one's been invited.
We'll swing it around some,
we'll fuck things in the out of doors,
we'll make this place like how we take it,
and we'll take this place like we made it.

It's the way things are now.
We've got to fuck the thing what needs it.

Where I Was From When I Was Seven: Bearing Down Upon The Buoy

Schmutzie — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:54:15 PDT

I was from a plastic rocking horse with vicious lips and peeling hooves strung up on springs, Hershey's chocolate topping in yellow tins, and baby dolls with nylon hair matted into tough clumps.

I was from the wooden shed tucked beneath a second story deck, its air heavy and cloying, filming my skin over with its sticky humidity and swaying webwork.

I was from the aggression of bright tulips, the planted sweet peas, the crunch of dry spring grass that battered my ears as I rolled down hills.

I was from family dinners and obstinance, from Herta and Cornelia and difficult aunts.

I was from nostalgia and denial.

I was from acceptance withheld and acceptance denied.

I was from the stolid watchfulness of Mennonites and their sudden bursts of laughter out of a secretive mother tongue.

I was from Alberta and the Dnieper, round watermelons with yellow flesh and stewed plums buried beneath thick dough and sweet, heavy cream.

I was from the broken bone of the brother I forgot, the lawn that caught his fall, and the grandmother who believed.

I was from cupboarded photo albums, the worn edges of a rose-handled serving spoon, and childhood drawings filed in the back of a metal cabinet.

I was from these depths of covert love, an impulse at once held close and pushed into corners, a tug-of-war balance struck between a conservative safety and a violent adherence, the weight of salvation bearing down upon the buoy.

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

George Ella Lyons' poem called "Where I'm From" inspired Fred First Floyd's form, which I discovered via Sweetney.

If you write your own version of the form, come back and link to it here. I'd love to see what it inspires.

Nobody Loves Your Bones

Schmutzie — Tue, 17 May 2011 11:21:45 PDT

Nobody wants your bones, not really.
Bones are only for poor people and dogs and scientists.

But think about it.
We all die, and one day you're going to die,
and your body will lie down on the earth,
or be left to slump in a musty chair,
or moulder on some mattress in an apartment while your lightbulbs burn out,
or maybe hide in a coffin after some expensive funeral,
and other things are going to eat you.
There will be birds and rats and bugs and nematodes and bacteria,
and they'll work at you, pick you until you're clean,
strip down your meat until you're just the bones,
and then they will leave you, too,
because nobody wants your bones, not even the scavengers.
An anthropologist might look at your bones someday,
but he'll only want them for the story they might tell,
not because they were your bones, not because they'll be anything.
He's not interested in the bones for being what they are.
He just sees signs pointing to something else.

The only person who wants your bones for being bones is you.
Those hard pieces of you stuck in the dark,
those hidden underpinnings,
those are yours and yours alone,
and you are the only one who will ever need them.

Hold your bones softly. Love them.

The entire substructure of you that no one ever wants to see
hiding in the black beneath all your meat,
least of all you,
will all just be leavings soon,
housed in a box,
or laid outside where the world can see you
if you're very lucky.

You have your whatever you are all wrapped up inside your chest
that can float on away from you when you're dead,
but your bones just have themselves,
and there's no they in them.
They have to borrow from you or have none at all,
holding you up in the dark while no one loves them,
maybe not even you.