Which

BEING REASONABLY CERTAIN

That my presence from the daily report has been elided,
that I forgot some time ago all concise directions
to the freeway, that if you ask me I cannot tell you
how best to escape, that I carry with me
the germ of loss, knotted up inside me,
like a little handkerchief, that I'm thinking
of myself in ridiculous terms, like Bela Lugosi
and lanyard, that to some a leaf-blower
is music, even as it coincides with dawn,
and dreams so good they melt in your
mind when you lay there wanting a lot more
violence or a bowl of cereal and the nagging sense
that you have done the wrong thing,
even that, even that, though this is fodder for debate
and maybe even philosophy, maybe
some other task which begins on a train,
on the walk home, in the middle of being distracted
by porcelain in the fragile aisle
of a store you swear is evil itself,
but here you are because it's dark or raining
or the Super Bowl went sour
in record time, and everything accounted for was too much,
that motion was called for, any sort,
that it was a prescription for an allergy
suffered only by the ancient, by Romans,
by people generally comfortable
with entrails having a larger say in public policy,
that I have been, the whole time, speaking of myself,
that this is no real surprise, that you will not be saved.

Another

I'M SORRY

Whatever murderous rampage I snoozed through
is to be regretted. It is true, I have let
many millions of you down because
the ethos I inherited from a tottering aunt
a long time ago was not equipped
to deal with the inerrant allure of hydrochloric
acid. Please respect the privacy
of the darling bobbin in this time
when I won't say much, or shave the hair
which grows from my body
in embarrassing waves. Please know
how much I will think of you,
which is only a little. If you were insulted
by something I said, let me say
I remember nothing, that I am leaking in this instant
all the qualities of the living
which many philosophers agree
amounts to self-hood. Address
your letters, your get well never cards,
to Husk Formerly Trusted
With the Maintenance of Households
and the Health of Small
Creatures. I'm told this will reach me.
That a concordance of my shames will be recited
wherever I go, and, maybe
it's just me, that seems harsh,
the sort of punishment reserved
for the homeless, whose filthy habits I condemn.

Radar love

THAT GUY ON THE RADIO IS TALKING ABOUT THE BIBLE AGAIN

That guy on the radio is talking about the Bible,
again, reciting from it, his lunch breath
a paraphrased ecstasy, his pants over there
on a hook, or in a tote bag he got
for free, somewhere, and that day was a good one,
an example unto all the others,
you might say, he might say, Jesus
might have said a long time ago
when nobody cared about the sad eventuality
of this prick. I was saying
something concerning pantlessness
but I got caught up
in anger. The way dolphins knot themselves
in skeins meant for tuna.
Which are miles long, the nets and not the tuna.
It is still true: I love this
planet, even though my life
amounts to a lot of waiting
on the lives of others to line up with mine.
So I'm not so unlike
you or this mouth that on the radio
becomes invisible
or monstrous tuna which pass through the waters
like freight trains,
never stopping until they do stop,
fatigued, sinking, glad
to arrive. This is what we mean by
at long last. This is what I mean,
though it confirms me
a fool, though my knuckles stain the walls with blood.

Cover for my memoir

Simple

INVOCATION

O voice on the radio almost dying, O articulation
of that pain, O hateful name, O anonymous schlub
I'd love to staple to something high up
there, where the angels and the weather dither,
O shame I once subscribed to when
I was a kid who feared a lot more than I fear now,
O petunia, O poodle, O wise master,
O supplicant drowning in the gutter,
what was I thinking when I thought of nothing,
only of all the days I'd fretted
at algebraic failures, the tires bleeding air
and the long walk, then, cursing
whatever was in sight, O gas station,
you too can go hang, you too can swing in the lambent
breeze, see if I care, see if I come
too late, weeping, with all my strength
in my arms and plans to save you
and two or three bus tickets, however many
I could afford, see that I am
every atom made of anguish,
see that I came a long way, see that hate
sent me out when the night
was everything, see that soon
it failed to ignite, O moon, O sun,
O flea mall lamp, O bargain, O repaired flame.

D.C.

FIRST IN A SERIES OF CORRUPTED INSPIRATIONAL TEXTS

A heart is a wish your dream makes so be glad
I tell myself like old cartoons advise,
that I have one, that one out of three ain’t bad
in ponderous games like baseball
or emergency animal medicine. You don’t care
which summer it was, gilded then burning,
and maybe by this point, this juncture
in the blood of it all, maybe I no longer remember
if it really was that season
I say it was. Maybe it was winter
or November, whichever fell first—
I was obsessing in those days
about the mechanics of cruelty,
the engine in which I was always losing
a finger, or something crucial,
an item on which the hopes of everything hung,
heavy and obdurate and impossible to forget.
Except that with time I failed
to remember: miserable, unable to shop
for adequate produce, tangelos which pop
like little suns in your mouth,
like balloons loaded with syrup.
Unable to assess the sky.
Whether the clouds and all the living
which are in them somehow,
whether these things know
their purpose and if they feel like sharing,
opening up at last, inducting the rest of us
into the details of the joke.
The password, the secret handshake,
the confirmation that yes,
all that pain added up to something
more than the fudged sums of so many fragments,
though my word isn’t one
you should trust, you should trust me on that.

2

ELEGY WITH NARRATIVE OF TRAGIC PASSING,
NOSTALGIA, AND PERFUNCTORY INVOCATION OF PEACE

There was the slip, the fall, the misstep and then
behind them all the cast-off banana peel
or slick of ice impossible at night to even see
or warm puddle of water issuing from
the refrigerator larded with how many years
of midnight oaths of final repair,
and the ankle turned years ago, lifetimes ago,
agos ago, it seems, so long it's been
cursing you, your stupidity, your drunkenness,
your inability to lift from the earth
one inch without truly dire consequence.
And then the bad knee, no, both,
plural in their congenital ache,
their first-thing-in-the-morning tale of woe--
but to go on is to belabor it,
your hypothetical end, your agnostic demise,
the groomed rows of data
on the actuarial table
which could have saved us all
this trouble, even if it couldn't save you from you.
Before this moment, and that,
in the other words of the past,
where you never really lived
nor in perfect truth did a single one of us,
the sun did your sweet bidding,
came when you called it,
and the clouds were strange, trained pets,
the good kinds, requiring no
effort on your part, no attention, nothing.

SINCERELY

Your rosy-fingered stevedore, your diligent crank,
your toxic asset, your uncle back in Malibu,
your aunt in Kittyhawk, your arcane symbol,
your broken clarinet, your lastborn, squirming
wildly in his swaddled birthright, your
instant message, your itemized brokenness,
your list of lost things, your forgotten abandonments,
your cast-offs, your too-small ring,
your finger bruised by the door,
your bruise in the night, which is not like
a bruise, though once this was
asserted, once this was written down,
sent to you, once this did seem right
to a lot of people, your aggrieved body mass index,
which scolds you in the dark
like a little dog, your papers, your imprint,
your forgeries, all of them in a row,
plain to children who have no gifts to speak of,
your naked sentiments, shining
like vegetables, rinsed then peeled
then served to people who appeared starved,
your pocket's pathetic cargo,
lint you cursed, change you hoarded,
your idiopathic dreams,
your mottle of skin, your rotten rot,
whatever that was in
the sink, all its improbable taxonomies,
your continued presence,
your philosophical cold case,
your evasions, your returns, your holographic scams,
your angelic coteries,
their hymns like an aftershock
in which there is only stillness,
stillness like a rock, your rock, your wound.

At least for now, I'm mostly goofing around over at Twitter. Follow me there if you like for updates as I revise my memoir.

Go

Poet Craig Arnold is missing in Japan. Learn more at:

http://findcraigarnold.blogspot.com/