Tag Archives: dr richard country poem

Were my chest made of oak,
or the past centuries, the seams of a
library’s great enlightenment, or the
strange atmospheric feeling of love, could
I be opened up easier?

Could I splinter in our embrace and
taste the moss of your lips and with that
correctly set the family table in your mind,
place the fork here and the knife there,
a salad plate, a glass of milk, and a smile
that is passed around the table like a medicine ball.

Could I give you this?
Am I able to fill the voids you present
as the reason for your own solitude?
Were I an antique and handled like
a Mongolian relic, I could be balanced
onto a shelf of your consciousness and
only whisper to you wordlessly that
the tears you may dust off of me are
for you, in a language you could not
decipher and become
a treasure you are not too terrified to touch.

But I am made of nothing but a tension
between my bones,
both hollow and forever cloying,
colorless, bright, and lost;
inflating the features
of my face that are repellant
to your solitude, to your idea of
happiness;
I can reach with my fingers,
listen to the gasp of my movement,
try to shape the words after they have
created castles, but I will not.
I am this tension and this tension shapes nothing.
I am left here contemplating,
beginning to combust.

meteor shower

I asked you to show me your body, and you did
with a crooked grin on your face, showing me your
teeth–cleaned every six months, and there, too, is
your mother–giggling and pushing down on me,
speaking to me:
“oh, when you do that”,
pulling my hands to you to create callus.

A leaking emptiness raising inside of the dust
and our eyes catch each other, briefly, and then
disconnect, music or chaos or both.

This is a memory, not reality–that
reality is nothing more then your bent body
on my shoulder, your arm up below my neck
as if with my comfort you must choke me;
your legs grab mine and hold them–
forceps in silence, a rough country of skin
and sheet and outside there is a meteor shower
echoing off of the window
plink plink plink.
The punctuation of your sleeping breath
between each falling star,
a bent, dreamless spoon wrapped up in
sheets and unnamed fear.

I close my eyes
I float down this moment
to keep this moment
to become this moment
to fill it with oxygen
and stand still on fire with nerves
your breath hot on my neck
hearing the world outside of us
plink plink plink.

Now I am trying not to die in all ways–
least of all the body, although that too will die as the evening of my life winds down
into something like a crumbling epistle;
but to let my ambition die, as well as lethargy–for lethargy left to its devices spawns
ambition out of pure desperation to remain relevant and sane.
Of course, this is all a circle, a chasing of ones own tail, an evolutionary callas that roughens
with hunger and rot.

I browse amidst books to feel less lonely; I finger the page and feel the almost roughness
of the more expensive books, roughed and leveled for the serious reader, which I feel
I am not.  Where are my notes in the margins, why does my hand and head not slowly cut through
the dust of stabbing sunlight in my office–because I read to end, not to endure.

Death it seems is nothing more than silence, an immense orgasmic release into nothing,
feeling the emptiness of head and heart just before expiring and being washed over by
the salt water of nothing, trailing up to your lips as you take your last breath, leaving a crust of
texture on the softest part of us to be kissed away by the relief of no expectation.
I am tired of its edicts and of its being the source of my actions–I must tackle it and hold it
and treat it as I want to treat fear: with indifference and a dimpled chuckle.

Mistaken or not, I endure and I proceed forward.  I wait for a bit more clarity, even sometimes seeking
it out and taking long and lonely journeys in the sprinkling rain of my own nostalgia, paying the
price of admission, heading through the turnstiles, taking a deep breath of the great showmanship
of arrogance and uncertainty; after, I push my hands down deep in my pockets and navigate
against the lint and walk along the shining river of my hopes and aspirations and take
with me this idea of death as a ruby to be tossed skipping across the moonlight soul water that empties into a future I cannot predict.