Dear Friend
Posted by Justin Reilly | Filed under '08 Fall: Notes from Underground, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
Dear friend,
Its one a.m.
And I should be dreaming of Princeton play calls
But I can’t allow my sight to darken
Because you see I’ve been in a fog
A ghostly daze
Much like your earthquake
That has sent me spiraling
In and out of that lava
That you so eloquently describe
I’ve kept Aphrodite
In my skyline for far too long
And now she’s stealing
My sunshine
Those succulent rays
That used to simmer my skin
Have now caused me
Melanoma
I’ve spent this last year
In a smoke screen
It’s been hard for me to distinguish
Clouds from
Facial features
Let alone
Love
From
Lust
I’ve been in a vegetative state floating through existence
Stepping over my fare share
Of roses
To get to a Daisy
And my love poems
Have been simplified to
“she loves me – she loves me not”
While plucking pedals
From these stems
And what’s more I never
Was really able to see the
Full beauty
Of this Rose
Like the San Francisco fog
Masking the Golden Gate Bridge
Much like your tectonic plates
Were rocked by after shocks
My water logged façade
Was dazed by a tidal wave
A merciless tsunami
That handed me doubt and stole my sight
And not even His palms
Could heal this blind man
Dear Friend,
The bigger they are
The harder they fall
Held true
In this Katrina
But not even
Flower Arrangements
Could be
t-shapen and blood stained
there was no Red Cross
in sight
and now I feel
like a flower gurl
at my own wedding
watching her stilettos
pierce my past
as if they were
meant to be sacrificed
pupils dilated
these headlights
struggle to illuminate
the pavement
they say if you made the bed
then lay in it
well I’m hittin’ pot holes in this road
and it feels like I paved it
I never thought I’d be writing this poem
But it looks like Dipolar Radar
Has once again
Lead this weatherman astray
“Your tropical storm has now been
Elevated to a hurricane”
So I boarded up the windows
And headed for higher ground
In the city
Of 5′10” beauty
Dear Friend,
Well if I’m Jay Gatsby
Then you’re my beam
Of light across
The bay
And she
Well she is
The asthma
Inhibiting my breaststroke
And these last 3 months
Have felt like a 100 meter dash
In the Everglades
Like a tornado twisted
Me like a clever braid
And spit me out onto
That road I paved
Dear Friend,
You see
It’s been awhile
Since I’ve fallen
To my knees
And prayed for sunlight
But our
Photosynthesis
Cannot happen
In its absence
Cause I feel like
Were in a foot race
Around the world
And a lunar eclipse
Just lapped us
So I guess what I’m
Sayin is maybe soon
My foot speed will catch up
And I can play Joshua
And freeze time
Or Hezekiah
And run it backwards
Either way I’ll make up
For lost time that has passed us
Like you said on
Some fairytale tip
When I can be to you
The way I leave this ink to drip
Yours Truly
For Those Who Shouted Barabas
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under '08 Fall: Notes from Underground, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
Manure. The smell of raw hide.
Everywhere Moans of sleepy beasts woken from the Palestinian dark.
The dark. It hugged everything like I learned a mother would.
The stale air mingled with newborn Elohim
and God among us. Of hay fragranced with blood and sweat and whatever else comes from inside a woman.
Pungent- the night, cinnamoned with lit frankincense.
All at once king. All at once being,
helplessly mortal.
I smelled my mother on me 9 months of amniotic fluid and wet butterfly wings.
Of prayers scented with morning sickness. My bendy plastic limbs.
Freshly oiled serpentine skin on me. It stung like vinegar.
And the taste of it would become one all too familiar.
The salt from the sea burned eyes that just learned how to blink.
This is Galilee. A smell as welcoming as breaking bread.
An aroma that bore your soul
Up and over its shoulders and taught you how to sail as your breathed.
Then doused by the stench of urine in back alley slums. Stinking slop and horse dung.
Of unleavened bread.
Of Bethlehem.
And all at once I loved and pitied man.
I smelled of wood- of puberty, of freshly squeezed Lebanese cedar with the pulp
still clinging to my fingers.
Knew the brashness of splinters way before they ever broke me.
Tied myself to timber to carry it home and laughed for the irony
I smelled the forest on me.
Of hammer-split silence and cypress that sings as it burns.
My carpenter’s belt next to the blacksmith’s metal wives rusting in the rain.
The iron the wood- they tasted pain. Knew it clench fist and up-turned palm.
All at once pauper and martyred God.
I smelled of lepers. Molten skin and untouchable. Adam’s heels,
Achilles tendons snapping in rhythm to Hosanna in the highest.
Of hospitals and the impatience of the dying.
Looked on in horror.
Spit on in public. So humility stinks of saliva,
of three loaves of black bread and the brine under fish scales.
I smelled of miracles. But the men hold their nose.
They will never know the smell of resurrected youths
who got the chance to break in their knees again.
Of a white shroud unwound.
40 days and nights with a giggling hyena for a stomach.
My beard smelling like the wool of shepherdless sheep.
Jasmine scented praise and burnt offering.
Smelled of earth with my hands forever drawing lines in the dirt.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Of severed ears and coward’s bones.
Of authority of anonymity.
Who is this man, that he casts out devils and makes the blind see?
Of saints-disciples- brothers- of men. Of 3 years of birthday celebrations in the round. Heads resting on shoulders then beside them on the ground,
of 11 bloody martyred crowns. Shaking. Garden praying.
Of lips with silver ducat teeth.
I smelled of an afternoon tart with citrus organs
begging once more to rinse in the Jordan.
Of ebony Palestinian nights -that cruel cruel mother.
Of the siren throats of Jerusalem’s daughters.
The familiar scent of my Father—
I had to climb to the top of a crucifix
Just to get close enough to breathe him in.
So when perched atop Calvary. I smelled everything.
Salt and vinegar. Temples. Timber. Hammers. Pine.
The Cat o’Nine and Judas’s broken swinging spine.
Wrongs. Palms. Lilies. Psalms. My mother. My Father. My altar. Manure…
The scent of flesh and blood was lifted from the ground, reeking of a man handled divinity.
I was crucified, buried, and rose on the 3rd day.
You smell me?
Epilogue to Youth
Posted by Garrett Carey | Filed under '08 Fall: Notes from Underground, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
When I kissed you
the whole world came loose.
The avenues unwound themselves
before us, and clouds
slipped free of the heavens,
bursting like snowy molotovs around you
in the street.
The beauties of the world
were at war
at your feet. You confessed
that your love transcended
sex: gender roles were nothing but
curls in your hair, to be fondled
and flicked and played with.
Your finger, delicate as breaking daylight,
could crush capitol buildings with
a little pressure at the end,
you said you brought a friend…
and then
there was nothing left to say.
Warm like sweat, the awe-struck stupor
of youth soaked into my clothes
made them too heavy
to wear. The indignant innocence
emboldened me when you
told me I could touch you there, when she
told me you could hold her
with no one near. There’s no one here
but three pairs of closed eyes
and lips at secrect trysts with inner thighs.
I was brave enough to persist
but afraid enough to omit
that I liked the taste of her
on your tongue
when we kissed.
I was young. I bit into your melon lips,
and she watched the juice trickle down my chin
whispering rough draft sonatas
about waterfalls and Vermilion,
she was young- we were too young to withstand
the full force of heaven, waiting prostrate
like the sound of angels singing would not cave our
chests and blow our skulls open like flower buds
in bloom, you could pluck us from your garden
soon. We were young, and you
were always in control, always
a few steps ahead
but you were always moving
too fast, always leaving
no chance for anything natural to catch
you, but light flashes
and car crashes
don’t have to.
Early mornings and open roads knew you
better than anyone, you
took to familiar streets with her
in your passenger seat.
You knew better
than to slow down on the blind curve,
and so did the other SUV.
You didn’t even have the time to swerve.
You were young. You were too
young to withstand the force
of leaving, as metal
kissed metal, and fucked inertia
as your face kissed the tarmac on its way back to
the earth, your face burst like melon
and she watched the juice
trickle through her fingers,
holding a tangled hairy pulp
where your smile used to sit
you were young, and she was older than the dirt
pulling her last bloody romance
out of a shattered mannequin
that looked nothing like you.
They found her hysterical on the hot pavement
and ignorant as men are, they tried to calm her down
and ignorant as men are, they saw your crimson mess on her shirt
and checked her first, you seemed too far beyond reach-
it was not worth their time
your crumpled frame must have stopped
sputtering before the sirens turned off.
She was baptized in coagulating silence,
complete but for the harsh whisper
of eternity slowly easing away
from her, and death
sounding dumbly
like hollow metal, bent
into a shape almost suitable
for music, when rung
the vibrations shed the earth
around you. You were young,
and they were old enough to know
it was for you the bell tolled
and they
fucking heard it-
but your life was not worth
their time.
Your life
was not worth
their time…
You did not survive long enough
to see your mother’s expression shatter
like crystal
in the face of the morning news, she
would have died to hug you -
and she did.
Your mother never took another living breath,
but duty could not let her rest.
Forced to fulfill her post-mortem obligation
to bury her first-born child, she was young
and hardly human, but to keep up with the ruse
you shared your funeral, you in a beech box
locked up like a hope chest
and her propped up in the pews.
I wish I could let her rest, I wish
I could bring you back then we
could have one more Saturday night
dancing like mockingbirds
so I could spend Sunday morning
hearing your call
instead of bearing your pall.
The slow march to absolution tastes wrong
as rancid milk, your baby brother in a black suit
reaching his hand just high enough
to touch the casket, he always
looked up to
you.
He was young,
too young
to be stripped of infinity
too young
to lose his virginity against the rough metal
of realization that his sister
was not coming home today.
Who is to explain the truth
to him?
We all had our shot at youth,
we all had
our chance to bruise our lips
upon the fickle mouth of reality
and some of us took it,
but what
can we say
to him?
Francisco
Posted by Ben Alisuag (Alumnus) | Filed under '08 Fall: Notes from Underground, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
His legs shake at the back of the classroom-
He’s not nervous, just thinking.
Imagines a freedom highway escape from his teacher and the babble of math equations.
He could care less; his eyes instead make love to traffic lights that blink his favorite colors or the tongue popping in the first row that reminds him of playing baseball,
Yeah, he gets distracted.
And he wants to stop his shaking knees and bouncing toes,
Wants to stop hitting his classmates,
And laughing while the teacher’s talking,
Wants to make sense of the white lines on the blackboard.
But it looks like scrabble and he’s illiterate at board games
He can’t possibly pay attention because it costs too much.
It’s two dollars a pop for the cure.
Got him addicted to Ritalin that only works half the time.
And that’s why you’ll see this 10-year-old waiting in the Welfare Line.
Rebellion is this kid’s language and nobody understands him
No one can afford to buy him a chance.
So he’s going to the 4th grade…again.
Thank God he’s short because he’ll fit in better.
And hopefully the math problems will make more sense this year.
And even I lose my patience sometimes,
yelling that sounds more like praying.
Lectures that scar like belt whips grinding over his shoulder blades.
I love my nephew like his new addiction to prescription drugs.
But I wish he could fight the disease the same way he crushes elementary school jaw-lines on the playground.
Because Francisco is not retarded, so don’t fucking call him an idiot.
Thousands of children have minds just like his; he’s a complex genius.
His actions, we can’t understand, so we pop pills down his throat,
Never getting rid of the problem.
That Francisco’s name will never stand adjacent to 5 golden stars.
Or that everyday my mother calls and ask why can’t your nephew be more like you?
And I have held hands with this 10-year-old God.
Repeated 4th grade because his teacher can’t find enough time for his misplaced voice.
Instead, she drowns him in handouts and homework, when he can’t even read the directions.
But he can recite every line verbatim from the Incredibles.
And he can summarize the Gospel at church every Sunday morning.
And he can manipulate video games with fingers like God and always come out on top.
But give him the first paragraph of Curious George, and watch him struggle over the opening lines.
I always thought he hated me.
Spoke with a smart mouth and clinched fist.
But at 8, he shaved his head for a Mohawk, and told my sister he wanted to read all the books I read in college.
Too bad he can’t even spell the 3 letters of his diagnosis.
Because when he sits to read a book, words dance on the page like run-away convicts. His eyes are like hopeless prison wards; not enough batons to beat the criminals back into their sentences.
Call him Holden Caufield, the Catcher in the Eyes.
What hurts most is that he will never meet the Great Gatsby.
Never dine with Jane Austen and ballroom dance with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.
Stuck with two left feet, he will never ride shotgun in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Forget about Romeo.
Forget about Juliet.
That love story never happened.
Francisco will never make passion as real as Whitman or Sanchez.
Never read love as pure as Wuthering Heights.
He will struggle to read road signs like blind and fingerless children trying to form words by reading brail with their palms.
He’ll probably have his best man write his wedding vows for him
Probably lay tongue tied at the thought of having to read his mother’s eulogy.
Francisco will never know words.
He’ll never know songs,
He’ll never get to read this poem.
