sometimes you don’t want to hand your words to anyone, because there’s a chance, there’s a chance, there’s a chance that there’s a kind of 99.9 percent hand waiting on the other end, to open them up, call their bluff, reach for the stack, and send them back
sometimes, you don’t want to track the days since the envelopes went away when your friends are passing praise about the life you’re living, a gift you were given, and you’re staying up scimming old prose, grinning, and you’re counting on that waiting room interim as the cigar-smoke hand buying rounds for the ward not the threadbare father pacing the floor, you’re counting on the doc to deliver the news with a steady hand and a champagne flute, you’re counting on him for a back-pat and clasp, not the red-stamp bludgeon of the forceps and clamp
because as much as you count all those futures you know, all the ways that an answer could knock on your door, and you can’t get to shaking a bare trope of faith while you start upon hating that faith-shaking wait, when the months turn to more than a sun down and up and they’ve long-dried the last sip of wine from your cup, you start to regretting that you ever felt good, that you ever were proud to do all that you could, that you ever believed in the yarn that you spun and the sweater it knit full of holes you called done, you start to upsetting the tone of the time by turning your back on the meter and rhyme, the cars there that once drove you down to the shore but stalled in a flash of unforecast sandstorms
and now you find that you start to forget that you ever had something in need to be said, that all that you made could ever be took, that your evening dress might earn you a look, now you’re laying into and holding and hitting your brain saying how did I feel right, how did I feel sure, how did I feel smart when states away some kid’s shooting arrows at your heart, crumpling your sentences to feed the hearth, abandoning your alliteration like the broken-wheel cart, pinning your irony to the dartboard, unplugging your apostrophe like the frayed chord, peeling your metaphor like street gum, binning your hyperbole for the trash run
and you’re wondering what they’re thinking, what you know they won’t be writing, on the postcard you self-stamp, making its four-month journey back to camp, you’re wondering what they’re saying in that coffee cup room in which they’re sitting, under that pile of papers they’re meant for reading, legs up on that table and your words unable to alter, bound to falter, the ones you thought were paper cranes but came back busted airplanes
and though your soul, once fattly fed, took the track like a thoroughbred, these are the days your leg goes lame and your jockey wants to throw the game, these are the days you get to wishing you’d never set your hand at fishing, that you never thought you’d bait a whale with the lure of a worm in a pail, that you never thought you’d play it cool in the midday drip and drool, that you never set your heart before the gun and it survived to limp on home, begging to dance when now you know sure as the rooster crows, sure as the wind blows, sure as the pin drops, sure as the dog barks, sure as the fates laugh, sure as the god wraths, that your heart couldn’t win and it was only your sin, you thought up legs and sent it on, when it never could stand for very long
but the trouble is the blood you feel pounding away as it always will, the trouble of the squeaky wheel that’s greased by the moonlight through your windowsill, the trouble of the late night, the trouble of the bright screen, the trouble of the empty room, the trouble that’s the silence, the blankness, the coldness when you cannot sleep and you’re wishing to drown in that air around begging for some womanmade sound, in the silent air that’s hanging there, unfilled and staring down your brain, down the plain of a bad day, down the train taking love away, down the crack in the prayers you pray, the same air there when the cake gets cooled, when the conman gets fooled, when the dawn comes quick and the spring is new, this, the air of a birthday, the air of a funeral, the air of boredom, the air of a shrinking world, the air of plenty, the air of slim, the air of her, the air of him, this, the air that holds your breath even when you’ve near got none left, even when you stomp and shout and still the thunder is drowning you out, this the air where you can’t not be, writing to eternity, cleaving every cell and bone and pasting them in the word-web home, this the air you’re willing to walk, right up to the very block, the air you’ll never try to leave, even if you find the new house keys, the air in which you bear no ill for those who never could nor will, for those who maybe only heard the sound of someone else’s word, the air where meaning has a home and you think it up and it is your own, the air where you can lift the load of another traveler on another road, like Dylan did when once he spoke as his head got twisted and his hope went broke, this the air he sang upon as he called your voice to share the song, unto that place creation flows, even if nobody knows.
A Few Minutes of Honey 