Poetry: Patrick Kelley

Early Grave

I am cold

My left eye twitches
These trousers don't fit me
Anymore

I watch her from bed
She moves across the room
Lost
Takes loneliness from a box
I shut my eyes tighter
Maybe
Later it will seem as though
This never happened

Beyond the window
Sounds of
Thunder echo mix with laughter and I and I

I am between trains One just left

Sometimes I forget my keys
No matter how hard I try
My children still hate me

The doctor says lose 20 pounds or
Go to an early grave

She asks me what is wrong Nothing
Why can't you I'm sorry
I liked you better when I know

Music creeps under the door with
Light
I just want I only want

This is not my life

--------

 

 

William Faulkner in Hungary

They stare at their open books not
to find answers but to avoid my gaze,
my incessant inquiry, as if I were the
retarded cousin at a funeral.

I want to help you but this is our job.
Reading this brings us together, so help me.
That's what I've been told.

This is not good, one says,
it is cynical and disrespectful to the
characters, disrespectful to the reader. It is
irrelevant and not fair to us. We should read
something life affirming.

Listen to me. I am in a foreign country whose
tongue I can barely wrap my lips around,
a land of hair dyed the color of a rusted bucket.
I am married to irrelevance, and nothing is
more unfair. You will read these stories
because they are unfair and have no relevance to
you. When I teach I talk to myself while you listen.

If nothing else, learn this fact:
life consumes you in small bits
and morning brings with it only the hope that
maybe this will all end soon. The world is
an overpriced ticket to a bad jazz concert
where only the bassist and drummer bothered
to show. The shops all closed fifteen minutes
ago and the money in your pocket is as worthless
as the apology from your drunken girlfriend
when she cannot remember where she's been
all night. You take her in and she sleeps it off

while you seethe endlessly in the brittle silence.
Imperceptibly
the distance around you
becomes the distance between you,

but from the awful radio comes a song you love,
a song that sounds like home, and

out the window the spruce tree is holding
fresh snow. Every story is irrelevant,
every person who lays beside you has lied

but there in the dark, it all disappears and
you can hardly sense the coming and going
and your wish to be consumed comes true.
------

 

 

 

I am The next Bob Dylan

Another gray afternoon
at home, safe behind
a locked door,
the wind brings nothing but
more rain, more clouds.
I can't get warm inside.

She is upstairs crying
again, the world
so empty today.
I plot my escape
humming old songs,
pretending to read the paper.
The wars raging elsewhere
start to look better
each day. I need
a weapon of choice,
something besides
the wordless glances or
these desperate crying jags.

Up the road a carnival truck
is broken down, tires flat,
the Tilt-a-Whirl folded up and
melting off the side. I wonder
where they went, the freaks
and fire eaters, the bearded lady.
I am one of them. I want to go
with them but it looks like
they are in the same condition

I am. The next Bob Dylan
song comes scratching through
the speakers and she shouts
from the bed,
begging me to turn it off.

I stand and lose my balance like
an astronaut drunk on gravity.
The world is so empty today.
The world is so empty today
and I am in it.

I step outside to find myself.
I find myself in the rain
again, in the rain
where I was left. Close the
door, she says. Please, please,
please close the door.

The penalty for being in love
is knowing the other person
will hate. The penalty for
being in love is not knowing
until it's too late.

The penalty for everything
is living through it.
--------

 

 

 

Waiting and Leaving

No one lives here
we all live somewhere else
a place where life happens

Work happens here work
work and waiting to leave
dreary evenings' rain and snow
rotten vegetables
an Edward Hopper nightmare
the only color
filthy yellow

A bus rounds the corner
the crush of people
as if Christ himself
were behind the wheel
come to take us from this hell

and these old ladies all belly
breast and sharp elbows moustaches
stippled on their angry lips

I press forward with them
through folding doors to salvation
the city waits on the other side
a desperate whore who listens who
understands my desperate cries

Inside the bus we wait and breathe and wait
to be delivered
the dead air hangs between our faces
horrible shoes scuffing the floor

A hand swipes across the window
translucent now with our moisture

Suddenly there are trees
red-shingled roofs melting through snow
then a field of brown stalks

The landscape is a dirty sheet
unfolding toward the horizon

Two hundred blackbirds descend
like the shadow of a
broken-hearted goddess
-----

 

 

Dead

Her words trickle into my ear like
whispers from a stream
around a blind curve.

She speaks to me in
another language,
one I heard long ago.

What are you saying?
The sounds come through
as if the hands over my ears
were birds flapping their wings.

 

 

I am dead;

others have what I once had.
This is all I can make
of my life.

I am dead but pretend to be
asleep
until it all goes away.

I imagine that soon
somewhere else this will be
different,
this will all be different.

For now
the days will float over me,
the world creaking, settling
like an abandoned house
that I will always live in.

She tells me,
It won't always be this way,
dying, not living.
Take your hands away from your ears.

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