Poetry: Timothy Ferine

Poetry

by Timothy Ferine









	WHAT IT MEANS TO ME


	My good hand went bad,
	and both legs won't walk.
	My eyes are a blur, my voice
	is a strangle, and everything
	I am means something other
	than what it means to me.

	I keep no mirrors
	because I can't stand
	the sight of me.
	I've no one to look good for
	at the center of the cipher
	my life's for,
	so I hide in my poems
	and past incarnations
	of a life that once meant
	everything to me.
	Boil me down until I'm nothing
	then melt the pot I'm in:
	set fire to my skeleton
	for when nothing's left
	there's nothing to compare
	me to but ash and memories.
	It'll even be pointless to bury me.

	And all the lovers I can't have,
	and every city I won't see;
	and the staircases I can't climb
	lead to places I don't go.
	This passive surrender to myself
	is all that's become of me,
	and it makes me angry,
	and my anger means everything to me.




	FLUX


	Everything's comprised of strings
	vibrating in air conditioning.
	God's an equation and life's only questions,
	collecting in piles we call "History."
	Nothing makes sense but sense
	so if you can't prove it, then just shut up.
	There's no promise; this I promise:
	Count on change and only change
	then turn around and change again.
	Press against this immutable truth
	until They drop a Hydrogen Bomb
	or the sun grows cold as the darkness
	surrounding the universe, cradle
	of relative forces in perpetual motion.





	FLASHDREAM


	We're in my grandmother's house,
	but the furniture's as it was during my childhood.
	On TV, we see an alert of a nuclear attack.
	We panic, start dashing around slamming doors
	and windows shut, as if to keep the radiation out.

	We keep bumping into the furniture,
	forgetting where it is, in its 1969 position.
	I'm trying to say "good-bye" when everything grows silent.
	I see the flash as it blinds me.
	In my chest I feel my innards dissolving.

	I jolt awake, look out my bedroom window.
	"There's been no attack," I think, relieved again.
	Then it occurs to me; last summer
	when she was hospitalized, receiving
	the chemotherapy that would kill her in a week,

	I phoned her for the last time:
	neither of us could find the words to say "I love you"
	or "good-bye," to bridge the space
	between my life and her death,
	a space that now divides us forever.