{image by the incredible French artist, Francoise Nielly. Found Here}
This is not a poem about love.
This is a poem about being fierce.
About all the claw-footed things inside;
the things with savagely beating wings and sharp, narrow, next-meal eyes.
This is not a poem for the faint of heart
who want some nice little homily about flowers and
rain and the music of falling leaves in the peach of spring.
Huh-uh.
I am the one with the flashing gaze.
The one who will cut out your thoughts and hang them from the rooftops
to be torn and shredded by howling winds.
I rolled up my sleeves when I sat down to write
and pulled my hair back.
I’m scratching this on the prison floor with the sharpened end of a
steeled mind.
It’s got me.
The burning coal-fire of whatever it is that sits in my belly
like a churning volcano
and spits and spews and shakes and
swallows cities.
This is not a poem about love.
Or about wishing.
Or silly, paper-thin if’s and maybes and the stale shreds of a futile hope.
No.
This is about being eaten inside out by
something so huge and faceless you can’t even name its name
or place its genus or species in
any variety of biological compendium.
This is everything raw, and bone-center, nerve-stretched-thin-laid-bare-on-the-table,
REAL
that’s pushing and scratching and butting and exploding its way
Out
OUT
OUT!
Through all the too-small garlicpress holes of
words and actions and the moving of feet one in front of the other
as the day swells and wanes.
And soon enough it’ll take the top of my head clean off and
burst and pop and fizz and whatever it is a star does when it detonates,
all over the windshield of my life.
And all I’ll see ever after will be
black and red
and the slashings of words
on brick walls like God writing on tablets
from the top of a smoke-ringed mountain,
and the world walking by like it’s nothing at all.
This is not a poem about love.
At least, not about the nice kind.
Not the kind that sends flowers or wears pretty dresses
or sits on beaches at sunset and says drippy-sweet
rhyming words.
If it’s about love at all
(which it’s not)
it’s about the kind that’s ragged and mud-caked
and sees too far and knows too much and holds too tight.
The kind that reaches inside your body
through skin and muscle and bone and sinew
and grabs your heart like a vice-gripped thief;
and you with nothing left to pump your blood.
It’s kind that won’t take you to the movies, but to the battlefields.
The kind that takes bullets
and crawls up on crosses
and carries you on its back up fiery canyon walls.
It’s the kind that snarls at you with wolverine teeth
when you’re even the tiniest bit less than everything.
The kind that rips and screams and tears things down that have
no business being there–
tears them down with fingernails and sweat
and the decimating force of the hatred of all that is untrue.
This is not a poem about love.
Unless it’s a love that carries the shame-heavy world,
and drags itself through guttered nights,
and fights with fists and truth and the blunt edge of devastating faith.
Unless it’s love that is
joy dark
and tiger strong.
That roars at fear,
and dogs your steps like
a wild, tameless addiction.
This is not a poem about love.
But about something worlds away
from four blasted letters-
from things shaped like hearts -
(but not real hearts)
and polite first-story exchanges.
from feelings – play-baubles for children in men’s bodies-
from who’s got game, from I want, from paper-mache vows and the rotten buckets, full of holes
in which we keep our base, sham-promisings.
Something big and wild and wide and hot.
Something untouchable. Something that burns and beats and ravages
and doesn’t waste time being sorry.
because it’s too busy turning you inside out
and re-arranging organs
and pulling you to the edges of the universe and
looking out with you on everything else.
This is not a poem about love.
This is about bleeding. And reaching.
And tearing yourself in two, and three, and fourteen thousand
and collecting all the shreds of you
and – on an igneous, blackscar-frenzied night –
rearranging them all on some vast
world-canvas,
creating something
entirely new and unknowable
made only of what was once your timorous self.
This is a poem about
pulling out your bones one by one
and drilling holes till you’ve made of them gory instruments,
and set about playing unheard-of melodies
on your own body
when the wind blows rough.
This is a poem about what happens
to you when you crawl out of yourself
like some holy refugee.
When you tear off the caul you were born with
and throw it to the dogs.
This is about when you see.
I mean SEE
things – and what that does to your
Soul.
And maybe it kicks it around for sport,
and maybe it slams it against doors in the shadows of seedy alleyways,
and maybe it hits it one too many times with a meat tenderizer,
and maybe it tosses it nonchalantly in an incinerator.
And maybe you survive.
And maybe you don’t.
This is a poem about deserts.
About heat-baked roads
and wracking, restless driving into days and nights
where nothing you see is real.
It’s about wastelands, and dry wilderness
walkaways
and wolf-things that crouch
and snarl
and smell your puling fears.
This is not a polite poem.
It doesn’t follow the rules.
It won’t decorously turn from the things that
slink in the shadows
and crouch behind doorways, avoiding the light.
This poem is all billy-clubs and
Mag lights
and the glint of steel
and the smell of powder and laceration.
It’s a whip-crack,
blade-slash heat,
rope burn,
bitter pill
choking, freezing, burning, fading, C4, cataclysm
of the unused grey matter
of the too-real, too-scarred, too-ugly
molten center of the heart
of you and me.
See. It’s like I said.
This is not a poem about love.
This is her talking, the first old woman I knew. She told me, “Blood, breath and today are all you’ve got, so use them like you mean it.” I still want to be around people like her, and to let myself be like her. It’s rough, but better than otherwise. Thank you, Shawnacy.
amazing, kevin. what a thing to share! … blood, breath, and today… indeed.
“Unless it’s a love that carries the shame-heavy world,
and drags itself through guttered nights,
and fights with fists and truth and the blunt edge of devastating faith.”
oh, friend.
i sit here, gasping and breathless.
i think a radical redefinition of ‘love’ is necessary and called-for. … not that this is it, of course… but we have to at least shoot our arrows in the direction of the target, right?
Dear Lord in Heaven.. how will any of us write about love after this? I could single out phrases and lines and stanzas to show exactly what makes this so uniquely a poem of our times – but I’m sure every reader can figure that out for themselves, and it would be redundant to copy and paste the entire poem in this box.
thanks, kerry. :] is there a particular facet of ‘love’ (or not-love) that you think needs to be addressed specifically in our time? some new or, freshly turned bit that distinguishes it from what it has meant in the past?
Finding meaning in its brevity, or passion over long distance, or the non-commital way to love… I could go on.
I really like what you picked out there, Kerry.
oh me too! it feels like the fragmentation we’re experiencing in this post-post modern world is echoed in the way we relate to people. even our closest relationships are (in my observation) only really shared in one or two areas. points of commonality. not only are we as individuals so far from whole, we don’t even attempt to love ‘wholly’. content to patch together some kind of manageable life, and to stepping-stone our way around each other, we can’t seem to be able to dive deeply – whether into ourselves, into the world around us, into truth, or into each other. we’re not accustomed either to that sort of work, or that kind of commitment; not to mention unprepared as explorers for what we may encounter.
that was, i suppose, some of the crux of this.. that love .. first of all, doesn’t always have to mean romantic love, and second, can often – in its ‘whole’ and ‘real’, ‘authentic’ state, be almost violent. the way truth can be violent. not bloody or physically harmful, but … spiritually arresting. we talk about being ‘hit upside the head’ by ideas, or being turned inside out by love, or by some unexpected experience or emotion.. these are violent experiences. they catch us by the lapels and compel us into some new space we hadn’t imagined before…
it’s a dangerous thing to be breathing and alive.
You know the truth. You know the deep down truth of being. Thank you for speaking it.
it’s an elusive thing, the ‘deep down truth of being.’ … very shape-shifty and contrary. thanks so much for reading, mandy!
This is not a polite poem.
It doesn’t follow the rules.
It won’t decorously turn from the things that
slink in the shadows
and crouch behind doorways, avoiding the light.
….and goodness am i grateful. i echo mandy – thank you for speaking this truth. for capturing it so we can see and feel and remember.
thank you! so glad you stopped by. :]
I’m struck and sobbing, seriously, I can barely get through your words. How did you know? Did you crawl inside, hunker down beside and start recording and documenting the chaos, the revelatory?
“Something big and wild and wide and hot.
Something untouchable. Something that burns and beats and ravages
and doesn’t waste time being sorry.
because it’s too busy turning you inside out
and re-arranging organs
and pulling you to the edges of the universe and
looking out with you on everything else.”
I feel the thunderous pulse and wonder if I can survive. Few really understand this feeling, this overwhelming, this living and dying.
“If it’s about love at all
(which it’s not)
it’s about the kind that’s ragged and mud-caked
and sees too far and knows too much and holds too tight.
The kind that reaches inside your body
through skin and muscle and bone and sinew
and grabs your heart like a vice-gripped thief;
and you with nothing left to pump your blood.”
My God, will I make it?
And these words, I don’t even know how you know?
‘And all I’ll see ever after will be
black and red
and the slashings of words
on brick walls like God writing on tablets
from the top of a smoke-ringed mountain,
and the world walking by like it’s nothing at all.”
It is relief, all relief that you can chart and map and name.
Seriously, Shawnacy, thank you.
we seem to be in very similar places just now, janae. i’m unspeakably glad for someone to walk with.
I keep coming back to this. These words. They haunt me. Captivate. They have a hold on my heart and won’t let go. I tried to leave a comment here time and time again but words.. escaped me. I simply want to thank you. I needed to be taken “to the battlefields.”
thanks so much for reading, heather. it’s been a ‘battlefields’ few weeks for me, lately.
appreciate the comment!
OH.
MY.
GOD.
I can’t type all the other things that I want to say coz they all contain expletives…. but Jesus!
This poem … WOW
I rolled up my sleeves when I sat down to write
and pulled my hair back.
I’m scratching this on the prison floor with the sharpened end of a
steeled mind.
I can’t say anything else. WOWOWOOWOWOWOOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW!
thanks, Bajan! glad to have connected :].
Argh, it ate my comment. I feel like the writer above – speechless, amazed, impressed – WAY impressed – you have outdone yourself with this one and that is saying something because you are so GOOD. I relished every line. This is white-hot poetry at its best. Whew. Way to write a POEM,
kiddo!
thanks, sherry! if you had to make a suggestion for improvement, what would it be?
Dear me. I’m not going back in the cage with that thing without the heavy gloves and riot shield. It’s got intensity down, no doubt about it.
I’m wondering…did you mean “mater” near the end, as it is written?
Anyway, this is no “low-ku.” (but I liked the low-ku!)
yeah, this is definitely not a subtle commentary… i wrote it a while ago, and it was an eight page mess of words thrown at walls… punctuated only by accidental bruises and abrasions. it took me a while to get in the kind of shape i needed to be, in order to go a full ten rounds with it in the ring and beat it into some kind of shape.
are there parts that you felt were extraneous or redundant? i feel like it’s still a work in progress. … they always do.
& thanks so much for catching that typo!
“because it’s too busy turning you inside out
and re-arranging organs”
How did you know?
This week has been a life-changer for me.
I keep finding prophetic words in places they shouldn’t be.
My heart has been enlarged four-fold
Someone came and scoffed at my funny rules.
Stammering about
I’ve forgotten who I am.
I feel angry at Life for dealing me this round
When I’ve tried so hard.
But lashing salt winds
Promise a foreign shore
I for the first time in my life fully fear
stepping forward.
oh, kit. … blessed be the winds that erode the rocks and the rocks that endure them…
the battlefield of this week seems to be planet-wide.
and though we know the process of being stretched is uncomfortable… it’s good for heart enlargement.
that one phrase, though… that you’ve forgotten who you are. not knowing what the speaker was referring to, i’ll still venture to say that ‘who you are’ doesn’t have to have anything to do with who you *were* at any given point, or with the culture you sprang from. similar to the point of the ‘beyond home’ essay, i think the shape of ‘who we are’ is not circular (we don’t have to circle back to our ‘roots’ to stay true to ourselves. though they definitely inform our make-up, and we can find a great deal of meaning in understanding them, they do not define our limits.) but linear (and sometimes very very non-linear). we’re not wheels, but trajectories. we must create home. create ‘khora.’(plato’s idea of ‘place’ which heidegger refers to as a ‘clearing in which being happens or takes place.’ and derrida adds that khora names a radical ‘otherness’ that ‘gives place’ for being, defying attempts at naming or either/or logic. ((this is in opposition to aristotles idea of stadia which is seen as more of a defined structure upon which order must be imposed.)) The khoric space of our selves is something that is dynamic, fluid and in which we can find a kind of organic order that already exists.)
we don’t always have to step forward in defined spaces. we can move to the next step in a kind of inner choreography that creates the very ground it stands upon with each pass and leap.
of all people, i have tremendous faith in your ability to carve out the foreign shore on which you wish to stand.
glad we’re friends, kit. :]
oh, one more thing. this song got me through the past two weeks. http://soundcloud.com/jtylerlyle/never-reach-my-destination
‘how bittersweet to understand
the wilderness is the promised land.’ … holy holy.
Thank you, Thank you.
Uncomfortable, yes, but the heart shines brighter. I just didn’t expect it to happen with my heart :-/
And your words on self are hitting home. Neither circular nor linear. It’s stepping out, somtimes forwards, sometimes sideways, sometimes back. Even amongst radical change I can find space inside.
Inner coreography…sounds good to these ears.
I value our friendship too.
I can’t breathe. And my face is burning in the region of my forehead where are the tears are held before they spill. God.
how could it be anything less?
I came back for another read and am just as astounded. You asked me if I could think of an improvement? Ummmmm……NO! This is a spectacular write. Right from the solar plexus. Wowzers.