finally notes

I can write you a murder ballad, heavy on the downbeats but slow
like august breaths in halls of wood. you still manage to get it all wrong,
clapping 1 and 3, exhaling on the evens;
this was one reason I could never move you.
how heavy do you think your embattled heart
weighs? you heaved yourself over that block, cracking and chipping
away, but we know it only looks like stone, soft
as a chest cavity. and still, I couldn’t bleed you.

this chorus bleats over and over again, dry and rolling. it
has little to do with anything but hooks at the end of lines,
dragging in the weeds and refuse that I’m lucky enough to find. this
contagious repetition happens to be just like fucking you: you can
easily tell when I’m just fishing for the sing along.

ears to the ground, it’s the lips of a bridge, one with mislaid purpose.
built never to be crossed it’s just an excuse for corrugated scrap and the
throw-away too weak for utility production, useful construction. the
road is perforated down the middle and these corded arms are held
wide enough, so I grab the curb. even
my fingers, all eight calluses lying, can crumble the blacktop in the dusty
west, and I tear your song in half.

it took too long to write this, to line it with the bass-beats of a heartline
shaken in green and erratic, glowing to let you know you’ve laid it
down. I topped it with enough crunched melody to make it
march through your rooms and cover your ears with stones.
all you wanted was the music in your bed to sound itself for
you and were kind enough to forgive the beatless silence.

all American writing ends with death, so it’s time to kill
the jukebox. this slaughter song won’t finish like it started: we forgot
the subtle promise of a quiet introduction, we lost the paired
syncopation of a first verse. now it alley-
screams over a flurry of sticks and strings, that dripping wet
brush of noise paints your face red as our familiar melody is mutated to
conclude.

I dreamt this end but never wrote it down. funny how music just ends
up where it goes, fading awhile, you imagine a whisper of a cadence
only meant for you to hear. that lonely tonic belts out as another
American poet butchers the ending.



Also, my Bruce poem got published! Woo!
http://www.inscribed.org/archive/msw/pdf/Vol4Issue5.pdf