Fossilized

I do not wish to begin, so I slowly peruse a cataloged catalogue of words.

Suddenly I am fastened upon the word “linoleum”

(I know from certain sciences that it was once made of solidified linseed oil,

but that in my time of living it is nearly always fashioned of polyvinyl chloride).

We poor folk know the word and its appearance in the world, for it covered our

hallways and kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms,

but sometimes there was carpet or a rug mixed in (though no one ever really noticed).

I don’t fucking know what she used on her wrists.

All the gods that are false, damn it, damn me,

shrink this earth like uncured leather

so that I can no longer taste in my own unsacred mouth the iron of blood,

so that I can know less well what she set free in her turmoil and her anguish;

may my bones be ground into meal for failing to stay that dreadful blade.

I shudder to speak but I am less than a weaver of lies.

Sometimes the truth cries for the telling when I do not wish it,

when I would give a thousand rubies that shimmer like as many suns

to never tell of what I know. I suffer less than she.

Her hair is very dark and she often wears it tied in one loose knot

and she returns, scars not yet set upon her arms, to find that

the man she lived with had left the blood that seeped upon the floor, he left it

spattered on walls and in droplets around the bathtub, he left it

for her to clean.

I don’t know if she used some formulation of ammonia to scrub her horror,

some different, natural, caustic cleansing element, or a synthetic relative. I did not ask.

Although I was miles away, I can see her there, stoic on her knees,

hair like night from dye that he once asked her to apply, a reddened sponge in her hands.

Could she have washed it all away with only water if she had added her tears?

Carmen 38

There was a man sitting at a table with a glass of whiskey and

two curses: he found himself more interesting than anyone else and

he was mostly correct.

Accounting

I sat next to you at the wedding and I wore a green shirt,

the one shaded like grass nearly dying for its want of water,

my red tie knotted loosely, and black shoes that were not shined.

I cannot recall what you were wearing, save that it was a dress, but

I remember that I did not know you on first or second glance

(it may have been the first time that I truly noticed your eyelashes),

and then my smile of delight on recognition.

I had come to the wedding because rumors of the reception had promised

the irresistible extravagance of bacon-wrapped shrimp and an open bar.

“I want whatever is red and can be poured into two glasses,”

You said to the bartender. He handed us two bottles until you went back for more.

I never said goodbye to you. I had seen the hair of a woman I had hurt very deeply

through a window. She was sweeping up the dust and grime and beer

from beneath the tables in a bar like many others, where the waitresses

wear their skirts too short and the beer is too expensive and too cheap at the same time

and I’d already spilled wine on my shirt to match my tie so I spun around

and went across the street and ordered three double vodkas and left a twenty on the bar

then went back across the street and certainly said cruel and unfair things

to that unfortunate girl, though I do not know the precise wording,

and from what I was told I was found by old friends laying face-down

in the grass by the river and that sounds just like something I would do.

I never said goodbye to you and eight months later you were dead.

Carmen 36

Carmen thirty-six is considered spurious.

In Memory

The first thing that I will remember of you

is that you described an intellectually deficient

*man (*Homo sapiens)

as one who, when put with his ideas into an enema, could easily fit into

a matchbox .

The second is that someone, once in foolishness, asked you if,

having had all your previous wishes, you would desire

a dinner with Shakespeare, and you responded (I search to quote correctly)

“…the only reason I want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to,

is ‘cause I can meet him, anytime, because he is immortal in the works

he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost

certainly be a disappointment…”

And the third memory,

because men such as I must have some conclusion, I say to you,

that most times when I recall your face I think of a day in Lebanon,

in the year of our imagined Lord Two Thousand and Nine,

when you were beaten by fascist thugs adhering

to the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.

You had defaced the swastikas that adorned neighborhoods

in the segments of Beirut. You refused to fight against them while your friends

pulled you away from their fists and boots

and you said, “No, no, I will not fight.”

I remember you that way:

battered, brilliant, the man

who taught me how to look at Orwell,

to be fearless in the faces of those that wish to kill you.

You taught me to tell them to bring the rats.

You taught me to tell them that they could kill a heart but not a memory.

Your mother named you Christopher, perhaps after a saint killed in Lycia.

You must have been bleeding on those streets on that day. The newspapers,

they spoke of six men that attacked you; their boots, their heels, their fists.

I can see you in a room in your hotel

with the bruises rising up like a loaf of bread

and a bottle of contraband whiskey in your hand.

If it was your moment then or now,

let me murder the timekeeper.

Let God raise a shield against me

and be torn into pieces.

__________

for C.H.

Fragments 10

I imagine certain moments, your hair in waterfalls

thundering from a fountain that was never built,

your blouse torn apart like a bee sting that had

pierced into marble, opal, gold or silver idols:

the poets of Rome did not

have such as you,

to make a stone as living as your lips

______________________________________________

your impure curse brews a stare that sets old forests

scorching upon the leaves that hang on dead men's trees

______________________________________________

I lick up your ashes in the manner of those red carpets of empire

that exist as if great evil did not dwell in bright-lit halls.

I watch the children of a fruit tree murdered in the daylight.

I see flowers that your mother places (lovingly) wither on your cairn,

and I wish to place them on a pyre so that you would not persist.

_________________________________________________

The imprint of your hands in dark-skied memory,

A thumbprint in sand waiting for the moon.

_________________________________________________

Oh come now, crocodile, to weep such tears

As if I had not seen your sharpened teeth.