Author: poetryfest

Dug in deep, a rotten keel,
And marked with faded letters gold,
A name that now he hurts to feel,
Reads sad upon the splintered hold.

Unmoved, the sky weeps empty tears,
They flood the desert beneath his eyes,
Where mournings spring will not appear,
Sunk deep beneath some earthly lie.

Glittering curves of brine and gold,
Emboss this sunken ship of state,
The lie, a promise written of old,
Stencilled by the good first mate.

Above the sky and below the sea,
It rolls a bitter and longing sigh,
But the bold corsair, so wild and free,
Can no more sail than he could fly.

Valley and vale mark his high brow,
His eyes are sunken inland seas,
Primaeval wilderness is his crown,
And within, an ocean’s memory.

The rain it binds both land and sea,
Grey shores fill an unflinching stare,
Fleeing to hide where Eternity,
Still bats her eyes and braids her hair.

“Eternity” she swore to thee,
“No ending we shall know –
Just you and me, upon the sea,
My captain, how we’ll roam.”

Eternity in painted strokes,
They but hold him from despair,
They keep alive those forlorn hopes,
That the ship might be repaired.

Hewn of oak, the captain stands,
Eyes fixed upon that golden name,
A stunted tree on foreign sand,
Forever to remain.

“I’m so fucking broke it’s absurd,” Floyd noticed the tear inside his jacket pocket. There are miserable times and there are the best of miserable times. Weeks had gone by and his dog Sue had been eating from the hand that fed him, trolling along on a loose rope. And then gone. Floyd remembered having found Sue running outside the Hermann Park late one night in February. He was sniffing at something lying next to the kiddie railroad tracks, an old muffin or something. He’d lost his tag and was without remorse. “Hey there buddy. Didja find something good?” It wasn’t snowing; it hardly ever did in Houston. But it was cold enough. He looked like a dog named Sue, like the old Johnny Cash song, and it seemed like Sue took pity looking at who Floyd was, or at least the way Floyd wanted to believe he was, backwater and fatherless.

Floyd got up off the curb and kicked the gravel underneath his weathered, old Doc Martin boot. Or was it crushed glass? He walked down the Bowery and lit a borrowed, given Marlboro. “God those taste like Shit!” Floyd thought about the conversation with the bartender at 2A, the musician who had some demos produced by the guitarist from Patti Smith’s band. The guy who knew his amigo from the art camp for disaffected city kids up in the Catskills. He was from Illinois, and was a decent musician, kinda Marshall Crenshaw. And he was friends with Handsome Dick of the Dictators who always had a Super Bowl party at his joint in Brooklyn.

There wasn’t much to the scene these days, Floyd thought. God, I wish I’d been here back in the day when CB’s was the place. You could crash anywhere downtown easy. Now it’s all stock-market exploding inevitable cock-suckers, he thought. Floyd had been staying for a while at the commercial space on 44th Avenue in Long Island City, but that wasn’t going to last forever. There wasn’t any plumbing except for a shower on the floor below, and you had to bring water up the four floors of back-and-forth stairs that make it seem twice as long since the elevator was usually broken. And it didn’t make it any easier that he was supposed to pay the dude who lived there, and had been making excuses the past few months.

There was a nasty smell coming up from the subway grate, the bizarre mix of urine, fish, sweat and milk that is brewed by an invisible witch on and under the New York summer streets. “Man, Sue would not dig it here,” Floyd muttered to himself. It’s a dog eat dog world. Or, a dog eat cat world… or something. Man, I should go back home.

Floyd wandered into a liquor store on Delancey and checked the prices of bourbon. He walked past some bridge-and- tunnel girls buying cigarettes, who’d probably lost their way from the PATH train. There’s a Korean place over by the beginning of the Williamsburg Bridge near Essex that’s cheaper, he thought. But what’s the point. I’d have to lift it anyway. Floyd wandered down past the barrage of international sweat- shop clothing stores and wondered how all this got here. The Ritmo Latino record store with the Tower-like Celia Cruz and Tito Puente airbrushes, and of course hell-hath-no-fury in a fluorescent dungeon McDonald’s. He turned up Essex, since Jenny his favorite bartender at the Johnson’s bar on Rivington would give him a few drinks on the house. He showed her some guitar licks and changed her strings sometimes.

She was like my surrogate mother
when I first came to the valley
& got into the industry. She was actually
banging Frankie Muniz at the time,
not on camera, of course; he was in his mohawk phase
& hooked on junk. He’s clean now, drives
the pace car for Nascar, weird right?
But her, I haven’t seen in years, we had a falling out,
I don’t even remember over what,
& I’m sure neither does she; it’s sad, really,
we were like that, use to watch reality Teevee
& drink white wine all night, go to the Anitas in Van Nuys
for hungover breakfast burritos & chocolate shakes.
I saw Frankie the other day, though,
at a fundraiser for chihuahuas with glaucoma;
he had on this gorgeous & ungodly expensive English suit,
(the royalties from Malcolm in the Middle
must be brilliant, it’s on Teen Nick every hour it’s dark)
& was drinking a bottle of Evian.
He was perfectly polite, but really,
I don’t think he knew who I was, only remembered her slightly.
It’s whatever, when I sign this new deal with Brazzers
I’ll be making bank.

Hey, listen up, I got a message for the crew
I’m feelin’ fierce, got my confidence brand new
I step into the room, heads turnin’ my way
I’m servin’ looks, servin’ sass, here to slay

My outfit’s fire, my makeup’s on point
I’m walkin’ tall, got my shoulders anointed
I’m a boss, a queen, a superstar
I’m makin’ moves, breakin’ rules, goin’ far

I’m lightin’ up the night like a superstar
My presence is felt, near and far
I’m unstoppable, untamed, and free
I’m slayin’ the game, and I’m makin’ history

So bow down, haters, and take a seat
I’m the one and only, can’t nobody beat
I’m on top of the world, and I won’t apologize
I’m slayin’ the game, and I’m feelin’ alive.

Little girl. You’ve carried
the burden of my name
my life, interrupted
by a car crash at my
own hands for longer
then you even knew me
on earth.

It’s time you lay down the burden
of my name, my life, my
goals that exceeded expectations
because you have surpassed
anything I would have wanted for myself
or anything I could have achieved if I survived.

The burden of my name
my life, is no longer yours
to carry. You’ve started building
your paradise in the place you feel
is home. But I keep seeing you
pause. Stop. Sit down.

You are afraid of your own power.
You don’t know how to live a life
not consumed in chaos and fear.

But little girl, you are doing that and more.
Yet you hold the burden of my name
my life and it’s unfinished work
As if you dishonor me by leaving it all down.

You are my image. Nothing more.
you’ve worked harder than I ever could.
Your time is now. Your life is yours.

My daughter, lay down the burden
of my name, my life.
Your debt is clear
I need to carry my own.

Fingertips, cloth, tickling, then pushing and digging into the body under them. Wrapping both arms around. Squeezing with my chest. Pushing into, pushing forehead in. Smelling, smelling the smell that is dying. Will die forever. It’s last go here at my nose, my lungs, running through my blood, but even then leaking1 out through my veins. It won’t stay I can’t get enough. And with every breath the input is less. More leaves creeping in. Less of my son, more of leaves and all the other things. He, and even his leaving remnants, is everything alive, and the only alive thing. The whole world else is dead product, where can he live in me? Where can he remain? – nowhere.

I’m not alive enough either, and am not made to live by absorbing his death. I shuffle up, scoop and struggle to stand, then set him back down. Better to do nothing. Better to lay and feel the cool blanket around him convect heavily, bringing him back into being inanimate. I pull his body to a slat of gold to keep him warm. The sun shines through the thin trees, like always, relentless, deciding to now fucking take the smallest of my mind off of this grieving. I turn, lay down and maneuver my body in the dirt so that we face closely. The permanence is ugly. His permanent face is ugly, and not him, a black hole with my heart turning around and slowly into it. But also the last time I can see his smooth cheeks pink and white, and his nose, and brown hair, light and eager looking, as if he only fell. What an ugly thing that I can’t look away from. Time – 10 minutes…20? The sun has moved behind trunks. I can’t tell if I’ve gotten cold. I need someone to stop me, I will kill them if they try. Even just this: if I could lay with him half dead in the dirt. Instead of him dying more, even just that. I grab his arms and squeeze, angrily, but the energy it takes just makes him decay more. Better to do nothing.

Eventually it is fully dark. My senses are becoming bored of my dead son. I feel betrayed and I feel cold at my ankles, hands, ears, and I hear the ruffling of the forest and smell its rot. My body is not mine then, its own engine, forgetting my son so easily, not as I would or wish to. I easily let it go, I am existing the most at the memory of him, in the center of my head, a ball floating on slowly moving water. Yet something looms around the edges of this, too, creeping up to it, ruffling the shrubs. It is the miles and miles and miles of emptiness. No one is coming. To stop me, to help me, feed me, pick up his body, scold me. There can not be the hope that it might happen by accident, that despite all odds against, someone comes, that God proves in the last moment, right at his last possible chance, that he cares.

Now my mind is on this and now I notice the easement I’ve allowed, never to be barred off again. It will wedge, angrily hammer down and my sorrow will split like a log. The empty world wins, once again: the sun always moving time forward, the blank vastness making time spent useless, my own body obstinate against my command. Only for a few hours did my boy die, only during that time did I understand it. I stand up. I start a fire, laboring with numb hands. Right as the sun comes again, I bury the body.

Turtle doves
with bleeding hearts
on a Christmas tree,
that sing a swift song
like midnight swallows
for this world washed
in blue sadness,
that drench this December
in their snow-pure
drops of love;
raw & red
like the saint
that froze his tears
and descended from the sky
with his diamonds
into the silver ashes
of gold fireplaces;
growing glimmers
of crystal rivers
on his face
and his fate
to keep this
forsaken– forgotten
cold world–
welcome & warm
like the home
only he alone
will always carry.

They called me a coward, said my words would hide,
Too scared to face the storm, I’d run and confide.
My thoughts were shadows, secrets locked tight,
In silence, I fought my own fucking fight.

They wanted thunder, loud as hell,
To shout like lightning, break the spell.
But my voice shook, a flickering flame,
Afraid the truth would tarnish my name.

They spread their bullshit, twisted my life,
Throwing stones, cutting like a knife.
I carried my truths in whispers, not screams,
Afraid to face the pain, caught in my dreams.

So call me dramatic, call me what you will,
These scars are mine, but I’m standing still.
I’ll find my voice when the time’s right,
And when I speak, I’ll be ready for the fight.

When the earth opened and swallowed you, I know now I should have left you
to be purified in Lake Michigan waters, baptized by clumps of sand, the tiny pellets
I later tidal combed from your hair, away from you. Like Jupiter, nostalgia beach ate you up
in one gulp, in one flat-bottomed step torn through the edge that beckoned to devour you whole.
You sank quicker than I did in our union, anchored to the turf that tricked visions of security
until your weight was pressed above it, bending to you like I did when you pressed me
to that bed bug bed when I didn’t want to have sex but didn’t know how to deny you
without a fight. I wish I could say I hesitated grasping at you with that twisted driftwood
life jacket, wooden oar, leaving you to swim in Princess Bride, Lightning Sand,
my childhood film favorite we watched the night before.

In up to your shoulders, sinking in soot, mouth gaping like some dead fish, wretched corpse,
or the hollowed out skin of myself, I saved you from any crisis you had and you loved me
the same, screaming, slurring, tongue wagging until I caved. Your pupils always darted around,
akin to an animal trapped, they did then too, when you were descending
the Wisconsin dune restoration divot. If I deserted you to your saccharine lips daring survival,
would you have died half in, half out? Grit under nails, claw marks surrounding you, posed
in my familiar struggle, with the abuse of abandoning me in sliding your limp body
from that crevice, I was condemned to clean up your mess the same as when you weren’t doll-full
of dust, grains taking up residence in the pockets of hunger
from all the meals you refused.

Maybe, your mistress would have still confessed to all the ways you filled her
while you finger-ripped my soul away from its vessel by each pink, thready tendon.
Would I have also died? Forever in love, buried in your pocket next to your keys and the phone
that you whipped across the dew bitten lawn while hollering something atrocious,
with its holes that I prodded an unspooled paperclip inside to pull out each trace.

You made sure to never hit me,

but you always got too close, like a dog waiting to snap
its foamy jowls, clicking your broken enamel pained jaw until I surrendered
to some everlasting tug of war— familiar hands clasped around that branch,
the same ones that circled my neck while you orgasmed runny and thin,
slipping to safety with a sigh of release, but I couldn’t heave you from the pocket of ground.
Leaving you to dig ten deep lesions in gluttonous grit, mimicking the addiction you granted me,
the Newport crystals in your teeth that dully glimmered when you wailed for my hault of help.

I never knew I’d someday relish in realizing you cornered, astray in your power
of being too lucky, grabbing at the soil beneath you in the a rough way you treated me with,
not in the skilled way that made you shiver when I butterflied my nails along your back,
hauling yourself out of the pit that satisfied my guilted craving of finally being rid of you.
Craving the deposit to hungrily suck you through its straw,
to pressure drag you down
with a rip current’s twisting and turning,
as a predator does its prey,

where you’d dance with the hellhounds,
just twenty-two inches away
from digested, perpetual banishment,
where the silt would have settled,
righting itself in a clean slate,
as if you had never existed at all,
returning to the unbelievable calm of being lonely,
but this would be just one more thing that would be my fault

The gun is good…Go forth and kill!

(The reader is surrounded by a chorus of masked youths dressed in black.)

They tell me the gun is good,
That it has never harmed anyone
Through its cold, mindless steel,
Its potent powder and ruthless point.

It is the beast that kills,
The beast whose myriad carpals
Evolved into a fist, a means to grasp
Stone, fashion deadly shafts,
And from these beginnings, an endless
Armory until even the ether is harnessed
For Armageddon,

The same hand that fixed with breath
And mineral spray vast murals
In the darkness, visions of migrating herds,
Of equine flight and creatures long since vanished,

The hand that now builds sprawling arcades
To house dreams etched in stone,
On framed canvases, or in projected light,
The embodiment of our better selves,

A hand that creates and destroys.

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

I hear the distant lamentation of mothers
Made immediate by wonders unimagined
By the old ones.

Our chosen elders, still robed like priests,
Pour over an icon, barely three centuries old,
Somehow archaic against our frantic pace.

Surely the wisest among us
Can break the impasse,
Quell the waste;

They will hear great argument
Through the furrowed brow of sincerity,
Fingers crossed behind the back,
As fear masquerades as preparedness
Fetish, disguised as freedom.

Do they hear the lamentation
Of the mothers?

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

The world is in a stupor,
Stunned by a poison apple,
A plethora of diversions –

My flesh, fragile against these forces,
The delicate conduits easily rent,
Can only unleash this threnody
For the mothers and fathers,
Sing like an anguished bird
In a fathomless mine
That enough will heed the warning
And survive.

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

How many lost lives are acceptable?
Humanity is a constellation;
An extinguished star changes its complexion.
What might have come of its light?
Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:

A dream of things to come.

(The members of the chorus remove their masks, one by one, and say what they might have become in life.)

A healer
A mother
A chef
A poet
An engineer
An artist

(or each may speak a profession of his/her own choosing)

Our vestigial fangs react to blood in the air:

We kill for avarice,
In anger,
In jealousy,
For territory,
For ideology,
For sport.

If we cannot control the impulse,
Then we must limit the means before

It
Is
Too
Late!

[BANG!] (The chorus stomps the floor in tandem.)

(Each chorus member pulls out a length of red cloth which has been hidden in their fists and
places it over an imagined wound, as each strikes a contorted pose as if shot, and should have
expressions of fear, anguish, confusion and despair on their unmasked faces. They freeze until
the reader moves.)

Robert René Galván