Gabriel Gadfly's Blog, page 18

Bone

What have you done to me?

Morning wakes light

in the window.

I pull away the covers

and lift myself up,

but my bones fall out

between the sheets.

You are still asleep;

the sun creeps across your lips

and my skeleton beside you

cups your breast in his hand,

his bones fat-yellowed

and marrowed out with desire;

I leave your side and leave my love

beside you, I leave all

the white osteology of my love.

Is my love macabre?

My love rattles.

My love clatters and clacks,

my love snaps and pops at the joints.

I cannot quiet it.

I can try to bury

all the raw cartilage and calcium

of my love, I can try to crack it

and mortar it down

to so much grey dust,

but my love must be bone:

it wrestles under the muscle

and blood of my love,

under the skin of my love,

the bones of my love are what

the tendons and tissues of my love

bind to when I love you.

My love is lunate and scaphoid.

It is vertebral, sternal, my love

is cranial and pelvic and hyoid.

My love is two hundred and six

bone white statements of my love.

The post Bone appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Apaches

The Apaches whirl low and loud

over the house today. They rattle the timbers,

they quaver the trees, shaking off twigs

and the empty nests of last year’s birds.

There are all kinds of birds

in the air here: the broad black wings

of bickering crows, the silent gliding circles

of hawks, distant Chinook and low Apache.

My father would know the variations

by the shape of the nose or the rotor’s whoop:

D-model from A, but I know them only by lazy

or rushing, by swoop or hover, when the sky is blue.

Day and night, when the weather is nice,

you hear them call to each other:

the stutter and cough of the gun on the nose,

the singular boom of rockets on the range.

No where else has these kinds of birds.

No where else feels loud enough without them.

The post Apaches appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

The Great Red Mouth, The Tooth

I dreamt of you last night.

Not you by name or you by face,

but you as the fever under my skin knows you:

The great red mouth opens wide,

the tongue works at the loosened tooth,

the tongue writhes in the brine barrel,

the tongue nails itself to the deck boards,

the cats pace hungry on the porch

for a mouth of meat.

The great red mouth

yawns down a quart of honey,

yawns down a quart of molten salt

what are you trying to cure?

what are you trying to preserve?

you end yourself trying but try —

I’m done trying.

In this dream of you,

I am the tooth; I rock in the gum,

declaring myself

with the copper not-blood taste of error,

with the bent angle bite,

with the wrong cradle, the wrong dock

for the incisor me.

Let me leap loose

from your great red mouth;

clench your jaw and I swear to god

I’ll crack and splinter; I’ll myself shear off

even if I leave my goddamn root behind.

Great red mouth

spit me out, wrench me out,

let me berth off in a bite of red apple

or I swear to god

I’ll abscess myself. I’ll eat you alive.

The post The Great Red Mouth, The Tooth appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

This Bestiary of Us

We nest in waystations,

half split between lairs,

two larva devouring each other

to become a single beast.

We meet.

We crash desperate —

no hestitation before we

skin ourselves and unhinge.

This is the monster of us:

a spider of limbs, a knot of pythons.

We have too many teeth

and too many nails.

We are Chimera.

We predator and prey ourselves.

We crush sex until it pops,

a bubble red and full

of throbbing. We writhe wet

into each other. Too hot,

too steam, too slick —

we are half circles fulling,

fused at crown of mouth

and tangled genital root.

We suck air and thrust

swallows of fire down

into our needy belly.

We have a beard full of blood.

We have a throat raw,

a vessel wrestled empty.

One mouth gasps, the other growls,

we hoard our clenches; we worry

holes into our shoulders to stash them in.

We slip free, we scrabble back.

One mouth wails, the other shushes.

The post This Bestiary of Us appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Imaginary

This morning, the sun on the porch

is just the cool side of warm,

and the little hula girl on the patio table

drinks light and shimmies her toy hips

while the crows bicker about us,

while the cats curl through our legs

and I tell you about yellow ginko leaves

and why they remind me of you.

You aren’t here, not today.

Today, you tell me you are imaginary.

You are a wisp of an image

swaying like the hula girl

in the steam that curls

off my coffee cup,

and vanishes just as quick

but I wish you were.

I imagine the spring light

in your wild hair, the music you make,

the poetry you fill my mouth with,

my fingers and my mouth,

I imagine my mouth

full of yellow ginko, full of your tongue.

If I imagine you

real, would you be real?

Be real, so I can tell you of the poem

I’ve picked out for your hip.

Be real, so I can translate the debate

and bicker of crows to you.

Be real, unbrushed and wild, be real

so when I cease to imagine and start to long,

you are what my fingers can grasp.

The post Imaginary appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Broken People and Whole

Your mother wrung her hands

at the kitchen table, said,

Honey, you ought not keep that retard baby.

Your doctor frowned at his clipboard,

flipped papers to avoid your eyes, said

In all likelihood, he’s never gonna talk. I’m sorry.

Your husband slammed the storm door, said

I ain’t signed up to raise no freak,

and you’ve never seen him since.

Never wanted to.

Thirty years later,

your son grins at you,

gap-toothed,

after singing in the Easter choir.

His knob-knuckled hands flutter,

grasping at spasms of joy,

and you can’t help but think

that the best he can do,

little as it may be,

is more effort of love

than those unfaithful people

could muster up for him.

Fuck what broken people say

about what a whole child can be.

Fuck what broken people say

about people they think are broken.

The post Broken People and Whole appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Bourbon

At two a.m., you are drunk on bourbon.

Celebrating on your balcony,

in the warm air on the last day of February,

with just a protein bar

and some kale chips in your belly.

You write me poems

and send me songs

and apologize apologize apologize

and you text “Call me please”

from three hundred and sixty five miles away,

because you’ve gotten yourself stuck

on the bathroom floor.

It’s the first time I hear your voice

since Birmingham. You are weepy drunk,

embarrassed drunk,

and I tell you jokes to turn you giggly drunk,

and you slip into horny drunk and tell me

the things you want to do with your mouth.

You are adorable, and I am a year of miles away,

coaxing you back into bed with just my voice

crackling over radio towers.

Rest, little drunk.

Tomorrow, you have a hangover

and this poem

and my love to look forward to.

The post Bourbon appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Filaments

Even when I haven’t seen you in days

I find reminders of you everywhere.

I slept last night

curled against your pillow

to breathe the scent of you in sleep

and woke with a thread of your hair

braided to my beard.

I bathed and glimpsed you

on the shower wall,

a coil and wet snake

I try to divine

like tea leaves or runes,

attempts to suss out

predictions of your return.

I dress myself; brush a string of you

from breast pocket, and walking out,

notice another in the hallway mirror,

a kiss nestled at my lapel.

You are in the headrest of my car,

my bag, my books, filaments left like gifts;

they tether me to you

until your hair and you rest at night

beside me again.

The post Filaments appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Cicatrice

That night, I kissed your shoulder,

your neck, the back of your wrist,

kissing scars and asking you

to tell me their origins:

the brick wall that shook

your brain in its cage of bone,

windshield glass, rearview mirror,

the knife you plied yourself.

You sat across my legs,

took my hand in your fingers

and navigated your scalp

so I could feel the dimple

under the hair

that grew back silver,

where the staples held

you together.

Your catalog of injuries

is just the smallest part of you,

but I couldn’t write a poem

long enough to catalog

every part of you

that my body, my mouth

longs for.

The post Cicatrice appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Sleep Study

Because I snore at night

and wake

sometimes,

chewing on a tongue of terror,

my doctor prescribed a sleep study.

Tonight, at the hospital,

a nurse binds me to a clinic bed

with sensors and wires and straps,

an electric kind of bondage —

I am tubed and surveilled,

expected to sleep soundly

in this antiseptic ghost of a bedroom,

where someone always listens

and someone always watches.

Two a.m., half-addled, I teeter

on consciousness, stumble-drunk,

one foot in the world and one in slumber.

Stare at the glass eye over my head

and wonder what all this paraphernalia

tells my nurse about me. What

can she read on her charts and monitors?

Can she see the yellow eyes

that have stalked through

my sleep since I was a child?

Can she see the name tags

fettered to my wet dreams?

When I wake, I’ll ask her

if she can draw me a map

through the architecture of sleep

to the fountain where

my poetry spills forth,

to the spring in the rock

and the steaming basin of words

where I drown every night;

every morning, I surface and gasp

for air, wring what drops of poetry

I can out of my beard and onto the page,

and, spent, forget my way back

until sleep seduces me again.

The post Sleep Study appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.