Patrick Fealey's Blog, page 7
January 24, 2013
Sundowning
Sundowning
The pieces reassemble, drops of golden light once scattered, return. The sun has a use: it teaches one how to say goodbye in silence. And along the pier he heard the lunatics and condemned howl from the hillside. Man and men sharing air. The greens are fresh, you know they grow on the decayed and the gnarled. It’s when cowards and heroes are forged by television sets. bells of bronze, silver, gold, and lead toll green shadows. Tobacco, chocolate and deodorant are the luxuries here, and maybe a funeral for the hollow skins of flies. Water trots onto the scene, it always finds a way. Red sunbeams through fanblades speak well of all. The emptiness goes unrifled by our tremblings as we wait to be terrified. And a castrated cavalry sleeps atop a sacred hill, shadows stinking absolutely. A religious experience here, the eyes against the air, a tapestry you can’t touch or stop looking at. You see and hear the quiet as the wind gives up the gold. And it is night, and oblivion sheathes its victory, and all pigs can walk into bars on two legs.
The pieces reassemble, drops of golden light once scattered, return. The sun has a use: it teaches one how to say goodbye in silence. And along the pier he heard the lunatics and condemned howl from the hillside. Man and men sharing air. The greens are fresh, you know they grow on the decayed and the gnarled. It’s when cowards and heroes are forged by television sets. bells of bronze, silver, gold, and lead toll green shadows. Tobacco, chocolate and deodorant are the luxuries here, and maybe a funeral for the hollow skins of flies. Water trots onto the scene, it always finds a way. Red sunbeams through fanblades speak well of all. The emptiness goes unrifled by our tremblings as we wait to be terrified. And a castrated cavalry sleeps atop a sacred hill, shadows stinking absolutely. A religious experience here, the eyes against the air, a tapestry you can’t touch or stop looking at. You see and hear the quiet as the wind gives up the gold. And it is night, and oblivion sheathes its victory, and all pigs can walk into bars on two legs.
January 23, 2013
on shore
on shore
no boat today. an east 30-knot menace. exposed from the east, we’d be hauling in our own puke – and my limbs. the old-timer on the dock, murph, tells me tomorrow is the day. west, 10 knots, tomorrow. i like any day but today, tho because they’d forecast possible thunderstorms, i’m already in these used and damp fishing clothes. tomorrow will be clear. murph asks if i want to work inside the lobster plant. i tell him no thanks, i prefer the boat. i have a cushion of a hundred-fifty, though i have none of it. a hundred-fifty if i count on my heroin dealer. out at sea is our waiting net, full of gasping fish, trapping more, an unguessed dead zone we will pounce upon tomorrow, to sort the quivering muscle from the wasted, white eyes. i walk up to a soda machine and find some options. i want that flag pole cut into beer cans. the wind holds the flag almost flat, sandwiched. we are flat-out . . . up at 4:30 for no work, but i am released to dreaming. this chick in chicago. i think about her too much. some kind of absorption taking place. in the beginning was her idea of the word help. she has soul, she bounces. she is a blue dog. i don’t need to talk to her anymore. i need to see her. do the voice and words belong to a beginning? or is she saying, "you are pathetic and i am stupid"? in the park at 5:30 i see a beige lab, her. i see a hackey-sack circle worn into the grass, a crop circle where youth landed, her. the breeze feints in the valley before the water, cool, perfect, her. the grass is wet and the park is a night sky through which i wander between old gas lamp constellations, blinding and turning me on, her, her, her. the moon is straight up, a slight crescent which is her reclining in her other time. a narrow ring of light around the moon, even the unsunned and unseen body. halos, they wait, steadfast. so do tanqueray buzzes. the head is sharp, points northwest, the toes point southwest. a crow flies across the wharf, lands on a cross-mast, the spot where it or its brother was yesterday at the same hour. other crows call in the distance. flapping old glory in the chalk-blue sky, an apt voice for these ten-million-dollar yachts. not a soul in sight, except for the crow as he drops from the mast and glides past my eyes. what kind of day can it be? a rest from the hunt is permission to die, to give orders.
no boat today. an east 30-knot menace. exposed from the east, we’d be hauling in our own puke – and my limbs. the old-timer on the dock, murph, tells me tomorrow is the day. west, 10 knots, tomorrow. i like any day but today, tho because they’d forecast possible thunderstorms, i’m already in these used and damp fishing clothes. tomorrow will be clear. murph asks if i want to work inside the lobster plant. i tell him no thanks, i prefer the boat. i have a cushion of a hundred-fifty, though i have none of it. a hundred-fifty if i count on my heroin dealer. out at sea is our waiting net, full of gasping fish, trapping more, an unguessed dead zone we will pounce upon tomorrow, to sort the quivering muscle from the wasted, white eyes. i walk up to a soda machine and find some options. i want that flag pole cut into beer cans. the wind holds the flag almost flat, sandwiched. we are flat-out . . . up at 4:30 for no work, but i am released to dreaming. this chick in chicago. i think about her too much. some kind of absorption taking place. in the beginning was her idea of the word help. she has soul, she bounces. she is a blue dog. i don’t need to talk to her anymore. i need to see her. do the voice and words belong to a beginning? or is she saying, "you are pathetic and i am stupid"? in the park at 5:30 i see a beige lab, her. i see a hackey-sack circle worn into the grass, a crop circle where youth landed, her. the breeze feints in the valley before the water, cool, perfect, her. the grass is wet and the park is a night sky through which i wander between old gas lamp constellations, blinding and turning me on, her, her, her. the moon is straight up, a slight crescent which is her reclining in her other time. a narrow ring of light around the moon, even the unsunned and unseen body. halos, they wait, steadfast. so do tanqueray buzzes. the head is sharp, points northwest, the toes point southwest. a crow flies across the wharf, lands on a cross-mast, the spot where it or its brother was yesterday at the same hour. other crows call in the distance. flapping old glory in the chalk-blue sky, an apt voice for these ten-million-dollar yachts. not a soul in sight, except for the crow as he drops from the mast and glides past my eyes. what kind of day can it be? a rest from the hunt is permission to die, to give orders.
January 21, 2013
Note to a crow
Note to a crow
xxxxxx-sun blue and cloud white ribs show beyond the lower gray clouds, which look like they’ve been drinking charcoal. A good-bye hero sky moving in to spell a day off.
An east-southeast wind dragging rain up from Jersey. A day off means actual sleep. But it is too early to call. These sonsofbitches have gone out in hurricanes and balked at drizzly two-foot whitecaps. My fate is open: a skate back to the showers or a monkey aboard to be yelled at for watching the sun rise on the sea instead of the scum on the lines.
I have three cigs.
A bottle of shoplifted Sprite.
No gum…
...and a Freon lip buzz and cold bubble symphony from the plant. Topside beggars roost like unfinished nails. A crow sits on the spar overhead. Sodium vapor wash on the paper, brighter than these scribblings for a girl I cannot waltz. How did you do it, men? The last place for poems here, it is the last place of poems. You.
A school of minnows jumps through a platinum hole. Fleeing death is a disturbing requirement here.
I cannot light a cigarette.
I am fucked if we go.
Conserve…
There is a dealer who owes me money. How’s that? It all goes around and this time it came to him. Interest nauseates me and he’s sure to oblige.
A raindrop!
Here…
Over there…
Salvation!
Delivered by a raven!
If I sit here long enough they’ll drag me into the lobster plant to measure my antennae. Black and white and red and red apron gluttons waiting with white feathers and glowing orange Marlboros on the loading dock. Crows on the deck of the Jerry And Jimmy, trying spider crab, passing.
Crows are goofy walkers.
A flock of pigeons makes a half-assed circle over the pier, seems like they think we don’t know they’re pretending not to know where they’re going. They rest uneasily atop the wiry roof of a bar. Some crows up there too. And a lone crackling starling that the crows will ignore until it is dead.
Purple.
Bright blue.
High, light and white.
A smooth yet complex unraveling. logical, scientific, plotted by the rules of affinity.
Maybe I am in the wrong place.
xxxxxx-sun blue and cloud white ribs show beyond the lower gray clouds, which look like they’ve been drinking charcoal. A good-bye hero sky moving in to spell a day off.
An east-southeast wind dragging rain up from Jersey. A day off means actual sleep. But it is too early to call. These sonsofbitches have gone out in hurricanes and balked at drizzly two-foot whitecaps. My fate is open: a skate back to the showers or a monkey aboard to be yelled at for watching the sun rise on the sea instead of the scum on the lines.
I have three cigs.
A bottle of shoplifted Sprite.
No gum…
...and a Freon lip buzz and cold bubble symphony from the plant. Topside beggars roost like unfinished nails. A crow sits on the spar overhead. Sodium vapor wash on the paper, brighter than these scribblings for a girl I cannot waltz. How did you do it, men? The last place for poems here, it is the last place of poems. You.
A school of minnows jumps through a platinum hole. Fleeing death is a disturbing requirement here.
I cannot light a cigarette.
I am fucked if we go.
Conserve…
There is a dealer who owes me money. How’s that? It all goes around and this time it came to him. Interest nauseates me and he’s sure to oblige.
A raindrop!
Here…
Over there…
Salvation!
Delivered by a raven!
If I sit here long enough they’ll drag me into the lobster plant to measure my antennae. Black and white and red and red apron gluttons waiting with white feathers and glowing orange Marlboros on the loading dock. Crows on the deck of the Jerry And Jimmy, trying spider crab, passing.
Crows are goofy walkers.
A flock of pigeons makes a half-assed circle over the pier, seems like they think we don’t know they’re pretending not to know where they’re going. They rest uneasily atop the wiry roof of a bar. Some crows up there too. And a lone crackling starling that the crows will ignore until it is dead.
Purple.
Bright blue.
High, light and white.
A smooth yet complex unraveling. logical, scientific, plotted by the rules of affinity.
Maybe I am in the wrong place.
January 19, 2013
Chained
Chained
I do not have the jetty to myself. I am not alone. I am watching things eat other things which are surely eating yet more things. Waves slide up the rocks translucent green and collide with higher rocks, turn white. Each set is a revolution. Anticipation, violence, silence, repetition. A cormorant dives through the bopping ceiling and the sky stops breathing. The cormorant reappears with a fish flapping in its beak. It holds the fish by the middle, crosswise. The fish is flapping. The bird shakes its prey. A quick twist of its head, it releases its grip on the fish and spins it, catches it again by the head. The cormorant pauses with the tail sticking from its mouth. I wait. It swallows. Its white throat swells and the fish is gone. Forever. The fish is not gone, never. I can imagine it, whole, in the gut, gills still trying and eyes burning in night as the universe shakes again...
I do not have the jetty to myself. I am not alone. I am watching things eat other things which are surely eating yet more things. Waves slide up the rocks translucent green and collide with higher rocks, turn white. Each set is a revolution. Anticipation, violence, silence, repetition. A cormorant dives through the bopping ceiling and the sky stops breathing. The cormorant reappears with a fish flapping in its beak. It holds the fish by the middle, crosswise. The fish is flapping. The bird shakes its prey. A quick twist of its head, it releases its grip on the fish and spins it, catches it again by the head. The cormorant pauses with the tail sticking from its mouth. I wait. It swallows. Its white throat swells and the fish is gone. Forever. The fish is not gone, never. I can imagine it, whole, in the gut, gills still trying and eyes burning in night as the universe shakes again...
January 17, 2013
Another morning
Another morning
Gray sky mist about the pines.
Sparrows singing:
Tonewyorkbenny
Backnobackbeatfeetbags
Warm breeze sneaks under the window frame, the earliest commuters diving into the hedges with trimmers, every socket with a bulb. The shingles are still damp when the sky makes one more offering, more of a gentle shake than a declaration, a dry rain on a puddle. A longing alto sax pleads with its player, a busted-down animal led by a cigarette back to his four walls, his glory.
If trees wept in songs, we might listen.
The rare miracle proves possibility, fosters my daily alchemies.
Another day and people are looking in and people are looking out and the sun is up there, somewhere, too far for most to embrace.
Gray sky mist about the pines.
Sparrows singing:
Tonewyorkbenny
Backnobackbeatfeetbags
Warm breeze sneaks under the window frame, the earliest commuters diving into the hedges with trimmers, every socket with a bulb. The shingles are still damp when the sky makes one more offering, more of a gentle shake than a declaration, a dry rain on a puddle. A longing alto sax pleads with its player, a busted-down animal led by a cigarette back to his four walls, his glory.
If trees wept in songs, we might listen.
The rare miracle proves possibility, fosters my daily alchemies.
Another day and people are looking in and people are looking out and the sun is up there, somewhere, too far for most to embrace.
January 15, 2013
Divider
Divider
The afternoon got here and now it’s trying to change itself, like a wet towel on a chair, the time when I am an empty gut swollen to its most unappealing, when the light proves its grace superior and even the roof is embarrassed. It’s not evil, but you must quietly watch your personality become an object, your body a struggling subject, a disturbance to the way the bottles sit.
A child has no understudy.
The man looks and fails without faith.
One tires of the small notes tacked to the forehead of what is called time, a mere fidgeting reflection of endless dissatisfaction. Silence swells as the what could have been’s fly and prostrate themselves before...before what? What is? And drain now of its holy uncertainties to give us a plotted idea of what we call disintegration.
I see a why, like a brook.
I see mountains of how.
I’m sitting on my anthill, a small deal where the cosmos is the last laugh. For those who live on insect wavelengths, it sounds like a bowl and a spoon and looks like a blanket waving from tacks in the window, small details you start to notice when you’ve seen the play too many times.
The afternoon got here and now it’s trying to change itself, like a wet towel on a chair, the time when I am an empty gut swollen to its most unappealing, when the light proves its grace superior and even the roof is embarrassed. It’s not evil, but you must quietly watch your personality become an object, your body a struggling subject, a disturbance to the way the bottles sit.
A child has no understudy.
The man looks and fails without faith.
One tires of the small notes tacked to the forehead of what is called time, a mere fidgeting reflection of endless dissatisfaction. Silence swells as the what could have been’s fly and prostrate themselves before...before what? What is? And drain now of its holy uncertainties to give us a plotted idea of what we call disintegration.
I see a why, like a brook.
I see mountains of how.
I’m sitting on my anthill, a small deal where the cosmos is the last laugh. For those who live on insect wavelengths, it sounds like a bowl and a spoon and looks like a blanket waving from tacks in the window, small details you start to notice when you’ve seen the play too many times.
January 14, 2013
disrepair
Disrepair
Bravery set out as captain on the seas of idiocy and found itself floating in a bushel basket, sticking pins into its bones to flee time. Performed for oneself, the trick succeeds in attracting only sharks, those most honest of prophets.
You grabbed the wing of a crying albatross and it calmly refused you.
Some wiseass on a passing rust-heap tossed you a fortune cookie containing the message "eat me." You laughed and a pellet of opium fell into your lap. You laughed again.
For two days you were intelligent and social, concocting a scheme to build an oceangoing real estate development for the stormy petrels.
Day three you almost jumped.
But when you leaned over the side you saw the devil.
You fell back and started with the pins again, pushing them against your sunbaked instinct.
You are forgotten.
Nobody knows you are missing.
When you see the basket is filling with blood, you remember your family and friends. You toss the pins overboard.
You wish you had a sail.
You wish you had a motor.
You wish you knew where you were.
You wish you had a boat.
Or at least bigger hands.
Bravery set out as captain on the seas of idiocy and found itself floating in a bushel basket, sticking pins into its bones to flee time. Performed for oneself, the trick succeeds in attracting only sharks, those most honest of prophets.
You grabbed the wing of a crying albatross and it calmly refused you.
Some wiseass on a passing rust-heap tossed you a fortune cookie containing the message "eat me." You laughed and a pellet of opium fell into your lap. You laughed again.
For two days you were intelligent and social, concocting a scheme to build an oceangoing real estate development for the stormy petrels.
Day three you almost jumped.
But when you leaned over the side you saw the devil.
You fell back and started with the pins again, pushing them against your sunbaked instinct.
You are forgotten.
Nobody knows you are missing.
When you see the basket is filling with blood, you remember your family and friends. You toss the pins overboard.
You wish you had a sail.
You wish you had a motor.
You wish you knew where you were.
You wish you had a boat.
Or at least bigger hands.
January 13, 2013
fish pomes I
Lately I have been unable to locate anything but ATM’s and heroin dealers, but today I was at the end of the pier when I reached into my pocket and felt soft paper. Crumpled napkins. There was writing on them, black pen, my words.
No cure
Is it again or is it always?
Oh no, not again.
Life, the greatest virus, hides in itself, the uninvited opportunist the host cannot live without. The ocean, black, patient with menace, is a straight philosopher. The galley is set for cannibals, tongues against teeth, the sounds! And blood on the walls, looks like a sidewalk. The advantages of a grass blade. Clumps sprouting from apathetic nutrients know when to stop. On and on a cursed breeze with shared destinies, we are roaming, bent. A drowned ballet feeding like barnacles.
Light
Dawn absorbs my fantasies and I’m stuck with a garbage bag full of posthumous decisions, none of which amounts to a shadow of a window screen. Why do today what you will want to do less tomorrow? Sterilizing garbage cans with dirty underwear, a philosophy to make friends by. Pounding wood into hearts isn’t for squeamish hands. I won’t deny it. I harden my stakes in the fires of my own humiliation, I pound them in with fists marred by contempt. I’m always just starting around here. The ones who sing about experience are always singing and even a symphony will grow cobwebs. The ghosts know which way the bows are pointed. One of these days my head is going to leap off my shoulders, just to get a positive definition of pathetically lost.
A job for tomorrow’s eyes.
Or maybe Friday’s eyes, which through their more advanced sensibility will forgive me my weaknesses and pronounce these splinters and ash understood, forgiven, and finally, saintly! I commanded the day to change direction and from somewhere the laughter of a strange young woman.
A cold rain has kissed my pantcuffs, sea knitted to sky in yarns of homes, sand.
Waiting for someone to scream, answered by crows and gulls, my most frequent callers.
Outrageous birds.
I can’t nail down my listenings and my songs get the neighbors bitching.
I had these things which I was told were inalienable after I lost them.
They’re written in wind, on crumpled curtains tacked to the walls.
A shrine to dead branches and the tail of the dawn. I listened to this pier long before I jumped off the end of it.
No cure
Is it again or is it always?
Oh no, not again.
Life, the greatest virus, hides in itself, the uninvited opportunist the host cannot live without. The ocean, black, patient with menace, is a straight philosopher. The galley is set for cannibals, tongues against teeth, the sounds! And blood on the walls, looks like a sidewalk. The advantages of a grass blade. Clumps sprouting from apathetic nutrients know when to stop. On and on a cursed breeze with shared destinies, we are roaming, bent. A drowned ballet feeding like barnacles.
Light
Dawn absorbs my fantasies and I’m stuck with a garbage bag full of posthumous decisions, none of which amounts to a shadow of a window screen. Why do today what you will want to do less tomorrow? Sterilizing garbage cans with dirty underwear, a philosophy to make friends by. Pounding wood into hearts isn’t for squeamish hands. I won’t deny it. I harden my stakes in the fires of my own humiliation, I pound them in with fists marred by contempt. I’m always just starting around here. The ones who sing about experience are always singing and even a symphony will grow cobwebs. The ghosts know which way the bows are pointed. One of these days my head is going to leap off my shoulders, just to get a positive definition of pathetically lost.
A job for tomorrow’s eyes.
Or maybe Friday’s eyes, which through their more advanced sensibility will forgive me my weaknesses and pronounce these splinters and ash understood, forgiven, and finally, saintly! I commanded the day to change direction and from somewhere the laughter of a strange young woman.
A cold rain has kissed my pantcuffs, sea knitted to sky in yarns of homes, sand.
Waiting for someone to scream, answered by crows and gulls, my most frequent callers.
Outrageous birds.
I can’t nail down my listenings and my songs get the neighbors bitching.
I had these things which I was told were inalienable after I lost them.
They’re written in wind, on crumpled curtains tacked to the walls.
A shrine to dead branches and the tail of the dawn. I listened to this pier long before I jumped off the end of it.
January 12, 2013
world trade
world trade
[it is difficult to envision what isn’t, but at the site you get an idea of the breadth of what was. the hole, the space, whatever you want to call it, is a valley through which no sympathy or anger blows. i felt it was the way it was, a familiar grating, adjacent to nothing.]
January 11, 2013
what's in six days?
what’s in 6 days?
it’s nothing
to be
poetic about
or proud of
it’s just an unfortunate fact
unfortunate because
i fell into the river last night
twice
i also fell down the embankment
split my head open
and tore my shoulder apart
a monster fish
fought for its life
though i would have
let it go
it snapped the line
i drank a beer
my first in six days
free, i could do anything
and i continued
the usual
i write drunken letters to friends
i have not seen in years
what is such a letter
worth
next to how we stood
side by side?
guilt, lemonade, nicotine, librium
i am a reluctant stabilizer
conscripted in a fight
against aluminum cans
will i sleep on the floor and be swept with it?
there is no romance, glory, or condoning
a war so easy to lose
it’s nothing
to be
poetic about
or proud of
it’s just an unfortunate fact
unfortunate because
i fell into the river last night
twice
i also fell down the embankment
split my head open
and tore my shoulder apart
a monster fish
fought for its life
though i would have
let it go
it snapped the line
i drank a beer
my first in six days
free, i could do anything
and i continued
the usual
i write drunken letters to friends
i have not seen in years
what is such a letter
worth
next to how we stood
side by side?
guilt, lemonade, nicotine, librium
i am a reluctant stabilizer
conscripted in a fight
against aluminum cans
will i sleep on the floor and be swept with it?
there is no romance, glory, or condoning
a war so easy to lose
