Books: An American Papyrus: 25 Poems
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Steven Sills >> An American Papyrus: 25 Poems
Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven Sills
AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMS
by Steven Sills
Post Annulment 2
Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
through
Solipsistic muteness
With an exhaltation startled and choking.
As the sun blazes upon the terminal's
Scraped concrete
The shelved rows of the poor men
Hear the sound die on the pavement
In a gradual dying echo.
A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
awaken;
And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,
But misses.
And as he watches his own spit vanish
From the hard crest of the world,
And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
to bleed...
And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the
angles
He and his wife stood to project
The intermingled shadows that both
Had labled as their marriage.
He enters the second bus:
Its coolness sedating the skin that
Overlaps his troubled mind.
His thoughts pull together
Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.
He feels a little pacified.
He knows the shadow's intangible depth:
Its vastness having overpowered him these months
Until he could not reach the logic that told him
To find himself outside its barriers.
As he stares out of the window
He wonders why she has left.
How could she have left without indication
When he has remained angled toward work
So that he and his wife can stay alive?
In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the
windows
Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,
Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell.
The idea of her not home, and legally annulled
From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his
desparate
Thrusts--makes him feel sick. He gets down from the
bus.
He goes to work. He suddenly knows that being in love
is not love.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Earth
I use her earth to plant my seed--
My limbs twisting around the collective molecules,
Trying to dig in.
Only the obscurity of my body
Presses so fully that it is neither
Body nor bed nor the intersection of both,
But euphoric traction;
And then, planted and repulsed,
Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her,
That bed of earth.
With all conscious force
I breathe the aloneness that untangibly defines the
Air. I swallow its ambrosia
Of depth and ask myself
Why I ever married the woman.
There is void.
Then a hollow answer calls my name and says "it was
time."
I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.
I use what has been planted for the reaping--
My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton;
And soon a building will be again the structure
Around men of cotton suits, pushing a product.
Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop.
She had asked to fix me breakfast
But I would not let her.
My miniature is one and black.
I drink me in when I am not
Pressed by the coffee's steam.
Cars' casketed phantoms of people
Chasing up and down Dunlavy Street of Houston
After something--their whole lives after something--
Come and go from consciousness like respiration.
The people plant and reap.
Who can count all of their
Insignificant names?--
Animals that are not created sensible enough
To propagate unless lost to frenzy,
Caught in structures without meaning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bar-Room Buddies
We Mongoled Human experience.
We pushed it into our mouths
As the crisp pretzels of which the shape became salty
dust
At our tastes: the crispness of life,
And we Mongoled human experience.
The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomever
it had beeen
At the moment of malevolently blessing our heated and
Maddening consumption, was what we left
Our wives for; and then hardened ourselves on
The springless cushions of the sofas of our friends
Whom we eventually forgot the names of:
The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled,
And felt the bladed emptiness
Of stomachs that couold not consume food
On mornings after. But the Angels of bar rooms
continually
Appeared before darkiened stages where, in front of
guitars,
We played. They apppeared at various stages to the
weeks of the years.
They came, silently whispering themselves off
As Sandras or Cassandras;
Stared up at us for two hours; and disappeared.
The reappearance of their light enamored us, and we
left
And followed but found bats that offered
No shelter, and often caves we could not fit into
Or wer forbidden from entering.
We invested our capital
In the Silicon Valleys of this great nation.
Third-world bitches, in factories, became sick for our
chips.
We held power.
We bred metals and bought the ownership titles
Of properties, but could not find a home of the world.
We married again and brought forth children
Whom were duplicate strangers of ourselves.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Retarded
Legs clamp around the rim--
The whole seated body sticking slightly
As moaning howls come from his
Paralyzed mouth.
It is after having
Put him to bed for a nap, and then the pot,
That this woman who would dab the bile
From his bed like one who napkins a spill from
A tablecloth, does not clean away
The substance behind the smell
Which predominates over the bathroom urinal
And aggravates his senses.
No woman to do these tasks,
And then to rim her hand
Under the butt;
No woman to drag him from
The pot,
After she has had his body bent
Toward her for the wiping,
And flop him onto the bench
In the shower; no woman...
She sits, cigarette limp in her mouth,
Thinking that the day has almost ended.
And the stars she stares out at
From the living room of the group home
She remembers are other earths limping
Half-free in the grips of other
Dying suns.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Houston
In Houston's summers the gods
Use the clouds as urinals
For three minutes daily.
In Houston the Boat-People
Come from planes.
Inner-city--intermingled and alone
Like its green Buffalo-Bayou
Strewn only in the imaginations
Of those who run along it briefly.
A mile from the bayou
The settled imagination of a
Nine year-old Vietnamese girl
Allows a mangled brown horse
To elongate and flatten out
To the reality of the rolled up carpet
(All because of the rain).
She feels the wetness now beginning
To seep into her clothes;
She raises herself; she sees the old Cuban
Walking from the house with hands
To the sky, as if to make the heavens appear a little
longer
In the manner that the downtown buildings,
From Dallas Street on, by their
Stories of windows draw down
the sky's enormity from measurement
Both extensive and inadequate;
And she follows him.
Apart
And yet they both think about the Vietnamese
Teenager with curlers in her hair
Who yells "boo" behind doors
That are entered;
The Cambodian boy who
To the view of the Montrose area
Pours on the bare shrubs,
And then strips and pours upon himself,
The water from a hose, and that both animal and plant
Glisten in the sun
As if they have been greased;
Falling into Houston's world of high buildings
From the descending planes
While hoping that the big world would
Not overpower their memories;
And the Cubans, in house #2 always yelling of "Miami."
They believe that Cambodian refugees
Always clean house #1,
That Africans never clean themselves,
and that Laotians often pour rice down the drains
Causing the faucets of the house to stop-up;
And that the welcome-center Manager
Does not care to bring over a little clothing
And a little food or take them on little trips
To the Social Security Office or the doctor's office
Past 5 p.m.--
But of different seconds in that minute,
Different lengths, and various perceptions.
She remembers the ugly man
In Vietnam that ran from the police
And then a scar around his eye
Opened from the clubs and the blood
Tried to escape him completely
As the body attempted to pull itself
From the street, and could not.
He remembers thinking that the
Cranium of an old man is always heavy
On the neck, and that his
Is becoming like this.
He desires to clasp the gate
That is around the Hispanic cemetary
And watches the cars on Allen Parkway, below,
Curve and toward the sun
Become a gleam moving endlessly
And instantly gone.
He desires to arrive there and
Read a few tombstones
Before and after watching.
She desires to imagine horses
Carrying her away from here to the West,
And other horses following with her family behind.
She desires to follow the Cuban that she fears
Since he is moving away from the refugee houses.
There are no horses in inner-city; and
The Hispanic cemetery cannot be found
To souls wanting to rest there.
"Este cerca de calle Alabama?"
He wonders,.
The rain stops. The hammers and saws
peel their sounds from a roof.
And he notices her steps
Despite the stronger sounds; halts;
And glances behind him as shingles fall ahead,
While wanting her to completely leave him
And wanting her to come with him.
In Houston's summers,
At certain areas, shingles like
The god's shit falls from housetops
And the dung dries in the air,
Flattens, and ricochets to sidewalks.
In Houston Cubans pack
From refugee houses
And plan to fly away into America, and depart
Far from the Castilian hot-dog vender
Of Herman Park waiting for
The thirsty and hungered
And those ignorant of what they want
But know that they want something
And so come to buy from her
Who wants people to come to her
For more than the chips
Because the hotdogs are overpriced,
Who formulates
That she is unskilled
And that a computer course would answer it all;
Far from the Netherland psychologists who
Stares at her ebony reflection
In Rothko Chapel's dyed pool;
Apart from others, and no-one, all
Pulling alone for humanity to both
Come and go from their lives.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Politics of Herb's Woman
Waitresses lightly frisbeeing out
Dishes of breakfasts
Catching glimpses of Colonel North's
Photos on the front sides
Of customers' papers and
Formulating judgements
Of rebel or martyr
From an appearance
And a few words that
Drifted in when the
Hands relaxed plates to table mats;
Farmers wishing the seeds
To suddenly open to be plucked up faster
So that they are not
The last ones laid in
By their hands;
Little "third-world" nations of people hoping
For the great debtor nation to continental-drift
To bankruptcy, painless and alone;
And nearly empty of thoughts--Herb's woman, Jeanie,
Behind the Ellison Building standing
With concrete drilling its stiffness
Through her soles.
There had been a time--
With face raised from her age-smelted pose
To the ever firm stories of that building--
That she would think of receiving
her paycheck so she could
Go to K-Mart and have something.
But now years on top of each other,
Uncountable to her,
She continues guiding
The few of the masses of cars
That turn into the lot
Where to park: in winters
Conscious of the visibility
Of her cold breathing,
And summers with the scents
Of greased telephone poles
And sights of light gleaming off
Car windows, she thinks
Of buying old junk from garage sales
For her yard sales, with the same prices,
So as to recall the sounds of human voices
Other than her own.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brumfield
His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's
manual
With which to have faith in, and no rules
But to move with the dustmop pushed before him
Along the empty corridor, and then down a staircase
Where he could descend to more passive depths in
cleaning.
At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet
coming to him;
Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked like
marble;
And these would be dominant sensations
Though he would be vaguely aware of them.
Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his hand
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
His unshaven face. Then in his only room where the
bare mattress
Was lain along with his leather jacket
And the dirty underwear cuddled around a clean
toilet--
Where the Rosary hung on a wall
And the guitar leaned in a corner--
he would do his push-ups.
Most of those early mornings some train
Would pour its breath to the weeds
At the edge of the tracks, losing them
In sound and mist of a voice
Screaming out, alone,
Through the cold and the living.
His arms would tremble
With the body weakening, and then demobilized, to the
floor
Before the count of fifty.
Through the fogged condensation
Of the upper corners to a window
He would glance up at the train--
Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,
Or the seminary, which he never
Grasped or rejected and so
They slipped away;
Or his mother, who with cancer
Began to close herself off to him--
Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time
With the familiarity of two strangers
Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracion A Traves De Gasshole
(Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)
Saturday. All the same:
A silvery grey
Thin and undistinguishable
From skies to parking lot
In exact shadow; and he finds his car.
The lid, laced in rust,
By the turn of the key,
Parts the grey as it pulls up;
The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;
And the ground beef slaps down on the floor
Of the trunk as if a second slaughter,
Its grounded nerves convulsing it
A couple of inches nearer the oil stain.
That meat, in body, that last moment
After consciousness has severed itself;
Skin peeling under the fur, hidden,
But not from the last hot beams ahead
Of emerging dusk, becoming crisp
And then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,
With the last of the air drawing in,
begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it
Like he could imagine, from unexact memories,
The woman, last night
At the hospital, whom he began to like--
her body pulling cell by cell
Apart before he had a chance
To finish the rescue with the hose
Descending the nostril as a rope,
and then flushing out mucus.
He gives the ground beef an air-born sommersault to the
bag
And closes the lid that is connected to the vague
light bulb of the
trunk.
The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid
Is lank and curved; the appearance of his face
With its facial tip of the nose and its greased
Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic
reflection.
His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic man
Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags
Of groceries in an embrace that could be
For weighty children; he thinks "The senescent,
Carless, careless baws--turd! A campesino!,"
And he envisions himself as that: having to pull out
the thorns
That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels
scattered cacti leaves from out of the back
Of the pickup to his animals;
And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses made
of wood
That had been patted loosly together like adobes,
beside
The families of the kiln workers
Whom with him eat out Land's blessings
And piss and shit out onto her graces,
But himself happily not knowing the language of the
Mexican people...
Himself not wanting to know the language
Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,
Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt
Echo.
He does not wish to think of them
Or the vaginas that are not his to put on
Or the illusive woman who would be sick with him
like a child lying on the sofa in fever and hoping
That in the shadows on the wall and the
Passing sounds that are concentrated on her mind
One will bring deliverance--only placing the
deliverance
On him and yet loving him for himself
Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his
car
He feels that the recreation in life is also a
routine:
A routine of sharing and parting,
And at the end one is grounded and tossed
Before the validity of his own
Perceptions is resolved. But he is alive,
Now; and he will put away his groceries;
Read a chapter of his Biblia,
A cenotaph of the dead..
maybe a verse; think of forgetting mass
and mailing in his tithing
And to veg' himself away a few hours
Before he would have another night
Of throats, lungs and
The air of the masses.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come
(Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)
Grabbing the already read letter,
Slipping out hot and wet
From the bare mattress--
Like Sweet Pea's turds
Right before
His psychomotor seizures,
Only without a softness to stub myself
Into--stiff and hard I drop
From the cold rim of the bunk
(Even if I awaken
The idiots below).
With non-syllables and vowellessness
A pitch that is language enough
To keep this man, Jim,
From wherever
The unassimilated disappear
Howls "He does not want me here"
While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinal
On the walls barricading a pillowed head.
The joke is on him this time...
All over him for the next hours.
The letter's impression
Writes and rewrites in my mind:
Come, my sister calls to our father
Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back.
Only suppositories are meant to do so.
Come, she speaks to me,
And the shrink
Shall put in touch
All that he did to us.
Tripping over Keith's mattress
I step out in humid silence
And wipe my cheeks.
Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry
Bugs in blue, electric lights.
Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,
Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body
To the bench where I sit.
Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;
Go to the bathroom, Keith:
In this camp I shape the minutes of his life
To some acceptable pattern.
He rubs his hands together
As if trying to spark fire
For the inhabitants
Of his imaginary world.
Stop that, Keith, I say. Sit, Keith.
keith sits: There is no coming out
For him after twenty years
This way,
Or perhaps for me.
The pale gas lamps are strewn around
A small area of limbs
In a corner of the sky--
All but patches are aflame
Like a roof of a tent around
The stakes, ready to break off
And fall.
Rock, Keith,
As the sun is stroked
So far into the lap of the night,
Suffocating and as good as gone.
The folding and unfolding
Of a crinkled letter into squares;
The imagining of the counselor
Of cabin four
And what a pulse would have created
If her head had drowsed
To my hand on the back of her seat
On our way here;
The general silent howling of "Come!"--
Keith does not cripple to this.
He has no sister that calls a stranger back
To erase and draw back
Them both.
He does not say "come!"
All hours.
He comes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Gentleman's Right
He must have thought
That there was some covenant of the old
That bound each to move around it
In a square orbit.
he was fifty now, so there
Must not have been any question:
Lessen the speed at the train tracks;
Stumble his car over their ribs;
Swerve closely to the drive
At a slower pace, and hope
That where men dodge the bumping
Of their tails from Parks
For a private club,
That one would come
Out from the doors, partnerless.
If not, he would have
To go around the block
Another time
Like other old fags before--
The railway crippling with
Its iron in each return raising,
Cracking up from the skin of the street;
Limbs of that bar's tree
Waving down (some
To the windshield), warning.
Thoughts that the energy of youth
Had some pivotal focus
Made each imagined man to him
Like a lollipop,
but the parks would not do:
There the man with the smashed fender
Might be obligated to 69
A winner without a face--
a drag race ending in the winner's backseat,
And on his tools which would rib in.
And inside that bar where women snuggle
Away their faces in equality,
And where men rotate hips on the dance floor
Like an earth's axes...this would not do:
For there were no friends to affect
Mutually and faggishly in embraces;
And the young and sensitive
Were Oriental and fonder
Of the cigarettes
They put in their faces
And the beers that suddenly appeared
Before them. This would not do:
Mouth-hugging the earth
On its bulge of life
Or moving to songs
Where the dances never end.
He was an old fag and must retain
A square orbit.
It, at least,
Was a gentleman's right
And in accordance with the
Manner of the fags.
The block was long.
In the shadows and oblique actualities
He felt its length. His stomach tightened
In fear of the length.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transitional Mendacities
No, the supremity of having been split off from
A larger entity by being spit out
From pussy lips while
Reeking pain and havoc
Like a living tongue pulled
From aperture and den
Is not sign enough
That he is meant
To be sustained
As an inegral part of the world,
Unique and indespensable.
Thinking about how much longer
He will need to play out the day
That issue is not his, and never has been.
"The job was done"
He could say, later,
After the storm.
Hand-limp,
His broom dance sweeps
Upended under an empty park bench--
Dirt caught under
The tongues of his feet--
So his paycheck
Will come in the mail
And become bank figures
He can suck from
To keep he and his woman
Housed and fed, and well enough
To legally rape each other in embraces,
Forgetful of their lives.
The man has a son,
and stands nights
aching behind an assembly line,
Sleeping the days away
While his son goes to school.
The son thinks his father
Is thoughtless and dirty
And his mother a grease-bitch
For marrying him.
The son grows up
Between his college books,
And begins to put it together:
A society of men
Wanting to take a variety
Of stimulating produce--
Though some were more the makers
Than the takers;
The image of rightness
In a man putting his hormones
To the making of a company
In a family; a family
That needs a provider to survive;
A man honorable and trapped
And there are nights
He awakens, gagging at the
Sudden thought of a man
Next to him
Who had engaged his body
In a lower form of sharing.
And he wonders if embracing a world
Of ideas can be done
When all things cannot be believed;
If humanism is
Energy vented
To avoid futility;
And what grossness
He would have to justify next--
All on those nights
When self-perspectives
Are swept under in change.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Man of Coal
You knew it was coming:
Twenty-three years and the mine
Would notice you one time,
Photocopied.
A voice below bellows
Your name, Dave,
Into the settling air of coal dust.
After you shut off the engines
And descend beneath the dragline's skeletal
Nose which canopys like a skyscraper on
Its side in mid-air
You confront a face
You cannot see in the descending sun. Shadow-still,
Enormous might engulfing over you
To the height of
The dragline's triple-tank wheels,
You see him--
The heels on his leather boots
Locked in the train-track grooves of dirt.
As he hands the notice to you
Its stiffness shakes
In your calloused hand.
You know that what is left of the day
Is becoming cold; and despite the smell
Of dirt there is a scent
Of watermelon in the damp air,
Although you do not know it as that smell
Or that there is a smell at all, really.
And yet a faintness of some half-knowledge
That touches its weight lightly in your mind
Drags itself into places you cannot touch.
Pulling out of his shadow
You think of how you might hand
This sheet to your wife
Like a child presenting to his mother
An award from school:
Your wife screaming laughter of relief
As she hugs the paper to her breast;
Or how your strong hand might sweat
As you pick up the reciever of the ringing phone,
Expecting that after saying "Hi"
That one of your college children's voices would end
The conversation there
For you to hand the vibrations
To your wife--but instead
That child
Congratulates you
For no longer destroying the land.
The noon hour whistle
Vibrates the walls
Of the hollow heavens
To the cab; the thermos-well
Of soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, but
You feel its stillness
Stagnating and absorbing
The contaminating minerals
Of the tin, walling in the contents;
And still you want to turn on the ignition
To finish out one more complete day
In the twenty-three years here
Of hard work.
The quandary then snaps, and you escape.
When out of the valley you enter the truck
And close the door--
The second time harder, and it latches.
You turn the key
And the truck bounces to the highway.
You stop at the sign;
Stop the motor while
Still on the dirt road;
But in the end turn left, again,
Home.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maddog
(Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)