Sonnettics

Improvidence is all that smiles on me
And then it’s just a Cheshire smile at best
It’s seven years since I was thirty-three
And seven more, at least, before I’m blessed
Or maybe I’m the one in bad decline
I’m not the one emerging from a tomb
Five hundred thousand dollars could be mine
If I could coax my verses to subsume
Improvidence, and make it reappear
As if it were a savior or a ghost
I wonder then if anyone would hear
My little songs, the ones I sing the most
I doubt it as I turn a shade of green
And fade into another mundane scene

I say my words are forced and water-bland
You laugh and say that water fosters life
I yell and drive my pencil through my hand
You sound just like my god-damned, fucking wife!
I feel the pencil throbbing in my palm
And suddenly a line occurs to me
I don’t know where you’ve gone but I am calm
And how can I be calm so suddenly
I turn my wrist; the pencil is a mast
Protruding from a raw stigmata hole
The words come to me easily at last
As if they were escaping from my soul
But irony flows easier than words
And all my lines by blood are now obscured

I keep a bag of blood beneath my bed
That’s turned into a moldy clotted lump
It oozes shades of fascinating red
And smells like something from a rural dump
I keep a second bag behind the stair
I haven’t checked on it for half a year
A third and fourth are sitting by my chair
A metaphor for hope and one for fear
And every night I tap a willing vein
(I tell myself the vein has got a choice)
And every drop of blood that I can drain
Before I faint is reason to rejoice
Then pale and weak I drag myself to bed
And dream in shades of fascinating red

I think we drank too much that starry night
Remember how we laughed ourselves insane
We held each other close, but not too tight
Professing love the wine could not constrain
I told you that it wasn’t just the wine
That nothing in my life had been as real
And nothing had, I swear you crossed some line
Some line I tried my whole life to conceal
It sounded trite; it sounds as trite today
And yet it was the truth, or not a lie
In eighteen years I haven’t found a way
To tune it out, forget, or to deny
Nor can I cross the lines which you have drawn
As you’ve tuned out, forgotten, and moved on

Security is such a plastic prize
It lasts forever ’til it’s heated up
Its dullness is displayed to be despised
And never shines like Liberty’s gold cup
Security is given, never earned
It has no champion, no “heroes proved”
You stand in line; they tell you what they’ve learned
And what from every bag must be removed
They strip you bare if that’s what’s been prescribed
From plastic towers by a plastic voice
Or else on plastic tablets it’s inscribed
And claimed to be the people’s holy choice
But towers tall we’ve seen can be assailed
And nobody can be forever jailed

Your wrist has almost healed where I restrained
The slap you tried to give me when we fought
I wonder now if anything was gained
Although I know it probably was not
I wonder why I said those words to you
“I just don’t care. I really just don’t care.”
And when you lunged I wonder if you knew
I thought that you might kill me then and there
That room will never be a place of peace
And now this house can never be a home
The intermittent doubts will never cease
And now begins the time we’ll sleep alone
Does every man who argues with his wife
Keep track of every single kitchen knife

Some star may be my home in years to come
A place where I withdraw to contemplate
The weariness of life and death and life
The brilliant cycles of eternity
But for today my home is here and now
This place where future lives are just a dream
A place where people’s eyes are blank and dull
And glazed by drugs or contemplating life
No star today is close enough to hope
That some small craft can take me safely there
And so I’ll stay here in the dullard’s realm
And watch the walking dead give in to life
Like them I’ll stare up at the darkened sky
And wonder when the stars will shine again

The sands of war smell sterile in the sun
Until they’re heaped upon the heated dead
They catalyze the stench of what’s been done
While covering the images of dread
The sands of war flash like ignited gas
When winds of chaos sear their clouds of dust
Which burn the flesh of everything they pass
As if the will of god declares they must
One hundred thousand soldiers would be brave
To spend a year upon the sands of war
A fool would put them all into a grave
Before admitting what he sent them for
But heated sands of war can also cool
And no one has to die for any fool

Your emptiness lies sullen on the floor
A ragged box taped up from end to end
It doesn’t serve a purpose anymore
Except to mark the place where you pretend
That god will give you gleaming gifts of gold
Because to ask for gold is still your right
Although it’s just a lie which you were told
A cardboard promise painted grayish-white
It sags where mold has spread across one side
It bears the marks of use and of neglect
It has a hole through which you look inside
Though never see the things which you expect
Until you curse this thing you used to bless
And wait for death to fill your emptiness

How firm is that upon which we have built
If when the house is cold the floorboards creak
Is that the sound of sublimated guilt
Or is our whole foundation truly weak
Perhaps my correlation is unsound
I don’t belong to any building trade
I only feel the shifting of the ground
When I’m alone or when I’ve been betrayed
Beneath the house, while guests are up above
I hold my hammer ready with a nail
Convinced that what I do, I do for love
Concerned that reinforcing too may fail
At least at last I’m firmly boarded in
And no one hears me cry above the din