“Wanderlust”

In McCook, Nebraska, USA,

Litle Gipsy Boy rides a boxcar highway backwards and smiles. He says, “look at me, Momma, I’m a cowboy now!”

The gunpowder in his saddlebags burnin’ him up a [chugga-chugga] Train Fever in his chest.

His hands are full of dime-store novels and road dirt.

At his belt hangs a revolver

twice the size

of his fist.

Boy say he wanna shoot Indians with it.

On the trail, Little Gipsy Boy looks like a Hallelujah, his hands, his legs, his chest, a chapel, his eyes broke stained glass bidding all the sunlight “come on in!”

The Midwest Sun sets in the East,

the Harvest Moon rising in the West,

Gipsy Boy chases a shadow, thinking it is his, and no one ever told him otherwise.

Just told him to “let it be, Boy.” “Focus on your studies.”

“Plow the field.” “Pick the crops.”

“Mind your mother, Boy.”

“Turn down the sheets.”

“Wash your face, Boy.”

They told him sleep, but never long enough to dream.

But Gypsy Boy doesn’t listen. He dreams his brains out.

And the dream recasts his feet in iron, builds them into [chugga-chugga] train tracks [chugga] train tracks, they sound damn lovely. Like his grandfather’s hands.

Covered in rust.

And damn sad. Heroes.

The grind of the boxcars rocks him back to sleep.

Wake up, Boy.

Smell the iron-cast coffee.

Taste the rust in the beans.

Tell us what whisper of adventure bid you well on these tracks. Tell us what the road told you.

Boy say he wanna shoot Indians like the cowboys.

Say he dreamt of a talking cow, and so skinned ‘is own and made him some boots.

They got spurs!

Boy say he made ‘em by meltin’ down the metal in his momma’s stovetop.

They’re black. “Like little niggers,” the boy say.

Like the ones he won’t share a boxcar with.

The old dark men ‘round the coffeepot frown, but don’t say nothin’.

Boy say he got two whole dollars when he pawned his daddy’s pocketwatch for travellin’ money. Used it to buy his gun.

Filled it up with bullets he bought off a tramp in New York so he could hunt buffalo people.

But then noticed there was a screw missing.

Boy say then he got mad!

Say the hobo sold it to ‘im tried to rip him off! Bastard!

Boy say he ever see that fucker again, he’ll shoot ‘im first!

~

In McCook, Nebraska, USA,

men who hated their jobs and boys who loved to dream sit around a coffeepot and tell each other how much they hated their jobs, and loved to dream.

One boy say he had one dream ‘bout a man named “Kalamazoo Chickamauga.”

So boy hopped a train to Boston to find him.

Then took another train to New York, a train to Philly, to Columbus, Chicago,

St. Paul, wound up in McCook,

Boy say now he headin’ to Deadwood to find Buffalo Charley and a new screw for his gun.

Boy knows nothing now but Train, train, [chugga-chugga]train, [chugga] train, [chugga] train,

Boy’s legs have grown into railroad spikes,

his empty chest,

a gaping boxcar.

To Write Love On Her Arms

   For the beautiful girls who like to wrap themselves in red ribbons and die, this is for you.

For the girls who have built their hands into hacksaws, their arms into ticker tape without a parade, their marching orders: “get over it,”

thrown on the side of the road. Their stress is on their forearms.

Their suicide notes: “look at me!” not a call for help or attention, just a plea, “please, look at me, I am sad.”

2006: An organization is founded and named “To Write Love On Her Arms,” its stated purpose: to help young people struggling with depression, self-injury, and suicide.

2012: A thousand beautiful girls are still carving up their arms, but now, some of them are actually cutting the word “love” out there in iron letters.

It is not funny or ironic, it is being thrown a rope and then using it to hang yourself.

Tired wallflowers, wearing sin on their sleeves,

red paint on their elbows

and shaking heads like a busted globe round.

Young gypsies with a death wish, like coffin makers with a hammer they sink into themselves, howling as they dive down, there is nothing holy about it.

It is not a sacrament.

If you want prayers on your skin, I will tattoo you lines of song down your spine and drown them something warm again,

but then again, maybe I just don’t understand.

After all, I’ve never tried cutting myself.

My little sister once told me, “it’s a beautiful thing Shaan, you just don’t get it.”

You’re right, I don’t. Why don’t you try carving an explanation onto your forehead?

She said, “Shaan, you cut just as much as I do, you just call it poetry when you’re done!”

You’re right, I do.

I bleed real pretty onto a page and call it “confession,”

nail my hands to a pen and call it “communion,”

so now,

I am solid on the outside and inky on the inside,

but you, my dear, you are still beautiful all over, so don’t treat your wrists like I treat my notebook.

You will not find love written on your arms.

It is written on your feet.

In your hair,

on your cheeks, your voice,

in the small of your back, the dip of your waist,

it is written in your breath. Sing it out, hon. Real loud.

“I am beautiful,” sing it out,

“I am a siren with a ballad in my throat,”

A sonata of sin humming love letters happy again, vox mei, vox dei, my voice is the voice of God; let it be heard out of your body!

Trade in your razorblades for a pen and a page; it will last longer.

Trade your arms for a mic and a stage; it will be louder!

Trade that time bomb

in your chest

for a heartbeat,

your sin  for baptism.

And trade in your bandages, your gauze, your long sleeves;

trade them in for your brother’s arms.

Have him hold you close.

Have him tell you, “darling, you are beautiful,”

“sister, you are lovely,”

“child, you are the better half of an angel,”

“honey, it will all be okay.” Not because it will be easy, but because we will make it be okay.

So for the beautiful girls with highways growing out their shoulderblades, lend me what’s left of your hands.

And together,

we will

try

to

scrape

a happy ending

out

of

that

ten-care pileup on your wrist.

Gypsy

In Belleview there is a man who has turned his bathroom into a shrine for a woman.

He prays with both arms out, palms up, he is asking for communion, he only eats bread, it doesn’t come. He is searching for a myth. For a Gypsy.

[Gypsy!]

She is in his hair

[Gypsy!] [Gypsy!]

All around and nowhere to be found

He dives into his hands

[Gypsy!]

She is not there.

She does not pick up the phone when he calls, she does not write letters, and she does not sign her name on them.

All the blank pages look like black ice

[Gypsy!]

In Belleview there is a man who prays at his tub. His bathwater is not holy but he drinks it anyway, it tastes like fireflies made out of ash

[Gypsy!]

He carries his shrine on his shoulders like a dragon, it breathes fire ‘round his neck and pulls him close

[Gypsy!]

She pulls him close. And builds a cancer in his throat.

He is choking on Gypsy.

She is in him. And angry. Scratching at the walls like matches

[Gypsy!]

Come on out. Please. Come on out.

In Belleview there is a man scratching at his collar with a pen. He thinks of Rockwell. And his sister. And the lines on his palms that he did not write and cannot read.

He thinks of Gypsy, all dressed up in fishnets and red lipstick and dancing like she knows how.

[Gypsy!]

Dancing like a firework trapped in a roller coaster.

She is shootin’ the moon. With spitballs. And paper airplanes.

Gypsy, would that you would turn your glue gun on my eye

I see black ink

Running down your back

Running from your hair.

It is a cave painting.

Gypsy, your back is a cave painting and my hands are bleeding ink! Stigma growing by the second and gulping down that tapwater tapestry I wrote in your bedroom. It feels like a sin. It feels like I am full of sin and you have holy water in your mouth

Bless me, Gypsy! I need it. I don’t know how much wallpaper I’ve got left, but I think I could make you a mansion if you asked me to.

If you told me to.

If you wanted me there

I would be dancing right next to you

With hollowed-out hands, a shoestring hammock, and a paperback novel.

That’s how legends are made, Gypsy.

I want to be in them.

In Belleview there is a man with no hands.

No feet.

With snakes in his hair, a cough in his throat, and Gypsy behind his eyes.

He is waiting for a dream.

Waiting for his hands to grow back.

In the meantime, he is trying,

Real hard,

To break out of his bathroom.

From the North Pole with Love

Dear Shaan,

Stop fucking writing to me.

I am not a grocer, nor a Chinese laundromat, and whenever I close my eyes now, I see nothing but half-rotten coal,

It feels like a sin,

I am full of sin and sludge and the snowy fringes of my coat are bursting at their seams.

I don’t care anymore, Shaan.

I am cold. And I am getting mean, and bloated, and drunk up on eggnog and schoolyard piss.

Merry fucking Christmas, Shaan.

Stop treating me like a therapist; inkblots freeze up here-just like everything else.

I am not Osiris; this sled is not a set of scales, it is a steam engine.

It is powered by coal.

It can carry heavy loads, yes, but not as heavy as your heart, heathen.

Stop writing to me, Shaan!

I don’t have the answers you are looking for. I am just as broken as you.

See, a few hundred years ago, a drunk reindeer drunk drove itself into my workshop and crushed everything

There are shards of hourglass and stars stuck in my forearms still, splinters in my feet, and puppet strings

draped

all over me.

They are making me move, Shaan!

But I am not a dancer.

I am too fat and too old for that. I am sick of flying, I want to walk. I want to leave footprints that don’t stink of snow and burnt logs.

The ash and ice are black and white, but they all look the same now, Shaan, like a wet little cigarette.

And every year, I am crashing a million broken psalms through the sky, and those horned little devils

in front of me

are trying to wrench a song out my chest:

“We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas…”

This holiday has eaten up my bones, Shaan.

All that’s left is hordes of fat and beard staple-gunned to a sled.

Jesus Christ! I am crucified on a cross of fir bark.

This crown of thorns

is red velvet

and mistletoe.

Shaan, this year, I am not bringing you any toys.

I am not bringing you a laptop, or an ipod, or a girl that loves you back.

And I am not bringing you coal either. You burn enough already.

This year, I am bringing you a toolbox.

It has a hammer for building,

a screwdriver for remembering

and a razorblade, for growing up.

Make your own workship, kid.

See what it’s like trying to scrape dreams out of wood.

1. There is no sweet tea here.

2. There is NO FUCKING SWEET TEA here.

3. People wear argyle sweaters non-ironically,

4. Despite the greater fashion opportunities afforded you here by wearing coats, boots, scarves, and hats, everyone dresses like an extra from a 1980s Canadian snuff film.

5. Well-intentioned politically incorrect jokes are not funny here, they are offensive.

6. No one wears sunglasses, even when it’s sunny out. Still not sure what that’s all about.

7. Hipsters don’t listen to soft, acoustic, indie-rock, they listen to punk.

8. No one’s heard of Dell computers.

9. No one makes subtly racist comments.

10. People offer you their opinion on things without your asking, and which you weren’t even talking about.

11. Slam poetry isn’t as good #AustinPoetrySlam #NeoSoul #MicCheck

12. The girls aren’t as pretty #SouthernGirlsAreAllShapedLikeSundresses

13. People own umbrellas.

14. If you drive in any direction for five hours, you’ll be in a DIFFERENT STATE!

15. Guys never wear boots.

16. Peoples’ first reaction to snow isn’t to run outside and start making a snow angel in the middle of the highway, it’s to go inside, brew tea, do a crossword, and make jokes about how global warming is a myth.

17. It snows in November, can you believe that?!

18. Frat parties are still stupid, but the music’s slightly worse.

19. Strangers don’t smile at you when you pass them on the street.

20. Hippies don’t wear tye-dye or smoke weed, they just burn incense and listen to the Beatles a lot.

21. People have opinions on more things, and are more offended by people who disagree with them.

22. No one likes taking walks. Again, not really sure what that’s about.

23. The Mexican food is TERRIBLE.

24. But the pizza’s AMAZING.

25. There are way fewer bars and way more coffee shops.

26. Apparently yacht racing is an actual thing.

27. Public transportation can actually take you places!

28. Preppy white girls have a slightly more legitimate reason to be irrationally afraid of walking by themselves past 6pm.

29. People aren’t as funny.

30. Everyone is always busy working on stuff.

31. “Live music” doesn’t mean a concert; it means one dude playing Moulin Rouge songs on a guitar in a Starbucks. Badly.

32. There are no Mexican people here. Like, at all.

33. People like Rent (the musical).

34. People rarely say anything sarcastically, hyperbolically, rhetorically, metaphorically, or jokingly.

35. People are still surprised by how dumb Rick Perry is.

36. Everyone’s a Democrat, but no one’s really sure why.

37. There’s no sweet tea here…

And–

The boy started to make a face out of it
And when he drew close to finishing it all,
His pen, coated in ash and shoelace ends
Folded itself in
And shed ink tears–
For the portrait would never be finished anyway.

But though the boy could not draw anyway,
His pen still wanted to finish it
Swiped away the tears;
The black, and blue, and all
With its hands, it reached in
And pulled the cross-hatch lines out by their ends.

You see, the pen knew stories only by their ends
(since the beginnings were immutable anyway)
It shut words in
Until characters were drowning inside of it.
Until they all
Learned how to cry [black tears]

These same stories, with periods like tears
Always held death in their middles and ends!
The pen wanted to set fire to them all,
But they all already smoked anyway,
So the pen gathered up the smoke and sat in it:
Breathing the faces in.

And as it let the characters filter in
It began to see the colors of their tears
They were not black or blue, but purple and green! And it
(the pen) saw that ends
Were not like middles in any way,
But ends in themselves, ends, and ends all.

But just as the pen began to understand it all,
The surly boy swept back in.
And though the pen knew his face well anyway,
It was shocked to see no tears,
And lines of shade with no ends,
And knew the boy had come to kill it.

Always “anyway,” the pen let loose green tears
All for nothing, folded itself back in
And all that’s left in the end; a ragged canvas with tears in it.

How Holy Wars

When the pearly gates were torn down from their hinges, and the Kingdom of heaven overrun by kamikazes, God decided to build a new capital and call it a Republic.
He commissioned a nameless carpenter to construct it, and instructed him,

“Take this Buffalo hide.
Soak it,
melt it,
cut it,
stretch it,
and carve it into a city limit.”

So the happy carpenter obliged.
He sat down a giant ring of creature hide and called it a fence
cooked up lines of song and dance and dominoes and called them highways
added a few of his own touches – a carousel here, a park bench there,
and rows,
and rows,
of bookshelves.
For days, he built, and broke, and set, and did not say a word,
and at the end of it all,
God looked down,
and saw,
aghast,
that the sly carpenter had laid down the city streets in a great Mandala.

And as God screamed, the carpenter looked right up,
and saw God
looking down
at him.

And he saw God’s beady eyes
And misty skin
And long, dead, fingernails
And he laughed, for he was overjoyed.
And God laughed back, for He was terrified.

In this season of college applications, I got to reminincing about my own application essays (for all 23 colleges I applied to) of two years ago, and started looking through my old files. I found an essay I had written for Brown on the subject of what the college admissions process had taught me. Keep in mind this essay was written after applying to nearly two dozen colleges, and after being posed the question “why do you want to attend [insert college name]” by about five different ivyleage schools expecting a page or so of sucking up from high schoolers. Anyway, enjoy!

Growing up, every child is told that there is more than one right answer to any question. And growing up, every student realizes that’s bullshit – no more so than when it comes to college admissions.

If nothing else, the college admission process has taught me a lot of important life lessons. I’ve learned how to work the system, how to tell people exactly what they want to hear; I’ve learned how to studiously say nothing, to seem like I have a personality while simultaneously avoiding any subject where someone might disagree with me. I’ve learned how to bury my own opinions under flowery euphemisms and play off the faults that make me human as minor details in an otherwise spotless resume.

I went into the process of applying to college with the dream of a real education, hoping to surround myself with smart people who disagree with me, and learn how to help construct a bright future for a collapsing world. What I’ve learned is that the only way to reach these institutions of higher learning is by selling your principals to the process and ignoring who you are. I’ve learned how to write essays that seem original and witty, while surreptitiously sneaking in a few references that show that I’ve read Kierkegaard and Camus, as if simply invoking the name of an existentialist philosopher is a psychic wink to admissions officers that I’m well read.

But perhaps the most staggering realization that I’ve come to is that colleges understand completely the superficiality and choreography of the entire process, and not only accept it, but expect it from applicants. Colleges ask things like, “what would you do with a free afternoon?” so that students can tell them about how we read academic journals and add our own tempos and dynamics to Chopin. But colleges know just as well as I do that between school, jobs, extracurriculars, and, of course, college applications, the only honest answer to that question is “watching television and spending time with my friends,” and anyone who says anything else is lying through their teeth. Colleges ask things like “why do you want to come here?” when they know full well that I’m applying to at least a dozen other schools, and while I would be happy to be admitted, there’s nothing in particular that distinguishes one prestigious Ivyleague history from the next.

If this is the standard that I’m being held to, if satisfactory grammar and charming, polite, faux-insightful observations are enough to get me admitted, then I balk at the future of these institutions themselves. And to think people wonder about why the world around us is falling apart; all I can do is remind myself that America got into Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Iraq courtesy of graduates from Duke, Harvard, and Yale.

Lady Lazarus and the Crows: For Sylvia

 

“First Born”

Upon her first resurrection, Persephone went down to the old store and purchased a basket of pomegranates.

She devoured them

Slowly

(with her chipped thumbs and her swollen teeth),

And scattered the seeds deep in her mother’s belly.

“I am born.” She says.

But as the girl is licking off her fingers, she is caught

Red-handed

In the Murder.

Swept up, along with attics of leaves and thunder and inkstains and bottles and bottles of CAUTION tape

Into winter

She dies.


“Second Life”

The crops in mourning look like a duvet unmade

Bent into itself at the corners by a dusty sun

“I can’t find my poem!”

The grain is flailing her arms back and forth, grasping for a pomegrenate seed, a scarecrow, anything to ward off this winter and summon the soil again

“Where does this wheat go! This corn? Where does the grass go? Where does the grass grow!?”

Suddenly Perseophone returns.

And as she wades,

Chest deep and bone dry in snow and plant corpses,

Her heels begin to rumble

Out

Dirt


“A Little Death”

They are charred birds with moons in their eyes, the craters beneath churning like primordial forges.

They are black like a coffin, like a coffin they are black,

They are black, they are black,

These birds,

Have wrapped up their words in a rundown school bathroom stall

They have thrown up psalms on the wall for little constipated kids to read

And awe

And scratch their little chins

And shake their little heads at the wisdom of these birds.

While Persephone in still just planting flowers.


“As the Crow Flies”

When crows and woman meet again, a great sound is heard. A voice like the thunder of God.

Like a hunting rifle.

And it shakes the ground straight through to Hell

And it makes the flowers huddle closer, as they struggle for warmth

And it makes the trees go pale as their roots curl tight

And that paleness plucks at the heart of the woman.

But the crows, the crows, the crows, did caw and caw out her name in drunken, sickening birdsong:

“Lady Lazarus! Come closer, that we might pick your bones dry again!”

The Lady is swept up again by the Murder.

But this time, she is lifted up into the sky, straight to the sun.

As she approaches, her hair is the first to go, burnt into stench and rank heat

And then her legs

And her eyes

And her voice

And her bones begin to blacken in the oven in the sky.

But before they are gone, she breaks off a rib and begins stabbing at the crows–

One by one!

Two by two!

Three by three!

Four by four, they fall! And the Murder is stripped to its last pall-bearer.

Unable to bear the weight of the thing alone, the last crow drops his blackened burden to the ground.

And Lady Lazarus falls for the last time

And she dives

And dies

And dies

Until everything else is borne.