Part of the Landscape
Stepping into your underwear
your thoughts are of the dead
Pulling up your trousers
of the dying . . .
Sliding into a sweater
of the crippled . . .
Tying your shoes
of those filled with tumors. . .
Throwing water onto your face
of the crumbling old. . .
Looking at your sinister face
of cancerous bodies. . .
Combing your hair straight back
of stroke and brain death. . .
Studying your cynical eyes
of the blind. . .
Watching gravity turn your lips down
of frailties of the flesh.
This is it? This is the horror then?
You smile.
You still have most of your teeth
You cock your hat at a rakish angle,
tell death to kiss your arse.
You sling your coat over your shoulder,
walking till things are unknown to you.
Very tired you fall asleep sheltered
by flamingo-colored trees.
Under red moonlight you rise refreshed,
walk through purple flowered fields.
Standing at the bridge’s apex
you stare down into luminescent water.
In fading red moonlight you can’t remember
your face anymore.
A black stone is dropped in the pool.
There are no concentric circles at all.
Slowly you become part of the flamingoes
feeding on the purple landscape.
Nothing around you moves at all.
No Place Here
He has no place in my life.
His stubborn Irish way
His scowl, his smile
His gravelly voice
Filled with amusement
And teasing…
No place.
My husband warms me,
Daughters’ laughing peals
Through the hallway
Making me smile;
This man has no right
To invade my mind
As if he were important.
The days and months away
Are supposed to heal me.
The moments shared
Are supposed to grow dim
And fade away
Like melting snowflakes
On a warm windowpane…
He has no place here.
The Watcher
As I write this poem.
He watches
Perplexed—he lifts his unremarkable
hand to his forehead.
Sweat
glistens at his temples.
Eyes penetrating—yet cool.
Amused.
Expectant—but not expectant.
To hell with him.
I start my poem—
The Hohokum Indian Tribe.
Nomads.
High plains drifters.
Covering the ground like leaves
drifting away with the seasons.
A dig in Tucson, Arizona..
My guide an antediluvian female
describes how the scattered mounds
on the ground are really ancient garbage sites.
The Hohokum threw things, “artifacts,”
out of wigwams, or out of mound doors
onto a great civic pile, until it was time to move.
She smiles through her fist of a face.
“Then, they’d pack up the old,
the young, the sick, and pull-out
the whole village.” She laughs.
That night I am drinking cactus liquor,
writing the part where the Indians
burn-out and kill a Mexican rancher and wife,
when suddenly, the Watcher in the wooden
chair walks over and stares at what I’ve
written. He rubs his hand across his
eyes. There’s more sweat at his temple.
He walks back to the chair, stares
through the windowpane without expression.
He’s getting on my nerves.
I continue to make the poem.
The following morning— crisp and cold.
The reservation so icy it stings my lungs.
The smell of old land
is everywhere.
Moldy.
My body aches from this slow
transport of time.
All my bones sore from the cold.
I drive the Government streets
lined with tract houses. Row after row.
More stockades than homes.
Curious brown eyes follow me
past abandoned pick-ups, rusted washing
machines, twisted piles of government
refuse, melting on lawns. Modern Indians
throwing modern artifacts from government houses.
Everything’s worn, burnt or dying except for these
new stucco dwellings that ignite the tan dessert
with bright rebellious and insane colors.
I’m about to connect past
with present,
when the Watcher stands
and repeats
the word
“Why,”
flatly—several times.
I’ve begun to doubt myself.
Still I continue the poem.
It’s noon, but still cold.
I’m out of my car in a dirt parking lot,
the Watcher sits in the front seat,
he doesn’t seem to move at all.
We are parked next to an Indian Casino.
A huge sign hangs over the
door: B I N G O T O N I G H T.
It’s the finest building on the reservation.
I consider the notion that a certain amount
of debris gathers at the edges of every human dream.
At length, the Watcher
angered by what I had written, springs
out the car window, and cat-quick catapults
into the encroaching darkness. As I watch him leave—
I fold this poem into the shape of a memory.
I Love Them So Much
Dear Reader:
I am writing this so I could speak to you. So please forgive me if I sound crazy, I am not.
Have you thought about death lately?
I think about it everyday.
Sometimes it makes me so sad I cry
I can’t imagine losing someone I love
I mean it just kills me to think about.
I lost my friend Nick like 2 years ago and did not register until later
I go visit him, and I still think about him almost everyday
I realized that after he was gone I missed him
We had good times.
For what has been my whole life I have been raised and guided by two women
My mother and my aunt.
I have kind of been forced to be a man on my own
As I grow older they grow older
This drives me crazy
Someday I will lose them
I will never hear their voices
That is just not fair.
I love them so much
Life is truly unfair
I watch the ones I love sleep
I think what would I do without them
I am so protective of my wife and daughter
I would be lost without them
I love them so much.
I was raised by women
And I have fallen in love with a woman
And my daughter is a woman
I would be nothing without the women in my life
I can’t imagine life with out them.
Thank you for reading this
Sincerely,
Brian Graham
In the Shade of Her Statuette
I wore a collarless shirt
to my wife’s funeral.
She wore nothing.
We were nudists.
I was reformed.
Her side of the family
unwisely chose
a wax statuette
to stand coffin side.
I had a ten-ounce flask
of Rip Van Winkle
which fevered through my neck
and chest,
soaking my eyes,
aiming at my wife’s likeness.
over the attendee’s heads
I envisioned her softening
into a form I had known many years before.
She’d awaken,
like it was the first time.
Her limbs flaring,
abrupt from her casket
like a newly lit candelabrum.
Her fire would massage
the parlor walls
into ripples of disaster.
She would single me
from the crowd
bent in the shape of an L-
clear in a dead flame,
clear as her under a maple
on a day I knew her young-
to burn me
on my cheek.
LRP
kissing her like curry
her body like a mansion
shelving all excess cream
that spills
and boils through her nostrils
I want to wring her
emerald, porous skin
and tell her no, but she
shakes her golden flakes
and lies to me
from the background
of some one
of her dreams
Shattered Heart
When you told me that it just could not be,
That you didn’t share the same feelings for me,
My world was shattered, crumpled and torn,
In search of my ‘rosebud’, I got pricked by a thorn.
Cupid had won with his poisonous sting,
Like in Carracci’s ‘Love Conquers All’
I didn’t lose heart, and held on by a string,
Always determined to get up from this fall.
I feel distraught when I gaze back to that day,
It’s not because you didn’t feel the same way,
What hurt me most was not how everything fared,
But how u never realized how much I truly cared.
I had never been so sure of anything else in my life,
Believing that you and I were always meant to be.
You are bound to get cut when you play with a knife,
The dripping blood helps me separate fantasy from reality.
As If They Could Dance Forever
A bright & cloudless day in LA
the sun is sleek & leaves no shadow.
Everywhere it is still—quiet—heat vapors
rise along streets & sewers & cement benches.
8 to 5’ers pull into parking spaces shaped like
coffins. Their dead lips rehearse words from
a list of politically correct things they have
been taught to say. Slowly they are dying. . .
Across Washington Boulevard sits the
Los Angeles Boxing Club.
Young men from Mexico & other Americas
arrive on foot, bicycle, or by bus.
They care nothing for political correctness.
They are here to live. . .or die.
Here to practice assassination.
Eyes smoldering with eternal resentment,
they strike the speed bag as if it was injustice itself,
they practice footwork, as if they will dance forever.
They slug it out with each other.
Sparring & sweating.
Some missing teeth & hearing
sometimes sense itself.
The cost does not matter.
They must have a dream that promises a way out. . .
out of downtown, out of their cheap room
out of a view of the alley,
out from under peeling yellow wallpaper
out from behind drill presses,
out from bending in the picking fields
out of their distant homes of burning poverty.
Rings at the Boxing Club have roped-boundaries,
but fighters’ dreams have none.
Like matadors or cliff divers,
they see this as their only way out:
grunting, sweating, elbowing & clenching
faces swollen & bloodied
they stagger toward a distant PRIZE
in a land called America.
Even though fate has already spoken.
Even though the die is cast.
Even though the odds are a million to one.
Most battle with hearts full. . .most leave
with dreams broken.
Still they come for that chance
always a new crop, proud & brave,
believing in miracles.
working
Working…what does it do? Does it intrigue me? No. Does it inspire me to do greater things? Not really. Does it push me to hope for better? Yes. I work for the people. Not like government for the people, but for the public people. I bartend, I wait tables, I deal with problems, I make people happy, and I feel drained at the end of the day. Do I look forward to my every tomorrows there? Not really. Everyday I gain the hope and intensify my mind to believe I will be doing something I love someday. People say: “you’ll be here forever.” I say: “hell no I will not!” I could never imagine my life being structured around providing the happiness for every person that walks in and out of that squeaky door. The thought perplexes and annoys me. What do you do for work?
heat wave
Heat Wave.
The wind dumped a load of African heat
in my vale, no escape; torn and rejected
flees, useless on the evening sky, held no
promise, but Africa’s great grief spilling
over, flooding Europe’s shores.
Scared of this dry breath of need we close
our doors and guard our shores, only let in
a few, those we can exploit to do low paid
work, to nurse our old, then herded into
satellite towns and blithely ignored.
But how oblivious we are, ebony scoured
smooth by the sand of Sahara, unstoppable
this vast wandering army; this, the second
migration and now, under the pitiless sun,
the children of Abel are seeking justice.
