The Way Words Echo in Our Heads

I wish we could hear them just once,
instead of over and over.

One day, tired, I sat down on the couch
just to listen to the ringing in my ears.

My eyes are so deep-set in my head
it makes it hard to see

past the memory of lost glamour,
being born too late, living in the shadow

of a beautiful downtown turned into
a ghost town, a hollowed hulk,

and how that itself now turns into
a memory of treasures,

how when something taken for granted
is suddenly over, the pause when you take stock

and realize you’ll never have as much,
that change is always a lessening,

the wall effect, you can’t see what’s next
even though it’s supposedly obvious.

I don’t know what to say about that,
I mean, I’m just barely here.

Related Poems

February

A mist appalls the windshield.
So I still see trees as moral lessons,
as I pass under them, shadowy and astute.

The glazed aspen branches hover.
Ice heats up and cracks, road tar steams
like some animal where the blush

of cheek is chilled by annunciation.
I cannot say her face was trauma driven.
I'm still saturated with her, taking in

her etched-in countenance, otherworldly,
enveloping, frightening, the face you can't see,
pressed against it. So how can you imagine

what it feels like? Their gravity suffices,
the sealed and straining torsos
of aspens, an affront to our high-pitched moans,

feverish with disarray. Our expressions
have too much God in them, too much cloud, too much
blood on nail, too much arrow, too much quiver.

“from The Sky Forever” [to say your land vanished]

to say your land vanished               into thinness                              scrap under your feet

when the name                                 feels the same in the mouth   who is the most hysterical person

to say I was never meant to            the origin moment                    do you remember laughing

be about poetry’s originating         in childhood trauma                  when the first American boot 

hit the ground in a cloud                of dust maybe before that         you’re killing me   

                                      

                   

 

                    

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Millennium, Inadequate Witness

Say we no longer bear witness to a body-politic of trauma
after revolution
                by anesthesia or erasure. Say we cover our eyes 
to crossed olive-wood beams on a hill.  Modes of witness   
expose our inadequacy, the human.  Forgetting
is a sign—yes, a thing once existed. Say we are unworthy
of witness, internal or external—
                         our damaged wisdom, for instance,
our diminished capacity for empathy
             and heightened apathy to torture
mingled with doves     
                      of unfettered desire
                                         or an eclipsed divine.