Every speech and homily:
a cry against the universe’s backmost wall.
I know the wall is God;
I hope the cry is, too.
Tag: Poetry
I Need You to Stay
We drove home late from the concert–
brother and sister
–into a dark quiet rippled only by streetlights
and our excited talk.
Half-past midnight, you strongly contended
one of the songs was a cry to God,
but I felt you’d overthought the lyrics.
To me, the words
referred to nothing
more than a girlfriend
–both of us fixating,
I realize now,
on whatever ideas
felt furthest away at the time.
1 & Ö
I want the freedom
of things unobserved,
in boxes’ dark corners
to crouch and to bask,
To be and not be
with a still unreserve.
But it seems
all I do is
co//apse.
Rim Shot
A shout-out
to the common storyteller’s lull:
To each hushed, metacognitive retreat
taken daily to decide whether,
upon re-entering as narrator,
to wrap the story
in the comfortable gauze of a punchline,
or leave it unbound
for some perceived virtue
of raw-rubbed authenticity.
One of Our Walks
We were on one of our walks, Alex
you and me.
I was 19 and you were 7
and neither of us quite belonged.
You were my foster brother and the full adoption
wouldn’t happen until September.
I was schoolless
for the first time in thirteen years,
biding my time till August
when I could be a freshman again,
and grades would start telling me
how life was going.
Both of us in the place
between belonging and not.
Just moving in opposite directions.
But we were on our walk
and you asked me
with your now-trademark directness
why I had to leave.
And before I could answer,
you offered
an explanation of your own:
“Because only Charlie Brown don’t grow old?”
A Standoff in the Shop of my Employ
Yesterday, a young man on a date
approached the register and asked,
“What are these?”
and I said,
“Cookies,”
because they were cookies,
but that was only partly true.
“Cookie sandwiches,”
I elaborated,
“They’re gluten-free.”
I knew that because I worked there,
not because of the disease that makes me know things.
“Oh,
he scoffed, stepping back from the counter just a hair,
“so they’re probably terrible.”
He waved his hand over the cookies,
denouncing this title upon them.
“They’re actually pretty delicious,”
said I in the cookies’ defence, still smiling.
I had eaten several
over the course
of my time working there–
cream-centered
chocolate chip
cookie sandwiches,
somehow delicious while
simultaneously
free of dairy, soy, egg, peanuts, tree nuts, and GLUTEN (!),
that toxic bane!
that demon in the dough!
that kraken of the cracker
that had plagued me six years hence!
The standoff could have ended there,
with a recommendation for cookies,
except the man parried.
“But what IS gluten?”
he asked, adjusting his stance,
stepping forward again.
“Can you tell me that?”
He asked, “Can you tell me that?”
as though this knowledge
lay beyond the realm of human thought,
as if gluten were a sentiment
only vaguely considered
toward breadlike effects,
with no real physical existence.
“Can you tell me that?” he asked.
And I could, because of the disease that makes me know things.
And I did.
Flawlessly,
fatally,
without hesitation.
“Yeah!”
I gladly replied.
“It’s a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley!”
“Oh,” he said,
deflating a little,
“Damn.
I didn’t think anyone actually knew that.”
There are few victories won
for those
with intestinal maladies
–most of them involve staying alive,
and eating food
that tastes semi-normal.
But every now and then,
you can make a dude look dumb
in front of his girlfriend.
Of Atoms and Insects
On the fifth night
of my sixth summer
at church camp,
–nestled in the bustling hub
of a 200-resident backwater town–
I stopped a while to wonder
at a towering copse of trees,
sprinkled in the cold, wild light of fireflies,
each of a million
blinking its independent rhythm
in a silent, elegant mania.
“Look!” a counselor called to her kids,
noticing too the glowing trees.
“Look at the light show God put on just for you!”
This statement bothered me,
and for ten years now
I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Why someone’s spiritual understanding of
Pennsylvania’s state insect
could annoy me so much.
It’s not that I don’t believe in God.
I do,
and I like the idea of a divine energy
somehow
coursing through these beetles’ lambent asses,
But I don’t want them to care about me.
To say every time I walk up,
“Oh, he’s here!
Quick, turn on your butts!
God told us to!”
I prefer nature’s soft apathy
to a cloying, needy Creator.
But now I’m reading about electrons,
and let me tell you about these sons of bitches.
Not only do they lack
singular locations
–residing instead
in uncertain “clouds”
of probable residence–
but their very essence
–wave or particle–
can shift
based on method of observation.
In other words,
how you look at electrons
doesn’t change how they appear to you,
it changes how they are to themselves.
Leaving me confounded
that lightning bugs
might glow ignorant,
but strip each beetle to its base
and you’ll find pieces
staring back.
Maybe I’m so unsettled
because I haven’t decided
which one God is more like:
The personal, pliable fragment,
or the indifferent and glorious swarm?
A Haiku on Dark Matter
If dark matter’s real,
it outnumbers everything
(but it might not be).
While Reflecting on the Paintings at The Mill
Each canvas
displays a struggle,
a conquest
of human will over physical matter.
“I let the cosmos ripen,”
says the painter,
“just long enough for it
to sprout elements,
(not one eon more),
“When the metals bloomed
I plucked them,
seeded them,
and crushed the seeds
so small,
they would forget themselves
if introduced to oil
or bound to water.
“A child was born.
When I was ready
I crushed that, too.
“I smeared
each gooey, bleeding offspring
on the pinboard with its brothers.
Baby Frankensteins
broken,
drowned,
and dried onto canvas
by my loving hand.
Each infant of the universe
frozen in beautiful mutilation.
“It won’t last.
“Eventually,
Grandmother Entropy
will restore paint, canvas, and painter
all to the former glory of
ash,
like a phoenix in reverse.
“But for now my trophies hang.”
Genre of Lack
I know from the tension in my gut,
that I just sat up from crouching
for the first time in a while.
When my eyes were closed,
I saw a fetus
shivering in the snow.
They’re open now,
and the skin around them is stiff.
So I know I’ve been crying.
I don’t want to put my glasses on.
I want to keep everyone around me
blurry.
So I don’t see them seeing me.
So I don’t have to wonder
if they see
the frozen embryo.
I’ve waited so long
for insufficiency
to disqualify me from existence.
But there is never any lightning,
or a mark of “final draft”.
I exist
despite
my
lack
of
genre.
Genre
of
lack:
my
spited
existence.
So this is what it is
to be born again, and again, and again.
A. Scott Meiser 