Category Archives: Poetry

Hammers and Nails

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I think you learned to love people
by watching hammers love nails

You bury them in succession
one after another after another
and you never expect them
to get back up.

Some do, of course.
It takes them years.
Decades, sometimes, but
they wrench themselves out
of the holes you put them in
with their heads still smarting,

so you go back.

You love them down again. Harder.
You put all your weight into it,
just to make sure.

I know what will break you.
One day you will love someone
and they will go crooked.

You will love them
and they will twist at their shank.
Bent over, hunching their back,
they’ll take you on their spine
and let you hit as hard as you like.

They’d rather be mangled
than hidden away.

What will you do
with a love like that?

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Teething

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Forget all else I have told you.

There is no calm inside me,
no serenity
no silence.

I have told you
I have nothing more to say
but I do
I do
and it comes out
only in wails at myself
when I get away from you.

I have hidden what I am:
a teething child

snapping at tombstones
and bricks.

I have chewed a box of knives
down to their handles,

gnawed curbs and sidewalks
for the taste of the moss in their cracks
and the feet that tread them.

I have ground my teeth down
to a mouthful of grit
and bloody nubs of gum.

I polish the back of my throat
in swallows.

Even that brings no quiet.

Call a dentist, please
please please.
Build me
a new grin with pieces
of chalk.

I was born with
a blackboard tongue
that needs scrawls
bitten into it.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Postcards

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Today, I found
a shoe box
under the bed,
full of post cards
sent to you
from people
who loved you.

Postcards from a gas station
in downtown Paris,
from a smoky Amsterdam pub,
from a little village an hour
from Sao Paolo
where the water is drying up
and the children
have eyes like coal.

Handdrawn artsy cards,
five dollar museum cards,
art deco cards, cubist cards,
dada cards you have to stare at
until you start to think of them
as something beyond paper.

Kitsch cards, sentiments,
and Hallmark rhymes,
and a dozen cards sent
from some marina tourist shop,
the same sparkling blue water
and the same white sailboats
and the names of so many
little coast towns.

All these cards,
and on each, scrawls,
“I wish you were here.”

I never sent you a postcard
from anywhere. I never
wanted to be anywhere
you were not.

Oh, I wish you were here.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Untitled 2

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When I am ash
and they pour me
into the greyfoam sea,
wrap yourself against
the salt wet wind
and turn an ear
to the lies frothing
out their mouths.

They will say
I loved this world
and all the people in it,
that I found beauty
and words to birth it
in the mind.

I tried
oh, I tried,

but the world is a carious tooth,
crag and rot-yellow,
the nerve exposed and raw.

Have mercy.
Have rage.
Have from your silent depths

the good sense

to rip it from the
throbbing mouth of space,
to grip the pliers tight and
crater the bloody gum

so the universe can heal,
and grow a voice that does not
make it cringe to speak.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

A Sound of You

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A sound of you
spectres itself
in the walls of this house

something like a sigh
something like a breath

I strain my ears
to hear it again,

trying to shush
my rushing blood
like a librarian disturbed

and hear you again
beyond me.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

You Have So Much Wealth In Your Flesh

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you have so much
wealth in your flesh

oh, you
abundance spread

oh, you

exult in
arch and stiffen
in whoop and heave

swallow tempt
and jubilee

be vain, be glorious!

shy but
you resplend

dare gaze on
your own shudders

touch and secret away
the finger’s lovings

let none love you
less than you learn
to love your own wealth
of flesh and light

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

The Traitor Tongue and the Wellspring Heart

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I do not know how to tell you
what I am feeling.

You ask, and
my tongue strangles itself.
It chokes itself silent.

Under my heart,
there is a wellspring
of things I wish I could
tell you, and my tongue
is the cork stoppering
them up. It is the sentinel
warden at the gate, letting
none of the prisoners through.

I wish I could drive a spile
under my ribs
and let it all pour out for you.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Powderkeg

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After the shackles are on,
everything goes quiet
and he begins to sob.

Pick up the cast down dresser.
Kick the torn t-shirts into the hallway.
Inspect the fist holes in the sheetrock,
try to remember which are old
and which are fresh.

Inhale his unwashed body.

This is the way violence smells:
adrenaline and sweat and piss,
a fruit of exhaustion left too ripe.
It smells like muscles tremble,
like carpet burn on a cheekbone,
like tomorrow’s bruise and ache.
You will never forget this smell.

A year from now,
it will wake you in the middle of the night,
a hot burn in your nostrils
with the memory of a punching fist
and your name shaped into a scream.
Your wife will ask if you are okay.
You will roll over and pretend to fall asleep
without hearing her.

The officer speaks static to her radio,
white scramble and fuzz,
she has to repeat herself
before you realize she is asking you
What do you want to do?
Hey, hey, what do you want us to do?

There is no answer.

Every person in the room knows
there are no solutions here,
no cure-all snake oil,
no jail cell or group therapy
or medication cocktail
that will make it better
and introduce this soul
born with his powderkeg brain
to quiet thought and serenity.

Stroke the sweat in his hair
and tell him you love him.
He cries into your hand,
says I’m a good man,
I’m a good man,
I’m a good man,
I don’t know why
I want to hurt you all.

Cetacea

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I think you are a kind of whale.

Solitary giant, gentle beast,
you feast on seawater
and storms. You croon
to the barnacles that cling
to your belly and try
and try to love them,
pockmarked and ruptured
though they may be.

You have been poached for them,
prey creature, ocean queen,
lacerated and scarred by
harpoon barbs and propeller blades,
the tongues in the mouths
of the people who birthed you
into the black jewel of the sea.
They have churned you
into a mad eyed migration
towards the sand bars.

You are an entire species endangered
and I keep expecting to come home
and find you’ve beached yourself,
that you writhe helpless on wet sand,
grit sticky with sea slime and tangled kelp,
that you drown yourself on air
and give yourself up
to wait for the black market men
with their buckets and knives sharpened
to carve out the precious parts of you.

You are too great for that.

I would break my bones
trying to haul you back into the sea.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.