Apricots

In your diary,
you’ve drawn little apricots
with faces: smiling, laughing apricots,
melancholy apricots–
little Spartan apricots driving
little Persian apricots off
black Greek cliffs.

On page 63, your daily apricot
is missing, and I like to think
he is off on some adventure,
lost in the labyrinthine underbelly
of hospital sprawl
your passage describes.

Every apricot in June shrinks,
sketched in fainter penstrokes:
ragged apricots until
the cusp of July
and a final apricot.
Ghost-eyed, half-formed,
he is staring up at me,
but no longer seeing.

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

Teething

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.

Untitled 2

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.

Powderkeg

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.

City Mad

You can feel a city ache
if you stand on its streets
in the middle of the night,
when all its citizens
sleep quiet in their beds.

You can feel it, a creak and a groan,
almost titanic, almost tectonic,
a body of concrete and bone,
every street light clicks automatic
through its colors like a heartbeat
and you can stand there in the stream
of it, learning to loathe yourself.

Understand you are not the only one
hating yourself into the asphalt.

You are not the only one
pulling skyscrapers down on your head.

You are not the only one
crying out to the newspaper boys
on their early morning routes,
read all about it! read all about it!
Here is a man who breaks his ribs
from the inside.
Here is a man who gnaws
on a mouthful of teeth.

Hush. Hush.

Oh, it hurts,
but the whole city hurts,
you are not alone in it,
and even if they sleep
while you wander mad-eyed
and awake through the empty streets,
remember:

You are a fine thing.
You are constructed well,
brick by brick and bone by bone,
remind yourself how tall you stand,
how many people scurry into you
to find shelter,
open every story
of you and let the breeze
wash the stale out of you.

Tell the newspaper boys
to rewrite that goddamn headline:
Here is a man
who makes it to sunrise again.

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

Okay

I keep running
into all these concerned people
in supermarkets
and pharmacies,

our friends, your cousin,
classmates, coworkers,
acquaintances,
and they knit their eyebrows
and they hum sympathetic
and they keep asking me
how I am coping
without you.

I smile
I tell them
thank you, but
I am okay
I am okay
I am okay

and tear my tongue
on my teeth
every time I say it.

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

All You Need Is Love

I woke up this morning
in a tar pit.

Bedsheets thick sticky
with black worry, pillow
sweat yellow to my skull
with nightmare
and night sweats.

I am thinking of mammoths
in La Brea, how I too
will be fossilized in this mire
if I can’t wash myself off
and stand up.

There’s an ache in my chest,
muscle and bone mimicking
the muck fist that clutches
my spirit. It is anchored
to the bedsprings, to the frame,
and I’m afraid if I lift myself up,
it will tear the heart out of me.
I exhaust myself with heaving
thrashes, and only bury deeper.

But,
I am also thinking of a Beatles song,
a small weak voice crooning from
somewhere beyond the tar,
a gentle reminder in the shape of a melody
that no one I want to save
can’t be saved,
even myself
and I want to go in search of it,
but how?

Tiny gestures.
Swallow pill,
brush teeth,
bathe body,
drink sunlight,
and feel the bog ease off,
even if it rages.
I will love myself in tiny spasms
and dig myself out

at least for today.

— Adam Kamerer


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Behind The Scenes

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

Grace Meditation

Here is grace:
Calm in the earthquake.
Sway when the earth shudders.
Release your pain,
let it seep from your pores
pour from your fingertips,
and stand in the rain,
and wash your pain
into the shuddering earth.

Here is grace:
Cool in the flames
of your own design.
You are all you choose to be.
You are all you desire.
Kindle your pain fire
with dry-plucked reeds
and warm the seeds
you planted in the shuddering earth.

Here is grace:
Breath in the stifle.
The gentle release of lungs filled
with pain charged with hope.
Rustle the stems,
motion releases transformation:
pain seed flower air,
a gift of grace and care
from and to the shuddering earth.

Family History

Lately, when I cannot sleep
I catch myself trying to inventory injury:

My mother as fracture and seizing,
as the snakes beneath her belly
that hissed holes in themselves,
as weariness that never seems
to leave her even after rest.

I log my father
as sunken lung and lacerated brow,
as miniscus gnawed by a wolf of bone,
as arthritis and achilles,
as apnea,

brother as gout and tension,
sister as cracked calcaneus
in her tiny foot,
as body and brain
betrayed by birth,
and further back
the lungs of grandfathers
and a grandmother’s heart.

Here are my own contributions:
gallstones and poison
that ground up my gut,
panic wails in my throat,
wheeze and night sweat,
and under it all, a deep unsettling,
a squid in the murky gulf,
suckers fanged into my ankles
until I grow tired
of kicking towards shore.

Here is why I record this witness
of wounds: I remind myself
that even all these traumas
cannot frighten off laughter and love.

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