Poem-A-Day #344 : Martha Wayne Is Dead

Martha Wayne Is Dead

Crack in the sidewalk
A string of pearls breaks
Fills each pivot - the spine
Of the city pits & burns

The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

Poem-A-Day #299 :The Hand of Glory

The Hand of Glory

All the locks - this one
the one in the dream about the abortion clinic bombing

There is the room - it smolders
bricks as rockets as pieces of living tissue
raining down on screaming people

If only everyone had been sleeping

*

I fear that I am not done with you
that I have somehow cursed myself
to think about you too often

There is a stability in forgetting
the atoning of it - cleanliness - like sweeping
up after winter

I dream about you often
they are angry dreams - are biting
I wake up screaming or crying or both

Somehow the circle was drawn around me
the salt I laid and the sage I burned
did not rid me of you

*

You take the hand of the killer

It will be puffy and damp it will bleed

Into the bucket of piss and salt for a month
you should know the herbs you 'll need

It must dry in the sun

Rest as a crossroads

Be nailed tot he door of a church

You did keep the killer's fat as well
you did make the candle according to tradition

His hair will be the wick

*

The sound of a lock engaging

Finality - safety - it is the sound of sleep
the eyes lowering as gates at the tower
a sort of dam against the light of the moon

Here is the hand of glory
it has powers to render all motionless
static - a stasis from the terrors of night
about to and already come

*

In the dream about the abortion clinic bombing

Everyone stood at the barrel of a gun

Your face was there - it was terrifying
because your face was there

The killer held the gun like a candle

No one had the milk to put it out

Poem-A-Day #232 : Masc4Masc

Masc4Masc

must                    clean                   revolver
     keep it     gleaming               like                the sun
no
                    milksops               here       no faggots
        we play                     tennis cricket volleyball golf
are men
                         must keep          being clean men
                                                                               fire
in                place               our cocks are shuttled
are being a spin
                        in a chamber
                                          scar tissue across the cheek

Poem-A-Day #105 : Ça va

Ça va

At some pointI will laugh
until my head comes off

The lines of my mouth stretching until the skull
pops like one of those plastic easter eggs
there will be nothing inside
save the remnants of an abandoned spaceship
that you lost when you were 5

This is the only sane response
to the story of easter and to mass killings
that feels appropriate

The skullcap makes a great bowl or so I'm told
it's one of those rhetorical things
that we know but don't Know

Recently I was explaining trepanning to some horrified person
they didn't understand that the hole is a hole
that you could blow into it like the end of a Nintendo cartridge
keep those webs away and those bits forming levels
there was confusion that it would repair itself reknit bind
and of course it heals skin covers everything eventually
but I mean a hole in your head is a goddamn hole in your head

There is a joke in this
somewhere a man drives
to a bar and opens fire

All those people opening like gifts
blood ribboning into the night
what song was playing when it happened

We are unaware of how much we tear each other apart
and until we get to the yellow fatty bits and the bone
it is hard to cease our hands
now tell me we both matter don't we
look beautiful in the reflection of moonlight off pavement

I imagine the bowl that was my skull
it is full of candy
there are so many hands that cannot be bitten

Skull of girl (3500 BCE), Natural History Museum, Lausanne

Dust Jacket : In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood (Vintage)
Designed by: Megan Wilson
Photo: William Eggleston

Megan Wilson is an associate art director at Vintage/Random House. She's been there for 20 years. She runs a blog and store called Ancient Industries that aesthetically connects to her beautiful covers.

There is a sense of the 1950s. Enameled pots and crisp aprons. Small flowers in vases. White gloves.

It is a beautified vision. A Mad Men Audrey Hepburn universe. A place that was somehow more. Before the Vietnam War, the peace/love movement. Before things went 'bad'.

It never existed, but it is nice to think it did.

In Cold Blood is about the brutal 1959 murders of the Clutter family. It is, more than anything, about the loss of the ideal of family. The end to that make-believe world of the 1950s.

The cover presents an American pastoral. The photo is by William Eggleston. Eudora Welty said of his work:

"The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree.... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"

The photo, and the book, live in a strange haze. As if time is still. The world frozen in a moment. Capote's book is languid though detailed. There is a sense of drift that that gigantic cloud captures.

The cloud over the landscape. The storm on the horizon. Though not a storm. Something else. The photo, and Capote's book seem to say that this is a new normal. A fact we must face.

And what of that? Is it true?

On December 14th America was shocked by the senseless murder of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut. It is the latest in a long history of senseless killings.

From the Brady Campaign: In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States.

I don't have an 'answer' or a 'suggestion' on this. I don't know that Capote saw or had thoughts on the state of American crime. I don't believe Eggleston knew he was capturing a vanishing world. The world he captured was imagined in his lens. Capote's on the page.

We are left with enameled pots and pans. A hand on a stir stick. A cloud on the horizon. Ephemeral and beautiful and terrible.

Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.