Private Goes Public

Smile no smile
On this face today
Jerk like a thing on a string
And go join the parade
Code will keep your privacy in
It won't help to win friends
Influence strangers
Or otherwise be in the swim
Mask will keep your features in check
Cause face is the place
Where the private goes public
And steps through the gate
Take your last kick now
At any regime
Smile no smile
See if they see what you mean

Suzzane Vega

Left Of Center

If you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Off of the strip
In the outskirts
In the fringes
In the corner
Out of the grip
When they ask me
"What are you looking at?"
I always answer"Nothing much"
I think they know that
I'm looking at them
I think they think
I must be out of touch
But I'm only
In the outskirts
And in the fringes
On the edge
And off the avenue
And if you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Wondering about you
I think that somehow
Somewhere inside of us
We must be similar
If not the same
So I continue
To be wanting you
Left of centerAgainst the grain
If you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Off of the strip
In the outskirts
In the fringes
In the corner
Out of the grip
When they ask me
"What are you looking at?"
I always answer
"Nothing much"
I think they know that
I'm looking at them
I think they think
I must be out of touch
But I'm onlyIn the outskirts
And in the fringes
On the edge
And off the avenue
And if you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Wondering about you

The View

This is the place. The chairs are white. The table shines.
The person sitting there stares at the waxen glow.
The wind moves the air around, repeatedly,
As if to clear a space. "A space for me," he thinks.
He's always been drawn to the weather of leavetaking,
Arranging itself so that grief--even the most intimate
Might be read from a distance. A long shelf of cloud
Hangs above the open sea with the sun, the sun
Of no distintion, sinking behind it-- a mild version
Of the story that is told just once if ture, and always too late.
The waitress brings his drink, which he holds
Against the waning light, but just for a moment.
Its red reflection tints his shirt. Slowly the sky becomes darker,
The wind relents, the view sublimes. The violet sweep of it
Seems, in this effortless nightfall, more than a reason
For being there, for seeing it, seems itself a kind
Of happiness, as if that plain fact were enough and would last.


-Mark Strand

Falling is like this

You give me a look that's like laughing
with liquid in your mouth
like you're choosing between choking
and spitting it all out
like you're trying to fight gravity
on a planet that insists
and love is like falling
and falling is like this

Feels like reckless driving when we're talking
It's fun while it lasts, and it's faster than walking
But no one's going to sympathize when we crash
They'll say "you hit what you head for, you get what you ask"
and we'll say we didn't know, we didn't even try
one minute there was road beneath us, the next just sky.

I'm sorry I can't help you, I cannot keep you safe
I'm sorry I can't help myself, so don't look at me that way
we can't fight gravity on a planet that insists
that love is like falling
and falling is like this.

-Ani DiFranco

White noise

I collect below here in the steepening shadows, above the sky absent of matter, within the stillness of the air. I am not a shadow for I do not trail another being, nor am I personage, I do not exist in the true sense of the word. Never to be a true interruption, I am simply white noise. The drawing in of breath, the steady pulse, the warmth emitted from my skin; you detect that, but you see nothing more than visceral matters. I fade, swallowed by this bleak existence and one would not know I am here, although you sense the physical space I contain. Like the indistinguishable blur picked up by your subconscious, the echo that did not completely carry to your ears. If they somehow penetrate this barrier, I would remain untouched, spared by the nature of circumstance but sheltered from these travels without destination. For it must pass, and never stay.
I am only a minor function in a system driven by it's own flow, hindered by the hesitation of a single postponed travel. I gather the remembrances allotted, severed from what I would choose to attach to, knowing that roots may never be planted. I am thrown about by the currents, with nothing to leave as a sort of proof I once was here. It is simply riding through this existence, extending attempts to contact, but forever untouched, untouchable.

Look Closer

They have an odd way of thinking, don't they?
the pessimists, criminials,
the ones who are dirtied
with obscure thoughts and scrambled ideals backward to ours,
always sending back our ideas of
what is safe.

somehow always contributing to our lives
maybe through direct contact
or over the unsettling news casts
they are there and to some of us
they are breathing nightmares never met

And yet, once you
come across one
they'll usually look the same
wearing the face of the ordinary
with deepset wrinkle lines in their older years.

Look closer, if you dare to take the risk of
gaining in on the distances of your minds
but remember it's at your own discretion,
what would you do
if you couldn't write oneway sermons
to satisfy your inclinations to complain?

But when you find out
where they really stand
or crouch as compared
to where they thought they'd be
where propriety would place them,
you come to think
they should have markings
or flashing signs above their heads,

but no,
if you could meet them a few years back
past all the shame they should have felt
we're all really not that different
and perhaps that is what scares you
as if you see them as necessary evils,
somehow completing the hierarchy
of civilization.

Regalia for a black hat dancer

though I was hollowed out by pain,
honeycombed with the emptiness of it,
like the bird bones on the beach
the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season --
such surprising lightness in the hand--
I don't think I could have told the pain of loss
from the pain of possibility,
though I knew they weren't the same thing.

When I think of that time, I think mainly of the osprey's cry,
a startled yelp,
the cry more a color than a sound, and as if
it ripped the sky, was white,
as if it were scar tissue and fresh hurt at once.


by Robert Hass.

American Sonnet

We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
and it is not fourteen lines
like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,
that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms
or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

We write on the back of waterfall or lake,
adding to the view a caption as conventional
as an Elizabethan woman's heliocentric eyes.

We locate an adjective for the weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish we were where you are,
walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered
as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,
a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral
will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

and you will toss on the table this reversible display:
a few square inches of where we have strayed
and a compression of what we feel.

-Billy Collins

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

not the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you're never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its map are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
it's emptiness,

the bleak, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.


-Mark Strand

Under my skin

Under my skin

I hesitate to say I was bait for you
Could that be something that you all would do
I'd be lying if I did now say I wasn't intrigued
but timing is everything here,
and for the moment the 'we' is reprieved
But, as I watch the girl unfold before my eyes,
I discover that I like her.

Would you please get out from under my skin
'Cause I can't begin this yet
And I don't know what my intentions are
they're speaking in a different tounge
And deep inside I'm not as tough as I seem
But I won't let you know
Until it's right I'm going stay my distance
and you should go.

I'm in the dance, and it's a chance
but stay and watch a while
I'll be singing a tune just for you with a smile
And maybe if I'm lucky
You'll tip your hat to me, and you'll discover
That you like her.

Would you please get out from under my skin
'Cause I can't begin this yet
And I don't know what my intentions are
they're speaking in a different tounge
And deep inside, I'm not as tough as I seem
But I won't let you know
Until it's right, I'm gonna stay my distance
and you should go

Crazy as it all plays out
I think I'm lonelier than I've ever been before
'Cause I was so close
To going through that door
But I don't want to be to blame for them
I don't want to be to blame

Until it's right I'm gonna stay my distance
and you should go
Oh would you please get out
I'm not as strong as I seem
but I won't let you know.

-Rachael Yamagata

Rooms For Tourists

A neutral place, without shared memories, a sitting room with sea view where our thoughts fight. The floor is polished, the curtains are flowing, how many stories have finished this way? We turn the page, ready to start over. The silence is white, cold between us, no more sharing, here we are no longer tiedto our past life. Snake men sliding over the sand to the water, we shed our skins, washed of the torture of the preceding hours. Our bags, nothing important, nothing precious since we will leave everything in the rooms for tourists. We turn the page, ready to start over.

What It Was

I

It was impossible to imagine, impossible
Not to imagine; the blueness of it, the shadow it cast,
Falling downward filling the dark with the chill of itself,
The cold of it falling out of itself, out of whatever idea
Of itself it described as it fell; a something, a smallness,
A dot, a speck within a speck, An endless depth
Of smallness; a song, but less than a song, something drowning
Into itself, something going, a flood of sound, but less
Than a sound; the last of it, the blank of it,
The tender small blank of it filling its echo, and falling,
And rising unnoticed, and falling again, and always thus,
And always because, and only because, once having been it was. . .

II

It was the beginning of a chair;
It was the gray couch; it was the walls,
The garden, the gravel road; it was the way
The ruined moonlight fell across her hair.
It was that, and it was more. It was the wind that tore
At the trees; it was the fuss and clutter of clouds, the shore
Littered with stars.
It was the hour which seemed to say
That if you knew what time it really was, you would not
Ask for anything again. It was that. It was certainly that.
It was also what never happened--A moment so full
That when it went, as it had to, no grief was large enough
To contain it. It was the room that appeared unchanged
After so many years. It was that. It was the hat
She'd forgotten to take, the pen she left on the table.
It was the sun on my hand. It was the sun's heat. It was the way
I sat, the way I waited for hours, for days. It was that. Just that.


-Mark Strand

Jealousy

It is not the tilted building or the blind alleys
that I mind,
nor the winding staircases leading nowhere
or the ones that are simply missing

Nor is a walking through a foreign city
with a ring of a thousand keys
looking for the one door the worst of it,
nor the blank maps I am offered by strangers.

I can even tolerate your constant running
away from me, slipping around corners,
rising in the cage of an elevator,
squinting out the rear window of a taxi,

and always on the arm of a tall man
in a beautiful suit
and a perfectly furled hat
whom I know is carrying a gun.

What kills me is the way you lie there
in the morning, eyes closed,
curled into a sweet ball of sleep
and that innocent look on your face

when you tell me over coffee and oranges
that really you were right there all night
next to me in bed
and then expect me to believe you

were lost in your own dream world,
some ridiculous alibi
involving swimming through clouds
to the pealing of bells,

a transparent white lie about leaping
from a high window ledge
then burying your face
in the plumage of an angel.


-Billy Collins

I dream of paper landscapes
in which I can alter
with the simple slide of a brush
allowing just a little credit to the ideas
of feng shui

once it gets old and unsightly
and my view does not match the picture
it is easily enough blotted out
coated with another layer of paint.

It's become three dimensional instead of two
because of my fussing, my indesicion
or slight changes in taste
and it builds with each alteration.

each time it seems
I wish to start again with something
clean and unused
so that I may lay something else
more original, or more suitable than before.
but I was only allowed one canvas.

but when I set down the
fine pointed brush, I wonder
if it would look better untouched
what if I brandished my first idea?

and then I come to realize
there are no answers
that reaffirm themselves.

whatever influenced the
refining process drove me here
and, at times, I recognize I am in danger of
over correcting
or leaving something bland,
without enough detail.