LIFE DURING BLOGTIME
I’m tired
of blogs.
Taking off
my pants and sticking myself in there.
The ones
about truck drivers and the ones about contemporary poets named Melissa.
It’s so
much goddamn work,
so many
hours under the covers,
the dim
light, the darkness, the words and words and words
that remind
me of ants at the ant hole,
going in,
coming out.
I know
three bloggers. They’re all
dancers.
One is an
intuitionalist.
She spends
hours studying mental hospitals and schools, museums and The Capital Bldg
right there
in the middle of chicken wing Washington.
I said, “What’s
the point?”
She said, “The point is to get out the
kinks.”
I was hot
for her and that’s the only reason I asked.
Read my blog, she said, and you’ll get the picture.
I didn’t
want to get the picture.
I wanted to
be the picture.
I wanted
her lips all over my chest and then a nice cold beer, a Schlitz,
from the ‘70s
when even
telephones
were
something everyone had to get used to.
Now, I turn
on my computer and I’m spent, blog-whipped and wet.
I turn on
the TV to relax--
the Celtics,
The Lakers,
those damn
Yankees.
But there’s
no TV on the TV
just blogs
about the blogosphere
zipping
across the pixels--
twelve
hundred postings on the second inning,
the fourth
quarter, the missed layup at the buzzer.
I get
pissed,
throw my
shoes.
They bust
open the screen
and there,
in the back of the broken Mitsubishi
are a bunch
of Polish people
dressed in
black
dancing The
Polka
like it was
Polka night
on the
Lower East Side
years
before the war.
THE WORLD AT WORK IN ITS WEIRD HEART
(for Paul)
You can
lose friends off of the backs of ships.
You can
lose them off of pine trees and the sides of toilets
after hours
in front of the single malt scotch.
Some of
them will make it to Iowa
and blow
their brains out on porter house steak.
Others will
take their sweet time on the FDR
at three in
the morning
as the
Williamsburg Bridge turns lightly into a multicolored dinosaur.
It’s a steel
nail in the gut
and you
move into the morning with your coffee
trying not
to think about them.
But you do,
there at the copy machine,
in the
middle of the meeting on higher consciousness
between
business deals.
Joey,
Bobby, Billy, Miranda, Chloe.
Back home
the wife takes her toast and brings the children to school
while on
her way to work
texts back
the billions of ones and zeros
that make
up her sadness and joy
because she
has lost them too. We all have.
It’s the
world at work in its weird heart.
We lose them
off of
blazing pink gladiola petals
and in
front of empty t.v. screens.
It’s a kind
of easy destitution no matter how scarce oil is now
and water
will be in three hundred years.
Friends are
lost to the steam of three hundred silent grasshoppers
and to the
story you tell yourself every morning
about how
it was her fault and his indiscretion and their madness.
But they
can come back,
like a
busted guitar string, broken mid-song
as you flit
with the morning crow.
You reach outside
with your voice
and call
out among the coils,
the spins
of humdrum life.
You put on
your mankind
like an
over-sized cheap suit
and say, Hello,
I’m back.
It was not
you who was lost, it was me,
and I am
here now, with my suspect instrument
caught up
in the strings, one note at a time.
SENTIMENTALITY
I wept in
the barber’s chair.
I wept in
the dining hall.
I listened
to Van Morrison and I wept.
I took out
all my sneakers and put them in the rain.
The rain
went barefoot across my face.
I wept in
my face and I wept at home plate.
When I wept
in the box I was four for four.
I struck
out twice. The game went hours
and when I
got home I iced my knees.
The dog
wanted out and we wept under the tree.
The tree
said, go, go home and we wept in Van Morrison.
My dog said
enough
so we put
on Sweet Baby James.
Everyone
weeps on Sweet Baby James, gets him all wet,
and if you
say you don’t
you have no
idea.
It’s not a
matter of taste.
It’s just
what it is,
the aching
in your heart that you can’t hold back with words and books
and
theories and language.
You put the
needle on the record and boom, you are inside out
with no
lingerie on.
I’ve wept
in lingerie and I’ve wept under a bridge, homeless,
with four
cents in my pocket.
I’ve wept
so much in the bathroom I couldn’t stop
and when I
stopped
I didn’t
want to stop.
I did it
some more.
I don’t
care how many hours it took me to finish,
I never
finished.
I am
weeping right now, in the attic, on the roof,
in front of
the TV.
It is the
only way.
It is the
most joyous of things, with a clear head,
it makes
the head clear,
an ocean in
Barbados, an ocean in your head.
It is a
love song of songs,
a weeping
song, whale song, woman song
weeping
inside her child.
I weep for
her.
Who weeps
for me?
She weeps
for the sun.
Today it
shines on the earth
and the
earth weeps because it is happy,
even in its
terrible sadness
it always
has something to smile about.
Matthew
Lippman is the author of three poetry collections, AMERICAN CHEW, winner of The
Burnside Review Book Prize (Burnside Review Book Press, 2013), MONKEY BARS
(Typecast Publishing, 2010), and THE NEW YEAR OF YELLOW, winner of the Kathryn
A. Morton Poetry Prize (Sarabande Books, 2007). He is the recipient of the 2010 Jerome J. Shestack Poetry
Prize from THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW.
