D S Caillte

D S Caillte Apr 2011

Seasons Change: The Difference Between a Jolt and a Crash

The bareness of Winter,
Skeletal branches,
Black and silver,
Chimes like a music box,
Like a melody stripped
Of frivolities, so the weightless
Chill in the air is life
At her most pure.

Summer's tension mounts,
Cacophonous nature
Or threatening silence,
And shanghais children,
The truly perceptive ones,
Into a game of tag,
Running like dervishes till lungs
Feel like burning.

class assignment 4.28.11; response to Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man"

D S Caillte Apr 2011

The Watchman

When one walks in the night
As I do,
There is nothing for it
But to switch on your torch
And pray that the batteries don’t quit on you.

If anyone tells you they know this town,
Well, that is a cocksure lie.
If anyone tells you that the alleyways call to him
Then he is simply running from the bridge
Stretched over the river;
It’s that long drop into black that’s inviting him.

I had a friend once,
Claimed nothing was alive
Till that one clanging clock,
But he saw the dawn too early
And stepped out like it was daytime already but—

Let’s not talk about him.

No, I’m not saying
No one has business on the night streets.
That’s my own call out there,
Business.

I like thinking I protect the town,
Like any other man on the force,
But I know what the real danger is.
No man should step outside his house at night
Dressed up and looking out like the sun’s high in the sky.
Fun, yeah, sure,

But the potholes will rob you
And the little rats will trip you up as well,
So it’s really for the best that when I see you
Rambling the dark
And not skulking like any proper man would
I shake my truncheon at you
And point your drunk **** back home.

I was supposed to respond to Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night," a wonderful poem, but sometimes your words just get away with me. I haven't been able to write anything in such a long time that I decided not to check it. Still don't know what I'll turn in to my teacher, though. (4.26.11)

D S Caillte Mar 2011

Good Morning, Mo Chuisle

Smog at this hour?

The rising sun alone
Can turn the heavy mass
Into something visceral,
The veil that lies
Between two Irish-American hearts.

Train tracks and wooden shacks.
Houses.
The smoke is there,
Too,
Rolling off the ends of our fathers’ cigars.

I swam through it last night at the jazz bar
As it rose higher and higher,
Turning the lights as blue
As the singer’s voice.
My brother’s piano sounded the real melody,
Driving,
Like trains waking up in the morning
And chugging through back courts,
Under windows,
And out into the country.

3.23.11
Written while listening to "I'll Love You Till the End" by The Pogues

D S Caillte Mar 2011

Cat

Cat, how does it feel
To know that no matter
If your eyes are of steel
And your heart like the latter
You will be received with love?

When humans copy your style
They are met with rejection
As if heaped with the bile
Of society's reflection.
You're the worst role model.

But they too spurn emotion
With a life almost sadistic;
I believe they repent with devotion
To the life of an artistic.
But what have you done?

You lie and lick and paw
And pretend to have a master
To whom you give the bird in your maw,
****** with the night's disaster.
Beauty must excuse everything.

Anthropomorphic poetry--a school assignment 3.3.11

D S Caillte Feb 2011

Tickle-Me-Staggered

We must all live within a dream.

This is my only explanation
For why no one
Else notices the submarine,
Gazes
Through the portholes
As we plunge into the deep;

For why no one else
Gasps
When the air turns to prairie grass
And tickles our fingers and noses.

Their eyes are so dim
That I long ago stopped
Gesturing
When swirls of music
And accents of muted color
Hit my face like jumping
Into the deep end of a pool.

This is my dream,
But they must have been abducted
Into it, Carried away like me,
Because I CANNOT believe
That these melting candles
Belong to me, a paper lantern
About to float away.

An assignment; responding to D.C. Berry's "On Reading Poems to a Senior Class At South High"

D S Caillte Feb 2011

The Corpse of Carpe Diem

No music, no friends,
Just a notebook,
Myself, and a pen
Under the purple sky.

Never again did I beg
For the sake of watching love
Run on white legs
Under the purple sky.

I traded distortion for reverb
With one gas tank
And earrings with birds
Under the purple sky.

I brushed aside wrong answers
In favor of questions
To watch a team like dancers
Under the purple sky.

I don't regret the ocean,
But standing by that pond
Was both devotion and demotion
Under the purple sky.

D S Caillte Jan 2011

Inspired by James Fenton's "The Possibility"

I remember well my first day of preschool
When the teacher taught us the Golden Rule
And how we were all God’s little caterpillars.

I remember the love I bore my stuffed horse
And how tightly I hugged my stuffed dog with great force;
I would be the world’s best zookeeper.

I remember my parents’ copious gifts of books,
How they were more important than my friends’ good looks;
Their stories still represent my dear childhood.

I remember the first time I discovered music of my own
Through a 90s band CD I had as a loan.
I danced with my headphones like a dryad.

I know the exact date I noticed at last
How much of my life friends had seemingly surpassed
And I vowed that I could never again be happy.

The stories were never again a fully open door,
More like a ditch dug out in the floor
Behind which I could hide my face forever.

One day, songs became a desperate race
To see who could sing and play bass,
So I’ve dropped out like a sixteen-year-old kid.

Now, lying under the stars thinking of this and that
I actually cower from the once-beloved animals like cats
Because they have uncomfortable interest in worms.

I was better off a caterpillar.