the grating voices of neighbors unsuccessfully singing Celine Dion ballads
the monotonous mechanical humming of the metal factory
the squealing of housewives watching an afternoon soap opera
the blaring siren of a firetruck racing with tragedy
the clunks and clangs of a nearby construction site
the roaring of the engine of an overloaded jeepney
the chiming of laughter from kids playing in the streets
the calls of the street vendor peddling sugary cotton candy
the whining of the dog begging to run around outside
*this is the music of life in the outskirts of the city

The floor was cold under my bare feet as I crept down the stairs, listening to the noises that the house was making. The kind of noises it made when it thought everyone was asleep – the hum of the refrigerator, occasional clunks, the creaks as the walls warmed up and cooled down. By all rights, I should have been asleep.
Outside, the night was the impenetrable black that you only ever see in the dead of night, in the middle of winter. My face looked ghostly and pale in the glass of the window as I turned the tap, water sluggishly filling my glass. It was a peculiar feeling – like being disconnected from everything around you. Freefalling.

“Bit late, even for you.” I jumped, when I shouldn’t have. I don’t think you ever slept. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Couldn’t stop thinking.”

“Ah.” Your shadow moved towards me across the room, and I watched your reflection in the frosty window.  “It’s cold.”

“I know.” This was how we worked, this shorthand. For a guy who never shut up, and a girl who never said anything, I suppose it wasn’t unusual.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m not the one who’s half-naked.”

You chuckled, and I turned to look at you. Sweatpants hugging your hips and nothing else.

“Are you allergic to shirts?” I felt compelled to ask.

“I sleep naked. This is dressed up.” You smirked.

My cheeks flushed, and I was so grateful that the dark hid it. Suddenly, I was conscious of my pyjamas. Which was ridiculous – there was nothing wrong with sleepy sheepy.

You were watching me, that slow smile messing with my head.

“What?” I snapped irritably, uncomfortable with the weight of your gaze. “What?”

“Nothing.” You said, shaking your head. “You just look nice” you reached out, caught a wave of my hair, “with your hair down.”

I tugged away, making an impatient noise, and you dropped your hand to my arm. I looked up at you, wild eyed, and you stared back. I didn’t pull away.

For the first time in your life, your eyes weren’t dancing around, constantly distracted. They were still. We were still. We were trapped in that second.

“Are you cold?” I asked, and a part of me congratulated myself. That sounded almost normal, nice one.

You smiled slowly, your pupils huge and diluted. I wanted to tell them to stop, they were swallowing the green and it wasn’t fair.

“Not anymore.”

You reached your spare arm up and cupped the side of my neck, I watched your eyes, and they watched your hand. You tangled your long, pianist’s fingers in my hair, and looked up, into my eyes.

“Can I kiss you?”

Before, when we were dancing and I was so scared that the music was my drug, that I’d come around and know it had been a mistake, I had said no.

But there is nothing hypnotic about standing in a dark kitchen, skin crawling with the memory of shivers and when the soundtrack is the humming of the fridge.

“Yes.”

Your head dipped slowly towards mine, and I counted every second.

One.

I was falling.

Two.

Your breath touched my face, my eyes were closed.

Three.

Maybe you were falling too.

Four.

Your lips brushed mine, a whisper of a kiss, and then deepened. And suddenly we weren’t two, beautiful, broken teenagers with no way out and who were so, so tired. Suddenly, we were a girl in sheep pyjamas and a boy with smiling eyes. Suddenly, we were inconsequential to the grand scheme of things. Suddenly, we were all that mattered.

And when you pulled away, and my eyes opened reluctantly, I saw that you weren’t going to disappear. There was no pounding bass to hide behind and my hair was brushing my the bottom of my shoulder blades.

“Okay?” You said, and I watched the way your eyes sparked, my mind was humming.

“Okay.” I said, and I knew that, for the first time in a while, there would be no nightmares tonight.

windy
and a long way down
the people pulsing through the streets
unrestrained

there's traffic
and cars honking
and all i can see
is life
movement

there's people
below these skyscrapers
that are alive
and have things to hope for
and i am not one of them

windy
and it's getting dark now
and i'm almost out of whiskey
so it's now or never
before i loose my nerve
before the reckless abandon stops coursing through my veins
before i forget why the hell it is
that i'm up here in the first place

the bottle clunks on the ground
hollow
completely empty
and i knew i should have brought another with me
or maybe picked a taller building
but as it is
there is nothing above me
all else
is below skyscrapers
all else
is tiny
and insignificant
and selfish
and **** it
why not
just
jump

windy
fast
unbreathable
cold
sharp

below skyscrapers

occasionally, a flash of white page blankets her face like a pale Swedish summer
the video stream clunks along on solipsist angles, falling, waking, back, here here
pen on her tongue and I wonder where it's been, disease travels funny highways but the constant revelation of
one germ after another makes the body a well-protected warzone, immunity flaunts its immunity,
the pen picker probably protects the person a bit more aptly than the hand-sanitized middle-man afraid of the swine flu

blue blanket holds her shoulders like she's swimming in a lake of silly putty and her white teeth glisten because
she's lucky and no one ever notices their fortune when it's so close you can't see it.

turn around,
have you found it yet?

each New England home you’ve moved into
and out of
creaks the same
under my changing weight.

the porch sags,
sporting chipped paint
from years of cigarette breaks
spent shuffling, feet dug into wood

flimsy locks and screeching mailboxes,
the basement granite walls
and clunks of the laundry machine,
speak to me in familial hums
as if to sing,
stay away.

the same centipedes
scurry by my feet
as water falls deafeningly
I’m frozen in time.

staring empty-eyed into these brimming closets,
my vision strains.
florescent light
gleams across shut picture books of
treasures lost.
nothing left but old habits

found, as tools to our escape.

even I’m still slipping up,
and into the courting beds of lost men
mothers looking to me longingly
bearing sad smiles and gifts, as they lock the liquor away.
every son’s depression tugs the same short leash

knowing this much,
calms me.

home is a sad that
hangs dry in the cool thick air,
a sad that feels like November
like drenched rain coats, muggy with our heat
and after school how we
sailed paper boats
just to watch them drown in storm-sewer drains

home rings like
the bell of every summer heartbreak,
which coddled me to sleep
then too, shook me sharply.
only to find myself deserted

a ship at sea,
my heart buried in sand, again.

home is
the heavy drought before the rain
it stands on our heads
it dances past our eyes
it lives in our reflections
teasing us,
as if to say
we’re not allowed to cry.

As the washer clinks and clunks its way toward clean clothes.
I sit and think while listening to the rhythms of the machine
as it cleanses all. If it could only cleanse my mind of random
thoughts of nothing, that seem always to get in the way.

To clear a path to thoughts of substance, paving the way to
literary greatness, or at least a word that wiggles itself into
some mediocre write which I know shouldn’t have made it to
someone else's eyes.

I need that garbled clump of goop that feeds my appetite for
writing, as it dislodges remnants of times gone by, things that
are shaken loose from deep within my soul, while it agitates
and spins me in new and different directions.

It is what life has given me to work with, an abundance of
good and bad, new and old, fresh and stale, with a vehicle for
me to climb aboard to explore the deep recesses of my mind
and soul. It seems that vehicle stalls at times and hesitates
before it is able to start again and continue on its way.

To take me out of this non productive place I’m in, to that
crisp clean white piece of paper so my pen will flow to places
it’s never been.


http://www.charlesdennispoetry.netne.net

© 2009 Charles Dennis

Clunky hands tick round
To beckon the rooster's crow --
No crisp morn summoned.

Perhaps sharp teeth sliced
Spilling chunks on moving gears --
Springs once sprung severed.

Though ticks still trundle
Their purpose swings freshly void --
Dense clunks breed gloaming.

With no shredding bay
Ending rapid eye movement --
Endless night transpires.

When the crunches and clunks emanating from your neck
become even more regular than the day before
you kind of get the hint that this skeleton was not made to last;
much past its sell by date of three score years and ten.

oems (48)
Ranked
Links
Gods and The Lesser Kind
They say,  come to the abyss,
the Abbadon, the back of beyond
a place that should be nameless

where condominium men
with cool blue eyes
gyrate coiled bodies
gesturing lambs
and lions,   seething
mean stories
sordid in their constitution,
spitting
bottle blades
******, but still shiny
from sore mouths-  and the girls,
they laugh,    They say,  

          come to the abyss,
the Abbadon, the back of beyond

where their lips
pale white,      cuss the sun, defiant,
longing for it to drop from a sullen sky
and into the decaying harvest
of their itching hands    stained cherry wine,
burning to kindle it firelight

near train tracks and trees,
the woods  rubber band their veined
branches, waiting for my
sweating flesh to melt out
by open flames,    an accomplice
to a crowd ignited,
                caught by
a sickening kind of fearlessness,
I don't feel good here

in the beginning,
boisterous, screaming

leapfrogging steel rods
with pupils the size of ponds
while others
are left lonesome,
staring at the hypnotic wonder light
that comes with a tremor
through stale bones
they never wanted

those people always come back
with their hands
and fingers
and fists   and arms
still alive
******* air
with a frantic disillusion,
digging for cheap thrilled
pennies in their jeaned pockets
just to watch a copper body
tossed into affliction,

hoping a God will come down
with the feelings of gold instead, but

I am out late at a blue hour
there are no saints or deities
when swallowed drunken, I will not worship
in this kingdom,
swollen bright, layered with gloss,
the hemisphere of this realm is split in halves
to be seen twice like duality,
reminding me
there aren't idols high enough
to live in my heavens,
nor darlings too sweet
not to ******--   these prayers are damp
and intimate. not meant for a drop of water
over the complete sea
or the illuminated commander of a tide, no

for now
I'm feeling human, which
disturbs the transcendence of the grounded sort,
now all I hear is a disembodied      run

run
because the people here
remind me that I will always search for
something without knowing what it is,      run
because they are too close to who I am,

all of us can be seen
lynching limp smiles
from the top of our scalps,
left to sway
halfheartedly
in a grave gesture
of love
sent to the spirit of midnight
who unravels freedoms
and happy notions,

injecting calm dreams
into the arms of slumped and melancholy
purple silhouettes --  a rush of warmth

silent culture, shamed culture,

believing they don't have **** to say,
deadened people

their backs
are down
hard,
almost panting in language,
with a heavy thumping protest
of indecision,
which in the end is a decision
that will betray them, and I am
no different than the last

smacking their bodies
smooth into rough, pulling
on short toughs of grass grown in a clearing,
happily burning greens because
everybody's starving,
I'll die feeding a plentiful hunger.

when it's over,
we are whaling Kerouac lullaby's

a consumed and sallow generation,  
unknowingly gutted
by a clawed sadness,
heeding the suggestion of sedation
to ensure survival--
******, but pretty alive,    ****
is the new love, is a numb love

there's something terribly wrong here

we must look
gruesome to you, Visceral
exteriors,
nauseous,
prodding the hot metal
that fills the chasm of our teeth,
crying a choppy
metallic haunting
shaking like factory machines
and their overworked bodies
heaving chained clunks
through the throat

wishing for goodness
in between bile, to take up communion
where open spaces
are too cold and seeking

an unholy embrace,
otherwise ethereal,
unafraid of sacrifice,
I'll give you what's left of me--
                   you don't know what you've done,
whenever we touch,
it is always an absolution of life

a forfeiture      a creature to shoot
and put down when perceived
to be the lesser kind-  
             angry and hostile
in my own environment

asking why small gods
the size of bullets allow the fearful
to be their messengers,
who tell the people of neon
to Pacific
that runaway consciousness
is a rebellion of truth

yet,  no answer will ready me,
history says I can't keep straight,
if ever you came looking for my life,
I still wouldn't know the difference between living and dying--
the back of beyond is so far away
and the Abbadon is a war that never ends.

I can hear the gears cracking
little by little. The aroma of metal
and oil fills my nostrils and time slips
as the clock forgets its steps. What once
was a slow waltz is now a freestyle.
The other machines follow suit
with jagged movements. Mechanical
clunks now flooding into my ears; drowning
my thoughts like a white noise. Metal bending
and groaning as pipes above me shake
with screaming steam. The pressure reaches
a dangerous threshold before-- a pause. Like time
being frozen. Except for a drip from outside
that fizzes on the still hot pipes. Clunks
are now barely heard in the back.
It’s peaceful, isn’t it- this factory
at night. These machines used to dance
in unison, but all of the workers have clocked
out to rest. It was meant to be a break
to keep from breaking, but home
is a little too quiet- and thoughts
begin to boil over again.

No more a whisper
Such were the demands
Demands levied upon fields of dreams
Fantasies sowed into the field season o'er season
Crops rising bone dry and thirsty for verity
Babes who would never know milk
Carrion who would never know decay
Work that would never know pay
Such were these dreams!
Slave to the whims of whimsy
Tossed o'er a deranged sea, churned
Nay
Spurned by the ****** that cackle in the depths,
Twirling their hands as would a maestro
and the dreams dance by these strings
Reigns upon the centaur
Thought himself more man than beast
but his master proves him wrong
throttles his dreams like so many tragic ****** and still...
And still!
He dreams.
But the dreams begin to seep a saucy essence
The stuff of childbirths and ****** victories upon the battlefield
Both an emerging of brilliance and an escape of nightmare
Both a wailing cry and a roaring scream
And the scaffolding clinks and clanks around the wispy form of the dream
And it clinks and clunks its way up, providing the mold for new dawn.
The prophet, who is both midwife and sycophant, utters a chorus of impassioned voices singing to the ends of the universe,
while the dream bulges and creaks against the form of the mold.
The scaffolding breaks in an uproar of so many eggshell fragments, blasting forth like shrapnel
And the veil of ignorance is pierced by this awakening.
And a hush falls upon the world in a tremor of silence
And the ache is felt in the effort of producing a single thought
For all is absent in the wake of this dream made flesh...
"She is here,"
The paragons of ages announce,
"And she will command your pleasures until your pains are destitute... and you shall live no more, for what is life without pain."

We watch the twinkling fish tank
from dry land. We watch
the unwashed
green algae encroach
on chlorinated blue.
It necrotizes. It becomes oil water.
It becomes licorice tea.
There's Venus, eyes stung, blinking.
We watch the swinging silhouette
on old boiled skin,
the true object of interest.
A rat scuffs her pink paws down
the plastic tube and clunks into the dish.
She eats. Black seed held to chest.
We're content, watching.
You hold me to your chest, too.