SUCH A SUNNY DAY

the objects
in his pocket

have lost
their identity

their significance
to anyone but him

a hairy comb
photo of an unknown

woman
who can she be

a torn-in-two
train ticket

chewing gum
much masticated

yet put back
in his blazer's breast pocket

small change
a penny and a sixpence and

a button
from the cuff

no clue as to who
he had been

before the water claimed him
as its own

the disgust and fascination
of those

passersby who continue
to pass by

it such
a sunny day

for death to
intrude this way

the miscellany of objects
ownerless now

the waters of the Liffey
calm and unmoved

It isn’t fair, it isn’t right; I don’t care what they say.
My dog was more than a pet to me; I lost a friend today.
Though I did the kindest thing, and stayed with her to the last.
I come back to a quiet house, now that my friend has passed.

The unused leash, the ownerless bowl, I survey through my tears.
Meg was my boon companion. Far too few were her years.
The vet gave me a cherished poem that I’ll read tonight again.
It promised Meg will wait for me just beyond the rainbow’s end.

The souls of Dogs are gentle which is why it takes less time
Before they achieve perfection and are ready for the climb
To that place across the rainbow, to the place where journeys end-
where the roses bloom forever I will always have my friend

O four twenty six AM night in small city apartment bedroom studying alone, under stars, under
             roof,
Steaming green porcelain teacup on sill of window propped open by ownerless two
            by-four
O Steam, rising into cool wind, swirling, disappearing in howling black night to silver
            maple leaves on limbs of giant bushy tree lathering in wind.
Desk light, O, my desk is covered in court cases,
Fugitive slave in shack by river staring glassy-eyed in oil lamp at pink dawn weeping,
***** in rags shuddering in corner sweating, lacerated by whip of laughing bearded
    man in gallon hat
and my spliff ash on twelve scattered pages.
O awe, teacup, steam and cool wind dancing, tree
    fanning in great commotions of wind-breaths through the window
Buzzing on energy pill I sat in black leather desk chair gazing, stood up, walked quietly in socks
    and grabbed the mug, extended my arm ***** out window in icy air
grasping Olympian Statue of Liberty torch of steaming green tea I brought my
    head through window looked up and cool-eyed I saw a star.

I wonder, when John Hancock
signed the Declaration,
if he could feel time pulling apart
then back together,
taking the shape
of his America.

I wonder, when Lincoln
felt the cold bullet
enter the curls of his hair,
if he had enjoyed the play.

I wonder, when ****’s
burned ownerless toys
and 80-year marriage rings,
if they were shaken
by the screams of thousands.

I wonder, when the sailor
kissed that nurse
when the war had been won,
if he thought about bombs
or her soft lips.

I have no energy left but for revolt — the revolt of the one
who abandons the climb, turns his back, and goes
back down the hill toward the water.

The pinstriped priests sharpen the horn between their legs,
The better to carve the granite commandments
that drag me to the precipice’s edge with a pill for my mouth,
a hand for my pocket, and a push for my back.

I have fed at the supersized trough, striven to become
a hallmark of standardized measurement.  
But I do not want to be fed by those factory corpses
who sit like workers in cubicles, unmoving and covered
to their hips in excrement and despair.

I do not want to work in a box turning time into regret and obedience into tears.
I do not want to be informed by the chyron streams
that feed the wells of desolation and ignorance.
I do not want to be a cog of an economy that fills the fountains
of palaces with the blood of innocence; where investment  is a tout sheet
that dissolves into electrons as the getaway limousine races toward the mansion.

The sheer and final exhaustion of the rebel is his last and only triumph:
he drops the knife of his cause, gently lowers the stiffening body
of his holy purpose into the receptive dust, clears aside
a few stony pieces of the rubble, and kneels in submission
to the earth and all its ownerless teeming beauty.
For then he knows: it is I, too, like these others, who have walked among the dead.
Then he leaves his climbing body there, and turns again, back toward the water.

They're are terrible creatures,
Smart, vicious,
And we're weak for em,
All of us,
We can deny it
All we wish
But they own us,
We're like dogs to them,
Following them,
Wagging our tails
For a smile or
Some dumb scratch
Behind the ears,
And god
How stupid we're,
Blind to our
Petite owners,
And they'll use us
And they'll beat us
And they'll rip our dog hearts out
And show em to us
And we'll still wag our tails for em,
Stalk em through the house with hopeful eyes,
Boy you know it's true,
Right now I'm ownerless,
Been so forever
And I've seen my friends get adopted
From the pound and
The look of em
All proud and parading
Em around the place like
"Guys look at me! Look!
Don't you wish you had this?"
And hell yes I do,
I hate to admit it
But it gets sad,
This ain't no good life for a dog,
I want one,
A owner,
I don't care
Whether she's
Vicious or not,
I don't care if I wag my tail
And later on
She leaves me on the streets,
Must feel good to be owned
By those terrible creatures.

When someone you loved very much dies, strange things
Start to happen to you, that you don't notice right away:
The hologram that their influence built around you
Turns inside-out; the bulk of it shrinks down
Into one of those super-dense singularities.
Their belongings start to feel impersonal and oddly distant;
Reminiscent of a strangers bags, sitting packed for the departure.
All the love and caring is siphoned out
When the owner leaves existence behind:
The void they left fills with a surreal grace, when viewed
From the novelty of their absence. A breathtaking coldness
Accompanies this second ownerless half-life:
Touching them, your own fingers are burned, frostbitten
Eventually dead to external stimuli.
The rigor travels inward from the extremities,
Making a slow ascent toward the heart,
Crystallizing everything along the way,
Melding it all into lovely, singular geometries
As one cell after another is enveloped.
Until the central core is an unmoving artifact
In the arctic waste, but unable to die.
A frozen cryosurgical intervention of stained glass
Ruby veins, suspended in frozen calciferous walls.
Other people do not notice the changes or see
Not unless you touch them-
Accidentally brushing up against you,
They feel then the penetrating cold,
Radiating outward in bitter waves.
Drawing their clothing more tightly about them,
They search for the taletale signatures of frost,
Wondering if winter came early this year.

Underneath millions of tiny spotlights we unearth our darkest secrets.
Tip toe unbound into the lake
White Freckled like a deer.
Her hips flirting just above the water.
Arms stretched up towards the moon.

She says:
"When the lunchbell rings
They lurk out of their door frames
Stretch their bones at the staff and moan
Like a horde of sorry forgotten ghosts.
Lingering in limbo.
Songs of unpet ownerless dogs
Waiting for anyone to come adopt them, rather than just be fed.

"I've known you for three hours and you're already fixing my mistakes." I say
When the advertisement for my call center plays in their REC hall
I promise my vitimans will make their children visit twice a week.
make them young and healthy.
And when they pay me my commission and it doesn't work.
You get to patch up the scars
no pill can heal.

She's sick of the suffering
Can't stand watering their caskets

down by the sand dunes of St Clair
the streetlights are phantasms, diffracted
in the squinting vision of night. Lightning fractured
across the sky cracked, cathartic. Imagine, to steer
into the sea as the evening stretches, take it
to other coasts, live a life less haptic;
resurrection by the unbound, and disappear.
but most days as the wind curls the sand around my toes, this beach to wash up the same bones
the same trunks of broken trees,
what was it I was meant to be
like a limp, whale on the beach stones
eyes to the sea she dreams
  the empty ownerless sea.

There was a world once and it was angry and it was violent but it was beautiful because it was ours. It was vast and open and unknown, it hated us and we loved it back.
There is a world now and it is silent and it is scared and it has no idea where it's going or where it came from. It is small, closed and transparent. It doesn't care about us because we stopped caring about it.
This world is not mine or yours, it's barely even theirs. This world is ownerless, lost and apart whilst never having been so close.
You and I, we and they, so connected by wires that stretch for miles that we can barely connect over fences that are inches thick. Or maybe I'm just getting older while it's getting younger.

It feels just like yesterday, whispers
a croaking voice inside, so familiar,
but ownerless, like that same white van
passed on every morning’s commute, a canvas
where somebody beautiful took the time to
spraypaint in pukegreen bubbleletters
“WELCOME TO HELL”, to
urban sprawl, or capitalism,
or something? Something, slinking like a
roach through rotting throngs of desperation
marching blind through subwaycar shackles,
carrying away the hopes of tomorrow on
yesterday’s dollar, building justifications
for plunder out of cold metal and glass…

eyes open. I open the morning door,
pierced by a crow’s shadow at
oppressive dawn. Bleary, half-formed,
each step out of the homeshell and down
the street feeling slowed down, like
the air has hardened into a sea of fudge,
saccharine bliss of ***** birds resembling
the endless sobs of the guilty, keeping them
down, today, locked up inside—

I have wasted years
apologizing for not being
enough to replace this futility—
I have no butterfly net
big enough
to seize the day.

On the far side of an idyllic fence
a groundhog darts out from a hedgerow,
barreling awkwardly, shamelessly,
away from the familiar cover of the underbrush—
Sparkling, from this distance,
playfully glazed with new sun
this shuffling ball of fur
hurtles through the empty field…

Why can’t I?
Stepping up and into
public transport, metallic husk,
the question remains, lingering
far after the sounds fade out.

--Graham Kellner

SUCH A SUNNY DAY

the objects
in his pocket

have lost
their identity

their significance
to anyone but him

a hairy comb
photo of an unknown

woman
who can she be

a torn-in-two
train ticket

chewing gum
much masticated

yet put back
in his blazer's breast pocket

small change
a penny and a sixpence and

a button
from the cuff

no clue as to who
he had been

before the water claimed him
as its own

the disgust and fascination
of those

passersby who continue
to pass by

it such
a sunny day

for death to
intrude this way

the miscellany of objects
ownerless now

the waters of the Liffey
calm and unmoved

SUCH A SUNNY DAY

the objects
in his pocket

have lost
their identity

their significance
to anyone but him

a hairy comb
photo of an unknown

woman
who can she be

a torn-in-two
train ticket

chewing gum
much masticated

yet put back
in his blazer's breast pocket

small change
a penny and a sixpence and

a button
from the cuff

no clue as to who
he had been

before the water claimed him
as its own

the disgust and fascination
of those

passersby who continue
to pass by

it such
a sunny day

for death to
intrude this way

the miscellany of objects
ownerless now

the waters of the Liffey
calm and unmoved

*

I was just coming up to O'Connell Bridge and the bus got snarled in traffic. It was a beautiful beautiful sunny day and as I gazed idly out of the window a body, sodden and shapeless but still all too human was being winched out of the river. So we were forced to witness this before the bus finally made it to the bridge. It was startling and cut like an emotional knife through the fabric of the perfect day.

My girlfriend at the time told of a friend of hers who had sometime last year thrown herself into the Liffey so that added an extra dimension to the horror. Everyone who had met her on that last day said she seemed so happy and were amazed that she had done so because "...it was such a sunny day." She only had a comb and a button and small change in her pocket...all she owned. A human life shrunk to so little.

SUCH A SUNNY DAY

the objects
in his pocket

have lost
their identity

their significance
to anyone but him

a hairy comb
photo of an unknown

woman
who can she be

a torn-in-two
train ticket

chewing gum
much masticated

yet put back
in his blazer's breast pocket

small change
a penny and a sixpence and

a button
from the cuff

no clue as to who
he had been

before the water claimed him
as its own

the disgust and fascination
of those

passersby who continue
to pass by

it such
a sunny day

for death to
intrude this way

the miscellany of objects
ownerless now

the waters of the Liffey
calm and unmoved

SUCH A SUNNY DAY

the objects
in his pocket

have lost
their identity

their significance
to anyone but him

a hairy comb
photo of an unknown

woman
who can she be

a torn-in-two
train ticket

chewing gum
much masticated

yet put back
in his blazer's breast pocket

small change
a penny and a sixpence and

a button
from the cuff

no clue as to who
he had been

before the water claimed him
as its own

the disgust and fascination
of those

passersby who continue
to pass by

it such
a sunny day

for death to
intrude this way

the miscellany of objects
ownerless now

the waters of the Liffey
calm and unmoved

*

I was just coming up to O'Connell Bridge and the bus got snarled in traffic. It was a beautiful beautiful sunny day and as I gazed idly out of the window a body, sodden and shapeless but still all too human was being winched out of the river. So we were forced to witness this before the bus finally made it to the bridge. It was startling and cut like an emotional knife through the fabric of the perfect day.

My girlfriend at the time told of a friend of hers who had sometime last year thrown herself into the Liffey so that added an extra dimension to the horror. Everyone who had met her on that last day said she seemed so happy and were amazed that she had done so because "...it was such a sunny day." She only had a comb and a button and small change in her pocket...all she owned. A human life shrunk to so little.