Hello all, and happy Memorial Day. I think this posts celebrates my two-year Substack anniversary, so I thought instead of some long confession essay or a fiction snippet (or, dear lord, yet another comic) I would post something a tad more revealing: poetry.
This year I have taken to supplement my daily journal writing with a single poem captured al fresco in a notebook with no editing. This came about because I realized that the poems come from some entirely different part of my consciousness, an aspect of self that at once knows more and less about whatever I happen to be going though. In the never-ending quest for self-knowledge, I undertook the commitment to regularly capture these “secret messages” from my self for later decoding.
Over the next month I’ll share some of these, but first I want to post four older poems that date from the past decade. Some of these may have been posted here before, so please forgive any repetition.
Changing The History
How cleverly he arranged it,
this erasure of these whose usefulness
had come to an end
his teams of former scholars
and historians combed through the official portraits
and snapshots and paintings
and countless old newspapers
the reams and reams of plans and directives and laws and ordnances
removing their names, their faces, their bodies
In one photo he stands at a table surrounded by his friends and fellows
flags are draped behind them. Some of them even smile while the
others
look gravely at the camera
Himself looks into the distance, ever the soldier, the hunter, steely,
hands flat on the table surface as though to keep it from rising
the weight of his massive body pressing it to the floor
One by one, the men in the picture
Zinoviev, Kursky, Chicherin, Kuybyshev
were denounced, disgraced, tried, executed
or died by suicide or alcoholism or heart failure or accident
as if they had never existed
Leopard Circus
The tiger who cannot change his stripes
is really a leopard. The stripes are paint
applied a bit at a time, while he slept
When he awoke he wondered
not at all about these new markings
so like the shadows cast by the bars of his cage
They fed him more than he could eat.
The stench of carrion rotting on the floor
was assumed to come from him
When told what tricks the tiger must do
he never thought the Tiger Tamer was talking
about him. He was really a leopard
and everyone knows it
is really a leopard
who cannot change his spots
Something Had to Break
Something had to break
I thought, seeing
the dishes lying so prim
behind glass-front cabinets.
But then I thought:
the noise. The broom.
How tiresome. Worse,
the windows. Thin, tall, rippled
antique in wooden frames. They
looked into the neighbor’s house
close enough to see everything
Break
a mirror, then. The bad luck is just
for the angry man reflected
in the jagged shards
a hundred eyes staring up
from the floor, sharp enough
to cut the feet of any fool
rushing in to tread there.
Wherever She Goes
Written for my ex-wife the day she left town for good, taking the children with her
Wherever she goes the crops fail,
babies drown in washtubs
and all the ewes abort.
The grass blackens behind her, every footprint
forever barren, a patch of earth
where nothing good can grow.
Clouds of flies swarm from her mouth,
every word a plague
that will leave no village untroubled
by unexplained death. The priest
takes a razor to his throat
slashes it during a confession
when her name is merely mentioned.
Villagers wave stones in her face
but will not kill her, though
the milk sours in the crock since
the devil you know is better
than the devil you don't
Thanks for reading!
Four Poems
Good poems, Josh. I especially like the first one