Poetry: Selections from Jay Sizemore

I am Unkillable 

~after Saul Bellow 

1.

Everything is an accident.

My conception,

the scar below my left eye,

bumping into the love of my life

in the apparel section of Walmart

folding a pair of silk panties,

and feeling like an arrow

fired through the ribs

of the last American buffalo. 

It's an accident I wasn't born

a buffalo, that instead of emerging

from that dark tunnel

into a brightness that erupted

like an exploding star, 

waking in a time 

where cowboys were paid

to pile bloody hides into mountains

while rotting carcasses

attracted flies in the fields.

I woke up here,

where every day is another kind

of mass shooting,

and yet, all the bullets ricochet

around my head,

criss-crossing into the shapes

of pentagrams and other glyphs

that hold no power of protection,

just more accidents in the cosmos, 

different types of collisions

or near collisions,

where just the wind

of a passing chunk of debris

changes its target trajectory,

altering all foreseeable events

for all of future history.

2.

The dark shadows move with the breeze, 

they brush against my spirit,

reminding me: I want, I want, I want. 

I want to burn like the brightest colors

bursting from the roses 

planted along the fence row. 

I want to scream, I'll blow my brains out! 

rather than admit my frailty, 

that I've faded like the elbows in an old jacket. 

I want to taste my grandmother's cooking

one more time, just one more time, 

that corn, yellow glistening with butter, 

beans freckled with pepper and fragrantly

steeped in a pot of ham hock,

and so many potatoes, more than any man 

could ever rightly consume. God, 

how I miss it. How I miss those Sundays

after my weekly indoctrination, 

teaching me that the dead

are never truly dead, 

but they'll never make you breakfast. 

I want to learn every instrument, 

to create music as easily as breath, 

to have the ability to express myself 

in a way that surpasses language, 

whether I'm busking in a subway

or standing on the polished stage 

of the opera house in Sydney, 

I'm reaching out across all barriers, 

touching that place without words 

and saying, this is what it means, 

this is what it means to be alive, 

and if you want to know 

what the dead are singing 

from just beyond their graves, 

remember this, this song that was you.

3. 

My heart is like an unfinished church, 

strengthened by grief

and unanswered prayers

I am a raincoat worn in the desert,

 

while nurturing a kinship

with every living thing. 

The truth comes in blows

that turn the world into a drum, 

my skin the surface, stretched

over that resonant hollow 

emitting the thunder of hurt, 

incessant as a night bird 

calling for a mate that doesn't come. 

You're either content to be, 

or perpetually becoming, 

in a constant state of renewal, 

discovery, unfolding like a crumpled page

set to a flame.

4.

Death licks his postage stamps

and mails all his packages

to the center of the universe,

envelopes filled with dust and dirt,

that no one ever opens directly,

rather it's another hand

clasping weakly at the loose soil

to drop in on your grave. 

In the meantime we wait,

convinced every rain drop

is somehow guided by the winds of fate,

and those arrows that keep missing

the heart by breadths

no wider than an inch,

keep emboldening our belief

that Death keeps his watch

from considerable distance, 

when just the opposite is true. 

He's always there, the whisperer,

chanting, I want, I want, I want,

barely disturbing the hairs

of the hidden inner ear,

convincing the body

of its own distraction,

to waltz fearless into the lion's den

and lay a hand flat on its tongue. 

Nothing is an accident.

From the stars to the tiniest gnats

buzzing around the eyes,

change is as inevitable

as it is necessary,

so when the arrow finally hits true

to stop the gears of time,

become the roar of the beast

that would tear your throat out

rather than live its days

shackled to the totems

of false gods.

The Werewolf Does the Foxtrot 

~after Hermann Hesse

You either go home and hang yourself,

or you hang your shirt up,

knowing that suicide's allure

is a mirage, a silver bullet

slotted beneath its hammer, gleaming. 

But it's not an escape hatch,

it's just a condemnation

to repeat the whole damned game.

It's the mistake of time

to believe you can outsmart the werewolf. 

This self-seriousness avoids

the cosmic joke of it all,

The self is not the self,

but a conflagration of selves,

competing to hear the music. 

This reality is not your home,

it is simply a way station,

a temporary dance hall,

a battlefield where both sides know

the war will never resolve. 

You will always fear death,

even if you find yourself dancing

and drunk in the arms of a girl

whose eyes hold the light

of a billion cathedrals on fire. 

You think you're an artist,

that you deserve to hear

your own thoughts recited

in classrooms, behind lecterns, 

your messages heavy as mountains, 

when Mozart died a pauper,

his liver swollen with wine,

and his body tossed in a pit

sprinkled with shovels of lime.

Who the fuck are you? 

The great sea of written words

swallows your poems

and absorbs them, churns them

within its amorphous and deitous mass,

never bothering to request your name. 

Don't be ashamed. Love waits

somewhere beyond the blood raw

promise of the razor. Let the wolf

learn to dance all the steps of all the days,

until one night it finds itself

smiling for no reason at all,

lost in the moment 

of a sky gifting its kisses

like messages in bottles 

from all the wolves who came before. 

The Business of Love 

~after D. H. Lawrence 

You can't hitch your horse

to the shadow of a fence post,

the heart tugs at the reins

of such fecund darkness,

a bull rushing 

among the bulrushes. 

The clanging torment 

of passion is a fire eater, 

a millstone rolling, 

heavy sky upon the earth

pressing down, relentless

in its gravity, its need. 

What am I but fruit

to be crushed 

and fermented for wine, 

a body meant for drinking

and exhilarating the senses

until repetition numbs the nerves, 

leaves the tongue lonely

in its bicuspid cage, 

wanting for the taste 

of something new, 

a mouthful of salty pennies

pulled from a fish's stomach, 

or a tangerine 

soaked in tequila sunrise. 

Love flashes bright, 

like a punch to the nose, 

but then it fades

to a dull ache

just before it's gone. 

You can spend so many years

trying to duplicate it, 

that first blush, 

the first crimson drunkenness

of a heart's hymen torn, 

but you always end up

just waiting to be born.

Jay Sizemore is a poet and author of 18 collections of poetry along with one collection of short fiction. He writes poems then wonders where they come from, like a coma patient constantly waking up having written himself a memoir of another life. He doesn't question the muse, though lately he's asking the muse to use complete sentences.