Long Backwash Poems
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Herons fragment the mist,
appear and disappear while remaining motionless.
The skiff rocks as a coal barge trundles past.
A dewy sky shivers.
Nowadays he just sits in a boat looking at Ohio.
This morning the sun reached the top of a willow
and got stuck.
He rowed toward the bank thinking to get under the tree,
filled an imaginary pipe full of tangy river smoke,
sucked on the wet air
as he watched the tree struggling with the sun.
For a while it was a tussle, then the willow shook itself
and the sun slipped away like an unmoored ketch.
At first, the sun just hovered like a blanched balloon
then it found a window above the mounded smother
and it rose up like a Choctaw bass
about to mouth a trill of small fry.
He was near to the shore now,
Ohio slanted down to meet him
cattails and reeds scratching the aluminum hull.
A couple of mallards jumped out of nowhere
and flew over his eyes. The clatter of wings
ruffled the chill bank where a dank light had sunk.
His mind followed them for some time
until they settled deep down
amid a wraith-wrapped Kentucky.
A heron slowly rowed the wind
stirring up the vaporous air, Patches of clarity
drifted across sky-high filtering puddles.
Ohio becomes a river town, the huddled houses
have scuttled their roofs upon soggy pathways.
The mossy hulks of an abandoned industry
wallow in a foggy backwash.
Castaway wharfs drip a spatter and smear,
a hand me down script of a yesteryear.
A small blue-collar marina,
beer cans roll on swaying pontoons,
a couple of dry docked rowboats
and canoes.
Truck tires thump harbor chains.
Someone is up early, someone else watches him
gut and clean a large flathead.
On the damp dock cats circle the bones and scales
creep through the miasma
their fur wet and glistening eyes flashing a liquid silver.
The catfish is naked and shorn of the river
a thing to be watched least it return to life
as something beyond the ken of cats and fishermen.
On the ramp he hitches up his straggling life
and drives away from a berth awash
with the haunted cries of Loons and Redtail’s.
Soon he will be back in the patched-up pockets of Ohio
where corn husks snag hoarfrost and rattle
in a fresh rinsing breeze.
Why do you do as you do
and not do as you don't say?
asked the journalist of the leader,
asked the child of her parent.
Because I like to help
and I do not enjoy recognizing myself
as a selfish hypocrite,
responds the leader
to writers of famous and infamous history,
respond therapeutic parents
to children writing compassion stories.
How do you know you are helping
and not helping retain a flawed toxic elitist system,
maintaining poverty of margins
far below wealth piling into too much power?
asked the cynical divestor
challenging this help-as-health investor,
asked the hurt and wounded child
challenging her health-confessing
professing irreligious monoculture.
I doubt I could help
without co-investing in flawed health with pathology
in both political and economic systems,
responds this wu wei leader,
responds this co-mentoring parent,
but what have you noticed
might help more
while collaterally hurting less?
It seems to me,
writes aging journalist
and systemic trauma informed WholeEarth Tribalists,
those plans and budgets and stories cooperatively researched and written
by and with and for co-investors
in our civil passion/pleasure trusting enterprise
sustain more healthy multiculturing mind/body wealth,
with less pathological neurosystemic backwash,
as compared to Business As 0-sum Usual,
anthro-absorbed profit monocultures
elitist Publican winning
to lose further uncapitalized
democratically needy
competitors against too-exclusive empowerment.
Why do you win/win extend co-empathy as you do
and engage compassionate communication
as you would become Earth's Beloved PeaceCommunity?
asked the exhausted leader of retiring generals,
asks indigenously co-intelligent MotherTrees
of their polyculturally extending forests
Root and crown
body and mind therapeutic
politically empowering/disempowering
enlightened/unenlightened economies.
Why do you inclusively co-invest as you do
and not empower what you don't communicate?
asked the journaling child
about her favorite MotherTree's
inter-religious Golden Rule
to optimize effective
and efficient co-governance.
we can think then relax a bit
take a sip or to of coffee until I give my foot a push
nestled in the very fabric of a fresh pile of manure
we stand clueless amidst the onslaught of big corporations & government...
peal back the wax to taste fresh air is it explodes through your nostrils
I was once there but I'm not anymore that was so 1984
so I explode inside as I taste the toast made out of hammer head boar remnants,
why does one equate logical persuasion with that of a mediocre blemish..
on the ass of politicians that drive their brand new Audi
get the best seats in the house as a shimmer like a mouse
businessman come and drink my wine and smoke my herb
the backwash of Trump as he sits in his ivy tower alone & desolate
why do we buy into the lie that says I am what I do
you will do as you are told until the very rights to you are sold
get out my cigarette and take a drag watching phony politicians on the boob tube..
yet this is nothing new its all been done before
a jar of Spam on the thick circumference of barbed wired fences
second glances as the shadow inferiority complex looms
a barrage of protester outside your door while your kicking it out back with a two bit whore
still there's toast we have to eat as an added substance
the morons in society that stimulate jagged pictures of beverages for your delight...
don't you believe in what television or radio says about you its only somebody else's fantasy
a gun man heads to Nevada to take out his frustration on innocent bystanders...
the nut job from Manhattan decided to take a little stroll in a borrowed home depot vehicle taking innocent lives with him
the good **** prick with flames of violence will have an eternal one way ticket with Bubba in cell block number nine..
then we insist that everything is fine a we lastly grasp for straws and wait for newer horizons to approach what a joke.....
"Ennui Sets In”
Whenever pen is placed
Between purloined phalanges,
When my mind unfolds and tears along the seams,
I know it’s time to move my thoughts,
Through the underground;
That dark crusty void
Of dreary dreams diminished,
Where loose hell raisers floss and shine,
Comb and spray,
As drowning voices backwash yesterday’s histrionics,
Dark-eyed winches peek through the
Centers of dead doughnuts;
Bleacher seats rust and wallow
In half-moon emancipation,
Ennui sets in…
My bow tie knows all the answers.
I cry and beseech for all those tomorrows
To resurrect, to pontificate, to loose
The bowels of screaming sunsets, yet sutured.
I flinch. I sigh.
Force majeure got in the way.
Polka dot panacea,
Wretched weasels in the underbrush,
Prufrock is the metaphor to mangle, impugn, vivify,
And otherwise squeeze until the cows come home.
I’m a poet without a message.
My heart pumps vexations of vaseline,
I am dry and empty
Like the musty moans of sweet madness,
Emanating elusively
From the hollow of ancient days,
Amidst unanswered questions,
At the fork in the road,
Two blocks northwest of my last dying breath,
I am the last sunset!
Ennui sets in.
Twilight vivisection holds the door open this time.
There is no respite,
From Raphael’s regurgitated Renaissance.
He jumps backward,
Through the darkening dissonance,
Dissolved, dismayed, dumbfounded.
Skipper Frank lies dead in the glittering gutter.
The Pancake Man melts into the waxworks.
Madame Tussaud wonders why.
Ennui sets in.
Dead meat saliva feeding
The roses of Robespierre.
Little Lord Fauntleroy is mixing martinis, and
A dozen dainty dames are dancing
Past the midnight of my time.
A blue trumpet, buzzing in the steamy shadows.
Lapping corpses line the phosphoric hillsides;
It’s not what it appears to be.
Truth and beauty perceived in the morning mirror.
Ennui sets in.
I closed my mouth around the words,
felt my skeletons wash up against
the shore of a silver tongue;
Driftwood,
laying still on the bank,
charred and cracking open
inside the swallow of shameful
Determination.
“I never wanted it to be like this,
never thought it would go
…this far"
I watched your finger list its way
around an empty highball glass,
its fragility reminding us both of
the damage of throwing stones
in a house ready to shatter.
I couldn’t look you in the eyes.
Couldn’t let you see
the poison forcing its way out.
No matter, how badly I needed
to feel anchored.
I was better off;
left to drown,
than to pull you under
the waves birthed by
my lack of transparency.
"I never wanted it to be like this,
never wanted to bring you down.”
I couldn’t look you in the eyes;
as the light shined through
the gleaming vessel wrenched
in your palms,
I ordered another round,
Unable to stand the spectrum
cast, the colors of truth,
with nothing to hide.
So, I finished my beer.
Tasted the backwash cast back,
from every selfish, thoughtless
draft, and forced it down.
The amber tint of the bottle
reflected nothing;
As volatile and opaque as
the soul clinging to it.
"I have to go,
I’m sorry.”
I left the money on the bar,
hoping it was enough to sate
our demons for the night.
-James Kelley 2014, All rights reserved
Inside the water
where they float or sway in their rusting roots
are horse tackle,
buggies,
unhinged parts of eighteen wheelers,
a girl on a tricycle, her bones still cycling in the drifting meld
circle squirrel and possum pelts,
The sludge of a dredging flow
tows bodiless pockets of former times.
No one can tell what is missing, what is still surfacing,
what is now lathered into womb-bearing suds.
A wake nibbles banks, it heaps up
headless pomades,
a filigree of funnel cake,
cotton candy,
half drunken sups of rum,
antedeluvian arrow heads,
the painted missing parts of the once and will be.
A momentous loss drifts by, is found by stooping gulls,
their screams almost musical
on a carousel wind.
Under the brittle reeds late summer copulates with
eddy,
churn
and jism.
There are corroding blooms between spent shotshells,
condoms colonize cattails,
belt buckles beckon
to forsaken underwear
that blossom now like pale squid.
The river slops together every wind-plowed recipe,
blends the newly-unearthed
with the long abandoned.
A backwash seeps moon-spills,
or drives a John Deere deeper into boggy entrails,
while barges slowly push each muddy footprint
toward empty shoes,
sunken slippers,
pumps,
loafers and boots
dropped somewhere between Pittsburg and the Mississippi
yet still moving along.
"He can sit in a room, and not perish"*
Or might he stand upon the deck,
release the dove, and weep for years,
not for its loss,
nor for the triumph of its flight
above the waters; they are not of God,
they are the backwash of our fears.
There in his room alone,
imprisoned by his conscience
he may let his mind fly free
while tears beneath his wings
may no more flood the ground.
But we are not alone;
we have the educated man fulfilled...
and weeping. He has not such irony
for comfort.
It is a flood to cling to.
Fears, we understand;
they are our bulwark
when an educated man could speak—
could sweep us all away with wonder,
separate us from such grand pretensions.
We are not free to weep with him.
We may not seek the refuge of the mind,
eyes not for insight, not for closing,
senses bound upon another time
away, another circus of distraction,
yes, another box of little men
to dance upon the screen.
It is a dance to take away our fears,
a dance beguiling death,
suspending it awhile with candied tears
and frosted dreams protecting us from envy,
nodding to the educated man apart,
who sits there in his room alone
and weeping for us,
just as we who may not see
across the arch of his reality,
cannot.
~
*quotation from Jacques Barzun
What’s the use of trying any longer?
Nothing comes out the way I want it to flow
Words perpetrate my every being
And I strain to get my temperament to slow
But my cognizance is reeling in a panic of waves
The voltage of emotion is overwhelming me
What is this journey impending to?
What is my purpose?
To obliterate or build?
I keep assurances only to splinter and shatter them
I melt into their regrets and apologies without looking back
Then I am slapped right back in the face
With my own waves of shame and qualm
I wish I was like you
I wish I could put a guise on and never show my face
I wish I could take a dagger and extinguish the sorrow
Destroy tomorrow
But it keeps coming back with twinges and pains!
I want to scream my way into your existence
I want to end all the overwrought thoughtlessness
I want to be lifted in your ease
To be beautiful and clever like you
The demon is me and I am foaming with misery
My horns are melting by your pertinacious confrontations
I can’t reply to the desolation of nothingness
I can’t make it all go away
I’m trapped! RELIEVE ME!
Cursed adrenaline rushes about me
My body is prickling and waterlogged in blackness
I swallow the poisons of my backwash
And back-fire every stab in the back
The beach at Orca Praia – Funchal Madeira
The powerful deep blue ocean
Expends its tidal force
Pounding down upon sea pebbles
With thud and smash so coarse
Watching from a vantage point
From the horizon to the shore
The lines of sea swell building up
Growing bigger more and more
Low, rumbling ocean rollers
Waves curling with such symmetry
Then the breakers quickly form and crash
Tossing up a plume of spray of sea
Incessant surf on shingle
Swash, swoosh and susurrate
With that endless marine motion
That will never dissipate
The waves break up and flatten
The tidal rush now gone
As the pebbles roll and rattle
Against each other as they tumble on
The roller spent, the wave now dead
Or that is what it seems
Then the backwash slithers downwards
Sluicing pebbles like big grey beans
The unending flow and ebb of tide
Today a calm but restless sea
Incessant waves wash and whoosh
So soothing it can be
But at other times she’s not so kind
Or benign to beach or land
Dashes disastrous desolation
With a fury on rock or sand
But for now I stand and wonder
At Mother Nature’s gentle reach
And watch and taste and listen
To the ocean on that basalt beach
she made a desperate leap but once more missed the boat
had to absolve her failure by swimming in ablution creek
the water was murky and viscous but therefore she floated
the sheen on her skin blessed her strokes in polluted disguise
distant proximity posed a new challenge as she sifted the debris
of her sad heart punctured by thrash of emotions and feelings
as astern backwash propelled her journey back to its start
when she bobbed up and down to the bottom of her resolve
she felt the stagnant drift of many years by the ocean shore
where she had been unable to set neither sail nor cast an anchor
restless and yes apathetic she had watched her rusty engine
to stay close to the harbour of uncertainty and bracken water
like a bubble from sunken Atlantis buried deep in her soul
the missed ferry sank because of too many passengers aboard
who attempted to catch the same wavelength of rapid departure
and she threw them a lifeline for she knew about safe passage
dolphins jumped up and down to the applause of the lighthouse
keeper whose beard was so long as to serve as yarn for the rescue
sometimes missed opportunities deliver grace in selfless struggle