My Inanimate Crew to Speak from the Grand Silences

I cannot work and yet I must 

Function is relative to the output,

The process is often critical,

Yet rarely analyzed in the conclusion

If the byproduct is of presentable appearance 

(I dare not use proper names, even in my own poetry)

 

The names read and somehow hers registers

The most phantasmal of the bunch, yet in analysis potentially the most damning

Dependent on the quandary if the woman actually exists or not 

Existence translates to sadism, nonexistence a varied flavor of hope,

For how can one contemplate forlorn sentiments for an imaginary creature?

The mind is left boggled with riddled bullet holes of thirst

For all manner of certainty, joy, and frustration  

A measure of me wishes to drink of anger to

Claim some entitlement for recompense, yet

That is folly and feckless,  

Part of me wishes for the indulgence to be a rule breaker,

To go with passion over logic for a fleeting carpet ride

That I could be gifted the oasis to converse;

The silence could be eviscerated to a dusty pith of past 

Men are prohibited from dreaming, we are paragons of confidence

Need is corrosion, vulnerability and dependence oxidizing infections

For love to take refuge a piece of our panoply must be removed

In order for any horse or rider to enter our gates 

I think of junior-high yards and purple notes with bubble script

Sophomore-year and the acne minefields and mind maps

The Junior-year dance floor and the metronome demagnetizing  

Three years of college and the voided attempts of commute imp

The spout-rants of an Esplanade avenue bar room, the sign-up lists

The ink pens in taxation classrooms jostling attendance

Chances taken and roaches pouring out of a box of Malt o Meal 

My god the Abita Amber on the porch drank a third and poured in the sink

The green metallic table and the neighbors’ listening-distance

The French door threshold with buttocks pressed into a fetal-ball

The black-misting drops and walk in a New Orleans Saints fleece

I am wearing four years later as I type these words  

The silence of such hallways and living rooms resounds

With the customary besotted-sobriety of normal  

Oh, the machinations of the nothingness personifying the surfaces

Of floorboards and popcorn ceilings like ear drums 

As if since the silence speaks such arias, the silence can listen as well

So one is drawn to bellow a cacophony of rebuke, bargaining, and disclosure

The volumes upon volumes pile with digital ink to smear away truth entirely

So that one may find forgetfulness in the accumulation  

For to a poet memories are galleries of sentiment one is tortured

To walk round repetitively for eons,

For as an artist can visualize a painting before it is painted and never un-see it

Or a musician can hear the song in is mind before it is composed and never un-hear it 

Poets are doomed to have the detailed depiction of their emotions

Sit like Van Gogh or Mozart in exquisite punctilious technicality

In the museums of our minds, the anguish and felicity become entrenched

Not into segregated galleries, but into mangled mementoes of time  

The hours, days reckon with tours of permanence

As if like a tattoo one can only blind one’s skin by placing another batch of ink

On top the remark of history, yet one knows fundamentally the lines of the former

Exist below, whether one has secondarily blanketed their occurrence  

These words were spoken, these silences given sword and arrow  

One knows the hue and voracity of the hallway of responding with such ignorance

One knows the quantity of ale left in the bottle, the grip of the precipitation on one’s cheek

So in now I remember bicyclists down Magazine Street where the third following in the pack 

Fell, bruised a knee, and the couple in the front and the horde in the rear

Started and stared asking in smatters, “Are you Ok?”

As if the words could find pertinence in the ache of the limb or vertebrae

As the skull of the rider slammed the asphalt 

I watched from beneath the balcony of a closed-on-Sunday restaurant

Knowing these riders were not coming here; the horses and bicycles were all off

To other streets, the pause was by chance until the knee was numbed of the contact

The inquirers could be satisfied with the placations of their inner humanity  

That they had in fact asked to the condition of the fallen, and then assured

That appearances were returned, that the rider kept on riding

The rest assuming the fluid under the patella or the white bloods cells could be mended

Absent further communication 

These guided cyclists of Magazine Street, you now join the pirate brigands of silence

With the purple note with bubble script, the acne mind maps, the dance floor metronome

The box of Malt o Meal, and my precious Abita Amber poured next to the soap holder

With the ring and least I forget this fleece extending to my wrists this morn 

You are my inanimate crew to speak from the grand silences of my Louvre

The blocks and blocks of canvases I may never go inside

Traded for a stone of grey two from the curb before le Notre Dame

Oh grand memory of yelling into the vastness, your retorts wind these foul-sails  

Onward into the triangle of islands found by those absent-minded fools

Blessed with foggy memories and the absolution of forgetfulness

I am left to the rack of my own reminiscence