Thursday, September 16, 2010

Migraine

Like a rogue father
She comes once a year
Twice this time
Have I debt to pay?

And is ever so kind to send warning
Sweeping in from the right but stealing my vision
“Here I come,” she cackles
Sentences start with noun but are left without participle 

It’s time to lie
Play dead
Trick her into leaving
Before I’m imprisoned to bed

Act late
She has you
A shot between the eyes
Bleeding on the inside

“What have you?”
Your peace, she replies, and comfort and value
I’m a useless lump of body
While her fingers stab my eyes

Her thumb digs a hole in the back
She’s palming my brain
No skull left

Yesterday’s care, tomorrow’s worry
Gone, when her vice tightens
All the world inside my head
Centered around a darkness that grows when the light’s in

No pill can ease her
No drug can tame her
She’s an infection spreading
Buried in a place where madness begins

Sleep is my only redemption
Soon she will leave
Pack up her things
Erasing her evidence

Consciousness leaves and returns
I’m stirred awake by her presence
Then once again it fades
Into blackness

Until the next morning I wake
Left alone like a midnight lover who fled
Everything is normal
And I wait for her return when she calls on my debt

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Grandpa's Music


I am 25
Listening to the rat-a-tat-tat, drop of the bass
Big Band, Big Sound, It is bigger than myself
I curl up in the Romantic horns and Copper voices
Horns that pull like violin strings and at the heart

Glenn Miller is my grandfather incarnate
If sound could be a ghost, and ghosts could be reborn
The sounds of women with smooth curls and curves, unabashed divas with their martinis and long cigarettes
I’m tapping my foot, really swinging my hands and saying
Oh no, no baby

Handsome men, faces framed by black bowties and faded memory
It’s a clarinet toot, the wail of a trumpet or two
And sounds I can’t identify

Scoot Scoot Scoot
Then Swoon Darling Swoon
Thank you Benny Goodman

Things are trivial with age
But the smallest things are the most important
Like a sandwich and cookie at one
Dinner at five
And Big Band in between

Melancholy disappears, boredom is symbol crashed
Swept up by trombones and everything is blue
Blue as the lighting in a 1940s club
Where he escapes

Tapping his foot as I’m tapping mine now

So long modern world
Too fast, too loud, too unconnected world

In his house are pictures
The color of newsprint paper

His wedding day, 1945, a young brunette at his side
My father, his brothers

Pictures that are more like archives
They tell of greater things
His Coastguard uniform tidy, hair slicked, crooked smile
When one was proud of his country and signed up for war
Them Japs are good as dead

Bang, bang
Now it’s Grand Theft Auto

I tell my sister about listening to Grandpa’s music
She tells me she’s doing the same
The world can’t take him away from us now

Not when we’ve got the tisk of a top hat
The bellow of a tuba
The rise and fall and rise again of a horn section
So Big and so full
That it wraps us in warm velvet and cradles our heads

This is what love sounds like
What it feels like
Clicks and scratches
The imperfections of memory and age and time

I am 25
Listening to music that’s older than my parents
Listening to the echoes of ghosts and the sound of instruments
That have long been retired

I’m listening for my grandpa
My eyes welling at just the right note

There he is

And my foot starts tapping