Caterwaul
I
I dream of the minds around me, in all their fury and grace and timidity and weakness and they thought they were awake,
ghosts coming and going through walls and the dead grey windows of our sleep-voices,
strands of smoke resurrected from the dying embers, trailing in the air that is its purgatory,
who grew up around me, within the Mark Twain childhoods of climbing trees barefooted and wading in water and oncoming summer storms, our pants rolled up half way to our knees thinking the best time to build a tree fort was in the rain,
who drifted down Goose Creek in the same beat-up canoe of our youth passed the trees with the police car hub-caps and whom I no longer see, really
who wanted to eternally glide along the Pennsylvania turnpike and die in an old farmhouse amidst the wrinkles of the Allegheny mountains and in hopes that maybe their final memory might appear under the brushstroke of the Wyeth collection,
who came from the Cherokee Roses of Georgia on a northbound train in search of the Bear’s Den and Raven’s Rock with its burnt skeletal tree tops,
who were the Florence Nightingales because they could only love the defeated, the fading, the dying soldiers – despite the lives they killed – who needed fresh bandages and someone to hear their final confessions
who buried themselves in pianos, laying their tired bodies over the metal strings that knew only of Chopin’s nocturnes and lion lullabies,
who spread rumors of a burning White House while they watched the crumbling towers from their home-economics classes
who loved her bookshelf more than her husband because she knew no person could hold all the right answers within their spines,
who lit Styrofoam fires in dark alleyways that never went out,
who watched the bicycle spokes glitter in still night lamp light, hunched in the hallway as awful, pitiful scribbles knowing that nothing – no thing – would look the same again,
who feared too much to open their eyes under water at the West Virginia quarry in search of the elephant bones that the circus train left behind,
who heard and welcomed the passing screams of ambulances, those fiery angels tearing through the night to rescue lost seizure-ridden souls and blood from the nightmares the dawn brought,
who sat in the dusty corners of karaoke bars and listened to men with names like Wild Bill and Buck the Outlaw secretly serenade each other with the coded lyrics of Tennessee ballads,
who pulled their spinal cords out from their backs, as if to draw an arrow, only to strangle themselves and let their heads sag and fall,
who no longer know the feeling of having the highway as their only thread of influence,
who rode along the back roads of Richmond passing cat-calling chain gangs, kicking up dust and past embitterment and talking about the general stupidity of the human race,
who drove through the Blue Ridge where the hills roll and run-down run-in-sheds stand atop these hills as beacons in remembrance of a hard day’s work and callused hands and the same stoicism as ancient Athenian temples
who sat trembling on the embankments of roads without lines alongside strangers and defeated metal and breathing the airbag dust like opium smoke and praising that inch of air that could never be!
who scoff at the white collar principles, preach and try to imitate the dirtied fingernails of gypsies and glorify the shivering miserable Bohemians sitting by the gutter for their artistry right before calling their fathers to remind them that their bank accounts need replenishing,
who lay on the floor feeling the fabric of the ribbons that ran red in their bodies, that wanted that night time glint as tangible as the sounds in thick, blind blackness, as tangible as sounds when there’s nothing left to see, that wanted the jigsaw bones that fit so effortlessly effortlessly effortlessly between one breath and the next. Effortlessly…
who examined the angry dissections, the red beads blossoming through the incisions and who cracked their ribs open like dusty old books for further study,
who unzipped their hands from hang nails in order to sip from the internal cocktail topped with hearing aid umbrellas
who stood back absorbing the city, the taste of it, and letting the grit and touchable gray air collect on their teeth and they foolishly fell in love with how it stifled their breath and blackened their lungs,
who wore colored muslin over their faces to part dreams from open-eyed nights,
who have voices that carry across streets during the quiet of a storm, the way the heat over a fire makes them fade, makes them distant
who sat in the foothills with loyal Christians, loyal friends but believing in the mountains rather than the Invisible Man,
who scurried through life as a cockroach across the tall and terrifying – in its vastness – floor, waiting possibly for a metamorphosis or for Godot,
who were enveloped in the bone embrace which is the loneliest of all and whose nerves were like split- ends, their trembling eye lashes reaching until the atlas and axis snap
who were spiders trying to use wire to spin their webs, a brain trying to keep beat with its heart, and its heart trying to reason with its infinite electrical impulses,
who tried in all their quiet desperation to wait for the sunrise, but whose bodies gave in to the thrumming walls and tumultuous color and decided sleep and nightmares might be easier,
who wrote underground vignettes of lonely confessions for Eleanor Rigby,
who blind-folded stone angels and left dried leaves in their hands their fingertips broken and lain at their feet,
who slept in Rip van Wrinkle dreams of moonshine and Old Rag Mountain and brains that coughed out thunder claps through starred nights and mornings of scaling back down bearded and with bloodied toes,
who believed suddenly and thoroughly that heaven is a cliché, hell an overused scare tactic, and dying an endless trend, a tired fad.
II
What gave only a few hours to squirm in its swamp and left them crumpled and in aftershocks of seizures?
Migraine! Blindness! Deafness! Paralysis! Loneliness! January rains with a broken window! Migrating through provinces of mud!
Migraine! Transformation into rabid darkness, mouths parted and foaming with pain that leaves you crazed and shaking!
Migraine! The ear pressed to the cold steel train tracks as the jarring cannonade fast approaches! Migraine! Time taunts!
Migraine who’s the losing time in the darkness! Lockjaw screams! Withering flower in fast-forward! Migraine the sleeplessness blurred blind ranting raving flurry of black feathers and sharp teeth!
Migraine the monster of my dreams! Psyche of Migraine! Migraine has no nervous system! Migraine that chokes them of air and clamped their fists in its vice! That cramped their muscles to quivering stillness!
Migraine that left them burning and turning and cold, lining their jackets with newspapers just to stay warm!
Migraine who took sound from them that came from the bloodied needle and ambled back like a sick coyote after its final meal!
Migraine that rattled their sternums gave them schizophrenic-violin nerves and catatonic eyes! Migraine that had them reeling in orange screams! Relentless! Putrid! Migraine rotting the corners of their stomach!
Migraine! Practicing its black photosynthesis! Growing leaves growing weeds pushing fingernails from their roots!
Migraine that soaked their hands white in bleach and leeches! Migraine that pinned me to the bed and damaged me!
Migraine doctor to pull back the eyelids with jumper-cables and inspect the condition of capillaries! Me, a history in rust, my chemistry broken! Migraine!
Migraine that left them in the tile-floored corridor with no lights! Migraine that gave back only fear and the delirious giggles of stretching bending shadows!
Migraine who was careful enough to count teeth to conduct them in a chorus of screams! Migraine the crooked child of shifty, fired-eyed, ocean-hearted twisted derangement!
Migraine to wail on the tender notches behind my ears! Migraine to slide my jet-setting tongue to the back of my throat and to let it hang!
Migraine to seize me! Hysterical aberration! Wrong confessions! Howl until the throat recoils and shivers into scales of rasped pain!
White knuckles snapped trying to pry its sinewy form from the remains! An eagle’s talons perched atop the skull! The epicenter! They fell! And heard the knocking of bones and floor boards! A clatter! Books and clocks falling from their shelves!
Wet cold grainy barbed-wire shrouds to envelope them! The ache in the knees rolling on them convulsing and pleading electrified numb! Merciless body! Merciless self-inflicted body!
The lowering!
III
Mister Meriwether! I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you are quieter than I am
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where Grandfather three sheets to the wind chased you with his pitchfork
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you fathered countless children with no names and to be lost from your memory or eaten
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you knew more of the stone house the rooms that smelled of turpentine than I ever would
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you wandered through the cattails near the pond and listened to the snapping turtles sloshing through the algae waters
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you listened to the hours slip down the side of the mountain
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you watched Great Danes and Poodles piss on the musty velvet furniture
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you sat in the driveway with the man from Germany and the woman from Yugoslavia in folding chairs watching cars go by
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you polished ’69 Mustang convertibles and drove them to buy ice cream sundaes and sit on the edge of Lake Erie just as it started to rain
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you went running through the groves of evergreen trees footsteps silenced by the snow and pine needles
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where the distance between home and the meadow got shorter and shorter each year
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you sat on the slab of rock to look down into the Shenandoah Valley
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you drank gin from the Sippy-cup your mother gave you in your high-chair
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where wild turkeys chased you through the pitch black forest along the state line
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where poetry never got written, dreams gone
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you never get mad only go mad
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you excused yourself to the forest like a dying dog to contemplate sorry old words and travels that never happened
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you must be as sleepy and sad as Cleveland suburbs
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you watched the shadow of water in your sink
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you felt yellowed and aged like newspapers from the 1960s
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where no length of road could bring me back
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where you lived your life, where you left your life like a lullaby
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
where things must seem lonely from your high perch
I’m with you on Crescent Rock
in my dreams I can hear the internal hammers and I no longer know if you were a memory or a figment of my imagination.
February 2010
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