douglaskoke.com - poems

Elegy For A Tuesday

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:35:18 UTC

I wake when I am done sleeping and shamble quietly across the flashing morning into the flashing day, practicing my stutter. And in this manner, I flounder
towards the evening, wearing my shabby ache as camouflage, speechlessly refining my hoax;rehearsing the particular ticks of my impediment; perfecting each nuance of my fallacious handicap,so that I might pass unnoticed. Ignored with an agreeable pity at best, and a subdued contempt at worst.

Head drooped, eyes down, I move through business hours like a wraith, dutifully performing my work in self-imposed seclusion, grateful for the dreary clangor of routine and its pardoning distraction, joyous for habit and its stagnant anonymity.

And thus, contented in my blankness, I move deadpan about my little squirrel cage, perseverant in not thinking or doing what I need not do or think,
presenting myself to review as blandly and innocuously as possible; a dull assertion on the flat plains of boredom, doing my best to incite in others
a want for something greater to observe. Better to look heroically rachitic, but ultimately forgettable. Anything else fosters expectation.

To insinuate grace is to be envied, remembered, discovered. To display any sort of greatness is to be admired for your promise, and inevitably
scorned as a dropout when those who know better watch you fall on your face. To be gifted and fail despite that endowment is a sin; to be thought incapable from the outset is a pardon of divinity, a reprieve from anticipation and its indefatigable quotas, a de facto license to be ordinary, and therefore left alone.

If given the choice, I'd rather appear an impotent fool than implicate ability. I'd rather be dismissed as an idiot than miscarry someone's hope.

There is no real sting in man's neglect, but there is genius in his
disappointment. It's easier to be lonely through laziness and bogus action than default on a genuine attempt, to be convicted by look and word as a
failure to real potential.

So I live my life as a self-inflicted cripple, calculated in my ineptitude, telegraphing my phony hobble to the world, my fraud shoved visibly in the fork of my crutch as I list home to hide and groan about my crime. Not a proper leper, but a penitent coward.

Some waste their days afraid of a nothing, a lack of success.
I am afraid of less: them knowing about it.

Blonde Hyperbole

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:34:26 UTC

I can tell you with stenographer exactness about the line of her cheek, or the nape of her neck. I can parse every minutia in the filigree of pale-gold hair that flashed between the slender calipers of her shoulders. I can relate the precise seismology of each infinitesimal shiver I felt when she first wheeled on the tiny quoins of her heels to look at me, gliding like an iceboat on her delicate points, radiating a smile so warm and sincere it nearly shot me with fright. I can remember each trace of agate in the green of her eyes, the almost startling poise in her voice when she spoke, the number of elegant twists in that thin black knot that tied her blouse about her collar.

I can describe every faultless inch in the russet marches of her skin, every notch in the lissome column of her spine, the impossible symmetry in the small of her back, that ineffable space where muscle cedes to bone and turns its smart profile in the curve of her hips, yielding gently into the stretches of her legs.

I can recall with astonishing accuracy every atom of her I observed, every tremor that drifted past the red of her mouth, every nebulae of beauty that
sparkled between my bashful staring and losses for words. I have memorized it all. And there is no wonder in it. There is no shock in my remembrance,
nor is there any surprise in its vividness.

I saw her, and it was done. It was easy.

A man would be hard-pressed to forget the first time he looked at another human being and saw an enticement to religion. The first time he laid eyes on
a woman and witnessed certain proof of divine creation, evangelized by her mere existence. Beauty in itself is impressive, sweetness alone is fairly memorable, but unforgettable are the whorls in the fingerprints of God.

Portrait Of A Year

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:32:57 UTC

Unlovable.

She spoke it, and so he was. She meant everything.

It was inarguable as fact. An indisputable truth, a burning, infallible axiom incandescing between the temples, the lobes humming; a tuning fork to whose
pitch and frequency the entire world vibrated at, at the expense of all other sound and motion.

The living breath turned gray in his lungs, his lips went false to all other kisses. His skin stretched dumb and mute over his long, skinny frame;
incredulous to the tracery of sun that speckled his lashes, the music that curled around the lee in his ear, the wind that dusted his eyes and pricked at
the hairs that aped his arms. A darkened, workerless factory, frozen in wait, stripped of its scheme of hot and cold, its geometries of ardor, turned off its maze of appetites, its clues of attacks and caresses shuttling from nerve
to nerve.

Insensate and ignorant, unaware as to what happens outside, folding into some impervious, slumping retreat. Detained in a pallid, texture-less resentment, jailed in some wooly murmur of lies and silences, droning prison-songs to drown out whatever joys might whirl about his face, whatever warmth might smuggle itself past his lonesome watch. All is static and impulsive, like limbs asleep, flickering and erratic but conveying nothing; a ghostly
chrome-a-key image; the weatherman's loud, moray necktie strobing on television.

Deprived of her fickle, cursory touch, he looks for better tools to know her with: jealousy and obsession. A steep, elevated incline of envy and yearning, and a long, lightless fall through her absence. Tumbling down that gap in spirit where the heart once raged and now lies bloodless. Plummeting
downwards to that red, lazy apple beneath, eager to crash intoits vagrancy, sitting useless and empty in the furlough of his chest, unredeemed, dreaming of grass to lay her on, the softness of her flesh, the quench of wine behind the taste of her mouth, the distance between her legs, her hips easing the collision, her body the upholstery between himself and the crime of wanting her.

There is reform in sacrifice, and so he falls unafraid, not caring how many leagues he drops. His skin as pale and uninformative as moon-wooed water; voiceless, only speechless bone and teeth and lonesomeness, impatient to hurl themselves upon the rocks of her dismissal, dense as diamonds and pressure and just as silent, keen on fracturing himself painful and anguished on that great unmoved indifference beneath, so that he might feel something- anything- again.

On Being Single (As A Gamble)

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:32:04 UTC

It's like outsmarting a motorcycle club in an after-hours card game; there is no way to win without getting a fist in my gut, no way to leave victorious without getting my teeth kicked in. It's impossible to walk out on top without receiving some injury for my expertise.

So, for safety's sake, I usually allow myself to lose. Most of the time it's only a little; I keep my antes small. Not enough to bankrupt me, but enough to keep my opponent playing through 'til morning without wanting to break my arm or fracture my knees to get their losses back.

My aim's to keep the game going, to drag things on until the long night's extravagances have given out; when the booze and manic posturing have been poured empty and everyone is permitted to bow out gracefully from fatigue, when everyone's spent and I can slink out with just enough of the rake to get well, but still go unnoticed.

Then I can curl up with my chintzy rollover prize and fumble for sleep, having defused my outward menaces by acting the Fish. Then I can crawl under the sheets and count my handful of coins like sheep, each copper clang a numbered mortgage on some tinny goodnight kiss tomorrow I can't afford today, a mercy smooch from my girl in accounts payable.

But I'm still the restless debtor, laying there, weakly spooning my tepid fortune as I try not to toss around, thinking of that larger mislaid stake, the size of its absence, my erstwhile bookie who always demands a cut. I'm desperate for a dream where my patience and meekness and scheming makes me an achiever, laid with winnings, warm and desirable, colored up to the larger chips; An unconscious hero, running my fingers drowsily down the flanks of my earnings... not some chump playing down to the felt, beholden to an incapacitating, irrevocable trust. I'm tired ofbeing a grinder. I'm tired of playing it close to the belly for the sake of one bad beat a long time ago.

Just once, I want to walk out with the whole pot, the big man.But I can't. No way. I'm still sitting at her table, using her scare cards, bluffing with
confidence she gave me, making my calls on her bankroll. She'll hear about it, and she'll find me. She'll want what was hers, and I'll dispatch my goons to beat it out of me for her. If I make good, she'll come looking for her piece.
And I can't buy her off. Because in my head,I still owe her.
For now, that's the kicker.

God Protects A Drunk

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:31:25 UTC

Sobriety is palsy, and the only cure drunkenness,
so let heat fuse sand into glass and fill it with wine,
so that we might burn our livers for a drink

Insomnia

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:30:48 UTC

The dogs know. On Pearl, in a brawl of brick and steel, I hear the barking reverberated in chain-link, coming through the plaster, ringing like blame in an unlit cubicle atop some skewed, sagging brownstone. It comes from the northwest, some tremor rolling in from the Flatirons, down the mainline and into the city, creeping towards blackest portions of Capitol Hill. Past Lorton Gallery, past Hungary Park, swaying in the anaglyph of tenements and row houses; an inaudible tattoo calling up ghosts into formation.

The sky trembles, hot and thick, rising up from the avenues, levitating. The coils in some municipal stove; air sucking at the blue flame below the grill
of streets and intersections, hovering above the blacktop like platonic July. Sleepless.

I can feel the impulse, building its wash in a snarl of lots and alleys. A single radiowave, gathering its drone in tangled fire escapes, twisting around
drainpipes and sooty aerials. Crackling across peeling gables and and lightless window sockets. Rattling in steam-lines and telephone cables. Twitching in the needles in VU meters, clicking in gears in alarm clocks, transmitted into loose bits of metal, buzzing. Bottle Caps. Radiators.
Street Lamps. Belt Buckles. Pocket Change.
Vibrating.

Rolling over asphalt and concrete, seeping through slats in fences, down narrow causeways, past iron lattice, leaping from roof to roof, down vents and flues. Slinking up beams and drywall, snaking through gutters and copper wiring into my room, hissing in the orange glow at the end of my
cigarette. Muscles coo sweat and nerves rush up to meet it. The world hums; some ghostly prickle, a spectral premonition of sensation, like an amputee's phantom limb. The converse of touch; I can't feel it, but the skin reacts as if I can. The skin is envious, and lonely, and freckled with lies.

I'm still awake, my mind damned by the senses, restless. The body sprawled across those same sheets and blankets, half-starved and lonesome, a soul-sick
goliath prone on a bed and box spring island. Staring back and forth from that
picture, to the phone. Hungry and unfed. Waiting. Feeling the building settle on its timbers, tilting my head, straining to hear the click, pushing my ear towards it. Anything to slake the silence.

Sleepless. Listening for the dogs in Congress Park. Looking back at the answerphone, back at that picture taped to the wall, her face frozen in some gasp. My love and my sleep. My first and only. And they won't call, though
they know how much I need them.

Again.
There.
Slower.
Anywhere.
Please.

On The Saturday After

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:30:03 UTC

The drapes belly out from her first-floor window into the room, swelling in the breeze to float above the pleasant haze of her bed. Blown past the transom with all of Friday night's ills and glories, flitting across the skews in our joints, moving indoors to stir the close lie of her hair. Flickering
over a drowsy blur of willowy legs, pink lips, and pert young breasts exceededtheir courage, cooing idly after an evening of too many drinks.

A rustle of clean white fabric, rippling like surf; once cosseted behind glass, shuttered from the eddies of winter, now a soft cotton port, billowing in the navigable calms of spring, lapping quietly at the backs of our knees. The curtains fork, splayed open to let the sun pour bright and warmly through the fault, spilling over my body stretched out on the slip, my skinniness cushioned by a thin whisk of ladies' sheets and soaps and perfumes, innocent of any weather past these walls, snoring ingratiated in a peak of meringue.

Flat on my back, limbs telescoped like an asterisk, breath sour from alcohol, still flush and half-stiff with blood, indulged from easy laughter and
shifting haunches and reflexive kisses given behind a billboard that could have read, "Lucky". Lying there asleep, languid and intractable, murmuring as her hand moves up my hirsute leg like charity. Dreaming dumbly as her palm moves over my wiry knee up my wiry thigh, the fingers white and inviolable, drifting past the sharp slant of my hips, patiently coaxing me awake by the
root. I gurgle, open-mouthed, lashes fluttering over a bloodshot sliver of blue-green, muttering nonsense like a proper bum as I turn over to face the blinding music of her white smile, flashing my crooked tobacco-stained moons in return.

Good morning.

Slowly, I sputter into consciousness, somewhat skeptical of my surroundings; blinking curiously at the flowers and lamps and furniture of a woman, gazing lazily past her sloping shoulders at the window, the light that seems so much softer than home, wondering whether lust or mercy has invited me to a place with such yielding, feminine appointments. Lying there, still half-drunk on cocktails and sleep, dizzy with early sunlight and the smell of sex.
Dulled by the thickness in my head, diverted by her touch roving over my skin, wondering where I am and what I have done to be baled in softness after three weeks of nothing but free meals and truth. All too cooperative.

Rolling over to cover her, knowing I have nothing to give her but time and speech and pain made art; nothing but a suspect idea of passion and the occasional ability to shape some powerful red self-pity into sweat and
moans and wrinkled sheets.

And so I stare, regrettably objective, marveling at the crisp colors and delicate patterns, the vivid design of her comforter, gazing sheepishly
at the woman whose chin is nuzzled into the bones in my chest. Trying to sit up and make some sense of it… this do-good blonde with her soft bed. An under-employed musician/writer staring up at her, whirling so fast he stays still.
Smiling at me, shaking me awake for a slow lay on a Saturday morning. Some wrinkled sheets and a faulty limerick in four paragraphs.

All hers, if she wants it.

A Recital For Someone Uncertain

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:29:03 UTC

They hovered there, dancing just above the skin, searching close to the bone for blood and heat and movement, listening, hoping, looking for some point of entry to burrow into to make themselves warm.

All my homeless provisos, scattered rootloose, looking for an admittance; apologies, explanations and respects, thrown out into the noise as audible objects of guilt, grasping at the surfacing for a gap, a pinch in the veneer, some wrinkle, some bow, some shaky joist to curl around and find their way inside. But there are none. All pieces fit tightly against the others, everything plumb and neutral, the pegs driven straight into the frame, square and true and concealing for that one short, burning moment of outward strength, that great instant of apathy and blurriness.

I feel the words flicking sharply against my ears, stinging at my evening's disguise, needling at the panels of my suit to find that yearning accident
beneath, pushing raw and painful through the air for everyone to hear.

The pleading auger of courtesy in her tone, some itching sweetness seeking the salt advances of my wounds, surveying my heart for its permeable longing and fondness. Each thread sharpened with kindness, slowly curling toward my center, revolving inward to the primal truth at my core, to bore down to that undying softness beneath. Inside, I'm burning; white-hot and molten, roiling with fire and sulfur, my entire soul turned liquid in some crucible of want and desire.

I know she can feel it, warm and familiar, magnetized and attracted like beads of mercury, straining under the skin like chunks of iron drawn to the pole, pulling towards her. It's there inside me, raging in sparks and fury as she moves to embrace me. But she feels none of its warmth. I have hidden it from her, buried it under a mountain of coal. I have made myself dead on the surface, lifeless and uninhabitable to her touch. I feel her arms go slack
around the stone refusal of my shoulders, dropping slowly in sad acceptance, afterwards retreating in small talk and downward glances, looking for an
escape. Clutching at anything anodyne and passionless, skewing in regret as clumsily as I had a dozen times before, feeling just as stupid.

Standing there, vulnerable and prone, her arms and speech raised against some branching need, held out with an absurd formality, pleading with welcome's
negative. Me.

I hate it. It is all I can do not to crush her against me
and cry.

I feel my whole body leaning forward, imperceptibly tilting in her direction as the blood shifts to those arteries or muscles or bones closest to her,
screaming to hold her. But I do not budge. I remain sedentary and obstinate, my fearful bitterness some inner counterweight against instinct, the heartache settling down into my heels to anchor them like lead. The pain is the only thing keeping me upright, muzzling me from blurting out surrender. I struggle not to buckle and fling the
world open again.

I had shaped this conversation in my head in a million incarnations, designed it with all its lovesick implements, had wept at all its predecessors, crumbled red-faced at all their impassive refusals. I had made Hell a thousand times; I planned it, I sawed it, I fastened it, built it rickety and bent, hunched-over in its braces like beggars' fingers, hanging myself up in its crooked beams, to live in its haunted attic until it stooped and cracked.
Every time it had been the same: me pleading with her to love me, and her answering, "no".

But now here, in this spot, for whatever reason, I held quietly. Settled plumb, solid, strong and exact, standing sturdy through desperate waves of nerves and sweat and opposing impulses. Miraculously calm.

Drinks shift in glasses, laughter rolls behind me, and I am fine-- or so I have pretended. An architect of indifference: accomplished in my invention,
competent in my design, thorough in my defense... forever damned to be the sole resident. Standing just behind the long white planks of its fences, studded into the sod like a lawn jockey. Frozen and polite.

I have smiled and spoken and listened, feeling the risk in the words fade away, shivering a little as the want and the need and the danger went coolly into departure, frosting the landscape in voguish aloofness.

I shrugged goodbye and felt proud. Some carpenter of my own disinterest, singing sotto-voiced at my bloodless housewarming, turning once more to walk
away, leaving behind a want, a love, a you, bravely stumbling towards my involuntary redemption.

I take a last glance at the room. Feel that last kiss on my cheek. I open the door and step out onto the street, the clamor shut behind me, bang.

I see you standing at the end of the block, but do not approach.The blood pounding in my ears, my heart moiling in its leashes, my lungs searing with breath to say your name. Every atom howling to call out to you.I turn, and
walk inside.

"Goodnight".
"Goodnight".
"Goodnight".