Getting up early tomorrow for my first trip to Jamaica! I just finished one of my patented “last minute and I have no idea what I just packed” packing jobs. This is what I have done for every single trip I’ve ever been on and I love the stress of it all! Staying up late into the night, I try on different outfits, spill lotions into tiny containers, listen to some good tunes, and work on burning off that nervous energy that comes from upcoming travel…. I’ve done this whether it’s four nights on an island or a business trip or two weeks in Europe! It’s a fool-proof method because you don’t second guess yourself, which I find is all too common with packing in advance haha. Anyways, this means no updates till Tuesday. You’ll just have to peek back through the archives and see if you can discover ones you may have missed the first go around… and when you do, be sure to leave a comment 🙂 I’ll be bringing some sunshine back! Ciao!
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Vultures
One more… this one less about Zach, more about the city, how violence is weaved into our consciousness until we believe it is natural, normal, and beyond our control.
Vultures
I peek between blinds dusty
On my fingers, nails,
Black with dirt; I watch through slits
The blood from kick after kick
A head on a curb, dirty with
City grime and lost hope and fury.
A body curled fetal around a tire
Desperate to stop the pain.I close the blinds
With a quick clip of my fingers,
Flip my cell and make an anonymous call.
I sit on a ratty couch and drink
A cheap beer and think of the time
I saw a vulture
Eat the eye of a dead sea turtle,
the smell forcing my eyes
To take another direction and leave the bird
Alone with its dinner.
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Poems to Zach Sowers (9 Months and Decision)
It’s been two and a half years since a friend of mine was attacked in Baltimore a block from his house and a few blocks from where I was living at the time. His name was Zach Sowers, and the brutal attack from three teenagers sent him into a coma from which he would never return. It was a time of immense emotion, waiting, upheaval, anger that rippled across the city, thanks to Anna (his wife’s) tireless efforts to affect change in a city so adverse to it. This profoundly experienced the way I view the city, and the way I view life. You can read the full story at http://www.zachsowers.com/. I wrote more than a few poems throughout the time. These are two.
9 months
At 27,
I was walking home from the bars
late, to the house, to my wife of nine months, to our dog,
and then there were shadowy figures and darkness.The pain was intense. I floated above myself
for nine long months, waiting. Then the pain disappeared.The waiting is over. I’m with my ancestors
and my heart beats on
in the breast of my wife.(RIP Zach 3/25/08)
Decision
You vomited blood like coffee grounds.
And I read these words
of an unexpected setback
in a quiet office that overlooks a long hall.I wonder
about the statistical chances of God
existing to send you
a miracle; weighing the prayers of those around me
against all of that
Existential philosophy.Later on tonight,
when I’m sleeping, I expect to see you in my dreams.
I expect you to say,
“Cheer up. It’s my decision.
I’ll either walk the hall back to you
or I’ll go the other way.”
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Age 92
92 and you
Bruise so fast, when catching
Your wife who
Dizzy and falling, desperately needed you.
And you were there.You were there
During world wars,
During depression,
During the birth of two boys and one daughter,
Then seven grandchildren, now six, the
Loss imprinted
On the lines of your face.This week is 92,
But you say, 38 ½ years have gone by
In a joke that is at least
Twice my age.
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old abandoned shoe
That old abandoned shoe,
the one that hitchhikes
on the side of Rt. 100
says “save me”
on my way home from another
day of work.
I try to block the cries
but still it looks up through
shoe-lace eyes
and a busted rubber sole,
“Please,
help me.”
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Spaghetti (Christmas Tradition at Chipparrelli’s)
In the dim light of Chipparelli’s restaurant
tucked in a busy corner of Little Italy,
we sit at a small table,
red tablecloth with white cloth napkins,
and a warm glowing candle,
reflecting in silver forks, knives, spoons,
another year of family tradition.I realize that my parents are just
a man and a woman. Two people
with past lives and younger faces.
They retell a story
and I can see vividly their first date:
my dad with two plates of spaghetti
he worked so hard to make
for my mom waiting patiently
in their private Italian restaurant
and that sudden slight nervous trip
to send both dinners straight
to the shag carpet with a splat.We pass the fresh baked bread.
My dad dives into his usual lasagna,
and my mom begins her usual manicotti,
and I turn in my spaghetti for
some exotic dish I’ve never heard of.I twirl my pasta.
Before me, my parents, two souls I love.
Before them, a little girl in pigtails
drinking Chianti.
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Dead-end Street
Collapsing darkness,
the kind that singes like a dying cigarette.
Orange
streetlights
smoldering
at the end of the block
in a city that seems to have eyes in the back of
its scheming
hard head. It has plans for you—Did you ever think that
you, that effervescent infectious
set of arms and legs, those
legs that go
on
and on,
could be here? In a back alley,
where rats crawl
and sirens slowly drown your voice.Hush without pity, touch gently
the wall, another brick in
ephemeral
hope;
only the rats escape with
a snitch and a rotten crumb
of gouda that
your neighbor no longer wanted.
There is no succor.
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Pieces (in Point Lookout)
I wrote this in college, on a trip to Point Lookout in St. Mary’s City, Maryland. The lighthouse is on the site of an old confederate prison, and it is said to be one of the most haunted places in America [you can even request haunted campgrounds]. I went with one of my best friends one night out of the blue, and he was so scared of getting too close. The night was very vivid, cold, and we didn’t speak much because it would have spoiled the scene….
Pieces
I picked up a rock
and skipped it,
ripples in a frosted river
and us walking
sand between our toes
under a black velvet sky.
The night dead quiet
and not a soul stirring
except some lighthouse ghosts
and our own two beating hearts
pounding out the rhythm
for the stars
as they danced across the universe
and then tripped,
fell scattered to the ground–
as if God shattered a glass
and we were meant to pick up the pieces
carefully, one by one,
and skip them across the heavens.
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complexity of the time-space continuum
Ok, I’m still working on the ideas/metaphors behind this one (started many years ago, still not even close to being finished). As it it deals with space-time, I hope you indulge me a bit. I have no business diving into these areas, but I like to anyway. The idea of relativity, of our clocks as inconsequential, all our fears, worries, anxieties all wrapped up in our own version of time, which we know only as a constant… then learning that it’s not! If you are into cosmology and related “light” reading, look up Mario Livio. [my fav astrophysicist/author]
complexity of the time-space continuum
I am a three dimensional solid although
many dark nights I feel completely flat.
I experience time, and it is blood pounding through my heart.In the universe, all is light billions of years in the traveling
through space billions of miles empty.
Here, all is the idea of now.So many times I say I have not begun what I set out to do,
that I’m wasting my life
sitting in this dark moldy stairwell waiting.Waiting on the perfectly safe door to open.
Waiting on a perfect gentleman to lead the way.
Waiting on that epoch fear that my hours will cease
before I’m ready.Some say “be patient and wait, in the future you will see.”
Future?
Don’t they hear the hours
while we stand still growing old.
Don’t they see sand swallowed by the tide,
by the moon,
All of us neither created nor destroyed
yet slowed by gravity, affected.
Don’t they understand by the end of this breath,
our notion of the present is the past
and by the time we decide to move,
the space is filled.No one, not even Einstein or Hawking,
has this relativity figured. Us poets
are not exceptional. We witness
our space plowing straight ahead
to only come out bent.
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Two Live, One Dies
He seemed embarrassed to call,
but now,
he clutches my hair painfully,
fistfuls of soft brown waves
twirled up and tangled in his white knuckle fists.His head rests on my shoulder and
bobs gently in steady shakes.I am crying,
but my tears are running down my throat
so he won’t feel them.My hands pet his hair and face
like a mother and son
and I whisper nonsensical
like empathy is possible.He is mumbling words,
prayers wet on my shirt,
for the friend in the backseat–
white sandy hair
bleached eyebrows
tanned legs
soft snores now permanent.(r.i.p. dave hayes 2002)
Poetry by JC Snyder 