Grasping at Goodbyes Poems by David Baxley
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Poems
c. 2011 A collection of poems written by David Baxley With illustrations and layout by Alexander Barnett Made For Typography 2 Professor Jay Merriweather
Beauty Catch Me
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Dreamer
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Sorry for the Inconvenience
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Breaking and Falling
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Grasping at Goodbyes
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Remembering to Breath
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Beauty Catch Me
Beauty catch me in your palm like a snowflake falling from a sky so perfectly blue its repulsive and melt me into rivers that flow through the folds of your life-lines. Beauty fold your hands and pray me into a heart breaking since the night freedom set its alarm to 9/11.
Don’t cover your ears love. Listen—to the clinking metal of a wind chime fashioned from dog tags. Feel the rhythm of combat boots marching to the cadence of blind obedience. Listen—I know a hundred-thousand things louder than a soldier’s gun. I know the heaviness of an empty room. I know the heartbreak of his mother.
Beauty fill my chest with your breath like the air prayed from the living to the dead and breathe me holy.
Beauty speak me with your tongue for I have been screaming through the windpipe of your sons and daughters whose open mouths you have filled with sand and silence.
Don’t cover your eyes life Watch—the night awaken with stars and learn to read by their light. Awaken from this dream that has become our American Nightmare. Watch—as Kenny Lukes, soldier and father learns to hold his baby daughter with one hand. Watch—as Tariq Hafeez rocks an empty cradle with brown hands caked by red mud. Beauty catch me in your palm like flecks of ash falling from a sky so perfectly torn its…beautiful and smear me into snowfall that falls upon the branches of your life-lines. Beauty fold your hands and pray me into the heart of a life breaking since the moment we closed our eyes.
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Dreamer
We gasp for the firmament of sleep as our lungs cloud with smoke from embers dying into trails of cirrus, stratus, and cumulonimbus, signals, from the fires of yesterday, burning, to not be forgotten. Awaken the comets in your eyes, harbor happy thoughts as you shake star shine from the wings of your muse like pixie dust and push back against the ground with both feet. For only in the night do our shackled limbs remember flight. Let go of the doubts you cling to like a drowning man and place one brave step into uncertainty like a child learning to walk by falling. Do not fear the breaking only in the keeping of their rules.
Say flint. Say spark. Say this is me speaking from my hearth. Stop choking on the ashes from the bonfires of dreams sacrificed to doubt. Allow your lungs to be free and open. Taste this life. Breathe this life.
You—are the dreamer. You—are the painter. Trust in the Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali of your unconscious, because it can paint with all the colors that our brushes hesitate to apply to the canvas of our waking moments.
Close your eyes and awaken the Monarchs in your chest, the hummingbirds in your hands and feel. Feel from your constellations all the way down to the dents in your shins. Allow your spine to open like that of a book. A book with empty pages thirsty for everything your pulse has yet to write. Love this life in spite of your clenched fists and cease to be witness to this life. Plead guilty. Stand charged and convicted.
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Sorry for the Inconvenience
while you do your best to block out a vest draped over a paunch 234 years in the making. Built brick by brick upon the cracked foundation of the dream mortared with double quarter pounders and six-packs kicked back to the chorus of touchdowns, a vest bursting into caution yellow that says remember the middle…America.
Stop and remember the children America. Or at least that’s what the crossing guard’s sign is preaching. Held aloft from the pulpit of his grip the octagonal sheet of red metal and reflective paint that calls for us to yield attention to remembrance.
Allow yourself to bend a knee to the oafishness of his grin and the mesh of a cap advertising mufflers and a split fingered wave that looks Vulcan, reminding us to “Live long and Prosper”.
You can see him, on any given school zone corner like a slice of Americana pie, slowing the self-important pace of traffic.
Stop and remember the children America.
Flip the radio dial from blasphemous to reverence, open your window, and crane your neck like you were passing the scene of an accident.
Their tiny outstretched hands uncurl like budding plants. Plants that have been stamped flat by the tires of an eighteen wheeler with golden arches embossed on the trailer.
Stop and rub the sleep of the American Dream from your eyes America.
Remember the landfill called a restaurant. Remember the railroad tracks called a ribcage. Remember the sweatshop
Give your attention undivided to this guard of the crossing. Brush the clouds from the skies of apathetic eyes and lift them up from the worn rubber soles of tired work boots, swim across the cresting waves of faded denim,
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called the north pole. Somebody pray for the children. Somebody pray for what is lost. Stop and remember the guard who says “Sorry for the Inconvenience” America.
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Breaking and Falling
Afternoon The day is winding away and I am searching for distraction from all that I have learned to live with. The flicker of the television out shines the image of myself as a boy reaching for moon rocks. The mashed and greasy burger in my hand is amnesia for fingers that have forgotten their longing to plant themselves in the earth and flower fossils.
Daybreak Day breaks through the window and scatters refractions across the floor. When I was six I broke a glass. While reaching for its place on the top shelf it slipped from my grip and shattered. In waking we shatter our dreams like that glass placed beyond our reach and the fragments we push beneath the rugs of waking eyes.
Twilight After the light of daylight realizations of the reality of our situations has faded we are captivated like staring into a sunset so beautiful it hurts. The colors of fading light mixing with the rising night look like the pack of crayons my son left on the dash of the car.
Noon The sun at noon day has seared our dreams too hot to live by. Suffering from sunstroke we have forgotten how to listen to the voice of ourselves as children. When I was a child I didn’t dream of flipping burgers. Filling the car with gas, shopping, and tuning our synapses to the rhythm of nine to five are all ritual offerings to the god that resides, beyond burning coronas, in the fiery heart of that star our eyes have learned to see by.
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Nightfall Blue gives way to black and my eyes close. I can see all the things that the sun has blocked out. These stars that my heart is free to beat to are giant balls of distant light and under them is a boy forgetting that he wants to be an astronaut. In the night I fall but I hope this time the dreamcatcher will catch me before I hit the day and break.
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Grasping at Goodbyes
You choke-chained depression with the shackles of Uncle Sam and now that he has come asking for the price you can’t open yourself. I’m still digging through a drawer of unwanted things in a house long abandoned, haunted by your ghost and the only key is formed from the bones of our family.
My brother gave himself up for dead the day after he set fire to his deployment papers, trying to catch freedom in the ashes while on exhibit in a glass house and no amount of stones could shatter the panes and release him. My guts are a war zone in flames with a pit big enough to dissolve twenty-eight years of memory. My lungs are filling up and I’m choking on the sands of a desert eight-thousand miles distant. I can’t catch the breath to say -goodbye.
Don’t go. I’m still trying to scrape away the rust. We all have since the moment of our birth. In this storm that is life we are looking for confirmation in lightning. Our hearts still beat c-sharp as we tune our spinal cords to the key of redemption.
It feels like we have already laid you to rest in a casket made of yellow ribbons. If you avoid hate-tipped bullets fired from angry guns, explosives billowing outward into clouds of cowardice, if you come home with flesh and sinew intact will you remain the same? As you push in firing solutions and turn fathers, mothers, sisters, and little brothers into shadows will you remain? Because not all casualties come home in body bags.
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Sacrifice is something someone comfortably anonymous should make. This can’t happen to you—to us. I’m still formulating my argument against a god I’m not sure can hear as you go off to fight for my right to fill my car with Muhammad’s pulse. I’ll sell it and walk or get a bike if it will keep you as are alive, unchanged, my brother.
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Those days when you were the princess and I was your humble steed. I would prance for hours across the floors of your now broken home on my uncle hands and knees until they bled.
Remembering to Breath
I opened a box of my favorite post cards, the one I keep inside my chest, and there you were, lodged between the summer camp of ‘94 and a boy afraid of the water.
Because I have been screaming for help through the windpipe of a man who cannot speak. Because I have been trying to keep you afloat as you swim for the familiar shores of home carried on the current of my blood stream.
The blood flowing like your father’s tears. My pulse finger painting forget-me-nots in your image.
And I have been running into the arms of someone who fades and find only the walls that now exist between us when I get there.
Recalling your image these days is like watching God rend branches from our family tree. because God has always been a boy playing with fire. Heaven has always been a pyre fueled by the kindling of suffering and fanned by the breath of a thousand unanswered prayers.
There are things I know by heart, like family outings to the beach, the wind waltzing through your hair and you just smiling because you still remember how to breathe, and there are things I don’t. Why are loved ones taken? Why does life have to cost so much?
Maybe one day she’ll show up in starfish of light and tell me why things are… the way they are. But until then I will mail this postcard of you and myself to myself to remind myself to breathe because we all have different reasons for forgetting.
If prayers were enough to save us I’d collect them all and stitch them into a white flag and wave it in surrender and ask God the tough questions he has been avoiding. Why did he abandon us like life abandoned my brother’s daughter and why did that man decide to drive for home and drive her from us on that hour that was anything but happy?
I still wander along the forgetful shores of my memory pressing shells to my ears. Hoping, that someday the roar bouncing back from the inside will sing in the key of your voice box. Most days I wonder if you were real or imagined and that if I forget you will transubstantiate like vapor steaming up from cold ground glazed with frost on a morning kissed by the sun.
Every breath we take is sacred. Every second of this life is scripture and these holes our hearts have learned to beat with are like the valves in an instrument and these wounds are where the places where the music comes through.
Now I hold my children extra tight hoping that with each embrace I can squeeze more life into them. All the while a man breathes forget-me-nots like paper planes taking flights of freedom through the bars of his cell.
And I know my shine can’t hold a candle to my rust but I’ll do my best to keep the flame of your vigil lit, burning bright as the days you were happy to see me.
I’ll keep wandering these shores placing one foot in front of the other and to do my best to remember to take a breath.
He drank to forget and now it hurts to remember. I wanna catch those planes soaring on the winds of regret and send them back inscribed with poems that speak of forgiveness. That I’m sorry for carrying this noose of hate for so long.
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