H E L L O , D A R K N E S S

Howie Good

Copyright © 2010 by Howie Good All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-0-9828032-1-9 Published by Deadly Chaps New York, NY: 2010 DCs1HG|2| Cover Design by Deena Acquafredda Book Design by Joseph A. W. Quintela http://www.deadlychaps.com

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Looking For My Muse

I stole words from others, blamed the royal tutor when caught, missed the beginning of movies on purpose but noticed the first buds, tried painting it all one color and then stopped somewhere on the road and sat waiting silently among strangers and dirty tables and the slow, agonized waltz of maladroit busboys.

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Oui!

The police seized a wolf from the composer’s small apartment. And then the moon, in a show of outrage, stomped off. Only a night earlier, the neighbors were nodding to the loud music in his head. He had the kind of genius for slapstick the French just adore. I was elated when I heard the story over the radio. All things are the same thing but different, like myself watching myself watching in the mirror.

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Multilingual

She speaks seven languages, none of them well enough to teach. At the gym everyone else using the treadmills is fat. I like the way she looks in her tall, red leather boots, with the tightly packed buildings of the old downtown rearing up behind her. Freud described dreams as day residues. The best advice I could offer was, Don’t fall asleep. It grew dark while we talked about it. She had a train to catch in the morning. Snow was predicted, but not because of anything we did.

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The Bright Shine Of Gong

And who are you to compare my heart to a Falling Rock Zone? Except for the red sweater, I look my age. Only the injured survivors can discuss the hypothetical as if it were real. On the empty porch of the shuttered house, I catch a whiff of what might be the sea. Crows fill the world with the same noise as a misdirected bomb. I step down off the porch – an implied promise to carry a light just in case.

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Fairy Tale

Rain like pebbles flung against a window. There was a time I would have been able to ignore it. But a man had showed up at our door one day grinning like the severed head of a traitor stuck on a fence post as a warning. He offered me a dark bundle. If you must define irony, I told myself, why not define it ironically? I went back upstairs. I tried to think about something else. I couldn’t. What used to be called the Flood of the Century rumbles down the valley every spring.

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Nothing Into Nothing Equals Nothing

The tiny bird riding on my shoulder only uses words I haven’t ever looked up. Better to live life, I answer, than to write about it. I walk out of the room followed by the man Chekhov said we should hire to hit us with a hammer when we’re happy – and who has, of course, a face like trampled snow. If I turn this way, the sky appears barely mended. If I turn that way, the last few Jews in Krakow are hanging from lampposts. Everyone should listen to everyone the way a doctor wearing a stethoscope listens to a heart.

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My Chagall

I feel like giving everyone the finger. What’s wrong with me? Nothing a flock of old rabbis flying in mini-vans over the village wouldn’t fix.

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Trees Shrug On Their Coats

Ambushed by spring, he looks himself up in the phone book, finds out where he’s living under another name.

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Garrison Keillor Won’t Read My Poetry On Public Radio

So what? It’s filled with words that love each other.

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In The Shadow Of A Junk Pile

Antiquaries in toupees, admit it! You never knew the nest existed until all the leaves fell.

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Blast Pattern

Other people inhabit the house where I grew up. The country my grandparents deserted no longer exists. Chinese hermit monks regard accumulation as deficiency. That’s why cups break. I’m surrounded even in sleep by anxious objects, souvenirs overgrown with dust. A pink beam of light transmits information. The forest retreats further. Streets collapse. Oh, darken the heart, the bomb maker urges, so it doesn’t think.

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At The Breakfast Table

Bombs Kill 95 the headline says beside the sunflowers in a milk bottle.

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Lost Glasses

The situation as you see it turning back into shadows, and the shadows into gunmen in topcoats and derbies.

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Blink Blink

Unused words during last night’s fight (quadrille, mayo, Baltic) float this morning like radiant dust in the mindless air.

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On First Looking Into Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems

I was only 14 and didn’t know what you meant. You meant how it blooms hatless and in all shades of green and without ever saying please.

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Songs Without Words

1 The clock stretches out both hands toward us. Fingerless hands. 2 She missed class a lot that semester. I tried to talk to her once about it. She listened quietly, like a dark window. 3 Her name was Staci Love.

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Love – to feel tender affection for somebody or for something. I looked it up. 4 She had begun to smell by the time they found her, and later I heard it was self-starvation, an irregular heartbeat under beaten gold. 5 The clock deserted her, and ever since, it isn’t late, but it feels it.

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Avant-Garde

Breton believed the ultimate would be firing into a crowd in the street until the bullets ran out. It isn’t blood, Godard said, it’s red.

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Red Circus

Step inside. Meet the strongman with the shaved head and tender heart who can quote Kafka. “It’s enough for the arrow to exactly fit the wound,” he assures the midget clown, while the bareback rider runs stumbling around the center ring after her runaway horse. And look! The lion tamer has his fist drawn back. He’s also encountered an unexpected impasse for which gun and whip are of no use. As for the ringmaster, I fade in and out like suicidal thoughts, the crying red eyes of disappearing taillights.

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Transport

I clambered aboard as ordered. It was dark inside, though it wasn’t night and wouldn’t be night for hours. Ghosts of lost objects patrolled the aisle. I leaned back and closed my eyes. When I woke up, fire was cradling my head in its lap. We were far from anyplace I knew. The woman reading to her seatmate hesitated over certain words – verdigris, exculpatory. Others passed around a Polaroid of a wall. Poor everybody, I thought. The sun, suddenly below the horizon, continued to breathe with difficulty.

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Dance of the Iron Shoes

The stairs creaked under his weight. He was carrying a small black satchel. My mother kept herself busy elsewhere in the house. If I lifted my head off the pillow, I could hear other children playing on the sidewalk. He suddenly filled the doorway of my bedroom. How you feeling? he asked. Sunlight clanged against the window. Flies crawled around inside my mouth. It was often like this back then, the sky brightening just enough for me to see what wasn’t there.

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Pig/Iron

Up a difficult stairway, it’s the new year, or nearly. I knock on the door of a strange apartment and ask the anxious man who answers if I live there. We’re like Biblical figures meeting by providence at a well. The effort to think clouds his face: the orgasm of a pig lasts 30 minutes; how long does death last? Down in the street, terrible dreams pass each other with a nod. I wouldn’t trust someone like me either.

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Could Be Worse

We could have other people’s thoughts in our heads. Someone could have spoken to the police about us. There could be an underground missile silo, and not an empty lot, at the end of our street. The neighbor’s dog could be a man-eating tiger, and the bluish clouds that blew in last night could contain remnants of Zyklon B. We could never have met, or made love like giants of modernism on a mattress on the floor, or read in the instructions deep colors bleed.

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Peremptory Signs Of Incipient Crisis

I raise my hand in greeting, but what looks like a person coming toward me isn’t. The clock is frozen at ten past. Individual faces have become as indistinguishable as raindrops. In a corner, a child chews on slivers of glass. The windows, when it rains, make a noise like applause.

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Hello, Darkness

Open windows can be hazardous. If there’s no music, why are the trees dancing? Everyone believes they are someone else. General Custer, for example. When they found his body on the battlefield, he had an arrow shoved up his penis. They never told his wife. It’s the sort of stuff you think about late at night.

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Spring, Delayed

Birdsong alarm don’t cry I can feel broken idols change trains upturned hands forfeit fire uncle decay still trying shhh tree sleep.

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Multiple Choice

A. the languor of confined songbirds B. also called the hypothalamus C. Hitler’s moustache D. a hole where the moon belonged E. all of the above

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Talk Therapy

Yes, it helps to talk, but you want that kind of help? Night is here, and flames, and we could be jabbing our tongues down a flower’s throat.

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More Snow

An open coffin filling up further with forms I must fill out.

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Love In The Age Of The Computer Virus

In a foolish instant make all my documents disappear.

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This Is The Way The World Ends

With you on top and me on the bottom and the lights out but light everywhere.

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Quartet For The End Of Time

1 I step around the puddle, the only mirror remaining. 2 Echoes and shadows, and on a neighbor’s lawn the teenage babysitter prophesying double-crosses. 3 Torn-out throat of morning, outdated X-rays of the afternoon. 4 Like a road flare still burning hours after the accident has been cleared away.

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Acknowledgements

The author deeply thanks the editors of the publications in which the following poems originally appeared, often in somewhat different form: “Spring, Delayed” in Fogged Clarity; “At the Breakfast Table” in a handful of stones; “Quartet for the End of Time,” and “Lost Glasses” in elimae; “Avant-Garde” in Metazen; “Songs Without Words” in Spilt Milk; “This Is the Way the World Ends” in slingshot litareview “Multilingual” and “Could Be Worse” in 2River View; “Peremptory Signs of Incipient Crisis” in Clutching at Straws; and “Nothing into Nothing Equals Nothing” in Durable Goods.

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About the Author

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 20 previous print and digital poetry chapbooks. His full-length collection of poetry, Lovesick (2009), was published by Press Americana. His second full-length collection, Heart With a Dirty Windshield, will be published by BeWrite Books. He has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net anthology. With Dale Wisely and F. John Sharp, he is co-editor of the online literary journal Left Hand Waving.