Missing Links

Missing Links poems by Zack Schwartz

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Table of Contents Introduction.................................................................................................................................................................................4 I....................................................................................................................................................................................................5 (I MEASURE TIME BY HOW A BODY SWAYS)...................................................................................................................6 WHAT TO DO NEXT (misplaced poem II)...............................................................................................................................7 YOU ALWAYS DRESS FOR A SHOW.....................................................................................................................................8 PRAYING THAT NO ONE........................................................................................................................................................9 MERELY OUT OF PLACE......................................................................................................................................................10 IN THE DAY AFTER AFTERNOON.......................................................................................................................................11 UNRAVELS..............................................................................................................................................................................12 THE ONLY WAY TO SAY A PRAYER....................................................................................................................................13 AND REDBROWN—THE COLOR OF..................................................................................................................................14 YOUR SILENCE......................................................................................................................................................................15 BUT THEY DON'T...................................................................................................................................................................16 MEANS MORE THAN LOVE.................................................................................................................................................17 NO LONGER CAN I (RE)MEMBER......................................................................................................................................18 THE (A/E)ND...........................................................................................................................................................................19 WHATEVER.............................................................................................................................................................................20 FINGERNAILS LIKE DROPLETS OF WAX.........................................................................................................................21 II................................................................................................................................................................................................22 (I AM A) WARMREDSACK....................................................................................................................................................23 IS NOT THE BEST THAT HEAVEN HAS..............................................................................................................................24 SEEING.....................................................................................................................................................................................25 THE STRESS SOAKED SYLLABLES...................................................................................................................................26 DARK WORLD, GROWING DESER: A SOLITARY MACHINE HUMS ON THE BEACH, AN ATOMIC FACTORY INSTALLED IN THE DESERT................................................................................................................................................27 HEAVEN'S LONELY STARS..................................................................................................................................................28 INSTEAD OF YOU..................................................................................................................................................................29 OR HEART...............................................................................................................................................................................30 THEY CAN MISS.....................................................................................................................................................................31 YOU ONLY TALK ABOUT LIFE............................................................................................................................................32 III...............................................................................................................................................................................................33 AND REMOVE THE SHADES...............................................................................................................................................34 (perhaps it is time to try again.).................................................................................................................................................35 AND NIGHTS I WISH TO BE UN-REMEMBERED.............................................................................................................36 i could be so easily broken.) my ...............................................................................................................................................37 HEAVEN HANGS IN THE AIR...............................................................................................................................................38 WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF AIR?...........................................................................................................................................39 OUT OF HER EYES.................................................................................................................................................................40 AND READY TO BE CONSUMED........................................................................................................................................41 EVEN THOUGH I'D RATHER................................................................................................................................................42 IS A ROAD A ROAD IF IT DOESN'T TAKE YOU HOME?..................................................................................................43 “CLOSE THE DOORS, YOU UNITIATED”...........................................................................................................................44 ONE NIGHT.............................................................................................................................................................................45 IV...............................................................................................................................................................................................46 EVERYDAY MUST BE THE END OF THE WORLD (four).................................................................................................47

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Introduction All but one of these poems was written during one of two “Poem Offs” I had with a friend of mine. Basically, the idea was that we'd take a line from one the other person's poems and use it as the title or first line of a new poem and then the other person would take a line from our new poem and use it as the title or first line of a new poem of their own. We started each Poem Off with a poem by a third party poet, in the first Poem Off I took a line from a Theodore Roethke poem and in the second series Tiffany started with a line from Graham Faust. For me it was a great source of inspiration and challenge to keep poetry in my head each day but eventually the Poem Offs became sporadic and then stopped and then Tiffany dropped out of my life mysteriously. I would occasionally look back at one of these poems and re-write it, read back through the whole sequence, both mine and Tiffany's and wonder about them. Once we had thought of putting them together in a way to show the whole process, each poem following the poem that was its starting point, but finally I decided to put all mine together and see how they stood on their own. So here are all my poems from the two Poem Offs we did, on their own, without reference to the poem they borrow from. I used re-written versions of each, not going back to any of the earlier versions or Tiffany's poetry they started from, but getting them together with all their flaws and gaps. Sections I-III are all originally from the Poem Offs, still in chronological order and Section IV was written almost a year after all the others, but is a poem I wanted to cap this collection. the curious can find all these poems in their original form at: http://www.schwarzz.com/blog the original poems they paired with are still at Tiffany's now defunct blog: http://revengeisnotjustice.blogspot.com/

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I.

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(I MEASURE TIME BY HOW A BODY SWAYS). in errant truth the hang man taught me time: we watched poets, young (and old) writers of timid love verses dance and choke with rough hemp as their partner, they moved in circles, and those circles moved. and when their circles and their gyres stopped we took down those martyrs of emotion, and I could not help but marvel at their unsunned white skin, their collars of blue, where rope had been their last jewelry.

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WHAT TO DO NEXT (misplaced poem II) suck down the lower superficial sun. spread the relative word of fertilizer, then gaze upon your weak reflection: that expensive pretty you you see. here, you must undergo the ground's account. take everything the sand does not use, all those roots always coming up threes, those trails of broken seeds, all those always—to the laughter with language, to the language with laughter.

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YOU ALWAYS DRESS FOR A SHOW they were fat-anorexic-pockmarked-acned-stuttering-crippled-scarred-and-damaged. after the spectacle, I made you the guardian of my shame, wrapped you in a skirt made of skyscraper girders, a haltertop torn from magazines—you hid your face underground, put on the world as your mask, unquiet and always changing—the eyes unblinking through the quiet dissolution or quiet disillusion.

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PRAYING THAT NO ONE i've seen me, this unbuilt room checked out, watched the cleaners scour the tile floors for: eyelashes, nail clippings, stray innovations. this was never home. you, you—

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MERELY OUT OF PLACE I think of you and steam rising off of rain slick cement, mattresses rotting underneath deadbrown leaves in the wood, toogreen patches of moss lurking outside a ramshackle doghouse, now that we've fucked, you can say you've done something cultured.

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IN THE DAY AFTER AFTERNOON absentee, some silenc ing machine clicks on. the black sun, drippin,g slides into position above the trees, brownleafed, lungbarked— you brought the un quiet. you brought the watery moon, the rain, the— rack of God's suits, all secondhand, all plaid, all cotton. I built myself bomb shelters in your shadows, concrete unhomes to write not poems in. you were my Enitewok, my last island home, a skin to count down with all those galactic voices that whisper towards an end.

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UNRAVELS it is untangled, a sky without clouds is a weakened sky. the wind cries we are all sinners under the bloodless sky. the wind weeps— we must not change this one armed woman suns herself, her hexes chasing away the clouds. in the night the moon will hang above, a fly caught in her web the one eyed woman watching, listening for the scraping of shifting furniture, whispering, whimpering things must not change.

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THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO SAY A PRAYER for me—and the coarse 'S' and guilty as formaldehyde or a bird's nest built of straight pins, or your shawl woven of cactus need les—I was born with a crystal heart com— pressed, pumping thick anti freeze, this is the only way to keep the glaciers from melting, from fractur— ing, the only way to say a prayer, for me.

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AND REDBROWN—THE COLOR OF... where do you hide when an immortal plasmate which knows everything and is consuming the world by transubstantian is looking for you? God, lurking in his lonely redbricked town on Mars, (or Deimos or hollow Phobos, that rusted sheet metal shell) decides now is the time for the firing off of all those fuckedup theophanies: yesterday I thought you plucked the sun from your eyesocket, bloody rayed and blinding... all the voices on the still unplugged radio are whispering everything the sidewalk thought it had kept secret—they drench me in sweat and and concrete and fever. will you let me stay in the dark? the silence and the cool basement, with it's steep stairs, whose ascension I do not admit, and it's ineffectually locked door, will you keep me from— the lord is in this place, how dreadful is this place.

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YOUR SILENCE is a ghosttown, your tongue a sunset, too moist and red to read true, your hollow cheeks given over to the crickets and shadows. you dance amongst your dustbins of silver or gold, un aware of turning into mud and silt, ravished by someone else's hot wind.

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BUT THEY DON'T “there are even living creatures which do not have a cell nucleus - lucky things.” as this universe with draws, tentacled and pissed off, don't say any of his three fucking names to me— child, come here everyone else can join me, drink gas oline from the pump, go back or to Sirius— whatever is the final wish of their retrograde hearts—

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MEANS MORE THAN LOVE Love is like the sun coming out of the clouds and warming your soul. the new sun has eaten my brain, the orange clouds have stained my pants, again—it does not come off in the wash, and smells of the looming sky's general menace. my electric goat is looking sick. I am tired of cleaning up the oil spills. of doing the dishes. of taking out the trash— my soul does not pitch in, anymore, but wanders off like a lobotomized patient in some bad 50's movie, watching for the welcoming arms of the vultures— at least it stopped shrieking, stopped crying that the moon is watching its every fucking move.

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NO LONGER CAN I (RE)MEMBER bite my ton gue in two to morrow I'm going to think about other people, to morrow I'll hate the sun in to rising, a gain, as red as my blood y tongue or as red as your lips if I could re member them.

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THE (A/E)ND please, please, please— how much of holding on is is actually giving up? yr. dreams: an antique door knob, its brass finish worn off by too many grasping hands my dreams: an abandoned satellite, a degrading orbit, something they meant to fly forever. falling and burning up.

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WHATEVER. I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile. we all always see everything upside down. sand down the clouds, make floorboards, lay them above the sun, above the moon, to heat and cool your house live there with your three inflatable wives, your cardboard headed children, your poodle—tell yourself: God said be happy. God said this is right. turn that television back on.

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FINGERNAILS LIKE DROPLETS OF WAX past Lebynthos, you'll soar, to Icaria, where once your past sank into the waves of turquoise and crimson— feathers, wax and finger nails bobbing on the skin of gentle waves dyed bloody (each crest a mirror of the dying sun) while on the shore salt water mingles with salt water, your father's tears dropping into the funeral foam, gathering the balsa he made into your wings and covering the fragments with curses of his own arts.

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II.

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(I AM A) WARMREDSACK tomorrow wants your wanting. the stain glass is all whispering something, something about my failure but my skeleton has not developed telepathy, my television is blinded, shouting some thing maculate, something to be bought, and my lips are still cracked and bleeding but the stars are not yet burning my skin, not yet. and my skeleton is still only yearning, not leaving, having not found that way out from me, not yet.

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IS NOT THE BEST THAT HEAVEN HAS there's all ways leaving, if I could get up from under my tree of fingers, my tree of tongues. Adam laughed and laughed, went on naming, wanking off into the bushes, but Eve made me a sickle of flattened the pennies that rained down from above, for the next harvest, after the seeds have been planted in the wet, black mud.

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SEEING the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing eye made me a coincobbled road, no wheregoing: lashtongued, blueringed. eye spoke me a blinkingwhitespotting openingthrobbing, an almostunseendown dewdroppedlipsparting

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THE STRESS SOAKED SYLLABLES the rising moon faces the sickening sun midnight snaps back down the road as if all things come back to dark, or early or fucked—I think only in endings, I think about yellow lines diverging and put on my sunglasses with one hand. midnight snaps back down the road, but then the sun fucks it back up again.

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DARK WORLD, GROWING DESERT: A SOLITARY MACHINE HUMS ON THE BEACH, AN ATOMIC FACTORY INSTALLED IN THE DESERT. there is no silence, nothing is lacking we have the unexplained: a cannibal sun, feasting on children. always chattering sand, grinding in the surf. the moon turned away, the wind pulling anything towards some other place— some place with rocks, where the machines are quieter and Thor's nine bootprints lead away from an infinitely arching hallway of vertebrae and lichens.

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HEAVEN'S LONELY STARS here's be yond, what we had hope d for—he slipped out back: amidst empty cans, broken bottles, all that glittering in the firmament, all the beauty left from the meeting of imp ossibility and imagination. but you, you 'll just stumble after, chasing, scraping your hands on the rough packed dirt, the shards of glass—the tears of stars...

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INSTEAD OF YOU you're all mirrors, chipped but not broke n as if unluck was something to be avoided, like un love— but you'll wait, under the streetlight watching the clouds boil ing. but you'll wait for someone who's not you, to take your place, to re leave you.

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OR HEART I think I outlived it, or made a concrete mold, something else to beat out no songs on. some other way to move blood, a wire to push cells and antibodies, oxygen or snake scales—bits of pencil lead, bits of ice. now my skin is smooth, now my skin is cold and never flushed and the only beat I hear, comes from the stereo.

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THEY CAN MISS our lives are boxes full of dirt raindrop eyes or smooth gray pebbles, I think you were talking about someone else, or, else you were—talking, or— eye think we've got it wrong, some paperclip has been misplaced, there is dust on your new book, or you fell asleep on the road and thought you saw an angel, or you fell asleep on the road and thought it was the end, or you fell asleep on the road and could not see that everyone else's eyes were also closed.

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YOU ONLY TALK ABOUT LIFE they slip through, red or blue, like playing cards, each moment or cigarette after which you stand, mouth open— here's what you lost, three pennies. here's what you found, a pinecone. here's what you left, a house that was all windows and doors, every wall torn down, every shutter taken off and you wonder why I stare?

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III.

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AND REMOVE THE SHADES love lost the game of chance. we ate the blackened sun with plum sauce. a skyscraper with spiders legs crept along crossing roads. I could only find myself by following the trail of paperclips. my grail was an empty paper cup. you see too well. is this a sun worth setting? flesh hangs on the soul, love hangs on the flesh, all the rest we can repair. some new pair of moons fill the sky now, pale and cratered. love was slenderwristed, she overplayed her hand.

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(perhaps it is time to try again.) these hexes, they also work long distance and distance would be what I love, if you were a star, maybe Pluto (maybe not), beyond my circles, below my skyways, on a bus on the road below, (at night if I squint they look like white electric snakes) and then you would love me again. lightyears would be your longing. distance my desiring, but together we only look out different windows, watching the buses.

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AND NIGHTS I WISH TO BE UN-REMEMBERED I think of you and the rotten sun, sinking into the sepulchral soil. did I rob you of wanted I wanted to? are you ten thousand yards long and unable to shimmer? or are you laying where the sun has yet to set, bathed in its bleeding warmth and is it only the effigy of the sun that is drowned in darkness and desire?

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i could be so easily broken.) my eyes you have my eyes, i think i saw a man on the bus pull a deck of playing cards from his mouth (a few fell on the floor, when he put the others back between his teeth, those remained in his hand. they were red. the others were blue.) your eyes were blue, even without the tears i needed, i had no other water to drink, the bearded woman had not yet taken my seat, that girl with the fucked up cross spoke in tongues until her cellphone rang. when i thought no one was looking i cut my arm open and pulled dice from my blood. i rolled them until my luck was not bad.

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HEAVEN HANGS IN THE AIR l (eye) ke the smell of a paper mill. angelic voices masturbat ing (eye) saw some thing float down, a sickly black feather, or shred of black plastic garbage bag hangs before my (---)s is this god?

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WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF AIR? black galleons eat the sky until all the clouds are gone and our skin is burned bare the Madonna of Chandeliers in her dress of broken beer bottles sits weeping in your desert the sand dances around her each grain a word you said and you are all I hear, but she cannot hear anything black galleons ate the sky and stars loom large—cold and dead

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OUT OF HER EYES lashes, weary or drops to roll down alabaster cheeks, bloodless lips her legs pale pillars of marble, delicately veined, pale blue rivers flowing south from her heartbreak and I wish I was dead inside of her, inside the graves of her eyes.

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AND READY TO BE CONSUMED you get eaten alive by the perfect lover. not by need, but desire the moon turns to blood. take your flesh from me and I'll disrobe the metaphors you've dressed me in—the world ended the day I was born. the day you were born the sun turned to bright, bright copper (though now dull and green) the color of the table we lay ourselves out on. the color of the hours that we wait.

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EVEN THOUGH I'D RATHER and the cold is everywhere, now, somewhere, but he is home at last. paperclip collects desire, like building snowbanks or the steady accretion of useless things I retreat into. home is where a hole is, the edges ripple in the breeze or the skin of a single celled bacteria, that I dreamed I'd become— but tomorrow's fallen behind, drawn too close to the heartbeat of the sun or too far from the gentle pull of the moon's desires but even the stars have less eyes than I—and even the stars have less—

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IS A ROAD A ROAD IF IT DOESN'T TAKE YOU HOME? you left before you woke, to go in dreams to where I won't take you. dark cloudy cities that smell of the sea where the walls are made of broken glass and everything would sparkle, if the sun ever shone and apart I'll love you more and you'll be less, only a reflection in a puddle or cafe window, only an echo to pine away watching the moon float on the tides.

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“CLOSE THE DOORS, YOU UNITIATED” in a thin coat of longing, some lapsed Ophite or Orphic, struggling to channel an addiction to sight into something more productive— videogame magic(k) (with or without the ‘k’) desire has a way of coming back, some sleazy Lazarus with the face of a superficial supermodel or rockstar, the only thing more powerful than God, unchecked by locked doors and only barred by loss and amputation— an eye for each sigh, a tooth for each truth.

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ONE NIGHT with every night the shallow dark flows in, first dull red, then gray. I think my Sleep long ago pushed his reed boat off that warm shore, and somewhere out of sight of the land of day capsized, but Sleep would not die—He lay in the colorless sand at the bottom of the ocean where the cold never sleeps and the sand never stirs.

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IV.

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EVERYDAY MUST BE THE END OF THE WORLD (four) a year of silence from the North where your idol stands, plaid and enormous, axe in hand, and you go on without poetry; since all our small betrayals and unkindnesses overflowed the basket you made of your dress for picking wildberries, and we don't know how to ask for forgiveness in Morse code, in telepathy, by the North Star— but the end of the world is coming, and some of us would like to say 'Hello', one last time.

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