Headphones

Here I'm standing in the elevator, at the cash register, on the train.

And I'm wearing headphones.

The guitar roars; the drums pierce the membrane of the sky until it sunders, but

Only I can hear it.

The music fills me up,

Focuses me

And gives me something to do.

I have a touch screen for a temperament

And songs rather than emotions.

Who wants to be human

When the world can consist of only beats and lyrics?

Now I'm strolling down the sidewalk, pacing back and forth, shivering in the rain.

I'm still wearing headphones.

Wrapped in song, I forget myself until she looks at me; the volume drops so

Only I can hear it.

My thoughts begin to thrum,

Taking on a tempo and a rhythm.

If not for these speaker levees, they'd burst out,

Flood the vicinity

And tell everyone how I'm feeling.

Who cares about one man

When his spirit can be so neatly packaged

Behind plastic plugs and a pounding piano?

There you are, approaching me, and in the chaos of the crowd we brush elbows.

You're wearing headphones, too.

The bass batters down your eardrums and the glass wall of space between us until

Even I can hear it.

You must be crazy

To hammer the sense out of

Your brain like that,

To let a genre so distant from you as me

To hear the color of your soul.

Who needs to speak

When thoughts are spilling out of her ears?

Could you please lower your volume?

William

The epicenter of the human soul

Contains a rift so deeply absolute,

Science confereth on’t the name “black hole,”

Though ‘f nature, ever she’ll be in dispute.

Upon this vast I stumbled once ago,

Borne thence on certain heedless whorls of Time.

My vision grasped a nexus, where below

All human thought compressed to one sublime.

The sole imperfect blot on this ravine

Was three playfellows hanging from a tree

That o’er th’ unfathoms perilously leaned,

Link’d arm in arm, and knuckles gripping knee.

The farthest, and the aptest to let slip

Was a fiancé of the purest brow.

Above, a raven lady with a grip

Could anchor total mountains to that bough.

And twixt the twain, who kept them both in hand,

A bachelor to’s incriminating ruff

Scream’d out against the hourglass’s sand,

But every word was swallow’d by the bluff.

With no unlisted hand to hold his quill,

It slipped, and splattered ink that oozed like blood,

And hung i’th’ wind, as on a silent sill

Constructed o’er the soul’s conclusive flood.

He railed at me to rescue him with rope

And save the lives of his attractive mates,

That beauty might survive. He hung on hope

Against the purchase ‘f worlds’ worser fate.

But knew I none could fain o’ercross that span

Within which chaos shudders to a close.

This tragedy I shouted to the man,

Who bellow’d back in verses fit of prose,

“Go to’t, thou rascal! Pigeon-liver’d red!

Know’st not the plight my willsome hand could save?

Or seekest etchèd doom upon thy head,

Printed on face, and afterward on grave?”

From’s frothy mouth and from’s yet flutt’ring pen

Abounded glamours two or three times wide

Who capered weightless ‘cross th’ abysm again

And over, sightless bridging the divide,

Then sank they only slowly toward the dark,

Resounding rather from its seamless walls,

And rattled wisdom as the mongrel barks,

And faded as first prince of autumn falls,

But ever their impression did remain

In will-o-wisps, in meanings without term.

That roughèd joiner ‘f glamours rent with pain

To see his progeny his dread affirm.

He wept. I called to him, “Lament you not!

Their plight was beautiful.” He shouted back,

“Alas! I knew them well. Ere I begot

Their noble forms, I knew not how to lack

A minute painlessly. When I gave birth

To their mistake and torment, I was eased

For but a moment. Now returned to Earth,

Those models wrack me with upset reprise.

Their loss carves out a coffin of my heart.”

I soothed him. “Sir, in smoke I see them yet.

Neglect will not their faces tear apart,

Nor will their ghosts allow me to forget.”

He smiled. “’Tis done. Beloveds, disappear.”

At that the trio plunged and sank away.

And I alone remain on th’edge to hear

His screams reverberate even today.

Poetic Fantasy

To dream of dragons ere I sleep,

To dream that stars beam in the deep,

To dream to listen to a fé,

I go on dreaming anyway...


Poetry has been a part of writing fantasy since long before "realistic fiction" emerged as a genre. In fact, poetry has been a part of culture far longer than prose. Before widespread literacy, rhyming patterns and image-based narration were the best tools for ensuring that oral traditions could be passed verbatim along generations. I don't know very much about the history of the transition to prose, but in British literature, many of the epic romances that have founded our written culture lace their prose with poetry as a way of recognizing the most precious values of the world contained in letters. Thanks to Tolkien, modern fantasy authors draw on Medieval British culture more than any other culture in history, and poetry is part of the package.


For me, poetry is the most difficult part of writing fantasy. I'm bad at poetry to begin with. There's a sense of dream, of logic without explicit narrative structure, that I tend to seek out, but what I write always reveals that I'm trying too hard. Then I need to have a reason to write the poem. On its own, that's a relatively easy question: what's on my mind? But writing poetry to include in a book is virtually ghost writing. I'm saying something not just on behalf of myself, but on behalf of a character or culture I've made up, and the words and images I use need to match this. And when it's all done, it needs to make sense to the reader. Talk about compromising priorities!


All my favorite fantasy authors are good at this, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I'd be interested in hearing some more authors, anyone at all, who can pull this off well.

High Winds

They flap like geese and through geese

They flap, into trees, and these

Need be the breezes that flee

Through the holes in Swiss cheeses

With no one to show where they

Blow, nor to flow ever slower

And slower, not knowing

We go where they go, that we

Do what they do not in lieu

Of the clouds that surround their

High site with that blinding rich

White that their blinds never quite

Want to rain, want to paint all

In vain, ‘til it drains them of

Rue that they knew whence they blew.

Chowder

[I wrote a sonnet! What's it about?]

A ruddy afternoon, dribbling post-vernal

Perspiration supersedes a whooping

Tempest some cerulean Mænads churned

To boil of reefy depths, a mollusk soup.

The leaping foam, fervent, discovers me,

All bundled up in sunscreen, trunks and skin.

Without a “do you mind,” the surly sea

Begins to serve up leftovers wherein

The guts of clams and other mollusks, nude,

Bombard me, a frenetic festival

The ocean musseled muscular construed

To drive me from its grumbles aestival.

Betimes when bored, and boogieing near the coast,

Eschew the waves; the deep’s a grouchy host.

Heliotrope

[This is a poem I wrote for the 2012 edition of SUNY Geneseo's Opus magazine.]

Lowered these two trembling fingers

To a rippling slab of shale

And, at once in reckoning her,

Felt her pulse begin to fail.

Wept pollutant hued of bloodstone.

In her glad freshwater spring,

Tears of salt relinquished unknown

Shudders never more could sing.

Wanted only in that second

Opiate to numb her pain.

All her poppy buds unfecund

Wilt, aborted, scarlet stained.

Surged upright within that valley,

Vowing there to save her life.

Up her august breast did sally,

Limbs with verdant vigor rife.

Towered tall atop the apex,

Hurling prayers into the sun,

Helpless, supplicating ibex

Bled his brothers’ sins undone.

Fused intents with ultraviolet

Spurts to iron heart. Unwed

Flesh on rock became the pilot,

Witness to her aspen bed.

Could not countermand infections

Paved by asphalt knife, betrayed.

She was skinned of snow protection,

Salt in every lesion made.

Broke two fingers where she trembled,

Flailing thighs in final throes,

Capillaries disassembled,

Tributaries overflowed.

Watch headstone of chalcedony

Switched for stark cement and glass.

This too-mortal alimony

Never should have come to pass.