Contents
I am broken, I am brown
This bridge goes nowhere
Yes, the moon was full
Silicon dies, steel dismembers
In what uneven heat
Call of the mail train
Worms will turn his bones
No one knows of the roses
Food for drastic mouths
I love L.A.
Glow of friends whose lanterns warm
An aqueous composition: fly and
flower
Flimsy boots for sturdy deeds
I have some living left
Scarred skin scrapes and cuts
The steady drip where steam
escapes
Before the sky turned yellow
Cows' bones rattle
Graves of unborn dead
This planet will spin now forever
quiet
No black bird will shake our knees
Bent rigid with any wire
Our sun weeps and rains
While the day shift sleeps
Home
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I Am Broken, I Am Brown
I am broken, I am brown,
I hear voices from the town.
No one takes the boats out
Now the fishes are all gone,
No one wants to throw the nets
And find them empty still at dawn.
Some comb the fields for berries,
Some take out guns for deer,
Some scrape the ground for nuts and roots,
Some sit and face their fear.
A few of us, just two or three,
Live hermit-like, alone, because
We cannot lose our painful dreams,
We remember what once was.
I am broken, I am brown,
I hear voices from the town.
This Bridge Goes Nowhere
Surprised on hands and knees
At the windy edge of a crazy bridge
(A great arm stretched from some majestic mountain or other)
On top of the bridge, not on the roadway
On the framework where the wind gusts like a wall
So high the colors of the world scatter
In the intervening atmosphere
Too many layers of air
Below on one side a concrete dam drops for miles
Curving outward wrapping into the earth
Dropped from Einstein's railroad
It's a small desert with one wet channel
On one side on the other a small sea
Below on the other side of the bridge
Rocks wait like pillows
This bridge goes nowhere stops in mid-span
Yes, The Moon Was Full
Yes, the moon was full and rising with misgivings
From the mist that never leaves the mountains
Where every question, every doubt
Drips undrying on the land
A paint we blend in our thoughts
In our factories.
Yes, the moon was full and seemed to leap
From the low clouds that soiled her light
And stilled the rustle of the evening breeze,
The same fog that slows our heartbeats,
Dims our clear view of the stars,
Dulls our vision of anything beyond our hands
Which made this fog,
Which make tomorrow the sky's veil,
Or the sky's clean window.
Silicon Dies, Steel Dismembers
I'm a roadside fool
Staring at machines' battles
(Only silicon dies, steel dismembers
And cannot be killed quickly)
Watching like a television
Boxcars plunging into tunnels
On dirty mountainsides
Piled high and wretched
What is their screeching journey
Scraping secret passage
Who has been there
To clear the necessary paths
And leave appropriate tools:
Wrenches, pencils, flutes?
This is television.
This is public.
I rise.
I buy groceries.
While putting them away
The neighbor's cat arrives
To spend the day.
In What Uneven Heat?
Walking like a pigeon on a web of iron
Where is your floor, your sense of balance,
Your belief that the world is really flat?
What child's challenge fogged your best eye
Lately, threatened your smug equilibrium?
Your shoes are so right
Your car is turbo something or other,
Why your unsteady hands?
Why your crooked mouth's cave,
Its cold, broken breath hissing,
Missing all the points you made
Yesterday?
What sky dripped its poison
Through your leaking skull?
In what uneven heat
Did your lenses grow
So distorted?
Call Of The Mail Train
In well-worn factories
Scattered like hives along the coast, the pencilled line
Between gloom and desolation,
Former angels lean on battered crutches,
Bluffing the clock,
Thrilling to the call of the mail train
Screeching from the distant ridge
That hides the world they bought their tickets from.
The train will find no bridge,
One angel warns,
Heaving in a single, drastic spasm
His vest, his profession,
His barrel of simple nails
Into the pointless, resentful sea
That bangs like a prophet on the cliffs,
An angry map, reciting rules
To make professors glad,
To make the average angel mad.
Worms Will Turn His Bones
Lifting one after the other numb leg high
Climbing in slow inches shedding skin and blood
Our hands grasp the slick trail slimed by snails
Fleeing before us faster than our boggy feet
Booted to the knees in lead chains we drag
We think we have to pull behind us old books.
We run from rooms of alphabets and tubes on end
With no bottom with unreadable letters
We run from reptiles growing horns from their cheeks
Pronouncing words we had forgotten our names
Our histories our birthstones ground to glass.
Watching the last minute of our lives
Spinning rolling twisting in deathly clatter
The last coin in our pockets the last telephone call
We wish for our friends another day another year
We wish for our enemy that worms will turn his bones.
No One Knows Of The Roses
A man from hell appeared
And died again around the corner
(No one stopped)
Gurgling and gasping his last lungs
Full of urban atmosphere
Stench and decay,
Blood and sewage in his throat
Fouling his final thoughts
He rattled his final breath
A dry whisper to the black concrete
He slept on
His bed.
How many times can we say
This is all so familiar
We've been here before?
No one knows of the roses we planted
For him our father our brother.
No one even knows we wanted to remember,
And we fall to our own conclusions
With paralyzed faces
Unable to laugh or weep
Gazing at the green waters
That boil away outside our memories,
Trailing our fingers in our small sorrows.
Food For Drastic Mouths
Can you reach beyond the sadness in your fingers
To spread your small skin over the misery
That beats its desperate wings at your window,
To smother this world's wailings,
Your neighbor's,
Mine,
Until we wake truly rested?
So many deaths call us, don't they?
Through the rattle of trash cans and street squabbles
Soft murmurs of distant pain pull and nag like old muscles.
Can you still tell night or day or sirens
From the nervous whining of your own brain
Asking difficult release for savage dreams,
Requesting food for drastic mouths?
And that confident, cocky man with gum on his shoe
(He doesn't know),
Mumbling his way through your life
For three or four seconds at least,
Is going overseas to be
A missionary among mongrels, preacher to the prayerless.
He thinks his answers are like gold,
Thinks his footsteps make grass grow.
No one tells him different in his own true language.
No one slaps his haughty house with human justice.
Yes, you struck him once with single stones
That left their tiny marks but little else.
You're not big enough or meant for that.
Forget the siren in your brain,
Your short reach;
Heed the future roaring past.
It cools your fevered face,
Fuels your crucial limbs,
Gives requisite directions.
I Love L.A.
Scraping chalk down miles of asphalt
Scarred and crumbling,
Pulling groans of gritty resolution
From thick, impatient throats,
Machines, not rusting, not minding the wait,
Aggravate the atmosphere.
These clanking, whining, whirring brutes
Don't know the meaning of a wish
For better, brighter days,
For air that doesn't scar the lungs,
And have no thoughts for sun and moon.
Their clocks are fumes and murk.
Streak, slither, stutter, slink,
And smash red sunbeams into dust.
You stink.
Can some future blank these monsters out?
By careful excision separate our need for motion
From this crude, corrosive clangor?
Pray Earth,
That freeways soon sprout flowers,
And autos die
A quick and painful death.
Glow Of Friends Whose Lanterns Warm
No one else dreams or wants to dream your tiny nightmares
Or fears the way you fear the dark edges of every scene.
We stare at you unnoticed.
We scrape the streets with different shoes.
Because we know there is no light in the corners of our lives
We hold close to us the glow of friends
Whose lanterns warm as well as keep away the blackness.
Aches and joys alike are best shared in the wordless touch.
We try to show you how
Together we have put aside our dread
Of the insignificant stings,
Of the inconsequential extinctions
One by one of our personal breath.
We build for tomorrow morning,
For those that come after us.
Because you remain apart, because you refuse this lesson,
We cannot listen to your whines and sniffles
Or care too much about your latest malady.
What is your pain to the pain of the world?
Where does your small suffering rank
Against the torture of the poor, the insignificant,
Against the weeping of children without food,
Against the tears of mothers without milk?
An Aqueous Composition: Fly and Flower
Wounded by the metal of our new world,
Dying a slow death in the tepid flood
That gradually fills the smallest pool,
A fly takes a flower for its grave,
A tiny rising lake of acid rain
Fed by our humanity's decay.
We corrupt even the gentlest moments,
Even the seconds when naked,
Nature bares her innocence.
Flimsy Boots For Sturdy Deeds
Soft, floppy shoes under beds,
Furry companions on call
For unscheduled excursions
Into dark corners of unknown noises,
Over wet lawns, cold concrete,
Away from sheltered friendly floors
To the basement, to the alley,
To quiet, to question, to quell
Small disturbances,
To relieve sometimes
Large uncertainties.
Flimsy boots for sturdy deeds.
I Have Some Living Left
In the blurry stretch of the graveyard shift
Workers nod in warm steel tunnels
Trying to stay awake
Fighting the easy glue that soothes the eyelids
After four A.M.
They've made their quotas.
They think in distant focus of the drive home
Dozing against the sharp points of morning sun
On impatient traffic anxious for the new day
They think of their bright daylight beds waiting.
They slap themselves in their drumming factories
Hearing in the humming the voice they throw
At the gray hair in the mirror each one saying
"I have some living left,
I have another future."
Scarred Skin Scrapes and Cuts
A puppy raised by wolves will be the fiercer
For his false tribes' training.
He compensates for duller teeth and claws
By savagery to hold his bloody brethren
At a living distance.
Our children become skilled at bad habits,
Their scarred skin scrapes and cuts.
They practice brutal games to keep the pack at bay.
But keep in mind the pink flesh underneath.
It churns and steams, creates the future.
The Steady Drip Where Steam Escapes
Crawl blind to your office, tiny man,
Down corridors with high walls.
Voices lap over the top of each small world you pass.
Why weep for the empty chairs?
Why listen for the murmured rumors, the missing information?
Call to mind the old, oily smell of machines and metal scrap,
The slam and roar of a well-fed furnace,
The steady drip where steam escapes
For lack of time and proper engineering,
For all the wrong reasons.
Run these frames through your nervous memory.
Try to reach the source of such deliberate confusion
In the sketches on your walls,
Cold without a window's relief, release.
Before The Sky Turned Yellow
So many books, so many letters
Piled like desert rocks
Brushed with eons, rose and gold,
Stained with slate that fell a thousand miles
From thunder caught in sunset flame.
No private ceiling on this library
Hides such ore from starlight,
From warm or stinging weather.
Lizards stroll and lick the sand from dictionary pages;
Their juiceless tongues leave no mark
On writings built from human tears.
They scratch through vacant scholarship,
Shredding idle paper,
But leave untouched
Small stories cast from love, regret.
When you write your fragile poems,
Think of those who wrote for us before the sky turned yellow.
Keep your pen and paper safe in mental vaults,
Or the cellar of an empty house.
Cows' Bones Rattle
Snails cross sidewalks,
Seek moist sprays, moss,
Green wood, not fire,
Spin clockwise under birds' eyes,
Flee cats' painful needles.
Curtains lift from shaded corners.
Sun spears shadows,
Sears blood from stalking spiders
Frozen in sudden spotlight.
Shrubs dress flies in modern clothes,
Hide new eggs, old leaves.
Waking worms scratch buildings' roots,
Smell earthquakes,
Crimson clouds.
Earth rocks and yawns, a late riser.
Thunder rumbles, drums,
Calls mountains down the stairs
While seconds decrement,
Days drop numbers,
Cows' bones rattle in bald skins.
Graves Of Unborn Dead
The switch that brings the purest light
Was never meant for skin and bone to throw.
The rope that cheats a race of life
Was never braided, bleached, and hung so low
That giant men could trembling reach it.
The knob that sends the current down
Was never shaped for finger touching thumb.
The fuse that sparks the final sound
Was never measured, cut, and spread to come
So close that any match could shaking touch it.
Buttons, levers, antique tools
That write black streaks on morning skies,
These artifacts hold no danger now.
They fade to outlines, wary ghosts,
Against your starry force, last woman,
Draped with dying atoms' radiant, fatal glow.
Lift the eyebrow,
Raise the finger,
Curl the lip.
Take a breath
And kiss the graves of unborn dead.
Stare down the dark tube of a future
Forged by men who only wanted more now
No matter what.
The dry grit of their laughter
Bounces forever on a blank sky.
This Planet Will Spin Now Forever Quiet
My cold ear cocked to the north
Wet in the salt spray
I listen at the border
To the tread of soldiers on the snowy crust,
To the windy bluster of the sky,
To the silent slide of satellites
Across the outer skin of atmosphere
Where grand, auroral curtains dance and fall.
I call some of these satellites by name
I converse with them in long modulated streams
Electromagnetic I call them by name.
Others I do not speak to
When they pass over I write their names
On green and yellow screens
Men stare at in dark basements.
Tonight the routine chatter halts abruptly
None of the old tests matter no confirmation appears
None of the practice runs were like this.
I loop in useless code
While the air fills with the noisy pounding of missiles
Thousands of them lifting their loads of dust and fire
Into the night heaven humans prayed into so long
That their gods would never let this night come.
It comes.
With the blast of a brass horn
I never thought to feel cold on my lips,
On the flaming feet of stars it comes
In the hands of children
Without parents burning their last house down
It comes its skull's teeth glowing
Its awful breath hot and stinking.
Dawn's light will fall on smoke and death.
This planet will spin now forever quiet.
I want some satellite not blinded not deaf
To speak my name
I am the radar computer
I am Gabriel
No Black Bird Will Shake Our Knees
Sweep aside the northern tripe
And wash the forests clean of dollar's grime.
Never shall this people kneel again, we'll
Die before we let los yanquis
In to take our land this time.
No black bird will shake our knees!
On the bloody shoulders of our heroes we will fight, we will win.
Bent Rigid With Any Wire
Who brings your headless bodies home
Bent rigid with any wire,
Balding vulture cloaked in sinful threads?
Who hears your victims' last accusing cries
Tossed away with bleeding faces?
Belching blood at dawn you rasp a nasty breath,
Your ghoulish brain concludes its brutal plan
For last night's awful task.
You work in darkness.
Your savage eyes have no lids.
Which mother hatched you,
Beast of lies and torment?
No mother of these valiant children
Charred and smoking on this red-soaked hill
Would give your sick grin any greeting
But spit and a spike,
If they could only pin you down.
Fold your filthy wings and join us in our streets,
Foul eagle.
We will translate for you the last definition,
The one that matters,
The true meaning of justice.
We learned it from your father
Who fights with us now.
He weeps at your deeds all night
In his lonely tent.
Our Sun Weeps And Rains
Look, look at our star
Sitting low and orange in the gray April fog,
Staring at us,
At what we have done.
Some of us are ashamed.
Some of us are too busy to be ashamed.
Some of us never look anyway
At that useless part of the sky,
Clogged as it is so often
With the acrid yellow exhalations
Of our daily deeds,
Ruined as it is so often
With acid yellow dust.
Some of us just want to put buildings there,
Just want to forget yesterday's clear view of the city
Climbing, crashing against the wall of mountains to the east,
Just want to erase the pencilled sketches drawn by prophets
When the edge of the sky was a dream, a destination.
Look, look at our star!
Is it too late?
Have we lost our horizon?
We stand on the beach and shuffle our feet.
We hold our illegible maps
In the misty, tangerine light.
Our sun weeps and rains hot hydrogen
On the sidewalk, on the sand, on the sea.
While The Day Shift Sleeps
Under the stars and the night cloud light
When the freeway traffic thins and flows easy
When the day shift makes its way to bed
We grind our teeth, we force our smiles
Into the long evening.
We sweat while the sun is down
While the day shift sleeps.
We are the slaves of the furnace
We keep the beast awake and hot
That threatens us in drowsy moments
With catastrophe, with the loss of our lungs,
With the loss of a thousand lungs,
With steam around us hissing from leaks
That slowly multiply beneath our attention
Beyond the capacity of the crews attending
The failures, the degradations of metals and men.
Oil boils, oil seeps into countless cracks
That creep like fungus to the critical joints,
To the seals, to the flanges,
To the gaskets that spell a good product,
That spelled the end of a good life
When the mother's hands that trusted them
Felt their rotten steel crumble into crusty dust
Flushed away by a caustic flood that drowned her
Quickly, without pity.
We ache for sleep when the sun is down
We want to rise refreshed with the coming of day
But we expect instead to pull
On the down side of midnight
Our last sharp samples of acid,
Cursing the company,
Watching in anger the fast-approaching fog,
Our final breath.
Tom Vernier
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