i contain contradictions

from Richard Hell's "Go Now":

"Memories are better than life. Nothing I'm part of is good until later. I love what time does. I make decisions on the basis of sensing what will produce the best memory. They're my finest works: all that multidimensional and liquid maze of experience minus the fear and uncertainty, or with the fear and uncertainty changed to something else. Because they are already finished. I've made them up and they comprise me. It's as if experience is only the dark, chaotic factory where these little infinity jewels are pressed into being. Everyone is the poet of their memories. Usually it's better to get things over with so you have the memory. But like the best poems, they're also never really finished because they gain new meanings as time reveals them in different lights. Maybe every memory is inside you from the beginning; they erupt and branch and merge in fantastic patterns, but if you really tried you could trace any one of them back to the same original. Maybe the best ones are all the same: of being born. Or dying, or whatever it is."

It's funny, for most of my life I've shied away from my memories, like remembering them wouldn't do me any good, or would catch me up in a dismal past when I was trying to reach towards the brightness of imagined futures. The more I look back recently though, the more I see that they are more who I am than what I want to be, and that sticks me right here in the present, somewhat ambivalent towards both. I like that word, ambivalence, because in common parlance it means to feel somewhat blase or uncertain about something, but it really means to have contradictory opinions about it, like you feel so strongly in both directions at once that it balances out into this amused standstill stepping stone.



***

oh sounds and visions
break a feast of senses
a fire a carnival an inane howling
that stampede of all fallen faces crawling
through your bedroom window
to watch you dress and redress
your growing pains and chaos contractions
collected in all the sads and unsaids.
pull the seed from your gut
regurgitate everything
fetal unfurling fingers
turn to creation twist
through mouths and the fat worms in haste.
draw them in wrap them around
the colors and bleedthrough limits
of language. make them dance.
make them dance out of the grey.

the world ends. not with a bang
but after dinner, when we all go home.
not with a whimper but drunk
revealing through the streets.
grab anything that moves
hand it a small card scrawled
with the words “what do you love?”
blow up your inflatable heart
and eat it. eat anything
like you’ve never eaten before.
taste dirt and starlight
like a small child
and scream “I live. I live.”

and live

do you dare? do you dare disturb
the already disturbed universe?
the mold the median
the flatline of this failed medium
god the silence after
the grooves we settle in.
skip the record and make it
to the peaks the hollows
the uncompressed crumbling
of porch columns and causality
climb out and cry free
molt with the birds of play
the first red breasts whispering
to totem windwhipped weathervanes
vanish for months and return
with a new noise an unstoppable
a springtime sweetheart
sex like a sandstorm seconds
slipping through space
like the numbered green rains
of fate.

***

don’t you know yet?
these are but possessions and conceits
will you sail them all away on no strings,
right this very moment?

will you permeate the right and right
and right away take root
outside the grooves?

peel back the petals of the i
and bloom.

***

you already know this, you may have forgot
as many times as time allows to forget
but you already know.

all it takes to move is the will to move.
dark is no wall you can run into.
when you hold the devil in your arms
and kiss him goodnight, you will wake
with wings on the outside and a taste
for all the hotdogs of your youth.

remember that grace, remember
jumping from swingsets, remember
a picnic table on some hillside
above a battlefield with churchbells
calling you back into each others arms,
remember the taste of scraped knees
and learning how to fly.

peal, peal, and remember.

this was all a dream a fever a door
you opened with such sudden expectation
you failed to realize
there was no ground on the other side
and no time to close it behind you
and you fell into it wondering
if you’d ever land again
and who might accidentally follow.

for once you taste the sky
and that light grows lighter
all through the lining of your senses
the mud seems so long ago
and full of tongueless bones.