Poetry By
Kevin Gillispie
Published on: 1/4/2011
Bitter Breath
In the glove compartment of my neighbor's Volvo hid always a fresh pack of cigarettes. His son and I liked to steal a few whenever the frustration between us made our company uncomfortable; whenever without some soft presence like the talcum-white smoke from the breathy glow of tobacco cherries to salve the hurt of our musical shortcomings we risked dwelling on our failure to release the turmoil trapped within our bodies - the turmoil we resonated with, but lacked the skill yet to perform away. His father's cigarettes held for a time the frustration at bay, but even music yet unheard pulls for resolution and when after his father's heart attack the glove compartment stash changed to Menthols we began buying our own flavors, that with each box came not only twenty moments of fire and salve but also the slow pull of independence that drove us to choose different solutions to our musical shortcomings. My friend chose to away deeper into the turmoil by fleeing Van Nuys for Paris and a conservatory where he could spend his days and nights becoming a fount of endless melody that draws upon his frustration instead of like me who chose the work-a-day worries away from music to smolder out under the promise of security - a computer, a cubicle, and little compensation for the regret of my never becoming or for the fear that my becoming was possible and ignored. When my friend walked on stage to perform his senior recital he sat down at the piano and paused. The keys were splayed as they had been for semesters and centuries, but he refused to play them and in refusing he chose - out of pride, pretense, or paranoia I can not say - to shun success by choosing not to graduate. Years later, his father suffered a predictable but premature death. Decades of cigarettes taken one sigh after another took him into a hospital where divorced and alone he soon checked himself out into night to die in the hospital parking lot. Last weekend, I found myself bumming cigarettes from a bartender who knew about the greats of Jazz and, for several hours, I recounted the names from my musical youth and enjoyed more bodily the smell and flavor of my nicotine memories than I had in their making because choice was the bitter threshold where my youth passed into the wilds where fear, refusal, and compulsion can quiet you face-down beside a car tire.
Published on: 1/4/2011
Alone in the Killing Jar
The jar itself would have otherwise pickled cucumber or preserved jams, but my friend's father had smeared the insides with a nebulous amber film like clotting honey and instead of thereafter sitting sealed with the fruits of labored months gone by, it killed, but it killed gently and in a manner of patience - if patience could come and embrace you, surround you, and slowly take every panicked breath from you until the terror passed into drowse and the drowse then into death, leaving only the unbruised body you once crawled among the short grasses with or fluttered around the honeysuckle and citrus with quiet and empty.
Published on: 1/4/2011
On Writing
My poetry's hobbler is meaning. Meaning, despite my vow to write well-wrought thought that moves from hand to page and page to print with margins meant for readers' gloss, I fear a meanness of meaning and never get anything written. So, say I'm writing the climbing of stairs to my door, where over and over the stepping and straightening of my leg on the left with the compression hip screw plays itself out up the flight in my head, but I don't write it yet because my limping left leg wobbles and wavers having disremembered the muscles and methods my right leg can't remember needing. There I am, sitting and writing about stepping and straightening watching it turn to sitting and quitting because the lack of meaning anesthetizes my pencil. - I mean, who cares? . . . stairs? It's a dull conceit at best, and a cliché at, well, it's a damned cliché! But I can't stop sitting and quitting about stepping and straightening and trying to extract some meaning from every foothold in my mind and my phone rings. "Why are you breathing like that?" - I'm writing a poem. "You're what?" - Steps. I'm walking up steps. "Steps?" - Yeah. I live on the third floor and my leg makes it hard to write poetry. "Oh. So you're not thinking about her?" (Then I remember how I could always recall driving into the snow. You nodding away on the bench seat beside me, layers of soft bundling around you fighting the fall your head wanting to make, and me - my lungs whispering in wordless aspiration, "let the chasm between us fill with the mountains around us, and let us finally meet with each." But your temple never finds my shoulder and we never share that gentle consummation when two trust the gentle between. You vanished down the slope. I wasn't fast enough to find you. I couldn't turn, I couldn't stop. Before the ambulance that drove me under the scalpel that parted my skin for the drill that opened my bone for the metal could swallow me, I tell someone, everyone, to drive you gently because quick mountain curves would leave you sick.) - No. I'm not thinking about anything. I'll call you back, I'm in the process of quitting.
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