Accessorizing

On May 23, 2014May 21, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Accessorizing a borrowed life with faces –

no names – they’re unnecessary.

Don’t complicate the process by streamlining

a story made prettier by scar tissue, scabbing.

A fault line runs through the doubting

air, fat on it’s own labor, like lighting

cigarettes on sunburnt backs. The first one always

clouds the breathing space

like too many clouds in too little sky.

A single teabag in the bathtub where

life gets stored, wrinkled-skin shining

toward a sleeker consumption. Borderlands fold inside out.

Don’t look anything in the eye. There’s a smoke

storm coming. A cigarette exhaled in someone

else’s kitchen. Riddle-red cheeks fade back into

other-storied guests.

We’ve been here the whole time.

________________________

Image found here

At least they choir

On May 21, 2014June 2, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Fickle, flaky, Freudian in

the way of a nasal winter –

hiding on a park-bench

pidgeon’d hole o’ Gram

pa’s forgotten stash.

Dive, dive, dive, oh wing-ed

wonder, wallowing on the shell-

crusted beach, almost in

noon-sleep, snoring through

whiskers thick with doubt.

One can only shiver

against gulls, gobbling

a breakfast, marooned and

still. Shout at their noisy

music, with sea-shanty poker-

faces. They may be raucous,

but at least they choir.

Inhale

On May 19, 2014May 21, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic4 Comments

Morning bones, cracked at the seams,

splice themselves into subway-tag poetry.

Ignore the crowd, they’ll trace

their own lines

back to when the post-

man knew where to go.

Still damp letters in stilettos

march and fall through city

grates that can smell soar feet.

But these feet write semaphore

that only sing

when you read backwards on

pages wind-blown forward,

east of the garden.

Words, stolen

from other people’s lives, hearth tales, fireside

songs, thirteen-year old misfit

adventures crouch and whisper their

secrets

out from

the corners, feed

a hungry pen, growling

for colors on gray paper.

Once you can no longer smell the parchment,

eyes adjust,

and life begins.

The ghosts are hungry

On May 17, 2014May 21, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

The ghosts are hungry for more.

But chiming bells overflow the glass

and teeth chatter in the gray sun.

There is music in the gravel tide,

washing up like red medicine –

bloodied capsules of cotton-talk,

gauze-word, suture-see. It only

gags the throat of a traffic laden wood.

Clouds crippled by the old songs, are still

just clouds.

Can you taste the buds of blue, jagged

sweat germinating tomorrow’s winter

garden, stuffed in a teapot on top of your lone

May Pole? Maybe the French kiss

nightmare taught a thing or two about that

unnamed wishing well world?

With hunched-back scar-tissue tongue

you lasso the last, unlucky

stragglers from the playground of ordinary

sights, you suck the juice out of the sunlight.

No more wrought-iron tail feathers for

this sidewinder peasant.

Suckling the teat of frozen landscapes, you

always forgot what nourished most

until they circle back round and

stump you from behind –

where all the best tales are.

Image found here

Try not to think of it

On May 13, 2014May 14, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic6 Comments

Bent shoulders squeeze tight against the

seven-layer’d Sheol, curtained against

a world, upturned, and studiously

oblivious to a two-breasted sparrow,

with shark-teeth and winter’d schemes.

Words, like rainless clouds hopscotch over

solemnities, trinkets, experiments, names.

They jostle for supremacy with other shelved

things, like those good ideas, old friendships,

and Dad’s breakfast table dreams – the talk

of little boys of unwhisker’d pedigree.

Watch a man’s skin curl under

flame while doing your nails, and then shrug

away the smell before answering

your phone. It could mean playground

talk, pajama time, and networking to

stop the voices.

Still, hiding there under the clock,

breathless and stoic, that pushes only red and

black and the carbon of sweaty

palms, are the patient lines on an ambivalent

face. Come the creaks and queries and

counting petals on the tired

sidewalk. But garden variety promises, wrapped

in gum wrappers are stuck in pigeon shit, refusing

release into the Cadillac morning on a

farm truck day. So, flow down trucker

tears, leathered and unbidden,

like remembrances of the somnolent road.

Those kind of tears.

Image: Circe by Wright Baker

There is a place

On May 11, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

There is a place,

under the porch where the rattlesnakes are snoring

with one eye open, the other one hungry.

…

There is a time,

when the lush day-damp dissipates into a certain thinness

of corduroy dreams pushed up against unpainted walls.

…

There is a place,

where the shadows have darker shadows

and light is the unwelcome uncle, drunk before drinks.

…

There is a time,

after 1963, when the streetlamps meant something

more than the start of a restless evening.

…

There is a place,

where rye ‘n water and pickled herring and asparagus spears

shared secrets to little boys of parent parties.

…

There is a time,

sandwiched somewhere between lunch money and

shit wine in a coffee cup when dime-store dreams were enough.

…

There is a place,

of a certain ripe solitude, a kind of naked jamboree

when conversation stalls but silence takes over.

…

There is a place. It was not then.

There is a time. It was here.

Writing…about not being able to write

On May 4, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words5 Comments

Oh, what a vexing irony: to sit and type out words about a losing game of hide ‘n seek with words. I will certainly not be the final voice on finding a lost literary voice. It’s just that, well, I didn’t think it would happen to me. So soon at least.

Shit, I’m only fifty years old. I’d hoped this wouldn’t happen until I had left an entire generation agog over my mastery of linguistic flare, and deftly adroit word choice. This is what happens to the aging novelist with one good one under her belt but finds herself paralyzed producing a second. Not me! I’ve yet to be published. By that I mean, more than the occasional University research paper, blogging, and the guy with the cleverest quips in birthday cards. As a writer, I am reaching for more than the guy with the best Facebook posts.

Shit, I’m already fifty years old. Shouldn’t I have something significant to say by now? One would think that this well-earned silver crop of thinning hair and commensurate wrinkles might have shoveled a thing or two into the loading bay. This sagging, white ass is well deserved I say. It’s watery impression sadly shaped into my favorite writing chair.

So, what happens when the words dry up? When the notes that come from pen or strings or keys no longer woo, titillate or otherwise amuse? When, instead, they are the stale, reused, overused bag ‘o tricks of a modern hack? When nothing sings anymore, but mutters imperceptibly under its own muffled (bad) breath? When one becomes a caricature of oneself – a sorry lump of stigma buried under borrowed artistry?

Can good art descend as easily from the ordinary, unadorned lives we live at kitchen tables, card games, and board meetings as it does from our bungee jump moments? Does one’s life, in order to become pregnant with words needing midwifery, require the overheated backdrop of anger, anxiety or joy? Perhaps then the super cooled, glacial faces of fear, pain, doubt, foreboding, even despair? Can the altruistic and universal issue from us as easily when our feet are ablaze with the dance of heaven and running onward to new adventure as when they’re encased in the cement of toilsome drudgery?

Men love when women laugh at their sorry ass jokes. I’m convinced that far too many women are far too polite as to give our jokes what they deserve – looks of disgust or grunts of disapproval. My wife still laughs at mine, oddly. I think, in part at least, it is because she’s often funnier than I am and feeds well off my fumbling attempts at humor. Mine is the bump and set. Hers the spike. Mine the missed lay-up. Hers the rim hang slam. She knows exactly what I’m about to answer when someone asks a question or tells me something either stupid or clever. If that was you, nothing personal.

My tricks are used up. Nothing surprises anymore. Little takes her by storm. This is okay in a good marriage. Not so much if one is the keynote speaker for a plenary address. Tell a bad joke to a packed house met by stony silence just once and you’ll never forget it (or so I’ve heard).

The flaccid, often noodle-y jokes that belch out of me these days are a good example of what I’m after here. To the uninitiated they may still speak or cause a chuckle or two. But, they’re not exactly earth-shattering stuff by any stretch. And every writer wants that – to be earth shattering, hugely entertaining, eternally perceptive, generously intuitive; all topped off with that orgasmic metaphor that leaves the reader with tousled hair and a far off look. We want to write that paragraph that causes readers to light one up afterwards.

I feel stuck, like the last dander of spring, clinging perniciously to the dandelion stalk refusing to admit summer. I’m that solitary bat hanging to the brick wall humming happily to myself while everyone else made it to Batman’s photo shoot an hour ago. Okay, so I exaggerate to make my point.

As a musician and songwriter, I’ve crossed this bridge before (there, see what I mean?) and what I’ve discovered is there are only three ways to overcome composing dry spells. One, write. Two, write. Three…well, you get my point. Best of all is when I’ve emerged from the songwriting dust heap I am always the better for it and have generally gleaned something helpful along the way.

So, here I am. I write to be a gooder writer, writing even gooderer stuff than ever before. It may feel awkward, like walking straight with one leg shorter than the other. But, at least it will be. I will have refused to be stifled by something, which, itself, refuses imprisonment. It barks insistently for release into the atmosphere it craves for its own freedom.

I’m not asking so much for the words as to dive deeper into the life from which those words await the pickaxe to dig them out. I don’t ask for inspiration as much as consternation that what comes has passed through the honing tapestry of a life, fully lived. I don’t ask for clever turn of phrase (well, that’s only partly true) as much as an honest churn of thought, where the ambivalence, arrogance, innocence and yearning that, together, form my life, blend and cohere into a face and a name to call my own.

Did I mention I’m only fifty?

Images shamefully taken from here

Thoughts gathering. Still listening. Longing.

On May 2, 2014May 2, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

He strode as heir apparent to a memory

in galoshes filled with dust

and leaves of threadbare

thoughts.

Gravel, like a road of broken glass,

bundles itself together in

tousled lumps of the old roads,

gathering.

Footfalls, freshly faltering,

appraise themselves of what had

gone before – like a wagging tongue, never

still.

Even the magpies mock their

cowboy choir – their country for

cajoling cowards, crowing without

listening.

Crumpled into corners of hours,

crouch the days of famished weeks. Years

rake up from the ditch, staring down his borrowed

longing.

Image found here

Finding a voice without one

On May 1, 2014May 1, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

He ran out of words right about the time

his hope hit a wall like winter in June.

Lucidity escaped through loss, and

a life runs its twisting course

beside another’s parallel stream, just out of view.

Where to the waning West became of

words that once transfixed golden-souled,

silver-penned pirates of the journey?

They scaled the hull of pitch and yaw ships

laden with gifts from the sand of distant shores.

There it is again, once song of the Muse,

now the Siren’s cry like a whip of lustrous thought,

piercing ears, thirsty for the music of sojourn.

“Listen, listen,” she sings and, by singing, hopes

to be free from something that never bound her.

He would answer but his voice is drowned

in the shriller insistence of a mermaid’s lonely tale.

A single wave-tossed rock provides her stage.

But loudly though she sings, louder still the waves

that divide. All others are silenced against her solemn tones.

Laboring under misapprehension of invisible dangers,

she notices not that all ships have left. The song she

knows well has merely chased all hope of rescue.

Soon, her shrinking solo speaks no longer to gods nor men,

for without a voice, there are no more voices.

Picture found here

A wet morning in Oregon

On April 28, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Silence, except for the insistence of ocean.

Backdrop for seabirds, arguing in a grumpy rain.

I let contemplation keep company with

a stubborn fire warming wet wood,

hungry for more than it is willing to give.

Morning.

These mangy hills, full-cliffed, sprung from

the deep places of the earth,

thrust their faces out to greet

a colorless sky, too dark to laugh,

too green to die, but not too proud to cry.

Spring.

There is a stooped and bent feeling,

cast abroad in the air, breathing heavily.

A tangled scene, untimely brought,

coils itself, unprotected against the beauty of

a moist, unsatisfied wind.

Oregon.