there are plenty of things unlike people
I can grab ahold of
that will not let me down.

that big mound of snow in the corner of that parking lot
is a good girlfriend for starting over with.
I'll make love to it like I used to kiss my pillow, practicing.
I'll thrash around on dirty white until
something connects with something.
I'll hit the pavement like an egg.
I'll pick up the colors revealed
with their budding circuitry aborted.

The world doesn't have to be made flesh
to make me yearn.
I'll frame it as a steaming image
with the part of me that can't believe
my own ability to breed.

I got this apartment for the winter
because I wanted a place with a window
looking out on that empty parking lot.
At night the plows make it shiny and clean with long
surging kisses. When the cars fill it up
in the morning I feel like I'm about to cry.
The form is so much better than the function.

I got this apartment because I wanted to believe
in my ability to live without
the company of total strangers.
I got this apartment because I didn't want
to get anyone pregnant. It looked at me
from among the classified ads
like an eye looking through flames,
just as desperate as myself, and more open:

single man seeks single woman
to remain single with;
single woman must be non-smoker;
must be

himself

pressing against an empty bed,

rehearsing both parts.

someone will know what you're waiting for

there won't be anything left in the house to open

there are as many lines here as there are
levels in this building which will be rubble
by the time you read this. something like a leaf
will fall off this poem.

there isn't a right limb. or whole bodies fall off
wherever a hand takes hold.

I see how unprepared I am for you

We were unhappy, fighting each other
We thought we had to be unhappy, fighting each other
We thought our unhappiness was necessary
We thought our anger was leading
To a wonderful breakthrough
We were terribly wrong
This is the song of our terrible wrongness
Look how clumsy it is
I cannot ask you to listen to it

Here's something I've never done before: I took one of my old poems (written some time in 2003) and cut it down into a drastically different version. You can check out the old version here: http://home.flash.net/~unlikely/whitesandand.html if you want to compare. I tried to select the strong, spare stuff, add a few little bones to the skeleton, and cut out the fat. I hope there never comes a day when I want to put everything I've ever written under the knife. But I enjoyed pruning this one:

white sand, red sun

I went on a white beach
to pick you flowers made of red fire
(there were none)
and it was a sun under my feet.
I let it burn until the earth
was torn away by its heat. I let it burn.
I went there to find you some shells
that the ocean had washed clean
their meat gone
their hour of oblivion and beauty come

I pictured them held in your hands
shimmering--
remnants from some underworld's broken skeleton
...an eternity swum and never reassembled.

I saw the water, mercury, uninfinite,
in its stretch toward
the false edge of this planet
the way the mist moves as the fish jump through it
and I wanted your hands on my body
to make my blood move
in the shadows of buildings
stretching their sun-drenched gravestones;

a leaf of paper falling sideways in its drift
and whispering on the skin of my hands.

later, over the bedside table
where the shells were drying,
I saw the hard light enter the hotel window
like something thrown from a mirrored universe.
all day I moved
like an aging helium balloon
dragging its string in the sand
toward a distant dock
until the children dragged their pails up
into shadows of adult umbrellas
in the backseat of the sun

the bluefish smashed their muscles against the air
the seashells warmed in the flesh of my hands
I looked at your picture through a distance of water
with the murdered gift so silent in my room
a small thing from the sea that cannot live.

Live lonely or die

I think of us all like flames pacing our apartments
scowling mica into our mirrors

naked, sick of all fashion
waiting for dandelions to sprout
from between the floorboards;
something fertile to make our cells bearable,
since we so seldom feel secure enough
to bless with kindness at each other's doors.

Don't you wish we were kicking a yellow
rubber ball back and forth across a big front yard
freshly cut grass sticking to our bare feet
the smell of life's blood enveloping us

waiting to hear a voice from a huge musical kitchen
call us in for dinner? And that we all had the same parents,
gentle people with plenty of time to laugh over a big meal?

LOVE POEM TO THE CONCEALED

2

In the next life you will be wearing my clothes.
You will have to unbutton my shirt near the top
to make room for the roundness of your breasts.
You will have inherited everything
that ever touched my body.
It will be an entirely different planet.
The blood will have been hosed off the sidewalks
and the broken windows will have melted away.
It will just have snowed. You will be your own child.
No
body built in childish humility
will ever fall down.
The trees will look like the skin of a baby's hand.
It makes me ache to sting this:
you will make it to heaven
and I won't be there to hold your foot.

LOVE POEM TO THE CONCEALED

1

I will wait until you are about to leave
to tell you I'm in love with you. Not
to make you stay. But I believe
that moment on your doorstep
when you gently respond "I know"
and kiss (not too near
my lips) goodbye
or look startled and slam
the door and
keep on packing (not letting me help you
carry the boxes
this time) will become
the tallest column
of pure winter air
on earth. Seen from space
that pillar of cleanliness,
untouched by sex
and lover's arguments,
sealed by just one
declaration, will be felt
moving from zone to zone
like a painting of a tornado,
a sculpture of a hurricane,
in your memory. For your mind
is my only country.
The gods will say
from the battered moons of Mars
these states are not united,
but something holy,
free and unrequited
is moving over them
like a queen without
a king or pawns to conquer.

A girl & I were taking a walk
and we found part of a bird:

tonight we saw
a bird's wing
in a parking lot
all by itself
it was sticking out from the peak
of a snowbank
Mount Monadnock lay
low in the sky behind the snowbank
the snowbank looked like the mountain's child
or it's shadow burned down
into a pile of white ash
and the bird's wing looked like
more than a battered flag
it had so many finely crafted
strands of color
and it was such a sculpture
we pleaded with an unseen hand
to re-make it

with a frightened look
you grabbed the wing and pulled it out
but no bird's body followed

where are your eggs, little bird
where are your children
are you bleeding in your nest
are little blue eggs dotting the snow
like fading drops
from the brush of some landscape painter
running away with their canvas & knives
to save their painting
as the snow engulfs them

did something tear you apart
I hope something didn't tear you apart
if it did I hope it was quick

I promise to be quick

I hope something gentle & strong
is carrying you away in it's teeth

there's a heat inside snow
everyone feels and denies
ash is raining down
from a burnt sky
we wag our tongues
we touch our tongues together
we laugh at how our tongues feel,
touching each other

Here's a letter I just wrote to my local paper on a subject that has disturbed me for some time. I hope they publish it; I've sent them many letters, mostly in jest, but this one is dead serious, and I think it's the best letter I've ever written them:

Dear Sentinel,

I'm going to risk attempting a couple of generalizations about humanity. Here goes: most of us use some form of art, whether it be film, literature, poetry, music or in-depth journalism, or some cheaper descendant of these forms, to keep us emotionally alive and inspired. And most of us are unnerved by "eccentricity"; by anyone who sets themselves apart from the rest of us through "oddness" of speech or habits, or simply by possessing a greater level of emotional intensity than the average person, especially if that intensity comes with a disconcerting level of candor.

These two characteristics on our part are uncomfortably, and intimately, related.

Perhaps most of us do not go to the highest places for the resuscitation of our souls; perhaps most of us don't go to the greatest songwriters, painters or novelists for our spiritual food, but we do go to arts and entertainment, even if in somewhat diluted form, to keep us feeling good, or to help us feel our melancholy more bearably. And the greatest practitioners of art, the ones who plumb the human mind and heart the deepest, the ones who have the major breakthroughs in invention of form and structure, and in the improvement and modification thereof, enable even the lowest hack, the cheapest action-movie maker or cheap romance novelist to have a form to work with. So even if we absorb only the trashiest pop culture, we are still "benefiting" from the contribution of great artists.

And these great artists, as anyone who's ever read a few biographies on famous poets, film-makers or painters already knows, are very often among the most eccentric, disruptive and even antisocial people on this planet. Which means that most of THEM would unnerve most of US greatly if we were subjected to personal, physical contact with them. I think that most of the people who read Sylvia Plath, William Blake or Charles Bukowksi would be jarred and threatened if they met a similar character in person. Most of us are content to get our dose of human agony and passion from a great distance; we'll listen to 'The Aeroplane Over the Sea' by Neutral Milk Hotel on our headphones and let it keep our adrenaline flowing on our way to work; we'll even use our appreciation of it to assert our superiority over people who enjoy lesser varieties of art; but let songwriter Jeff Mangmum walk into Kilkenny's on any night of the week and attempt to disrupt the hum-drum routine that makes up the majority of our conversations (as he very likely would, as so many artists have rudely done at parties throughout history), and we'll be outraged at his intrusion.

This is to point out that, when it comes to art and appreciation, most of us are exploitive; we support the act of art, because it thrills us and allows us to feel cultured, intelligent and interesting, even "spiritual", but we are not prepared to deal with the uncomfortable reality of the human beings who make it, perhaps because such close contact would force us to face the idea that perhaps art is not just something to get us through our day, or to lord our hipness and cultivation over others; that it does not exist just to interrupt monotony for a moment, but to disrupt it once and for all, to call us to a more honest, more passionate and less compromised existence.

Yes, we admire, through our appreciation of art, the dangerous and thrilling magic of human individuality, but in our daily lives most of us are threatened by the same display of individuality at its most extreme, and we seek to bully it out of existence for fear that it might destroy the comfort of our routine. This means that our relation to art is parasitic; we feed on the beautiful bones of those we have eaten; we allow those who are alienated by us to thrill us with their torment as long as they remain on stage, on vinyl or on paper, as long as they don't make the mistake of walking into our lives.

Kate Bush once sang, ecstatically: "we let the weirdness in." But "we" usually don't. She does, and is willing to risk being ridiculed for it by those who don't. Would that more of us were that brave.

Just a thought. Hope I didn't make anyone spill their coffee.

Sincerely,

Luke Buckham.

Nervous breakdown man

father walks in the sky the sun
is dispersing the continent of clouds
on which he walks and he's so brittle now
that he can't carry you
to the fragile heights he's living

father sits on a stained bed it's his magic carpet
in his mind it's a rotten place to sleep for the rest of us
a weightless place for him to live I think
he found the wrong heaven
but the female angels are wearing their uniforms
the food is cold and clean in its basket of air
he sees it suspended in transparent stomachs
the male angels are eating their fill they are not
vegetarians

his mouth is a trap he can't open for fear
of letting god out to avenge
the clumsy loves of all his human cousins
living in the shadow of the hospital
in two thousand winters one day his shattered pants
cloaked and scattered the mystery
from which I leaped, impotent

Talking sociopath blues

days when there's nothing gentle left to say
to anyone
skies flash open on every planet like ocean shores
of broken seashells

the way you speak the word love
makes them call you crazy and mean
you ask between kisses why there should be
another song on the jukebox
another drunk fuck if it's not
going to change
everything

and your half-friends roll their half-eyes
call you half a fool
agree mildly
that we all need to be raised from our graves

but
who wants to do
all that shovelling

The cloud people

the clouds have style because they don't
change because they can't help it
evaporate because they're in love
with not being in love with being in love

the clouds I can't explain
are ruining a life I don't want anyway
the replacement is a bowl of peaches in hell
the replacement is a girl
beautiful and holy
turning into a woman
while nobody watches
in a bar full of
violently idle drunks

Letter to a girl

I apologize for typing this on your body

I ran out of paper

there's something wrong with the landscape tonight
the snow is soothing in the twilight but
beams of light keep shooting upwards
from the footprints I leave behind

that doesn't make sense, does it

also, I've noticed beams of various colors
shooting upwards from other sets of footprints
some of them are brighter than others,
and they're everywhere

the sidewalk is covered with bouquets of light-beams

I'm confused

what I'm seeing is dragging me out of this world
forehead-first

I don't want to live in a cave of diamonds all alone

I need your help
I can't carry this dazzlement around all by myself

that's why I'm typing this on your body
not because I ran out of paper

some bodies look
hand-crafted
with such an intensity of love

it burns my view of the world
(which inhabits my body)
down to one glazed eye

staring at a wound in the sky
and inhabiting that gash
like something looking back
with its own whole body

the lips of the wound calmly open
huge globs of yellow paint
rain down like punctured hot-air balloons

splattering sad pavement
making the landscape of the eye
live again

blotting the lines on the lot
where we park our restless deaths
every day

& walk out of our hulking bodies
like birds on crutches
a series of wounds inhabiting a larger wound

Looking for victory

Because I violated my own soul
with false humility when I was a boy,
because later when violence stupified me
I read about politics and meditated on murder,
I have lost my language
and the sensitivity of my limbs,
I can't enter a bar or a restaurant
and tear the syntax loose
from these horrible conversations,
I can't boil the air with my eyes
or make the carbonations sing with eternal life,
and I have nothing to say to the woman
I have fallen in love with.
All my purity is gone;
yet I will love her even
if she falls into debt,
if she worships mediocrity,
if she is promiscuous,
if she throws tantrums
and smashes glasses
against her kitchen walls
and weeps with shame
in front of the embarassed police.
I will love her.
I will love her even if she dies, and so
nothing can remove her from me.
And I can't do anything.