scrapofpaper | i believe regardless; i believe in everyone

"Travel"
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Shakur"
I'm coming at you live from the half way out
Where the winter morning stretches out

Like a white sheet over lovers the infinite
Has fetched. The still & bone-blue white

Couple found parked, frozen on the highway,
I'm thinking of them & the drug that made

Them think they were warm enough to chill
Because I know staying alive requires pills

And a wicked streak. I'd need a head cocooned
In bass, I'd need to be locked in a womb

To hear your dopey two note melody, your song
Pimped by wreckage, your light longing

For lightness. I'd have to be as quiet
As the youths whose youth made them stupid

And lovely. They are God's niggas now like you.
I'm thinking of the stall of intoxicated cool

That stalled you before it stalled them. I know
Men who want to die this way, smoke like snow

Tattooing their bodies with narcotic holiness,
The glaze of status, the faux lacquer of bliss.

I'm coming at you live frostbitten & thinking
Language is for losers. Who cannot think

Our elegies are endless endlessly & the words
We put to them too often unheard & hurried?

I'm coming at you live from the intangible.
Do you want to ride, or die crowded into a small

Space spitting Come with me? One day my song
Will be called "Language Is for Lovers." One

Day desire will not be a form of wickedness.
And when you offer your drug, O Ghost, I'll resist.
--Terrance Hayes

"The Black Album"
Black like my sister's black eye an imaginary father
gave her, so now she is forever beaten
by the absence of men, her pupil,
black like a record is black.
Black like my coffee mug but not my coffee
for I drink it with cream. For I walk out
onto the beach and bless the black bottoms
of the boats, for the plankton glow
inside the black sea like white blood cells.
For music and poverty are the great regulators of the world
when white kids in Kansas are bumping Tupac
from the windows of Ford pickups, working
in the canneries, dreaming of LA; raving and mad
between the turntables. The more I listen to Jay-Z
the more I'm reminded of Led Zeppelin,
The Stones, how they begin to live
the same life. How they need each other like organs
from a greater body. And then there are the black
keys Mr. Mozart bent into sound
so the people in the castle would have something
to move them, when outside the sky was black
and so was the moor, someone walking
across it, lost in his own suffering,
but a part of everything, the bog, the moon, the man
on the moon with his black dinner jacket, his teeth
bright black and earth below with its factories
pumping like a dog's heart pumps after its owner
drives up, opens the door, calls out its name.
Black like the buttons on your grandfather's coat
and black like the suits we wear
when our grandfathers die. I'm telling you
it's hard to tell the rivers apart from the hills, the super-malls
from the ma and pa's when I feel them both
so acutely. Black like the licorice used to be
and black like the lace bra Susan wore
beneath a baby-blue t-shirt
and how I would take her to the mat like a wrestler
and how she would keep her black boots on
so that now when I think of black boots I am no longer thinking
of Neo Nazis or soldiers but bedrooms and bedposts.
She had a black pair of handcuffs with black feathers
so that it looked like a black bird of submission.
For she was good when bound up
by black leather belts, for what we did
we did in the black voice box of evening
and in the morning when the light came in
to touch her where she slept, drooling on the pillow.
David wrote, "I don't know,
now, if any of us get out of this."
And I'm not sure any of us would want to,
the world coming together, crashing
around us, while we drive through the forests of Vermont,
listening to the Black Album, blasting it,
and the black bear that leaps from the road onto the tree
like a heavy black star, so that later
I would think of blackberries growing off
the freeway, the way you feel when you're moving
along like a train running, furious, on all this black coal.
--Matthew Dickman

IV
What's that shining in the leaves,
the shadowy leaves,
like tears when somebody grieves,
shining, shining in the leaves?

Is it dew or is it tears,
dew or tears,
hanging there for years and years
like a heavy dew of tears?

Then that dew begins to fall,
roll down and fall.
Maybe it's not tears at all.
See it, see it roll and fall.

Hear it falling on the ground,
hear, all around.
That is not a tearful sound,
beating, beating on the ground.

See it lying there like seeds,
like black seeds.
See it taking root like weeds,
faster, faster than the weeds,

all the shining seeds take root,
conspiring root,
and what curious flower or fruit
will grow from that conspiring root?

Fruit or flower? It is a face.
Yes, a face.
In that dark and dreary place
each seed grows into a face.

Like an army in a dream
the faces seem,
darker, darker, like a dream.
They're too real to be a dream.
--Elizabeth Bishop, from "Songs for a Colored Singer"

"Questions of Travel"
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?
--Elizabeth Bishop