Panhandle Skateboards
Poems by Elizabeth McKague
Winter in Berlin
I dreamt of emptiness before the wall came down.
Turkish banjos hanging on braided strings.
A parade of locked drums mocking
the upturned iron mask of the canal.
When the bell rang
I heard children ice skating
below the level
of waste and love and solitude.
I watched angels disappear on the arms of song ghosts.
My Siren leapt from the rocks.
I folded memories.
Nightfall. Three thirty in the afternoon.
The architecture bleeds with subdued circles of art.
Funny how the street smells become dark too.
I’m raw inside.
Like an unfinished vessel.
I thought I could tell you.
But all my moments are one.
Surfer
I didn’t do much.
Just wrote “The End”.
I knew I could drown the instant I saw you
as if from across a room moving on an ocean
as if asking, “what fucking sky landed you?”
Welcome to my island. We have everything
you might need here to measure words.
Except for a French Press.
Wild red roses already blooming-- February.
So many books whispering inside me.
So much hope in maybe finally
a man who’s been saved.
I am wise enough to be afraid
yet tender enough to protect the life of my heart.
Now I can say I wanted this.
Even if it hurts to begin again
Gotta ride that wave…
Let’s play soft and hard, baby.
I.
Bath of innocence.
World through their eyes.
Blue, green, blue.
The Editor
When Emily found herself laughing out loud
she threw away the key.
Beautiful- this gray light.
Surrender. Inside the Kaaba- nine planets.
Better than a trailer park, better than a brick house--
Throne of Imagination.
When Emily really looked into his eyes after 178 pages
she fell asleep and woke up simultaneously
and wondered about his cock.
Sound of rain in the garden.
She wished they were in Rome, no—
she wished they were in Prague.
When Emily changed her name
she allowed herself to live on arrows of light.
Sun surrounded by a sun, surrounded by a sun, surrounded by
Trop vieux pour l’amour d’être aveugle.
To be taken. Take me, take me, take me.
She was happily right about the size.
When Emily touched his arms
she felt his past and kissed his mind.
Santa Cruz
I started to weep when I watched you stretching
in all that blue near the waterfall.
It was as if you were gathering love and reaching for a frame.
Splash. Said Poseidon to Narcissus.
A good father moves out of himself and that becomes his womb.
I haven’t changed since I looked into her eyes and saw her soul.
Oh, all the music in this house!
Confession: in all my life I’ve never felt lonely,
there were always angels, fairies, spirits, ghosts…
Writers need solitude, yes, but they do not need to be alone.
It’s a reflection.
Why it feels so good.
Someone truly cares.
My magic forest.
Home.
Downward Grind
In one novel I make Lord Byron say, “We should never use the word ‘creativity’
until we are absolutely sure what it means.”
Then, 200 years later, Nick Freeman arrives on the scene.
I Don’t Want to be Wrong
Seems like Alessandro Baricco
has been reading some Alberto Moravia.
And here I believed that not all men
The river runs into the ocean
(not the other way around)
Just want
You see… it’s all about
to
the mouth
Fuck.
And there I believed that
Despair is a little strong
try—become melancholy
He understood respect means a hell of a lot.
Forget about Grecian urns and madrigals
I can find truth and beauty all by myself.
But what matters
First of the last
Like dead gods rising to haunt desire
Is lust and trust.
Tattoo of Narcissistic weeds.
I had heart palpitations at the beach.
Yet my sky is clear, my horizon
touchable.
There is an elegance about living
When one acts in real time.
Space, earthly space—imposter of absence
like a mob in the street.
Time doesn’t have streets.
Behavior counts.
Promises are not only for children
And friendship is the highest form of love.
Admit it
you adore his cock.
Admit it
his inked arms turn you on.
But the blade you pulled from the sheath
you read his book.
Found a man honest enough with his self
to cry out, “I won’t give up!”
I knew it was a mistake
Yet where’s the adventure without a challenge?
I’m untamed. So are you.
Two foxes without a Prince
Lost in this invisible kingdom of expectancy
Running from safety to freedom
As if we’ve let ourselves loose
In order to be lost again,
aching with hope.
But dude, there’s a limit.
The forest has a periphery
and is surrounded by a bottomless ravine.
When I want my sacrifice
to be noticed by the stars
I’ll do it on paper.
When I want my legs to embrace
the crisis of a man who feels
I’ll do it with absolution.
Selfish assholes don’t belong in this house.
Yet here I am
planting an olive grove for you
waiting for the telephone to sing
awful as Orpheus beaten by Lazarus,
sipping iced grapes filled with grief
and watching the single flame of a lazy white candle
become a cradle of hours past
wasted on the idea of, “No, this time
maybe this time
his heart has a memory
whispering to his soul.
That this time
he wants a reason
for pride.
Don’t Be a Confessional Poet
I have an atlas of regions
where it just happened inside
and I couldn’t step back.
Soft spot for artists.
Yeah, I fell off that rock.
Strange, how I can turn the page
without looking at yesterday. Raw.
You’ve entered my landscape.
Devastated it like a storm
then kissed it in the early light
that sacred bridge before dawn.
It’s hard to be strong. For me
it’s really hard to be strong—
that’s my secret.
And when somebody beautiful opens my world
I surrender from that battle.
What I like about the dead—
They don’t pretend.
As if I’ve always known this is my last life
because I love so much.
Spider webs on the souvenirs from history.
Sign posts when to slip from exhaustion into eternity.
Photographs of purity.
Illumined laws of family.
And so many men who came to tell me
they would never read my book.
Hannya
It was about disappointment.
It was about dread and failure.
Self hate.
And I’d say self-pity but I don’t believe in that crap.
Another kind of pain.
It was about
wanting to touch you.
The Life of Torquato Tasso
Truth is
you are a very good writer.
Suffering
the fleetest beast to greatness.
Amor Vincit Omnia
It’s a test.
A novelist must believe in destiny.
Half a gift.
Let’s change it up—negative certainty—Andrew Dertien—rides again.
When the reviews come out they’ll say things like
Urban Grind is Joycean/ A masterpiece of visceral energy/ Rule breaking candor and
heart wrenching honesty. One mind, two ends.
Two minds. One end.
In my version, anyway.
Sometimes when I’m writing at my desk I turn
to stare at leaves of the trees in the garden
waiting for them to nod on a breeze as if
they have acknowledged my presence and answer with a sleep.
And when the hummingbird is suspended in mid air,
she speaks.
The king of Tuscany put him in prison
for loving the wrong woman
--in essence, the queen.
And while incarcerated, 1587, he went insane.
He died a few days before he was to be crowned
as The Prince of Poets by the Pope.
Alas, he died in vain.
And things like:
Nick Freeman represents the body of American hypocrisy/ Dertien’s story is at once caustic and wholesome/
Humor of a righteous rebel/
Gritty, hardcore prose that reaches towards the spiritual.
And so on.
But will it matter to you—what they think?
I’m guessing the answer to that question is ‘not’.
I mean, who cares anyway
when your editor thinks you’re so hot!
Le Belle Epoque
I went out with a bang
You—with a whimper.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
Regardless of the change in weather
sans duck tape
I will always remember
Eros wings of silver
Silencing river of myth.
I was careful at first, artless, veiled.
There were, are—so many rudiments misplaced.
But the walls beyond grammatical error
bastioned, and I discovered a door through which to enter
subjected—a silhouette, stripped bare at the hip.
Inspired, my aspiration flew higher
and intellect crashed into that reluctant vault of Nirvana
like Icarus speaking to St. John of Patmos
in whispers.
And now here we are, abandoned on divergent shores
of the apocalypse.
… what is referred to, in some cases, as romance…
Or the difference between
the selected works and the complete edition—
“The rare woman waits
for the re-born man.”
She has climbed many mountains, sang on many ships, delivered children from evil
and built her true house
out of faded flowers and random twigs
all to secure the inviolability of that final sacrifice,
the most important one, the one without which,
there is no substance to living.
Amnesia
Because there was a time when need ate away at instinct and your world was a cave,
and it still comes—irrational fever anger—
neologisms of lostness—egoism, in waves,
I forgive you. The pattern was made back then
and now it’s attached to you
like an anemone on an underwater rock.
And I can see you trying, even when she doesn’t see it and they, well, although they intuitively presume it
yet cannot name it,
from my place in the background
shadow in a shade
a boundless vision enters those moments where,
while the gesture may appear entombed
inside you, a sense of virtue
mixed with pain captures the age of your face.
What was the question? Something about being a good man… is replaced
with the answer of being a good father.
There is only one way to be wealthy,
but a thousand ways to be poor.
There is only one way to love, but a thousand to hate.
The tree of liberty has its seasons,
yet its ground is rich with grace.
Merci, de rien…
No dogma, no misperceptions,
no apologies as a result of rage—
just simple considerations would be welcome,
if you cared enough to stay.
The Hanged Man
Dry wet suit hanging down below the abdomen.
Based on a portrait of Rimbaud in Abyssinia.
There are only two things one can’t be objective about—
violence and love.
If you were going to single out a reason?
People hurt each other enough as it is (violence and love)…
I was there more than once myself you know, fallen, falling,
Yet the elements: earth, air, water, fire—
won out.
If you’re going to talk about the iron in ‘irony’
It would be human and masculine.
It would be what is recovered
L’éternité.
It would be what is pure
La mer mêlée au soleil.
Let’s walk along La Seine past all the green bookstalls
translating bridges.
Paris has been sandblasted since then,
that is
since the dark ages.
The Tempest
There is no limit to the opportunities to sabotage your self.
By the time others taste your fear
its vintage has turned to poison.
I’m not afraid of the albatross on your back
or the serpent on your chest
but the lion in your heart terrifies me.
‘Twas devils changed the constellations.
Set sail
Ship of Interference
kept Andromeda in chains
when she should have been saved by a tale
with an end ordained.
How easily you relinquished my task,
yielding to the sanguine expectation
of organic matter getting sucked into effacement
by a black hole.
And other bitter trials of folklore, edited for schools.
“Set a course into the wind!”
Go back in time and be guided
by the knots of jewels
in the Great Net covering all.
You call it sex.
I call it
Ecstatic Mysticism.
I used to draw Saints, now I draw apparitions.
He moves through the double sliding doors
then disappears
because it’s better to stay out of the line of attack
like a metaphor.
Cold, nude, wicked Zhivago branches at the window…
You didn’t have those in Texas
did ya?
Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap.
Like a syringe.
“Hoist up to heaven and shoot down to hell!”
Captain’s orders.
I’d like to think there’s a loophole.
Another way to track down
what you lost and all that you wanted to redeem
before the iced tea on the sun porch
turned from brown to red to green.
“Look there-- on the vanishing point--”
dirty rags hanging in the sky
And so, here we go
into the Odeon Redon eye
of a cathartic downpour.
La Bohème
Yeah, I can’t do theater
but I can do Opera.
Lets go see a classic--
Puccini makes me weep.
And I’ve been wanting to cry all week.
I want to break down and tell myself the truth about lies and force myself to move out of this overwhelming vermillion
under painting of pathos and reconciliation
that will definitely bleed through each stroke of my brush,
impressionistically leaning foreground against
background and blurring every detail
that has to do with the fiction of life
and the representativeness of love.
For you it’s a matter of function, for me
that of form—
The natural imagery of a man and a woman
entwined in sleep.
Permission granted.
Rumpled sheets.
Rudolfo burns his manuscript to keep warm.
He finds her in the dark, “Che gelida manina!”
The dance outside in the night in the snow
and the glow of the café.
The winter scene at the tollgate.
“Donde lieta usci…”
Paradox, flood of tears—
The muff and the medicine
but it’s too late—
He rushes to her bed
yup, she’s dead—
calls out her name—
but it’s too late—
Curtain falls. Bitter end.
Donde lieta usci…
You don’t get it, do you?
I mean, that’s what all these stupid poems are about…
Not with happiness, but anguish of an operatic degree…
if I were to leave.
The Titans
I salvaged the mirrors and built a Chateau
Louis XIV on the road to Damascus
And other extravagant terrors of broken architecture
and misunderstood text.
The fountains froze over.
A message was sent to the King of Swans
but it was the wrong century
so entered into enemy territory
and used for bandages—
in their language
called blindfolds.
It hurt my friend today, over jasmine tea at the Café Reverie
to listen to my multifarious feelings for you.
So we changed the subject
to the Nazi’s attempt to destroy the Ponte Vecchio,
the infamous bridge where Dante first sees Beatrice.
Because of its literary significance, the Germans finally agreed
not to blow the thing sky high
if the Americans promised not to cross it.
And so it was. Fact.
I crossed the bridge myself a few years ago.
It’s where the Arabs buy their jewelry.
Alas, in time, perhaps the structure
of our dearest memories remains,
even when the historic moment
that once pierced inevitability has been traumatized.
Wide awake.
Mindspring.
Marionettes in the attic
tripped up on arsenic
salvaging real time for the price of a broach—Jocasta’s.
You want to talk about crime and punishment
then put in a context (not a Russian novel)
and stop hiding from
the first day of Spring.
Borrowing Books
Down and out on London Road.
The best shelter
is in
your mind.
Torture is out of the question.
It wasn’t a game and this ain’t my picnic.
Where else can you find a field of blue flowers?
In the mailbox.
How many days have ended the world?
Go to Ocean Beach and read the waves.
What’s the big secret anyway?
Childhood.
Redeemable emails
Water is best.
Thales of Miletus should have married Thetis,
goddess of nerieds, mother of courage and wrath
as if they were synonyms.
Not a bedtime story.
Into the River Ouse
Pockets filled with stones.
Oh, my dear Andrew you have no idea
how sometimes I feel so old.
A response would have been futile. I’ve nothing to prove
save attention to detail.
You misunderstood the intention—
How I wanted to see you as Arjuna knows Krishna—
But you left nothing in the exit
except for a mountain of nettles and cackles
and inconvenient overtones.
I suppose what I really wished was that my affection
could have been powerful enough to warrant value.
Fabric of my grasp
torn by an ancient oar.
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