The hole

By this writing I am returned to re-plant the fallen flag
of ownership on the rim of this sinkhole,
whose 30-year-wide maw has swallowed
the shimmering dance floor of solid belief
and righteous purpose
that produced the catastrophist I’d become
(people ask: what happened? I say: evolution
and a lucky ladder.)

Even so, I gaze agog at the loss a god has cost me,
left with only cartoon rules (don't look, keep moving)
to explain the dance for so long on thin air.

You could say (and some do)
Down there in the detritus
are salvageable chunks of good deeds done,
prizes won, lives saved and blessed
and bits of my own blissful smile
as a happy thin-air dancer once.

Yes, and this explains my flag's collapses:
Good past footing is now soft ground.
There's more to weep for here than to own --
when foundations crumble the temple goes down
and a lifetime with it.

Calling it good doesn't make it real.
Every conned victim believes, for a time,
in value received from the predation;
every junkie's jiggered brain
runs movies indistinguishable from reality;
every drug is a prayer,
every prayer a drug.
Every delusion works
awhile.

No, not a conscious con man I,
who advertised to wonder-work,
no lie. Just an addict myself to the meme
that drove the dream,
a user of what I purveyed,
the comforted of the comfort I wrought.

And now, by this writing,
in a mood of fresh eviction,
a homeless, aging philosopher
once more tracing the wound of this wasted space,
still unowned, unnamed, unrequited,
staring again into the stolid face
of the faithless lover for whom I killed to keep
(spurned for cause, a failure deep),
I beg patience of friends old and new,
(the loyal, the weary, the few)
as I shoeless, flag in hand
dally in dark indulgence again.

Soon I'll depart for tomorrow,
shod in new taps
attempting a few good turns
before shuffling off the edge
of our common last time hole ahead.

If there's wisdom to snare
from this natural disaster I say:
do all you can do to remain sane
and whole,
follow no leader outside of your soul.

© Mario Tosto – All rights Reserved

It's goodbye

(Lyrics to a song written many years ago but still apropos.)

You were saying that you knew my mind, that it’s special
The two of us knew better than them all.
Such an old line but I’d spend all my time
Listening to you lie.
I didn’t see the storm brewing,
I forgot you were only human
And I missed that you were screwing up my life.

You say you’re just the other side of the coin, I flipped it over.
The counterfeit is plain to see after all.
You were only faking, making like you knew me well,
But the things you did would show me
That you really didn’t know me
And your flattery was fogging up my mind

So if my leaving leaves you feeling bad, take a lesson.
What you're missing isn’t true, not at all.
It was just a play, only ran a day
And folded out of town,
And I know that you’ll forget me
As I am today so let me
Take my leave and don't upset me,
It’s goodbye.

Oh Lord

(A Song)

Oh Lord, I am so tired.
I traipsed your rugged narrow straits,
Knocked in vain on heaven’s gates, oh Lord,
I am so tired -
I don’t want to walk here anymore
I don’t want to walk here anymore

Oh Lord, I am so hungry!
Your manna gives a junk food thrill
That masks the pain but does not fill, oh Lord,
I am so hungry -
I don’t want to eat here anymore.
I don’t want to eat here anymore.

And so this testament in song
Attempts to chronicle the wrong.
I did a shaman dance on the surface of a hole.
Where firm reality should be
I stood on stark vacuity.
It’s not your fault,
I was the one who chose the role.

Oh Lord, I cannot hear you
The Sirens now have all been drowned
I can’t generate that soothing sound, oh Lord,
I cannot hear you -
I cannot be soothed anymore.
No, no, I cannot be soothed anymore.

And to my friends so true so long
I don’t blame you for what went wrong.
I did a shaman dance on the surface of a hole.
Where firm reality should be
I stood on stark vacuity.
It’s not your fault,
I was the one who chose the role.

Oh Lord, I cannot feel you.
Imagination’s magic touch
Has fallen on its broken crutch, oh Lord,
I cannot feel you -
I just can’t believe anymore.
I just can’t believe anymore


© 2007 Mario Tosto, All Rights Reserved

Waiting to live

Here I am again
At the house of the parents of my middle-aged friends.
Such a breathless spell about it,
A silent waiting for tragedy
Under the cheery chat of a Sunday afternoon dinner,
The reassurance that everyone has a place at the table
And just possibly a place forever —
If at least one of us can
Master the secret of eternal life
And rescue the rest.

I go to see my friends, and be seen of them,
And play the thinking game,
And this is where they go again and again.
But our breathless shells bounce off each other
And we never meet, never follow each other into the
Question and the mystery.
This must wait.

We are cordial and kind and
Very, very careful not to change the routine,
Break the spell.
Tomorrow shall be like yesterday
And there shall never be today at all until it comes.
This is the studied calm before the tragedy
That will shake us and change us
And finally put yesterday into a hard little bubble
To be set on the mantle with the pictures
As we go on with the lives
That become the delicate relics that our children
Will carefully cherish
As they wait.

Sixty-Six, Alone, No God

(after a line from "Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil" by Sharon Olds)

"In the strange quiet, I realize"
Why I now seldom hear from my old intimate:
Fear of my incipient atheism and
Hard jeremiads read at church
Have prompted a hailmary email
In the mistaken belief that Bible bells will break the spell
And call me back from this far country,
This Beaujolais Nouveau of my godless youth,
Whose music is stronger spirit now in my dotage
Than my thirty year fast on a pilgrimage
Where everything godly I professed and
Solemnly vowed to live for and die for
(And learned how to lie to myself for)
Turned out to be only simulated flight,
A long sky dive into the sinkhole of a footnote,
A mere ellipsis…three dots (one for each decade?)
A period
Of ignorant bliss
Almost microscopic next to the
Bold characters that spell out
The statement of what I was doing
When the kingdom came…
(What was I doing?
Oh, yes , singing.)

I can bear –no, I enjoy–
Being without my old Imaginary Friend,
But the silence of old real friends
Is a new blues as hard to sing
As it is easy to understand.

Life just now

Son,
You are right:
This imperfect world is all that is real,
It deserves our attention and care.
If my life is a lesson,
Its wastage is wisdom -
Defer not till heaven
One earthly good.

God is self-damned
By being absent when
The faithful pray.
But some of them wake, even I,
And stare with eyes broken open
At the wonder of what you’ve discovered
Without Him.

You are writing the book
I thought I would write,
When I started my circular journey,
The one about meaning
And ultimate purpose –
You’re searching the wonders at hand.
The way you love your sons
Better - but not more -
Than I ever loved you,
Is miracle enough
For a lifetime of seeking.

Make me your son –
Play with me as one of your own!
Make me laugh and teach me to
Joyfully expect
Nothing more than life just so,
Life just now,
Reality.

The rat in the wall

When thinking of death and I can’t sleep
I hear it gnaw at the wall
Turning it all to dust in nibbles
Intent only to gnaw and gnaw, keep warm
And stay away from the neighborhood cat.

My common wall neighbor says what’s the use,
You can call a man to crawl around
And plant poison,
Who in a few days returns
To retrieve the bodies, but
It always comes back.
The bodies are just costumes.
The raw banality remains
To gnaw in slow motion
Toward the head I dream with.

Morning comes it’s gone,
The sound of it
Drowned out by other dreams
News-weather-sports-film-at-11,
Till night again hosts our rendezvous
Each side of the wall,
The clock watching like a hawk,
Blinking only once a minute
Till the moment we two meet,
The wall chewed through, the feast begun.

If I ever go back

If I ever go back
It will be in the manner of elephants who,
Teeth worn and starving,
Having done all to live and reproduce,
Heave a sigh in the gloom and
Deposit themselves
On the bank
Of where it all began.

Until then, do not expect me back.
I am trying to move
So as to fall forward
When I fall
And in so doing
Be both fool and sage,
Trial and error haunting me
At every stage,
But lengthening the list
Of possibilities
For its own sake.

Take what you can
From this junk drawer of a life
And dispose of the rest
Of my foolishness
With maybe a wry pause
But don’t be afraid
Of offending me
Or my memory
If my freedom
Fails to set you free.

If I ever go back
I hope I do not find you there.

On the apostasy

Spun off from the eddy of faith
My bark, like a bottle enclosing an old note,
Wallows awhile in the backwater shallows,
Righting itself for what’s next.

Then, in the becalming the becoming:
An oarsman of reason evolves,
Pulling stroke after logical stroke
Fearless toward the Bright-troubled sea.

Luxury

Awakened by death prowling the halls
I note neither of us is dead yet
And so I reach over and touch you lightly,
Not for conversation but
Like a miser in his vault
To tally the unfair excess of
Our love,

Which we forget or pretend not to have
When the poverty of egonomics
Makes us act like assholes or strangers
Or rats on a wheel treading each moment
As a clone of the last.

I gloat, well knowing
This treasure will fade,
That prowler finally invade,
And leave one of us
To join awhile the poor millions who,
Longing for luxury like this,
Only imagine they reach over to someone
Who loves them and sleeps assured
They are likewise loved.

Regret

I regret I am not the poet I would be.
I do not bear the burden every hour.
I fit it in when moved by reading or pain.
I am a self-medicating poet
Dancing with the words until I feel better
That I have at least written something
That will live after me.
For writing lives after you
If someone will pick up the pieces after you’re gone
If someone will care
And they will wonder why
You could never be satisfied to just be a poet,
Why you had to be everything else,
Whatever was going on,
Whatever seemed interesting at the time.
A poet needs to brood, needs to dwell
On life and the mysteries,
Must hold a thousand things in his pen
Like the reins of an unruly team of mustangs,
Like the circus master surrounded by beasts.
I am mostly managed by events
By moods and opportunities taken and not taken
With the dimension of my life spelled out by
The tales of ordinary men,
The shirtsleeved ones who think little
But only go to work, muse on a mystery
And then fall to sleep.
I am a sounding board for nonsense,
And an amplifier of trivialities,
A spokesman for the mute
And a trial lawyer for the insane
Who plead only to be allowed to live in their fantasies
Like the rest of the population.
I am a scribe of horrors
Witnessed by figments of imagination
And nonsense writers in the air.
I am a lonely man with no one to sing to
And everyone to please,
But no one to listen to and no one to tease.
I am a solitary man a poet of nonsense
And a wanderer from the near shore of sanity
To the outer banks of despair.
You do not hear me and it is just as well.
You are better off not to hear as I am better off not to write
And we will both traverse the night together as saint and sinner,
Mother and muse, nothing wanting,
Nothing used or eaten outright by fame.
I am a winter man, barren and cold
And a bit too old for you to believe in.
As an oddity I gain your respect
But not as a familiar or reflection.
I am a deserted man with no plan and no way out.
I am a deserter as well and lure you to my cause
Like a boney old soldier hidden away
For decades in the bush waiting for
Victory but exposed out of time and ridiculous.
I am a man of distraction who never could get it straight.
And you left me thinking how odd of him
To even exist at all, he makes me feel
Strange and foreign here in this land.
Off we go to another dimension for solace and respect
For courage and neglect of self for
All the world a stranger and a useless scrap
Of memory that aspirates in the wind
And disappears down your throat
Like the diva’s song.
I am consequential in mysterious ways,
Not alone the bearer of import
But a sidekick to fate, your warrior in kind,
Your accuser in ways you thought safe.
In the parcel of history that is now
I am a lonely old poet knocking heads
With the ordinary.

Again

In the days of Vietnam
Before the cuisine and immigrants
We vowed we’d learned it
Once and for all
Learned how relentless
Stupidity can be
How good men can go bad
In the flurry of emergencies
And urgencies and the higher mission
Of cause and party.

How did we let it happen again,
Again, against that never-again?
How did we let that resolve become
Anachronism and hand wringing
And oh well it’s not our game?

Where is the rage and the spitfiring?
Lost, wouldn’t you know, in success
In the comfort of having made it anyway.
We are loath to bang the drum
For fear we’ll miss our lunch at noon
Or the shopping trip.

Where are the martyrs and screamers
Blocking the path of arrogance?
Sound asleep in age and ease
Hoping someone young will roar
And bring it all about before
We all go down in dust,
Lessons lost and treasures tossed.

New day’s resolution

For me a new year is not 365 stepping stones
For becoming something more than you are,
It's a grid of holes punched out
In orderly rows like the grate of a storm sewer
Over which passes a torrent of moments
Called my experience.
Some vanish into the holes,
Some slop onto the spaces between
And these sluices make up the flow of moments
Retained in memory that I call my history.

That you and I meet here at this reading,
This aqueduct between black holes,
Is most marvelous luck and sufficient
To fulfill the resolution I made for today:
To say just this as best I can
As who I am just now
And to thank you for being here.

Naturally selfish

Mikey I call him because he likes my recipe for hummingbird food
Like the kid in the cereal commercial who taste-tested and liked Life.
Though there’s room and food enough for four
Mikey fends off all the other hummers
Because he’s naturally selfish.
It’s why his species survives.
What matter that one hummer goes hungry?
This one will reproduce his selfishness and skills
And therefore his kind for at least another generation
And provide wonder and entertainment
For those of us who must be fair and generous
Because we foresee more complex possibilities
And through cooperation survive.

Attachments

My friend the luthier says
The bridge on this guitar needs replacing.
Trouble is, the last time it was replaced
They used epoxy,
Which soaks in, fusing the woods
So you can’t detach the bridge
Without tearing up the soundboard,
Wrecking the guitar.

Elmer’s would have been better, he said.
It’s water-soluble,
Just makes the two woods hold hands,
So when the time comes,
A little warmth
Can coax them to let go
With grace.

He says I shouldn’t try to fix it,
This old lovesick guitar,
Just play it till it breaks,
Then hang it on the wall -
Souvenir
Of all the love
Songs sung
As it swung in my arms.

It’s too late to ask,
But between the woods
Of me and you
Which would have been
The better glue?

Isaac & the kid in heaven

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. (Genesis 22)

When I saw the knife
I knew too much to be fearless.
He’d been so weird on that trip up
The mountain.
Don’t worry, it’ll be all right, Dad said.
But something was wrong. Something
Had to be killed
For God
But all we’d packed was wood
For the pyre.

I’d seen animals sacrificed before:
Slit the throat and light a fire.
Everything is all right after that.
God gets satisfied
And lets us live until the next time.
So when Dad tied me up
And put me on that pile of sticks
I knew too much to be fearless.
But I was just a kid – I mean, a child –
And stronger instincts
Said trust, obey.

In the silence of that mountain altar
We heard our hearts beating,
My father’s in time with my own:
Two primal imperatives
Insisting on life
Resisting the twisted logic of
Sacrifice.

But then we heard something else
That held the blade in abeyance:
A rustle nearby,
A young goat trapped in the brambles,
Caught in a tangle of deep-rooted faith,
A perfect substitute,
A kid - I mean a lowly child.
It would do.

Why are you crying,
My sweet young friend?
What?
You say that kid was
You?

The executioners

Saddam! Saddam! So evil
that in the end you won.
Your ruthless taking of life
Took our reverence and replaced it
With your own dead soul.

Saddam! Saddam! You were already dead
But we believed our murdering
is better than yours,
Our revenge a strong but bitter pill
That would bring us peace.

Saddam! Saddam! It is not you who died
But we.