Andrew Haley: Runner-Up, 2006 Utah Writers' Contest

Poem to Get Started

There was a way inside the station
I knew once as a kid
Climb up on the dumpster lid
Bathroom where I learned
The brown soap foam hardened
Human nature is like that
We don't need these damned words
Right is right

When I ran away
Dad pulled over
Said Gary Bishop
Hammer and pentagram
And ever after
Star in circle, upside
Down meant innocence
Under the hammer
But let's be clear
Innocence is the eye
I stuck a wire through
Following the thrill
Of inborn
Fascination, something
Sick I guess most of you
Would say but I don't
Care anymore for diagnoses
Tim is overlord
Tim is a mad jumble of heaping planes
A thoroughfare for the electric
Dream storm vulcanized hallucination

I packed a blue bag with my name sewn in white letters
I got fat on hamburgers
Lingering past dark
Walking mercury light suburban parking strip
Fourth grade easily a hundred
If measured in frustration, loneliness, sorrow
And why not? does it matter
What the hours log, doesn't it matter
What the animal
Keens, the registry of the howl?

You turn to pornography
You turn to what they give you
You turn to packets of ketchup and a plastic tray
The color of an amusement park outside Chernobyl
You turn to dirty broken-ankle fields
You mock the new girl with yellow curls for scabies
Fat poor with a pretty face god save you
You get mocked, accessory to hockey mask white trash heavy metal
Accused of heresy in the pea gravel heart
Of fifth sixth seventh grade chain link Marine Corps
You turn to fifty-cent carbonation
You turn to the lure of words whose referents when seen
Vaguely disturb you
You turn to a group of individuals with dull, neo-Nazi
Sympathies you hate, who turn into Buddhists
You hate, who transform miraculously into full blood
Cheyenne you hate and mosques are torn apart
By Hindus in an article on the back of a door
Vaguer yearnings are ignored
One day, without meaning to, you tear somebody's braces out

There is a park
Where you throw Chinese stars
And one day somebody accosts you with a skateboard
And another day, somebody bloodies your nose
And one day you stab a bully in the gut with a piece of wood
And the blood comes out because you have a mother
And sisters
And they know how to get the blood out

There comes the day you wake in the dust watching motes in the light
Knowing
Their sunder and the permanent break
Understanding in the flux of the morning
The arc of foibles
The passage of the vaguely good along the arc of pain
Hours with you in my arms letting the wet
Through to my shoulder, knowing the animal
Smart, knowing the cold
Absolute
Tar paper we nailed not knowing how
Melting in our gloves under the noon
August of skies lashed to a white chair at the bottom of the pool
Lighting my arms on fire with kerosene
My human machine
Hurt hurt hurt
I fucked my joy out with my hands
I fucked my joy out with anybody's hands
I learned the neat opiate trick of sleep
And I will go there
Whenever
It comes around

This is not autobiography
This is a poem for Laurel
 Asleep on the couch
Dreaming of easiness

It isn't
The way
It isn't the way
I have to let you know, Laurel,
With your body so particular it has its own thousand-letter definition
For a pattern of jolts and jerks, a way of language, the moving,
systematic methodology
Of habit, circumstance, memory, genetics, immediate need
There is no word nuanced enough to mutter

I see nothing
In our way
Of codes and vain systems
I am turning back now to the brute animal god