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by J�anpaul Ferro
You used to listen to our every word, dance with us
on the television like we were all drunk when we hadn�t
even had a drink,
but now you�ve ceded back us into non-existence,
you know better than us: You know everything!
down the dark road we all stumble, all of us peer-to-peer now,
all of our brief encounters afraid and incomplete;
up to the little bright brook along the blue path that
goes through those trees riding up there, leading down
to my little bright red house that I took my mortgage out on;
every day I sit there watching all of the signs, traces
of footsteps in the dew left by the rain, but I am always
walking away by myself now�or at least it always feels
like this is the case;
I feel something, maybe it is hope or a flood or
something chemical that can burn in a beautiful
unanchored dream that can make everything whole
again�my own horrible storm that won�t go away;
maybe a few words that can ring true, a magical bell
to un-ring everything you ever said that was a lie,
every day this inelegance that we have to read in the
newspaper�it didn�t get there by itself, because you
are the one who said it;
exit your ghost�those lips that we never loved;
bring in someone else that is up for the job; leave us, please,
because we don�t love you; cue applause�fade to black.
Experience Is Not The Best Teacher
We heard The Chipmunk Song floating through
the air as the mushroom clouds rose up over the
ocean;
you looked at me with X-ray eyes; both of us
standing there on the red carpet in another time,
people we don�t know standing all around us: the
world�s best words as they all disappear�
sempre
domani
dolce
for ten seconds, dusk and dawn wrestled in the sky,
twelve blue rivers gone; you and I kissing on the bed
like the legend has it;
tied down and tortured, the sun exploding slowly,
all these slogans appearing in the sky, one by one
for every person who has ever lived / gone missing:
My Life Is My Message
Love Thy Neighbor
The Soul Is And Has No Where To Go
All We Ask Is To Be Let Alone
I Am Responsible Only To God And History
Silence Is The Ultimate Weapon Of Power
A Lie Told Often Enough Becomes Truth
Fighting Is A Part Of Our Religion
This Won�t Hurt
Goodbye
There is this little bar in downtown Providence
where all the patrons stay out super-late;
all the girls wear silver dresses with spaghetti
straps, and they all have long tanned legs,
everyone drinks Stolichnaya and listens to
the stardust of Swedish pop songs,
you hate me, and I hate you, and the person
over there hates both of us equally�
our own universal principle of little vs. big
countries,
and we waste every night like this�like our
everyday life is being dictated to us by these
beautiful rogue blogs;
in the morning we find that we have all gone
and killed each other, and there is nobody to
go to our little, jaunty bar at night,
our insignificant and little bar that we had loved
so very much every night of our pathetic, little lives�
like we had even mattered.
God�s press conference was heard in all two-hundred
and twenty-six world languages,
Now everyone in every blue window knew exactly what
was on his mind and how he was going to do it�get rid of
us all;
24-hour news coverage will do that for you,
especially if you are God.
�
Down at the world team meeting we all shook hands,
laughed as we held our drinks up to our mouths out of
fear, smiling at all the pretty Japanese waitresses who
were only there to serve us,
each and every person dreaming of one day earlier when
we were all too arrogant to ever prepare for this moment
of complete human banality \ CORPORATION
Another night in ruins,
all the ghosts going up and down the Spanish Steps,
a bomb goes off in Trafalgar Square, a bigger bomb goes off
somewhere else;
there is a blue sunset with five suns setting in the sky,
the Indian Ocean on fire, all those red starfishes washing
up on shore to hear us scream;
there is a Dominican girl in a blue dress whose husband
plays guitar,
He is burning on fire at her feet,
her mother, father, brother, ten cousins, and six sets of uncles
and aunts have disappeared,
their empty clothes go jumping about,
a smile on a mouth going one way, a little memory
on a shard of mirror going another,
notes in the air looking for a stone to land on,
looking for something that might last forever,
maybe a window, maybe a day, maybe a night,
a bed where we used to lie, a lovely song,
a redwood growing toward the sky;
instead, there is a pile of coffin nails,
a ripened man lying over there, the dark seeds of
of our blackest sight:
blue jeans, Donald Trump�s hair,
jazz on the Mississippi, a credit card
buying martinis in Key West,
the ashen lines of the corn fields in September,
but it is all gone now.
I walk these New York City streets,
the rain chasing everyone in but the ghosts,
Dylan gone, Warhol dead, the twin towers
all the way under ground;
in some other moment I�m with you again,
in the witchcraft of the night you are all around me,
I am splitting you open to taste all of you,
I hear your voice reciting all poems by Galway Kinnell,
our needs the exact temperature of the human soul,
oh, how you loved that I was in Communist Party,
but you never knew how the Communists shot my
grandfather in the back while in North Africa;
I can�t say why you left; you never explained anything
that you did;
it was like our lust for one another was murdering
our very souls, like love itself could kill you if you weren�t
careful enough;
I know all sixty-eight positions of your mind,
I know where you hide and what is in your porcelain eyes;
you always knew how to unfold me, unbutton me down
to what you wanted and needed like a Siamese twin,
complex as you took all of it�everything that you wanted,
wingspread, all of our dreams politely hard, ours souls
tattooed on each other�s sadness: all that goes away;
Sometimes I was your father and you were my mother,
other days we led each other through the garden cemeteries,
headlines of war, horror, despair, but we never broke down;
now there is beauty in the darkness of this city,
headlights driving fast right by me; you�somewhere
out there where I cannot save you; the only war within myself:
amnesia and the odd, beautiful colors of death that awaits me
down in the alley while I stand there staring so admiringly:
like I was looking at your hands on the first day that we met,
our souls screaming; our words � not making a sound.
A 6-time Pushcart Prize nominee, J�anpaul Ferro�s work has appeared in Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Connecticut Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Long Island Quarterly, Bryant Literary Review, Portland Monthly, The Providence Journal, Arts & Understanding Magazine, Barrelhouse Magazine, Oregon Literary Review, Cortland Review, Hawaii Review, and others. His work has been featured on NPR�s This I Believe series, WBAR radio in NYC, and The Plaza�s Masterpiece series. He is the author of All The Good Promises (1994, Plowman Press), The Driver (1994, Thunder Mountain Press), and Becoming X (2008, BlazeVox Books). He is also a 2-time Best of the Net nominee. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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