The trucks that come for us

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Sports Utility Vehicles on flatbeds.
Abandoned basketball courts. Backboards
look down like judges robed in dead kudzoo.
The art of checking in to a hotel room.
Tricking the lady up front into putting incidentals
on the company card. The faded gray places
where there once was stark white lines
marking parking spaces. So many engines
designed around combustion sitting in rows.
Waiting to explode. To so much
‘I never could have imagined.’

How tragic.

That red Jeep Cherokee with the crumpled nose.
Just below a second story hotel room window.
Footsteps at six am, at seven cardoors slam.
And sleep. In a place I should not feel safe.

Where the keys are plastic
and so many strangers
also have them.

Yet. Here I am.
Drove down state and ended up a night at Comfort Inn Apalachin.
Just outside Endicott. The highway noise never stops.
New York mountains frame towns and keep them from being cities.
Waking up in April and the world outside is snow white.
I remember. The trucks that come for us.
When cars no longer drive.

Marbles

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

It is snowing in April. Last time I saw snow this late in the season I was a teenager. Hiking across Roan Mountain. We woke up in an old fire-watch cabin converted into a simple shelter. With a loft. It was the last weekend in April. Of course we had to sleep up top, and woke to snow on our sleeping bags. This time is a little different. I’m currently in my early thirties, toe rocking my two month old son, a sort of mountain all on his own, watching flurries of snow descend like white hot hornets in waves breaking before a double layered windowpane.

I’m not going to lie, I still woke up excited. Every time. I wake up and the world is clothed by the crusty white eyelid of winter. Whole great lakes lie like frozen teardrops, wind lashes dark tree filtered horizon. All that milk chocolate churned up by cream lipped waves, all along the shore like lips. Something about this temperamental weather lends itself to similes. Pardon me for not holding back. But the whole scene is like being inside a marble looking out.

And we were going to hike in it. Through it. Wind building its own structures out of snow, men and boys stomping over drifts three feet between trees in places. We climbed down onto the road in Carver’s Gap, which was completely frozen, and I ate it. All of it. Bit off so hard I actually cracked my Nalgene water bottle. You can ask anyone who was there. I was finished. In the moment, and for good, even though I hiked the next fifteen miles, I really didn’t. I was drug along in a sort of social stretcher formed of positive reinforcement and statement of base facts. I was rocked into stasis, and sustainable forward movement, by people who, in that moment, were far far more put together than I was.

It went from novelty to reality on that trip. Snow. Between here and there. Where I’m sitting now, under siege by an army of angry water in varying forms. Navy archers behind a cavalry of seething aqua and a tooth bearing beige wearing infantry up front, eating the shoreline foot by foot, entrenching and digging their way into this place. Where I am. Toe-rocking my own little Roan Mountain to sleep watching it snow this far into spring. Typing. Drinking black coffee.

Not as much as you might think has changed between then and now.

Mostly. I’m just not so surprised when a scene I was happy to wake up and see first thing eventually also makes me slip and fall.

There are a lot of experiences that are really quite dangerous.
That are also inexplicably, breathtakingly, treacherously.
Beautiful.

Now take your breath back. And brace yourself.
Marbles weren’t made just to be beautiful.

Land Poor #oldjournals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

You work dirt soft
and form rocks
out of the palms
of your hands.

The skin flakes off and leaves you.

To bruise blue and callous fingers.
Wrinkle knuckles.
Vein-traced paths twist above bony
wrists bent and flexing always. Stalling.
Avoidance in abundance.
Blisters too.
Fast friends to you.

And you are their inspiration.
They depend on you for friction.
For handwritten diction
dated phrases of speech
strangers looking stranger
than if southern meant
alien off another world.

Cut grass. Wave passed.
Smile miles down the road.
Flush commodes into septic tanks
emptied in cracked quartz rock clay.
Hot sun. Burnt red necks brown.

The skin flakes off and leaves you.

To bruise blue.
Same tan trembling finger. Only you linger.
Only what was planted at the core.
Only what was unafraid to be called poor.
And you are.
You stay.

Sore.

Write-Handed

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Write hand has lost its stamina.
Whipped-shaken fingers clacking at the end of every sentence.
And penmanship, embarrassing. Some secretive tribe-speak
encoded only in laziness. Right hand has not been writing.
It has been fighting. Curled close folded like cats on cold nights
hugging leaky windows beside the fire inside.

Forming poorly insulated fists. Lifting over and over
a backpack stuffed with old World Books.
Autographed contemporary poetry reader.
An anthology of lesbian literature.

Throwing weak punches at unflinching air.
Short-hair. Tucked shirt. Alive like all it takes to survive
happens between eight in the morning and five at night.

And it isn’t right for the wrong hand to write too long.
Hardened hands at nothing. Feed clink in crimped metal pans.
Dead goats into clay. Write the very ground into ripe gardens.

Folded and unfolded and massaging keyboards and gripping pens.
And when the write hand has been found not writing, then what then?

How often should a writer have shake out his or her hand,
just to finish a poem?

Too many beers in one night.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

White, with lavender veins.
These words have never been read together before.
That’s just the way words work. Ones and zeroes
and binary languages inspired by binary species.

Too many beers in one nights.
Too much green for one leaf.

Airport security scares me.
So do toddlers who glare at me.
Asking questions in their eyes.
Country roads. Take me home.

Pink. All pink. To the brink. A few weeks before blueberries,
there were pink flowers on shooting star whips
in taupe branches no one notices. Who is not looking.
Metal detector beeping out in the night.
Echolocations stacked. Like layers of sound.

Or a new swimming pool in the backyard.
And a reaffirmed friendship.

Discovered within undeniable benefit.
And yet. Some form of yet. Of future tense.
Some credit we borrowed from tomorrow so no matter what,
today, we stay friends. Orange.

Red orange burnt brown yellow petals.
Bent black on the ends.

Do not ever take it off, for anyone.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

No honey, do not take off your rings.
Ask for the pat down before ever removing jewelry.
Said the lady in the navy on navy pant suit.
Lavender latex gloves. Peach palms. Clocked in grin.

She is right.
She knows what she is talking about.

These sorts of things, rings, tend to disappear. She said.
Leave your hands bare. Instead.
Of just that one finger lingering on that left hand.

A young couple of friends in the air.
Both their counters elsewhere.
For a time. Like siblings in the care
of their mutual employer. Her father.
Their boss. Our loss. Is his cost.
And he puts a smile on to bear it.
He bought the ring. We wear it.

An arena in which we follow behind the rich and share
conversations with our phones while we bypass strangers
none the stronger for learning their angers. Their plans.
Why they run. Full hands.
Through airports at eight o’clock on a Wednesday.
Morning. Maybe. Mourning. Maybe late for a wedding.
Maybe hers.

There may be a new ring of her own to put on upon landing.
Such a thing as mystery demands to be beyond understanding.

Just worn out. And never taken off.
Even if it keeps you from taking off.

Once you have put this ring on,
do not ever take it off,
for anyone.

A thing to end all things.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Wake to thoughts of Armageddon; a dissatisfying end to all things.
The thoughts that follow eerie revelation.
The broke-nature an event of this sort brings.
Carried to our doors. Sat heavy in sore hands.
The last of wanting nothing but more, finally.
Alive with the world. Not living off the land.

Leapt to make up a big frightening word for an ending.
Sunk chins rested depressed against fists, dented into chairs,
sad angry about a bitter name for a new beginning.

Creation, myth, confusion. Not a clear dramatic term, like Armageddon.
The end of things, rings and binding shackles, food and the plate
and the servant of a spoon, gone, with shoes, clothes altogether,
with pillows stuffed by bird’s feathers, life, in some weak sense,
a thing, an object, beaten broken, thoroughly germinated,
and dead, disappeared, alongside fears, hopes, joys,
alongside tiered mountainous buildings and cloud crowns
forming powerful arches and then torn apart.

Armageddon.

A thing to end all things, or perhaps, things in general.
Not a conclusive end to all, but just one damned divisive wall,
tall built between people and places and the things we brought along.
Certainly these objects are not you. Or me, which would mean,
as sure as hell, parts of ourselves are tossed out in the trash.
Organs and resources external, external only to imagination.
An ego let go returns like a loyal dog, dead squirrel in its jaws,
a bribe, alive, to live like you own your world, preyed to hunt for,
played with the lifeless limp bodies of things you twirled, hurled,
threw away uneaten whole, apart from the shallow signatures of teeth.

No use, no purpose. To king mentality it is right to never be wrong.
Devour weak to feed strength, guilt, regret, these real emotions,
leftovers from a more sentimental time.
This is the era of the sentiphysical.
You and all others must keep your heads on. Awake.

Armageddon. The end of living for your own sake.
A world no longer your reward.
All things destroyed. And gone.
Nothing left in the world, yours.

This Game.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The pieces have weight to them.
They move like dinosaurs slow crawling across the board.
They have a woman’s initials in permanent marker on the felt on the bottom.
AH. Revelation. AH. Turned over and read. AH.
Set down in two straight lines forgotten.

Until he takes your queen with his bishop.
Until his rook corners your king. AH. Again.
Laying on its side. The head of a warhorse.
AH. A pack of pawns hips bent.
A stolen board. Inherited hoard.
Kings and queens and the rest of us in pieces in between.
A world we like to think we own until the shape
across the table straightens out and checks us.

And that is when the game gets real.
The pieces have weight to them.
Each move grows slow and clunky,
lumbering heavily across the prehistoric board.
AH. Revelation. AH. Turned over and read. Red.
This game. We say we play.
Still contains a crumb of war.

Like family

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

When heat tumbles through skin and knit cloth,
like stifling, sun-warmed mists rising up to the occasion of a morning,
I feel so like the earth.

When jungles of oil-darkened hair frame a face,
crowd sky blue, dusty vision, tickled behind ridge dotted ears,
spreading rashes down a sun-red neck, when feet hurt,
when towering spine stiffens,
heat gets up to blood bathing the brain
and causes a nerveless organ to undergo the experience of feeling pain,
I am truly the naked mammal child of my planet.

And in these many moments,
the languages of elemental parents and grandparents,
great aunt the sun and granddaddy moon,
wind and water table cousins,
close kin and friends who pass over like rain,
stirring and kicking in the swollen bellies of clouds,
are familiar to me.

I hear their words clear, but understand only faintly.
I believe the world is telling me that I have lived here
like a stranger long enough. Now, we,
the earth and me, will be like family.

A Crimson that Lasts Forever

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

They leave metal edges on the insides of lawn mower engines sharp.
Pull cord broke. Spool fell out tucked under Honda’s little black-painted hood,
and a whole coil of flat tense sharp and hard came undone.
It was rewrapping this infuriatingly functional component,
rewinding that winding coil up tight and small,
when an as sharp as a kitchen blade metal dove deep into the white cartilage
of my middle finger knuckle. Held that arm up above my head, to God,
to balance, to the stonewall all the tools were not neatly strewn out on.
Waiting like a child for discomfort to pass, for some parent
to sweep down like a miracle and make a distraction.
Four hours in on an eight hour work day,
and that hand must keep going, gripping,
pulling handled cords and squeezing plastic gas mixture powered triggers,
arriving home to a large-udder goat, counting on the milking
she’s been getting each afternoon, and soon, rather than later,
one handed the impatient beast, took twice as long, more time gone,
and a yard still full of soft stalk moss-dotted grass needed to be worked on,
and, about fifteen dibby birds too young to know to put their value up at night.
Never seen a raccoon’s leftovers of her majesty plucked alive, eaten raw,
from the crown to scaly yellow legs and red, white down scattered all over.
A little Rhode Island Red beat her wings just the right way.
Scratched her twiggy claws and must have flipped that whole slice
of wrinkled skin on my knuckle back, because every other bird
I touched that night has blood on its feathers.

In a few weeks though, each one will receive her opportunity
to repay the favor. To show their truest color.
And we will have stained one another
with a crimson that lasts forever.