A Scratcher

Beside me on this train bench,
a man calmly tears
his face to pieces
and I imagine
within he is roaring
with itch. The greed
of his fingers
and the needs of 10,000
brief reliefs are eroding
what we recognize
as one of us.
I try to look
away, let him be
placed on that invisible island
of others.

With so much drought,
the boats of compassion no longer float;
should I hope for suffering
to restore some rain of empathy?


by jerry gordon
6.13.10

In and Out of TV Consciousness

My dad died tomorrow
four years ago,
and so I imagine him
sitting on some sofa
that would make atheists
grumble their circular fundamentalisms.

He's there with his tall glass
of White Horse whiskey
and his colorful game board
of medications, each somehow
connected to his heart trouble.

Before vanishing into Arizona,
he wasn't interested in health.
Talked more about self-death
and animosities, things he would
remember again and again against
the raspy sweeping
of altzheimer's impeccable broom.

So, today, the day before Father's Day
four years ago, I watch
a jittery loop of images
shining just behind my forehead,
of Dad nodding in and out of TV consciousness
as some eternally uncancelled series of JAG episodes
are broadcast by some discount cable channel
in heaven or hell.



by jerry gordon
6.18.10

My Crown of Honor

As if it is my crown of honor,
I set my hair on fire
each morning.

Rolling out of sleep,
I gather matches and gas
from beneath my mattress
and ignite the nappy mass.
It snaps and cracks as a whisper of flame
speaks its pungent descriptions.
The heat increases, reaching toward my eyebrows.
I watch the flux-form shadows of my thoughts
weave the wall with calm confusion.

Somewhere behind my eyes,
the orange ember of my brain
clicks and ticks and clicks and ticks and clicks and ticks,
distilling my head full of
futures and memories down
into a fragile stack of ash,
a cloud of 10,000 clouds
piled like gravity likes its pages:
still enough to fathom
the frenzy in any movement.


30ish minutes later, I rise,
make my bed
and start the day.


I put my head beneath
the bathroom spigot
and smell the fire's fragrance
stain the water.
Flowing down the drain,
it's already found its ocean.
My hair grows back almost
immediately, or at least before
I get on the 9AM train and need
to plot my angles to an empty seat
or dual for dominance
at the ticket wicket.

But, even come afternoon,
when my hair gets wild and fucked up again,
there remains some trace
of the morning's combustion
to insulate myself
from too much me.



by jerry gordon
1.14.10

A Review of YOU

Here is a very nice review of my 2007 chapbook YOU, done by Niluferplum over at http://niluferplum.blogspot.com/ . Check her stuff out.

How is it I'm
content with this
perfection?

Reading YOU, Poems by Jerry Gordon, Three Cornered Moon Press, 2007

(A poem of sorts about a collection of poems)

Like a diamond miner, YOU extracts the beauty in all the places - the celestial and, more delectably, the mundane. A probe is lowered into "a room beneath the street," an exceptional ear is exposed to "a sutra sung for every train car and every crack in the concrete," and a "mind breathing close."

I plugged myself into the delicate machinery of the photocopied pages, I let it inject into my poetic vein what is outside of myself. The stuff, in a flash, travelled through the intimate vessel and spoke to the parts that do not know language but know all. I bathed in beauty, I was happy, enveloped in a poetic daze, with a spark in lieu of a heart, born out of the meeting on a torn page of an author with his reader. Beauty was floating all around me and pushed the ecstatic rose to bloom inside. I was linked by a golden thread to YOU, to all. I knew I was safe in this quantum writer's laboratory where minute details are observed with no other bias than the benevolence that should always accompany the extraction of truth and beauty. I knew I was saved.

The room, the street, the crack, the breath, perhaps indeed they were outer trivial occurrences, but it is his fortunate eye and it is his ear - it is the shape of his soul - that sculpted the folds and the secret corners into reality. I contemplated the contemplation and his arrangement of the external elements. I witnessed "a torn piece of gold paper from a cigarette box" turn into a monument. I marvelled at scraps of the hidden inner material, which so freely seem to offer themselves to the filigree worker's attention, to be woven into such miraculous moments.

How beautifully you are "talking about architecture." Perhaps because the architecture is breathtaking and there is no other way to talk about it.

niluferplum, a reader's poetic orgasms, 10th June 2010

But, I'm dishonest

If I were honest,
I’d write you and say I called
to just hear your voice, to feel
the chemicals that fall
like a diligent mist within my brain
when I think or write
the bodies of your name.

But, I’m dishonest, so I’ll tell you
that to my right, a woman
just dropped a can of apricots
and it rolled down the train car
to where a man leaned out
to return it to her hand.



by jerry gordon
6.11.10

Beyond the Other Tracks

An object only comes to rest
when it finds some spot of solitude.

Coming back from Kyoto
after improvising and talking long
about Being, tuning the self,
suicide and death,
my train slows, stops and then creeps
past a train stopped on the other tracks.

I watch from my window,
staring in at the various little cultures
happening in the other train's cars:
a middle aged man sprawled out
and sleeping on a long bench;
a group of high school boys
leaning far out their windows
to see where they just came from;
slouching passengers sitting with
the drained-faced looks of forced patience.

My train slides on, leaving the other
and comes to a humming industrial light
pouring its brightness down on a blue tarp
shaping a woman's body.

The body has been made soft enough to fold
over the right angles of a concrete drainage ditch,
a body that perhaps 20 minutes before
could climb the fence beside the sidewalk
and time its leap in front of that now stopped
local train towards Kyoto.

This thought makes me
wonder about that leap and its actual details.
For example, did she land
on the ground between the rails
already ringing with the train's approach?
And thus, did she land standing
or just come down already falling?
And, if she landed on her feet,
did she feel any sense of accomplishment--
some twinge of successful physicality--
or was it just one more pulse
of irony or futility to drive her
into the train's embrace?
Did she turn towards or away from
the train's light and its unobstructable momentum?

It was obvious in my glance and recognition
of the body half-poured into the gutter,
it was knocked back off the tracks.
But who knows after how much
interaction with the train?
The emergency trucks didn't gather
where she climbed the fence.
She was transported by the energies
and logics of physics, but I wonder about
her final immeasurable moments of thought
and perception. Did she hear the beauty of
the Dopler effect or her name spoken
in one of the tongues of her mind? Did she
sense a release or the approach of punishment?
Did she build one final memory before becoming
lost to herself and wholly gone?




by jerry gordon
suicide on the Hankyu Kyoto line
5.6.09