Me at a Table Writing a Poem About the Swell

I said to myself, 'Nothing swells forever.'
But then I saw the ocean's turning,
it's ever-charge and flow between the land
amassed from the weeping becoming
of whatever solitary fantasy it was
that mapped its prison. But the questioning
was not over: 'Isn't there more water
than land, pocked with half-dead floating
similarities to all the dreaming
almosts that sleeping landed brains
concoct whether they will it or not?
Is that a prison?'

I didn't answer;
the bill was before me. I refused to pay.
The service was shit. I wasn't satisfied.
I ask a question: 'If it's a prison,
then who's got the key? Where's the
sordid, fat, mustached guard
gourding on pizza, twinkie and mash?'

There were small tin clucks from within
the walled room hung with all those
posters I used to love, that he
took when I was done with them, hoping
to be more like me. The sounds
pined on and on for some time.
New York City with its ghostly friends
permeated in its busy waiting -
and when the fool appeared all a-frowned,
struggling with the quiet of the Adirondack trees,
he had no answer for me. He just shrugged.

Chris White is Famous

The lost thread's stitch seems odd in the light
set by that paltry sun ruined so very young
and I can see all those raves where you danced
to the happy fried rhythm that mocks me yet
and spies sorely on the edging peace that grows
between the soul's vacuum and the becoming soon
of the black-suited man on the train at noon.
Then you vanished leaf-like into the autumn.

Mothers hide a hatred for their sons:
pain that was planted and Papa with his grin.

Chris White is a Champion

The fight is gone, dearest one. Those ashes
are the exploding fool's, his blazing was.
The gloves I hold are ashamed, but I smile still
and wonder at the difference between that past while
and those hills, demons, worries and a thousand things more
that get all pulpy like sea plants along the shore
where some sore sailor probably glanced at
in passing. The colours of things swerve into white.

Oh darling, the world will award you the title
so long as law is gold and guilt its little law.

Chris White is a Family Man

God's spawned family molted all the hair
that I saved for the sake of dreary power
and spat into pale blue cups of old regret.
I remember the church flowers before they faded
and to that decay three heroes go -
what prowling bald insistent eye
keeps those few happy while the others
remain taut with the eager and the want?

So feeble they will always see discarded
a face that I know was only a sad departing.

Chris White Gets Married

Past glances' remit trembles the little air
that hangs there still in the dull stare of sorrow.
A popish fear moderates every rising feeling
that soothes the many with an okay feeling;
more candy is made for the happy children
then between friends when enemies are made.
That faith renewed seeks a smiling future
where she isn't. No, not a speck of her.

But I see what we were, my weddinged love,
before I was sucked up into the pull from above.

Chris White Will Be Hungover

The worried night will forever bathe the baby day's flow
with those pink mouthed and sore dumb memories
that miracle a better path for those young who know
the most boring secrets. The grasp of the differing
thing does not make enough sense for the sickly.
("To be well and to be free as the naked need be.")
I spell her with her own vague wicked times
as the dim remembering is caught between the pines.

Feigned glories and upward thrusts are okay
so long as they don't retreat from the tall strict day.

We Are all Chris White

This week I will write a poem for each of these supposed 'Chris Whites'. They come from a google search on my name, which is fun to do if you have common one like mine. The point is that it gives something to the writing. I originally wanted to put pictures of myself on here and I get anxious about the whole process of uploading pictures from a camera to the internet. I'll get over it.

Who Just Had an Epiphany? (Part 1)

I have been thinking on and off over the last few weeks about the idea of epiphany. And what I like about how this idea has come along is that it's done that 'come out of nowhere' underdog move on me. I recall distinctly learning about 'epiphany' in high school and have always thrown that into that dim place where creative naivety has thrown a lot of received wisdom; and that's the point, or the turn, that I am referring to - it's when I find something truly amazing and revealing in that pile that I have what I now realise is the very purest form of epiphany.


The thing I like about learning is when it comes out of nowhere and does that strange Mama shaking her finger at you gesture, pointing to that pile I mentioned above where all the things she taught you go, dismissed as they were by your youthful flight.


'I told you so,' she said.


'I know,' you say and you see the heavenly light descend from that secret place about her figure. You see what all your vain strivings for sainthood have done. Or worse, what they have undone. The kind have been forgotten. The quiet unheard. What happened to that subtle eye and ear? Have you been so submerged by that fat, doting ego that you can't see the simple beauty shining in all the many neglected characters of your own epic rise?


This pull to frame what I'm saying into a story shows that epiphany has something to do with returning to a home, which is what 'nostalgia' means. I also seem to be drawing to the existential quality of epiphany as a type of enlightenment, which has something to do with Christian religious ectasy among those medieval saints. And then I'm sure there is some classical context having to do with Dionysius, if that cult really has anything to do with the rise of enlightenment thinking, as Nietszche suggested in The Birth of Tragedy.


But to return to that high school Me with a lot of unformed things on my mind being told by a middle-aged lady who once was young but then got married and pregnant and learned new things about life beyond what she knew as her teenage self that every story needs to have an 'epiphany' to really work, that if the character does not have this moment where they realise something important about themselves or their world, then the story doesn't work, I naturally thought it was all wrong and was drawn towards those stories that did exactly what she said they shouldn't do. This taught me what I would learn about a bike if I decided that it didn't need a seat; I'd learn exactly why seats were invented why they're there at all.

Education is often like this: a number of ideas and formulations that are each a long evolved species with their own histories are thrown into the hollow of our imagination spurting (or newly lusting) skulls. And as I write this, I hear some training teacher telling me, 'Education is like a garden. We have to sow the seeds that will grow tomorrow today.'

'That April when St Paul Marched Home'

The big soft wave is rising behind
and above there are sweet birds singing,
'A smile is a small beginning,' to the tune
of that song that seemed cheery in the desert.
Can trust evaporate the horny thread
twirling before the glass-eyed filing love?
But crows and morons will tire the same
as puppet worlds ignite with screwy lights low
what glob-pulled idiots have always already known.