November 9th, 2016
Still the breeze and the taste of exhaust through my window
Still cough up what is left of last night in the morning
Still my house sits on a corner where the man with the shopping cart full of cans likes to sit
Still hear him sift through my recycling
Still hear the wailing hum of the TV
Still empty from the night a red sea rose from the Midwest
Still my hand reaches for a blade or beer or blunt or blanket
Still mouth fixes to say revolution or revolt or regression or repression
Still safe
Still white
Still straight
Still come from bastard aristocracy
Still my skin is oligarchy
Still fascism sits like a quip on my tongue
Still will not escape elitism
Still tongue is sharpened by my skins learning
Still tongue opens the walls of my mouth
Still lips, the blood of my wound I won’t let close
Still my wound is a scourge
Still my scourge is my skin
Still my skin tastes like a spray painted swastika
Still swastikas on the TV
Still courts in the streets
Still jury and executioner
Still execute the famished
Still silence the poor
Still rhetoric the echoes
Still echo the rhetoric
Still puppets won’t escape their strings
Still a poem is not enough and yet I write
Still a howl is not enough and yet I scream
Still a god is not enough and yet I pray
Still my god is hollow and yet it kills it kills it kills it kills
Still I turn to god
Still turning is its own privilege
Still my country turns to its god
Still its God is a man
Still its god is oiled ivory
Still its ivory is carved from a darker body
Still the darker bodies bleed
Still my country’s god is a quiet atheist
Still my country’s god feels like home to many
Still all the streets in my home town are named after cute animals
Still all the boys in my home town are named after apostles
Still my whole home town is a confederate flag, even if I am the blue in it
Still I am complicit
Still all the white fathers in my hometown get drunk off Americana as the city crumbles for them
Still they profit from the crumbling
Still it is not the buildings that crumble but the bodies
Still my classes speak of classism as history
Still my history is classist
Still the media fancies itself activist, so do I
Still we do nothing but comment on the world as it burns
Still I teach kids who are burning, I show them how to make the fire pretty
Still the day turns my city like a cog
Still the bodies keep it turning, they are its grease
This is the truest sadness I have found:
To crawl each morning into a world that will not stop.
i've been thinking about the sky a lot lately
/ i’ve been wishing I could grab a handful of clouds and watch the mist die between my fingers / i've been thinking about what might watch over us / what might not / what might hate us / and how we waste our lives reaching / when people ask me about my faith / i wonder which cloud i should talk about today / i look up and see a sky full of promises i have broken / or that have broken me / when i was born i couldn't breathe / they had to work my lungs by machine / exorcise the cloud from me before i could walk / and so i was born of flesh and metal / each time too much God gets under my skin / something loud and made by human hands begins to pry / i think i am addicted to the ripping / when i think about the accident / i think about the clouds that burst from steering wheels / like God’s hands to hold you as you bleed out / i think about how mine never deployed / how God would not reach for me / i look out the window of an airplane and am sure you would suffocate if God got its hands on you / and what could God know of holding the folded paper of a child's rib cage / without crushing it / when the semi-truck hit / anything holy in me was shaken out like wet dust / i have been reaching for it ever since / when you ask me about faith / you are asking me to hold each almost death in my hands / to know i was born into clogged lungs and yet I breathe / to know my brakes failed heading towards a red light / that i was hit driver’s side / and walked away unscarred / you are asking me to account for inches / if god pushed the semi / just so / if he kept my lungs pumping / to be honest i do not want to know / if i am the lucky dirt beneath his fingernails / still / each memory comes to me in a haze now / to try and wrap my fingers around them is to try and hold the morning fog / before it climbs to wander above us / promises / answers / i will never be able to reach / when i look at the sky / i often wonder what i would do to divinity if i could just get my hands on it / i think about what its rib cage would feel like / between my fingers / how easy it might be / to crush it in my palms / and watch scripture evaporate.
I’ve happened upon this very time and place and decided to keep it
My name is Tom Dreitlein, representing Tom Dreitlein and I am looking for new clients / I wish someone could have told me what it would be like / and what a silly wish that is / I have tripped upon the room where you may have found death, and so I decided not to look / I love you, and I miss you / for now I am without a body and therefore without a heart / all I have are eyes and mouths / they both lie to me / still / I turn back time when I speak / I like that / I stepped into a broken lock and found God Loves Gays spray painted in pink / it felt like the sign hanging in the peak of my head / I wish more people hung their own prophecies in their bedrooms / I found a broken bible, stepped in and called it my home / I found my new home, broke in and called it my head / My head is a bedroom where I want to hang all of my broken bibles, but you can’t bring every lock home / some you can only walk along until the tumblers begin to look like woods in the snowless winter / I know now I know nothing / other than my own bedroom / It is the only lock I can turn / I wish someone could have told me we were all broken gods tumbling / and what a silly wish that is.
Tom Dreitlein is a poet from Rochester, NY. A senior studying English at the University of Buffalo, he currently works as a Teaching Artist at the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology. He wants to talk to you about poetry and other things you can scream along to in your friend’s basement.