Our Numbered Days Read online

  Our Numbered Days

  Neil Hilborn

  Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Neil Hilborn

  Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press

  Minneapolis, MN 55403

  http://buttonpoetry.com

  All Rights Reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover Design: Doug Paul Case || [email protected]

  ISBN 978-0-9896415-6-2

  Table of Contents

  Our Numbered Days

  MSP PHI LGA ALB PHI MSP

  Ballad of the Bruised Lung

  Joey

  Our Numbered Days

  Snow Theory

  Unsolicited Advice to Minnesota Children

  Fabric Swatches, Paint Samples

  Bystander Paralysis

  Not Dead

  All Harvestmen Are Missing a Leg

  Memorial Day

  Future Tense

  April, 2013

  Our Numbered Days

  Chitin

  The Sadness Factory

  Ekphrasis with Peeled Onions

  Phreaking

  The Talk Show Host Has a Nosebleed on National Television

  The New Sheets

  Again

  Our Numbered Days

  You Can Look

  This Machine Kills Fascists

  Dust Mop

  Song for Paula Deen

  OCD

  What the Cicadas Don’t Understand

  Moving Day

  Little Poems

  Parking Meter Theory

  Skyline with Cranes and Stormcloud

  Our Numbered Days

  On Sitting on My Ex-Girlfriend’s Porch, Listening to Her Play a Song about Me that I Know Her New Boyfriend Helped Her Write

  I’m Sorry Your Kids Are Such Little Shits and that We Are in the Same Zen Garden

  The News Anchor Is Crying

  Our Numbered Days

  Here and Away

  Our Numbered Days

  Traffic, Lightning, Gutter

  Enabling: a Love Song

  American Revolution Trail, Charlotte, North Carolina, Winter

  It Was the Day I First Fell out of a Window...

  Liminality

  Our Numbered Days

  The best way to get to heaven is to take it with you.

  Henry Drummond

  Heaven isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.

  Sierra DeMulder

  Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.

  Andrew Jackson

  In many languages, the word for heaven is the same as the word for sky.

  Wikipedia

  I will sing to you all the things I stopped myself from saying while we were alive.

  the author

  All the way to heaven is heaven.

  St. Catherine of Siena

  I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.

  Frida Kahlo

  The light dimmed, and the singing in his head stopped.

  Louise Erdrich

  When my mother dies, I will lead her

  like a dog into the space between

  our walls which is just like the space

  between here and always, the king

  and the kingdom. I will lead her by the hand

  if she be blind and I will wag my tail

  against her knees if she be afraid

  and I will leave her at the gate.

  Life on earth will in some ways

  be easier. I will not have to return

  her phone calls. I will not have to feel

  guilty when I want to hear no more

  no more about the divorce. I won’t cry

  though I will want to cry. Though I will hate myself

  for not crying. When my mother dies,

  if I am still alive, I will slouch

  on my knees as though in prayer, I will

  write one or two poems, then I will

  no longer think of her.

  MSP PHI LGA ALB PHI MSP

  How miraculous that we all

  keep our shit together. How miraculous

  that no one has a premonition of flames

  and tries to open the cabin door. The airline

  pilot next to me keeps his eyes closed

  during takeoff and landing. He does not

  drink anything. I have an orange juice

  with no ice. I want to watch the horizon

  as it gets farther away. This man

  might just be smarter than me, but he is also

  flying coach and reading the sports section

  while I do crosswords, so he is probably

  still smarter than me. Pretension

  can look like intelligence if you squint

  hard enough or wear glasses. There are,

  for some reason, always Buddhist monks

  in the Philadelphia airport. Buddhist monks

  rewrapping their robes. This is my sixth time

  in this airport. My sixth time because of two

  different women. I have paid probably

  a couple thousand dollars for the privilege.

  Five cheesesteaks. Surprisingly good caramel

  popcorn. Maybe thirty hours, five just trying

  to find outlets. How miraculous that I can go

  basically anywhere. How miraculous, the doors,

  the wings, the recycled air. How miraculous,

  flight is just a fall that never finds the ground.

  Ballad of the Bruised Lung

  Many things happen in your life that shouldn’t:

  the black spot that grew into cancer, the sub compact

  that just could not wait to meet you; maybe things do

  happen for a reason but that reason is stupid. Maybe

  your brother fell out of a window only because

  he’s an asshole. I love you, but I can’t keep

  letting you show up where I am and remind me

  of what I said to you all those times

  I was drunk that one time. Most of them were just

  hurtful nonsense, but I am proud of “You are like

  a comet: every so often you come around

  to fuck up my shit.” In a perfect world, all the towns

  in Illinois would be named “Blood” so I could

  no longer pick out yours on a map. When you’re dumb

  enough for long enough, you’re gonna meet someone

  too smart to love you, and they’re gonna love you

  anyway, and it’s gonna go so poorly. It must be

  odd for our mutual friends who like me more

  but think you were right. To say I hate you would imply

  a world in which I kissed more than your stomach. Look,

  we’ve established that I’m a jerk, so let me say this:

  I am a flat tire and you are a pothole full of lug nuts.

  I am a pile of bricks and you are holding a sledgehammer,

  which is to say I would not exist without you.

  Joey

  Joey always told me, laughing, as though

  it were actually a joke, that he wanted

  to kill himself but it was never the right

  time. There were always groceries

  to be bought and little brothers

  to be tucked in at night. Don’t worry.

  Joey isn’t going to kill himself

  twenty more lines into this poem. That’s not

  the kind of story I’m telling here.

  Joey got a promotion and now he can

  afford Prozac. Joey is Joe now. Joe

  is a cold engine in wh
ich none of the parts

  complain. Joe is a brick someone made

  out of fossils. If you removed money

  from the equation, Joey would have been painting

  elk on cave walls. People would have fed him

  and kept him away from high places

  because goddamn, look at those elk. I think

  that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill

  aren’t just related, they are the same

  gene, but try telling that to a bill collector.

  We were 17, and I drove us all to punk shows

  in a station wagon older than any of us. We were

  17 and I bought lunch for Joey more often

  than I didn’t. We were 17 and the one time Joey

  tried to talk to me about being depressed

  when someone else was around, I told him to

  shut the hell up and asked if he needed to change

  his tampon. You know that moment when the cartoon

  realizes he’s taken three steps off the cliff

  and he takes a long look at the audience

  like we are carrying the last moving box

  out of a half-empty house? Joey looked like that

  without the puff of smoke. He just played

  video games for a half hour and then went home. Once

  I found Joey in my dad’s office, staring at the safe

  where he knew we kept the guns. Once Joey

  molded his car into the shape of a tree trunk

  and refused to give a reason why. I once caught

  Joey in Biology class staring at his scalpel

  like he wanted to be the frog, splayed out,

  wide open, so honest. There’s one difference

  between me and Joey. When we got arrested,

  bail money was waiting for me at the station.

  When I was hungry, I ate. When I wanted to

  open myself up and see if there really were

  bees rattling around in there, my parents got me

  a therapist. I can pinpoint the session

  that brought me back to the world. That session

  cost seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars

  is two weeks of groceries. It’s a month of bus fare.

  It’s not even a school year’s worth of new shoes.

  It took weeks of seventy-five dollars to get to the one

  that saved my life. We both had parents that believed

  us when we said we weren’t ok, but mine could afford

  to do something about it. I wonder how many kids

  like Joey wanted to die and were unlucky enough

  to actually pull it off. How many of those kids

  had someone who cared about them but also

  had to pay rent? I’m so lucky that right now

  I’m not describing Joey’s funeral. I’m so

  lucky we all lived through who we were

  to become who we are. I’m so lucky I’m so—lucky.

  Our Numbered Days

  They dreamt not of a perishable home.

  William Wordsworth

  July is gone like the gasoline it took to make the circle again: Florida to Florida by way of America.

  Laura Jane Grace

  All that brooded,

  ignorant in your safe arms, concluded.

  Ruth Stone

  Home is wherever people know our stories.

  Sam Cook

  The worst lie is to say good-bye.

  Where are you going that I won’t follow?

  Calvin Forbes

  Home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.

  Anthony Burgess

  Books; china; a life

  Reprehensibly perfect.

  Philip Larkin

  In the past ten years, I have seen

  my father perhaps ten times, and while

  that is almost certainly an exaggeration

  it tells the truth of this story: my house

  only felt like a home underwater, in floods;

  my father was an astronaut because to me

  stars or the distant flashing of satellites

  seemed closer than wherever he was;

  when I hear a Jeep outside, I think

  it might be him, come to get me.

  Snow Theory

  When you hear the phrase Winter Weather Advisory

  you imagine a guidance counselor and snow

  that is unsure what it wants to do with its life,

  don’t you? Don’t you see skills tests

  about its life before it rebecomes

  water? The name plate on the counselor’s

  desk reads Felipe Rios. Señor Rivers,

  as Snow calls him, has a constant supply

  of green highlighters. No one knows

  how he gets them, because rivers can’t walk

  to the store or be guidance counselors,

  duh. If snow can drift, so can leaves

  and dust and responsibilities. You can have

  a light dusting of feathers. Snow is a sentient being

  that hates when people drive in straight lines. Snow is

  migratory. Snow is a dog that wants

  all the sidewalks to be covered

  in salt. Snow therefore is a happy dog.

  Imagine if fire extinguishers were full

  of snow. Imagine the fun we could have.

  Unsolicited Advice to Minnesota Children

  Listen here, you little shits. You are growing

  up in one of the most beautiful places

  on earth. Everything here is all decked-out

  elk and the imperial majesty of winter

  and you ingrate children of the snow

  spend all your time in “classes”

  learning about “things” that will teach you

  nothing about ice skating on the bones

  of your enemies or lighting moose

  on fire or felling fir trees

  the beaver way or how to make friends

  in a blizzard which is with a shovel.

  What I’m saying is, it’s beautiful

  as a mushroom cloud out here, and by the time

  your grandchildren can enjoy it, it’s all going

  to be a tepid ocean anyway, so whatever

  you do, put some of it inside your head before

  it’s gone. It’s all yours, you bastards. It’s all yours.

  Fabric Swatches, Paint Samples

  As you can already see, everything is fucked.

  Paul Guest

  I will, in all my hereditary optimism,

  try to be honest my dear, not just

  about where I am and particularly

  with whom, but also where I am in the vast,

  melodramatic plane that is my feelings

  and where I have placed you

  and how exactly to cross

  the Stupid Desert to find me.

  There is quicksand in the Stupid

  Desert that I call my exes—they don’t

  hate you but, my darling, they also

  do not know you, which is not to say

  I don’t speak of you, because I do,

  I do, to my therapist

  who I fired, to the women

  at bars and at work and

  at Roller Derby bouts who confuse

  me for an exit sign, darling,

  I use you, yes, to feel secure or loved,

  or like a tire wrapped in chains,

  so let us say at least that I do not

  use you abnormally. All of this

  is to say that, should you move here

  to live with me and the mental

  disorders I call friends and mental

  disorders, I will not lie to you. The sea

  is so wide and our boat is so small.

  Bystander Paralysis

  It is, as it turns out, very difficult

  to get Ikea
furniture into the trunk

  of a subcompact. Harder still

  when you are a middle-aged woman

  who I theorize does not work out (not

  because she is a woman or middle-aged,

  but because she is screaming “Curse

  these weak, beautiful arms!”) and your son,

  who I guess is my age, is sitting

  in the front seat staring at what I hope

  is his phone. The corners of the box

  are becoming quite sad. I am,

  as I said, probably her son’s

  age. I am not helping her

  because that would be like

  asking her to adopt me and I already

  have a mother who I don’t

  call enough. Maybe her son

  doesn’t have legs. Maybe he does

  but that doesn’t change the fact

  that his mother is a huge jerk. I am not

  helping because I have already

  assumed so much, and I would rather

  let her suffer than be wrong.

  Not Dead

  In the bar, before the lights

  are on but after all the rails

  are clean. In the station wagon

  I learned to drive then wrecked. In

  the morning, always in the morning.

  In the basement of that tea shop

  that, for some reason, employed

  both of us. In the neighbor’s yard

  on Halloween. In the middle school,

  high school, and community college

  boiler rooms. In a snow plow,

  once. I should have been saying “goodnight”

  and fucking meaning it. I should have

  been in my kitchen and not that kitchen

  where my arms were way too long

  to be arms, or in the coffee shop,

  or the other goddamn coffee shop, or in

  the street when it had just started

  snowing. When I say I’m on my way

  I probably mean it, I probably

  want to die less than I say I do,

  but who knows, the statistics

  are sporadic at best. I’ll say I love

  you when I actually love you.

  We are in your mother’s house

  and I guess I want to be here. There’s no

  reason not to, I guess. I guess

  I’d rather be tattooing a bunch of triangles

  on myself or ordering a steak

  at an Indian restaurant or setting

  all my shit on fire, but none of those

  are currently reasonable options. If anyone

  is gonna kill me, it should be me. No,