Todd Clouser: Writing

I promise not to be offended when,
As this poem passes,
Your thoughts have left
For greater things

When tomorrow’s record drapes you in its
Eager melody or evening lovers
Draw their shadows
Between you and I

When the grinning lips of
Well dressed newsmakers, or
The first naked statue you saw
On the museum field trip

Separate us like nightstars on a windshield

When we read each other
Like a child learning an instrument
He cannot bring himself to
Practice, sitting quietly

At the black piano, whistling
Melodies to the wall,
Out of tune with the notes
On the tipping stand

Or when the first line of
The greatest poem we may ever
Write comes breaking these
Uncertain stanzas

Or the bars in Amsterdam, watercolor
Wind on the canals, the smell of
The ships running in reverse, the desperation
Of a new man in an old town

Because in the end, we all come more for catapult than embrace, pencil than paint,
Begging to be thrown to and from where we have been

"... I beg of you to keep the matter of my deafness a profound secret
to be confided to nobody, no matter whom.." – Ludwig Van Beethoven

Sitting with my shadow behind, sketched by sun
I am imagining Beethoven, legs crossed, sitting before his symphony

The yellow paper manuscript and the conductor’s arms
Trading the glances from his determinably unbreakable eyes

The pounding timpanies, the watercolor violins
Waking the sleeping wonder of the thick red stage curtains

His romantic story written only in his off beat foot tappings
Deaf but to the sound he creates, the notes he must have heard a thousand times

And now I feel really close to him
I am growing empathetic at the soundlessness of the raucous applause
To the hallway chatter, left but to the old hanging diamonds of the lobby chandelier

His noble grin shuffling from the harwood stage
His integrity buried in his silence, his shame in his obviously sleepless mornings

And now I must limp off into a day in the life, having learned
That there is no sense in having shame, for what we cannot change

He mostly drove on side roads, Minneapolis to Boston
Grandmother's glasses tilting like old men's shoulders
Across his obviously Irish brow

Cigarettes bleeding out paper cut window openings, wind and runways pass
The fools gold promise of escape
Keeping his heart beating

We used to get blood red drunk together, like glaciers in summer
Savings for a dying world
Melting off our cuss dirty tongues

But now the doctors are in single file recess walk, coming and going
His mother and father's eyes tearing over him
Like funeral goers into caskets

What is a word like scizophrenia trying to say, its medicine mouth
Can it not save the weeping
From watering the sidewalk?

So I am opening the Providence airport glass doors, simply with a step
And he is late as spring
Singing through bear trap teeth

We meet over spilled coffee, his hands shaking noticably
And I am speaking excitedly selfish
To a moment in time

And months pass in snow and eraser paintings, art of shame
And Im taught that our minds, if not hearts
Are more clay than stone

Sitting with the President

I sit purposefully in an oak armed chair, the shady part of the large windowed room
Our smiles are gentle, intentionally unassuming, like a waitress passing along the bill or gathering a dirty ashtray

We talk about quitting smoking, our favorite newspapers
He mentions some books he is reading, confessing he always reads the last page before the proper time

I tell him of mornings in Mexico in the rainy season
That you can see the storm days before you feel it, the rain practicing its falling out in the ocean

I ask of the rivers, the smell of the air at dawn in Africa,
Believing that he, from time time, must beg to leave his night black motorcade, to join the wind in some silent bar of a foreign city

We share stories of the lines appearing across our foreheads,
Joking in dinner table laughter of the silver lining, the grandiosity, of his bathroom mirror

I glance unknowingly at his uneven fingernails, his perfect shoelaces
He confides he had always wanted to learn the guitar, I tell him silence leaves every dream as a wish, he is impressed

Somewhere I am hoping, looking for his sadness, always equating, to a fault, the weak with the honest
I ask if he knows what happened to Elliott Smith in Los Angeles, if he ever made a mistake falling in love, he prefers other topics

So we humor each other casually, eye contact awkward only when it lasts too long
Until he is summoned to walk amongst the duties of the day, leaving in a scattered single file, black haired men in matching suits

And he follows wincing impulsively, dressing in short sentences of certainty
His affable smirk, his watercolor gray hair, perfect suit, raising the red curtain over our bare and uncertain human-ness

And I begin to wonder how it feels
To be safe from everyone
but yourself

A believer is made one by
The quiet medicine sun
In this grandmother wood cabinet
Of a world,
Opening and closing
Like a the mouth of a yawning
Autumn time, empty branch bird

A believer is made one by
Pericles ash resting in
vein thin cobblestone
streets of an unborn
city, washed
in the new moon
starlight, eyes of
a lover

Somewhere between story
Book love, and the dead
Weight of television hum,
Between suffering and comfort
Is either the easiest choice
Or most difficult task

Ive been shaken into kidspeak

America take me back
Slide your heavy arms around me
Drag me through the towns of your story
The hangings, the stone dust sidewalks
I'll take it all

Do we not see that, from the first
footprint left in the Earth-dust to the coal
train’s summer cough, we are orphans
Left by a busy mother to do our
Own care-taking

Dropped at the door of
A humming world perfect
In complexion, only cradled by our
Own arms, awoken by our own
wails, left to pool our own tears

Will time not look back at us
Wondering how confused
We must have been to perpetuate
These generations of orphans, passing
a world scarred with our filth,
A child left to her own
Will they not be impressed by the way
We could consider ourselves above
ourselves

Will they not see that some-
where in the story of
Jesus, Mohammed, someone started
To see themselves, mirror words,
And they were wrong

You have sandals on your hands
Your knees planted in the sidewalk cement, jean scrape
And you are asking me for money
In this country where I never should have been

Your face is stiff like the weather in London, a place you will never know
Your lips are cracking, just where they meet, life ash
People pass
I am just one of them
And I dont love you

Novelist

Where does the novelist begin
In a helpless hangover of discontent
Plaintively wailing for joy
A mirror spit by moonlight

A green eyed hornet of a woman
Blinking coldly into her coffee
The wear on her face inviting
You to story the reasons

Maybe someplace we have never been
Like a shaken wooden restaurant in southeast Russia
Or shooting ducks in the North Dakota twilight
In your grandfather's arms

On an American highway in the horse sleep daylight
Thinking what could have been
Rewriting the life of a friend
The pen lining about begging triumph

I'm not sure but I am in awe
All those pages turning with new words to greet
A sad character I will never remember
Saying something about pirates or whatever

Something about meteors and the way
They made her proud
With all their distant showmanship
Dancing violently together

The skin between their eyebrows hopelessly lined by their quest
To remind us of wonder

remember when you have a son
nothing is erased
words get stamped upon the letters
that will fall from his full grown mouth

that the window he sits before
is curtained by the canvas colored
humming of your stare or gentle smile
your push or hold, grace or rain

his language slurred by the
reflections of campfire ashes in your eyes
or the hallway light shadows
underneath his bedroom door

and remember before his sketch is colored
it was exactly as you would please
that you built and pulled the
curtain from his quiet stage

and know you are his audience
and that an artist is not to
be believed when they insist
their work is simply for themselves

know that he goes falling in life, held by the parachute
built by your wrinkling hands
landing in the same feathered arms
that surely must catch us all

I imagine the winter mornings must take a lot of pride in their work
Making the most of their brief stay

Laughing in a Frank Sinatra press picture pose
At the black chalk ash scattering across our soft wood living room floors from the ashtray fireplace

Mocking us as they stamp our conversations with predictable musings
Plastic handled shovels emptied from the store shelves, the dog’s nose dug in snow

Bending the sunlight through our still morning windows, light on a lover’s face
Knowing, as Stravinsky and his feathered pen must have in scribbling "the rite of spring", that we are weak to the promise of a new season

But unlike Stravinsky’s magic carpet crescendo, the sound of the sun warming
The daybreak star of winter gives only enough to stop our sleeping, to rise and wish to return

Each note and bitter winded morning the end and beginning of change

Other Lovers

The way you know to kiss
Every morning's evening, every kiss I missed
How couldn't I wonder
About all your other lovers

The conversation, the words spoken
The love kept from being broken
A lazy car in afternoon wind
On some highway where I've never been

You spoke to him quite the same
A feather hand on his back, he whispers your name
Your sun red face, tears walking
Ocean wind breathing over your talking

But there is no sense finding guilt in your kiss
I am sick with love, now the pain I miss
So allow me to lie with you and be the only one
Borrow me your empathy, tell me they are outdone

Leave your old loves hiding under your eyelids
Swinging through my thoughts like city park kids
Waiting to be left alone
By the lover you now know

Train Songs

A train can make a perfect song
The toes that dance on steel aged lines
A tender promise, violent ride
To somewhere new where wonder lies

To places I have never been
By melody I travel with
A quiet church in dust soaked towns
The sound of white and winter's ground

The old guitar's soft weeping wood
Of street church hymns and loves that pass
A cracking voice, its rhythm tears
To sew the heart that drown in years

A promise blind to destined pains
A dream thats spit through wind and rain
Through nature's wonder, past goes torn
A train in song, our romance born

The World Smoking Its Last Cigarette

When they wrote of the apocalypse
They must have known
they were creating it

That eternal salvation, damnation
Is nothing to
trust a man with

That when the wings spread
Their comic flame
Over our still blue oceans

The sane will run or sleep

I’m guessing I will re-enact
A favorite movie scene
The type I watch and wonder why I never did it

Like the man at the warden;s desk
Watching the needle bounce off the record
The symphony serenading the tomb of a prison

A feet on the chair grin
Like the world smoking it’s last cigarette

I’ve never liked Denver much
Like one big bagel shop or magazine article
A drive through its towns a flip through the pages
Only modern in it soullessness

I’d prefer Moscow
The free verse nature of living
Obviously drawn in the faces
Of everyone, just a body to lose

Denver has everything to lose
Its young professional magnetism
Its empty outdoor sand ashtrays
Sports teams, malls, lack of sex shops

Do you know you could get to Moscow for
2 thousand dollars and live there
the rest of your life for a couple years
worth of rent in Denver

And there’s very little police presence
That actually does any policing
The government is entirely untrustworthy, but
At least all of its citizens understand and admit to it

Though there was one time, I was 17
And was driving on I-70 out of Denver to
The Rockies, watching the red and white
Signal towers blink on the foothill tops

I had an experience entirely out of character
My body went firing as I’d imagine
I would feel jumping from a plane
Amidst the fall evening highway blacktop

I went setting with the sun
And as the wheels swept down the first
Mountain backside, semi trucks poking along
I forgot about most everything --- Jesus, fathers, who I wanted to be like

I tried a few times the same drive
Without the same results
I have to up the stakes
But its still there

rest my love
Ill take care of the worrying for a few hours

rest my love
Ill take care of the worrying for a few hours

dont bother to wonder

Hurricane

Flip your tongue at me, hurricane
I am intrigued
Spit your petty wind through my hair
Make me believe in God

Twist my lazy clouds of sadness
Remind me of love
Break this desperate pen
And make me remembered

Drink me beggin beneath your table, shame me
Pass and make me reborn
Soak the city in your breath
And unbury my dreaming

Send me writing to lost lovers
Carry me to the sun
Lift me from this stomach of heaven

When you left me shaking yesterday
I could finally accept
That our kiss of a knife love
Is gone

And I miss it
The bleeding tongue of memories
The eternal turned 10 minute
Euphoria

Remember when you took me
To some exotic place
That you made certain
I would not remember

And we took her home
In a jeep or something like that
And washed our hands
In a bathroom with no light

And the hotel man in no uniform
Dropped his lighter
Delivering the towels
That I forgot to return

And I woke up sad
In a sun completely risen
But you were waiting
All night

And I loved you in the lunchtime morning
Kissing my sickness dead
Rolling cigarettes wildly
On the hotel bible

And I had no socks
But the filthy ones beneath the bed
So we watched the television
In a language I don't understand

Finding every reason not to leave you