A Poem for Monday: "I Love Country Music" by Paul Killebrew

I Love Country Music

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 BY PAUL KILLEBREW

Sometimes we blubbered through the fallout

of willful confusion in pants that didn’t fit the legs

we sawed off. We looked at each other and fell

forward and back, forward and back, a little bit

like dancing and a little like aggravated assault.

At times it seemed reasonable because it always

seems reasonable to accept whatever anxieties

or losses must accumulate in the face of what

we really wanted all along. In buildings and on

streets you could paint a few eyes on a face 

and see the careless representation of brothers

and sisters making a family out of paint

and the gracious mistakes of seeing. Mistakes,

the essence of sight, could have been all we had 

to go on anyway, and not for us to leave behind

what took us through the shower of dumbasses

with tact and a breath of elegance, even the hope

that later, when the streets cleared of agitated needlers

and the AC kicked on for good, we could sleep

on the clothes spangled outside the closet and find 

a reason for closing the bedroom door on shadows

of pedantic radiation from thin margins of lamplight

always suggesting some other plot in some other bedroom,

tensions to splay us soon enough. And then it occurred

to you, or maybe it occurred to me, doesn’t matter, I think

actually someone called and said that anyone who doesn’t 

leave something for you isn’t worth having, so maybe

now's a good time to find a dapper little high school

where everyone can be a little less civil, and blessed

with selfishness, we could part the fingers interlocked

between us, make fists and get busy. Then intensity

fermented into green books of music, loud country music,

and I love country music. It rolled around my ears

in corridors where boredom had once been so irrefutable

and heavy, and I was happy and dancing and throwing

punches at pigeons and even hitting a few. But the romantic

arc never made it over the willful lack of conviction,

some gap between the faces on the heads we saw

pass our table in the sour-faced restaurant run by those

French people, okay a gap between that and the face

in the dream you had of your father, the one where you said

he stuffed a billy club down a duck’s throat and called 

for another shot of Dewar’s. I expected you to take things 

when you left, but not those things. Light diffuses

evenly across the kitchen, blood through my body,

and it’s sort of funny, but our whole thing fits between

two haircuts, like a roadtrip or something. I feel now

that I’ve been digested by time, and light would pool

into terrible reflections of my own back as I backed 

into a mirror or performed some other forgetful jujitsu,

an effort to lose thoughts or patterns of thought,

but the light diffuses and you walk through it,

collide with little pieces of what ate you, get angry

and write long letters about how your hand can’t talk,

how the paper is so light and effortless when you hold it

how could you even know, you couldn’t even imagine

holding this light and ridiculous thing that my hand

brushed over in patterns it will later try to forget.

Then I taped my mouth shut and tried to whistle.

Leave me alone. Don’t call. Get lost, dumpster

of confusion. I know it’s never been that easy,

that from the eyes in your skull the black plastic bags

were suffocating the trees even though to me it was

more like a ballerina’s shadow had escaped and was dancing 

through the branches frantically with desperate happiness

and cause for alarm. I guess either way something unsafe

and ridiculous was happening, and I guess we knew it,

I think we even talked about it, but I’ve been a little lonely

since I started writing my dissertation. It’s about class

consciousness among people who work behind registers.

And it’s interesting, there’s all kinds of different races

and classes and income levels represented in the world

of cashiers, but at the level of values we see predominantly 

two classes, the complacent and the entitled, though many

cashiers are some measure of both. The complacent

are resigned to what they understand to be their position.

They’re courteous and reliable; class issues only arise

when people are rude to them, which they tend to handle fine,

though if they say anything about it afterwards, it tends to be

a cruel and brief dismissal not only of the occurrence,

but of the entire offending person. The entitled

have a very complicated expression of social hierarchy.

Because they see themselves in transition,

usually ascending, there’s this idea that their values won’t,

or can’t, find full expression from their current position 

and so they don’t feel compelled to act in a way consistent

with their values, while at the same time they may expect

to be treated in accordance with those values. When people

are rude to them, they flip out. Basically today’s been pasted 

together from the leavings of some green intensity

and cigarettes crowded at the back of the passive

classrooms of the skull. Will there be coffee

on the other side? Will there be ladies to walk up to you

on a plain old shit-for-brains day and ask you of Washington

Square Park, “Why is this on the map?” I like it when people

cock their heads a little when you talk. Seems elegant.

I tell them I’m not sure, but Henry James wrote something

complicated about it. Then these nice ladies with a telling lack 

of accent move along into non-history and the bulk of our hours

waiting without a mind for restitution. I would surrender

our moist telephone calls and arthritic tribes of entitlement

if I knew who to give them up to. I never go anywhere             

or do anything slow because revision is only a function

of doubt. Well okay, maybe doubt and shame. Actually,

it’s just shame. Revision is a function of shame. But enough 

of these dead people, we must rise like blood in April! Instead

here I am peeling seconds off the end of my life,

glass of water, frown on face, notebook open to the parade

of minutes and obvious as a daisy cutter in the desert. 

No more nights in the kitchen or bowls of macaroni,

no more misdemeanors with the microwave or blue orbs

whistling into my ear, no more cats meowing

at the television, no cigarettes on the patio, no more

blessings in drag. My schedule is totally blank this afternoon.

PS: For an audio recording of the poem, visit here.
I shortened the length of the poem for this site. The full version is here, too.

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