Monday, May 13, 2019




Everything Was Beautiful

Let me start by saying
my breakdown included swans.
Arched white cobras on a January lake
where I spent a week with Father Knowles,
acting landlord of my anguish 
within the white walls of his rustic cottage
where I wept every afternoon to Mahler
staring out at water refusing to freeze
at the height of my inner spring
as my heart bloomed so violently
it broke the vase of my body,
registering love as a fissure
that then and always after would
equate tenderness with sorrow. 
At seventeen I was both lovesick boy
and ailing white orchid on a sill.

I remember everyday
the ache in my heart felt
like a sore throat in my chest.
So full of gratitude and love was I
that the vessel of my adopted body
sprouted it’s first hairs and became
an unreliable narrator; an acned protagonist 
of a past I would return to again and again
in middle age to mine its quarry
of lost gold and youth and beauty
blighted by my own unworthiness.
That year I swore I’d become a monk
as my heart had been made spiritual
in God’s furnace of emotional agony.
Sadness became my go to emotion
angling to feel loss before loss felt me,
to taste the same grief even when
I had found future happiness.

Was it Mahler who taught me 
that sadness was beauty
and those seven days spent
tracing another boy’s name 
in the white snow
with no way to find my way back
to or from him?
So ill with first love,
and never to be the same again
after challenging the vows
of the pederastic priest;
huckster of empathy 
vs 
a love that would last
as long as I lived.


Peter Valentyne
May 13th, 2019

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Grown Men Asleep
in Broad Daylight

At night, sleep does 
my living for me;
a form of surrender 
that takes no strength.
But I’m restless
and long to be more 
than merely alive.
Sleep is a shadow
advertising itself everywhere.
Faux faces made of airwaves
beckon and lull 
all while
night seeps into day.

Take the conductor on the Q line
who fell asleep at the switch
derailing the 3 train cars
and injuring dozens
including a Chicano nun and 3
small children on their way
to Coney Island.
The papers said the conductor 
had 3 times the recommended dosage
of NyQuil in his system.
Or did something inside him
just want to jump the tracks?

Asleep in our chronic patterns
like constellated stars
too tired to twinkle,
only in the morning
are we certain of our actuality,
as the juxtaposition of lying
horizontally on a bed
is so fresh in the memory
in comparison 
to what it ought to mean 
to be vertical.

I stop in my tracks. 
Am I that anonymous student 
I saw in college coming home 
from the cinema
who in a somnambulist state
was found standing in the Quad
asleep on his feet?
As a full grown man,
being awake is a daily struggle;
consciousness,
my last curriculum.

Exhaustion is everywhere,
a smoggy human freeway.
Detached from our vehicles
(which now drive themselves)
we need only look for signs,
though I feel culpable 
for recognizing this
and useless to affect a remedy.
So I have to ask myself:
What if I can’t see my own 
unconscious manifestations?
Like not being able to smell
my own bad breath.
Don’t let me be blind
to my own wretchedness.
I beg the mirror
to give back my life.

A glass of wine 
each night 
becalms my nerves,
quenching my desire
to be one 
with the moment,
even if I have 
to trick myself
into believing 
there’s nothing 
at stake.
I’m old enough not to care 
about stepping away 
from my ambitions.
I don’t want to be
driven.
I want being
to be enough.
And so
I live
in the fervor of a
blind man’s prayer.

I ask you.
What will happen
if we find 
ourselves disgusted 
by the whole 
human race?
What if our brother
really was our business
all along,
and transcendence 
the only sign
of having lived 
a good life?


Peter Valentyne
May 12th, 2019



From "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"


Poem 
Sans
Images

We cleave to 
five memories
in order 
to keep 
our lives
in place. 
Each one
is by turns
devastating, 
fortunate,
revealing, 
spiritual, 
and 
fateful.

Is this 
what we 
are meant 
to do?
Stay 
where
our facts
fix us 
in faithful 
allegiance 
to life’s
turning 
points?

Why was
love and beauty
my soul’s 
intrinsic 
weaknesses?
Both,
ironically 
caused me 
pain
as nothing 
else 
could.
need
only
consider
their loss
to realize
who
I always
was.

On the
other hand
hate and hardship
inadvertently 
revealed
my
strengths;
one through
an act of
resistance,
and
the other
 through
acceptance.

Maybe 
needed
the contrast
of the other
to
finally
come to
my
worth.

Peter Valentyne
May 9th, 2019






Untidy Alice

“Tidy desk, tidy mind”,
her boss once said, in a
brusk, but pointed appraisal.
Alice had held back her response
(and her girlish crocodile tears)
by pressing her tongue
to the roof of her mouth.
Only an idiot’s mind is tidy.

That same week, she’d been told
by the Human Resources lady
with the arresting red hair,
a fellow worker had complained
(seeing as her desk faced
the communal xerox machine)
that her appearance was too unkempt;
a word Alice oddly favored.

It seems her desk had begun
to take on too much personality.
It being October, she had tacked
a series of brittle red leaves 
to her partition, as well as
random magazine cut outs 
of sinister pumpkin heads 
and a scowling scarecrow
that glared defiantly out 
at the entire department. 
Alice’s true feelings were always
barely buried in the details.

Unbeknownst to her fellow employees,
Alice had a terrible secret:
her fourth floor walk-up
in the West Eighties
looked substantially worse
than her chock-a-block desk at work
ever could. That was mere child’s play.
No, Alice made her home 
in what was for all intents and purposes
 a shattered looking glass.
But seeing as no one had, nor ever would
see where and how she lived save her, 
what was the problem?
But this little dust up with management
had made her feel like she had reduced 
her entire workplace to a trailer park. 
Or, as she liked to refer to it, 
Satan’s House of Financial Worship. 
The one perk of working in such corporate digs
was her ability to comb the internet for knitting sites
on her down time and printing all the best patterns
and designs while she drained the color ink
from the IBM xerox on the company’s dime.

Truth was, whether known or not,
Alice’s home would not have passed
anyone’s muster.
She couldn’t help that, nor did she care.
She’d long grown used to it.
(Nose-blind, if you will.)
Though there was nothing overtly odiferous,
as her kitchen had been 
crammed with miscellaneous clutter for years.
An onion had less layers.
No, more accurately, her apartment
resembled the nest of an egg-bound bird,
a dilapidated lair littered
with the droppings of some ravenous beast.

For instance, when Alice found a blouse
she liked, she purchased it in every color
of a triple rainbow occasionally
seen in the skies over the Serengeti.
Alice’s mind was made for both hunting and gathering. 
The buck stopped there and no further.
She made her killings entirely for sport
and rarely made use of her retail carcasses.
Rather than mounting her game on the wall
she was content to leave it bagged and tagged
 in indistinguishable piles splayed across the floor.

How will I know
what I think
if my thoughts
aren’t piled 
around me
like a make-shift
beaver dam?

How will I remember
mother if I don’t
keep her tethered to her
favorite polka dot scarf?

Alice kept her life in place
by not allotting things
their proper place
as her belongings awaited
their chance to be used.
It never came.

Out-dated checks, old receipts,
unopened mail, back issues
of Redbook & House Beautiful
extolled their haphazard story,
if not a cautionary tale.
Make that a grim fable.

Alice’s own life story was writ
within the same disorderly debris field.
She had tried everything once.
A hundred hapless hobbies.
Tap shoes, accordion, guitar,
mime (including berets and white gloves), 
yoga books and mat, several paint sets 
(watercolors, acrylics, and oils),
Etc. piled upon etc.,
once chosen, lingered un-used, 
and never to be discarded.
She lived day by day
with the forlorn sensation
of what it was to be buried alive
amongst tangible articles
made of her own faded impulses,
even as she remained
staunchly unwilling to relinquish
the evidence of any road taken
even with a single step.
Props reduced to artless artifacts;
bric-a-brac, Hummels, saccharine figurines.
She had a weakness for porcelain angels,
cherubs, and faeries;
 decorative objects without 
the modus operandi of proper care.
Her favorite was an angel made from 
pinecones with a soda pop top for a halo
 that would have been nice on a coffee table
at Christmas. 
At least it had made it to the stable.

Alice held herself in place
by unwittingly imprisoning 
and ignoring all that she owned.
Paralyzed by minutia,
her heart generating
it’s own gravitational pull;
nothing that found it’s way 
into her magnetic mortuary 
ever left the lady’s limbo. 
She was queen
of her own underworld
and this, her careless haven.

And so,
Alice could never have a visitor.
She could never make a meal.
She could never find anything,
though there was an eastward drift 
of bags towards the door
that contained her more current items.
For instance, she always knew where 
she wedged her keys and the Binaca spray
bottle, and the Secret roll-on, and her purse
which all formed a ramshackle Jenga
the equivalent of a bad hand at gin.
There was no bed, no t.v.,
she never cooked a meal.
She showered at the local Y
as her bathroom was co-opted
by boxes of books, records,
and old VCR tapes.

Alice herself was on the heavy side.
One might be forgiven in thinking
she stored her memories
inside her bulbous posterior.
Her facial features were pleasant enough
but her hair was longish and tended to be oily
and because she refused to dye it,
a spectrum of drab gray to ever darker ends
resembled a b&w rainbow. When she piled it into
a knot atop her head, it looked 
especially mismatched.

Alice’s self worth had formed
a permanent poker-face.
If her apartment had become
a mirror, she no longer saw her
own visage in it. She was curiously care free
in her fourth floor 
walkup mausoleum.
At night, she slept like a cat
curled up on the floor 
in a corner, her own
constant companion.

Because she had been able to dodge
the building’s super for years,
nothing had been fixed or repaired
in a decade. The high ceiling’s paint
had begun to peel off resembling
the surface of a giant upside-down
jigsaw puzzle. Near the back window
a gaping wound in the ceiling had opened up
like the door to another world
in a horror film. One couldn’t look
at it and not think of a swarm
of vampire bats pouring out
from it’s dark crevasse.
Not even her.

But to Alice, she delighted in living
inside her own namesake museum. 
She, like an item she failed to curate
was among the appropriated,
the lost and found…then lost again;
belongings awaiting their chance
to belong.
Paperwork from 1979 to present day
could be found swamping the floor,
a woman gathering evidence
as tactile proof of her own existence.
Everything held the same
emotional weight,
every purposeless piece
a sedated keepsake 
in stasis.

Did she, in fact, see herself in the broken things 
which she insisted were still worthwhile?
Here, in her hovel of solitude
who was to say otherwise? 
A pale light pushed it’s way through 
her make-shift window shades 
(made of bedsheets) illuminating
an unridden exercise bike
draped with a towel
that resembled a hobo’s ragged cloak.

Who can save me from myself?

As of late she had begun to fantasize,
first about a fire that would burn
away everything she owned, then
about a flood that would sweep away
every last bit of the detritus of her existence.
She remembered an old movie she’d seen
called Inside Daisy Clover. At the end of the picture
Natalie Wood blows up her beach house by
closing all the windows and turning the oven on.
She could still see Natalie triumphantly
trotting down the beach glancing back
at the explosion blowing the life she abhorred 
to smithereens. But Alice would have
no such luck. She couldn’t bring herself
to harm her neighbors, even though most of them
had condemned her as if she were a
hunchback living illegally in the bell tower.

People in general tended to make Alice feel
less than.  Though she could easily hold her own
in any conversation, she, like an elephant,
could effortlessly remember any detail told to her.
Alice could recall crying at least twice a week
for the last two years. It didn’t take much
to bring her to tears. A sideways glance 
would suffice.

Let me be who I am.
Your judgement only
tightens my hold on things.

Alice was made of an obstinance born of tyranny.
She had been brought up by her mother and grandmother
who were themselves locked like bucks 
in a constant quarrel for domination.
Her mother had been relegated to tending
the yard and garden outside the house.
The grandmother reigned over the interior, 
particularly the kitchen where no one was allowed
to touch a pot or cook a meal.
However, Alice was expected to clean up after eating.

The garden was off limits to her.
She remembered a story about a family
who had insisted on growing their own vegetables
only to die of cancer as their garden
was in the vicinity of a local power plant
and it’s poison had leached into the soil.
To think they perished believing they
were nourishing their family.
That story resonated with Alice
as its twisted irony woke something
inside her.
The truth was so often topsy turvy
that way.
Alice knew her life was topsy turvy as well.

Now, as she sat knitting a baby’s blanket
in both pale-blue and dusky-pink yarn
for a co-worker who was expecting
they knew not which, 
atop bloated bags of fabric samples
and various un-worn sweaters,
in the fading half-light of the veiled window,
she felt like a spider weaving a web,
stitching and looping
in the tidiest of 
zen-like knots
she could muster.


Peter Valentyne
May 5th, 2019