Portrait in Crayola
My outer edge is frozen steel,
A razor drawn in blue and gray,
A switchblade shining in the sun.
That wicked knife, that cold abyss
Uncaring as the distant stars,
Holds those at bay I will not tell
The spending of seventeen years
That makes them longer than an age.

Follow light dancing down the edge.
The metal's pale, blue tint grows rich,
And it becomes the royal hue
Of the people and birds and beasts
Capering on old china plates
In my grandmother's dining room
And curtains hanging dark and thick
From a hall's ceiling to the stage.
My memory is bound in threads
Of mystic azure; locked and bound,
There lie tales I may someday tell.

Walk along those threads of sky
All through the many days and nights.
Pass the shores of a distant lake.
See the haze of approaching heat,
The red of rage, of blood, of flame.
It is the red that drives me on,
Makes my disused tongue a lash.
The red of all-consuming flame,
Of love that, burning, will not die
Orders my days and set my course.
It drew a reader from her chair
And sent her on a strange crusade.

Know this, my nature in crayons,
My story on the color wheel,
And you know more of my nature
Than most I meet will ever learn.

Sonnet to Aria
Where all the days are long and gray, you shine,
My light in darkness, and you pierce the fog
Of hours that grind past wasted and the smog
Of years trying to make more mindless swine
Of intellects bright burning; you're the pine
Bough blazing on December nights, the log
Melting the snow, and, in the spring, the frog
Heralding the first summer night; your fine,
Polished brass sings the contours of my soul.
Golden companion, some would call such love
Of a tuba the stuff of old freak shows,
But your rich thunder, steadfast and whole
Inspires a fountain and a deluge of
Poetry to a muse that no one knows.

The American Vampire
There once was a vampire who ate
More girls than he needed to sate
His thirst; he grew fat.
The doctor says that
He'll have to start watching his weight.

Lunch in the School Courtyard
We laughed around the dusty table.
The food is stale; at least we ate.
These brick walls have us surrounded,
But, out here, in the courtyard,
We can see a pretty sky.
We talked about the stuff outside this,
Where the walls don't rise so tall,
Drifted into where things happen.
It's not much; it's all pretending:
Just aliens on TV,
But there won't be a quiz.
No one shutting down our voices,
Letting us know what we're supposed to think.
They don't care about our stories.
I guess that's how it should be.
A story's safe when they throw it away,
Call it stupid, leave it in the bin at the curb.
No one's gonna pull out its guts
Looking for symbols and themes.
But, before we got done,
A train whistle buried our words.
Then the bell rang like rusty chains
Dragging on ugly, tile floors.

Ballad of a Tuba Player
I'll tell you the tale of a man I once knew
Whose sad story still grieves me even to this day.
For years, he played tuba in so many bands
In a half-ruined school all those long miles away.

Where the brick turned to dust, he worked his hands raw.
In the sweltering band room he sweated, he swore.
Years of wear fell off every tuba he touched
As he labored over them on the grimy floor.

He was first to arrive at every concert,
Walking in the gloom of the still-empty house there,
Lifting weights it was thought that no other could move
Except for a woman with a gold mist of hair.

He didn't just play out his soul on the stage.
Every daily rehearsal, he thundered and roared.
Though the weeks ground like millstones, through sickness and floods,
Over dust, over heat, his song always soared.

He ruined his shoulders; he ruined his back,
But the love of it that burned in him never waned.
He had so much trust in his band directors,
And I hope that they know how their hands are now stained.

He was good at making new tuba players,
So they kept him in lower bands and made him teach.
His reward for showing the young ones how to play
Was to have all advancement kept out of his reach.

Each year they told him it would be the last time,
He'd stop being held back for this reason, they swore.
Each April, like clockwork, they said the same thing:
That they desperately needed him there one year more.

He loved the section leader in the top band,
And long the two yearned to work beside each other.
They were kept distant as the two poles; their chance
To play together they cannot recover.

They bounced him between lower bands as needed
Until a new teacher felt his ensembles could
Do without their steel spine; the tuba players
Were broken in the name of progress and the good.

When he was caught in nets of red tape, not one
Of those he served, body and soul, would stand by him.
No band director would defend their willing
Workhorse; to let their man hang was their heartless whim.

Now he finishes his diploma in dark,
Beneath a shopping mall, so far from all the friends
He had in better days, left with the fading
Hope of salvaging something from all the loose ends.

They left him with his sorrows and the haunting
Memories quick to goad him, slow to disappear
And the specter of a fierce, green-eyed woman
To whom he knows he will never again draw near.

On the Occasion of Breaking Up
The movie ends; the credits start to roll.
Thoughts I cannot express, words I can't say,
Collide in me like clashing thunderstorms.
The world we made, the things we love turn cold.
Someone made rousing speeches on progress.
We knew change sometimes takes her fees in blood,
But no one cared until your name went on
That list with many more we knew and loved.
Friends slipped away into their private tears,
And left us with no band, no hope, no home.
I know you'd tell me to leave you behind,
To journey past the bounds of this lost land
Where I'm just one more looser on the wrong
Side of the times; too old, too brave to bend.
You'd say to run so far, so fast, this flood,
These rising waters, cannot bury me,
But I can't bear those words, to hear you say
That I should live when what we dreamed has died
That I should flee alone, leave you behind.
I lie, and I tell you there was no choice
But to depart so that you cannot say
There's nothing to forgive; you understand
Why I came here tonight to break your heart.
The credits finish, and the lights go up.
Those sticky seats reluctantly release
The threadbare bottoms of our worn-out jeans.
We walk outside, and we say our goodbyes
Standing in the halo of the marquee
That glows above us like a cruel mirage.

Half-Dreamed
A boy sits on the floor dressed in strange livery
Of thick, plush cloth in crimson, gold.
Afraid and near to tears, he waits for me.
I wade through the cacophony, the storm,
Between the drops of madness coming down like rain,
The crowds that snatch up instruments and flow into the hall.
I kneel beside him; black and white
Are thrown against the red and gold.
His silver tuba flashes on my dark jacket.
I work; this is his first concert.
Within a quarter of an hour, within ten minutes,
Two; these mangled valves must move.
My white shirt shines, fresh-ironed yesterday,
Tucked into pressed slacks over studded boots
The hue of the abyss that I polished as the sun sank low.
My tie is straight.
My hands unbend, remake.
I am Order; I walk through the tempest, and, unharmed,
I carry on; the colors on my vest,
The band, the place the day,
Are all irrelevant; now, clear and cold,
I save the night, the show for him.
The dogs begin to how, and jeans are scattered on the floor.
I barely hear; a paper ball,
This morning's news flies past my ear.
Its path bends
Around our warded circle on the dusty tile.
I wind something in wire and pray.
They move; it fades away,
Another miracle well done.

I chose these poems for fairly straightforward reasons. The first one works well as an introduction, a way to tell the reader about myself. That seems like a good way to begin a collection of poetry, even a small one. The sonnet is there for several reasons. I taught myself to write Italian sonnets when I got bored in my eighth grade English class. They are a specialty of mine, something I can do well every time. One form poem was required, and sonnets are my workhorses. They are good, reliable poems for making good grades, getting into anthologies and doing well in contests. Also, if the first poem is like a title page and an introduction, the second is a dedication. In Stephen King's book On Writing, he talks about having a constant reader, someone one imagines peering over one's shoulder as one writes. Mine happens to be a tuba, a seventeen-year-old Mirafone 186 named Aria. I write a lot of poems about the tubas I meet, but the bulk, and best, of them are about Aria, the one with which I have fallen in love.
Poem number three is a limerick. Like most limericks, it is a fun, jokey poem. It did not fit with the much darker tone of the longer poems, so I separated it from them by sandwiching it between the beginning and the fourth poem, which I put in that place because it has notes of fun and disappointment, making it an easy segue into the two long, sad poems that comprise the story I want to tell. Both three and four were chosen to show my versatility. The fifth was chosen because it has tension. That is where I begin the story, fragments and glimpses of the events that brought me to Decatur High. Last year was a time of great upheaval at my old school. Some people did benefit from the changes, but most of us lost much more than we gained. I took a look at one person's tale of woe. This gives the reader the background of the story that is told from a much more personal angle in poem number six. Five and six are about the same people and things, and I am the speaker in both. Six is more about me, and more about emotions, while five is a catalog of events that is far more about the other party concerned. The seventh poem finishes the journey, taking the reader to a place where a hurting, grieving speaker finds some healing and renewal. It resolves the tension in five and six and rounds out the collection like the last song in a set, tying up as many loose ends as is possible in writing truthfully about a real human life.
I thought about several project ideas. My first plan was to bind a book by hand, but I have less than two hundred lines here. It seemed like hardly enough material to fill a pamphlet. Then I thought about a poetry door and realized I have no idea where to buy a used door in Decatur. The idea of a window also seemed attractive, but materials were equally elusive. I thought about covering a cloak in the words, but it would either involve long, painful hours of writing by hand for me or a lot of boring dictation for anyone I could talk into helping. I would also have to buy enough cloth to make one. A fabric store is another thing I have yet to find. In the end, I decided the blog was the best option. It presented an interesting challenge. Believe it or not, I have never presented my work digitally before. I type everything and often store my work on computers, but I have always printed it out to turn it in. I spent the better part of a weekend looking for a good template. Finding the pictures took more time and effort. Then there were the challenges of formatting on Blogger. My lines jumped around every time I tried to use spell check. It was a good experience and I am glad I chose to do the project this way, though, given more time and some art supplies, I might have made something more tangible.

Ballad of a Tuba Player
I'll tell you the tale of a man I once knew
Whose sad story still grieves me even to this day.
For years, he played tuba in so many bands
In a half-ruined school all those long miles away.

Where the brick turned to dust, he worked his hands raw.
In the sweltering band room he sweated, he swore.
Years of wear fell off every tuba he touched
As he labored over them on the grimy floor.

He was first to arrive at every concert,
Walking in the gloom of the still-empty house there,
Lifting weights it was thought that no other could move
Except for a woman with a gold mist of hair.

He didn't just play out his soul on the stage.
Every daily rehearsal, he thundered and roared.
Though the weeks ground like millstones, through sickness and floods,
Over dust, over heat, his song always soared.

He ruined his shoulders; he ruined his back,
But the love of it that burned in him never waned.
He had so much trust in his band directors,
And I hope that they know how their hands are now stained.

He was good at making new tuba players,
So they kept him in lower bands and made him teach.
His reward for showing the young ones how to play
Was to have all advancement kept out of his reach.

Each year they told him it would be the last time,
He'd stop being held back for this reason, they swore.
Each April, like clockwork, they said the same thing:
That they desperately needed him there one year more.

He loved the section leader in the top band.
Though they yearned every day to be with each other
They were kept as distant as the poles; their chance
To play together they will not recover.

They bounced him between lower bands as needed
Until a new teacher felt his ensembles could
Get by without those who were their steel backbone
And broke them in the name of what he said was good.


When he was caught in nets of red tape, not one
Of those he served, body and soul, would stand by him.
No band director would defend their willing
Slave, and to let their man hang was their heartless whim.

Now he finishes his diploma in dark,
Beneath a shopping mall, so far from all the friends
He had in better days, left with the fading
Hope of salvaging something from a million ends.

They left him with his sorrows and the haunting
Memories quick to goad him, slow to disappear
And the specter of a fierce, green-eyed woman
To whom he knows he will never again draw near.

Half Dreamed
A boy sits on the floor dressed in strange livery
Of thick, plush cloth in red and gold.
Afraid and near to tears, he waits for me.
I wade through the cacophony, the storm,
Between the drops of madness coming down like rain,
The crowds that open cases and run out into the hall.
I kneel beside him; black and white
Are thrown against the red and gold.
His silver tuba flashes on my dark jacket.
I work; this is his first concert.
Within a quarter of an hour, within ten minutes,
Two; these mangled valves must move,
But now they are a flattened insect's legs.
My white shirt shines, fresh-ironed yesterday,
Tucked into pressed slacks over studded boots
The hue of the abyss that I polished as the sun sank low.
My tie is straight.
My hands unbend, remake.
I am Order; I walk through the tempest, and, unharmed,
I carry on; the colors on my vest,
The band, the place the day,
Are all irrelevant; now, clear and cold,
I save the night, the show for him.
The dogs begin to how, and jeans are scattered on the floor.
I barely hear; a paper ball,
This morning's news flies past my ear.
Its path bends
Around our warded circle on the dusty tile.
I wind something in wire and pray.
They move; it fades away,
Another miracle well done.

1)I raise my head and blink at the boy kneeling on the band room floor.
2) The room is filled with noise. It's loud, off-key, and weirdly out of place. I chew him out for being obnoxious and creating additional stress on concert night.
3) The concert starts in a matter of minutes, probably less than ten judging by the speed at which everyone moves.
4)I get down on my knees. When the sand and grit on the floor cut into my legs, I notice that I'm wearing some kind of slacks, not jeans. I have on my tuxedo.
5) He wears a strange, red-and-gold, version of the DSA Beginning Band uniform.
6) I notice that he looks like he's about to cry
7)He pushes Decatur High's silver concert tuba towards me.
8) This is his first concert, and his instrument is a wreck.
9) The people around us are moving faster. Whatever is wrong with his tuba, I know I don't have much time.
10) Somewhere, a dog howls, or perhaps a wolf. Others join in.
11) I pull the instrument over towards me as quietly as I can so as not to add to the general cacophony. I sigh.
12) There are jeans and a t-shirt on the floor.
13) I work on his mangled valves.
14) A ball of newspaper flies across the room from nowhere in particular.
15) I feel vaguely annoyed at the insanity and chaos of the situation, but I performed one of those perfectly routine, concert night miracles. I saved a kid's first show for him. I kept the section at full strength and able to do its part on one trippy concert night. Wherever this particular circus is taking place, whoever is the ringmaster, I did my job, and I did it well. I leave the room and walk to the stage.

Dream
I kneel beside a boy in the uniform of the Beginning Band of Durham School of the Arts in the Decatur High band room.
He wears a crisp, white shirt tucked into neat, black dress pants. His stiff, leather shoes are shiny and black.
I have on a tux.
His jaw is clenched.
He squints.
His upper lip twitches.
The concert starts in a matter of minutes, probably less than ten judging by the speed at which everyone moves.
He's upset because his tuba is broken about three seconds before the downbeat of his first show.
I work feverishly on the valves of his horn, one of the two concert tubas here in Decatur with the same kind of adrenaline-laced strength and speed that lets a woman with a 120 lb frame lift up the front end of an SUV because her kid is trapped underneath.
I end up feeling cool, detached, and serene as I watch my fingers flowing over the mangled valves so fast they almost blur.
I'm so focused on my work that I never look down to see what vest I'm wearing and know whether I play for DHS or Wind Symphony. It doesn't seem very important.
I watch myself perform a miracle for this kid, saving his first concert, but it feels so easy, so routine.
His appreciation isn't lost on me even though I've done this dozens of times before. I remember how it felt when someone did it for me.

I raise my head and blink at the boy kneeling on the band room floor.
He sings a song I once heard on the radio. It's loud, off-key, and weirdly out of place. I chew him out for being obnoxious and creating additional stress two minutes before a concert.
I get down on my knees. When the sand and grit on the floor cut into my legs, I notice that I'm wearing some kind of slacks, not jeans. I have on my tuxedo.
He wears a strange, red-and-gold, version of the DSA Beginning Band uniform.
His jaw is clenched, and he looks like he's about to cry.
He points towards a little, silver tuba like one of the Decatur High concert horns. The room seems colder, so I pull my heavy, leather coat off of a chair and put it on.
The people around us are moving faster. Whatever is wrong with his tuba, I know I don't have much time.
I pull the instrument over towards me as quietly as I can so as not to add to the general cacophony of preparation. I think about how it's so loud in here that my family can probably hear it from their seats. I sigh.
I work on his mangled valves with desperate speed. My hands seem to know what they need to do, so I read a bit of the paper, which someone left on the floor.
I'm not exactly sure where I am, who I'm playing for, or what I think I'm doing, but an ice cold confidence that I will at least get this particular tuba to hold up through the evening comes over me. My location and band are unimportant.
I take my coat off. There are jeans and a t-shirt on the floor.
Somewhere, a dog howls, or perhaps a wolf. Others join in.
I have the valves moving again. The boy is grateful and relived.
I feel vaguely annoyed at the insanity and chaos of the situation, but I performed one of those perfectly routine, concert night miracles. I saved a kid's first show for him. I kept the section at full strength and able to do its part on one trippy concert night. Wherever this particular circus is taking place, whoever is the ringmaster, I did my job, and I did it well. I leave the room and walk to the stage.

Dream
I raise my head and blink at the alarm clock.
It probably says 6:02 because the song on the radio gradually wound its way into my dream and pulled me out. If the day seems unlikely to be particularly pleasant, I swear at it, quietly so as not to wake my family.
I get out of bed.
I rarely have the time or energy to make it properly, but I try to leave my red and gold comforter the way a civilized person would.
I walk across the room to my alarm clock.
The house is frigid. I shiver and fantasize about the leather coat hanging in the closet.
I look in on my snake. I hit the button on top of the clock-radio, almost always harder than I really need to.
I leave the room, carefully skirting the sousaphone lying in the middle of the floor.
I try to get across the hall and down sixteen steps with a minimum of creaking and thumping.
I eat one chocolate muffin.
I read the paper.
I put on jeans and a shirt.
I listen to the dog bark at my father returning from his bike ride as if he's an ax murderer come to kill us all.
Then I brush my teeth and hair and leave for school.