help-I'm alive- my heart keeps beating like a hammer

Almost three years sober
And I am still learning
How to keep my head above water
To feel the spark I felt after my first sip
Of Jack Daniels, the rush I know,
If I drank enough I would spin
Like the skirt of a Flamenco dancer
But I could keep from falling down
If I knew just the right amount,
Just the right recipe for success
The spark in his eye, seeing me
When I felt like no one
Made me feel like something

Self-esteem and loveless dancing
Tragedy and the art of deception
Are all man-made words,
I pull the threads out and unravel
The sweater of my life
All the pink threads that were supposed to lead
Me somewhere
I am fragile and these red lines on maps
Give me panic attacks
If I could go wherever I wanted
I’d never come back
But uncertainty makes me nauseous
And still I don’t want to know what
Is true
I believe in your skin like tissue
All the femurs and fissures beneath
All seem make-believe
But I wanted to see them
To know if you were real

You are electric but still falling apart
The stuffing falling from your ears
I try to push it back in.
I am lost and confused
All the ledges seem daunting
Every night comes without warning
My skin is tracing paper
My eyes are wet
You don’t know how to read the maps
In my skin
The quiet sighs I make when I am sleeping
You don’t know how to solve
The algebra in my face
The lipstick marks on the cups
Can stay
I am pacing in slow motion around our apartment
It took only a few hours to watch everything
Decompose
If I were prettier
If I had more degrees
If I could look you in the eye
Like a viper, ready
To attack at any moment
How would you react?
I have no tact but you consume
Me and suspend me into belief.

The reason I write poetry

This poem popped up again in my Literary Analysis class. I understand it so much better than I had when I first read it 5 or 6 years ago. It is probably one of my favorite poems.

You Can Have it by Phillip Levine

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.

Update on my publications:

My poem, "It is You Who Hides Behind" is featured in the current issue of Remark Magazine (damn fine poetry)

Buy the issue or a subscription at http://remarkpoetry.net

Thanks!!!

Also:

"My Time, The Lunch Break Book" is finally out from Poet Plant Press and I'm damn proud to be the featured poet.
My poem "It is You Who Hides Behind" is featured in the current issue of Remark magazine:
A lot of familiar names in here! Here's the skinny:

My Time - The Lunch Break BookA book project by Chris Bodor
Featured poet: Wayne Mason
Illustrations by Jad Fair, Ashley Bobbett, and Marc SnyderForward by David Barker (author of Lunch Hour Poems)
Contact Chris for contributer copy discountsEveryone else:$10 each Check, MO, well hidden cash to:Chris BodorPoet Plant PressPO Box 861094St. Augustine, FL 32086-1740 USA
Featuring poems written during, or inspired by, the lunch break.

David Hill/ Mary Beth Bodor/ Michael D. Grover/ Linda Kay/ Royce Icon/ Austin Taylor/ Jason Gray/ Raindog/ Aleathia Drehmer/ Glenda Bailey Mershon/ Steven Seidenfeld/ Zachary C. Bush/ Cheryl A. Townsend/ Miles J. Bell/ Karl Koweski/ Wayne Mason/ t. kilgore splake/ Adrian Manning/ Helen P. Peterson/ Misti Rainwater-Lites, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozababal/ Michele McDannold/ J. D. Nelson/ Luis H. Valadez/ Zoe Alexandra/ Mathias Nelson/ Chris Bodor

more info:http://www.myspace.com/lunchthebook


More forthcoming poems from me will appear in Thieves Jargon (props to new editor & friend Zachary C. Bush) & the Cerebral Catalyst. I'll keep you posted for when they go live!