Our Numbered Days
Neil Hilborn
Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press
Minneapolis, Minnesota
2015
Copyright © 2015 by Neil Hilborn
Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press
Minneapolis, MN 55403
http://buttonpoetry.com
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover Design: Doug Paul Case || dougpaulcase@gmail.com
ISBN 978-0-9896415-6-2
Table of Contents
Our Numbered Days
MSP PHI LGA ALB PHI MSP
Ballad of the Bruised Lung
Joey
Our Numbered Days
Snow Theory
Unsolicited Advice to Minnesota Children
Fabric Swatches, Paint Samples
Bystander Paralysis
Not Dead
All Harvestmen Are Missing a Leg
Memorial Day
Future Tense
April, 2013
Our Numbered Days
Chitin
The Sadness Factory
Ekphrasis with Peeled Onions
Phreaking
The Talk Show Host Has a Nosebleed on National Television
The New Sheets
Again
Our Numbered Days
You Can Look
This Machine Kills Fascists
Dust Mop
Song for Paula Deen
OCD
What the Cicadas Don’t Understand
Moving Day
Little Poems
Parking Meter Theory
Skyline with Cranes and Stormcloud
Our Numbered Days
On Sitting on My Ex-Girlfriend’s Porch, Listening to Her Play a Song about Me that I Know Her New Boyfriend Helped Her Write
I’m Sorry Your Kids Are Such Little Shits and that We Are in the Same Zen Garden
The News Anchor Is Crying
Our Numbered Days
Here and Away
Our Numbered Days
Traffic, Lightning, Gutter
Enabling: a Love Song
American Revolution Trail, Charlotte, North Carolina, Winter
It Was the Day I First Fell out of a Window...
Liminality
Our Numbered Days
The best way to get to heaven is to take it with you.
Henry Drummond
Heaven isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.
Sierra DeMulder
Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.
Andrew Jackson
In many languages, the word for heaven is the same as the word for sky.
Wikipedia
I will sing to you all the things I stopped myself from saying while we were alive.
the author
All the way to heaven is heaven.
St. Catherine of Siena
I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.
Frida Kahlo
The light dimmed, and the singing in his head stopped.
Louise Erdrich
When my mother dies, I will lead her
like a dog into the space between
our walls which is just like the space
between here and always, the king
and the kingdom. I will lead her by the hand
if she be blind and I will wag my tail
against her knees if she be afraid
and I will leave her at the gate.
Life on earth will in some ways
be easier. I will not have to return
her phone calls. I will not have to feel
guilty when I want to hear no more
no more about the divorce. I won’t cry
though I will want to cry. Though I will hate myself
for not crying. When my mother dies,
if I am still alive, I will slouch
on my knees as though in prayer, I will
write one or two poems, then I will
no longer think of her.
MSP PHI LGA ALB PHI MSP
How miraculous that we all
keep our shit together. How miraculous
that no one has a premonition of flames
and tries to open the cabin door. The airline
pilot next to me keeps his eyes closed
during takeoff and landing. He does not
drink anything. I have an orange juice
with no ice. I want to watch the horizon
as it gets farther away. This man
might just be smarter than me, but he is also
flying coach and reading the sports section
while I do crosswords, so he is probably
still smarter than me. Pretension
can look like intelligence if you squint
hard enough or wear glasses. There are,
for some reason, always Buddhist monks
in the Philadelphia airport. Buddhist monks
rewrapping their robes. This is my sixth time
in this airport. My sixth time because of two
different women. I have paid probably
a couple thousand dollars for the privilege.
Five cheesesteaks. Surprisingly good caramel
popcorn. Maybe thirty hours, five just trying
to find outlets. How miraculous that I can go
basically anywhere. How miraculous, the doors,
the wings, the recycled air. How miraculous,
flight is just a fall that never finds the ground.
Ballad of the Bruised Lung
Many things happen in your life that shouldn’t:
the black spot that grew into cancer, the sub compact
that just could not wait to meet you; maybe things do
happen for a reason but that reason is stupid. Maybe
your brother fell out of a window only because
he’s an asshole. I love you, but I can’t keep
letting you show up where I am and remind me
of what I said to you all those times
I was drunk that one time. Most of them were just
hurtful nonsense, but I am proud of “You are like
a comet: every so often you come around
to fuck up my shit.” In a perfect world, all the towns
in Illinois would be named “Blood” so I could
no longer pick out yours on a map. When you’re dumb
enough for long enough, you’re gonna meet someone
too smart to love you, and they’re gonna love you
anyway, and it’s gonna go so poorly. It must be
odd for our mutual friends who like me more
but think you were right. To say I hate you would imply
a world in which I kissed more than your stomach. Look,
we’ve established that I’m a jerk, so let me say this:
I am a flat tire and you are a pothole full of lug nuts.
I am a pile of bricks and you are holding a sledgehammer,
which is to say I would not exist without you.
Joey
Joey always told me, laughing, as though
it were actually a joke, that he wanted
to kill himself but it was never the right
time. There were always groceries
to be bought and little brothers
to be tucked in at night. Don’t worry.
Joey isn’t going to kill himself
twenty more lines into this poem. That’s not
the kind of story I’m telling here.
Joey got a promotion and now he can
afford Prozac. Joey is Joe now. Joe
is a cold engine in wh
ich none of the parts
complain. Joe is a brick someone made
out of fossils. If you removed money
from the equation, Joey would have been painting
elk on cave walls. People would have fed him
and kept him away from high places
because goddamn, look at those elk. I think
that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill
aren’t just related, they are the same
gene, but try telling that to a bill collector.
We were 17, and I drove us all to punk shows
in a station wagon older than any of us. We were
17 and I bought lunch for Joey more often
than I didn’t. We were 17 and the one time Joey
tried to talk to me about being depressed
when someone else was around, I told him to
shut the hell up and asked if he needed to change
his tampon. You know that moment when the cartoon
realizes he’s taken three steps off the cliff
and he takes a long look at the audience
like we are carrying the last moving box
out of a half-empty house? Joey looked like that
without the puff of smoke. He just played
video games for a half hour and then went home. Once
I found Joey in my dad’s office, staring at the safe
where he knew we kept the guns. Once Joey
molded his car into the shape of a tree trunk
and refused to give a reason why. I once caught
Joey in Biology class staring at his scalpel
like he wanted to be the frog, splayed out,
wide open, so honest. There’s one difference
between me and Joey. When we got arrested,
bail money was waiting for me at the station.
When I was hungry, I ate. When I wanted to
open myself up and see if there really were
bees rattling around in there, my parents got me
a therapist. I can pinpoint the session
that brought me back to the world. That session
cost seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars
is two weeks of groceries. It’s a month of bus fare.
It’s not even a school year’s worth of new shoes.
It took weeks of seventy-five dollars to get to the one
that saved my life. We both had parents that believed
us when we said we weren’t ok, but mine could afford
to do something about it. I wonder how many kids
like Joey wanted to die and were unlucky enough
to actually pull it off. How many of those kids
had someone who cared about them but also
had to pay rent? I’m so lucky that right now
I’m not describing Joey’s funeral. I’m so
lucky we all lived through who we were
to become who we are. I’m so lucky I’m so—lucky.
Our Numbered Days
They dreamt not of a perishable home.
William Wordsworth
July is gone like the gasoline it took to make the circle again: Florida to Florida by way of America.
Laura Jane Grace
All that brooded,
ignorant in your safe arms, concluded.
Ruth Stone
Home is wherever people know our stories.
Sam Cook
The worst lie is to say good-bye.
Where are you going that I won’t follow?
Calvin Forbes
Home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.
Anthony Burgess
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
Philip Larkin
In the past ten years, I have seen
my father perhaps ten times, and while
that is almost certainly an exaggeration
it tells the truth of this story: my house
only felt like a home underwater, in floods;
my father was an astronaut because to me
stars or the distant flashing of satellites
seemed closer than wherever he was;
when I hear a Jeep outside, I think
it might be him, come to get me.
Snow Theory
When you hear the phrase Winter Weather Advisory
you imagine a guidance counselor and snow
that is unsure what it wants to do with its life,
don’t you? Don’t you see skills tests
about its life before it rebecomes
water? The name plate on the counselor’s
desk reads Felipe Rios. Señor Rivers,
as Snow calls him, has a constant supply
of green highlighters. No one knows
how he gets them, because rivers can’t walk
to the store or be guidance counselors,
duh. If snow can drift, so can leaves
and dust and responsibilities. You can have
a light dusting of feathers. Snow is a sentient being
that hates when people drive in straight lines. Snow is
migratory. Snow is a dog that wants
all the sidewalks to be covered
in salt. Snow therefore is a happy dog.
Imagine if fire extinguishers were full
of snow. Imagine the fun we could have.
Unsolicited Advice to Minnesota Children
Listen here, you little shits. You are growing
up in one of the most beautiful places
on earth. Everything here is all decked-out
elk and the imperial majesty of winter
and you ingrate children of the snow
spend all your time in “classes”
learning about “things” that will teach you
nothing about ice skating on the bones
of your enemies or lighting moose
on fire or felling fir trees
the beaver way or how to make friends
in a blizzard which is with a shovel.
What I’m saying is, it’s beautiful
as a mushroom cloud out here, and by the time
your grandchildren can enjoy it, it’s all going
to be a tepid ocean anyway, so whatever
you do, put some of it inside your head before
it’s gone. It’s all yours, you bastards. It’s all yours.
Fabric Swatches, Paint Samples
As you can already see, everything is fucked.
Paul Guest
I will, in all my hereditary optimism,
try to be honest my dear, not just
about where I am and particularly
with whom, but also where I am in the vast,
melodramatic plane that is my feelings
and where I have placed you
and how exactly to cross
the Stupid Desert to find me.
There is quicksand in the Stupid
Desert that I call my exes—they don’t
hate you but, my darling, they also
do not know you, which is not to say
I don’t speak of you, because I do,
I do, to my therapist
who I fired, to the women
at bars and at work and
at Roller Derby bouts who confuse
me for an exit sign, darling,
I use you, yes, to feel secure or loved,
or like a tire wrapped in chains,
so let us say at least that I do not
use you abnormally. All of this
is to say that, should you move here
to live with me and the mental
disorders I call friends and mental
disorders, I will not lie to you. The sea
is so wide and our boat is so small.
Bystander Paralysis
It is, as it turns out, very difficult
to get Ikea
furniture into the trunk
of a subcompact. Harder still
when you are a middle-aged woman
who I theorize does not work out (not
because she is a woman or middle-aged,
but because she is screaming “Curse
these weak, beautiful arms!”) and your son,
who I guess is my age, is sitting
in the front seat staring at what I hope
is his phone. The corners of the box
are becoming quite sad. I am,
as I said, probably her son’s
age. I am not helping her
because that would be like
asking her to adopt me and I already
have a mother who I don’t
call enough. Maybe her son
doesn’t have legs. Maybe he does
but that doesn’t change the fact
that his mother is a huge jerk. I am not
helping because I have already
assumed so much, and I would rather
let her suffer than be wrong.
Not Dead
In the bar, before the lights
are on but after all the rails
are clean. In the station wagon
I learned to drive then wrecked. In
the morning, always in the morning.
In the basement of that tea shop
that, for some reason, employed
both of us. In the neighbor’s yard
on Halloween. In the middle school,
high school, and community college
boiler rooms. In a snow plow,
once. I should have been saying “goodnight”
and fucking meaning it. I should have
been in my kitchen and not that kitchen
where my arms were way too long
to be arms, or in the coffee shop,
or the other goddamn coffee shop, or in
the street when it had just started
snowing. When I say I’m on my way
I probably mean it, I probably
want to die less than I say I do,
but who knows, the statistics
are sporadic at best. I’ll say I love
you when I actually love you.
We are in your mother’s house
and I guess I want to be here. There’s no
reason not to, I guess. I guess
I’d rather be tattooing a bunch of triangles
on myself or ordering a steak
at an Indian restaurant or setting
all my shit on fire, but none of those
are currently reasonable options. If anyone
is gonna kill me, it should be me. No,