Poetry Suite by Sean Patrick Mulroy
“to miss the field of yellow flowers
for the venom of its bees”
Poetry by Sean Patrick Mulroy
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"walk on"
Paul Newman comes to visit every morning
with the mail. Paul Newman is the mail man.
He brings you brown packages and sometimes little gifts—
candy bars and wildflowers,
foggy cans of coca cola, right out of the icebox. One time,
a shiny goldfish swimming in a plastic bag.
You shout, Mom! Paul Newman’s here!
so she will bring a cup of coffee to the door.
Maybe today Paul Newman will have time to come inside.
For this to work, he has to be just what the movies promised,
strong like the cowboy in the movies.
Maybe he brings you a cowboy hat.
He must have seen your favorite shirt
with the cowboy on the front.
He whistles, Hiya Champ! Is Mommy home?
through the screen door. He looks at you
with eyes like pale sunlight.
Now, let’s say Daddy
went away. Let’s say Daddy
went on a business trip
forever.
Let’s say Daddy went to war. On the moon.
What a hero daddy is.
Let’s say he’s dead.
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"picture of a lover at 19"
More hair, for one.
Dark waves of it pour over his face—
he’s smiling.
Lighter, somehow.
Undefeated.
To say that youth is arrogant
is to miss the field of yellow flowers
for the venom of its bees.
Besides, it is not only time
that ages us. Though years
can write upon our skin
with unseen knives,
some things must be stolen to be lost.
Look
at those eyes. Shining
like that.
It was a man. It must have been.
A man who
stole those eyes.
Replaced them
with the two lead bullets I have learned to kiss
only when they are shut.
I imagine that he keeps them
in a tinder box.
Only opens it at night to warm
his hands beside their weakling
glow.
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"the neighbor boy"
vague memories, circa 1993
In the living room, I stare at Zach Morris' bare chest on television. My briefs are tighter than the Gordian knot. His nipples are a light brown, shiny underneath the fake studio sun. My mom is asleep upstairs and dad is on another “business trip,” and so I sit and stare at the bottle blonde actor on the screen. He looks just like the neighbor boy, whose name is Nick.
Once, I overheard my mom say on the phone that before we moved to town, a man had grabbed Nick in the old woods near my back yard and then thrown a garbage bag over his head. The man was trying to take Nick somewhere, but then Nick fought him hard and he escaped and then the man was caught and went to jail but only for a little while.
Nick only came over to play one time. On the day he came to visit, I ran to the door and stared at him through the front window just like I stare at television. I wanted to see the boy a man had tried to capture. I wanted to see the boy a man had tried to take away, take away to a quiet place to touch his freckled back. I wondered if Nick was afraid to play out near the woods. I wondered if he thought the man might come for me someday and if he took me to his house, would there be television there? I wanted to ask what it was like to know that someone wanted you. Why he fought so hard to get away.
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"rough sex with strangers at 3:45 am"
the body isn’t a key to anything that actually opens.
sometimes, it’s a lock pick, but you have to turn it
in directions where it’s possible to break.
So, tonight, on my stomach, just this one time,
from behind,
because I don’t care what you look like,
or if I live or die.
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"brick the sky"
I know now what I want will never matter or become.
I know now what I want will not be what I have:
the body of a man, its troubled sleep,
the dozen fallen lovers, cursing
what they reach for,
me, and also not me.
I know when my life is over, I won’t have regrets
or maybe, I will have so many that I won’t
be able to pick out just one. They’ll be
an avalanche of white
and bitter pills, and I will hold them
in my mouth.
As for suicide, I know him as a train that will arrive on schedule.
If at that time I decide to climb aboard,
what of it?
I leave it to my life
and to my unseen god
to pull the spikes out of the tracks for me.
If I am to stay on earth I will
that something larger than my fear of the unknown
will hand me tools to build
a house that I’m reluctant to forsake.
Survival is a process of undoing.
Sometimes it’s a method of avoiding what is real,
when what I need is comfort.
Sometimes it’s a shade that’s drawn against the truth of light.
When most I need it to develop into shelter,
it becomes the opposite of rain.
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Sean is the author of “The Pornography Diaries,” a poetic study of love and sex as seen through the lens of media study and film analysis. Sean has performed his poetry in art galleries, literary festivals, concert venues, and universities in 10 countries and on 3 continents. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Bakery, Assaracus, Rua de Baixo, Neon, Moonshot, Side B, Union Station, Tandem, Frigg, Best Indie Literature of New England, Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and Ganymede. Sean currently resides in Western Massachusetts.