Tag: Poetry

Poetry

What it Means

As the Powerball lottery makes headlines again, climbing to a $1.5 billion payout, I thought I’d post this poem I wrote back in 2018, about the largest jackpot payout in history. It’s from my first book of poems, Figments.

To buy a ticket is to buy an opportunity not to win, because you won’t, but to dream about winning. To live for a few days with the thought that it might be you, out of everyone else, it might be you that’s chosen. And what kind of person, what kind of life would you lead then? You buy a ticket to think these thoughts.

What it Means


The poem tells you what it means
if you drove all the way to buy a lottery ticket
on the Californian border because
you never know about these things
and there’s a line because nobody’s won yet.
The payout is over a billion—Imagine that!
Imagine what you could buy with all that.
You have to remember you’re at the age
when you’ve started to feel as though
you might’ve missed out on something.
Whatever it is, a billion dollars should cover it.


You know there’s a better chance
of being struck by lightning. The news
keeps telling you that. But it doesn’t matter
because who wouldn’t want to be struck
by lightning and live to tell about it?
You’re assuming you’ll live because
you’re assuming the right kind will hit you
and not anyone else standing in a line that
outlines the parking lot of the Indian casino.
After all who wouldn’t mind
their greatness being thrust upon them?


It might as well be you, you’re decent,
and if you won you’d want your family
and friends to have some. You might
even give back to the community, who knows.
At any rate it would certainly be nice to lift
this weight off your back, whatever it is.
What you’d do with the money is less important
than what you imagine being chosen must feel like.
A world somehow faithful to your point of view.
For you require great significance to satisfy.
You must touch lightning bolts to live.

Poetry

Danse Macabre

The Danse Macabre was a trope in medieval times that showed up in a many different forms of art across Europe. It reminded the viewer of the universality of death. Skeletons were often depicted leading folks of all kinds to the dance, entreating them, reminding them that everyone dies, that death is inevitable.

It seems morose, but it’s hard to tell from the pictures that I’ve researched whether or not that was the intention the artists were trying to convey. The human subjects often don’t have definite expressions. They’re portrayed dispassionately, or sometimes confused, while the skeletons themselves are animated. The skeletons are having a good time, smiling, enjoying themselves. A grim joie de mourir.

The experience of social media often feels like this dance. The apocalyptic prophesying, and the fiddling while Rome burns, is enough to make one anxious. And the skeletons smiling all the while, inviting you to join. What else is there to do but dance along with them?

Danse Macabre

Emperor, your sword won’t help you out

Sceptre and crown are worthless here

I’ve taken you by the hand

For you must come to my dance

…

This is dope, and terrifying.

The center cannot hold.

The endless doom scroll.

I am called upon to bear witness

by the fetters of my phone,

to crowd out of existence

the solemnity of free time

and feel myself addicted.

It wants all of my attention.

It wants all of what I call mine.

Elsewhere I rinse the mind

in soporific bath waters of

infinite permutations of

entertainment. I sooth

the puling ego in the tepid

sink of hyper civilization.

And in my unallowed heart

I think, If only the rough beast

would turn and look at me!

It would not overthrow itself

like a madman his shadow

if it saw the beauty I see,

if it knew how beautiful

and unexpected I was.

It would fall in love with me

and I would change it

for the better. I would save

its soul with love, and the

worst of times would be done.

Robert Charboneau

Poetry

A Division of Tongues (I)

Some stanzas from a series I’m working on about the Tower of Babel and Solomon. From a section on the motif of the Division of Language in the Tower of Babel story.

The idea of language coming apart is a fascinating one no matter how you look at it: mythological, psychological, social, mental.

I have been trying to think through this idea that there is something that a word means and when it stops meaning it the word still exists and still acts as a label for that something which it’s not anymore. Sometimes new words are made for the occasion, but sometimes not. Sometimes words are borrowed to understand what they were never intended to. This is the problem of the sign and its referent, whatever that means.

Words are planted, and grow, and do not stop growing. When I mean words here I also mean phrases, ideas, thoughts, ways of thinking.

The problem of language
is the problem with
the engine stalling out
or the microscope
that cannot see
all the way down.

When there’s no other way
of saying something
we must say it
the way it sounds
though it may not be
how we meant it.

We’re locked tidally
to the manner of the
language that’s spoken,
just as we cannot know
beyond our science
without some hoping.

So build it up and out.
Fine tune instruments.
Build them large without
and more precise within,
so we can mean only what 
we mean, and no more then.

Tomorrow we cure
through technology
death and disease
and reverse entropy
by taking measurements
absolutely accurately.

Today we say something
knowing full well it is
not what we mean,
to know it ourselves,
so it may come to look
like what it seems.
Poetry

Lament of the Pharaoh’s Daughter in Summer

Part of a series I’m working on about some biblical stories.

The Pharaoh’s Daughter was the wife of Solomon. Solomon, king of Jerusalem, who desired wisdom above all else, had a harem of a thousand wives and concubines, a feat rivalled maybe only by Genghis Khan? I dunno, but it seems excessive. Apparently it was his love of women that ended up being Solomon’s downfall.

The Pharaoh’s Daughter is the only wife named in the story, although that’s probably not the name on her driver’s license.

Here she is, in a lament that owes a debt to William Carlos Williams’ The Widow’s Lament in Springtime, and to the story in Kings, and to my own misgivings about forgoing relationships in search of wisdom

Lament of the Pharaoh’s Daughter in Summer

Even when you are around
you’re not here. I may have
your eyes, at times, never
your ear. I have looked down 
the bottom of wells for you.
Asked sunsets what to do.

The sun in the afternoon
is muggy and unbearable.
Nor ice, nor dripping reeds
hung from windows will
cool, but the heat keeps me
from being able to miss you.

Only in evenings do I know
the same sorrow as widows
and a dying like the sun’s dying
going down again and again.
You’ve built magnificent houses
but do not know how to live in them.

When will your searching end?
When will this yearning ripen
into wisdom, that you may
be done with learning and
return to a family and to me?
O when, my love, O when?

Knowledge will not warm
a bed. It does not take children
to the park, or kiss a forehead.
Knowing will not sooth the morning
I wake and find you’ve left for good,
having understood some revealed truth.

Wilderness is all that knowledge
knows, and all that satisfies.
It ventures into woods unceasingly.
It strikes out to map and civilize
and breeds, in cities it leaves
behind, contemptuous familiarity.

Next to knowledge I am nothing
but a name, something to check
back on, to be reassured nothing
out of the ordinary has changed.
Only the same want for affection,
only desires, unfulfilled, remain.
Poetry

Extremely Online

You were trying to remind yourself

what it was you were doing on here.

Seeing if you saw yourself in each post.

You and the phone are two objects,

des atomes crochus, orbiting like

a binary of heavenly bodies:

what the screen shows you to be,

and what, in reality, you are.

At the barycenter, an identity.

What you were trying to get at

but which always seemed to be too far.

Now one of you is gaining mass

while the other is losing it

when you decide whether

to keep scrolling or to quit.