"I saw the best minds of my generation..."

I saw the best minds of my generation unable to get lost, measuring, adjusting, calculating, double  checking, always within an hour

Of an air mattress and a shower,

Always a message away from directions and a click away from the answers they

Always assume to be right, always found

Except when jeans are tight, when the music is loud, except when drinks are strong and lips are parted,

Except when the Teenage Dream with a real clumsy shave has dirt under his nails,

Dark blue in a crowded room,

Alone except for the buzz and beep and you always blink red even when the lights flash

Making your bones vibrate join the mob mentality

Always found because it burns and aches like breathing hard to think they cannot reach you for an instant as it would

Always be the second true love was confessed and flesh became more than flesh because in the back of your mind you

Always brushed your teeth and slept on fancy sheets so that in that internet intimacy you could be more than skin but that is all of what you are

Except if you are lucky someone will realize that you can bleed more than binary codes, Dynamite might be enough to ignite what your parents pretend you never because 

you don’t have letters on your skin or a trellis under your bedroom window and you always wear your watch, always because you have to –

You forgot where the sun rises and the moonsets so point of reference is a mess of screens, and too many letter screams

that way you seem on top of it when you give your firm handshake and direct eye contact, direct eye contact

Always when you expect them to choose you, then, always a cable knit sweater, maybe cotton, probably cashmere but never just 98% because then who would want to touch you?

Disintegrate

Forget every time I wear your necklace

Instead, bring to mind a memory

Remember when we were reckless?

Please, please, begin to liquidate

the first night of the now ordinary -

forget every time I wear your necklace.

We should learn to commemorate

what I wish was imaginary.

Remember when we were reckless,

before there was a tear to annotate,

before the kiss that made us secondary?

Forget every time I wear your necklace.

You managed to integrate

Passion and spite by breaking a boundary,

Remember when we were reckless.

You tore the sky I made to originate,

the moving of stars turned sedentary.

Remember every time I wear your necklace,

Forget when we were reckless. 

December 3, 2010 - The Book of the Dead Man (The Numbers)

The Book of the Dead Man (The Numbers)  by Marvin Bell

1. The first part of the poem, called About the Dead Man and the Numbers gives the impression that the poem will be about the logistics of death, rather than the emotional, philosophical side. The first two lines of the poem, "The dead man makes space for himself the way a soccer player moves to the place to be next," links the dead man to the game of soccer, and the next three lines are explaining the flow of a game. How the dead man anticipates the future and is sometimes significant and sometimes irrelevant, and always a step ahead of the current action.  Bell then goes on to say that the dead man, or his death, "stroke the embers of a failing thought" and inspire philosophical pondering of life and death.  The poet who is doing the questioning asks, and the next six lines of the poem seem to almost be a response from the dead man.  They all express a sense of abstraction, "a resonance to wrap one's mind around" except for the very last line which says that "It's what you do facing the guns" which is a mater of fact answer to the question "what it is to live as if one were already dead."  It is also the first time where "you" is used this opens a direct line of communication with the reader.

2. In Part two entitled More about the Dead Man and Numbers the very first line draws the reader in with a "we". The next few lines explore the disconnected nature between the dead man and his body and time.  It describes his "way of making the ephemeral last," creating long scenes on small moments while all the living in the world are struggling to get a first row seat. This is perhaps a comment on the inevitability of death.  The importance of death is further emphisized in the line, "The preacher offering a future world, the historian waxing nostalgic, and the dead man underwriting them is what it takes." Here Bell shows how it is death that motivates the living and questions what it is like to be the dead man "among shifting loyalties?". He concludes that it means living in the remnants of the present, accepting that you are going to die, and "finding space for when it will matter". 

This poem is effective because of the parallel structure it creates between the first and second part and the evolution of the poem over the course of these sections from broad and categorical to personal and individual.