Something Like Living, by Joe Boyle

Composition, by Alberto Burri (Italy), 1953.

 Something Like Living

If an oil painted portrait is a second hand reflection
a burlap sack is: the flatness of defeat
grafted textile imprisonment
startling sacchi

They must have said 
pointing at the bloody rips in the cloth
the sulfurous dust graining the corner
"Here is blood washing up on the shores of Tripoli
Mussolini's funeral shroud
the skin of a dead monster!"

But it is much more deliberate
necessary even
when One fingers the running stitches and crazy veins
One feels the tired vital signs
of a free man

We all make art from what we know
the pieces of our selves 
given by fathers jailers lovers and passersby
they are the things we know 
crowding out the light of our day
shouting us down
they threaten to topple us over
bury us

And you knew bandages
rough wool suits and laundry sacks
the necessary pieces of your self
to use anything more 
that's vanity

The scars of prison 
the shredded linen
and the aggressor
the inhumanity of men
I don't know this
I am still fully on the other side of the wheel
the slow upward ride of accumulation 
and satisfaction
                                You shake your head
if the victims ran the show
there'd be no one left to share the dark
tenuous stitches of our dizzy dreams
crooked smiles and cracked faces in the thread
you wouldn't have saved these scraps
from the bin

Everyone finds out 
what they are put together from
that they are not colourfast
some are only late to the show

In the worn out places
dirt clots in our scored surfaces
I can almost smell the sweet decay of earth there
almost see the gangly little flowers crawling through the cracks 
in our crumbled wall in early springtime

These remnants flicker and fade 
when I turn to look: patchwork quilts
and walls alike mean nothing in themselves
they exist obedient to their purpose
to settle for a quiet life longer than ours
stand against time
measure our ever changing now

To keep some things out
and some things in
and let very few things pass between
only a warm breath
a single strand from a pale silkworm
or the weedy green shoots of time

Joe Boyle

Joe Boyle earned his M.A. in creative writing at University College Dublin in 2013, where he edited the annual class anthology, Fault Lines. His thesis was a collection of poems called "The Innocents." He currently lives in Kent, Ohio, where he studies, reads and, at times, works. He can be found pushing pencils at an Akron block. He graduated from Kent State University in 2012, where he studied history, English and writing. Joe has been published online and in print in Bare Hands, We Are The Catalyst, Luna Negra, and the book for the 2012 Jawbone poetry festival in Kent, Ohio.