Full Description
Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings," and Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words' power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.
I hear the dinner plates gossip
Mom collected to a hundred.
My friends say get on board,
but I'm not bored. Dad's a nap
lying by the fire. That's why
when radios broadcast news,
news broadcast from radios
gives air to my kinship, Dickey,
who says he'd go dead if ever
I discovered him to them.
I took care, then, the last time
bedrooms banged, to tape over
the outlets, swipe the prints
off DVDs, weep up the tea
stains where once was coffee.
Not one seep from him since.
Contents
I hear the dinner plates gossip
A page writes me (my words blue
Stashed my secret name in its haven
If I think in yellow, I can remember
My notion of heaven? Um, plumb garden
The circulars blued under my eyes
It's not that I don't believe in God
Tsk tsk, go my wits, like a grandfather
Sweat no longer creeps me out
I feel as male as I feel female
My tongue-print's on your butter
Flirting from pokeweed, Dickey
I cut back on coffee. And air. And sky
‾
I was twin pencils. A fit in one sex
I'm speaking with my mother's voice
Dad. He plays dead, and his leash
Okay, here's what we did. Dad was a quark
Sieg Heil, Father, for the dammerang
Dickey said it's the "perineum"
Mother said you count your friends on one hand
Black cats ring bells. I'm your son
From the time he opened his mouth his talk was off
Mom and Dad made livings in Heaven
Parents are the nations that thrust you
‾
Dickey's death feels all over me
"He's gone," Mother Teresa told me
First I denied the no-seeums speckling
If the raw world left in me's red
I hear, in my phone, vocabulary where
Dear eyes, my ears keep paired for you
A finch in my chest flinches to get
Iris of the one-eyed Satan—see it?
I shake my head, my right brain's
Back on my wings, wings became me
Don't have to swim straight, dark says
‾
So I left my apartment, got down where
Damned if my thumbs-up, deadpan
When I saw her, her face was a marinade
I moved inside a movie about women
Noise-canceling paws at my ears
. . . nobody's safe inside the airtight zones
The Trimínos rent free in my head
They'll rant what's left of you
You say I'm in one of my highs
Your head meds serve my serfdom
Words next-to-last-next-to-last-next-to
Dickey my door, I'm seeing. Yesterday
I feel well, but keep hoping to get well
