B.J. Ward Quotes

From ragbag, stumblebum, peripatetic lout
To bonfire of catnip that burns itself out
Bristled sack of hiss & claws
Cinched at the maw

As children we learned our shadow
is a darkness we never totally shake
until we lie down, pull the shades,
draw the curtains, shut out the world,
and turn our own light out.

You better ignore this.
You better staple your eyes shut
and put pot-lids over your ears
and pinch your nose with vice grips
and cement your mouth shut
with real cement and while
you're at it or in it or whatever
cut off your hands for good measure

My fist is her flag still furled. Take the cannoli and leave the tuxedo - This is my jackleg opera to the world.

Leads to Bear Down
Bear Down
gives way to little crown
Crown concedes the Head
then Head produces All
Snip the fruity cord
little King begins to bawl
then grows bored
So begins his fall

A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.

As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?

The judge sentenced us to life
real, awake life
out of the jails we had been roaming in
life in prism
then started handing out fines
for parking too long.

Out in this profane city,
sometimes sidewalks
seem the only cement that connects us,
pressed by the sacred strangers
we will never touch.

In that house I built
a bonfire that illuminated
the fecund earth around it.
And in that split-level
my friend Tommy, only eight
teeth left in his whole head,
dug a huge illegal grave
to bury his father's packhorse.
He marched that sumpter
into the dark study
and shot its head on the left
so it would fall right.
That night, as if to argue
with the day,
Karen and I made love
on the front lawn of the mansion
one cul-de-sac down,
four feet away
from what would be
a window cracked
open to allow the outside
in.

These words are my mother's,
my father's, my brother's, my lender's, my garbage
man's - the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere.

I'd reconstruct Heaven, or usurp Hell
write till I swing open like a door hinge.
I arrive - a rogue who'd refurbish town.
I take my pen, begin to nail things down.

I wanted to shove her
away, thinking of my job, of headlines,
of how this kind of comfort was outside
the behavioral guidelines of my contract.
She began to sob more softly while holding me
tightly, and I let her. I let her have control
of me for that moment. I let her break
behavioral guidelines as more important ones
had been broken on her. And then we stopped
being student and teacher - just a couple people
at a loss when the powerful and unexpected
had been suddenly thrust upon us.
The principal and three students turned the corner
and stopped short. I knew it might be years
before I cleared my name, but far longer
for her to reclaim her life.

Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.