Jeffrey McDaniel Quotes

The Quiet World
In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table - would there be any trace of me?

I mean, have you ever imagined
the ocean is alive, and needs to tell us something important, and the only way it can talk
is by making waves crash, and we just lounge there, drenched in cocoa butter, on towels
with crappy novels and volleyballs, sipping spritzers, as the ocean uses all its strength to repeat
the same warning over and over?

When you were sleeping on the sofa I put my ear to your ear and listened to the echo of your dreams. That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships. I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you and ask them the questions I would ask you. Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke rising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don't wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms.

I want to whisper poetry into your mind and imprint love letters to your soul and dance with you in an empty white room of potential

Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

The Everlasting Staircase"
Jeffrey McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while world war II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man --

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll

I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,
the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.
I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.

I wish slitting the wrist of the clock
would let this moment last forever –
your tongue so deep in my ear
it feels like a paintbrush, coating
the dark, peeling walls inside my head
with a carmine veneer.

I graduated first in my class from alibi school.

We didn't deny the obvious,
but we didn't entirely accept it either.
I mean, we said hello to it each morning
in the foyer. We patted its little head
as it made a mess in the backyard,
but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed up
at our bedroom door, in its pajamas,
unable to sleep, in need of a hug,
and we just stared at it like an Armenian,
or even worse - hid beneath the covers
and pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.

Once I thought I found love, but then I realized I was just out
of cigarettes.

I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,

but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.

I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers

from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal

pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue

ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror

over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted

in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep's clothing

and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord

around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u

and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels

and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I'd jump off the roof of your office building

ju

Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.
Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.
But for me it does-I walk down the street
and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry
eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math.

I swallowed a hand grenade that never stops exploding.

I've had the wind knocked out of me, but never the hurricane

Sometimes I hate this language with its false words like sunset. The sun does not set. It doesn't rise either. It just stays there in one place, yet we get all romantic, huddling on beaches to watch its so-called departure, when it is we who turn away from it, which is a good thing-if the sun could turn, it would never come back, it'd just keep going, look for some better planet to nourish.

Moonlight is another lie. It's a luminescent echo. The moon is a politician whose speeches are written by the sun. I long for a world where witnesses in court must place their hands on a dictionary when they swear. A world where an archer must ask an arrow's permission before loading it into a crossbow. A world with inverted flashlights that shoot out beams of darkness, so you can go to the beach and sabotage sunbathers, rob them of their shine.

A world where people eat animals they wish to emulate. But who the hell am I? I'm just the spark from two people who rubbed their genitals together like sticks in a forest one October night because they were cold. I'm just burning the firecracker at both ends. Every morning I get up and swallow my weirdness pills.

I know the glass is half full, but it's a shot glass, and there are four of us, and we're all very thirsty. I know it's easy not to cry over spilled milk when you've got another carton in the fridge.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women - those you write poems about

and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction

lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast

as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,

as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long

regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

of a candle being blown out tr

It's like escaping a hot, bright room
for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow.
People eliminated. A carpet of silence
for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming
a pleasant dream of itself. The itch
of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends
a chill vanishing between vertebrae.
It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if
clocks will pause for a moment
before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny
freckles on the face of a century.
Where is the constellation we gazed at each night
Through a bill rolled so tight
the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs
literally unraveled? I am alone
in the rectangular borough in the observatory,
where even fire trucks can't rescue
the arsonist stretching his calves in my brain.

If you heard your lover scream in the next room
and you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood.
You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say,
'Darling, are you OK? '
No, you'd wrap your arms around his shoulders
and worry about the pinkie later.
The same holds true if you heard the scream,
ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm.
But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room,
and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body.
Which do you rush to and comfort first?