Free Collected Poems by C. K. Williams Page B

gutted and fixed the space between us and then a violent,
    almost physical loathing took me, for all I’d done to have ended in this place,
    to myself, to everyone, to the whole business we’re given the name life for.
    I could go on with this. I could call it a victory, an exemplary triumph, but I’d lie.
    Sometimes the universe inside us can assume the aspect of places we’ve been
    so that instead of emotions we see trees we knew or touched or a path,
    and instead of the face of a thought, there’ll be an unmade bed, a car nosing from an alley.
    All I know about that time is that it stayed, that something, pain or the fear of it,
    makes me stop the wheel and reach to the silence beyond my eyes and it’s still there:
    the empty wind, the white crosses of the renewers slashed on the doorposts,
    the last, dim layers of paint loosening from the rotted sills, drifting down.

Near the Haunted Castle
    Teen Gangs Fight: Girl Paralyzed By Police Bullet
    — Headline
    This is a story. You don’t have to think about it, it’s make-believe.
    It’s like a lie, maybe not quite a lie but I don’t want you to worry about it.
    The reason it’s got to be a lie is because you already know the truth and I already know it
    and what difference does it make? We still can’t do anything: why kill yourself?
    So here’s the story. It’s like the princess and the pea, remember?
    Where they test her with mattresses and a pea and she’s supposed not to sleep
    and get upset and then they’ll know she’s the princess and marry her?
    Except in this version, she comes in and nobody believes it’s her and they lay her down
    but instead of forty mattresses do you know what they lay her on? Money!
    Of course, money! A million dollars! It’s like a hundred mattresses, it’s so soft, a thousand!
    It’s how much you cut from the budget for teachers to give the policemen.
    It’s how much you take from relief to trade for bullets. Soft!
    And instead of the pea, what? A bullet! Brilliant! A tiny bullet stuck in at the bottom!
    So then comes the prince. My prince, my beauty. Except he has holsters.
    He has leather and badges. And what he does, he starts tearing the mattresses out.
    Out? Don’t forget, it’s a story. Don’t forget to not worry, it’s pretend.
    He’s tearing the mattresses out and then he’s stuffing them in his mouth!
    This wonderful prince-mouth, this story-mouth, it holds millions, billions,
    and she’s falling, slowly, or no, the pea, the bullet, is rising,
    surging like some ridiculous funny snout out of the dark down there.
    Does it touch you? Oh, yes, but don’t worry, this is just a fib, right?
    It slides next to your skin and it’s cold and it goes in, in! as though you were a door,
    as though you were the whole bedroom; in, through the backbone, through the cartilage,
    the cords, then it freezes. It freezes and the prince is all gone,
    this is the sleeping, the wrong-sleeping, you shouldn’t be sleeping,
    the so-heaviness in the arms, the so-heaviness in the legs, don’t sleep, they’ll leave you,
    they’ll throw you away … the dollars spinning, the prince leaving,
    and you, at the bottom, on the no-turning, on the pea, like a story,
    on the bullet, the single bullet that costs next to nothing, like one dollar.
    People torture each other so they’ll tell the whole truth, right?
    And study the nervous systems of the lower orders to find the truth, right?
    And tell the most obviously absurd tales for the one grain of truth?
    The mother puts down her book and falls asleep watching television.
    On the television they go on talking.
    The father’s in bed, the little gears still rip through his muscles.
    The two brothers have the same dream, like Blinken and Nod, like the mayor and the president.
    The sister … The sister … The heart furnace, the brain furnace, hot … hot …
    Let’s go back to find where the truth is. Let’s find the beginning.
    In the beginning was love, right? No, in the