Find Learn Become: A Poem by Tommy Sheffield

by Tommy Sheffield

Overview

A poem about the death of the American dream.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491775196
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/07/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	977 KB

Read an Excerpt

Find Learn Become

A Poem

---

By Tommy Sheffield

iUniverse

Copyright © 2016 Tommy Sheffield
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7518-9

---

CHAPTER 1

I. Fire

realize mortal life pure.
And then it all happened, helping me to the man that I am. To me, is
feel like terrible death wretched.

Burning skin turns raindrops tepid. This world is something I cannot endure.

Man / Mine / Others / I / We / She / You / Marissa / They / Heather / Anne / Us

are all dying. Everyone is dying.

I live to be nothing But who am I I'm just a A broken Viciously Laughably
more than my name. to complain? stain. pane. tame. sane.

are forgotten hopes
We almost our
have amongst dreams


(Static.) (Realization.) (Denial.)


Look, stands much! do you listen hear ?
there too
Oh, how to as it burns away in front of you
Where again, few! it hurts love !


Come close to our folly.

When pyre fight all to smile while I around him.
a must for things at wonderfully
Soon man light good, to gaze die look away.


"I am hurt." He gives me a lecture. "I feel pain." He gives me pills. Like you know
what it's like. There are no words left to express what is severe. We live in extremity.
We bask in longevity. Nothingness is a fearful imagination we avoid at all costs.
Surrounded with comforts, you know nothing of pain.

Now imagine your entire family, dying all at once.
Two kinds of love, severed to nothing.

I sunlight your
This fear,
think through lips to its fingers
the clouds smile in are gripped
world and its WAKE. round my
of you dusk.
UP. You, chest, to
darling. The trembling smother the
You rain, heartbeat, love we
brought it stopped HOLD. held stubborn
me for
ON. too long.

The lights of my life will be lost forever.

II. Mend

Chris,

I heard about the fire. Words cannot express how sorry I am for your loss. Your sister and I have readied the guest bedroom for you to come stay for as long as you need. We'll be by your side by tomorrow night at the latest, so hold tight until then. We've been praying every day for your speedy recovery. Your Mom put your family's name in the church prayer book, and Father Preston has offered to come visit you, if you'd like. Can't wait to see you.

Your brother-in-law, Peter

A fragmentation of consciousness began my spiral. To let the wind, with its crisp deception, funnel me into enmity and madness. I had once thought, a couple years ago, that I had finally made it. I had braved the adolescent mystery and emerged victorious into adulthood. I had found love, however fleeting it was, and had even started going back to church, so my girls could brave the mystery better than I. My poor girls. You, incarnadine devil, slippery Satan; you, who ripped down the walls of my sanity, burned the temple of my faith, and cast my heart into conflagration — you will regret tempting my spirit; taunting my fervor. You dangled perfection before me, laughed in my face, and burned my heaven to the ground. How cruel. To leave a man alone in a world that turns, despite the deaths of his daughters, or his wife, the green majesty of nature itself reinforces the torment. Oh! To be alive is torment. To not have been taken in the fire. To have watched it. To have heard it. To have felt its red hot fingers, slicing through sizzling skin. I am a ghost among men, blind to the beauties of the world. I hang, from a fearful gallows, smothered and suffocated by the roped smoke of suffering. Below my feet, I see the rising flames, but this cruel world, which has hunted my idealism to extinction and wrenched the color from my vision, refuses to let me fade easily from existence. It has locked me in isolation, a ghost among men, floating alongside hearts that still hold passion, like a shirt at the dry cleaners: racked, rotating, repetitive, residual, and reminiscent of past humanity. I have nothing upon which I can place the blame, so I inherently blame myself.

(Struggle)(Rest)(Repeat)

The days pass without meaning. My sense of place and time blends into a confused conglomerate of memories I try to remember, and those I try to forget. Times, dates, all forgotten after the funeral.

hold love alive death difficult.
I true is and is too
believe he a lie life easy.

I went to my bank to withdraw from the ATM.
I don't usually go into the bank; people tend to wince at my face.

Even so, I'd never have done different. Even if the interminable strength of the
entirety of the universe held my feet to the ground, I'd still have destroyed
my hands clawing at the earthen clay to halt my wife's screams.


take shivers
Remember?
Please my away
Good.
warm name
That's why it hurts.

We used to snuggle under the covers until the sea of our bodies settled to the still waters of sleep.

tear the world today
a in of outweighs
care the seam tomorrow

[We know what makes us better.]
[We do what makes us worse.]

till lose them
Love today tomorrow.
them ends



I be
where can't a good day. And I'm beginning to lose track of what's real.
there have


Forgive
point
me for

asking
the
but what

happens

when we

die?

to

"You finally stretched your feet and
ghosted away from me, you had to fade away,
you had to leave, I'm pleading for one more time
with what I know now, I'm begging for the same flake
to fall twice for the first time, I'm begging for what wasn't said.
That night the snow shaped the land, and I walked home,
I laughed the whole way because I suppose
if it hurts, it's worth it, but now that ghost is me."

I go,

— Pianos Become the Teeth,
"I'll Be Damned"

wherever

And shouldn't you be here, with me?

Or maybe here?

Because now
me
no of your around one more.
one jokes me
I live for those.
Just makes tell anymore,

I miss them, yes, I miss them so. follows

Each caskets, seats they haunt down.
empty three in all, me
These seat, caskets they tear thoroughly.

it
I to burnt
watch express with
and how mine,
I it my
wait felt clementine, but
and to spattered,
I feel blind,
wish her seared in
for flesh, my mind; pain
a absurd,
I must from
word melted; look away

* If mind
you don't following
me
around
for a bit more

I
like to
pace
when
their

faces
flood
my
mind;

forgive
my
awkward demeanor,
my
strange
lack
of zest,

But I've lost all that.

Please,
bear time.
with last
me the
again,
for
hopefully


There
well, see, no;
it was gone,
for a moment,

but now it's come back.

And won't I come back, is love s hit.
I say can't someone still this
But must they believe will reading face.

Thank you,
Still reading?
Please leave,
I welcome you
What are you, a sadist? I never liked you
into my soul.
I fucking doubt it. here with me anyway.

love you given, but a likeness.
You don't what are you've never felt
know comforts until lifelessness.

"My God. Look at him. The poor man. When he got home and realized his family was in the fire,
he ran into the house. The firefighters found him clutching his wife's burning corpse, if you can
believe it. See these markings here? You can actually see where her body rested in his arms."

III. Renunciation

a thought I
I thought
vision, had me; the end
a held plagued
I had
with under that feared
blends the semblance to
Fury water the remember
to in forgot,
drown and left me to pick at the damned
craters that riddled me to optimism.

At the peak of sunset, Apollo is at home.
I am at home in my home alone and I think I've worsened from it.
I eat meals with the three chairs in which the empty coffins of my memory sit.
Nine thousand dead words in the tomb of this tome.


day, shade, memory loss
the its the of follows
night, light, mimicry fire


I like to walk, through the park, but I keep from the playground.
The kids don't know how to react to my scars. And I'd rather avoid all that.


When back

I stepped in
first that church


Even there, They wouldn't But that My pain, Interpreted by the I can never smile
they dare baby stamped all most innocent without creating a
stared stare that over me, of all to be demented form of
at for cried when for all grotesque, my previous self;
me. long. looking at me. to see. with which I agree. no mirrors,
no photographs,
no memories.

"This is lies, this is bullshit. I resolve you with a trick of hand and a joke of sight."

— Pg. 99, "Hotel Nevada, 1982"

Cigarettes, whiskey, pot, painkillers, speed, coke, crack, meth, molly, ecstasy, horse tranquilizers, sniffed glues and gasolines, opium, acid, shrooms, salvia, peyote, DXM and the grape cough syrup that comes with it, PCP, heroin.

In that order, lay my past
two years. Even addiction
couldn't keep me sober
from their screams.

I synthesized Dipropanoyl morphine, a drug stronger than morphine and heroin, using propanic anhydride, a chemical unwatched by the DEA, to extract the substance, using a recipe I found on a forum written by an amateur who had admittedly researched using Wikipedia, and for about ten minutes, the heat that sweated my conscience, disguised by my creation, cooled to what I remember before the flames. I gambled with God that day but don't call me foolish for I knew my intent and the purpose of my risk was to ward off the remnants of my past that exist.

Needless to say,
the drug nor the risk imparted peace
upon me.

That prosthetic nose. The one the doctor gave me to wear.
It itches with a repetition that would shame a hummingbird's wing.

Sometimes

when I think no one can see,
I take it off and scratch where my nose used to be.

One time

when I did, a dog nearby attacked the monster he saw,
protecting his owner from the stench of imperfection.

Every time

I see bodies, going places, through the streets, in the park, on the subway;
I notice they managed to keep from disfigurement, and for that, I applaud them.

No time

not once, has another commented on my looks.
To praise would be preposterous and to insult would be sadistic,
so instead it remains unspoken, as if I had no appearance at all.


I am
a ghost
among men

Floating, a bag of bones, burns, and blood, copying those around it for hope of camouflage in its natural environment. It has adapted to social difficulties with even more aptitude. While most people genuinely smile, and wave, and meet others gladly, this specimen has found a way to blend in soundly with short, finite conversations that shun the shy and weird out the outgoing. Not overtly abrasive, but distanced, distracted, as if nothing could garner its full attention.

I tried many times, over the course of this study, to revive his spirit. I told him the usual: "time heals all wounds," "God has a plan," "we're in this together," bullcrap.

It's all bullcrap and bullhonkey.

All the things they do to

make you better seem
to make
me

worse.

would say am sound you saw me last, leave me be,
You
I more when can *
don't know that sleep than my dreams
I have peace, please?


instead of closure, that are gone.
*but, now they
it seems
I and can't do that.


Love's virginity tempted me to commitment, betrothal, and procreation.

It kept me close, slit my throat, and tossed me into the river.

I will die a virgin to its majesty.

I reached into the clouds and ripped out their tears.

How foolish of me.

They rained down on my soul, who, soaked in water, I hung to dry outside.
When the vicious winds, in all their glorious indifference, swept away the animus of my being,

I was left, bereft, to walk this planet
a ghost among men.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Find Learn Become by Tommy Sheffield. Copyright © 2016 Tommy Sheffield. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---