A History Of Silence

1. Sheldon decided he was an elephant.

2. Everywhere he went, he wore a gray t-shirt, gray sweat pants, and gray basketball shoes.

3. He also carried a brass trumpet that he’d painted white.

4. Sometimes he used that trumpet as a tusk.

5. Then he’d use it as the other tusk.

6. Sometimes he played that brass trumpet and pretended it was an elephant trumpet.

7. Every other day, Sheldon charged around the reservation like he was a bull elephant in musth.

8. Musth being a state of epic sexual arousal.

9. Sheldon would stand in the middle of intersections and charge at cars.

10. Once, Sheldon head-butted a Toyota Camry so hard that he knocked himself out.

11. Sheldon’s mother, Agnes, was driving that Camry.

12. Agnes did not believe she was an elephant nor did she believe she was the mother of an elephant.

13. And Agnes didn’t believe that Sheldon fully believed he was an elephant until he knocked himself out on the hood of the Camry.

14. In Africa, poachers kill elephants, saw off the tusks, and leave the rest of the elephant to rot.

15. Ivory is coveted.

16. Nobody covets Sheldon’s trumpet, not as a trumpet or tusk.

17. On those days when Sheldon was not a bull elephant, he was a cow elephant.

18. A cow elephant mourning the death of her baby.

19. In Africa, elephants will return again and again to the dead body of a beloved elephant.

20. Then, for years afterward, the mournful elephants will return to the dead elephant’s cairn of bones.

21. They will lift and caress the dead elephant’s ribs.

22. By touch, they remember.

23. Sheldon’s twin brother died in the first Iraq War.

24. 1991.

25. His name was Pete.

26. Sheldon and Pete’s parents were not the kind to give their twins names that rhymed.

27. In Iraq, an Improvised Explosive Device had pulverized Pete’s legs, genitals, ribcage, and spine.

28. Sheldon could not serve in the military because he was blind in his right eye.

29. In 1980, when they were eight, and sword fighting with tree branches, Pete had accidentally stabbed Sheldon in the eye.

30. When they were children, Sheldon and Pete often played war.

31. They never once pretended to be killed by an Improvised Explosive Device.

32. Only now, in this new era, do children pretend to be killed by Improvised Explosive Devices.

33. Pete was buried in a white coffin.

34. It wasn’t made of ivory.

35. At the gravesite, Sheldon scooped up a handful of dirt.

36. He was supposed to toss the dirt onto his brother’s coffin, as the other mourners had done.

37. But Sheldon kept the dirt in his hand.

38. He made a fist around the dirt and would not let it go.

39. He believed that his brother’s soul was contained within that dirt.

40. And if he let go of that dirt, his brother’s soul would be lost forever.

41. You cannot carry a handful of dirt for any significant amount of time.

42. And dirt, being clever, will escape through your fingers.

43. So Sheldon taped his right hand shut.

44. For months, he did everything with his left hand.

45. Then, one night, his right hand began to itch.

46. It burned.

47. Sheldon didn’t want to take off the tape.

48. He didn’t want to lose the dirt.

49. His brother’s soul.

50. But the itch and burn were too powerful.

51. Sheldon scissored the tape off his right hand.

52. His fingers were locked in place from disuse.

53. So he used the fingers of his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right hand.

54. The dirt was gone.

55. Except for a few grains that had embedded themselves into his palm.

56. Using those grains of dirt, Sheldon wanted to build a time machine that would take him and his brother back into the egg cell they once shared.

57. Until he became an elephant, Sheldon referred to his left hand as “my hand” and to his right hand as “my brother’s hand.”

58. Sheldon’s father, Arnold, was paraplegic.

59. His wheelchair was alive with eagle feathers and beads and otter pelts.

60. In Vietnam, in 1971, Arnold’s lower spine was shattered by a sniper’s bullet.

61. Above the wound, he was a fancy dancer.

62. Below the wound, he was not.

63. His wife became pregnant with Sheldon and Pete while Arnold was away at war.

64. Biologically speaking, the twins were not Arnold’s.

65. Biologically speaking, Arnold was a different Arnold than he’d been before.

66. But, without ever acknowledging the truth, Arnold raised the boys as if they shared his biology.

67. Above the wound, Arnold is a good man.

68.Below the wound, he is also a good man.

69. Sometimes, out of love for Sheldon and Sheldon’s grief, Arnold pretended that his wheelchair was an elephant.

70. And that he was a clown riding the elephant.

71. A circus can be an elephant, another elephant, and a clown.

72. The question should be, “How many circuses can fit inside one clown?”

73. There is no such thing as the Elephant Graveyard.

74. That mythical place where all elephants go to die.

75. That place doesn’t exist.

76. But the ghosts of elephants do wear clown makeup.

77. And they all gather in the same place.

78. Inside Sheldon’s ribcage.

79. Sheldon’s heart is a clown car filled with circus elephants.

80. When elephants mourn, they will walk circles around a dead elephant’s body.

81. Elephants weep.

82. Jesus wept.

83. Sheldon’s mother, Agnes, wonders if Jesus has something to do with her son’s elephant delusions.

84. Maybe God is an elephant.

85. Sheldon’s father, Arnold, believes that God is a blue whale.

86. Some scientists believe that elephants used to be whales.

87. Sheldon, in his elephant brain, believes that God is an Improvised Explosive Device.

88. Pete, the dead twin, was not made of ivory.

89. But he is coveted.

90. If Jesus can come back to life then why can’t all of us come back to life?

91. Aristotle believed that elephants surpassed all other animals in wit and mind.

92. Nobody ever said that Jesus was funny.

93. Then, one day, Sheldon remembered he was not an elephant.

94. Instead he decided that Pete was an elephant who had gone to war.

95. An elephant who died saving his clan and herd.

96. An elephant killed by poachers.

97. Sheldon decided that God was a poacher.

98. Sheldon decided his prayers would become threats.

99. Fuck you, God, fuck you.

100. Sheldon wept.

101. Then he picked up his trumpet and blew an endless, harrowing note.

More more more to come! Here’s a sneak peek of my upcoming fall tour!

September 3^rd, 2012
Feature @ Electric Truth
Baton Rouge, LA
 
September 5^th, 2012
Red Dirt Poetry Slam
Oklahoma City, OK
 
September 6^th, 2012
Write Club
Norman, OK
 
September 11^th, 2012
Austin Poetry Slam
Austin, TX
 
September 25^th, 2012
Da Poetry Lounge
Hollywood, CA
 
September 30^th, 2012
Portland Poetry Slam
Portland, OR
 
October 1^st, 2012
Bellingham Poetry Slam
Bellingham, WA
 
October 2^nd, 2012
Seattle Poetry Slam
Seattle, WA
 
October 10^th, 2012
Berkeley Poetry Slam
Berkeley, CA
 
October 11^th, 2012
The New Shit Show
San Francisco, CA

My new book, The Endless Return Home, can be purchased online here!

22 poems. Heartache. Some severed hands.

What you buried
did not stay dead.
Every drawer you open
is now a window to something sharper.
Clean and silver,
your father’s voice
follows you around the house,
childproofing your thoughts.
(She’s fine. We’re fine.
Don’t touch that. She’s out
of the ICU. Don’t touch.
There’s no need to come.
Don’t. We’ll survive.)
He’s hidden all of the bottles –
the ones that matter –
on the top shelf of his closet.
When he goes out
to smoke, you touch each
of their faces. Promises
you don’t intend to keep.
At night, you dream
of a Witch’s house –
the windowpanes filled
with tiny handprints –
a dying rose garden,
a trail of pills to lead you home.
An escape you are aware
you will someday take.
You spend each morning
digging in the yard,
your wrists thick
with plants that choke
everything around them.
A dozen graves to haunt.
We all die, we all break,
a promise is a promise, you’ll say.
Today is just a beginning –
a chance to say
all of the things you meant
to say. Tomorrow
is still just a ghost.
You must believe
in her first.

- © Carrie Rudzinski

*For National Poetry Month, the 4th poem in my attempt at 30 poems in 30 days.* 

Beltway Poetry Slam
7:30pm @ The Fridge (516 1/2 8th Street SE (Rear Alley)
Washington, D.C.
March 27th, 2012

Spotlight Feature at Sparkle 
9pm @ http://www.busboysandpoets.com/tickets.php
Washington, D.C.
March 28th, 2012 

The Fuze
8pm @ Infusion (7133 Germantown Ave)
Philadelphia, PA
March 30th, 2012

The Dirty Gerund
9pm @ Ralph’s Diner (148 Grove St)
Worcester, MA
April 2nd, 2012

Watching the news about Diallo, my eight year-old cousin, Jake,

asks why don’t they build black people

with bulletproof skin? I tell Jake there’s another planet, where

humans change colors like mood rings.

You wake up Scottish, and fall asleep Chinese; enter a theatre

Persian, and exit Puerto Rican. And Earth

is a junkyard planet, where they send all the broken humans

who are stuck in one color. That pseudo-

angels in the world before this offer deals to black fetuses, to give up

their seats on the shuttle to earth, say: wait

for the next one, conditions will improve. Then Jake asks do they

have ghettos in the afterlife? Seven years ago

I sat in a car, an antenna filled with crack cocaine smoldering

between my lips, the smoke spreading

in my lungs, like the legs of Joseph Stalin’s mom in the delivery

room. An undercover piglet hoofed up

to the window. My buddy busted an illegal u-turn, screeched

the wrong way down a one-way street.

I chucked the antenna, shoved the crack rock up my asshole.

The cops swooped in from all sides,

yanked me out. I clutched my ass cheeks like a third fist gripping

a winning lotto ticket. The cop yelled,

White boys only come in this neighborhood for two reasons: to steal

cars and buy drugs. You already got wheels.

I ran into the burning building of my mind. I couldn’t see shit.

It was filled with crack smoke. I dug

through the ashes of my conscience, till I found my educated, white

male dialect, which I stuck in my voice box

and pushed play. Officer, I’m going to be honest with you: Blah,

blah, blah. See, the sad truth is my skin

said everything he needed to know. My skin whispered into his pink

ear, I’m white. You can’t pin shit on this

pale fabric. This pasty cloth is pin resistant. Now slap my wrist,

so I can go home, take this rock out

of my ass, and smoke it. If Diallo was white, the bullets would’ve

bounced off his chest like spitballs. But

his execution does prove that a black man with a wallet is as dangerous

to the cops as a black man with an Uzi.

Maybe he whipped that wallet out like a grenade, hollered, I buy,

therefore I am an American. Or maybe

he just said, hey man, my tax money paid for two of the bullets

in that gun. Last year on vacation in DC,

little Jake wondered how come there’s a Vietnam wall, Abe Lincoln’s

house, a Holocaust building, but nothing

about slavery?  No thousand-foot sculpture of a whip. No

giant dollar bill dipped in blood.

Is it ‘cause there’s no Hitler to blame it on, no donkey to stick it on?

Are they afraid the blacks will want a settlement?

I mean, if Japanese-Americans locked up in internment camps

for five years cashed out at thirty g’s, what’s

the price tag on a three-hundred-year session with a dominatrix

who’s not pretending? And the white people

say we gave ‘em February. Black History Month. But it’s so much

easier to have a month than an actual

conversation. Jake, life is one big song, and we are the chorus.

Riding the subway is a chorus. Driving

the freeway is a chorus. But you gotta stay ready, ‘cause you never

know when the other instruments will

drop out, and ta-dah—it’s your moment in the lit spot, the barometer

of your humanity, and you’ll hear the footsteps

of a hush, rushing through the theater, as you aim for the high notes

with the bow and arrow in your throat.