Poetry

You Trip Me Up

by

David McLean

some feeling trips me up
but it is nameless
still, it is silent
and doesn’t like definition

it is called sorrow and grief
or anxiety, Angst for the
pretentious, who name their
vague unease thus;

but it is the rain on the window’s
pain, it is the sky that is
grayest when most blue, it is
not the news but what it tells me
that i am really not listening. it is a
restriction and everything we missed,
the mounded attention over the graves
they rest in, our fathers,

it is that the past retreats
and it si the diffuseness of meaning,
it is words that will not propose
but fall apart,

it has something to do with the heart.
it is the painless razor and the drugs,
the obscenity of grief’s defective
rejection, it is far too much

the meaninglessness that buggers us
like licking a dead nipple it is
and we are cripples, death’s touch
our only love.