When Hope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems is about how relationships form and dissolve in the most unlikely of places, how the old wars of the heart bemuse and confound. In the twilight world where nothing fails to sink below the horizon and everything depends on a fragile peace, people loose and find themselves after the fact. Love rescinded demands brutal answers to complicated questions, and hate diminishes and returns with renewed vigor. Combining a restless brew of honesty, anger and irony, Hughes has created a stark world with frightening and beautiful writing.
When Hope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems
John Hughes
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2005 John Hughes
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Cover photograph by John Hughes
Table of Contents
The Silence of the Storage Units
The Transcendental Love Machine
Captain of the You Know What You Know You Know
When the Deputy Deputy Boss Called
Out of Date I Want to Touch Somebody
It Is Not What You Feel It Is What You Cannot
The Psalms Songs of Peter and I (A Modern Take on Leonardo)
Simple Complications
I give you this because nobody seems to listen.
I give you this because I do not listen to myself.
I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.
I can see you listening.
I try to see you lying in your bed or sat at a table
Or sitting in your familiar place.
The streets are still with constant movement,
The air alive woven with silence.
I give you this because nobody seems to listen.
I give this you because I do not listen to myself.
I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.
I can hear you breathing.
I know you are listening.
There is love in your heart but you don’t know what love means.
There is love in your soul but you don’t know what soul means,
The air dead swollen with violence .
I give you this because nobody seems to listen.
I give this you because I do not listen to myself.
I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.
I come from innocence.
I navigate through bitterness.
I show you whores and wastrels and charlatans and fools.
I show you how the heart is squandered in its search for peace
And the only witness is you.
I give you this because nobody seems to listen.
I give this because I do not listen to myself.
I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.
I can hear your loss because I come from loss.
I cannot escape my loss or my hopes.
There is hate but it has not won.
There are trophies but they are fleeting
And as with triumphs our frailties plagued dwindle.
I give you this because nobody seems to listen.
I give this because I do not listen to myself.
I give you this because we betray lies and that is a slow burning death.
The Silence of the Storage Units
I think about all those yellow doors.
What is it that we keep padlocked
Inside the deserted corridors of those rented
Spaces that has been thought useful once
So it will be of worth again?
Nightly swallowed by artificial strip lighting
I peddled my Norwegian bicycle back and forth,
The concealed belongings of lives passed by,
Years of conversation sent into a blackened mouth.
Had my possessions been able to speak
They might have preached more about misunderstandings;
The question of where we vanish to been clearer
Than it was on those days when the sun’s face
Seemed cloistered beneath a fusty cowl.
That summer of sorrow I was marooned
In the wake of the bitter odyssey,
The yellow doors shattered moons whose steel
Shards had dug deeper into estranged silence.
I willed the future’s agape mouth to hurry up and swallow,
I willed not having the bottle to care for the world
So that in the corkscrew scheme of things
My yellow door held back the old inside for the future
And the future for the outside old.
I tried to hear my key finally turning in the unit’s lock,
Afraid that in mine I would have found nothing.
Back and Forth
I used to think fog was the worst and that made you useless as a pole
But as my smoking cigarettes burnt through the night, your rubber soul
Swung like Tom Waits sings of diamonds. Turned on throughout
The lonesome nights, off during the crazy days, the small arms in, out,
Your straight backs could have arced the globe. But what did I know
Flicked at random from red stop, unsteady amber and green go?
I heard you revered tunnels designed with your own precision.
It could be argued it has something to do with short-sighted vision,
That the way that you can beat, beat, beat back the heaven’s rain
And wipe away the watery tears of years collects the sky’s pain.
You tend to scratch behind the scratch too with the claws of a cat.
But with the time that we were brought together spent, I fell for what
I used to think was around the corner, trapped like a dreaming
Schoolboy in daydreams, unsure of girls, still learning
How to trace the fall that the sun takes. With the to and froing,
Slippery as a David Byrne psychotic, you pitched into growing
Blooms in barren ground. Seeing through you now only underscores
The frugal days when you proved distance is only a measure of deep scars.
Kafka and Marquez
In the warped solitude of the avenidas’ squalor,
In the shuffling footsteps scrapping on icy cobbles,
Amid the raucous partying
Let us return to our desks,
Think a keyboard a duvet,
The mouse a pillow
And sleep on them as if they are feathered beds.
Let us offer to the people that which can’t be thought real
Until we answer with paint and books.
Chateau de Germigney
The sun went in eyes opening to the dream that it was,
The dream that it would be.
Eat the rich, he said,
I don’t watch T.V., she replied,
Food jams building inside intestines.
Bed time, they said,
Cognac? she asked,
So we can be by fire and the stuffed hog, he said,
Eyes opened to the dream that it was,
The dream that it would be.