“Not All Rivers Reach The Sea” And Other Poems by J. A. Nelson

J. Alan Nelson, a writer and actor, has stories, essays and poems published or forthcoming in journals. He received nominations for Best of Net and Best Microfiction. He played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld.”

Not all rivers reach the sea

Some never did.
Dams and drought killed others
as we enter this dry night
of humanity’s terrors
where our AI child
outthinks us
and robot dogs with guns
target us with thermal cameras.

We let food rot if the hungry can’t pay.
We make children have babies
and call it pro-life.
All these people die
as they alway do.

All these animals and insects and trees
and plants die as they always do.
We live on their bones and bodies.
We eat the dead
and in our turn are eaten
as we live in beauty
the dead bring us.

I see Laura Warren, I cry

I go to my office, close the door. I can not stop. She sees me run, win the Brazos River race. I see her at the news room in that long dead newspaper. She catches my look, sees the inadvertent reveal of my raw beating heart, all four chambers, that I fumble to yank back under cover with a cloddish jerk. Blood spatters on the desk, my clothes, the floor. I grow cold, my vision fades as she gently lifts my slowing heart, slips it back into my chest, reconnects the atria and the ventricles with tender fingers, then carries me outside as a freak blizzard hits. My vision clears, I see Laura as the thaw hits and the ice melts off my windshield in the parking lot, the light so diffused I see she is immortal, her long delicate arms and legs aslant. Her dark eyes peer with that indescribable look where everything else, myself included, fade into her background. The winds so high the car creaks and shifts as the warmth comes into the wild day so fucked up no one misses us despite the commitments we shattered. That was forty years ago. I trace the thick scar ridge on my chest. I gasp. I sob. I cannot stop.

The cost of living

I buy a lottery ticket each week
and light a match to it
before the numbers are picked.

My father was a pastor
a man with a doctorate in theology
who spent most of his life

gathering money like a miser
and hiding it,
suspicious of all.

I know I won a multimillion dollar
jackpot. I don’t claim it.
I don’t give a damn.

The dogs and cats remain to be fed.
The kids demand to be fed.
An end to all of us comes

tick by click by tock by clock
in this Derek Walcott flame.
I’ll remain who I am

even though time says
I’m transitory, ephemeral.
I don’t give a fuck.

Why miss the moment
with the frivolous lie
of money?

Is it me?

 You, in bliss, start to write letters to make words to describe a bliss that sometimes makes you close your eyes, and sometimes makes you open your eyes in surprise. The words spill forth. 
 Beware.
 There’s a monster that lurks in every blank screen, blank paper, blank wall, a tree you gouge out your lovers name where ever you can write or sound words out. The monster watches.
You know words contain all we know, but as you combine them you discover things unknown. When you work to pull that woman or man or asexual who holds your heart from that blankness beware the monster doesn’t follow. It was trapped there like Lucifer was cast to the earth, Cronos, castrated and chained in Tartarus with the sinning angels. Like Nimrod, babbling endless nonsense, understanding nothing, sunken in the eighth circle of the abyss as the disciple Peter, or his pseudepigrapher, wrote in his second letter. 
 Yet there is a worse monster. It is not a child of time but it understands, squeezes and warps the tiny cell of time Into horrors unimagined by placing word against word, breaking their meaning out like a gutted warrior, and restringing the guts to sing new, horrible words like a corrupt violin of frozen gore. It has learned that words can work like rungs on the side of an abyss to climb climb climb out of the gravity well it was cast. It brings dread, fear, terror and bad bleak nights of eyes that stare in agony at the unknown. 
  Be careful when you engrave the name of your love and the letters start to sound your love’s name you do not summon the monster. Oh god please don’t let the monster be me. Please don’t let it be me.

binge watch

I love to watch early midlife crises
run that A-Z gamut. Yep.
That same gamut you see
replays like an old show.
Mayberry or
Friends or Big Bang
or Game of Thrones or Squid Game
yet new to whoever.
It may be schadenfreude…
but no. It’s sadness
with snickers.

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