A Glance of Mathew Dickman Classical Poems Slow Dance Love

Best of Mathew Dickman Classical Poems Slow Dance Love 

I gladly present you some of the best poems from Mathew Dickman and before we start reading his beautiful poetry lets just revised some of His Background. Matthew Dickman (born August, 20th, 1975, Portland, Oregon) is an American poet. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Oregon (2001), and has been the recipient of fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is the author of two chapbooks, Amigos and Something about a Black Scarf. His first book, All-American Poem, was winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, published by American Poetry Review and distributed by Copper Canyon Press. He was also winner of the 2009 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for that book, and the inaugural May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

SLOW DANCE 

By: Mathew Dickman

More than putting another man on the moon, 

more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga, 

we need the opportunity to dance 

with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance 

between the couch and dinning room table, at the end 

of the party, while the person we love has gone 

to bring the car around 

because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart 

if any part of us got wet. A slow dance 

to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people 

rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant. 

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. 

It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting 

on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck. 

Your hands along her spine. Her hips 

unfolding like a cotton napkin 

and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky 

are dead. The my body 

is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody, 

Stairway to Heaven, power-cord slow dance. All my life 

I’ve made mistakes. Small 

and cruel. I made my plans. 

I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine. 

The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children 

before they turn four. Like being held in the arms 

of my brother. The slow dance of siblings. 

Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him, 

one of my great loves, he is absolutely human, 

and when he turns to dip me 

or I step on his foot because we are both leading, 

I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer. 

The slow dance of what’s to come 

and the slow dance of insomnia 

pouring across the floor like bath water. 

When the woman I’m sleeping with 

stands naked in the bathroom, 

brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit 

into the sink. There is no one to save us 

because there is no need to be saved. 

I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed 

the front yard. When the stranger wearing a shear white dress 

covered in a million beads 

comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, 

I take her hand in mine. I spin her out 

and bring her in. This is the almond grove 

in the dark slow dance. 

It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping 

for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance

Classical Poem

 By Mathew Dickman

I’m listening to a symphony where heroes and villains are still alive.

Not a soundtrack of soldiers parachuting into occupied Belgium

but spies in pinstripes. Not a dark forest

lit up by gunfire and the wild eyes of a lost elk

but a dark alley, a cobblestone alley, an alley where important

documents are being passed between the black leather gloves

of important men

near a window where a barmaid is pouring beer into dirty glasses.

It’s the kind of music to make love to

a tall skinny woman who works all day at the public library,

her breasts roaring like the two lions outside.

It’s what I imagine astronauts are listening to

inside their helmets

while they watch a new planet begin to spin,

and then another and another like notes from a cello until the night sky

looks like an aquarium,

full of the mystical and unreal. Space dust

floating through a dark channel, a movable space

relaxing into itself. I’ll tell you

the composer’s name is Valentin Silvestrov

and I know as much about him as the umbrella I bought yesterday

knows about me. The radio program

says that this is the music of existential metaphor, silent songs,

which I do understand. I have them all the time.

When I first saw your feet, for instance. The curve and bright white

of them. The time you walked into my room

wearing your father’s El Dorado hat and said

I am not my father. This is not his hat. Well, I thought,

you must be suffering

and it was life, the crestfallen drive-thru,

that was making you cry. But it was me.

And I’m no one in particular. I’m certainly not

Valentin Silvestrov living in ’80s Berlin, all the West like a giant carrot

dangling in the blue sky and Rilke’s angels

haunting him, following him

into the bathroom at night, waiting for him on the street

after someone the composer knew had died and it had, for this to be

  classical,

begun to snow. Heroes and villains killing each other in half

and quarter notes. Valentin putting on his greatcoat

with a rip in the lapel. Walking out toward the traffic. Walking home

and eventually laying down, like all of us, in the well-made, unbearable, bed.

Lens District 

by: Mathew Dickman

Whenever I return a fight breaks out

in the park, someone buys a lottery ticket,

steals a bottle of vodka, lights

a cigarette underneath the overpass.

I-5 rips the neighborhood in half

the way the Willamette rips the city in half,

it sounds like the ocean

if I am sitting alone in the backyard

looking up at the lilac.

This is where white kids lived

and listened to Black Sabbath

while they beat the shit out of each other

for bragging rights,

running in packs, carrying baseball bats

that were cut from the same hateful trees

our parents had planted

before the Asian kids moved in

to run the mini-marts

and carry knives to school, before the Mexicans

moved in and mowed everyone’s front yard—

white kids wanting anything

anybody ever took from them in shaved heads

and combat boots.

On the weekend our furious mothers

applied their lipstick

that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds

and our fathers quietly did whatever

fathers do

when trying to beat back the dogs of sorrow

from tearing them limb from limb.

Lents, I have been away so long

I imagine that you’re a musical

some rich kid from New York wrote about credit,

debt, and then threw in Kool-Aid

to make it funny for everybody.

I can see the dance line,

the high kicks of the skinheads, twirling

metal pipes, stomping in unison

while the committed rage of the Gypsy Jokers

square off with the committed rage

of the single mothers.

The orchestra pit is filled with Pit bulls

and a Doberman conducts them all

into a frenzy.

In the end someone gets evicted, someone

gets jumped into his new family

and they call themselves Los Brazos,

King Cobras, South-Side White Pride.

Dear Lents,

Dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,

I am your strange son,

you saved me when I needed saving

and I remember your arms wrapped around

my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around

the school yard

the night Jason went crazy—

waving his father’s gun above his head,

bathed in red and blue flashing lights,

all American, broken in half and beautiful

Love

by: Matthew Dickman

We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses

of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang

on the lattice, our bodies throb

in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games

and we can't keep our hands off each other

until we can—

so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs,

falling in love again.

We go to movies and sit in the air conditioned dark

with strangers who are in love

with heroes like Peter Parker

who loves a girl he can't have

because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights

more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around

his waist or his tongue between her legs.

While we watch films

in which famous people play famous people

who experience pain,

the boy who sold us popcorn loves the girl

who sold us our tickets

and stares at the runs in her stockings

every night,

even though she is in love

with the skinny kid who sold her cigarettes at the 7-11,

and if the world had any compassion

it would let the two of them pass

a Marlboro Light back and forth

until their fingers eventually touched, their mouths

sucking and blowing.

If the world knew how

the light bulb loved the socket

then we would all be better off.

We could all dive head first into the sticky parts.

We could make sweat a religion

and praise the holiness of smelliness.

I am going to stop here,

on this dark night,

on this country road,

where country songs

come from, and kiss her, this woman, below the trees

which are below the stars,

which are below desire.

There is a music to it, I hear it.

Johnny Rotten, Biggie Smalls, Johan Sebastian Bach, I don't care

what they say—

I loved you the way my mouth loves teeth,

the way a boy I know would risk it all for a purple dinosaur,

who, truth be known, loved him.

In the Midwest, fields of corn are in love

with a scarecrow, his potato-sack head

and straw body, hanging out among the dog-eared stalks

like a farm-Christ full of love.

Turning on the radio I hear

how AM loves FM the way my mother loved Elvis

whose hips all young girls loved, sitting around the television

in a poodle skirt and bobby socks.

He LOVED ME TENDER so much

that I was born after a long night of Black-Russians

and Canasta while "Jailhouse Rock" rocked.

Stamps love envelopes, the licking proves it—

just look at my dog

who obviously loves himself with an intensity

no human being could sustain, though you can't say

we don't try.

In High school I once cruised

a MacDonald's drive-thru butt-naked

on a dare from a beautiful Sophomore,

only to be swallowed up by a grief

born from super-size or no super-size.

Years later I met a woman

named Heavy Metal Goddess

at a party where she brought her husband,

leading him through the dance floor by a leash,

while in Texas cockroaches love with such abandon

that they wear their skeletons on the outside.

Once a baby lizard loved me so completely,

he moved into my apartment and died of hunger.

No one loves war,

but I know a man

who loves tanks so much he wishes he had one

to pick up the groceries, drive his wife to work,

drop his daughter off at school with her Little Mermaid

lunch box, a note hidden inside

next to the apple, folded

with a love that can be translated into any language: I HOPE

YOU DO NOT SUFFER

“My Brother’s Grave”

by: Matew Dickman

Like a city I’ve always hated, driving through but never stopping,

my foot on the gas, running all the lights,

wishing I were home. Hating even the children who live there

as if they had a choice. I imagine him

in his ten-million particles

of ash, tied up into a beautiful white bundle of lace, a silver bow

looped where his neck should be,

thrown into a washing machine, set on a delicate cycle

to spin forever under the dirt. The all of him

left, the vegetation of him, the no more thing

of him: his skateboard and mountain bike and beers and cigarettes and daughter

and mix-tapes and loneliness, his legs and feet and arms and brain and kneecaps.

Outside of the graveyard

there is still some part of him

buried in the mysticism of his DNA, smeared across a doorknob

or brushed along the jagged edge of his car keys. Two kids

from the high school nearby

will fuck each other on top of him

and I won’t know how to stop them. Someone, sometime,

will throw an empty bottle of vodka over their shoulder

and he will have to catch it.