All You Ask For is Longing: New and Selected Poems: New and Selected Poems

By Sean Thomas Dougherty

Dougherty was awarded a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans from the U.S. State Department

Awarded two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts fellowships in poetry

Well-known in the early days of the performance-poetry scene, performing in slams across the country and at the Lollapalooza Festival

True poet of the working class, the urban poor, and the city streets

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938160318

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Publisher’s Weekly describes Sean Thomas Dougherty as “A blue-collar, Rust Belt romantic to his generous, enthusiastic core,” and Dorianne Laux praises him as “the gypsy punk heart of American poetry.” He is the author or editor of fifteen books including All You Ask for is Longing: Poems 1994-2014 (Boa Editions), and Double Kiss: Stories, Poems, Essays on the Art of Billiards (Mammoth Books 2017). His awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans, and an appearance in Best American Poetry. Known for his dynamic readings, he has performed at hundreds of venues, universities and festivals including the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Old Dominion Literary Festival and across Albania and Macedonia where he appeared on national television, sponsored by the US State Department. He works as a Med Tech and Caregiver for people with brain injuries. He lives in Erie, PA.

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New Poems

Dear L, The Choruses We Lost Along the Coast

How many years employment didn’t matter? How many years it didn’t matter except the next score or hit, except only after the children arrive and inside your head you chart the waste, cloaked in without you, the color of loss is white or gray or blue. What left except the birds, twigs, the dusk moon and the barbed-wire fence ache, to become a life of fragments—wildflowers dailies a name. They are so light without us. Listen this is the noise, dark-worn, smelling broth, seeding cloves. Choruses of Yes. The Russian landlord who took the rent in cash. These sleepers we’ve become. Half-unbuttoned, black gypsy hair, the fat sizzling in the pan and the vacancies. Uncommon nouns. Icons of the dead etchings of light. Grind down on the gear a single word box trains or boot issuing neighborless, the inaudible voices scythe the dark to see things in parts like silhouettes of blown autumn leaves covering the backyard where Corey sang the Supremes, dressed in that platinum wig, his head thrown back. Come spring these litanies they monogram the sidewalks where we haven’t died. Near the river where our children first ran, to have survived so much and still see azaleas, mums, the flowers of your swollen hands. I weigh the way our fears lie down. I watch some mother bend to tie her child’s shoe in the playground of broken glass, the shards we carry or discard. Or Joel tossing his hand away at the Borgata, the one he knew could end the hustle. Was the river turned? Is everything such a bluff? This metaphor is not a metaphor but the truth for some of us who toss the dice or lift the cue. The gamble of our lives. The moth-flutters toward the flame. Through daylight I squint as I watch my children run. My insomnia is a sign I am allergic to the sun. Our eldest daughter never sleeps, she we know will be like us, running from nothing toward something like a river that flows but never departs. I light a cigarette underneath the autumn moon, 3:00 A.M. see the light on in my neighbor’s room, my Bosnian neighbor told me of the war, the men fallen to their knees along the riverbank, told to bend over and clean their faces and shot in the back of the head. What riddle does the bullet hold? The ditch reveals the dead above the dead inside the dead, inside our heads, like Russian dolls.

The Blues Is a Verb

Pray without speech. Bear witness walking

and dying slowly. In the whole universe

this one and only place which you have

made your very own. An instant of provocation

without the proper greeting. And down 6th Street,

car alarms ululating. A fifth is your morning

medicine. A silhouette in chalk

on the sidewalk watches the children

run. Down and up Second Avenue

a red Monte Carlo, slows in an

old shark-skinned suit, the air

like furious birds. Someone leans against the brick wall

sharing a cigarette, blue-black under the fire escape

Mrs. Janofsky’s boy nods into his own hands.

The poor are many and so the women come

and go, bruises on their eyes like fake sapphires.

Men who never not hear the noise in their heads.

But not knowing the dead, roaming the streets

like feral cats, you hurl yourself into the oncoming traffic

of their eyes. Somewhere a search has been called off.

Whitecaps cover your mouth as you struggle

not to drown. You stick your fucking finger

in the socket. You cannot holler.

All the street assassins know you can break

a man’s neck in a second flat; they grin

at their electronic palms. They enter and exit

through broken arteries. A razor left by the mirror.

The ghost lines of cocaine and tar,

along the boulevard beneath the diseased

elms. Someone wishes a lottery ticket with a nickel.

Dear L, Our Diminishing

She puts another one on her nose, laughing. She crushes a shell in my hand. Perhaps this is the key to the lock that exists between things? My daughter has her own shell, her awkward wings, the first signs of her talons starting to show. She is tossed gravel at the neighbor’s dog. She is cherry blossoms blowing against the chain-link fence. We are the ones who dissolve— Look up at the daylight moon, that familiar wafer, stuck as she is in the throat of the sky. Here, take a swallow. If there is a jar to drink from, let it be whiskey, and rain water. More triumphant than awakening in a waltz. Speech without marginalia. She is a weed, dandelion heads popped off, goldenrod bunches, a music that unmasks sadness. Is she a leaf falling without grief? Is she a bean sprout? The New Station of the Cross? She is like a hymn where nothing’s clocked. She is a radio switched to a Soul station. Nine millimeters of lightning bugs. What is a hammer the shape of a fist? She will not survive, she will tear the world apart. She is our new dictionary, making up the definitions as we go along. This is how she arrived. You and I are words, are sentences our bodies spell and erase. That is how it is with us. I want to spell you a biography in the dust. Something shrouded. Once we were here and now we have returned. Paragraphs I have yet to write on the Pharaohs. In the backyard my daughter and I collect the carapaces of cicadas—we turn in the failing light our diminishing bodies with frail sway.

Dear L, Am I Another Exchanged for Yes

Skinny-dipping in grief we must reclaim the present tense as we watch our children run, or do we raise our fists? How much have we survived to sing or swallow? You and I have faced the war down in these streets, seen the fucked-up and the fallen, the misdemeanors worn like medals, petty drug court violations, the parole courts that made them failures. Four walls in a funeral is our favorite flick. The city follows us out to the fallowed field. How many sirens have we sighed as they passed by, to bust some stranger? How many mysteries, the years have lifted, passed? The mystery of not abandoned. Sunday afternoon it was something like dear shelter and dirty lace curtains from Crystal’s mother, stealing her prescription pills, we spoke in low voices as if trying not to even hear ourselves. The packages of salt you hid in the dash. I love you like the first letter that begins a new, secret alphabet. When you entered the room. When a bee arrives at the hive from finding. We drove fast hurtling toward nothing. We never noticed the bodies of fragile things smashing into the windshield.

Poem to Be Put in a Drawer After Telling

I can see the mountains behind you when you shake your hair,

over one’s shoulder is all that you have done.

A secret that finds me most in the forest of silence (trees with no wind).

The branches of trees are the lines in a measure of birds.

I can’t tell but sometimes I swear they are singing Billy Strayhorn.

What I mean to say is that the light through the branches

makes shapes out of shadows that move

I swear by themselves, after the light is gone and we have gone to bed.

There is nothing to fear in the dark, it is the time we learned to sing.

~

There is a lullaby and a name for everything wild.

He was murmuring, nearly singing in his sleep,

in another a language like a name you’d say,

or a lullaby he sang, long ago to a lost child.

The police cars do a little dance when they turn on their sirens.

The neighbors survived a war, sometimes I catch the grandfather

staring out at the sky as if staring out at his dead.

A house of lost things. We’ve become a house of lost things.

To announce, as Lorca says, the baptism of newly created things.

My neighbor is a very tall man, he works the nightshift at the frozen-food factory.

Back in Bosnia he was a carpenter. His son, smoking a cigarette on the porch,

told me he used to make extraordinary cabinets

full of secret drawers. What would he put in them, I asked.

He looked at me as if I was a slow child, blew some smoke into the dark,

Secrets, of course.

~

Secrets across the driveway. Secrets in the tomato plants he plants in the backyard.

The earth itself is a secret long in the blackness of space.

A plot to keep our secrets. A secret plot.

I want no secrets, you said once, years ago, and then lied to me.

Sometimes for hours he speaks, I cannot understand. His loss is another.

How many dead he carries? I carry seven. Seven dead.

One for the water. One for the bed. We all end up in the earth or ash.

~

When one is weary and worn we wear our secrets on the outside.

When I was not yet grown I knew a boy, a boy who hung himself

by the noose of a secret. Sometimes in the dark I can still hear him

trying to tell us. A rope is a secret that carries