East By The Moon: 10 U2 Poems—By PJ

Joshua Tree Bono (watercolor, manipulated at Photomosh.com) by Kelly Eddington, 2017.

East By The Moon: 10 U2 Poems

PJ DeGenaro

I started writing poems for significant birthdays in 2016. I'm glad they finally have a good home.

Birthday Funk For B

May 10, 2016. Kind of a prose-poem I guess, with little shouts and murmurs. Very derivative of…something. I always liked the way singers like Al Green or even Van Morrison could take the phrase “wait a minute” and load it with so much meaning. I was sick when I started writing this and I had that weird fever-brain thing. That’s my excuse.

You put your armor on in parts. A little at a time. It was innocent, it made sense. You were too young. A small thing. Couldn’t find a hat big enough to hide. Strange tilted eyes that held a ghost inside, freckles like tears, mouth just a little too wide. But soft. You wanted to be hard. Like chocolate poured over ice cream makes a shell. A man-shell over a sweet-cream boy. You could be hard and shiny. Deflect the light. Moving smooth in patent leather. A sleeve, a boot, a zipper. Something to hide your eyes. Slick hardware to reflect, refract.

From way down here I watch you walk. The way your leg curves, the dip and swerve. Volume, amplitude. You can’t hide that. Because sometimes you just have to rip it all open with your fist. The armor. Your jacket, your shirt. Two jackets, two shirts. A slash across your chest, your bleeding heart. What do you want from us? Wait a minute. Let me testify:

The first time I really prayed, I prayed for you. Couldn’t stand to see you hurt. Month of the dead, long nights cold as bones. I said wait a minute, hold on. I said “I’ll go down in the underworld to get him back. Just watch me now.” But if anyone is Orpheus, it ain’t me babe. It’s you. So I put you in my dream-car and drove you through the dark.

In the springtime you came back. Crowned in solid gold. Doing the twist, going like this. I came down to hear you. I would have come anywhere. I could see the armor strain across your back. I knew you wanted out. Here you come now, there you go. And all the heads turn to watch you. Come back, come back. Go man go.

Now wait a minute, baby. I watched you walk. All down the line. The bright lights and your shiny hardware, your chocolate leather shell. They couldn’t hold you in. Your smile twisted left. Your wrists and neck. Your fingers fluttering, stroking a phantom. You fell to your knees. You tore it all up. You roared at heaven. You crushed my heart in your fist. So you got to wait a minute now. All right. 

You got to live forever now.

Right-Hand Man

August 8, 2016. This is the first poem I wrote for Edge. When I started doing this, I was a little uncomfortable with myself. I kept this one short because I had this idea in my head that it would make Edge uncomfortable too—if he knew about it, which of course he didn’t.

You are the right-hand man
And the bearer of cool waters.
Becalmed ivory moon circling
Your beautiful friend the earth,
You pull his tides
With knowing fingers.
A sympathy for pulse and string,
A sound that carbonates the blood,
And betrays the hot ember
Burning at your core.

Boomerang

May 10, 2017. This is the second birthday poem I wrote for Bono. I mean, I can’t actually give him a present or anything, so what else is there to do? This one has a little compressed autobiography along with some meanderings about 1980 and Reagan (and it’s haunted by Trump, as all these poems ended up being haunted) and boring radio and then… Here it is. This poem appeared in issue 20 of The Write Launch.

At home in bright flat America
Red and white halter, blue shorts
Sucking Bomb-Pops on the concrete porch
Thumbing the Tiger Beat boys
Who hung five on their skateboards
Sun-bleached, enriched Wonder Bread
Singing baby baby baby, teen dream.
They did not move me.
Back to school in dirty November
Brown cords, muddy shoes,
Clouds rolling over America,
Like the sun never even happened
Landslide, lowered heads, burrowing in.
DJ’s with hoary beards, hot-tubs
Drop-ceilings, flannel and fern
Album-sides on the FM, mountain jam
Shoveling dirt over whatever
White light, white heat was left.

Walking down Sunrise
The day you came through—
Her radio next to my ear
Woolen mittens, numb toes
Only her and me in the crusted snow.
Someone took a chance.
Shot you from a spire
Forty miles away in New York City,
A bullet to rip through the clouds
Honed laser, beam of red light.
The wind tore you up, scattered you,
Reconstituted you in transistors.
You rose up singing.
FM never heard a free bird like this,
Young and taut and wintergreen,
And sweet stinging strings,
Throat and muscle, wire and wing.
You moved me. Who was that? I cried,
An owl in the ruins. Who, who?

Now winter comes again
but light shines through,
Now the lamps are lit to pierce the dark.

Traveling Light

August 8, 2017. I don’t really see Edge as a cool and distant satellite, and I know that when he’s performing, a great deal of his brain is focused on what he has to do next, and next, and next. This is just sort of how I felt before and during my epic JoshuaTree2017 GA experience with Kelly. A beloved early reader reminded me that a satellite can be, in fact, a Satellite of Love.

My plan was to go it alone, to travel light,
To get to where you are.
My plan was ascent.
Imagine this plane seen from earth,
Seamless, silver, trailing vapor and lights,
Distant and self-contained,
Giving away no sign of the soft cargo
Strapped into its seats.

I want to be like you, Slim.
An ingot of metal, a smooth bright bolt,
A streamlined ship in the sky.
But tonight I am bruised fruit
Dripping sweat and love on the streets
Of a city where I don’t belong.
Hot in love, always in love.
Grasping with damp hands for
What I can never quite reach.

Teach me how to be like you.
Cool as a satellite moon
Orbiting the heated earth
Through the breathless night.
Nothing spills from you but sound,
Stainless steel, sublime.
A blade, a probe, a screw, and then—

A pulse of pure indigo—
Fine as a skein of silk unspooling.
Fine as traveling light.

Open your eyes, Slim. Smile.
It’s a shock, I know. We’re still here
Watching you, stretching out our arms,
Raising our hot wet hands,
Spilling hot red tears
Into your bowl of darkness.

Killiney

May 10, 2018. I’ve been to Dublin exactly once, in 2016. I made my family take the DART to Killiney just to soak up the vibes. It was indeed Good Friday, and the part about the older gentleman is 100% true. In fact, he pointed out which house on the hillside was Bono’s. I had not asked. This poem appeared in issue 20 of The Write Launch.

For three days I was a stranger in your city,
Pressing my palms to a train window
Watching for the blue glint of the bay.
I thought I might find you in the water’s thin skin,
In the creamy foam, speckled and bearded with wrack.
A place where wanting feels like gritty eyes,
A sore throat and not enough sleep,
A place where the wind scours your hands and face with salt.
I came as close to the water as the water would allow me.
I picked up as many stones as I could.
I filled both jacket pockets.
But they weren’t enough to make me believe
I had stolen some kernel of you from this beach—
This ordinary beach, curved softly as a lip or a thumb.
White houses watched me from the hills,
And an old man told me how to reach the village.
But it’s Good Friday, he said. You can’t get a drink.
I said that was fine, I was used to being thirsty.

On Your Birthday in a Fearful Year

August 8, 2018. America felt pretty dark. The person I’m addressing in the first part of the poem could be Edge, because why not, but it could also be anyone who’s been comfortable enough to think that the world made a certain kind of sense, only to realize we’re all (most of us) in the same leaky boat, even if the people in the nicer cabins don’t realize it yet. The second part of the poem is about feeling faint in the sun on 8th Avenue just before being allowed into Madison Square Garden for an e+i show on the hottest day of the summer. The last few lines are very definitely about Edge, because he was kind of the muse for the whole thing, somehow. This poem appeared in issue 20 of The Write Launch.

Because to look up at the sky feels dangerous now.
You might draw the notice of the man
Whose job it is to seize your brief moment of joy,
And throw it down, crush its face on the pavement
With a boot on the back of its neck.
Because you can’t stop knowing, all day long,
What lurks on the dark side of the building,
What follows you from house to car to dinner,
A dinner you can hardly taste for the sound of
Whimpering or snarling just outside the door.
Put one foot wrong and the call is made,
Your friend taken away in cuffs. Or
It rains for weeks and the mud slides down the hill
To choke the house. Or the children disappear.
Or the parched woods catch fire and burn.
These are acts of God (these are not acts of God.)
You are not yourself, I am not me,
The truth is not the truth.

But let me inside this dome, this shelter of dark and light.
I promise not to stay too long. I won’t trouble you.
See I’ve waited in the street all day
While the sun burned a hole through my skull
And sparks whirled at the edge of my vision.
Only here are we not afraid to take food and water
From a stranger, even if the food is stale,
Even if the water is warm inside the bottle.
Lead me trembling into the cool sanctuary.
Something like a cathedral, I think:
The choir loft here, the nave there. The hidden chapel.
The holy of holies. An oblong of undulating votive light.
And there, bathed in the colors of a rose window,
Your face, crafted by a God who loves you.
Nothing, nothing in the world is as important
As your hands, as the movement of your fingers.
This has always been the truth.

Concerning the Diplomat

May 10, 2019. Things are dark. Not as dark as they will be, but pretty dark. I think this poem is self-explanatory.

He crossed the border.
He fell into a no-man’s-land
Of fearful windows and neighbors’ eyes
Dragged his fingers along their gates
Trailing bloody prints and messages in code.
He tramped through mean gardens and mud-rubble fields
And the door slammed shut behind him
And a hand yanked the curtain closed.
Through smoking afternoons
He carried a flag of no nation
Wandering everywhere, belonging nowhere
A hungry cat grinning at the dark
In the unnamed places, under pale skies of
Block and tackle, winch and crane
On a river pricked with needles of rain.

He crossed the border.
We waited on the other side of the barricade
Decoded his messages in blood
We were his new neighbors.
I watched him from between my fingers
I watched him dance between barbs and potshots
The flag of no nation unfurling from his shirt
Like a flower from an open wound.
He was the shoot straining toward the sun.
He was also the sun. His arm was a tendril or a ray.
I caught him grinning, I caught him grinning at me,
I tried to make him do it again.
How we watched him, each of us as twisted with hunger
As a child in a famine fever dream, grasping
For a chance to be held inside the light.

He crossed the border.
Attained lift-off in gilded lobbies and
Lifts, elevators shooting up the sky.
He was rushed through palaces with white facades
And kingly rotundas, shoes hushed on marble floors.
Now he is the diplomat with the tired eye
The shoulder bent from hoisting the whole world,
Hauling the women and children on his back
The whole hungry mob hanging
On the long black car that births him,
Grinning, into the camera’s eye.
Every flash a new wound, a hot pain to blink away.
The cameras watch him stride, hands open
Chin-first into the conference room
Where the friend who is also the enemy waits
With fingers crossed behind his back.

Wink

August 8, 2019. This one’s strange, but don’t be alarmed. It’s not so much a poem about Edge as it is a poem that he kind of haunts. Or some version of him haunts it. (And a friend shows up late in the game.) This all came about because I once managed to catch Edge’s eye when I was very close to the stage, and before I could stop myself, I winked, and he kind of looked briefly taken aback. Oh well. For good or for ill, at least these mofos motivate me to write things..

In my dream you’re sleek and low-down,
And you stalk the streets of my city     
In your chocolate leather jacket,
A bandana pulled tight on your brow.
The streets are oily-slick and wet.
On the pavement outside the Lucky Dog Bar,
You crouch down, avert your eyes,
And let me sniff the back of your hand. 

In my dream you stay on your own side of the street
And you will not catch my eye. 
I wink at you. For a minute there I think I’m your friend.    
I know what time it is. I’m every woman,
I climb every mountain high enough.
I’ll bet I can bend your note, Slim. I’ll bet I can.
Don’t be such a drag.
Look, I’m a careful girl; I’ve never caught the clap,     
And I’m sorry to be the one to tell you
But you do sound like church bells sometimes.   

In my dream, inside your house,
You dance a dance called The Tangle.
You dip him and spin him in your arms, and
What I wouldn’t give to be either one of you.
I would scrape the floor to find the wood
Under the carpet under the linoleum under the wood,
Your loamy earth, your very root.
There’s a stain like a bathtub ring inside your teacup.
I poke my tongue in; I cradle it against my chest.
Please, just play me that song.
Play me the hardest song you’ve got.    

60 Lines On Your Birthday

May 10, 2020. Oh Jaysis, the man turned 60 in the middle of the Plague Year. Not gonna lie, this year was really hard, and this isn’t a poem so much as a bunch of sentence fragments. 

We meant to throw you a party
People all over the world
‘Cause you seem like the kind of guy who enjoys eating his cake
And having it too
Maybe some plump cream puffs and syllabubs
Trifle and flummery, your fingers sticky in the sugar glaze
A champagne fountain to poke your tongue into
Fat mylar balloons like cherubs
And beribboned boxes of full-blown roses
Placed there by a lover’s hand
For you to open and open and open

But we couldn’t plan a party this year
It’s hard enough to wake up alive in the morning
To see the sunrise set the curtains aglow
To breathe, and breathe, and breathe

Let me tell you something, sweetheart
I don’t join fanclubs
I don’t follow leaders
You don’t have to be Elvis
You don’t have to be Jesus
(Just a bit of each)
I only want to watch you get older
I want to see your face
Even if it’s a little rough
From always taking it on the chin

If you walked into a hospital today
Carrying a thousand ventilators on your back
Some people would ask you
Who the fuck you think you are
Some people would rather die
Than suck on oxygen they got from you
Some people’s minds are so congested
They can’t dream up a selfless act

I imagine I can see you from the back
Sitting at your desk, curled around your phone
Punching in the international codes
Waiting for the transnational translators
Waiting on hold, holding your breath
Listening in the quiet for the steady breathing
Of your wife and children in the next room
You know you need to fix this
You know that only you can fix this
The weight of the world lies heavy
On your shoulder
I see you take your glasses off
Red marks across the bridge of your nose

But let me tell you one more thing
‘Cause I think if you knew me you wouldn’t mind
If I talked. All we really want—
No, this time is there no them, there’s only me
There’s only me, home alone
Waiting for the day when my breath won’t be a threat
Because the heart wants what it wants
And this is all it wants:
Another pounding heart, the bass and drums and sweat
The songs are in my heart
I breathe them back at you
Because I believe in a celebration
And I’ll never leave before the encore.

Tablature

August 8, 2020. There was a “first half” to this poem that dealt somewhat obliquely with current events, but I said to myself, “You know what? Fuck that! Let’s write about arms and fingers and hips (and brains) instead.”

In the dark, the sound follows the form of the man
Starting with your fingertip pressing
The nylon string to the hardness of metal and wood
And your thumb pushing up from the other side.
In the dark I imagine I can travel up your arm
Follow a tendon binding muscle and bone
Over swellings of sinew and vein
I can ride a whipping neuron up
To the sharp and tilting bones of your face
One laurel-leaf eye looking out at the world
One looking in at the map
Your fingers must follow
To the next note, and the next
Their route picked out with fairy lights
Sparking on/off across the blue hemispheres of your brain
Then I would spill out through your mouth
In a rush of air and sound
Catch in the warmth of your open collar
And hang there,
And hang there,
Looking down at the hip that rolls and rolls
And controls the whole operation in secret.