matthew dickman

Looking through one of my old journals, I found this poem that I'd cut and pasted from an issue of the New Yorker a couple years ago. I'd read an article about Matthew Dickman and his twin brother Michael, who is also a poet, in an earlier issue of the magazine and became somewhat infatuated with the two of them. Maybe it was because of their twinship, and that each brother's writing represents quite opposite ends of the poetic spectrum - which is something of a romantic notion in itself - but I found something about them very endearing. I was never a big poetry fan, though I had always wished to be, and reading the Dickman twins' poetry helped turn me into one. 

I think this poem of Matthew's is especially striking. It's desperately melancholic, all the more so, I think, for the digestibility of the lyricism - like it's not a poem at all but maybe a modern monologue, a confession so honest it breaks your heart to hear it. Reading this poem feels a little voyeuristic, as I think good poetry should; it makes you feel ashamed, as though you were intruding on a person's very private rituals. Though it's about the death of the poet's older brother, and intensely personal, I think it can relate things more universal. But even if you can't find those things, at the very least it'll make you feel something true.

King

I'm always the king of something. Ruined or celebrated,

newly crowned, or just beheaded. King of the shady grass

and king of the dirty sheets. I sit in the middle

of the room in December

with the window open, five pills, and a razor. My life long

secret. My killing power and my staying

power. When the erection fails, when the car almost hits

the divider, I'm king. I wave my hand over

the ants bubbling out of the sidewalk and make them all knights,

I sit at the dinner table and look into the deep

dark eyes of my television, my people. I tell them the kingdom

will be remembered in dreams of gold. I tell them

what was lost will be found. So I put on my black-white

checkered Vans, the exact pair of shoes

my older brother wore when he was still a citizen in the world,

and I go out, I go out into the street

with my map of the dead and look for him,

for the X he is,

so I can put the sceptre back in his hands, take the red

cloak from my shoulders and put it around his, lift the crown

from my head and fit it just above his eyebrows,

so I can get down on one knee, on both

knees, and lower my face and whisper my lord, my master, my king.

-Matthew Dickman

(from the November 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker)