| Poem 1 |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|02:02 am] |
My fear is simple, heart-faced
from a line by Lorna Dee Cervantes
This year, again, the azaleas
came with no trowel work,
and the seeded mint hurdled up
like tiny trees. There will be blackberries
in April and that end
of Orion’s winter hunt
will mark the end of my astronomy.
Once it wasn’t so predictable –
flashing gull on a boardwalk,
the slammed shot glass, a dark lip
of my stocking puckering off.
Is it love that does this?
I will sit still for it, cross-legged
on a bed reading. I will make a face
and hold it until the wet clay
sets and readies to burn brittle.
New springs no longer surprise me
to gardens or fresh basil pasta.
Just stillness and return, some absent
promise of heat, sleeping afternoons,
the same fragile birth of again. |
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| 1: Woolworth |
[Apr. 1st, 2009|11:09 pm] |
Two rows over, woolweave, laces through leaves
We'll find each other's fingers in the smooth cool dirt between us
Not a path per se, but we're both there
Mumbling
And in some cases, seeing
We'll find him, you and I
Us two are dew droplets on a spiderweb's netting
Baubles strung in the hair, decor
Frippery
But we're so much more than that, no matter
how much they won't let us
Seatbelt, staple us down
Won't work when our fingers are oh so good with the locks
Just like Daddy taught us in the first place
I'll find him, if you find the way
Sniff the air
Find the bad spots because we ain't no canary
And dropping dead wasn't my agenda here
Sometimes you gotta mine for gold
In the heart, in life
In foolish wastelands
Sometimes people are left behind
And you gotta catch em
It's the only thing that can be done.
Dear Papa,
Trust us
We'll bring the bacon back home.
You can wedge that in between covers and sew a binding right on
Laces strung every which way
Glue down the spine
Slap me till it sticks. |
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| 01 - Re: |
[Apr. 1st, 2009|08:20 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Playing-card insecurities
and witty ripostes by email
baby-scars and an age spot
and a '58 Corvette L8
comment thread a mile long
zero to 30 all too soon...
Fresians replaced by Subarus
(does the Prince have a steady job)
the first notes of the BVW 565
and the lingering bite of chardonnay
all that's left of the midnight oil
a smile at 1 AM with a Kodak attached
an arc Overwijk could have scribed. |
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| #3 Thank you for the coffee beans you smuggled home from Vermont |
[May. 5th, 2008|08:44 pm] |
I have a need for things that keep me awake.
How many times I rely on you
to do that for me, when I, eyes-half shut
with routine, ignore the peripheral,
and want to go back to a place
I can’t accept.
Its use of red and neon
reduces the world to cash, check or credit.
Would you, asks the cheery cashier, in exchange
for agreeing to buy more than you can afford
and this nifty two by four inch magnetic striped plastic card,
like to save a trivial amount of money? No, I wouldn’t
like to save ten percent today, or any day. What would I do
with a collection of percents?
I want one hundred percent of everything
and to exercise my diminishing rights
as an American consumer to pay
the fullest amount permitted by law.
It’s moments like these that I cherish
my two point three cups of coffee. They keep me
from a compliancy of saying sure, okay, please.
My stacks of register receipts and used UPS boxes
are getting low. It has been days since I’ve seen
the neighborhood brown truck stop outside my door.
I must not be supporting the Internet economy enough.
The invisible one that lives in giant grey warehouses
in Iowa that sends me weekly e-mail about free shipping
and sales, clearance, outlets and credit card debt.
Outside their box, shrink wrapped items are real enough.
They pile on my book shelves, coffee table, I have to pay
for them eventually. This acquisition is somehow part
of the process, to not need to replace
the used with new is odd, or at least un-American. |
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| #30 - Claims |
[May. 1st, 2008|09:36 pm] |
You'll let me put a word or two to you.
I've right enough to recollect
I've right enough to pen you by now
If you want, you can have the candlesticks back
in exchange for the poetry.
I'll even give back the tiny end tables
(whatever you call them, they're fancy)
for a short. More than a bit of flash-
I think the effort involved in stealing them
credits me something more than just a chapter.
You like the cat enough
(and I know you do, don't deny it)
that you ought to find me worth
the time
You of all should be able to. |
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| #29 - There Is No Path to Old Home Anymore |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|11:43 pm] |
I don't know what to call to anymore
except, I do
I just don't know why this pile of goosedown
is here
and where did it come from and where
and where
did the times go did the pearls disappear to
where is my wife she's off sleeping with the daisies and
in the interim
I wonder why I went there, wonder
if it was all really just crookery
and heists and
madcap teenage hijinks or was it really
reaching up
but being pulled sideways am
I really
getting this story straight or
telling it to myself through the funhouse mirror
am I getting it right
am I getting it right
good Lord, am I getting it right? |
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| #2 (I know) |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|09:19 pm] |
I pretty sure that girl at the party was hitting on me
Then again, I think she just wanted me
to sing some Tom Petty at the karaoke bar,
but the way she tried lull me with stories
of repairing A-10’s in the Air Force, the firepower
of its 30 mm Gatling gun whose shells melt
through tank armor was hard to miss. Sure I used to play with A-10’s
as a kid, I think, well okay it was really the Cobra Rattler
and it had vertical takeoff capability
because that’s what every childhood terrorist
organization needs, a quick escape and beyond
that I wonder where that plastic plane was in an Ohio attic.
She imagined talking about planes and guns were hard to ground.
But what was she doing living outside
Alexandria, telling me she wanted to study
forensics in college, but instead waited tables,
looked at the smudge marks on empty sweet tea glasses.
Before we left the bikers and heavy metal singing,
I only managed to “Folsom Prison Blues,” touching
parts of “Handle with Care” neither like “Free Fallin’”
with its music video of Petty floating backwards
through shopping malls on an escalators, the perfect place
to sing about typical male fear of long term relationship commitments,
or at least to buy a new cordless drill. Instead I’m left to ramble
how much I hate the Eagles and outside the bar, over cigarettes
some guy wants her to sing “Hotel California” with him.
Back home, the whiskey is gone, and so is my interest
in what she would do if any man ever tried to leave her,
and that she still wasn’t drunk enough. For what?
But I was and didn’t want to know. The best I could do
was say “yes,” “no,” “really”
There’s a couch by the front door and some blankets.” |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|05:42 pm] |
26.
Three years.
Several edicts issued
promoting an arbitrary deadline
as if putting a limit on the crawl of time
itself would put a stop to the rise of the kingdom.
27.
I dove backward today
through a hospital stay
(worked so close to death
that my family cared)
my own body betraying me
(so cold, so painful
the loop that saved me)
the skidding next to Sunset
(three hours wasn't
enough to stop the car)
somewhere along the way
I got a sense of where forward is
but it was lost in the
checkout line at Von's. |
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| #10? #11? Or my last one? |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|07:27 pm] |
Drinking Poem
I was probably drunk –
it’s amazing more poems
don’t start this way. The shot
glass O of my mouth
against his on the loveseat.
My bones so small on him,
like he was a slat wood
raft, a causeway through
the dirty Pontchartrain.
The day before you came home
I woke up with my pants
inside-out, a slit-eyed
memory of myself in his
bathroom, fumbling
with my tongued pockets.
And the day after you said
you would leave again,
I closed the wine bar
with another man, who cupped
my knee in his white horse
of a car and sucked
the air from between
our drowned bodies.
There is no forgiveness
in the emptied bottles
on his living room table,
the silent teeth of blackouts
on bourbon and cheap shiraz,
but today, I found my landlord’s
white pinwheel flowers had become
ten thousand blackberries
licking up my chainlink fence.
And my bell peppers have popped
from their starry beginnings
into the hard fetus of fruit.
I wonder sometimes if patience
turns us hard, like the hulled seeds
of pumpkins left to heat? Wait
translated into nothing more
than the brief pyrotechnics
of skin, the sure pop
of a button through a hole.
That long burn of a new cigarette
lit outside my favorite dive. |
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| #28 Squares |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|01:55 pm] |
Welcome to the new story
It's a lot like the old one. We've just tightened a few screws and
kicked out some loose boards
I think you'll like it.
We'll like
playing that same old game again
but different, and this time,
for more points. We'll like
playing for keeps this time
for the second time
and not having to remember which way was the right way
not having to worry at all, because
you see there are no funerals
there are no diagonals
there are no more urinals
this is baseball
this is chess
this is jenga
and when I cast the chips in I'll cast the chips in
all real on the pile, no wooden
nickels no
false corners no
dutch ovens without
well-played hands
and we'll see who gets the last laugh but
it's not so much the laugh that's
important, but
which will have echoed. |
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| #27 - Understand |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|01:46 pm] |
She didn't look like she was going anywhere, but
that is the first mistake me make, that first look
defining purpose by impression. No one wears it on
their shoulder, or on their hand. They don't even
carry it where they can pull it out fast. It's just
there, in the pocket of a heart, maybe jangling
around her ankle the next day, and later on it'll
be tucked up in her cheek. We don't think about
where to put our purpose, we're too busy with it
to keep track of it. And when we want it, need it,
it's always right there in the palm anyways. Right
where we meant to put it, if we ever had wanted to. |
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| #26 - REPREZENT |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|01:42 pm] |
With the max line it's always a matter of
drag
and
flow
not accounting for the times we didn't relay
It's easy. With everything comes practice
With every action comes
weight
purpose
effect
and in the interim, in the small thuds of silence afterwards
we pause
and consider
The swan was dark blue, stood on two sturdy legstumps.
Its tail trailed behind it, scale on scale on scale.
And with its crown perched on its head, I wondered why it so resembled a peacock.
As far as I could recall, there were no peacocks anywhere. |
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| #25 |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|10:29 pm] |
In the precise area that followed
who would be able to know
how the dust and the plumes fell
what swallow-laden remorse would pile redemption
on your pillow with the posies
and make up for something more
Who would say goodbye, with a pinprick
and give you what you couldn't pretend was snow
who would make you into tulips
and tell you how to breathe once more |
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| #24 |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|10:23 pm] |
It is not the 24th
today
Pineapplecones drifting down a swallow
driveway
In Vista it's almost instantan
eous
Well, I have a whole 512 gigs
of meg
When you see a drink it's best to drink
After a year that rule is no different
But the company is what really changes
Whether the liquor is smuggled or not
Also,
cocks |
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| #23 - In & Out Art |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|09:32 pm] |
I was so in love with the canvas
that
I just couldn't put
paint
on it so now
I have thrown paint across it
hurled curlicues of lavender and velvet blue periwinkle
and now it is no longer
sacred
or maybe it is finally sacred enough
to put paint on
I'd tell my parents
but they would just ask me why
I hadn't called |
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| 21 |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|08:57 pm] |
21.
Washed today down with
something?
can't concentrate
but
there's XKCD in the channel
where Pipe is X to tha D
- no salt on the frizzle
and drinkin' Bailey's from a shoe
and Dad hits me with the worm
and takes it back
and
and
and |
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| #22 - Development |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|11:18 pm] |
We had a talk, the two of us
the other night, under a long moon
its light cast in reflection over reflection over reflection
layering the waves
ocean below us, before us
we were high up on our cliff
And it feels like "ours" at that distance, even though
it's more yours than mine, much more
Anyways, I had a cigarette
offered you one, and to my surprise you accepted
'What a gentleman', the other voice in my lapel pocket
snickers
but only with so much mock
at this point in developments it's conversation too.
A three-way conversation more than a two-way
but you knew that before I even asked if we could talk
you and I, under the stars
you know I don't go out alone anymore
Still, I extended the offer
because it seemed to matter that I tried.
I always think of what I miss. It's nice to know you miss
that upon change, you acknowledge, and that you can reflect
I don't think that is relevant here but,
in a way, is it what this has been all about?
I ask you about the stars. Or maybe I talk to you
no questions, no motives
who's to tell the difference at a certain elevation?
I ask about K, about my tribe, and my family
I ask most of all about myself and that which I've beget
I make shapes with the smoke I inhale.
It's all part of getting comfortable,
I suppose
It's all part of growing into me
breaking the new shoes in
You give them pots, they whose roots you tend
He gives me shoes, he who my roots now lead to
I wonder at how accurate that metaphor might be
How close to home
A transplant's ponderings.
What words did we really have besides idle conversation?
Or was this what all the trouble was about?
Sometimes, that is enough. |
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