My lover Peterson
He named me Goldenmouth
I changed him to a bird
And he migrated south

My lover Frederick
Wrote sonnets to my breast
I changed him to a horse
And he galloped west

My lover Levite
He named me Bitterfeast
I changed him to a serpent
And he wriggled east

My lover I forget
He named me Death
I changed him to a catfish
And he swam north

My lover I imagine
He cannot form a name
I'll nestle in his fur
And never be to blame.

No one has entered
the stone of this place
in a century, the dust has powdered
even the cat's lashes. Still I sit, robes folded, crown
pinned upon the river of my braids, their diamond
points have not forgotten how to find the door.
It is kept open. Someone might yet care to find his fate.
Once there were feasts here, tables set in silk, glazed peacock
and pomegranates so ripe a look from me would tear their skins.

I love the quiet.
The void of voices begging me
for youth and vengeance, for the fastest way
to travel over water or how to spy by moonlight.
I love how my hands do little but settle on my velvet lap.

Afternoons I rise to circle the gardens, the devil's trumpet large
enough now to shade all that lies beneath it: moss, pond, the small
star blossoms that burst in clumps along the earth, so bright,
so content to bleed their red selves into shadow.

Let your mountainous forehead
with its veins of bright ore
ease down, the deep line
between your brows flatten,
unruffle the small muscles
below your temples, above
your jaws, let the grimace
muscles in your cheekbones
go, the weeping muscles
sealing your eyes. Die into
the pillow, calm in the knowledge
that you will someday cease, soon
or late, late or soon, the song
you're made of will stop, your body
played out, the currents pulsing
through your brain drained
of their power, their purpose,
will frizzle out through
your fingertips, private sparks
leaping weakly onto the sheets
where you lay breathing
and then not breathing.
Lay your head down and relax
into it: death. Accept it.
Trick yourself like this.
Hover in a veil of ethers.
Call it sleep.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

 I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing 
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn't matter what came to pass, 
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I've decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place 
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed 
For no good reason, other than this.

 Is when you return to a place
and it's not nearly as amazing
as you once thought it was,

or when you remember how you felt
about something (or someone) but you know 
you'll never feel that way again.

It's when you notice someone has turned
down the volume, and you realize 
it was you; when you have the

suspicion that you've met the enemy
and you are it, or when you get 
your best ideas from your sister's journal.

Is also-to be fair-the thing that enables
you to walk for miles and miles chanting to
yourself in iambic pentameter

and to travel through Europe with 
only a clean shirt, a change of
underwear, a notebook and a pen.

And yes: is when you stretch out
on your couch and summon up ten thousand
daffodils, all dancing in the breeze.

At first there were too many branches
so he cut them and then it was winter.
He meaning you. Yes. He would look out
the window and stare at the trees that once
had too many branches and now seemed
to have too few. Is that all? No, there were
other attempts, breakfasts: plates served,
plates carried away. He doesn't know
what to do with his hands. He likes the feel
of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw?
Yes, and he likes flipping the chairs,
watching them fill with people. He likes
the orange juice and toast of it, and waxed
floors in any light. He wants to be tender
and merciful. That sounds overly valorous.
Sounds like penance. And his hands?
His hands keep turning into birds and
flying away from him. Him being you.
Yes. Do you love yourself? I don't have to
answer that. It should matter. He has a
body but it doesn't matter, clean sheets
on the bed but it doesn't matter. This is
where he trots out his sadness. Little black
cloud, little black umbrella. You miss
the point: the face in the mirror is a little
traitor, the face in the mirror is a pale
and naked hostage and no one can tell
which room he's being held in. He wants
in, he wants out, he wants the antidote.
He stands in front of the mirror with a net,
hoping to catch something. he wants to
move forward into the afternoon because
there is no other choice. Everyone in this
room got here somehow and everyone in
this room will have to leave. So what's left?
Sing a song about the room we're in?
Hammer in the pegs that fix the meaning
to the landscape? The voice wants to be
a hand and the hand wants to do something
useful. What did you really want? Someone
to pass this with me. You wanted more.
I want what everyone wants. He raises
the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins.
That's what the violins are for. And yes,
he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it
until it shines. So what does it shine on?
Nothing. Was there no one else? Left-handed
truth, right-handed truth, there's no pure
way to say it. The wind blows and it makes
a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on
the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there
no one else? His hands keep turning into
birds, and his hands keep flying away
from him. Eventually the birds must land.

 Mistaking me for someone else, he asked me to marry him. This has
happened more than once. The first time, I was eighteen and the boy had
a diamond ring in a box. It was the Fourth of July, it was dark, he said, Happy
Independence Day. Of course, the ring was too large and slipped right off
my finger into the grass. (It belonged to someone else: the woman he 
married, eventually.) And when I was twenty-one, that redhead, sloe-eyed
and slinking out of his grief, said he'd imagined I'd be his wife. But he was
mistaken. It wasn't me. Then a drunk who drove too fast, who threw the 
proposal over his shoulder like some glittering, tattered scarf. I staggered 
out of his car, saying, No thanks, No thanks, No thanks. And the man over 
eggs one morning, in the midst of an argument, saying he planned to wait
for spring to ask for my hand, then he never asked. (So of course, I married
that one for a while; spent years convincing him I was not his cup of coffee, 
not his girl.) And in Prague, on a bridge called the Karlův Most, a stranger,
a refugee, who mistook the way I stared at the river for thinking of suicide.
Who mistook my American passport for his ticket out of there. And 
others-the man whose children grabbed the food off my plate, called me 
her; the man in Chartres Cathedral humming the wedding march into my
ear. And tonight, at dinner with friends, happy, discussing their wedding
plans, a man I've known for a couple of hours turning to ask me to marry 
him. I don't know who they think I am. Do I look like a bride in these rags
of wind? Do I look like the angel of home and hearth with this strange green
fire in my hands? 

is it legitimate to feel asinine about feeling asinine

has anyone else ever felt incredibly sarcastic about feeling incredibly depressed but at the same time felt incredibly depressed

is that something that anyone has done

is it normal to perceive your behavior with extreme sarcasm and then experience anxiety, depression, alienation, and low self confidence, and then feel sarcasm about your feelings of anxiety, depression, alienation, and low self confidence, and then reevaluate your behavior with an even more extreme sarcasm, in an endless loop that you can not stop consciously processing

is someone saying, 'get over yourself' right now

or maybe, is someone saying, 'this is juvenile and derived' right now

are there others that rely almost entirely on external validation to feel motivated to achieve personal goals, to relieve depression, and to increase self confidence

is it normal to think 'i hate myself' but not take yourself seriously, but really be serious about hating yourself

thank you for reading my poem

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigous then meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious
and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland in the rythym of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensible, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away
he doesn't expect to arrive.

The Recurrence
Todd Zuniga



The rules of The Recurrence were: anyone who had ever been missed could come back. The expectation from the living was that the streets would flood with the dead, overflow that would squeeze every space, pundits on airwaves concerned with crowding. But day of, when no dead Recurred, there was a mad sadness, fingernails against floors and pillows wet with cry. Suicides in droves, a national emergency. For so long we had carried our missing in tiny bags, closed up, but given the chance we romanticized our hurt, split open the seams, let it consume us. Our egos couldn't believe that out there, anywhere, there was something better than us.





Source: http://www.abjective.net/001.html

To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will;
it is at best an act of prudence. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,
it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.

Always enter a home with your right foot;
the left is for cemeteries and unclean places.

O-guf! Tera armeek is rarely useful.
It means Stop! Or I'll shoot.

Sabah el khair is effective.
It means Good Morning.

Inshallah means Allah be willing.
Listen well when it is spoken.

You will hear the RPG coming for you.
Not so the roadside bomb.

There are bombs under the overpasses,
in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars.

There are shopping carts with clothes soaked
in foogas, a sticky gel of homemade napalm.

Parachute bombs and artillery shells
sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals.

A graffiti sprayed onto the overpasses:
I will kell you, American.

Men wearing vests rigged with explosives
walk up, raise their arms and say Inshallah.

There are men who earn eighty dollars
to attack you, five thousand to kill.

Small children who will play with you,
old men with their talk, women who offer chai-

and any one of them
may dance over your body tomorrow.

Does anybody know a poem which ends with the line. "They weren't my lovers. You were. You said you were."

?

In a little while I’ll be drifting up an on-ramp,
sipping coffee from a styrofoam container,
checking my gas gauge with one eye
and twisting the dial of the radio
with the fingers of my third hand,
Looking for a station I can steer to Saturn on.

It seems I have the traveling disease
again, an outbreak of that virus
celebrated by the cracked lips
of a thousand blues musicians—song
about a rooster and a traintrack,
a sunrise and a jug of cherry cherry wine.

It's the kind of perceptual confusion
that makes your loved ones into strangers,
that makes a highway look like a woman
with air conditioned arms. With a
bottomless cup of coffee for a mouth
and jewelry shaped like pay phone booths
dripping from her ears.

In a little while the radio will
almost have me convinced
that I am doing something romantic,
something to do with “freedom” and “becoming”
instead of fright and flight into
an anonymity so deep

it has no bottom,
only signs to tell you what direction
you are falling in: CHEYENNE, SEATTLE,
WICHITA, DETROIT—Do you hear me,
do you feel me moving through?
With my foot upon the gas,
between the future and the past,
I am here—
here where the desire to vanish
is stronger than the desire to appear.

Meditation on the Word Need
by Linda Rodriguez

The problem with words of emotion
is how easily meaning drains
from their fiddle-sweet sounds
and they become empty instruments.
I can say love
and mean desire to give—
open-handed, open-hearted—
or I am drawn to the light
shining from your soul—
or my life is empty without you—
or I want to run my hands
and mouth down the length of you—
or all of these at once.

Need, now, is a plain word.
I need a nail to hang this picture.
I need money to pay my bills.
I need air and light,
water and food,
shelter from storm and sun and cold.
To be healthy,
to be sane,
to survive,
I need you.

remembering my mother
at a theatre in Athens
thirty
thirty-five years ago
a revue by Theodorakis
those great songs
she fell asleep
in the chair beside mine
in the open-air theatre
she had arrived that day
from Montreal
and the play started close to midnight
and she slept through
the mandolins
the climbing harmonies
and the great songs
I was young
I hadn't had my children
I didn't know how far away
your love could be
I didn't know how
tired you could get

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For, lo! my own shall come to me.

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.

What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.

The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.

now, Ezra

you more than anybody, knew what the
poem is! a trick, a toy, to be worked on
at whim to fit fanciful patterns.
work it well enough and
then profound or
seemingly profound meanings surface
on the page.
but, essentially, it was just shuck and jive
for you
just as it is for everbody
else.
there was/is nothing holy to say.
there will never be anything holy to say.
we live, we die, right?
and are each caught, in between
this way and that way
it's pure folly to get slick about
all this.
we all come up short in the
end.
the worst say it badly.
the luckiest say it a bit differently,
bored with what has preceded them,
they just say nothing in a newer
way,
to hold that ground for a decade or
two,
(or a century or two)
in order to be
safely preserved in textbook
minds---
hardly a reward
for the simple hell of every
day living.

yes, poetry is a lie

In case you hadn't noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you're talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you're saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)'s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren't, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences — so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not —
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don't think I'm uncool just because I've noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It's like what I've heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I'm just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest? You know?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally...
I mean absolutely... You know?
That we've just gotten to the point where it's just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness (that's, that's a noun, right?)
Our disarticulationosity
is just a clever sort of... what is the word I'm looking for?
... thing to disguise the fact that we've become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since...
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you, and
I challenge you: to speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.