30 September 2009

Ghosts are a metaphor for headaches

Ghostly (9/30)

It's fog over valley - a warm day - pressure
on my skull filling in every crack
I know it's some weather - pressure drop - a
hung-over lecture rattling
It drills - a curtain over eyes that buzzes lightly
cicadas with glassine features
they break at the first sign of breathing -


I get headaches. Often. They happen at season changes, temperature changes, pressure changes, weather changes. I have learned to live with the dull ache inside the lobes. Yes, I have taken pills. Yes, I have mentioned it to doctors. I take ibuprofen when it gets really bad. Two do the trick for a few hours. If all fails, I go to bed early after drinking a ton of water.

29 September 2009

Cheapen, poetry readings make me sad

Is it true of all artists that they feel like they are lacking in their art?

This question plagues me. If I fear anything, it is giving all of this up and it somehow being ok with me. The idea that I could go on with my life not thinking about writing. Not answering 'writer' when asked what I do. This scared the shit out of me.

I went to a reading at the New School tonight. This was after an obnoxiously long day at work tearing apart a failed branch of our business. All vacuuming couches and boxing used dishware. I was tired to begin with is what I'm saying.

So I go to this reading. A reading for the winners of a chapbook contest at the New School. And I am genuinely happy for the woman I know who won. Because she is a writer I actually like, who I believe deserves a little credit. She has a book coming out. Again, deserved. I will buy it. I don't want this to seem like an angry letter to X about X. It isn't at all.

The whole thing makes me sad beyond belief. The reading, the clapping, even the little chap books they published. I cannot place the sadness. It is ambiguous and larger then a feeling of 'shoulda been me'. After the reading everyone seemed a bit down in general, maybe it is a state of the world moment?

Sad, tired, hungry I ended up at a Quiznos eating alone in NY. I wonder the aisles of The Strand and then head home on the 4.

What sort of point is here Michael?

None. I have no point. Do I wish I had a book coming out, sure. But I don't know what that would mean to me. If it would mean...that is also something that scares me. Getting what you think you wanted all along and finding out that it didn't mean anything to you.

Here is today's poem. It started out about pennies...it ended up about death or something like it.


Cheapen (9/29)

Pennies tarnish - turn green the
milky waters of the bay

There are barnacles that look like Lincoln
on hulls of schooners

His nose smells all seven seas and in
Times Square they have a bit of curtain

From the Ford theater - history
under glass - untouchable

Eventually all faces are left to pictures only
just masks

Of paper
there is a thickness to blood lacking in paper

That copper taste and the red that seals brown
that softens in water

28 September 2009

Black

Black (9.28)

Burn - there is
a break in wood it's a charcoal mess in here

My heart is a breathing organ with an unblinking eye

Breathing is painting
burning through the torso

That heat feel in the cells - in there like spontaneous

Makes you want to put your head down
some chopping block - reach out

With some limp-wristed faggot hands
go down on this blade - eh? - this one here

Here -
take the creaking - it is the sound of hate in your chest

My heart is a hearing organ - a kneecap breaking on a tire iron

Colors are a bore - spreading vine making
your body becomes abandoned temples

The shears are breaking on lead - the turn aluminum

In a kitchen in Green Point it is 3am
a chamber burned - the outline of a body left behind

27 September 2009

Unworthy ya'll

Starting this week I am going to try and find something interesting to post along with the poems. It may have something to do with the poems going up or it may be random.


Unworthy (9/27)

I fear that I am unattractive
That I am always going ot be alone
Everyone is disinterested - taken - and crazy

I fear that I am never going to be a good writer
That I will be a ma-have
Inside those bars you can see them all networking

I fear I have genetic disorders
A bad heart, ASL, cancer, gum disease
My head is going to decide that sanity isn't for it

I fear the divide between reality and dreaming
It blurs sometimes
It's an oceanliner - I'm a bit of wood

I fear tomorrow will be the same as today and so on
That the sun will rise and the sky will be blue
I fear not being afraid

26 September 2009

Tout

Tout (9/26)

This is a strange sort of watching
a sitting on a pole sort - a bird kind of state

You are dressed in your fall camoflage
are wood ducking the season - attempting to catch cool

Who are you with your sitting buck
high-hatting matching my gait - a wing thumping a leg

You seem to be motion sensored
in a tree - you want everyone to ignore you walk by you get shot

25 September 2009

Buildings are only images too

The Blur Building is fascinating.

It was built in 2002 for the Swiss Expo. It was meant to convey a sense of a whirling cloud over the lake. Visitors were given raincoats.

I love the idea of a building that is amorphous, that cannot be focused on. Almost like a true object...always changing and never looking the same to each person who views it. A visual representation of Plato's Analogy of the Cave.

Beautiful.

Beldam

So this is going to be a bit of an experiment.

Over the course of a year from 2007-2008 I wrote one poem every day. Each was based on the OED word of the day. The project began as a stop-gap after a long period of non-writing. It was nice to have the topics taken out of my hands. Each day I received an e-mail with a word and a definition. I had 24 hours before I got the next. There was little wiggle room, if I got backed up I had to get in gear or be left behind.

The word became the title and I went about like this for the full year. Starting today this blog will host the results.

Let me know how it went.

Beldam (9.25)

How many breasts have come
into full rotted
been taken away on some metal
table the mammaries of my mothers
slug-like bleeding
a kombucha mushroom rubber and melting
if each had two at the start how many are left

The spaces between cells turns clear then black then light

How far back are we dying - here is a necklace of women
the thread a bread crumb for the cancers

Each amazonian breast
placed in a vat of honey
soaks until golden
is spooned like cow tongues
onto a waiting child's mouth

We are dying because we are passing everything - we empty
into each other

Is it a sort of root
the nipple a tuber like a switch
the tubes push dust in my family
mothers don't feed so much as spread
everything spread a
war of gourd a hollowing
from the center of the universe
out