Poem-A-Day #240 : Hill House, Not Sane

This is the end of the Hill House Poems. I think I ran out of ideas at least 15 poems ago, but I stuck with it. One poem for each chapter in the book. Sorta.


Hill House, Not Sane

Houses conspire in other ways - steadfast until collapse
          fuzzed hills pile
                                     until they sky themselves - there is
no truth in these things - we lean into each other

Speak in the tongue of brick and mortar - safe - not sane
          our skin entangles
                                        with this permanence

The crutch of reality flexes
          until breaking - until fracture and stardust
in our eyes blinds us - we drive into death - we fall into
the mouths of the world

Poem-A-Day #239 : Ends

Ends

It is a quiet hunger - not a thirst - not the kind that forces people into the woods to force leaves into their mouths -

The sound of leaves of metal accordioning - the folds are pleats in a curtain that moves quietly in a breeze - it swirls the dust in an attic the hair under the bed -

No one can satisfy this hunger - one must forget to survive - oleander in the veins - it smells like old houses creaking in the ocean of night - like trees turning yellow and mast-like before winter erases them -

You must go the way you came - must arm the threat of starving - there is a tree and there is the road and the choice of allowing yourself to move -

And there is the breaking sound of digesting

Poem-A-Day #238 : Parted

Parted

Love affairs
become our skin -

A second layer of mist
on the grass -

Toe the rocks in the bird's gullet
and find the places that need to smooth

Perhaps the cliche of parting and sorrow
should be broken

Whispered into the cracks of a stone wall
turned - such sorrow is parted sweet

Once the lovers meet -
journey towards each other

The destined touching of fingertips -
separating the newborn twins

Is a deathly business
journeys end in lovers meeting

and then peeling themselves
like the sound of oranges - until they pith

Poem-A-Day #237 : The Library

The Library

Broken
the spell of Hill House
somehow
come inside

Dance
of the iron railing
the rotting of wood
in the veins

The broken
once there is
so hard to puzzle
together

Poem-A-Day #236 : The Spot of Our Sanity

The Spot of Our Sanity

The soft spot of our sanity - when pressed like a plum - gives its black juices to our fingers

Here is the sound of singing the brush of fabric against goosefleshed arm - it radiates heat

The spot will well up - saturation point like floodwaters filling the soil - will eventually give

Thumb through skin through meats - the smell of rotting rose petals - yellow beneath and pitted

Poem-A-Day #235 : Only So

Only So

The hallways are running out of horrors - the long trail of threadbare carpet looks less like a river of blood and more like its shabby self - only so many ghosts can scream in the night at once - only so many tomatoes can be thrown against the windows -

Poem-A-Day #234 : Study

Study

Scent of old books and tobacco

The swell of viola in humidity

Here the blaze of copper - the pop of heavy fabrics

What ivory object falls from a shelf

Collapses - becomes an archetype of lines on carpet

Here is the form man and the form room

They are fighting for dominance of space

These objects want to divorce

Want to be only themselves and their shapes

The scent will leave will drift like a cloud of toxic gas

Poem-A-Day #233 : The Grattan Murders

The Grattan Murders

A knife
His hands
A wire
A shiv

The clock counts the ways
that a man could kill his family

It strikes twice per hour

How drunk his ass must have been
how sad his life before or after - he
must have been on PCP

He lost Jesus

A knife
          from the kitchen block
the one for turkey at Thanksgiving - the
one his father gave him
     the day the baby was born

His hands
                    around his own
mother's neck - he'd dreamt it
since he was 5

A wire
     the folds of the skin - leather
the wire is a belt the wire is a moment
a switch from the tree out front
               a sound like be a man

A shiv for baby

He had been staring out at the lake for hours
had managed to not drink or anything
had come home silently
had decided without deciding

Poem-A-Day #232 : Masc4Masc

Masc4Masc

must                    clean                   revolver
     keep it     gleaming               like                the sun
no
                    milksops               here       no faggots
        we play                     tennis cricket volleyball golf
are men
                         must keep          being clean men
                                                                               fire
in                place               our cocks are shuttled
are being a spin
                        in a chamber
                                          scar tissue across the cheek

Poem-A-Day #231 : Wall

Wall

The oleander - mother house of my heart
thick around it with the ripples of vacant footsteps on water

I was as vacant once - will be forever
the laughter of death on the hillock under the trees

Hand-shaped candles melting into bowls of candy
a Halloween of the brain - pick it clean - but pick it cleanly

Poem-A-Day #229 : Up All Night

Up All Night

The branch fingers the window
                                                   all night
that small bent sound - in the morning
names are engraved across the surface

Out the cloisters and into the sunlight
there - in the small oldest rooms of Westminster
a glass coffin houses old wax in the shape of a dead prince

The corner calls out
                                 in curling lines
time has etched its graffiti in the form of some
other dead man's initials

That we want to leave something
is not in doubt
                        the tree
                                     the man
both have seeds to sow to tend to reap

Poem-A-Day #230 : Stray Cat

Stray Cat

I have felt not at home
within
and without

The universe is not a cold dead place

It is just cold
and mostly not alive

Our matter
coalesces around us
it speaks to us at night
in the sounds of houses settling

If I have a hand to hold
let it also be my own

Poem-A-Day #228 : Night

Night

all in your head : the twisting blackness is

wood caves in itself : fire is hollowing

the children's faces darken : coal smoke ash everywhere

Poem-A-Day #227 : Planchette

I love Ouija boards. I love the idea of things talking to us from beyond whatever this is, from whatever that is. I love the lie of it. The beauty of it. The need for it.


Planchette

Ghosts of trees
                          break open and
       split along their Blaschko's

The rupture is a balloon pop -
                                                 the second it takes for sound to enter your ear
pick at your brain register there is infinite -
                                                                      the threads of wood in your eye tell you more

Heart wood
                              is both poetic and descriptive
and tragic in your hand or sanded into a banister
to slide down

But shaped into a heart -
                                         and holding a pencil -
                                                                             the wood can speak its screaming truths

What these spectral beasts say
                                                  the creak of ships at sea
                                           the vanished static of leaves
or the shrapnel of falling down

Whichever it is -
                            those voices are in your hand
warming there and feeling polished -
                                                            they are making the small plank left behind move

British Planchette c.1850-19860

Poem-A-Day #226 : Mrs. Montague

I've been very bad at loading these to the webs. But it was release week for my book (order it HERE) and I kinda took it easy.


Mrs. Montague

She arrives
and automatically writes
her name across the page

This screen capture is larger than my poem.

Poem-A-Day #225 : What Will I Do

What Will I Do

          only to watch it die
in my hands - the daisy - obviously

the greenness of the grass
     it was too much honestly - burned - it was blazing

the daisy - obviously
          it burned in my hands

curled petals went white then not
          it was just not for me - only for the soil

     not for these too clean hands

Poem-A-Day #224 : Path

Path

Paths don't know where they go
          they lay themselves down over and over and they end up
     where they do

They take us in the night          they are kidnappers and thieves

          One can find themselves in the garden of judgement
when they thought they were out for a stroll in the country
          the gates of hell
                    fling themselves open at the merest whisper

The rotting corpse of a child will throw a ball to a rotting dog
both          will smile up into the face of their guest
and will take their hand and never let go -


And the path that led there will not even notice what it has done
                                                  it will just keep sending travelers
                                                  into the grinder

Poem-A-Day #223 : Bibelot

Bibelot

Beside the bed is the book the pages covered in woodcuts covered in twisted faces they are mouthing words in the sleeping ears around them they are silent but their silence is also hugely exploding they are forming themselves into solid objects these objects are letters that form and unform words the letters sing in a voice that cracks the sky the sky cracks and cracks and the bowl of it cannot hold enough cherries cannot hold enough cannot not the sound of voices the sound of wings the sound of a child listening...

Poem-A-Day #222 : Eleanor Thinks About Her Companions

Eleanor Thinks About Her Companions

The room is warm is red with it

and she is thinking darkly that these people

hate her secretly find her silly

And she imagines them dead or worse

Imagines the sound of herself

as the sound of cheese being grated

That ones voice is the sound of bravado

it is the brag in the lung as it pushes oxygen

into the blood stream - without me etc. etc.

The father one is a bearded sink

a point of darkness where the knowledge dies

he is a buttonhole smoking a pipe

The psychic lesbian is a trope

that has never caught on but here she is

sitting on the carpet admiring her red toes

Eleanor wants them to go away

wants the silence that a mother's death promised her

she wants to disintegrate into the woodwork

Imagine them being eaten by the fireplace

her warmth guaranteed until the bones ran out

Poem-A-Day #221 : Hands

Hands

Hands held
so tight
you can feel
the fine
bones
the tendons
in the finger

The roll
of those rope
like tendrils
that wrap
from muscle
to bone
to circuitry

They
make it go
you can feel
the steady
thump
of blood
in there

Hands
the thing
that opens
gates
closes them
it is a
permission
organ

Feel that
nimbleness
the fragility
of the nails
against nails
the crack
of knuckles

So tight
that you can
feel them
breaking
can imagine
them floating
off their arms