Poem-A-Day #362 : Hearts Have A Way

Hearts Have A Way

I beat forever my heart don't want to
what of this house in my throat

The sun beam broken on sea shine is the summer of things

Cephalopod dreams and champagne wishes
are sponges to the blood stains from the crime scene

Dune this but forget how to dune that

On the lighthouse downs the horses come rabbit
they antler and speak of the black mass with raspberries

At 3 o-clock exactly there will be apocalypse loons

I forever my beat don't want to heart
but hearts have a way they spleen themselves through

Poem-A-Day #326 : Broken Poem

Broken Poem

Your zoology is confusing
A tongue on your skin - mine - in the creases of your arm
Let the broken blood be the broken glass
A light comes into the room - it is a ghost expressing discomfort with limes
Trees become fish for you
Scales leaf and collapse - they make a paste - they pop
Animals on our bodies and our mouths and our left parts
It spills and spills and spills
Cages erupt around the world - they fill and open - they burn
A missed connections ad on Craigslist mentions the figure of Orion
The arrows land in the yard
We chase the Chinese New Year and try to name the puddles
Squeeze citrus - squeeze eggs
There are things we can build and not build - nothing else

Poem-A-Day #297 : That Woke

That Woke

I want to write something inflammatory
about how you are all about that
woke life

But I am tired

And uninterested in the discussion
not because the discussion shouldn't occur

But because the discussion will change nothing

Because fingers will point at the problem
will call out the problem
and will remain distant from it

Enough to not be bothered

Outside the hills fill with mist - they roll
like turf before a football game
they turn black and white

Here the vision of snow falling
the problem is covering in it

The static of it fuzzing silently

Let's both say something about our privilege
it will make us feel better

You can whip out your dick and compare it to mine
and then we can all feel satisfied that
we did all we could in the face of all this injustice

Poem-A-Day #274 : To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (after W. B. Yeats)

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (after W. B. Yeats)

Couch yourself in the comfort of stone
the broken seal, the mouth of earth
and let your heart be hard, let your tears
be gold streaming across your worth

You hear the calls to dismantle even bone
the flag waving in the night, a hearth
breaking like Alexandria across the world
allow your words to unfold engulf give birth

To a moment where you renew, arise
there is not hopelessness in defeat laid prone
the rut you call home will expand, cocoon
your throat will give new life yet, defeat will atone


Yeats' poem:

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

Poem-A-Day #272 : On the First Hold the Collar Close to Your Neck Night

On the First Hold the Collar Close to Your Neck Night

The sound of train tracks cooling is a baking sheet in the oven clang

These are house noises - the world
is a house making noises - the cooling
is the world making house

The pie was delicious
                         at least everyone said so
               why is it so hard to believe those sorts of statements
          conditioning - because - praise is ego and ego is inflatable

And no one can float on it alone

The oven cools it has a stone in its belly and the stone is blackened

On the first hold the collar close to your neck night the world sighed deeply and said that the years are getting harder to come back from

It closed up itself
curtains and all the doors
were resealed this autumn the windows leak still but...

Picture a train track popping - the back
of it breaking and curling upwards into the dark sky

It shatters into ravens and they
shatter into a rain of snow hard as glass
glinting like fresh asphalt

Jacobin Pigeon

Poem-A-Day #269 : Your Fandom Is Not Helping Us Live

Your Fandom Is Not Helping Us Live

At the edge of the cliff - a seance is forming

The sound of humming is as loud as the wind rolling int he canyon below

There are plenty of words that could be used here - Trump Clinton environmental collapse America - that could be used to convey concern or mood or tone -


At 1:00 in the morning the post on Facebook seems like a letter from the end of everything

It talks about rowsing the Hufflepuffs and casting some bullshit to fix the world

There is the impulse to post a response asking if the parents of these children know they are awake on a school night - but this is a college communities page and it's a Friday


I believe in magic

This isn't about your hopes and dreams

But this is not real - the swirl on the screen and page are imagination - and I know that I sound condescending right now but it's hard not to when you seem to think that there could be a room larger on the inside and that using the word 'cast' instead of 'pray' is worth something


Is this the start of a religion - I see the roots in it - in some weird future the Books of Potter will be debated for what is and is not canon - will there be factions that stand on either side of the Dumbledore queerness debate

I'm making light of this

Because it's deadly serious - fantasy will not save the world from destruction

We stand on the edge of a cliff and there is very real erosion happening beneath us

And we are thinking about levitating when the time comes - not taking a step backwards

Poem-A-Day #265 : The Latest Poem About Violence That I Have Written

The Latest Poem About Violence That I Have Written

I often think about Matthew Shepard
and what the last thing he heard was
and I hope it was a bird or
wind in the leaves

Not the sound of his own skull
cracking like an egg
on the side of a bowl

But deep down I know that was what he heard - engulfing
the sound of bone becoming soft - islands drifting int he ocean of brain
and then becoming nothing

And I fear that sound

I sleep restless with that sound

I dream endlessly of that sound

I hope - at least - that he could see the stars

Poem-A-Day #244 : Of A Broken Wheel

Of A Broken Wheel

A broken limb -
               the eye - a wheel carrying you towards that gas station over there -
          not that you are on empty but you never know...

                                                               There is the impulse to lake - to
                                    find the tree this thing fell from - to
              rub the bark across your chest until it reds

The aesthetics of clouds -
                                                                            epistemology of algae -

                                                                 There is a greenness in both - the wheel
                     of the car kneecapping the day - the Emily Dickinsonness of
a broken wheel that is also an eye looking at a broken wheel -

Here death -

                                    Everywhere the sound of cicadas -

                 How both are ticks along a carved piece of wood -

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 #219 : Blood

Blood

If you cracked the wall open the blood that would fall out would drown the room in scent and iron and the shattered fragments of red light would sift the carpet would finger the room like a zen garden whose names are written there and how does the blood find a way out of this space beastly and soiled the blood is the house's it is a twin without skin the house a twin of only skin there is no other place there are no bones the holes in the walls will no heal there is no scab wallpaper is not strong enough

Poem-A-Day #210 : How Best to Prepare

How Best to Prepare

There is no backpack full of things that can make the going easier
this is a Mt Everest of a house it is strewn with bodies they line the path are signs
they are mile markers

Young wide dead in the driveway
Young wife dead in a fall
Young wife dead in consumption
Old daughter dead in pneumonia
Young heiress dead in suicide

All this rimmed in gold
we have no name for it
there is no name for it
it is not a broken dish to be sewn back together

Mad in its birth this deranged house is a shard of glass in your eye

There is no preparation no amount of oxygen therapy
to get you to the top

Burn it down find a way to burn things already burnt and burn it again
then sow the ground with salt