Poem-A-Day #318 : It Is What The Brain Does In Response That Causes Concern

It Is What The Brain Does In Response That Causes Concern

In the stark light of January it is hard to predict where it will come from
the broken man missing all of his teeth or the men in their "nice" clothes
coming out of the diner

Conversation in the parking lot our gayness on display by virtue of existence
the voices may come harsh and faggoting or they will whisper followed
by laughter and stares and cackling as doors to cars open and shut

And in that moment everyone who is a target will be hushed and silenced
and kept from being as loud and real as those people who get to drive
out of the accident that just occurred

A cell phone may go off the ringtone a Tina Turner song and someone will
have to decide to answer it the cars will move silently by the small pressed
selves and eyes will lock

On the phone a parent or friend or sibling and they will be asking what's up
the moment will elongate time stopping a hung phrase looping itself to death
there could be a fire in that rubbing second

"Fine" will be the answer because there is nothing finer than coming through
the micro without a fat lip or a worse screeching of tires or blood on the snow
there is only fine here

Poem-A-Day #286 : Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation

Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation

The process is the thing

To see the car in the tree - the wood nails and glue

The idea of oil crisis - a sort of fracking
cracking the shell of the idea of a country

We want to see the yellow box on wheels as savior - we
want it to drive us to a future we cannot imagine


I pump the gas into the car that was bought as an afterthought

It is cold dark out and the station is bright

The truck across from me is empty - the door open - there is no one around

I hear the sound of the pump fulfilling itself


Saint Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael

Our lady of broken promises of lemons and car making

Industry science and technology - I want to talk about
the abandoned - the people who held their money out
and felt the rain coming


Light the candles - there is the repetition
                    desire need poverty and fear

It is a sort of cycle

And then the promise of freedom that cannot be

The mind convinces itself of its cagedness

And she stands up and points to the horizon - and the horizon responds
with light and with lines of dollars

A moment arises - it becomes prophetic - cool to the touch

The process is the thing
at the end of it there is no result - the hollow space
of new event and new horizon

Ad for the 1975 Dale

Poem-A-Day #266 : Highway at Night

Highway at Night

          Curving sounds

                                        green in their echo

               There is evidence that everything will not be fine

It moves

                        in that moving it settles like salad dressing

          and the curve is a spoon

                                                            How sound curves

                                           enters the canyon

                              of your ear

                                                            settles there sets up home erupts

            The drum

                             a sort of rainstorm


                                                            Sound of snow

                                            Volcanoes of color becoming solid objects in a field

          a herd of rams waiting under electric lines

Poem-A-Day #261 : Insecurity

Insecurity

The ashes smear across the windshield
a sort of dark rain
                    coal as performance

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 #203 : Driven

Driven

We are really going - we will not need a map

Until the wheels are worn - and we have come
to the end of the world - the journey will be the positive action

Dear Evil - Oleander is poison is the flower of Hiroshima
it was the first to bloom after the bombs exploded and the buildings burned

When I died - the empty field the road to nowhere the open gates
of the spell - we will come back - we will break the spell

The end of the world is a cup of stars - insist on
the cup of stars - hope - find - a house of stars

The map is a line dear Evil - it crawls like millipedes

Julie Harris in The Haunting (1963)

Poem-A-Day #183 : Zeus in New Mexico

Zeus in New Mexico

The lid of the sky
and the lid of the ground

A half-open eye

The copper stream of tears
reverses itself

The day is a statue unearthed
in a field after millennia

It is missing its body

Its hand is missing fingers

In the cataract
milky self-rorschach of shadows

This thing sees you
and now seen you exist

The view from my patio

Poem-A-Day #120 : The 4Runner in the Arroyo

The 4Runner in the Arroyo

Broken tree limbs line the arroyo -

A sort of nest forms
          in this space - you are the egg
here             the sky lowers its
                    feathered ass right on down

This could get real new age in a second -
                     so -

You pull the collar up and brace for waves -

Does the burnt-out SUV pressed into the soil - forming
a wall for the dryness of this riverbed
                    mean
                              anything

Here - words become smoke -
shells popping on a battlefield -
          someday -
                    in the future -
poppies will red on this spot

Their spiny fuzzy heads will spin into tulle -

The small gnats of their seeds swarm against this space -
remind the SUV that it was once mobile -
red and full of gas -

Poem-A-Day #103 : Wall (fragment)

Wall (fragment)

The view from the window is of a brown wall that softly curves at the top
a road extends from it into the distance
every car a sort of promise of something going on out there that is wonderful and good
the temptation to leap into it -

To go out the door - into the lot - the car - drive until the gas light comes on -

Poem-A-Day #89 : Impressive Instant

Impressive Instant

One eye on the patch of skin at the base of my neck - one on the dog being dragged across the street
its legs strung up in the leash - there is a car coming

The dog has stopped walking the man is pulling and laughing - a woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth says that both will be hit

I feel like this moment is being binge watched - can it absorb - this compression

There is too much being held by this otherwise dull moment - in reality not much is released

The dog is fine - somewhere the man too - we finished our cocktails within the hour and the night crept over the mountains unsure of its place in the new spring

What is so interesting about décolletage - about the smell of water on dry earth - the color of whiskey floating in the corner of an eye

Poem-A-Day #68 : ...and the Memory is Also Small

...and the Memory is Also Small

On the other side of the highway
the silver SUV sped towards home

It sought center
and smoothness

It carried a procession of bodies
through that space as careful as a mother

And the dog

It didn't have time to be more than
yet another small branch of kindling

Spinning - a loom endlessly kicked
in some dark room

Gold turning into straw then into shoots
and finally seeds blown in the wind

Poem-A-Day #7 : Tangle

Tangle

Everything smells like vanilla in the morning

          waters came then waters went and they took things with them

The purple eclipse slid through the stop sign

          driverless there were flashes of light from within like selfies being taken

Sargasso, the weed of deceit

          steam in pipes is leftover atom maneuvers

That odd looking second line of cars across the street form my apartment showed up two days ago. It goes up Bedford 4 blocks to the gas station, where the National Guard is allowing people to get $10 worth of gas. There is another line for emergency vehicles. And a third for pedestrians with containers. I saw people carrying water bottles...

That line is there all day and night.

Fisher

Fisher (First US Death in a Car 1899) 9/13

Loop and catch

The pull back is key

Stiffen the rod

like an extension of your arm

and release into the sky

Henry Bliss

you stand firmly

at the end of one era

Stepping off from a streetcar

into the blank road

at 74^th and Central Park West

You are catching

like an extension of arm

in the air

You are releasing time

feeding the extra line

to the tugging future

Tug hard and the line breaks

Henry Bliss

this is a man named Arthur

he is driving he is coming

from below suddenly

The line is snapping your arm slacks

Everything gets away

Indy Apple

Here's a poem about car racing!

Sort of.

And my favorite music video with cars in it!

Fiona Apple - Criminal



Indy 4/20

Could be a car sliding black mirror road
That nighttime moment, glossy, no signs of rain
The lights make everything blue
A muscle car throb - purple chrome distortion
It's all James Dean - a woman with a hankie

Can of ironic spray paint - drift in Tokyo
Hush hush of nitrous, measure of laughter
There is a breast
floating on the hood - breast in heels
Some dark denim cocks, gasoline -