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 #260 : Fellfield

Fellfield

We erode -

                    The computer was no longer working - it was big - it was out of date - we threw it into the dumpster after trying for a week to find somewhere to donate it to

          for parts - education - whatever

                              the sound of the screen breaking was the sound of ice cracking in  glass of scotch - sharp - you could picture the crack across the thick gray surface - could feel the crack with your fingernail

Eventually all mountains turn into scree -

                    The pile of weathered glass looks like marbles - it feels like marbles - like an oddly smooth skin

          colorful skin - breaking skin - the remnants of oceans

                              why do we come here - why do we roll around in these piles of glass what good does it do to stare into the compactor - the dump is not a place for us we are attempting to not be trash

The rubble will hold -

                    The broken computer still houses the memories of what it was - if there were a way to turn it on it would still window itself would probably even bring up the last file

          like a basement in flood - the molding folder would open with a resounding crack

                              inside a map of what once was - topographical and emotional - green and fading and barely legible - it would smell like moths - you could plant it in the ground and it would grow another mountain

Poem-A-Day #153 : Dead Bird in the Garden

Am I gothic? I've been accused of being gothic.

I'm going to finish out the month of looking back with a weird poem about gardening that is not about gardening at all. It does feature two obsessions of mine: 1) Birds; and 2) Decay. So there we go.

Starting tomorrow I'm going to take a friend's advice and start a series of poems about wood. Just wood, it sounds boring right? It is going to be AMAZING though, I swear. How much wood can a Michael chuck if a Michael could chuck wood? 30 days worth, if we're lucky.


Dead Bird in the Garden (4/28/05)

The sky is a gray sweep
of clouds making their brushstrokes
a perfectly windy sky -

Here the reel will speed up
as shadows blur on the landscape
if there were sound in this movie
it would be a lone viola -

Dip your fingers in
the rust-mud colored clay
that nothing will grow in
pull the rock from the shell of earth
roll it in your palms
put it back -

The heavy rains have
cracked and broken open
the small mound
the insides glow fiercely -

A small pool of black stares up
it has feathers that fold wet velvet
they are falling away -

Here is a rib poking out
a hip-bone the tip of wing -

A sudden sweep of air
across the breaking soil
the rest falls away -

A radish beneath the skull -

Poem-A-Day #110 : The Most Gentle of Destructions

The Most Gentle of Destructions

Smoke fills lungs - water - a sort of pool

You are a cave system

The roots of trees reach through the topsoil of your skin - there is not a violence in this it is the most gentle of destructions

Like a tree falling in a silent wood without a set of eyes on it - it is the crumbling face of the buildings resurrected in Pompeii

You are a three thousand year old visage - weathering

These languages against you are salts splitting their ways into your strata - they leave a snail trail behind them - they want you to follow their journey

The cracked open mountain - broken by dynamite and willpower - reveals a strange cake-like interior

Your layers are less complicated for sure - there were fewer lives involved - but they are just as interesting

What is this red thing your finger is on - where was it supposed to go -

A relief from the ancient city of Nimrud - a site destroyed by ISIS in 2015