Poem-A-Day #303 : Aisle 3

Aisle 3

There is the idea of a person who builds a bridge - an architect of spans
but I am not sure that these crossings exist

Here is a fire starting at the base of a tower - and there is always someone dying in fires
always a fire in need of someones to die

At the grocery store the faces all look like milk cartons
I scan them for expiration dates - fine the barcodes on their irises and tick them off my list

An overwhelming sense that this is a toy unwinding - collapse in aisle three
it's devoted to cleaning products - I am rolling on my back - a dying beetle

There are picnic supplies and they are all about keeping food away from things that live outside
and there is a canyon opening and closing its mouth between one shelf and the next

Legs to the sprays - arms to the plates
allow each cart to roll over the spine - train cars going to who the fuck knows

I do not burn bridges so much as not bother to build them in the first place
this suits - ill-fitting - but it does

Poem-A-Day #258 : Species Complex

Species Complex

.
There a body
orange black under sodium-vapor light

Eyes a void
                    don't look in the void

What colors the body
in day

.
The butterfly
lands on the drying plant

It is November why is this thing living

Wings fold unfold
                    scales are enormous eyes
that move
like snakes entering narrow spaces

They are liquid

The impulse to bathe in the copper wetness is unbearable

.
It is easy to say - we are all the same - without enacting it

Language is a seed
                    it will sit dumbly on the pavement until watered

Language is a turbine without water
a magnet
                    coiled in copper wire
left to collect dust

Feel the sound of water through the tunnels of the dam

The turbines long to be harnessed to it - they rub themselves raw
in this longing

.
Sound of buzzing

The body
                    yellowed - like paper - always everything reduced to paper

There is a thing in that
a sort of comment on ledgers and graphs and the way our lives are grid-ed

On every corner a lamp destroys the color of the world

Sepias the entirety

The body and the other body
                    every body

Jaundices - lands on the dying milkweed
growing between the sidewalk joins

Hums

Corrects pitch until in line with the light

Repeating Patterns of Mimicry (2006)
Axel Meyer

Poem-A-Day #251 : A Series of Quakes

A Series of Quakes

The arboreal script pulls across the trunk of the tree

glacial - a sigh in the hills of Scotland - one lone rock in a rut

Out in the ocean - a puffin gives egg to rock

Weight is heat - press and brush fire - the movement of warming

a finger lick up the lip of canyon

Scotland is experiencing a cold snap - a few thousand years

The loneliest rock will dance - glacial kph is one per year -

human expansion clocks the same

We seek the bloodstones in the hazelnuts - burn them to paste

Poem-A-Day #245 : Lips

Lips

Not today

Or any day really - if honesty is policy - which it is not but still at least there is the potential of a day
               where they are not not -

Periscoped from this point out there is the mind that wants to speak to others - that wants to be that
               kind of guy - social etc... - look there is an arm and it could be around your shoulders - and
               those lips could be kissing you -

Every lip could be kissing you - here is a room of nude lips - a bowl of them - they are dried apricots
               - the look like taffy or jerky or another soft problem to think about - they are 2+2 - a broken                dish against a wall - they are the sunrise the eclipse but in a storm -

Poem-A-Day #166 : Wood (Part 13 : Collapse)

WOOD!!!! Read Part One HERE.


Wood (Part 13 : Collapse)

Think about sand and how it gets in to everything it is near : kudzu does this : there are weed trees like Chinese Elm that rip open the world beneath the ground and tear up the stones of our walkways : there was tree in my backyard it was an apricot tree it tore open the sewer pipes and my backyard erupted in a monsoon of shit :

This is why we make wood into furniture : we need to tame it to control it to have it not be so wild : you could argue that humanity does that to everything : but we don't turn most things into something we put our asses on : nature is scary it is the only thing that could destroy us completely :

So we geometry out of it : pull it from the earth and turn it into grids and plots and eventually we cultivate it into things we want more than what it was : we table it until such a time as we forget it needed to be tabled :

I don't know what started the fire last night : there was a fire last night : the swarm of things that make up a building began to unravel and pull apart : a vine suddenly releasing its holds and falling from the wall into a heap at your feet :

Collapse :

Poem-A-Day #146 : 42

I still think about this man. He showed me where he had also been bitten by the brown recluse spider. Where the infection was boring a hole into his arm. Turning flesh into puss.

And I still charged him.

This poem is a reminder. I think of this man every time I feel my humanity slip.


42 (11/1/04)

He said his daughter died

That the service would be on Halloween

That she was bitten by a spider
while they lived on the streets

His jacket is too big for him

He is thirsty and wants a soda

I charge him for it
$1.60 for carbonated orange juice

I feel nothing until November
when, while standing at dawn
in a field

I realize I am cold

That I paid money to be cold

That I am in a field
in the mountains
by choice

And I charged him for a soda
the day before
he put his daughter in the earth

Poem-A-Day #86 : The Road

The Road

It's not so much that everything has been done
things are just the same as they've always been

man is man so...

               I'm trying to be nice about this

     but it's tiring to see people make claims about the breaking of the world

and not just sigh...

There is no road less travelled
just roads less defined
ambiguous meandering ambiguously

Here is a story: someone does some thing it doesn't matter what and someone looses their life savings as a result and in anger they pull a gun and the police come and there are more guns and how this ends is obvious to everyone even if it is shown that the thing done is terrible and the first person is at fault...

Perhaps molecules can only arrange themselves in so many ways

                    and maybe those arrangements can only interact in so many ways

          and those interactions can only happen so often

And they burn out ?
to be replaced by ?

So here's that road
worn and clear of overgrowth the ruts of wheels deep

man is man so...
               might as well...

Poem-A-Day #58 : I Am Clearly Still Angry

I Am Clearly Still Angry

The clay pots sit where they were left in the fall - waiting and filled to the brim with last year's soil - the small rocks lining the bottoms of them taken from that house with the rose bush I endlessly obsessed over - caring more about its limbs than my own -

The sound of their breaking - imagine the sound of fired clay against concrete - the breath being pushed from the lungs of a body being beaten to death - ribcage cracking like kindling on a fire the wood so wet that all it produces is smoke and the smell of furnaces -

I want to promise that they will be protected from this - that they will have seeds in them - will have new sprouting heads - that I will not throw them one after another towards the highway that spirals into the distance like a great rubber band across the landscape -

But I can't keep secrets - and I hate the idea of things growing from these shells and I want them to sit dumbly in the rain the wind the blistering heat of summer - I would only plant to watch the green shoots turn yellow and white and wither -

I am clearly still angry -

But let this emotion enter and absorb the room - here the pots become vessels for something greater than growing - they are where we can place our organs as our bodies empty - I feel the pain in my back becoming greater - let me put my kidney here just for a moment -

The heart fits nicely in the small urn that had alyssum in it - purple flowers pop across the surface like barnacles - that we had that kind of water - that those small beak mouths could open and find their peace - that the sun wouldn't need so much from us -

How does the soil know when it is time to squeeze the roots until they break - that winter is coming - that the trail of vines is also a lower intestine - fuck these branches needing to be pruned - and these fingers for tracing the buds like life signs no one will notice the fresh scent of green anyway -

Source - Garden & Home

Poem-A-Day #10 : Fragile

Fragile

      At the counter the man was bleeding had on dark glasses was holding himself in a way to make him invisible but he was clearly there he fumbled his wallet and struggled to see through the swollen eye and finally took his glasses off

      He said he got jumped


      At the counter the man was mumbling incoherent was probably drunk his clothes looked like they slept in a gutter he was picking at a large oozing wound on his arm the skin was turning white around the edges there was a smell of death in the room

      He said he was bitten by a brown recluse


      At the counter the man tried to say 'coffee' but his voice caught in its throat and rattled he managed to order but spilled it on the floor his head was wrapped again and again and again in white gauze his eye was shot through with red his face was purple

      He didn't say anything

Unsolved Mysteries

I love mystery. Be it the wonder of how a magician created the illusion or the unexplained murders that Robert Stack menacingly intoned on NBC, then CBS. I am in.

The internet is a boon and an ill-advised hole for people like me. The research-minded. I love reading about events, pouring over details, deciphering meaning. I love to know all the things about a topic. I remember little of it, but the point is in the looking.

The internet is full of the unsolved.

Take the story of Benjamin Kyle in Florida. He was discovered on August 31, 2004 naked in the trash area of a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He had no identification, no memory of who he was or how he got there. There was evidence of several blows to the head and he was covered in blood.

He is believed to be in his 60s, from Indiana and he possibly went to college in Boulder, Colorado. He has oddly detailed memories of movie theaters in those two states as well as kitchen equipment.

He was given the name BK for Burger King ans later took the name Benjamin Kyle. Recently a documentary has been made about him and Senator Mike Weinstein was able to get him a Florida ID card so he could start to build an 'official' identity. He has no social security number and thus does not exist. A White House petition exists to help get him one. Without a SSN he cannot legally stay at homeless shelters or get a better job.

Recently I moved back to New Mexico so I'm feeling a little hyper-connected to my history. The concept of a blank slate may sound great, in theory, but it terrifies me. Watching this man attempt to go about his life without a history amazes me. I couldn't imagine it.

A different type of blank slate is the mysterious dead man.

The Taman Shud case is so odd. So very very very odd. That I really want to write a book about it. And will someday.

On December 1, 1948 a body was found on a beach in Australia. He was well-dressed, in good shape, and there was no obvious cause of death. The labels had been removed from all of his clothing. On Jan 14 a suitcase was found with clothing labeled 'T. Keane'. They connected the case to the body through a ball of orange thread that matched some used to fix a hole in the dead man's pants.

A sailor named Tom Keane was missing but his friends and family said that the clothes were not his and the body did not match.

Sewn in the man's pants was a slip of paper that read 'Taman Shud'. The phrase translates from Persian to mean 'finished'. It is the last line in a book by Omar Khayyam. They found the book. It had been left in a man's unlocked car three days before the unknown man died. In a different town.

The image above is what was found in the back of the book. A cypher that has never been decoded. Also in the book was the unlisted phone number for a woman. She claimed she had no knowledge of the man, though she nearly fainted when seeing the photos of the body. Coincidental, (or not) she had given a copy of the book to a different man 3 years earlier. A man who still had the copy. That man would only give half answers and innuendo when asked questions.

The woman's son shared rare genetic disorders with the dead man. The likelihood of this being a coincidence is estimated at 1 in 10,000,000.

And there's more! A man was found unconscious next to a bag containing his dead 3-year-old son's body in June of 1949 after being missing for 4 days. The man's wife claimed her husband thought he knew the dead man in the Taman Shud case. The wife had been terrorized by masked men for the days prior to the discovery of the husband and son. The man was committed to an institution after he recovered.

In 1945, three years before the Taman Shud case, another man was found dead with a copy of Khayyam's book open on his chest. A woman who testified at the inquest into the death was later found face down, wrists slit in a bathtub.

It's the perfect knot. Everyone involved is dead. Everyone involved refused to be helpful. What is most amazing is that despite all the information I just dumped on you, none of it leads anywhere conclusive. It is blank.

And that mystery is what I love. The inability to know. The desire to know. To fill in the blanks. Who was the Taman Shud man? Who is Benjamin Kyle? What led them to where they ended up? How does anyone get where they end up? That's the real point of the mystery. That ?

Inspiration : Beldam

Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons visits Alexander.

Beldam 9/25/09

This was the first poem-a-day poem. As with all the poems, the word came first.

'Beldam' is an old-English word for witch or hag. It is implied the woman in question is ugly.

At the time my family was facing a lot of death. My aunt had recently died from breast cancer. My father's mother had died suddenly from cancer and my mother's mother was diagnosed with lymphoma. She would die fairly soon after.

With all that around me I was thinking about what makes an ugly woman. I thought of the Amazons and their practice of removing the left breast for archery purposes. In our society women who are left breast-less are viewed as weak, less than. My aunt had a double mastectomy. To rebuild her breasts they did a procedure where they use a flap of skin from the stomach and stretch it up and then use the muscle to build. She was left nipple-less and belly button-less.

Each amazonian breast
placed in a vat of honey
soaks until golden

I wanted the image to be empowering. Enshrining that lost part of the body in gold.

Artists interpretation of 'Mellified Man'

Honey is naturally antiseptic and antibacterial. In Burma there are priests that bury their chief abbots in coffins of honey. There is the myth of the Mellified Man. An older member of the community agrees to the process. They abandon all food and water for only consuming honey. After awhile this diet would prove fatal. The body is then suspended in a coffin of honey for up to 100 years then the 'mellified' body is taken and sold as a confection to ward against ailment.

is spooned like cow tongues
onto a waiting child's mouth

That confection is both sweet and terrible. Our own genes cause us to self-destruct. We remove the bad parts, but what happens to them? We still pass on those genes to the next generation. The idea that what we take into us becomes a part of us is as old as man.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and he that loves it will eat from its fruit. (Proverbs 18:21)

Endocannibalism is the eating of a member of the tribe. There are many reasons that people did this. Most are based around the idea that the dead person's soul will enter the living who consume the body. There is a belief that the experiences and power of the dead will be absorbed by the living.

The consumption of the honeyed body is the ultimate metaphor of gene-passing. Of knowledge. And the good and bad that come with it. Cannibalism is linked to all sorts of diseases. A mad-cow like disease called kuru occurs in the tribes of Papua New Guinea. The disease has been traced back to one individual who was consumed at death.

we empty
into each other


Inspiration is a try at exploring my own work in a thoughtful way. A book report on me.