Poem-A-Day #334 : New Shoes

New Shoes

The website is selling shoes - highlights thinness of the sole
color of variety - daily dance in neon for $60

Imagine toes into them - tightness of new a swaddle across arch
that leather fresh rubber - moment of paper in toe

Putting the shoes on - sock of ground beneath - sudden support

Safety is - a broken pair - foam cracked burned
rounded into parody of a clown

How aches the back in those things - how creeps the body
for $60 made in Americas you too can walk the streets in glowing style

Thinness and feeling renewed - the opening of eyes -

Classic Wasp Trainer - Gola

Poem-A-Day #330 : When I Am King You Will Be First Against The Wall

When I Am King You Will Be First Against The Wall

I sleep in linen vestments - break
all bread at a bloodwood table - a chair made of silver
in my mind - it is so gleaming -

The crown has thorns - God - does not allow this image room to expand -

Under these robes - a terrier warms my ankles is
a dust mop of a thing - I want to tell you about the letting go -

At some point you have to unhinge
your mind - make it a door - a chest that opens warily
it will only house curtains - a dead moth but it will house
these things well -

But you have to allow it to be emptied - God - the room that is needed
an economy of space - a sort of draining swamp -

Nothing is my own - everything is my own - my Voice
and my Fear are my own - and those things build themselves a castle
that becomes entrenched immediately in vine -

You will plant the seeds - someone
else will eat that bread and be nourished - or poisoned -

That rule is necessary and necessity is rule - well - everyone
loves a fascist until they are the one getting the rod -

Here - I will show you the interior rooms of my mind - gore - all the way down -

Poem-A-Day #261 : Insecurity

Insecurity

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

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 #243 : Impulse of Lateness

Impulse of Lateness

Your hand on the trunk
of the tree

Leaves making their
inevitable suicide

Here a sky
being unexpressive

The tree symbolizes
absolutely nothing

Even though you're sad

Your phone is ringing

Does it feel like stone
the trunk not the phone

Rough
we all know the feeling

It is time made physical

Your phone
it's the thing you're late for
calling you

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 #177 : It Has Taken Me A Long Time But I Am Ready

It Has Taken Me A Long Time But I Am Ready

His hands are the color of leather
                                        This is wrong I know it is because it feels like theft
He reaches through the empty space of the window
I hand him the three dollars that I have decided I don't need today
                                        I am cheap - smug - airing of family secrets
                                        I have come to my own words for absolution
                                        and perhaps this is the worst part of it
I want to tell him that I am sorry but I tell him to be safe which is the same thing as sorry
                                        My own fears of poverty - I am poor - will probably die poor
                                        but I have a roof and sometimes food
                                        and since I don't have hands that look
                                        like they are coated in coal I am obviously better
I do not tell him more
and I sit and wait to turn the car into traffic in a silence that builds behind my ears like cicadas storming in their trees
                                        Better than - all my life I have felt the pressure
                                        of somehow climbing a ladder that wasn't even before me
                                        a ladder that no one told me I could even climb
They are screaming
                                        I wanted to sound better and look better
                                        I put on that drag and do my business every day
The cicadas want me to know this as I drive my car into traffic
they need me to hear these words as I listen to my music
and think about my day before me
                                        It is a weight
                                        cheap - smug - and trying not to be noticed as such
I am like this man with the dirty hands sitting on a corner by a McDonald's
I am this man sitting with a cardboard sign that says HUNGRY / PLEASE HELP

Poem-A-Day #69 : Confession #12

Confession #12

There are times I want to watch the world burn - allow
every cell to wither and die - dust clinging
to a Swiffer or swept like the ants
that dot the floor of my kitchen after I've sprayed them with poison