Poem-A-Day #306 : Alien

Alien

I want to go to Mars -

They are sending them in - are going to give them the keys to the place
experiments and the building of bubbles to live in

I dream of the bubble housing the smaller bubbles

The small growing things in the shield of man-made ecosystem

Think about the likes on those selfies -

God this is boring - is broken - there is a sense that a hole in the window would send everything in this world into space

It will freeze there

Lose itself in the not-black not-dark

Why don't we have a word for the color of space - the vacuum of our heads

I want to go to Mars -

Put on that suit - drift in the expanse for years - and come out the other side alone
where I would send cryptic emails and video messages

Where I would piss on the dead sand of that planet and make castles from the mud

Mainly -
I don't want to talk to people anymore

And that is the thing that resonates - the internet has left me not wanting to hear or be heard

I long for a rotary phone that only clicks and never receives but that's not true because Candy Crush -

Here is the buoy in the open wilds of imagination - it blinks seven times
is silent -
is even and calm - it only knows what fingers have touched it tell it to know

It beckons -

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 #248 : Mute

Mute

Angela Davis is talking about Palestine - again - still - forever
she is the dynamo at the end of the universe
spinning wildly free of man - and she is talking about Palestine

That word - Palestine - it renders us incapable
it drops into the already formed puddle and only renders itself mute
part of the unknowable whole - but we clap and nod in agreement with it

It is Tibet - Putin - hunger in Africa - it is the inescapable
destruction of cancer - it mutates with the passage of time
it is hard not to hear all human voices as records helplessly in groove

History is nothing if not unclean - at best
perhaps the broken turntable is a metaphor - the stupid cycle is stupid
the needle dull - the speakers are geese demanding your sandwich

The water in the pool of Palestine is unclear - still - reflections numerous
there are endless ampersands - their barbs catch in the back of the throat
they render everything as ellipses

Poem-A-Day #241 : Everywhere / The Dream

Everywhere / The Dream

It's hard not to see apocalypse everywhere

The dream of drowning again - the one with the boat
and the attempt at fleeing - the one where your arms just
give out and your lungs are only shrubs not trees

The one with the darkness of water - the tingling
necessity of cold - spikes of jellyfish tentacles
never teeth not sharks this isn't that kind of thing - it
is a gentle death - so fucking quiet

Remember when you dreamt of bees all the time

They would land on your cans of soda - somehow find
the hole in your jeans and sit on your flesh - tongue
the salts there like miners looking for veins

Those were good times - less cold - often so full of sun
that you would wake up needing aloe on everything
feeling itched like poison oak - you drew oak leaf
patterns across every page of every book you read

At 7 AM the phone alerts you that a child has been taken

It is the sound of alarm - a sort of bleating in the darkness
that also resembles the klaxon of air raids - a unexploded
bomb in a churchyard - the mine your foot just ticked

The child is traveling in a beige car - are there
still beige things in the universe that do not travel - that
do not move constantly towards being less beige
do they all have children in them

Then at 9 the notice of a bomb downtown - a robot
lobster clawing at it - digging in a trash can or a strange
backpacks large pockets - there is a question in the sound
of alarm and that question is not why

In the dream of drowning there is a moment where you want ice cream

And that is natural - you probably want to go back
towards the kitchen - the boat sinking breaking falling apart
about you - you want those churned salt-licked milk crystals

There isn't anything clear in all this is dark - it is night
will continue to be so - the bomb will not be found - will not go off
the boat will sink and sink and sink because it is an unreal
a fractal inside your brain of what a drowning looks like

Poem-A-Day #206 : Blue Room Green Room

I haven't talked at all about how I'm working on these poems. I'm reading one chapter of The Haunting of Hill House each morning. At some point I sit down and write about the chapter using quotes from the book.

In theory these poems will track the narrative. Though I think they will probably just track the creepiness of the world Shirley Jackson created.


Blue Room Green Room

Stillness is a vial
of thick cloudy liquid

There is no evidence that this
belongs to the rest of the world

               It can hear us

               Don't be so afraid all the time
               it's altogether Victorian

The sound of glass breaking
the clouds no longer suspended
they ooze along the floor

               Do you have an Aunt
               a comic Uncle?

               Was there always a bull in a field?

The blue figured paper
twitches in the dimming light

Stillness seeps into the floorboards
stains itself

               What fun it would be
               to stand out there and watch it burn down

Poem-A-Day #187 : 3AM

3AM

When the street goes quiet
the late darkness seems to fill the world
in an unmoving

I imagine trying to cross it

Once you open the door into it the quiet will grab you
will probably strip you of faculties
your body will become a tree in winter

Like quicksand perhaps

Sliding your entire body into clay
or mud or the leftover oatmeal from this morning
and then it will harden over you