Deprotonate

Deprotonate 8/21

You have removed yourself

Your skin is dragging and you look colorless

The outlines of your body are bold and you are paint-by-number

Melatonin has pulled itself into its old paint tubes

Your eyes are hollow orbs, marbles breaking on pavement

There is a miniature nova in your chest trailing debris

You are circling a drain in an ocean, the gulls pick your hair

Fingers don’t grasp, even your bones are pulling

A walking is happening, but only your legs seem to be going places

Morbid

Morbid 8/20

I spent a day reading about diseases
Looking at abbreviations and diagnosis
Fixating on what I could could could have

Where I've been

I want to open a vein and see it
The pooling red liquid will have something
In it that will tell me where the damage is

Like a tell

The skin is a rampart is a moat a lagoon
And these are the things that can cross it
What sort of rot gets at live flesh

The kind you let in your head

Onioned

Onioned 8/19

There are layers – dripping with clearness

Glassine paper lanterns on the river
glow irritatingly like fireflies – bobbing
in some sex dance over a lawn

Geologic process sped up and polished

Tart smelled and soil filled – there is a peeling
in our hindquarters – a releasing of the
bowels

If you wet the knife it comes slower

Firmness

Firmness 8/18

Sisyphus is digging his heels into too soft ground

We are watching a slide show of your childhood
            this is the part where you face a past while dancing with a future

Hands at 2 and 10 – 2 and 10 – are you watching that semi
            because it’s coming over here whether you move or not

His shoes are up to the Achilles in mud

You are on a flat plane – the car is in neutral and you are drifting forward

It is a waltz maybe or tango possibly
            but you are young and dancing and hopefilled

The plane is tilting – everything is rolling backwards – the way it all came

It is an orchestra – the fluting is your heartbeat is the sound of drums
            here is the part you realize the movements are endless repeating

He makes it to the top he begins again

Christen

Today was the 10th anniversary of the cafe I work at. We had a big party. Bands, cookies, discounts on coffee/tea/beer. They watched Armageddon and sang along to Aerosmith. There were belly dancers and an electric violinist.

I came home and read about the history of Sesame Street. There have been 4212 episodes in 40 years. There are still three original cast members, Bob, Susan, and Carol Spinney who does the voices of Big Bird and Oscar. Bob is 80.

I was only 3 when Mr. Hooper died in 1983, but I remember it vividly. Maybe it was a rerun? Did they rerun that episode? Did Sesame Street rerun in the 80s? Is it such a part of our collective childhoods that I remember it even if I didn't see it in 1983 on November 24th, Thanksgiving Day?

I cried this evening for the first time in a long long time.

Was it for the weird finality that a big anniversary party has? The fact that such-and-such a time has gone what now then? The general loss of childhood? The sudden remembering of the great loss my family has experienced in the last few years?

I cried.

And I'm not sure why.


Christen 8/17

Water in the river

Drinking in the river

Taking in the river

Stinted

Stinted 8/16

Four trees are squaring off an archway
                then braiding into the sky    they open up
leaves against blue

How many years of forcing the limbs down then
bending them at right angles

This is botany in sudden action
                like a burning symbolic bush    man’s furious
control over earth

Giant bonsai experiment with man-sized figures
holding hands underneath

Posterity

I posted today's poem yesterday. And here, yesterday's poem today.

Which is about history. So we can all pretend it was intentional.


Posterity

You, who read this    what is it like
            Who are your neighbors?

Can you see the Milky Way from the roof of Santa Fe
            I wrote about trees in that house            leaves            sounds of spring

How like applause they are            how ominous
            The shape of an aspen stand turning yellow against a smoke-filled sky

Something I learned in the high deserts speaking
            in riddles reveals what you want to hide faster

Or so they say            I love that saying    pure ambivalence
            I was in a play about ambivalence in Santa Fe

Is the warehouse still standing?
            They were going to put up shopping malls

Of course            you should read this on the third bench from the middle of
            the Brooklyn Bridge            that is where I am

Of course you could be reading it anywhere            Does anything even exist
            since Coney Island and the cost of living and swine flu?

Did they ever put in that Starbucks on the corner?
            I used to look in abandoned windows and think about living

I stood on the beach as they closed the gates on Astro Land
            all balloons            collapsing bull markets