Poem-A-Day #275 : Cum

Cum

How does evolution

Here the pin prick -
The drop of electric wires
on your chest

A stew of self bubbling away

You want to eggwhite it
but it's not even true

There is a vanilla here

The pus of it

I cannot swim but look at this go

Poem-A-Day #274 : To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (after W. B. Yeats)

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (after W. B. Yeats)

Couch yourself in the comfort of stone
the broken seal, the mouth of earth
and let your heart be hard, let your tears
be gold streaming across your worth

You hear the calls to dismantle even bone
the flag waving in the night, a hearth
breaking like Alexandria across the world
allow your words to unfold engulf give birth

To a moment where you renew, arise
there is not hopelessness in defeat laid prone
the rut you call home will expand, cocoon
your throat will give new life yet, defeat will atone


Yeats' poem:

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

Poem-A-Day #273 : Myth of the Mother Virgin

Myth of the Mother Virgin

I want to talk about bare arms - the pull of gravity on a mother's arms - the feeling of the flesh and the darkness of stretch marks

How shamed we make them - these arms

I want to take your hand and tell you that I abhor your politics and your husband but your choices are your own

I am tired of hypocrisy in all forms - Melania - I want to talk about the fact that you wore an identical dress to the one that Michelle Obama was shamed for - the one her arms hung out of - and you sat and talked to her and we both know she noticed

Your body is identical to this one - we cannot accept that we share parts with the ones we hate

I look at my arms in the cold light of late November and I see that I am ugly

I am certain that you have looked in mirrors and felt this

Certain that you have made yourself a golden nest and that the universe is appalled that it hasn't been so lucky

What do shamed arms look like

They are covering themselves - they do not allow the hang to show - they pretend that nipples are the color of cotton candy and the size of dimes - they imply that labia is to be only seen when it is sexual

Shamed arms are unable to carry the weight of much

They find the black and white photos of history and color them in acid colors

I feel for your nudity - I worry it - the universe has discovered that breasts exist and that even the most visible of women might have bared hers for money

And it has recoiled - retreated into the arms of childhood - wandered into the woods and retreated into the forts they built themselves - Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS

There is a pile of snowballs - a sort of pitchfork in the gut

Poem-A-Day #272 : On the First Hold the Collar Close to Your Neck Night

On the First Hold the Collar Close to Your Neck Night

The sound of train tracks cooling is a baking sheet in the oven clang

These are house noises - the world
is a house making noises - the cooling
is the world making house

The pie was delicious
                         at least everyone said so
               why is it so hard to believe those sorts of statements
          conditioning - because - praise is ego and ego is inflatable

And no one can float on it alone

The oven cools it has a stone in its belly and the stone is blackened

On the first hold the collar close to your neck night the world sighed deeply and said that the years are getting harder to come back from

It closed up itself
curtains and all the doors
were resealed this autumn the windows leak still but...

Picture a train track popping - the back
of it breaking and curling upwards into the dark sky

It shatters into ravens and they
shatter into a rain of snow hard as glass
glinting like fresh asphalt

Jacobin Pigeon

Poem-A-Day #271 : My Trouble With People

My Trouble With People

               There is
                    the sense that
                         we can only hold so much

The image of a sunset that one time in France when there were donkeys braying in the distance and the sunflowers caught the gold-ness and leaned themselves toward the nuclear power plant while the sound of dinner being cooked drifted up the stairs

That house had no windows just the thin aging wood of shutters and the cool plaster of the walls it was white with it it was beading cold sweat with it there was the smell of a wood pile everywhere and the hills around the place felt like lazy cast aside blankets

               What memory
                    was erased
                         by this

At the grocery store we are standing next to each other by the frozen bags of vegetables they are candy-colored and delicious the bags make ridiculous promises about life lived inside these bags there are giants here

I do not notice that I know you and you seem to be breathing in my inattention which clouds the space like a mountain top like snow storms like the exhale after a cigarette you turn and I turn and your eyes flash at me like headlights on a curve at night

               Perhaps erased is wrong
                    it implies accident
                         when a finger must press delete

Poem-A-Day #270 : The James Ossuary

The James Ossuary

1
Draw a circle on the blackboard :

Circles are more difficult than you think - they deceive
                    find ways to flatten under your hand :

Make an ouroboros line of salt eating itself :

Lot's wife turns her head to look back at the burning bed of Gomorrah - it is the moment in the movie where the score drops out and the silence hangs there like wool drying in the sun :

If you could step into the chalkboard - into the circle with the flat side you have drawn -
                    you would be standing on a chalkboard in a classroom -
          looking insane -
defying gravity :


2
Chalk is the compressed shell of history :

The ocean's dream of itself :

Darkness bleached of its inky crush :

How does the weightlessness feel in your hand - I remember
               slapping the felt erasers
     against each other

                         until the cloud of dead things welled around me - there
is a feeling of erasing the self a sort of tossing of a smoke bomb - you are Batman
making your escape

     in their blindness
bullets will not find soft places to press :

It was a reward - the erasing :


3
The chalk box had James in it :

And I don't know what that means - he is not here now :

You find a box in a field and it is stained with the brown of dirt and the red of iron and the holes along its surface are oddly beautiful :

Inside the box are the bones :

I dreamt about removing my skeleton again
                    this time we refused to go grocery shopping
          it was Black Friday it was Boxing Day it was the 4th of July -

          we sat in our -
                                   my
                                          - pajamas - we watched episodes of The Simpsons

                     and then I woke up :

4
The box that James was in - sits in front of you - it has been litigated
declared fake - the very idea - !

The issue is that is is historic evidence for Jesus - the inscription :
                    Ya'akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua
                    James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus :

It is another scene in a movie where the sound drops out - unless
          it's that kind of movie
                              where heavy strings rise up out of the darkness around us

          telling us that this is now :

This
is now :

5
How goes the circle - the standing against it
          the pausing of physics :

The box is compressed history - your hand
compressing itself - is also a history

You realize that blackboard chalk hasn't been made from chalk for decades - the piece in your hand is made of gypsum -
                                        from the Greek - gypsos
                                        when burnt and rehydrated it can be used as plaster
                    it can build - it is drywall :

The room around you is a box of chalk :

The James Ossuary

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