Poem : Cockshut

Civil Twilight in Manhattan

Twilight is my favorite time of the day.

It is so cleanly between two things. So present in its liminal nature. It feels like water starting to tide. This is probably why it has a history of being "magical" or "important".

In Hinduism it is advised not to eat in this time period as the Asuras are most active at this time in their battle with the Devas. To gain power from mutability seems incredibly useful.

There are three kinds of twilight: Civil, Nautical, and Astronomical. Civil twilight is the period after sunset when things are still fully distinguishable by the naked eye, it is also called the blue hour. Nautical twilight is the period after Civil twilight when sailors can still distinguish a horizon to take measurements for position at sea. Astronomical twilight is the last phase, it is when astronomical readings can begin. When the faintest stars begin to show through the skyglow.

Cockshut is a very old English word for twilight. It literally means - the time chickens go to sleep, when they shut up.

---

Cockshut

Everything is the color of things going to sleep

and that one vein in your arm that pulses under the pillow.


In the whitespace between rooms              a filament
                                                     a gap

passes unnoticed — one single silk thread of breath.


Opposite of a rooster call — a moisture

                             sliding down a single finger of grass.


The walls grow pine needles — cooling              cooling
                                                             cooling

gently —              now —              not              so gently.

Poem : Colour-de-Roy

Bolinus brandarus

Purple has a history of being a royal color.

This is mainly to do with how hard it is to make purple dyes.

It's hard to make purple dye because the first real source for the color was snail mucus.

Mythology tells us that Heracles was walking on the beach when his dog found one of these snails and began to chew on it. The dog's mouth filled with the purple saliva. This color became what is today called Tyrian purple.

The snails were bolinus brandarus. The spiny dye-murex. The snail has a mucus that it uses to paralyze its prey. It is also a defense mechanism. To get the stuff for dye you either crush the snail or you milk it. You milk a snail by poking at it until it secretes the mucus.

Then you make robes for your king or queen.

--

Colour-de-roy

The dog you made us get runs off down the beach
despite being called over over over he refuses to come back

We got him because of his sad face
because of the two small scars across the front of his nose

Little square bites of gray in the blonde

Tyrian purple

I say you made us get because you made us go
to the shelter to the hill the shelter sits on

I like the dog fine I wish he’d come when you called him

The beach has tuned itself into a throb of seaweed
after a storm the sand is raw and untouched

Over the small hill the dog is tearing at the earth
shaking itself in a tug of war

He has eaten a spiked shell has lodged it in his mouth

A hundred arrow-sharp spines piercing its mouth
now stained purple the eyes filled with purple saliva flooding purple

All around him horseshoe crabs line themselves

Their heads inland and scorpion tails out to sea
each and every one of them dead

They wanted something somehow in their blind eyes they knew
it was just over this or that scrub of bleaching grass

They died crawling from one world into another

Poem : Bloody Caesar

Bloody Caesar (The Theatre of Pompey)

Side streets mirror the edge of the theatre’s stage

Fragments of the old building jut out of basement walls

have become columns in buildings
old but half as old

On the spot where Caesar was killed
a cat sunbathes

Poem-A-Day #353 : Trigger

Trigger

from the Dutch trekken "to pull"
the rope is attached to your spine - your spine
fleshless taken exposed lost tail that it is
you are a dog on a chain you are
a dog sniffing the crotches
of every man in the place
from Latin catena it was always just a link
to be held closed soldered
silver shadowing the fence hides a monster - you
are the monster
here a needle thread floss make a wish
a bullet of yarn a trigger of hemp
beads of silk and bone the teeth of every dead soul
that burned across this earth

Poem-A-Day #349 : Infinite Projections Into Space

Infinite Projections Into Space

I'm so tired of thinking about Zeno

...

Here          a space to occupy ourselves
droll and whatnot          a second space that fills halfway on will alone

Look - I said that we could be friends - and in doing so negated the chance

...

In the slipstream of the canoe
one lone fresh water salmon
pinks about          it doesn't roe here
nor does it          understand that it could
it just               becomes a thing
eating               at the muck on the bottom
of the river
thinking about sex and food nothing else

...

Let's not kid ourselves

we can tangle any time

...

The purple in the light bulb screams burn out          the rattle
a sure sign of darkness to come

In the instant of night - out in Los Alamos - there is a green flash
and it reminds us of the fires

But it's just the horizon eating itself         just the breath exhaled
by the horses pulling the chariot

...

The tortoise tho

...

In the video          the woman is tweezing a snail shell
the parts a broken cup and saucer          a clear kintsugi
upon the brown fragility of its surface          the detail
that the glue is only on the outside -

A naked snail - foot like - a weird sort of digit          sits
patiently

...

It all just spills outwards

The dam giving way to the winter melt          the sound of it - crunching
like a wafer - there is a need to hear this sound - concrete crumbling
edifice and economy          collapse

We watch Walking Dead and hope we'd not get wire to the head

But we all know we'd die episode 1

...

Poem-A-Day #326 : Broken Poem

Broken Poem

Your zoology is confusing
A tongue on your skin - mine - in the creases of your arm
Let the broken blood be the broken glass
A light comes into the room - it is a ghost expressing discomfort with limes
Trees become fish for you
Scales leaf and collapse - they make a paste - they pop
Animals on our bodies and our mouths and our left parts
It spills and spills and spills
Cages erupt around the world - they fill and open - they burn
A missed connections ad on Craigslist mentions the figure of Orion
The arrows land in the yard
We chase the Chinese New Year and try to name the puddles
Squeeze citrus - squeeze eggs
There are things we can build and not build - nothing else

Poem-A-Day #259 : Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe

This is an erasure of the first chapter of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I'm not entirely sure it works. But here it is.


Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe

Once
something happened
during
the war

There were children
sent away
because
of the country

The odd
afraid
night
trying to talk like mother

We've fallen and no mistake
this
anything
won't hear us

Doors empty
beginning to feel
an owl
falling so thick

Quite empty the
dead blue window
always expecting
woodwork

Cold queer
open
other light
coming

Poem-A-Day #182 : Incubate

Incubate

clear
bubble
crystal
an eye loosed
tadpole
glass on skin
the enormity of the eye

then the pupil spins
it jerks
spasms
tiny t-rex arms
gripping water
losing
working up to break the ceiling

froth
water at boil
bone broth and simple syrup
a tail is a hand
it clouds
bubble as locomotion
eye taking it all in

engorged
what does losing a tail feel like
breaking a crystal ball
it goes down the stairs like boom
it sinks quick
skin is paper
ripping

the feeling of it inside you
a bot fly in your neck
pillow
the sound of fans
fingers on metal now
what rebirth is this
blindness and seeing for the first time

Poem-A-Day #179 : It's Raining (After Apollinaire)

It's Raining (After Apollinaire)

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Poem-A-Day #55 : The Memory is Enormous

The Memory is Enormous

.
I sit in the dark of the room
I see the lights from a police car turning
red          then blue          then

The books on the shelves seem hesitant

.
If I say that I loved you - that it really fucks me up to think about it
and that ends a season before it begins -

Will someone please turn off the alarms

In the street there is a car and it has run into something and that something is an echo

.
There is that drive to the airport
An image of all the wrong - spinning in some pocket of time

like a goddamn metaphor for everything and yet - there it is

Life          caught by the grill of an SUV on the highway
murdered like some cow -

I raise the blackjack and I think about what body to place under it

.
The dark is carbon paper

And the trapped object is a dog - wild or otherwise

The body of which - is cartwheeling

.
Here is what happened:

          The dog ran across three lanes of highway
          Barely making it - I almost was the one -
          And I caught my breath as it reached the median and I prayed as if I believed in God that it would stop and sit and be but -

          It made it two more lanes - this dog - running like something was chasing it
          The grill of the SUV
          Silver - breaking the light like water

          And the dog's body was unhinged

          It spun like a top - like some stuck
                    perpetually spinning thing

                    I know because I began to scream and whenever I drive by it - the cars slow down to look - to see what this endless black hole in reality could possibly be

.
And what I'm not talking about is that I was picking you up at the airport

That this is so difficult

That it was some kind of warning - that it was the last time

          I was driving towards you and the lights were flashing
red          then blue          then

And instead of stopping I kept screaming and crying and screaming and I was driving and then I saw you and your eyes and then the moment and the moment in duplicate and then the moment repeating until the end of the universe

.
I was waiting in the dark for the lights to stop so I could go to sleep
So that the books would stop holding their breath

Poem-A-Day #50 : The Skye Terrier (Queen Mary)

The Skye Terrier (Queen Mary)

What was the thought process - the former Queen walking to her death with a terrier in her petticoats - was the dog so normal against her legs that she didn't think to leave him - and how did it get by the guards the man with the axe the crowd beyond the scaffold -

And after - when the dog wrapped itself in her dress and refused - and became bathed in her blood - the royality of that baptism - a terrier saturated until the color of her sleeves - after - was the dog able to stare into the faces of politicians and not flinch -

They burned everything that her blood touched - the block her head rested on - the gold-embroidered mask across her had to be hacked off twice head - the dress and the wood of the platform - all in the fireplace until ashes were all that remained -

And it makes one ask about the dog - they supposedly washed it - they supposedly kept hold of its trembling loneliness - one can assume - until it died from the chill of living outside the coats of a Queen

A Skye Terrier - Source: Wikipedia

Stuffing

I have discussed my love of entropy a few times.

I have not discussed my love of taxidermy. Over at Lapham's there is a long read on Barnum's American Museum and the long history of making dead animals look alive.

Bobcat Form - Foster Taxidermy Supply

I'll sum it up. The American Museum of Natural History was set up in 1909. At the time, there was little concern for making things look real. Then Carl Akeley came along and invented processes that recreated musculature and bone under the skin. He posed the stuffed animals in lifelike poses, sensationalist ones. It was a revolution in making dioramas. He went through and remade all the AMNH scenes. To do so, a lot of animals had to die.

I once dated a guy who lived with my good friend and co-worker B. Their flat was divided by a large living room and kitchen. I dated C only for a few months, but one night I went to get ice for some water and discovered the bodies of several rats in the ice box.

In zip-loc bags.

B was, and still is, an amateur taxidermist. She made surreal and fascinating tableau out of them. I loved it and immediately began to research the process involved. The skinning, de-boning, drying, and then the assembling.

Whitetail Form - Foster Taxidermy Supply

What amazes me is that at one point the process involved filling a skin with sawdust and beating it until it looked vaguely like the animal it once was.

Today there is a whole industry built around this. Naturally. The forms that replicate musculature are amazing ghost-like images. It is like staring into the abyss of death.

The faces of these forms is what I can't help but stare at. They seem judgmental, angry. That they are molded to look very realistic is telling. One could argue that this is a good thing. That the people who kill then mount these animals should have to stare into that hollow face day in and day out.

I don't have a real problem with hunting. Nor with trophies. As long as the hunting wasn't brutal or illegal I have no issue. I would hope that the animal in question is at least used for meat.

I will admit to a massive sense of unease when coming into a room full of trophies. The false glass eyes, the slightly misty skins. Again. Ghosts. Tombs.

Like wondering through a catacomb filled with skulls.

It is a mirror of our own mortality. And it fascinates me that people who hunt would want that in their homes.

Inspiration : Tout

Tout 9/26/12

You are dressed in your fall camouflage
are wood ducking the season

Yes. Yes you are.

While it is easy to see the basic idea behind this poem. The true inspiration came from my cat.

This is my cat:

Awwwww...

He likes to sit high up on bookshelves and stalk me. Sometimes he hides in boxes or drawers and jumps at me as I walk by.

He's a cat.

So I mashed hunting and my cat together with a creepy stalker vibe and some vague doppelgänger-ness.

high-hatting matching my gait

Also...doppelgängers are super creepy. Like really. Abraham Lincoln claimed to have a vision of one that Mary Todd Lincoln interpreted as him winning a second term but dying before the end of it. Other famous people reporting the phenomena:

      Percy Bysshe Shelly - Percy and his wife Mary Shelly supposedly met his double.

      John Donne - Saw his wife's double the night she miscarried.

      Johann Wolfgang Goethe - Saw himself riding horseback.

      George Tryon - His double walked through a party shortly after his ship sank in the Meditteranean.

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

THIS! 9/14/12

THIS! on September 14th, 2012

1) Murp

2) The Donkey Sanctuary

This is a great organization that rescues abused and elderly donkeys. They give them a place to rest and recover from their lives. They have an amazing store where you can buy cute donkey things or give money towards improving working conditions for these animals.


3) Farren's Dream Dog

Farren is a special lady. She is a talented writer/editor and an amazing person. Earlier this summer she lost her cat very suddenly. Her dog was diagnosed with a terminal illness almost at the same time. She's finishing grad school and facing bills bills bills and no one should do that alone. Give a dollar or two to help her get a French Bulldog!


4) Ampullae of Lorenzini

Sharks and a few other marine animals have gel-filled spots on their noses that allow them to sense electric fields. This is awesome.

Poem-A-Day Reprint : Gut-buster

This is an edit of an earlier poem-a-day.

Gut-buster 7/11/2010

A horse walked into a bar
            on hind legs

The subtle arching

            below knees to hoof
is what caught my eye

            That this was a real honest-
to-god horse

            It had balls and cock
and the whole wax
            of mane running Fabio

He sat alone in the corner
            ordered some horsey
drink – I watched all night

            Dark oil pool eyes
blinking at me

Pigeon

Pigeon 4/25

The flightless pigeon
walks back and forth
in front of the cafe

Looking inside then
out into the street at
the cars zooming by

It jumps when people pass
its useless wings open and
shut dumbly

Haunted

Haunted 2/11

Having obtained some evidence of spirits in the basement, the team headed to the attic.

It is the ghost of a monkey, running in the cage-like room.
Frantic.
Trapped.

The attic was inspected to make sure no living animal could make the noises.

I told you so
You thought I was crazy.

In the basement a doctor chopped off the heads of monkeys.
In the attic his daughter lived with a pet monkey.

Linda keeps her candle shop open despite the problems.

Jim will not go into the attic
But loves money.

Coral

Coral 2/10

Hands
color of clay pots
bloated fingers
break their casings

Callus

The cool water
is clear
opens fresh wounds
brightens the old.

Snail

Snail 2/3

The snail shell found in the chamomile
means there are few steps between field and cup

The insides are candied ginger
curled across the golden curl of mica

The cup is hot and everything turns to liquid
becomes scent of dry flowers and sleep.

Word Mark

I know...this is also not a haiku.


Word Mark 12/10

I would type on the Underwood

Would smudge the ink – press my fingers

together they felt like chalk like graphite

The lines of skin would highlight themselves

Here a life – line of the fact of having worked

The black under my nails was deep

I felt a connection with squid

The fingerprint in the corner of the page

another melting geometry

Like that Underwood – gone reliquary