Poem-A-Day #336 : [Yesterday - there was]

[Yesterday - there was]

Yesterday -

there was a Constitutional crisis -

a glitch - it
                    skipped   & caught   & tore
                    in alltheplaces.

It is hard
to ask paper
to hold ideas
for this long
without burning.

Poem-A-Day #329 : [Cornmeal on the hands - a burn - a polish -]

[Cornmeal on the hands - a burn - a polish -]

Cornmeal on the hands - a burn - a polish -
that becomes the glue sealing the broken ceramic bowl -
that lived on grandmas shelf -

It is like a gymnast at the double bars -
this bread making - it is an act for the cameras - will be scored -

Perhaps the fingerprints will vanish in it -
give way to rising and lowering tides - it would fit -
a buttered flesh for a buttered flesh -

Poem-A-Day #210 : How Best to Prepare

How Best to Prepare

There is no backpack full of things that can make the going easier
this is a Mt Everest of a house it is strewn with bodies they line the path are signs
they are mile markers

Young wide dead in the driveway
Young wife dead in a fall
Young wife dead in consumption
Old daughter dead in pneumonia
Young heiress dead in suicide

All this rimmed in gold
we have no name for it
there is no name for it
it is not a broken dish to be sewn back together

Mad in its birth this deranged house is a shard of glass in your eye

There is no preparation no amount of oxygen therapy
to get you to the top

Burn it down find a way to burn things already burnt and burn it again
then sow the ground with salt

Poem-A-Day #176 : Unfinished Thought On Malaise

Unfinished Thought On Malaise

                         and when I said that I just wanted to throw things to the flood
               and you broke into screaming fits and the skin on your forehead heated itself
     and your eyes reddened into sand

Sometimes we are bad people look I make choices look at all these choices I'm lousy with choices they cover the room in an installation of choices they impede progress and attempt to become life itself life of choices choices burning out themselves to become a star of imploding choices nuclear choices that will melt flesh

I don't expect you to understand with your ontology the way it is

-

     The impulse to undo everything is so strong

                    - put paint back in tubes - thread un-sweater - butterfly the goo-filled cocoon -

          Do not mistake this for destruction
though I understand that feeling this is more about what happens to things when they are un-ed

Do we forget them

When the city - which does not retreat it is not alive in that way - when the city cracks like a beetle under foot like exoskeletons in diatomaceous earth like the earth after rain -

                                        Do we forget that easily
if we want to I suppose we do - and when the thing falls and breaks on the pavement
we must either mourn or get the glue

-

Rust

Life lends itself to malaise

A sort of tentacled feeling
          suckers and all

     and all the things that might come with them
               the stinging ticks of a swarm of baby jellly fish wrapping on your legs
                         when I said it I meant it and I even intended to do it