Poem-A-Day #351 : Rorschach (after Jeanne Marie Beaumont)

Rorschach (after Jeanne Marie Beaumont)

I spill water on the old coffee table.
Too simple. Grains expose themselves like privates.

It feels like the kind of wood - HA -
one searches for when lost in the forest. Dry.

That one stain from the burrito - think
about culture spilling forth like foam. Go on.

The bones of a cripple
left to bleach in the winter sun - taking way too long.

Crutches left in a church hallway, no souls around,
desiring to grab one and hobble forth newly less.

Not my table. Whose? A woman's, dead and ringed
by the ivory of dogwood blossoms, spring's crown.

Her face, sounding. A flute? Sure.
I said privates because this shouldn't be seen this way.

Count the rings - Kim Novak in Vertigo -
the scent of pine will fill and fill and fill.

Next. It sat in her townhouse
filled with its early 90s neon and chrome and whiteness.

Oddly cool. Not particularly desired
but the face of those men she dated.

And if I say "tree"?
I'd say - life we cannot fathom.

Cabinet? Container.
Tell me again.

A map. A map of the universe
breaking and disintegrating.

Poem-A-Day #237 : The Library

The Library

Broken
the spell of Hill House
somehow
come inside

Dance
of the iron railing
the rotting of wood
in the veins

The broken
once there is
so hard to puzzle
together

Poem-A-Day #235 : Only So

Only So

The hallways are running out of horrors - the long trail of threadbare carpet looks less like a river of blood and more like its shabby self - only so many ghosts can scream in the night at once - only so many tomatoes can be thrown against the windows -

Poem-A-Day #232 : Masc4Masc

Masc4Masc

must                    clean                   revolver
     keep it     gleaming               like                the sun
no
                    milksops               here       no faggots
        we play                     tennis cricket volleyball golf
are men
                         must keep          being clean men
                                                                               fire
in                place               our cocks are shuttled
are being a spin
                        in a chamber
                                          scar tissue across the cheek

Poem-A-Day #231 : Wall

Wall

The oleander - mother house of my heart
thick around it with the ripples of vacant footsteps on water

I was as vacant once - will be forever
the laughter of death on the hillock under the trees

Hand-shaped candles melting into bowls of candy
a Halloween of the brain - pick it clean - but pick it cleanly

Poem-A-Day #228 : Night

Night

all in your head : the twisting blackness is

wood caves in itself : fire is hollowing

the children's faces darken : coal smoke ash everywhere

Poem-A-Day #223 : Bibelot

Bibelot

Beside the bed is the book the pages covered in woodcuts covered in twisted faces they are mouthing words in the sleeping ears around them they are silent but their silence is also hugely exploding they are forming themselves into solid objects these objects are letters that form and unform words the letters sing in a voice that cracks the sky the sky cracks and cracks and the bowl of it cannot hold enough cherries cannot hold enough cannot not the sound of voices the sound of wings the sound of a child listening...

Poem-A-Day #222 : Eleanor Thinks About Her Companions

Eleanor Thinks About Her Companions

The room is warm is red with it

and she is thinking darkly that these people

hate her secretly find her silly

And she imagines them dead or worse

Imagines the sound of herself

as the sound of cheese being grated

That ones voice is the sound of bravado

it is the brag in the lung as it pushes oxygen

into the blood stream - without me etc. etc.

The father one is a bearded sink

a point of darkness where the knowledge dies

he is a buttonhole smoking a pipe

The psychic lesbian is a trope

that has never caught on but here she is

sitting on the carpet admiring her red toes

Eleanor wants them to go away

wants the silence that a mother's death promised her

she wants to disintegrate into the woodwork

Imagine them being eaten by the fireplace

her warmth guaranteed until the bones ran out

Poem-A-Day #221 : Hands

Hands

Hands held
so tight
you can feel
the fine
bones
the tendons
in the finger

The roll
of those rope
like tendrils
that wrap
from muscle
to bone
to circuitry

They
make it go
you can feel
the steady
thump
of blood
in there

Hands
the thing
that opens
gates
closes them
it is a
permission
organ

Feel that
nimbleness
the fragility
of the nails
against nails
the crack
of knuckles

So tight
that you can
feel them
breaking
can imagine
them floating
off their arms

Poem-A-Day #208 : Four Separated People Looked Trustingly

Four Separated People Looked Trustingly

The house steadied
                                        located them

Eddies of air          the center of consciousness
                 
                     somehow separated

Welcome
                     Welcome

                     Can you make a martini?

Poem-A-Day #205 : Journeys End in Lovers Meeting

Journeys End in Lovers Meeting

                    I need your help
                                        in the dark
                                  somehow

                    this formed itself
together                    into a great powerful pattern

          it reared its
great head against the sky          that we cannot see

in the dark somehow
          I need your hands          to locate

                                   the badness
                           
                             I cannot even hear you
                   but the hands          touching

               in the dark
the stones                    the rough sandpaper sounds
of the air in the trees
          of the nails on the nails

I need your help
          in the dark                   somehow
                                         please

Poem-A-Day #204 : Last Chance

Last Chance

All the trees in the world are trying
to keep this place locked and double-locked

The gates are chained and the path is
suddenly less clear there is no sky in the sky

I am rocked in its cradle - a colicked baby
I would have never suspected this of myself

Being able to tilt the cradle onto the floor
to muss the world until it is all blankets in furrows

Undo the ease of life and run a left-behind goose
in the midst of coming winter

The last chance Eleanor in some mythic story
rocks going only uphill etc etc etc

Excitement drowns the voices screaming from the lake
get out of here get away turn back re-lock

Turn tail goose the winter is not so bad
there will be shelter in some field or other

You will find a table to sit at that isn't vile
diseased or full of broken plates and your brother's flesh

Bones light as the air I cannot see
feathers and all that floating like dust on the wind

When the gate opens you will find yourself
moving without movement forwards always forwards

Poem-A-Day #201 : Eleanor

Eleanor

At 32 who could see the shower of stones
the calcification of small guilts

The universe inside becoming one millimeter smaller

I have been spending my life waiting for a house
to open its doors and eat me until my molecules separate

The fantastic reproaches both small and gigantic

What if you flip cards over and I guess them all right
the  windows wouldn't shatter - that will come later

Or not at all

At 32 the hall of portraits of faces that are known
becomes a hall of empty frames

It constricts like an eye in the bright light of day

Youth is binge and age is purge
it is the sound of air sucking into long locked rooms

Poem-A-Day #73 : ...the dead drift among all those words meant to explain the dead

...the dead drift among all those words meant to explain the dead

The acorn still wearing its beret sets itself on the shelf while the horse chestnut faces the other direction looking freshly living and full of layers of gold beneath the red-brown

Fingers on that surface - it is oiled - the pupil a stoic white is blind and cannot possibly understand the fashions of other tree seeds

These trees that will never tree hold the ghosts of dead women - they roll on the counter like those jumping beans you get at five and dimes from here to Amarillo

They came haunted - holding on to the yards they were found in - in them you see pronged leaves in that shade of green that only happens in July when the sun pulls through filaments of chlorophyll

Here there is a desire to crack open - to find that small tree within the black hole of un-birth - a sort of ur-lung - the egg before the chicken

A hammer would help - like popping the lid of a tomb - finding a room full of those Pompeii body casts - that exhibit in New York of preserved criminal remains refashioned as art

Would that the ghosts release - find some comfort in having their tiny homes engaged with the everything else - would that the ghosts find a rumble elsewhere

• The title is taken from Garden of the Fugitives by Matt Donovan

Source - Dionisvera/Shutterstock