Poem-A-Day #243 : Impulse of Lateness

Impulse of Lateness

Your hand on the trunk
of the tree

Leaves making their
inevitable suicide

Here a sky
being unexpressive

The tree symbolizes
absolutely nothing

Even though you're sad

Your phone is ringing

Does it feel like stone
the trunk not the phone

Rough
we all know the feeling

It is time made physical

Your phone
it's the thing you're late for
calling you

Poem-A-Day #239 : Ends

Ends

It is a quiet hunger - not a thirst - not the kind that forces people into the woods to force leaves into their mouths -

The sound of leaves of metal accordioning - the folds are pleats in a curtain that moves quietly in a breeze - it swirls the dust in an attic the hair under the bed -

No one can satisfy this hunger - one must forget to survive - oleander in the veins - it smells like old houses creaking in the ocean of night - like trees turning yellow and mast-like before winter erases them -

You must go the way you came - must arm the threat of starving - there is a tree and there is the road and the choice of allowing yourself to move -

And there is the breaking sound of digesting

Poem-A-Day #145 : A Theme Emerges of An Obsession With Nature & Death

A lot of the things in my journals are untitled. I gave this one a title that reflects where my mind clearly sits most of the time.

I think this is a bit of a riff on Pound's petals on a wet, black bough. But it probably could be argued that anything written about nature after Pound is a riff on that.


A Theme Emerges of An Obsession With Nature & Death (7/11/04)

Light catches
in the grooves
of the tree's abdomen

Leaves tremble
debate amongst themselves
whether to jump or not

It's the breeze that does it
that makes
the leaves want to fly, that

And the light
in the deep
skin-cuts of bark

Sparkling
in a rainstorm

Poem-A-Day #143 : Study #7 (Labyrinth)

I obsess over myths ancient or otherwise.


Study #7 : Labyrinth (8/12/04)

*
When Daedalus sat
looking over the
rolling hillside of Crete

Tapping his charcoal about the desk

His eyes would unfocus

A glaze of rainwater and milk over his iris

The floating olive leaves
would intertwine and mesh
forming a sheen of glazed
leaf pattern over darker leaf pattern

And in those leaves was the key :

          Trap it in a pattern of light
          Move it into the vein
          Place it in the center of god

*
The idea that these walls that drive you mad are the walls that have always contained you this is the thing we must remember

*
When he handed off the beautiful bull
could Poseidon have known
the chain of deaths attached to it

That Minos would cage his only son
his only daughter would die abandoned

Theseus' father would leave a namesake sea
so that the cursed child would always burn -

*
Did Pasiphae know that her bull sex would
unravel a ball of yarn attached to her fake udder
and finishing across the ocean at the feet of the man who killed her son?

*
As the green parts fade
they get red, brown, gray

A gray only seen once in all things
A gray that is only in death

There are bones left

Bones loosing marrow
small holes of air rupture the surface
leaving only the imprint
of canals that once carried blood

The leaf skeletons
          (at their centers)
this is where a light will never go off

*
All I know is this:

His wife gave birth to a creature of unspeakable traits that was ravenous in hunger for human flesh

*
Carved into a mountain
the sharp walls would slice open
and cut everything
into darkness -

Poem-A-Day #75 : New Leaf

New Leaf

Cardboard tube split along its spiral axis
unfurled
                     painted the purest of greens

Poem-A-Day #5 : Winter Morning

Winter Morning

Hash of leaves      soft    under foot
      the pillows on the bed still smell like you

Pine is caramel      vanilla      tar
      [the sound of birds]      sunlight waxen      drips