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 : The space - of a letter

I wrote this for a friend who is hurting. It isn't going to help anyone but myself.


The space – of a letter

               The space – of a letter – the –
void within the Q –

               A soft rain – holds itself
rocks itself – this is the thunder – popping the floorboards – rain
trying not to feel – desperate in its lack of color –

Think about letters without voids – ones
          zeroes – the whitespace –
          around an I –

          Someone laughed – it was fireworks –
in your peripheral vision – it was a sudden peel of a Band-Aid –

That you couldn't stand – let alone think of white space –
               well –

               There is an answer to the question –
that answer must unfill – it must –

Poem-A-Day #346 : I Look Terrible In Photos

Now is a good time to mention that I am about to hit the one year mark of this version of Poem-A-Day. I've been debating what I want from this thing and have found myself deciding to alter how these work.

So...the project will continue, but I'm going offline.

I will still post 2-3 poems a week on here, but the majority of the poems will live in a physical, handwritten form. This is to free up the project from the constraints of blogger and to give me a bit of breathing room to explore posting more essay-type things on this blog.

I may start posting more of them to Instagram or Twitter as a result. We will see.


I Look Terrible In Photos

In every photo of myself I am a tree ,  arms reaching out their wires attempting to dig a wall ,  being a tree in photographs results in a body that is constantly a seedling ,  it never fruits ,  always in flower ,  I remember the smallness of the earth and the press of roots but there is little calling from the sun ,  it is an orb in the sky that will not quit smiling ,  a cruel thing that ,  the camera an eye unblinking (  an image no one has thought of before  ) ,  a shield pitted with arrows ,  here are the results of the capturing ,  the soul is iced and held and in constant summer clothing ,  eyes will never catch the glint of the stars because the stars are forever behind the blueness of daylight ,  the sun has won here and the wooden feeling in the body has as well ,  in every damn photo I stand there with a hunch and the arms of a dead man ,  it laughs in its suit and tie ,  the blue of blood pops in the black and white of the moment ,  here everyone ,  an offering .

Poem-A-Day #337 : Manhattan

Manhattan

On rocky tops the lighthouse beaming
its mirrored sun - arms
spread a veritable wide embrace -
there is a sand in the gleam - winking
causing pearl in the ducts of the eye

That pool created dip of earth
sinkhole - cocksure - earth loosing itself
a new address would be best - the beam
pressing buttons of travel making lease
on a room in Crown Heights

Oh the sound of gulls - this city on a hill
garbage belched from below it echos
reflects itself - reminds
what could an echo be - the
whole a twin sun binary edging

Poem-A-Day #321 : January

January

The aloes are growing -
it is cold - but - they shoot themselves at the windows
dark green - moving - outside the snow becomes fog - becomes breath

Poem-A-Day #290 : Nightscape

Nightscape

On your skin

A color like purple

It thighs and glides across surfaces

A woman is thrown into the pool of a taxi

There is night and then there is city

Each thing defines itself against the void of space

Your eyes are glares

The streetlight blinks yellow banishing color

Mono

A wish to be the reflection in your sweat

The smell of garbage

A rat across your foot

Uber and crash

Your teeth are violet

Poem-A-Day #258 : Species Complex

Species Complex

.
There a body
orange black under sodium-vapor light

Eyes a void
                    don't look in the void

What colors the body
in day

.
The butterfly
lands on the drying plant

It is November why is this thing living

Wings fold unfold
                    scales are enormous eyes
that move
like snakes entering narrow spaces

They are liquid

The impulse to bathe in the copper wetness is unbearable

.
It is easy to say - we are all the same - without enacting it

Language is a seed
                    it will sit dumbly on the pavement until watered

Language is a turbine without water
a magnet
                    coiled in copper wire
left to collect dust

Feel the sound of water through the tunnels of the dam

The turbines long to be harnessed to it - they rub themselves raw
in this longing

.
Sound of buzzing

The body
                    yellowed - like paper - always everything reduced to paper

There is a thing in that
a sort of comment on ledgers and graphs and the way our lives are grid-ed

On every corner a lamp destroys the color of the world

Sepias the entirety

The body and the other body
                    every body

Jaundices - lands on the dying milkweed
growing between the sidewalk joins

Hums

Corrects pitch until in line with the light

Repeating Patterns of Mimicry (2006)
Axel Meyer

Poem-A-Day #256 : Migraine

Migraine

                    My head is a burning sigil -

                                        Cloth in a bottle -

     Words form and then spread across the page until they are a smear -

                             Listen to the broken vials of pain meds -

                                                   Light will shatter -

                    Pop all the vessels in the universe -

                                       Cover and run from this -

Poem-A-Day #253 : Poem

Poem

I close my eyes as I walk down the hallway

Light reds the space - it oranges skin and pops along the carpet like sprouts coming up

I want to be free - the air does it - the light makes its way from the eye to the eye along the way it breaks for the hills - somehow free happens - somehow

Spread arms like skin coming away from a rabbit - heat in there - light - a paw on the end of a key chain

Poem-A-Day #172 : light / The dream

My walk home from the bar was less and more than the night warranted.


light / The dream

Awake from the dream to the room bathed in blue full-moon light

The dream was about bloodied people in the street a woman drug behind a car

Full-moon light is about underwater colors and the fractals of time crashing on the walls

Your eye will take this all in simultaneously because we are able to hold two things in our two hands

The broken evening will become the fractured skin and blue light will stand in for red blood

Her blood was possibly purple and the street was colored in sodium vapor yellow

And the cars were just steel on tires moving endlessly forward in space

Poem-A-Day #154 : Wood

Dakota R. Garilli, editor at the amazing IDK, sent me a list of suggestions for Poem-A-Day topics. One was just the word 'wood'. It was both the least interesting and most full of possibilities as I have always found trees to be fascinating and weird.

This month will be an experiment. It will go badly. It will be transcendent. I am writing a 31-part poem called Wood. The poem has no purpose other than to be everything and nothing. It is an ars poetica, an explanation, an attempt. It is modeled after A. R. Ammons' Garbage.

This is a conversation. Feel free to respond.


Wood

We should probably start somewhere obvious like a forest : that feels good this time of year : the shade from the full green leaves would cast a pattern of green light across the bare earth below : leaves from winter would have mulched themselves and everything would smell like earth and growing : everywhere in other words alive :

Here those forests would be Aspen and pine but I'm sure you have your own concept of 'forest' and you should just go with that : the actualities are not important just be in that space of sunlight filtering down hitting you and be in that quiet that only people who live in cities think is quiet for a bit : is your breathing regular :

I ask because everything around you is alive : because it is in a state of motion : I ask you about your breathing because you are in it and it is coursing through your bloodstream as we speak about it : did you know that it only takes 30 seconds for alcohol to hit the brain : did you know that the lungs are hands holding on to the air for dear life :

So why have I brought you out here : am I going to kill you and leave your body to nourish these trees or for the wolves to tear apart and feed their young : I might have an axe in my car I might have a gun you won't know that the language doesn't reveal what's in pockets or trunks : if only it could : I don't know why we're here any more than you do :

That's the trick though : I'm supposed to KNOW what I'm doing here have a plan a map a big red 'X' that marks some spot on the map that is the place that I am going to dig : I don't have the arms for digging : I'm more of a burier of objects histories knowledge : I could bury us and then we could really think about things :

In this moment the trees are probably swaying in the breeze I do hope you have a breeze in your forest they are so much more interesting when they move in ways we can see : I want to talk about the trees and why they are here for me and you : why we are here for them : this isn't some eco-bull shit please don't think that I want to hug anything : get away from me :

I want to thesis about why I come back to this again and again : the roughness of the bark on my hands and the veins showing in the leaves : I want to discuss this with you : I'm not sure how to begin that though I will plant the idea here and I will come back tomorrow and the next day and the next and I will see what sort of tree has begun :

Poem-A-Day #61 : Motel No.1

Motel No.1

The dip in your knee collects the glowing street light

At the edge of town there is a burnt out motel it holds onto the skin of its visitors as a sort of currency against being forgotten

Lines on the road are tattoos dug in with a heavy hand

It's snowing in May the charcoal will turn silver and then probably never burn again

Poem-A-Day #30 : Glow

Glow

I sit in the light of a thousand LED lights - it's comforting - they last thousands of hours - that something will last longer than the cells in my face

It's like the lighting in Barry Lyndon - flickering bonfire on the skin
Let's put on our topcoats and dance the volta - let's dance the volta like it's the Restoration and our hair is piled in powder and curls with a model sailing ship on top

A brown swirl of water comes up over the bank of sand - it foams like sewage - the sound of it absorbing is the sound a tree pressing its roots into earth

What is this circle of lights here for - it's in the trees of this forest - fireflies can't hold a - they dance in the wind that whips itself the wires are barbed cat-o-nine tails are lashing the molecules of oxygen are burning them and scattering them

It's difficult to understand - it's a stone rolling itself down a hill and breaking the surface of an ice cold lake

Source: Paper Lantern Store

Room

Life Edited

I've been thinking of space.

Rooms within rooms.

The idea of a room. What it is.

Beyond four walls.

I've been writing on it. Thinking through how I deal with space.

From the base idea of a room not existing before it is seen. A sort of classic koan-like thought experiment. From that idea up to the idea of entering a painting and leaving behind the 'real' world.

The mutability of space.

Floor plans.

Think about entering a room. A car. A forest. For the first time. And the wonder of that moment.

It's like looking at a word for the first time.

lighght

That is a poem by Aram Saroyan. The question is inevitable. Why?

Because when you look at it you begin to question the nature of light. The nature of language. The nature of everything.

How many gh's could you stuff in there? Infinite? Because the 'gh' is silent you can slide over them. They approach the infinity of light. The speed of it. The beauty.

Ian Daly talks it out at the Poetry Foundation:

"(The poem) is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer."

Saroyan himself says: “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process...Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”

I think of a poem as a room. A space you must enter. Thinking about spaces we see and deal with on a daily basis allows us to reconnect to the magic of life. Beyond the space we have created for ourselves.

Odds-on

Odds-on 4/9

I look out over the city of Santa Fe and I see a tilting plane of desert – a cracked paper surface and scared face of earth – the buildings are growing – a giant’s causeway – the sky is the inside of a bowl glazed in turquoise and silver – I look over this place and see nothing of the poor children the inequity the people – this makes me heartless – I look at your face and see light radiating from your pores – it’s something like your soul – something like mine – this makes me unable to see individuals to see myself to see anything but the molecules slipping into bed with each other and forming things – my finger – yours

Radiant

Radiant 1/16

A box of light

Drape

I don't get to do this enough anymore.


Drape 7/15

The sun bakes my bed – bleaches my green blanket
I lay there at 6 o’clock and feel it scrape against my back
            a parade of bedbugs across my spine – I feel the mosquito insert
The sun has long nails made of iron – keening the death of Greek gods
            she etches her loss onto me – I lay there every day and sleep

I could close the curtains to her advance but no one else has a window
            that she peers in at 6 o’clock
No one else bares their back