Poem-A-Day #281 : I'm A Little...You Know The Rest

I'm A Little...You Know The Rest

Of course I want to rage - kettle myself

I know how to whistle

The man at the corner was screaming repent into traffic
his mouth a dark hole into which pennies could drop and never fulfill a single wish

I thought about the unsteady hand that drew the sign
thick black scrawl against sunflower yellow
these are Charlie Brown lines I thought I wanted to yell out the window
          THESE ARE CHARLIE BROWN LINES

But I drove through the intersection - his wild hair in the wind

It's cold in Santa Fe today and this man is freezing to message

His temperature must be high

The problem with my raging - it evaporates quickly
becomes herbal tea

I never said this was going somewhere interesting
though you came on board and probably assumed it would destination

The reality is that I stare into the abyss of life and I don't even see an abyss

I see a thin cloth - loosely woven and unevenly made
full of holes and without pattern other than the continued overlaying of things

And I don't think raging helps thin cloth sustain

Steam does though - maybe - in directional ways

Iron-like ways

What I'm saying is that I don't want to rust but I don't want to shine either

Poem-A-Day #245 : Lips

Lips

Not today

Or any day really - if honesty is policy - which it is not but still at least there is the potential of a day
               where they are not not -

Periscoped from this point out there is the mind that wants to speak to others - that wants to be that
               kind of guy - social etc... - look there is an arm and it could be around your shoulders - and
               those lips could be kissing you -

Every lip could be kissing you - here is a room of nude lips - a bowl of them - they are dried apricots
               - the look like taffy or jerky or another soft problem to think about - they are 2+2 - a broken                dish against a wall - they are the sunrise the eclipse but in a storm -

Poem-A-Day #244 : Of A Broken Wheel

Of A Broken Wheel

A broken limb -
               the eye - a wheel carrying you towards that gas station over there -
          not that you are on empty but you never know...

                                                               There is the impulse to lake - to
                                    find the tree this thing fell from - to
              rub the bark across your chest until it reds

The aesthetics of clouds -
                                                                            epistemology of algae -

                                                                 There is a greenness in both - the wheel
                     of the car kneecapping the day - the Emily Dickinsonness of
a broken wheel that is also an eye looking at a broken wheel -

Here death -

                                    Everywhere the sound of cicadas -

                 How both are ticks along a carved piece of wood -

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 #242 : Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's Law
There is an equation for everything - it's exhausting
          right now the man next to me is doing complicated figures - it's calculus
                               but could be advanced geometry - physics
I don't know
and that's my point - there are figures on pages for every damn thing
and I don't know them -
                                                  I think about the things unknown
                              there are expanses of them - not horizons enough
            you are standing on a mountain and you can see the whole way
around the world right to your ass - and then inside your ass to your stupid brain

But sight would fail you first - the world fills and fills and fills
because it is an expanse - humanity is bureaucracy - a steady fractal -

          we multiply to fill the space given - we are at our highest number right
before collapse -

I don't know if we collapse - it's exhausting
thinking about apocalypse - I feel that numbers are ants marching across
the corpse of the forest - sifting the leaves for foodstuffs -
                                                    that could be peaceful -
                                  but if we go with the proof in the math
              it's probably unpleasant - it's probably equalling
there's a diagram I'm sure - it's probably a triangle closing its sides to us

We can multiply to fill the space given but if the space shrinks we're fucked

Poem-A-Day #241 : Everywhere / The Dream

Everywhere / The Dream

It's hard not to see apocalypse everywhere

The dream of drowning again - the one with the boat
and the attempt at fleeing - the one where your arms just
give out and your lungs are only shrubs not trees

The one with the darkness of water - the tingling
necessity of cold - spikes of jellyfish tentacles
never teeth not sharks this isn't that kind of thing - it
is a gentle death - so fucking quiet

Remember when you dreamt of bees all the time

They would land on your cans of soda - somehow find
the hole in your jeans and sit on your flesh - tongue
the salts there like miners looking for veins

Those were good times - less cold - often so full of sun
that you would wake up needing aloe on everything
feeling itched like poison oak - you drew oak leaf
patterns across every page of every book you read

At 7 AM the phone alerts you that a child has been taken

It is the sound of alarm - a sort of bleating in the darkness
that also resembles the klaxon of air raids - a unexploded
bomb in a churchyard - the mine your foot just ticked

The child is traveling in a beige car - are there
still beige things in the universe that do not travel - that
do not move constantly towards being less beige
do they all have children in them

Then at 9 the notice of a bomb downtown - a robot
lobster clawing at it - digging in a trash can or a strange
backpacks large pockets - there is a question in the sound
of alarm and that question is not why

In the dream of drowning there is a moment where you want ice cream

And that is natural - you probably want to go back
towards the kitchen - the boat sinking breaking falling apart
about you - you want those churned salt-licked milk crystals

There isn't anything clear in all this is dark - it is night
will continue to be so - the bomb will not be found - will not go off
the boat will sink and sink and sink because it is an unreal
a fractal inside your brain of what a drowning looks like

Poem-A-Day #240 : Hill House, Not Sane

This is the end of the Hill House Poems. I think I ran out of ideas at least 15 poems ago, but I stuck with it. One poem for each chapter in the book. Sorta.


Hill House, Not Sane

Houses conspire in other ways - steadfast until collapse
          fuzzed hills pile
                                     until they sky themselves - there is
no truth in these things - we lean into each other

Speak in the tongue of brick and mortar - safe - not sane
          our skin entangles
                                        with this permanence

The crutch of reality flexes
          until breaking - until fracture and stardust
in our eyes blinds us - we drive into death - we fall into
the mouths of the world

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 #238 : Parted

Parted

Love affairs
become our skin -

A second layer of mist
on the grass -

Toe the rocks in the bird's gullet
and find the places that need to smooth

Perhaps the cliche of parting and sorrow
should be broken

Whispered into the cracks of a stone wall
turned - such sorrow is parted sweet

Once the lovers meet -
journey towards each other

The destined touching of fingertips -
separating the newborn twins

Is a deathly business
journeys end in lovers meeting

and then peeling themselves
like the sound of oranges - until they pith

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 #234 : Study

Study

Scent of old books and tobacco

The swell of viola in humidity

Here the blaze of copper - the pop of heavy fabrics

What ivory object falls from a shelf

Collapses - becomes an archetype of lines on carpet

Here is the form man and the form room

They are fighting for dominance of space

These objects want to divorce

Want to be only themselves and their shapes

The scent will leave will drift like a cloud of toxic gas

Poem-A-Day #233 : The Grattan Murders

The Grattan Murders

A knife
His hands
A wire
A shiv

The clock counts the ways
that a man could kill his family

It strikes twice per hour

How drunk his ass must have been
how sad his life before or after - he
must have been on PCP

He lost Jesus

A knife
          from the kitchen block
the one for turkey at Thanksgiving - the
one his father gave him
     the day the baby was born

His hands
                    around his own
mother's neck - he'd dreamt it
since he was 5

A wire
     the folds of the skin - leather
the wire is a belt the wire is a moment
a switch from the tree out front
               a sound like be a man

A shiv for baby

He had been staring out at the lake for hours
had managed to not drink or anything
had come home silently
had decided without deciding

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 #229 : Up All Night

Up All Night

The branch fingers the window
                                                   all night
that small bent sound - in the morning
names are engraved across the surface

Out the cloisters and into the sunlight
there - in the small oldest rooms of Westminster
a glass coffin houses old wax in the shape of a dead prince

The corner calls out
                                 in curling lines
time has etched its graffiti in the form of some
other dead man's initials

That we want to leave something
is not in doubt
                        the tree
                                     the man
both have seeds to sow to tend to reap

Poem-A-Day #230 : Stray Cat

Stray Cat

I have felt not at home
within
and without

The universe is not a cold dead place

It is just cold
and mostly not alive

Our matter
coalesces around us
it speaks to us at night
in the sounds of houses settling

If I have a hand to hold
let it also be my own

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 #227 : Planchette

I love Ouija boards. I love the idea of things talking to us from beyond whatever this is, from whatever that is. I love the lie of it. The beauty of it. The need for it.


Planchette

Ghosts of trees
                          break open and
       split along their Blaschko's

The rupture is a balloon pop -
                                                 the second it takes for sound to enter your ear
pick at your brain register there is infinite -
                                                                      the threads of wood in your eye tell you more

Heart wood
                              is both poetic and descriptive
and tragic in your hand or sanded into a banister
to slide down

But shaped into a heart -
                                         and holding a pencil -
                                                                             the wood can speak its screaming truths

What these spectral beasts say
                                                  the creak of ships at sea
                                           the vanished static of leaves
or the shrapnel of falling down

Whichever it is -
                            those voices are in your hand
warming there and feeling polished -
                                                            they are making the small plank left behind move

British Planchette c.1850-19860

Poem-A-Day #226 : Mrs. Montague

I've been very bad at loading these to the webs. But it was release week for my book (order it HERE) and I kinda took it easy.


Mrs. Montague

She arrives
and automatically writes
her name across the page

This screen capture is larger than my poem.