Poem-A-Day #349 : Infinite Projections Into Space

Infinite Projections Into Space

I'm so tired of thinking about Zeno

...

Here          a space to occupy ourselves
droll and whatnot          a second space that fills halfway on will alone

Look - I said that we could be friends - and in doing so negated the chance

...

In the slipstream of the canoe
one lone fresh water salmon
pinks about          it doesn't roe here
nor does it          understand that it could
it just               becomes a thing
eating               at the muck on the bottom
of the river
thinking about sex and food nothing else

...

Let's not kid ourselves

we can tangle any time

...

The purple in the light bulb screams burn out          the rattle
a sure sign of darkness to come

In the instant of night - out in Los Alamos - there is a green flash
and it reminds us of the fires

But it's just the horizon eating itself         just the breath exhaled
by the horses pulling the chariot

...

The tortoise tho

...

In the video          the woman is tweezing a snail shell
the parts a broken cup and saucer          a clear kintsugi
upon the brown fragility of its surface          the detail
that the glue is only on the outside -

A naked snail - foot like - a weird sort of digit          sits
patiently

...

It all just spills outwards

The dam giving way to the winter melt          the sound of it - crunching
like a wafer - there is a need to hear this sound - concrete crumbling
edifice and economy          collapse

We watch Walking Dead and hope we'd not get wire to the head

But we all know we'd die episode 1

...

Poem-A-Day #348 : Knife In Water

Knife In Water

The darkness of thought - knife in water

imagine that kind of jump

                                          where body can
                                vanish in liquid
I crave that kind of
going

Imagine me knifing the water each time I say goodbye -

I re-read the ending of The Anthropology of Water
and do not remember that the final image
is of a dying cat -
                              The cat is looking out from very far back in its eyes now, from a huge room where everything is running slowly away

                                                        - and then -
                                                                             The soul of a cat is mortal.

                                                                                                                          - and then -
                                                                                                                                               It does its best.

Think about Anne Carson's imagined dead and real dead - and then add self to that

A hacking cough that results in a claw-footed tub in your toilet

the words
                                               tangle knot
                                       find purchase to foot on - there
is beauty in the glass knife piercing your rib cage

What is best? -

The dying distance themselves from the living - not
because they are afraid of infecting us with their death
but because they may want to turn back

paths become dangerous backwards

Poem-A-Day #343 : Vermin

Vermin

Maybe there is a cockroach in my skull
just behind the eyes
running legs along the sack encasing the brain

There
a drain
a run in a stocking

Feeling like a constant faucet
houses creaking in the night cools
congestion pooling post-nasal

Would it live forever
die and
create a void of longing and eventual rot

At night
I would see it in negative
a butterfly against a lightbulb

Poem-A-Day #339 : Hope Chest

Hope Chest

The box full of things - unnamed as they are -
hold the history of place in the reflection imposed surface

The sun comes from behind eclipse - it
momentarily explodes - loses itself - becomes a break in the lack of air

This is opening - a seam of paper tape - a fold
sun echoing in pulp - in dust

What are these broken lines of thought
burning a hole in the universe of a closet - they flap like broken doves

Beak cracks - the rubble of it - a light bearing
fruit - rotting and burning and searing the faces of memory

Poem-A-Day #302 : Fragments of An Organ

This is not a finished thought. I have no idea where it is going or what it wants to be.


Fragments of An Organ

Against the wall                    pieces of the doorway
begin to connect themselves in ways
foreign to passage
                                                                      There is a sound like paper burning
                                                             the joints are grasping          making out
tonging               They are making themselves a cathedral
                                              a soundway

                                              They will be an organ before they are done

Pieces of hands lay about the floor
fingers
                            like dynamite        
                                                             They are not real hands
they mannequin and pale themselves and become sand that could become glass
if only someone had fire

-

What a sound - the end of days - the reeds on the water will be the only thing to communicate with - the color of the moon before snow - a scent of lilac and sweat -

-

Impassive

&

Unrelenting

                                        Words tossed against a chest of drawers like laundry
                              - how did you begin to see into the crystal ball of this skull -
Motionless & -
                                At some point the doorway had to be reconciled - burned
                         or released - or -

                                                                           There was an inability to let it go

                                                                                                                     A sort of keylessness in the vetting
someone said that the man before us was a sociopath - others said he was just emotionless and distant - one called him a monster and pushed him into the burning effigy of Guy Fawkes

-

We are in a basement and there is the sound of music above us
It drifts through the sparse boards of the ceiling
It is a dirge
For others perhaps a wistful memory keeper
Here it plays out the burning of a church that is a memory

We are terrorists in this mind
Here to burn holes
The door frames attempt to re-
And we laugh at their feebleness
They manage to make noise

That is all before they collapse
We use them to construct a barrier

-

I was trying to find my way into the memory of sound in the giant room with the giant organ - to discover if the emotion rang there - if it hung from a light fixture - if it was kindling - it was not there to be found -

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 #192 : Couplet #13

Couplet #13

Yesterday
there was the sound of skin against a saw

Poem-A-Day #69 : Confession #12

Confession #12

There are times I want to watch the world burn - allow
every cell to wither and die - dust clinging
to a Swiffer or swept like the ants
that dot the floor of my kitchen after I've sprayed them with poison