Monday, December 8, 2008

Things that delighted today

1) Babies wearing glasses. Four separate sightings!

2) A random young man in the library asking me to rate 3 other men's pictures, on facebook, in terms of hotness. (Less delightful: "My opinion probably doesn't count, I don't like guys," I said. He said: "Oh, are you in Rainbow Alliance? No? Why not?" No. Just... No.)

3) Foldy ears. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IjpZRSQ7t8

4) Colors: Weird-glowing bluish snow in twilight, sky gone mauve and gray at once, and a lusciously red-berry-filled tree supporting a small birdnest. Oh, and also wet pavement reflecting lights. There has been a poem gestating for over a year - the way traffic signals illuminated the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks - especially after rain or snow, when street and tunnel walls are lavishly streaked with red or green.

5) This picture from Iron & Wine's EP, "The Sea and the Rhythm":


I like things that are alluring without actually revealing anything.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Lavinia

(Draft 1: Imitation of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's style for class, with liberties taken from Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus")

Clumps of sticks swing at the wind.

Dry wind. Enough to peel back black

Bark from black stumps in this circle

Around the still bog water. Yellow water,

Yellow grass, and the black crows calling.

The crows tell a story, which is an old story.

Old as the song the dry wind sings

Through the black bark and dead grass.

Old as anger. Crumbling in the grass,

Heavy footprints. The boys have run away.

They are laughing boys. And dirty.

Dirty from bog water and blood.

Their laughter is dirty and smells of iron.

Dry wind. Her body bends in the wind, twisting

In her white dress, a ruined dress,

Stains seeping dark from the dark triangle

Of her young cunt. Mouth open. Empty mouth.

No, not really empty at all, empty only

Of her little pink tongue. Now oozing,

Wet and hot, rent open, like the inside

Of some swollen fruit gone near to rot.

Clumps of sticks grow from stumps

Where her hands were and are not now. Claw

And claw at the wind. At her own chest.

Where do the hands lie? Folded

Or flung apart? Do they miss each other?

What now tastes the tongue?

Stale bog-wafer of still water-sodden dirt?

Crows are crying their dry cries. Wet mouth,

How to cry? How to tell the story? How

To sing? Song, story both are spilling

Warm and red. Flies are coming.

Green-gold swarm. Returning the song

Of the wind and the crows and the far-flung

Tongue and the stick-claws clawing with

their terrible hunger, terrible hoarseness.

But the swarm song is low. Low tone.

Low in the grass. A song without iron. Low

Song in the yellow grass in the red sun.

Song of things blessed and bled.

Monday, October 27, 2008

I'm in a poetry class

...and so life has meaning. My absence (from vomiting poems on the internet) is largely attributed to all the theory I've had to ingest recently. Reading brilliant work & its criticism, not being as brilliant... You know.

In any case, I'm turning in this to my class tomorrow. The assignment is an imitation of Frank Bidart (further proof that the best poets are gay, lonely, longing). His work can be on the creepy side, which is why I chose to write about something so awful as asphyxiation.
(P.S. I'm having indentation issues. Does anyone know how to indent stuff on this website??)

Perfect limbs won’t peel away

Look at you – gold and whole, your painted,
impenetrable pores thigh eyelids lips breasts hipbone

roast in stage light. Gold dancer,

your chest swells. You’d scrape your shell
off to sawdust, the lungs that sag

like rotting wood under the weight

of skin you writhe to relinquish.
I watch your gibbet-jerks; you twitch
___________________________and twirl and twirl and twirl

Perfect limbs won’t peel away

like the bird that careens, bright in sun,

between flying and falling as breath dies in it
like the bird watched by the creature

watching in the dark, the dark

creature that craves the dancer,
craves bright surface and flare of the beauty

I’ve made of you; your skin
shut like an eye; your painted,

perfect limbs can’t peel away. Trapped, shine, MINE.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Photograph by André Kertész

Artificial light slices right angles –

blackened brick corner, crumbling stair, crammed-

together buildings too many teeth in a mouth.

Laundry line and telephone line

outlined brightly. This night, half-light

in empty alleys is less longing,

less an ache than eked-out, shadow-strewn

generosity, though everyone's asleep. No –

gone, by now. What promise is this?

– held together in narrow dark spaces,

in small frames and forms.

An instant's feeling extends through, as if it's

anything to do with you.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Our Joy

(This comes mostly from the latest salacious CNN.com scandal. If this poem doesn't work out, I'm turning the story into a musical. Or a Lifetime movie. http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/10/cloned.dogs.ap/index.html)


You bounded hungry into the world, doggedly hunting

down what it owed you. You never could discern

that line between sweet-talker and a stalker.

In Ireland, on the run, you played deaf and dumb –

your sick heart pinned to him like a star. That cold country,

cold chars of stone in a church courtyard. The bells

pealed out, without melody, a rush of hard, clanging sound

so like the inchoate cries welling up in your own throat.

“I loved him so much,” you told the judge,

“that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a

carnation up my nose if he asked me to.” You were crazy,

said tabloids garish with grimy details –

has-been beauty queen, kidnapping, pair of handcuffs

(mink-lined). Your love’s carnation is rotting,

Joyce. Sugary decay smells like all the pages

of notebooks stuffed in your trunk, your pen tight-clenched

and drilling in scrawls of him, him

pulling into his driveway, him on a park bench,

buttoned shirt and Bible open in square hands,

in dry Utah air. Not like it was. The cottage: Slick meat

of heavy thighs spread on the bed a holy offering.

His thick wrists bound, you fell and felt

warmly received, like a homecoming.

What you get from someone who can’t leave you,

it isn’t quite love but it almost filled you.

You disappeared. But still starving in those decades

for your due, anything that loved you, always more.

Your fat pug you had divided into five,

and in the picture you, too, could have been a clone.

You and the small wriggling pup you clutched tight.

Faces wrinkle-folded, your mouths opened in twin twisted O’s,

yours with joy, blue-dusted eyelids creasing, his, wide, still

with the shock of being born. “That’s our Joy,”

they said. Your face, again, smears across newsprint

in colors tawdry as cheap polyester. Fugitive,

you’re gone, you look out weak and wounded

in dazed amazement. Cheating world.

It offered you platefuls of nothing but air.

Friday, August 8, 2008

(Draft 2) You may not touch

because the painting is old and not yours.

Blazing red, bison hulk

over slim human shapes.

But lines of skull and horn, hoof and calf

are tender as a lover’s traced curve,

her side’s slope from rib to hip.

All red, faded but raw, a bloody color


because it is blood, and fat.

Some once-alive beast, insides ground

with rock to powder. How right –

the rendering made from the real.

The stone would feel ragged, the shapes

smooth, dusky dust-flaking shapes in the palm.


At night, in the park, what I could say

wasn’t enough when I asked my friend,

Do you want to do stuff?

That, she said, meaning the unspoken sex word, that

opens a whole ‘nother can

of words. She messed up her metaphor

but it made more sense, the feeble conversation

spilling out, dark, dirt-clumped and wriggling.

That, she said, wasn’t necessary.


Words are a poor vessel for desire,

but less lonely a place than inside skin.

Through the painted figures winds

a thin red line. Some form of magic,

says the placard on velvet robe cutting me off

from a life preserved and contained.

I am keeping my hands to myself.

I am keeping myself to myself.

The line ties red outline to outline –

umbilical cord, I think,

connecting all of them, all

wrenched from one gaping womb.


What is necessary? Touch is.

Reach into me, remind me

that body, if anything,

is bridgeable. Skin, soft barrier, bare-

ly containing all this living,

can it hold us back from each other?

Reach. And make it hurt.

That pain is duller than our distance.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Boy in the grass

Lightning charged the soil, he had told me, made it rich

and lying open for the till and plunging fingers.

Storms ripped to the roots of long grasses,

made them stretch deep through rocks, worms

and arrowheads, longer than each dry blade.

In a yellow stretch of prairie I explored his form –

muddled-colored eyes wide, wild

and helpless, shorts around his ankles.

Mosquito clouds and power lines split the air

with dull buzzing songs.


Even then I was remembering him, red shoulders,

fresh smell of sweat and hot wind.

And a maleness to the smell, alive-ness.

I held him in metaphor. I fed him to it.


Dangerous to mix up the real, flesh

with flanks of hill, sunned arms for red rock.

But that is, after all, natural,

to confuse, infuse bodies

with bright fragments like broken porcelain –

a sharp piece of song lyric in her room, long

past midnight. How the profile lined in white streetlight,

rain falling, reflects – as if between two mirrors –

splintered wet blue nights, fingers tripping down

forever unrolling keys, each note sweeter

and more mournful than the last.


Yellow and hot, the afternoon

was every afternoon,

laughing on my knees in gold-lit heat, high grass,

summers I was younger. Floating sparks – Oh,

poor loved bodies, pumped to bursting,

others’ impressions pressing in,

filling in the outlines.


Something bucked inside me, buckled.

Broke, on his slack mattress, in a white room.

But that matters less than when I took him

in the grass, in my mouth. My knees

pressed dirt hard and I felt it, or imagined

I felt it – fierce and electric, a burn

slicing through skin, deep.

Past metaphor, past memory,

into earth warm and waiting.