Last day... although I think I might just keep trying to do one every day...

Sandwiches and the rearranging of images,
a sisterly smile helps to decorate the room.
Music kneaded into the ear
with the help of raspy afternoon voices.

To all those who read and respond

(whether in the comment boxes or in their pretty little souls):

giant THANKS!!!!!!

I want to reply to all of you personally... but, um grad school....

LoveLife

If we were an ocean
the penguins would be flowering
(emperor penguins)
you make my heart bloom like a jellyfish
and I dream of leaving deep red
lipstick algae
on the crested-white wavetips.



This is what happens when you watch nature shows and think about boys.

I often end up hurting myself while writing

This time
I didn't poke myself in the eye
it was a success.

ugh... grad schoool

no moments to float
been drowning for 34 hours.



I freewrote about this feeling and may translate. We'll see.

All-nighter

I feel the weight
braced against
in the nightlong earthquake of the mind.

SO MUCH HOMEWORK!

the weekend has long since been folded into the horizon,
and the moonface pokes holes into any left-over enthusiasm.
Monday morning is bound to find its hallways
awash with the demands of work too-long undone.

Attempted Sonnet #1: A Dialoge Between Dance, Street and Sky

sun-dusted pink from dancing massed street-side
in muddled twists of body and drumbeat
the beasts on asphalt speak, they do confide
with elbow flashes, flurries quick and sweet:
"we are the place that you became." they said
with big bang punctuation, words begin
a churning mouth of limbs and fingers spread
the air is left no room to breathe, swathed skin
whose movements ramp a lovely skyward steam,
through sweat the mass breathes frantic steam-pressed streaks
against gravity's grasp, broke by light beam
before each fracture the beasts do speak:
A sweaty message made through cry and mess
through sunburned dance and pressed togetherness



parts of it are super contrived but I haven't done this in YEARS.

Improv apologies

Compression causes animal noises in the basement
numbers spouting from the mouth
like a fraying corner of carpet
I caught the length of each breath with a yardstick
wedged stories between every inch
and then let them fall through the bottomless measurements
devoured only what my ears could catch.
I'm afraid that when I give myself to you
the only thing left will be the sweat
of a hard day without thinking of you at all.
Can't stop
can't be broken from this sideways binary
that opens it's eye to nothing,
an empty oval compresses into a blind value
Next time
I'll try to keep the zeros out of my eyes.

Headache poem

brain bleeds forward and back
the pendulums aren't ready yet
and a symphony of clicking pens collapses
the words run out your nose
especially if you hold your breath
solar flares in the backyard of the brain
steal colors
pull them through the pinched eye of an hourglass
measure every grain of perception




OUCH!

Poem in 5 minutes:

So many sieved thinklings decide to make ripples,
a thought drops out
and uncurls in the rainless evening
the bricks become especially contemplative.
And an idea gives the blush ricochet:
One more red enlightenment

Kneebloom Bruise

aubergine petal
punctured by goosebumps
soothed purple in the bathwater.

On the walk back:

If in the smallest hours of night
your eyes linger too close and long
upon a blue heron,
it will fly to another shore.

also:

beneath the streetlamp eyes
discarded tulip tongues
burn bright as the freshest sashimi,
the blue bells look on
their purple eyelashes litter the roadside with distraction.

"I wait to be back on your mind"

I walk deep toward the bay.
Tilted back like a roofer
so the hill won't get the better of me and my backpack,
brimful with obligations.
A desperate twig begging escape
beckons from the storm drain.
When I reach the bridge
I always feel the crooked urge to leap from it's smoothness,
not from a hunger for endings
but for all the lovely skin stories I can never know,
cool air rushing past face and sandaled feet
the water that would echo out in choppy circles of shock.
I'm over the bridge now and past the supermarket,
the sidewalk speaks to my eyes in a chalky voice;
dirty love pressed into cement-mixer discharge
night cools it into a hard reality:
"I wait to be back on your mind"
wanted to call out, but I didn't.
wanted to be there, but couldn't.
I spent every stride undoing the knots on my hands,
my fingers became the nooses I used to drag myself homeward.


Didn't mean for it to be so morbid. It was a fine walk in fact...

this edit made me hungry...

Anxious balloon
in a lifted elliptical;
latex holds in the weight of the unspoken,
pushes against the social gravity.
The tension extends without the space to apologize
and walking silently together might be the hardest thing I've ever done.


All the other lines about day of silence were crap.

Short...

the forces of April make week-day neighbors
of my sandals
& my hiking boots.


the poem about Day of Silence experience is unfinished.

For yesterday

It was made yesterday but not posted because I was SO TIRED.
Constrained myself to 2 syllable words.

Every itchy eyelid winches;
simple twitches inside yourself,
become mindful about pushing mouthfuls into ideas.
Bloated via business
lofty ideals
impose endings upon every promised future.


PS I am participating in Day of Silence today and my next poem will probably be about that.

Mono-syllabic experiment..

A man drops rain words down the mouth of bus ride:
“The sun is not as bright as the snow,
and as the high lakes flow forth from the sharp blue dusk,
green makes much of the night.”

I did a lot of things today that I wanted to write about

but I spent my time doing them instead.

This is a scrappy piece from yesterday:
My poem won't hold still,
(like a baby who wants to catch a butterfly)
can't pin it between the pinch
of a ball-pointed impression,
It vibrated out
and the sounds dissipated in 8 different directions.
(the humbled, now-too-big images crawl back to their chrysalis)

This is what happened at work: 3

I found a three-legged spider in my notebook today
& sat beneath the shady legacy of a long-ago appletown prince.
Together, as insects, we devoured the weight of seven-syllabled endings;
a single word holding our mouths under a v-shaped spotlight.

Before being sentenced to a full-bodied crescendo
you breathe a rhythm dictated by periods,
a series of full stops extended into lung, abdomen and thorax
—rest stops on the road map to a lyric bellyfire.

And when the windshield fractures
your eyes become 2 halves of a three-pointed compass,
the image rose up and folded over into a tripled repetition.
And, as every insect will show,
3 is not enough to live on.

One is pretty and one is philosophy...

Drove into the deciduous yesterday
and ate every shade a litle lighter than usual.
A plucked-up priesthood of branches and wind-regulated wisdoms
lets you moving into morning—
inside an early velvet there is purple fog and raspberry birdsongs
each can be tasted through glass and baseboards and tuperware.
In the distance a relentless ocean pushes, pushes, pushes
Small rocks into smaller rocks
heavy blue hands cradle kelp in a meticulously effortless balance.
The crabs observe each occurrence without tilting their horizontal faces
and about all this, say nothing at all.




Subjectivity—what exactly happens in the process of seeing:
See the skin and the scales pulling back,
hesitate there,
don’t muffle it with calloused measurements,
sensations filtered through the lenses most raw
defy the 5-fingered separation of impressions.
Fresh skin responds to salt and temperature,
susceptible as the surface of a hungry tongue,
a small pang might translate into taste
or at least a new synthesis of seeing.

and then there came a few more (stocking up I guess)

A few things that happened today:

I had no idea about the curtains;
the green getting greener
through the creeping up of noon.

As an old crumpled box
leaves even older hands,
a deluge of checkers
bends us all under tables.

On the main drag
two magazines recline on the sidewalk
& gossip hurriedly as
a series of bulldozers pass.

Two poems with one thing in common

(last part is the best and I am seriously considering getting rid of all the rest)
4/7/10
Bus Stop Poem:
Soggy morning
heavy with hunger
you must wait as the bus galumphs forward.
Wait for a processed breakfast.
Getting to know the neighborhood stride by stride,
greening leaves flooded into understanding
thoughts sinking into a backdrop of chilled earlobes.
The neighborhood coughs
and I can just spot a flemmy retention pond as the wheels scuttle on
a burp shortcuts me back to my hunger.
Now fully engaged in a precipitous growl
I make grasps at interaction as we curve onto a detour.

From a distant windstorm
branches and their big brother boughs have descended
and lay cryptic like bones in a fire,
the lungs of the bus gutter and sputter
Stop
Exhale before the speed bump.


4/8/10
Freewrite Poem (started from my favorite line of the last poem):
A cryptic cataclysm of bone pickers and fanatic philosophers
make itching an act of ritual
& the meaning of a sneeze so goddamn clandestine
you’d think every virus expulsion a sin to contemplate.
But this shit is unconscious
& what is unconscious is unstoppable,
Like a mob or an angry mother who would kill for her children
Kill for the danger of ideas.
“Never hurt a fly,” they all used to say about her;
The air around the insect is subject to great violence.
Fear is so often fueled by the breath of the earth,
Wind can move anything
through the hand of the eventual.
Science undoes the subtle,
Overturns the minutes beneath the minutes
Seeks out the creepy-crawlies
Rips off the legs
And eats the underbellies with cold philosopher eyes.

today's poem is a joke about grad school (there's two punchlines!):

Q: "What is the ultimate consequence of accelerating all objectives toward yourself?"
A: “Welcome to hell."
A: "It’s not so bad.”




Kinda funny, but also kind of sad...

you get three today!

But they're pretty short (pretty cute though) the last one is my favorite:

Your feelings were wrapped in fruitskins
tart and taut
making colorful fools of us all.

Letters are flying into me
so fast so sharp,
their edges have no time to soften into words.

The deepened mauve of pomegranate
creates a too dusky tea-time
I am afraid to reach through the steam
and stem the hotness of purple steeping.

Easter Morning Snippet:

There is thunder on the radio
its rumble is punctuated by powdery gray light,
the dusty color filters through purple leaves.
I am finding a messiah in every smile this morning,
a half-hidden bicycle gears joy into breathing.

A moving poem for the 3rd

The drawstring on my days is getting less and less effective;
Been devoured by a handful of hours so full
you have to push a several events out of the way just to get a yawn in,
the energy could fuel you from New Orleans to Nova Scotia.
Moving
Moving
moving in every direction.
No body can ever move in only one direction—
when we crept into a 3rd dimension we lost all sense of focus
spreading out of singularity.
It occurs to me that identity behaves in this way
unable to move but to take several paths entwined by the magnetics of space and time.
With place-holders shifted
I left a jar of molasses in the empty cupboard
and forgot to dust every windowsill.
I sit with objects made apparent by being closed into boxes
A conspicuous shower curtain becomes more vibrant by peeking than it ever did when fully unfurled
I avoid the flirting eyes of objects in boxes.
As others, I’ve no doubt have found
It is a singularly strange experience to carve out a new home,
like a plant trying to pot itself for the first time.
So I breathe.
The leaning piano hides cleverly
How drunk it has become with the play offered from bumbling, wayward fingers.
And in the end pajamas help the most:
In flannel fields, pastel sheep eat numbers to help themselves into sleep.
When I join them, I laugh so hard I begin to snore.



I wrote most of this in my car on the way home (to my new home) by stuffing my mouth up to my phone and recording bits.
it was smoothed over when I got home and "finished" (for this blog anyway) at 12:30 last night (or morning if you want to be all sticklery).

If you'd like...

to suggest titles or changes/edits I would be more than happy and in fact pretty damn grateful!
kthnx!

This Morning I Wrote:

All language can be encompassed in gesturing cycles of consumption.
Two predators circling so close they have eaten clean through each other’s shadows,
teeth inching up to spine.

Morphological hunger churns, pulsates and deceives,
no pyramid or pattern can hem in the depths of this hunger.
Every conceivable sound becomes devourable:
Language makes us like coyotes,
bodies pressing sustenance from every scrap we manage to push through
the dime-sized drum-skins rocking just inside the ear.

You’d be surprised how much can fit through there—
But you’ll still want more in the morning.
The coyote is always behind your stomach.

Poets and lovers must have it the worst
(although the jury is still out as to the limits of “poets” and “lovers”):
They are hungry for baby snot and the wise thickness of tar,
hungry for acid rain and a toxic belly…

And upon being fed this hunger becomes more hunger:
You and the coyote circling each other
with teeth soft and loud and unapologetic,
we work toward a contradiction in physics
and hungrily whisper: “Let there be no shadows between us.”

A poem for the fool's day...

As inspired by Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

The scurried shuffle & whisper of the squirrel’s feet is accompanied by a clicking chirp
& the exhale of morning
as a feathery tail brushes against her dewy heartstrings.

Rock faces play at nervous chatter—
shifting rocks break the reverent mountain silence
like giggling teenagers.

All across the city
different decibels of pish-tlick-click-and-clack
are pushed from their respective keyboards
with hands reluctant, fervent & uninspired.

At 3 o’clock on a Wednesday morning
someone coughs and the stick of incense begins to ash,
resulting in a small, unnamable sound,
perceptible only over the sound of steam rising from my tea.

Getting a late start

I wrote a poem this morning and after sharing it with some of my partners-in-crime, they reminded me it is national poetry month which warrants an obligatory attempt at writing a poem for every day of the moth.
I have to confess: I didn't write one yesterday although I wrote 2 the day before (3/31) and am hoping to transplant one onto the first (which I hope isn't breaking the rules...)
I may not be able to write one every day ( have a crazy busy life) but my goal is to at least have 30 poems by the end of the month (and not to be writing 18 of them on the 30th). Some might be haiku. I will do my best.