To Be Sleeping

Tonight you, my lover, are finally sleeping.
December wreaks havoc on all things circadian.
In such limb-slunged slumber your bedded body swallows its rhythm
I can hear you calling out dreamy-mouthed
Lips sticking & parting:
“Refuge.”
Breath quickens 

with the blanket slipping,
unraveling rhythms circadian.

The two of us spend our winters trading insomnia & adventure.
tonight I am watching you, my lover, slumber
I look up to find the tongue of morning brushing my body,
the highways already cradling their early workers to more productive dreams.
School buses are making their pickups.
The city belongs to birds and dumptrucks
and my lover's pushing freckled dream breath
back and forth over the bed.

It's raining horses.

When it rains like this
newspapers slush
into pudding on the sidewalk.
When it rains like this
I have no doubt
that you would still love me
if you let your intentions run wild
like the horses they are.

Obedience to Authority or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dissent

(this needs a LOT of edits but it might be a slam piece if I reduce it some)

They did the experiments in 1961 and again in ‘74
Every time the people decided
to let their limbs and appendages be overtaken by the machine
Fear dancing violence and risk through their fingertips.
Really now,
Listen folks,
I know I am not wearing a lab coat,
a badge & sidearm,
or a dashing broadcaster’s blazer
my teeth aren’t aligned or white
& sometimes I love the wrong ones,
girls cluttered with freckles and brush-fire eyelashes.

My uniform is unloaded,
empty of emblematic shields
empty of colorless technical certainty
When you see these outfits on the street or on TV
Your gut knows that they know more than you.
that’s been the rules since you began drinking
sugar substitutes with the glowing babysitter.
Newcaster voices soothing your teeth splitting in.

And today the miracle of modern science says
get that wisdom out
rip it from burgeoning in the back of our jaw
you listen because you suspect the headaches aren’t quite wisdom
& hey, you’d do anything to make the pressure go away.

But they’ve been stuffing violence and our trust under their lab coats
beneath those shiny seals of JUSTICE
An like they’ve so graciously been taught
these uniform wearer will run from responsibility even after they have been hooked/cuaght by the truth
they will point wildly,
above their own head and shout
“I was only doing what i was told was right.”

Teenage religion lets their other hand (the one that isn’t pointing to god’s breast)
cut bruises into the souls of all they deem
unseemly though their godspectales
IN Michigan you are allowed to bully as hard as you want
as long as you say it was your religion that told you so.
Fear dancing violence and risk through their fingertips.

I am a tool for His work.
I think when they say him it’s not just god
They mean the proverbial
Man
Could it be true?
Does god live in our worst overarching cultural notions?

Last thursday our senior citizens got peppersprayed in the streets,
tonight one victim of that same seal of justice violence
lost her baby because of the toxins and the kicks to her belly.
At UC Davis this week
the officers pointed their canisters downward
sprayed fire into the eyes of citizens.

“It’s just the job.”
Their service, used as a tool for silence
Violent compliance tactics are necessary for public safety
they point above their heads, at the rules.
Obedient to authority.
Most unable to tell
we are STILL in the throws of that social experiement

So listen up folks
listen to my words and not my uniform
Being concerned about the rules
is the opposite of being concerned about your fellow human:
in 1961 65% of us are willing to follow instructions at the painful and potentially lethal cost of other
Being concerned about the rules is being concerned about yourself
and your place in society
being concerned about the rules is about self preservation
we stop living and start merely surviving
we begin stuffing our neighbors, their grandmothers, their unborn children and their hopes under the violence of the lab coat

Authority channels through our bodies
dancing risk and violence in our fingertips
and we then become terrified of our own agency.

Our limbs become echoes of the of the heierachry.
So please. Listen.
Question authority,
and laking that please
please
at least
question your obedience to it.

Your Voice, My Name, Love Letters

Your fingers find music in my ribcage
like a child meeting their very first piano
words bounce like quarters off my sternum
coinslot sighs caught in the latticework of lungs,

You say my name like rosebushes  
climbing, 

ambitious past their trellis.

Your voice is a train whistle in foreign city
Your voice is a fever comprised of equal parts mathematics, alchemy, and hearbreak
Your voice is a helicopter heartbeat 

all four parts conjoin a centrifuge of THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
Your voice is cedar burning thin and clear.


Yesterday in the shower 

when you asked
how I’d feel if you took my name
Your voice hit my bones like a tuning fork

my body became water over riverbones.

You say my name like rosebushes
Long-stemmed words exit out the throat
Ten letters running skinny-legged in your signature.
Take it.
My grandmother told me
the root word of our name means.
Home
And I want your voice.

You say my name like doorknobs and evergiving hinges
Take my name
open all of my syllables
on dotted lines and after each expectant X
Our matched signatures will be rosebushes burning.

This is not a poem!

I am participating in Nanowrimo and making my first attempt at noveling since I was 15. Post here have been less frequent leading up to this and will remain sparse during the remainder of this month. I am still writing poems, but they have less time to be sculpted and honed for such vicious bloggery as this.

Kissin'

I swear your breath feels like a birdsong.
I am looking for shortcuts to your face.
I want to be pen pals with your taste buds.

Please, put this ink in your mouth.
Inscribe your fetish tooth by tooth.
Unloose your alphabet.
Steep in mouthly feelings.

Don't hold hostage the magic in your throat.
My mouth is dancing,
crazy to chase your music.

Fever Poem

These glands are pulsing
cruel like a pendulum
pinching salty in the corners of my eyes.

Reason buckles in a flood of chemicals
I want to write.
I want to wrangle down a poem
I want to keep the words from collapsing.
I want to found an architecture
better than this fevered skin

I imagine my neurons dissolving into mud
my thoughts fossilize
poems become only shadows in the rocks
like a series of shaded pendulums
marking time between periods of devastation.

In better days
when things are lush again
someone will dig them up and trace the stories
back to their original intent.
I want to write
I want to sort out
some sort of poem.
I sort out the wanting
and mud becomes
some sort of poem.

Another missed connection (not exactly a poem but eh)

To the cell phone hero:
Black sedan
black wide-rimmed specs
delightfully nerdy.
When i dropped my phone in the middle of the street and yelped,
You held up two lanes of traffic
& saved me from a world of fretting and being incommunicado.
You are surely a very kind & generous soul.
Thanks for helping me out.

WRM

River Stone Physics

Our lungs come together like river stones.

We make smooth sounds against summer’s dying breath.
this is my season.
I shift gravity around in my body
use my tongue to press down the constants of the universe.

Gravity pools half-arbitrary
in nooks and bends of my body.
Forces begin to course and flurry
catching in eddies behind elbows and knees.
And now I feel it
the wind pulling off my kneecaps
as light as rose petals.
I am not ash I am just power.
A body of power coursing.
Autumn rivers overrun their casings.
I am a cask of physics overrun and running amok.
Afraid my limbs & fingers & appendages
might just start breaking off softly,
floating up to the ceiling fan.

I am afraid that the bends in my capillaries are becoming round and heavy like lumps of mercury
I feel their weight perforate my skin
and burrow into the mattress.
Thrilling fears push it even further
The separation of matter leaves holes burning in the sheets.
I might end a pile of gasping ashes.
The sheets pulled crooked on the bed.

I need you here
to hold down my wicked skin.
My heart is losing meaning
like a bullet burrowing through it’s backside
all the heavy parts are coiling together.
Say my name and anchor this body back to this world
smooth over the cracks you opened when you opened my mouth too far
You knocked my body off its axis,
You left my moons spinning and opening their eyes like hurricanes

Suddenly a rupture
and that deep-seated well of pelvic gravity was upended
thrown off kilter completely.

and I am floating.
with this river always within me.
When I die my descendant will rub river stones together and think of me.
My name will mean to them what is between the river and the rocks in the riverbelly.
My name will mean ripples in the air
and a cathedral of trees opening their lungs to winter.

Your mouth moved stillness into sound
Convinced me my body
is more than just a random series of kite strings:

“You are birds & church bells & early morning;
a crucible for compassionate action
I don't think you understand how big you are;
how filling the whole room you are"

A Few

List of signs that summer is dying:
Riding bikes on broken pavement
while the sky flames pink and tangerine
sky closes up shop early.
Conversations stall,
and nobody brings up the weather anymore.
Citizens use too many modifiers.
You can taste nostalgia even in those last hold outs:
 hot ham sandwiches,
 beer cold enough to rattle your teeth,
& kisses in the park, with cold water running over your feet.


Body and Bones
My body came to this spot
to free the world from sentience
to taste that back-of-the-mouth ink
that is not so easily held down
by the loud philosophy of wax paper
I am trying to talk about
shout about
all that it lost in the repeated reprints.

Holding what's lost begins my tongue buzzing
something hooked and honeyed pulls taught in the stomach
these butterflies have become long & loud
and now are cable cars tracing electric circles through my system
Sounds pop coppery from my mouth

 Reality hangs light & shifty like a kimono.
and between frantic diaphanous breaths
words start breaking down
fractures abbreviate into a periodic table for meaning.
She's so—

 Heavy

 You make my marrow aware for itself &
in a cascading moment of re-alignment
my bones begin seeing each other as neighboring countries.
Bones cry out throaty in deep rattling celebration
Bones celebrating their interdependence.
With cores condensing we are starting to shake off gravity's hand.
You make my bones feel power,
like superman could be their sidekick
or climb as high as we might ever wish

 There is gravity in your mouth and it want to crawl in and get unspun.

City Girls
The sweet smell in the air is complicated by something rusting
I smell the city making noises outside.
The skyscrapers shamelessly shout out their own names in the angled amber light
Tonight, I have traffic lights for eyes swirling red-yellow-green.
I am no longer made of mouthfuls of forest.
I am not made of trails in my backyard
and cardboard sliding down hillsides are only glimpses of my childhood.

We are city girls now
 and in my naive kind of way I sometimes want it all back
I want it to unfold like a lion yawning
like a spire of light bouncing out from mountainy teeth.
Instead, I will write you letter from the thicket of my childhood

Writing 5 Poems at once

Plaid runs hot on the roof of my mouth
Screaming and scrapping perpendicular
colors getting more and more confident in their contrast.

I love the red pen
proving there's life in writing
things unfurl and beat like a paper bird
in the wind
that is strong enough to rattle the wind chimes.

I am swallowing the expectations.
and being run by my typos
I want to pull and spit
And then I want rip a bird from my wind chime lungs.

Talk

Networking
In conversation
those eyes were dancing like two sparrows on a chain link fence
open and round and swaying like an amber thicket beneath the moon
mouths moving in pink agreement
we ended like an unfinished sentence
or a greeting card whose punchline is waiting to be opened.

I think about your throat
and hope you don't notice the forwardness on my face.
beneath the shadows colliding like breezy lace
our tongues press down the angles of the sun,
is it night already?
I am thinking and you make me think about
how telephone poles must keep each other from being lonely
when they live in the desert.
So many lines pressing up and marking the belly of sky
like swooping bars of music

Ghost music whispered though the blades of a ceiling fan.
I can hear your voice from all the way across the country
summer heat boils into syllables and anxious talking over talking.
You're my favorite one to interrupt.

IT'S BEEN SO DASTARDLY LONG AND I AM SORRY!!!

(but more poems forthcoming!!!)

7/27 (listening to a friend work on a story)
Silvery fricatives bouncing out in a tonguish frenzy
sharp notes telling stories
that carve out spaces in the dark.
It’s not quite music
but there are those who sway
& close their eyes as if it were.
Your body in this story
is a crow’s beak cracking
& your hands are a lucky blanket with a few holes worn into it.


6/28 restaurant poem
Butcher paper flakes and flails
bunching like hide beneath the palms.

This love note is for high high kite flying
—for anchoring lightning to your heart keys
—for making science of electrical storms.
This love note is meant to be turned upsidedown
in the answer key of your calculus textbook.



6/29
Your kiss pulls the fire alarm in my lungs,
whistles & bells become a beehive between the ears
& every sensible adult fiber of my being is running about,
Wild with the notion of fire.

8/12
The moon sees right through me tonight.
Quiet and timeless in her lavender stockings
she thumbs around that flat pastel landscape,
and makes the adjectives run rampant over a tumble of timorous thoughts.

The evening is just staring to grow out its beard,
Jellyfish torn up & pressed against distant mountain shapes.
I am simple & slightly sore in this story on the island at twilight
& in this story all of the light bulbs flash then die out
at every gasp of emptied lusty breath
our throats pull what they can from the smoke-filled air.
When we come together I begin breathing like a light house.

Sinews push action electric through the skin
Our moon is burning brighter now,
swinging like a single breast waiting to be bookended.
I’ve always thought that the sky should have at least two moons
like the sky is actually just some big cloth wrapped around a woman’s body,
at most a single breast slips out once
maybe twice a month.

We would swing that other moon into action
Smashing out new gravity.
Catastrophic tidal changes would ensue,
Our bodies becoming flooded coastal cities.
Thick red algae washes up on street corners.
Between crashes of water & light
I watch your skyscraper eyes getting their feet wet.
And when we open out mouths to speak
Only the low grinding of whale song comes out.

(I think this one is really yummy but it needs some working over before it is book ready!)

It's been a while

7/16
Neglectful birds become red clumps of feather on the highway,
bodies bribed into forgetting danger.
The dive begins
At the end of the day you're lucky to end up an aching heap of joints and mumbles.
We're like two lost marbles symbolizing the mind gone mad.
Are we still bookends if there are no pages to be bookended?
I need to have us bleed stories in between
& have a little breath making spaces in the salty air.
My footprints are yearning for meaning
heels coming awake all pins and needles.

Sometimes being with you is like that
pangs tingle like the fourth of July hot in my chest
chambers pumping blood like flaming arrows
the veins come untangled and
(almost) too fast
my heart comes awake to you.

Just outside summer is cracking up the sidewalks.
Loud green fingers
tickles though the rubble.
Beneath the stoic patches of asphalt
hoping energetically
"We'll get there!"
Now the story is not about eventuallies
This is about in the in between pushing up
green every day
making known the summer on your tongue.
Because being with you
my sweet & hungry summerling,
being with you is canaries waking up in my rib cage.

7/19
Up on the Hill they are pulling down the posters
using backward hammars.
The telephone poles have grown thick,
six inches before peeling down to tar,
strips of color
paled pastel pile up like half-hearted confetti.
Leftover shows crowd the sidewalk
higher than Seattle snow ever deigns to fall.

7/19
Twisted season
bent away from the sun
you can see the heat in the air.
Summer weighed down cloudy
& hot like a runners breath.

7/19
I saw him
sharp hat and tan suspenders
and he pointed me into a giggling coincidence.
"I wish I could take a picture."

Words picked up in transit:

"Hold on!"
stop(s) the requested yellow lines
coins sleep, (only dancing) off-peak,
alcoholic safety problems manually break cover.
(&) push, push, push,
yellow & red line activities may be recorded.

(With) property littering respect,
red pulls down.

Do the right thing (in all caps):
Extinguish her inside(s)
(with yawning corded) release.

in the Year of Zoll

Sometimes I just can't believe that I live in the 21st century.
It's not that I can't wrap my head around scientific adavances
like robovacuums
and bacon flavored vodka,
it's more so the fact that that I can't even get comfortable
with writing out the numerals 2011
(as well as all the nostalgia clustered around that discomfort).
Every time I write it out complete
I don't see a number at all.
In point of fact, all I can see
(until I put other numbers around it)
is the word
Zoll.

Now this may be entirely due to poor penmanship on my part,
but I find I quite like living in the year of Zoll.
Indeed, I find I greatly prefer it
to living even in the notorious 21st century.
All necessary respects being given to the visions of Jules Verne,
the gadgets here buzz ostentatious,
too busily widening the having gaps.
Smartphones have become a nearly clear-cut socieo-economic identifier.
Incomes expend and the Apps pile up like magazines
on the cement in your uncle's garage.

Zoll is much miles less mundane.
In the year of Zoll
people began punctuating their buttonholes with pinwheels
and folding manifestos into fortune cookies.
Zoll opened with daisy-mouthed whimsy.
23 turtles sunbathing.
Hashbrowns that couldn't help but be slipped from your best friend's plate.

Zoll was the year that progress and gentrification finally saw through each other's skins,
began seeing other people,
only making contact prophylactically, and under the safety of goose-down covers.
Venn diagrams became very popular,
so much so that it seemed you could draw them about anything
and anything else.
Zoll became all about intersections and collisions.
Nobody scorned garish outbursts
or crying out while masturbating.
It was in the year of Zoll that they started cracking down on empty intercourse,
volunteers posted conversation prompts in elevators
and bathroom graffiti was encouraged
by mandating each stall have at least one wall lined blue like notebook paper.
Etiquette instructors secretly bit their nails, and became more obsolete.
On new years night the mountains called out cloudy-voiced to the Moon
and She broke open like a dusky pinata
showering our archived bones in foldable light and clockwork mnemonic devices.

Blonds (with and introduction to redheads)

Summer is the season for redheads.
July breathes freckles into the sky.
That is july burning bright red on the horizon gettting greener
I hope this blog explodes.
Explodes like summer on the skin of a ginger,
I am in love with those spots
and I am loving you every moment you accumulate more geography.
I like the distinctions
summer invites into your skin.

Conner/Chase
I like your east coast sweater
all marroon with the collar popped out.
I like you clean cut
and smoking a cigarette like a teenager.
I want to smoke with you.
Or maybe just stand next to your smoking mouth.
I like changing my mind
and smoking that lavender cigarette at 4 am.
I like breathing sage on your waterbed.

Jason
With skin so pale I could sometimes see your veins in your face
and around your round and translucent eyes.
Your were nowhere near ginger.
No need for the sun or summer in your skin.
Eyes softer than a dusky throated sky.
Pale and paling and railing against becoming more invisible all the time.
Outlandish leather posters and sex at your parent's house.
Once in that house and once on the hood of my car.

Ian
The blondness you give me is brittle
the way lightning touches the sand into glass.
I've begun to wonder if you have ANY scars at all.
Your hair is brushing ashy against the sky.
Wide open like the holes in your shoes
our eyes get bigger at every meeting
and NOTHING can escape our unquenchable bouts of whimsy.

Katlyn
I held you in that cold mouth of ocean
the sounds bouncing off our bodies
as I promised that thin stip of a body a little better warmth.
Full blonde breasts in the surf
behind that bikini
which I thought about so easily removing.

Blondes then,
for a while
were off the menu.

Eric
Then
the first one both blonde and ginger
Dreaming of being a redhead.
That dream swooped down,
only crawling up as you stooped all through winter.
Full of stoic amber shine.
You are like an insect in an amber glass eye.
Golden like summer would be if it lasted all year long.
We didn't last that long.
Enough for a season and then some.
It's always good to have some.
Long blonde strands always longer than mine
I remember that day I realized with great dismay,
that I would have to stop looking for gold strands between my bedclothes.

Found another Strand of a different type.
But he is not a blonde or a ginger.
He is mostly dark
and thoughful olive skin all over.
Big features hold to many feelings
all taut in a wraping,
bound up intentions are the best looking when tied down in his words.

Kyle
was my first blond.
Whose Name I won't forget.
I make up trauma about his name.
Unsure of the actual transgression
I know his group of malicious friends used it against me.
Blond and blue in the face.
I though sweet sexless thoughts about him in my thirteen year-old mind.
wanted to touch his nealy invisible hairs just to see if they were real
and not just wisps in my imagination.
Eyes like water.
I think I was afraid that they would rush away at any moment.
I think that might be why I chase them
the blue eyed blond ones.
Everything about them is just so damned ephemeral
at any moment they might just rush away,
temperamental like a tide.

Breakfast

Butter sits decadent next to chocolate on the counter.
Breakfast pits rich,
add coffee
and you've got sweet gravity
churning a singularity in your belly.
Delicious implodes quietly into afternoon.

Rib Spreader memories

Sweet like tide pool childhood.
I am a pilcrow on the back of your neck.
I am sweet potato fries wrapped in brown wax paper
and cradled by a small wicker basket.

In the morning when we were the first to wake
we took up opposite corners of the room
let sunshine be the only language between us.
Your words are still missing places in my torso.
These gaps in my ribcage are swoops and sways in the shap of your name,
like running your fingers over a picket fence.
I am not thumping about you anymore
I am not even making that kind of music.
anyway
what does it matter if I were.

Way back in September
we were just naked mouths jumping reckless into the ocean
And I miss being salty with you
I'd like to reset our bones
and keep something soft between us.
I met you too fast perhaps.
It was right and right and right
and right is not a direction
give me peace and pieces
and I will sort out the remains
make a pile
and graffiti our past lives to the sky,
you are not a willow tree in a hurricare,
that is only be breasts when we fuck
and I am not ready for this to end
is it over?
Because if it is over you can never turn the lights back on.
The lights in a flattened building can never be re-lit.
Are you going fast enough to knit back a contraption
to fuse our being back into closeness and be?

I am too many moon shadows these days
Our names forgetting each other
as fast as our ribs fell together all those months ago
I still need a few more moons
to smooth over the gaps in my torso.

Morning Poem

Woke up dry and fractured.
All moisture seeped out
Body and breasts and belly
are a bay or a river bed dried up.
Crackling with dead fish
and clams that are too afraid to open their mouths.
Patience in the mouth of a barnacle.
Body emptied of tensile strength.
A flattened out hierarchy of discomfort
awkward like a pachyderm in a party dress.

A poem about your name (roughly edited freewrite)

Dream in tattooed tongues,
Velocipeded spoken poetry,
ringing bells,
a tingle crawling upened down the throat.
Red lines collecting along your bottom.
Stop.
This is not a telegram.
Maybe a singing telegrtam.
Bang.
Interrobang.
I'll need to be punctuated.
My sentences running rampant
drying out of ampersands .
No periods in sight.
A blemish at the end of thought.
Spirals attaching through the throat.
Is it over?
I can't remember all the letters you wrote to me.
Does it matter
that I'm still in love with someone eles?
Does it matter?
What is (the) matter?
and how does it?

I had a hurricane meet me
and become a piece inside my body.
Butane beneath the skin.
"Forget me beautiful child."
This week is just that kind of love letter I suppose.
Good thing I still have that plane ticket.
I've never been to New York.
Or Brazil.
Dry mouth and dried out punctuation shouldn't stop you.
You can pick up some pauses
and something wet along the way.
Just start making tracks.
Start with your name.
a poem about your name.

notebook build-up

Seattlites in May
This Summer's been holding out for so long
we forget our sweaters on public bathrooms hooks.
When the first sunbreak hints it might stick
we plunge our hoodies to the very bottom of the laundry basket
feel a strange inkling of violence between our hands and umbrella shafts

I saw you leave you your jacket at a bus stop
missed it while you were pinching the light from your eyes
your sweet, tilted-up, triangle cheeks
gathering up the the novelty of a sunburn.

We wrote that love letter together
when we took off our outer clothes
eager to expose the places we'd paved over
all winter long.

With purple-throated tulips
bending, bumping,
large 'lips calling us out by name,
Sunlight rolls in thick with nostalgia rebounding bright,
duck feathers swick out like arrows,
seduction swept blue & open above,
Springtime's got all of the wiles.
No matter how late she comes
our hopes always circle back into her warm submission.

Seattle seasons come and go so softly
the roles are often reversed
our cold longing bodies hooking hot on the heels of spring.
Spring is the lover we'll always have hope for
whose beauty smothers out our better judgment.
You left your sweater in the bathroom at cafe press
hooked inside the 3rd stall,
you both seemed the better for leaving each other.

In Case of Rapture (written 5/21)
To ready yourself for the rapture
pick some lilac for your pigtails.
Miss two consecutive buses.
Study the worn down pavement in front of your stop.
Wait for the puddled clothes to become like cracks on the sidewalk,
Emptied of their wasted nakedness.
Some bodies are never fully used.
Always remember
your life weighs nothing if you're not of use.

Express grotesque concerns:
"What about the children
right that moment being born?"
with that baby
half born & half being born
if the mother keeps her gravity
what happens to her body?
Does her pelvis split as the child is lifted?
or is the infant severed?
Each permutation plays out at the same ratio
half rapture and half rupture.

(Blackbird singing
in the dead of night,
you were only waiting
for this moment.)

Ready yourself for broken wings and ripped up skin.
line your pockets & shoesoles with feathers.
Acknowledge that poets
should always hold on to something broken.
Write through the entire ordeal
with whatever materials available.
If you happen to find yourself floating
hold fast to something shattered and indistinct,
if you must, sink your teeth into the furniture.
When your teeth fail you
recite HOWL until the words bring you down.
Don't let the dirt leave you!
It is your primordial home,
Mother of the bottoms of your feet.
Dirt birthed your palms
and you won't gather any callouses in the sky.
Stay here.
Stay dirty.
Stay human.

Allow gravity to collect
in the places your soul has been cracking,
get heavy with the deep muddied filth.
You are more than a weightless rain cloud.
You are a river
and a river isn't a river when it's ripped from its belly
If all else fails
please remember this:
keep at least 1 finger firmly stuck
in the silty muck of being.

Smallish Manifesto
When there's so many pages to fill
they feel thin like sunlight in the wind.
Open spaces invite puncture
paper screens in a karate film.

Ragged creeps up
cornering the weaker adjectives.
Is that a symbol for how it all breaks down?

You should never use a word you don't mean,
if the word you mean is unavailable
fuse together a new name
or use a clearly denoted placeholder.
"Something like soul mates?"
for example.

May 19th List
1. Plastic straws lazing like fish bones
2. Year 7 tears
3. Thumbsucker Yellow
4. Mangled daisies
5. 1,000 splinters waiting to happen
6. Shadow-striped bicycle spokes
7. The hazards of spinning
8. Creating situations for stretch
9. One leg craned out of the merry-go-round
10. Elbows flaking
11. Ball bearing music
12. Big bubblegum haze
13. "Let's play!"
14. Only one bolt left
15. "Now that's the squiggy stuff!"

Not a poem (but it's about poetry!)

I know I usually only write poems on this blog (and in my own purist kind of way I have been priding myself on that), but I need to disclose the reason I have been not-so-every-dayish and more once-every-other-day-or-twoish about posting.
In addition to ritually writing 750 words every morning (usually directly after I wake up) I have begun reviewing and editing pieces to compile as a manuscript. I have a good lot of material to sift through and plenty of edits to make so there is an drool-worthy but staggering mission ahead of me.

The downside to this is that I am finding myself less available (timewise) to hone my words into poetry. This does not mean I won't be writing poems to share on this blog. Just that the frequency will be less. (hopefully at least 3 times per week!) I will not be pressuring myself to write/post a poem every day (at least until my book is done).
Writing poems is so much more reflexive at this point (which was a major goal of this project). Having seen out the whole year (though broken laptops, relationships, and internet-less road trips!) I am very satisfied and proud of my performance!
Yay!
See you on a tri-weekly basis!

Sway

Sea legs. I want to write about sea legs
about the whole room rocking,
the walls I could swear were swaying,
But something else came up
surroundings swishing and floating
the night ended shuddering on the crisp red bed sheets.

Brackish Music

Birds
when emptied out or flattened
(if they are lucky enough to realize it)
release their souls
into cable car throats.

This city is lining its wiry mouth with feathers
as the cables laugh a sharp triangular laughter.
With fibers interlocking
her quicksilver voice uncurls.

Brackish music peaks
that's when the torsion might spark
then fizzle out
like a ghost in a light bulb.

What it's about (free-est write ever!)

What is it about?
It is about satellites and antennae,
or the first thing you see when you look up.

Did you know your molecules are being reduced right now?
Frequencies at the cell-level are conspiring to keep the machine together.
For the kids I guess.
To get her.

I wonder if that means anything at all.
Suddenly there is function in the world
I've got to do SOMETHING about that.
like finding music on the roadside.
DO something drastic
take your throat out of our neck,
let them stroke each other,
then separate again.
I am kind of almost there right?
barely having what I have.

Why do the words feel like grains of sand,
(don't tighten your grip,
don't even think about reaching for the toast or coffee)
do you get it?
do you get it at all?
I am caring about it so much less this morning.
the worries were so comfortable before the became aware of themselves.

I infinitely prefer the pen

Just give me a note-pad dammit
that way I can actually feel the pages filling up.
Run my hands over the backsides of the pages,
feel the words inverted and savor their imprints.

Snippets

It was so cold last night
I don't think I could make it
if that chill closes in tonight.

It looks nice now,
but the horn says that there is going to be storm.
The weather here changes at he drop of a hat.
Rain shadows are really quite impressionable.

it's okay to type the words over
and over
the work is never done and that is how it is supposed to be,
just like you have to live every moment up unti lthe one you die.
good god I am hungry.
Wish I could eat my hands and feat and blanket.
If I make enough words I'll be able to eat them too.
Maybe.
Better save the blanket,
there might be a storm tonight.

landsick

psychosomatic rocking
slung low
this hunk of dirt has a heartbeat that unsettles the feet
pavement is pulsing
under a gelatinous mouldy-fruit-skull.
There's a fuse under all that sway
and it only takes a moment
for everything to reach its pit.

I fly off the handle rocking
knocking into the backdrop
mouth leaking
spittle and words indistinguishable.

two 350wrd pieces.

Horror
Just thought you should know:
there's red running down your chin
and reaching in a curved stream from your ear.
Despite your white-toothed smile
we are now
only waiting for your lips to turn.
Olive branches are actually quite brittle
prone to growing sharp-edged betrayal,
leafy undersides plotting against the fruit.

Ambitions burgeon into a silencing stance
and my body
(as well as my body of work)
can't give you any more ears,
your mouth having eaten too many voices
"it's about what's good, you see.
For everybody.
We shouldn't being advertising that it's okay,
to be
like 'that'."

Well.
People are like that
and in your righteous bones
I can see a creature coming alive,
the infection gathering to a head
My listening gets stuck
on the way you use
"everybody"
you see unless you mean to say what's good for everybody
is food, and home, and drink, and love, and freedom to be-
then we're not talking anymore,
because I am battling back against that crawling thing,
whose eyes are fueled by panic
its engine begins toothy:
bifurcating us and them

Your monster makes violence against photographs and scantily clad canvases,
and your red rhetoric will only be read as a prophecy
for the hammering death of uninhibited expression,
cracking voices shake and shatter down to plexiglass
and bolted down foundation.
Violence empties out the access
and after the images fall back to their base elements
arts is left one last valiant act:
expose the splatter patterns,
unapologetically open its cracked mouthparts,
bring sharp and close into focus
what's been done to the mechanism.

Broken voices should never be wingless for too long.
Red rhetoric is a halo for the inhumane.
So please before you hoist up your hammers
let us clean our mouths of any possible massacre.


Instability
I.
Before taking the stage there are those particularly terrifying moments of physical vibrations, when all your neuroses seems to resonate at once, moving loud through your bones as if you were a tuning fork. The contents of your mouth lose their anchors. Your teeth and tongue become soup behind your lips.
The stage is waiting for you legs unwobbling approach. With it's lonely microphone dare your stomach widens it's nauseous eyes. Certainty fluctuates dangerously like a chain-smoking barometer. The modifiers getting ragged around the edges as the incongruities lumber in the corners growing closer.
Physics is picking on you, or maybe your (un)luck is bending the rules. But your chair is not familiar anymore. Laughing legs criss-crossed against your support. These are the moments of insanity. The legion of over-stretched moments in which the stage takes you, rockets every kind of neon neuroses through your veins until your name comes up. The Stage opens it's mouth all black and bright.
And you take it.

II.
That's when your train comes in, when the rails stop pulling your wheels apart. The timeless spinning stops, and you catch all of earth's gravity between your fingers. Your word-plucking fingers, making poetry shapes in the air and slashing hieroglyphs into the microphone. You are a singularity choosing its corporeal form as a typewriter. You are a sparrow building it's nest in a boiler, a flower getting hot with heartburn, a hard-drive with a headache.
The equation of living gets broken by your teeth, the marrow hangs in the air, now hot with the infinitely possible permutations. Numbers running algorhythmic through your fingertips as the numbness palindromes itself out.

III.
Neither is safe or stable or committed to getting back into balance. Poetry isn't about that. Poetry is not a checkbook. Poetry is instability.

prose poem (unedited cause I am lazy) NOW EDITED!

My summer is opening again and it’s got wild animals for teeth. Last time I went out away I let some of the words hang back on trailing postcards, the way a kite makes its tail from the pinching repetition bows. The intervals were measured by how often I could afford and procure the proper postage. The redwoods crept closer as the asphalt narrowed its tongue. And I watched yellow over take the landscape from Coos Bay to Arcata. The Bread truck hummed and Allen took so much care to write all the miles down with a carpenters pencil. The dashboard overflowed with numbers and wetted our hands in the paling green pickle juice. Jumped naked into a cold ocean. Came out with mouthfuls of kelp and salt. We stopped for sandwiches and peed in a field. The fennel cracked and breathed a licorice dust in the hot yellow afternoon. Even the shadows collected some gold flecks that were more than just dust, I'm sure. I saw the gray smile of sea lions too many times to count, they were like eyelashes in a blinking bruisy bay. The fog didn't even matter. We flip-flopped our way across on honeyed vagabond smiles. It didn't matter that it wasn't 1972. We stopped for every hitchhiker, even let some of them make love in the back as we fried eggs with sand between our toes. Low slung propane between he the dunes we made a mess of the pancake batter We gave whiskey to street performers because we did not have any quarters left, danced to the busking music as sunny skies began shutting their doors. We spent $10 a day until our pockets dried up. On the first hooked leg of the trip the forest nearly ate us. That was the night I decided not to do any of the driving. I resolved then to hang my body out the sliding wooden door, to sit in the chair that might pitch me into an asphalt kiss. I danced to Credence in a swirling tan contraption of a dress as our wheels howled down the California coast. The fog nearly coaxed us over the cliffs. Hwy 1 breathed purple down our necks and slipped us into danger with switchbacking slings and swallows. We've got the dents to prove it and I hope there is still some of that hillside worming dirty in the cracks of the van. Two mandolins made conversation and in between all of that we picked up Thea. She drew a pirate on the naked pine siding and gave her voice to the road. "I've been doing this since I was fifteen" she said boldly to our dumbstruck faces. She said most everything boldly. She told the best jokes, dirty and otherwise, fetched us food still-warm from the prizingest of dumpsters. Girl knew all of the tricks. Lived large and made grand (pause) exceptional laugher. I received a voicemail from her the other day. Said she's be in the headed west again soon. I hope she calls me back. Maybe she'll want to sleep in my yard, even though the city sky seems to make her sick. You could tell from just one conversation that she was made of all love and endearments. Lit her cigarettes like they were candles for the hopeless. She gave. defended the downtrodden when the tourists bent in to snatch a moment of their motions. You should always ask before the flash. My name is knocking around in her mandolin case. I hope Thea calls me back. And that somebody records her music, in case to road ever decides it’s done with her. My mind keeps wrapping back to those licorice fields, where we didn't know who owned what part of the land, listened to how overgrown the "no trespassing" signs had become. We sang a few songs and watched the highway pass above us. I hope someday the road calls me back.
My mind is running out. My mind is running out on legs growing thin as ball-point pens. That can’t be all of it, it just can't. We saw elk, like icebergs, in the tall grasses. Only visible from the eyes up. Drank all through the night with our campsite neighbors, hoping their 9-year-old daughter couldn't hear the dirty word falling sloppy from our mouths. That morning, over a mountain of bacon and all the leftover vegies we'd carried 600 miles, we spilled coffee on each other's toes. At one point there was a ping-pong table. I traded a new book for an old one. And stopped to cherish the dog-earing pages. I hope the road calls me back.
I still haven't looked at the photographs. I took so many photographs and I still haven't looked. I left them on a disc in a drawer. A shiny silver donut shut in my bedside table. In the second drawer, where I put the things, I really, don't care that much about. Old birthday cards and giftbags I intend to re-gift. Giftwrap is far too expensive. I ate a hamburger for the first time in two years and slept all the way back to the ocean. The concrete arms tied us down for a full forty-five minutes. We squirmed under its arching freeway tentacles. Sometimes the highways collided so violently that I was convinced we were gridlocked in the sway of two gargantuan cephalopods making love. Or making something convoluted at least. All the way down we lived on tuna fish sandwiches. The road called out our names with repeating yellow tongues and I hope that the road calls me back one day. Her cracked asphalt voice is one I have begun to silence with empty pocketed excuses and a sad sack of somedays. And I miss her. In conjunction the whirring roundness of rubber and his old engine reluctantly turning over I miss her voice the most.

Some subjects (a summary of the untranscribed)

lately all the words
(nearly self-forming at this juncture)
have been falling between the binding cracks
notebooks harbor huddling places
for lines washed into blues shivery-thin
and bent down, wine soaked corners.

I wrote about the letters running together
"Sincerely,"s bumping into "Love,"
the coincidence lets us round ourselves up.
We both ate too much that day.
My mouth is full enough to avoid the conversation all together
Instead I invite the furnace to be our mouths
or at least to gesture the way our mouths might.
It's good to stay warm.

One day
You'll open to the momentary-ness of the words
(instead of loading them up with all that momentum)
start approaching your typewriter
like a finger trap
its keys teething down
pinching anachronisms into careless digits
sentimentalism enters most easily through the fingers.

Regrets can only be swung one way at a time.
you see
regret is an odd number
maybe even prime.
with strange angles that gyrate
defying measurement
or any intent to condense.
Even when you consider all the factors
the numbers open wide
and laugh like unbalanced odds
One side of the metronome is alway hungry.
Still
it's worth deliberating him down to one-sided echoes.

The air is electric with revolution
in both political and carousel forms.

The Earthworms

The earthworms yawn long, magenta & mauve
over Seattle's glossy sidewalk mouths
wet concrete tongues
stubbled with pebbles of milky and ambitious size.

Singing above the street lamps
power cables crackle open the throat of midnight,
in movements sharper than a hum,
lines vibrating edge over edge.
The mercury drops through April
sharp and heavy with intent.
Cold air forces spring into a fever pitch
of shivering restrained colors.

But the earthworms,
you must pay (you pen's) attention to the earthworms,
slow like a meditation master
they make breathing a full-bodied endeavor.
Dreamlike
the sidewalks are splitting
under the force of one more season
that's where the earthworms come up
and make the most of the her jagged and unconscious rupture.

Secret Ambition

At nine(teen)
my ambition had rose petals stuffed in her mouth
and lace wrapped around her ankles
we muffled her with romance
and hid her body in a trunk.

And now it's all crashing down
with the smell if decomposing romance.
there's no money there
in the murder or the hiding.
We've got extra smiles under the counter
who sell themselves much better.
Smirks provide the best business
& I've start keeping nickels between my teeth
the heavy metal takes up my breath
pushing poetry back into the trunk,
I mean,
the deepest part of the throat

I'm sending a tea-cup hug to my tempest tossed throat pocket.

But the nickels are falling round from my mouth
and I used my last paycheck to roll the tax man
one long cigarette

And the poems are lining her body
dusting the trunks innards with romantic decay
chocking down poems and rose petals
I have to keep the coins inside
no matter how many debt sores open the gums

This ambition is made of somersaults
and cinnamon echoes
her feathers are fluxing and cruxing,
but we stuck her hands in the dishwater,
made her dance in the broom closet
stuffed her dreams into a hairnet.

She gets quieter as the rent gets taller
never chooses secrecy
with hands too fast to be anything else.
but the empty pockets
stifle the frenzied speed
and anchor stillness
beneath the fingernails.

This boldness is getting chomped
between the typewriter teeth
the hammers bruise the paper in alphabet shapes
and the whole damn world is imposing again
widening the emptiness of pleats and pockets and purses.
All those dreams steep like tea
or a field lying fallow
as the toxic machine pinches the pennies in.
My feet move me forward
round coppery bruises and all.

Seattle Somtimes

too long
the inattention swicks back and forth
like lazy windshield wipers
their slanted eyes and cagey minds set
to move as slow as possible.

But that's what it is to move in Seattle,
You become intimate with the needs of each rainy rhythm.
The sky dribbles
because the seal on that gray horizon never quite snaps shut
like a half-screwed jar quietly wetting your bag
and all of it's contents.

Observe in horror the wrinkled words and blue lines run amok
mourn their passing
and then slowly (over the course of several sunshined afternoons)
drip back into complacency.

this turned into 2 different pieced up on edit

Start from scratch
pull the doodles
and their marginal dancing
into alphabetish glyphs,
make a mouth for every journey,




Every day I drive along one side
of the two roads
whose triangle mouths parenthesize Jet City's murkiest river.
The margins stretch through each compass point
in name and distance.

That was where I saw
(what was left of)
them.

I've wanted to write about those dead geese all week
their bodies sit still and oval
necks hanging lack
across the yawning diamond lanes
but the cars got in the way,
headlights too loud
for 4AM birds rounded down.

buildup

written 3.22.11 while waiting for a friend
There are moments of genius
& then there are others.
Mustard yellow times without distinction,
murky like watery tongues
creeping up the wallpaper.

You can't coax it
out of eating the entire bag of cotton balls.
The endeavor softly upsets:
"Consuming what's soft won't make you nay softer."

What's required is a reversal of the voice box.
The chords getting seasick in their nervously rocking throat,
but this challenge isn't about lapsing backward into genius.
The (r)evolution requires non-euclidean progression.
Quantam shivers must crowd the dance floor
with exponential happening
Their coupled bodies falling through the phases
Tongues frothing up mustard yellow.

The ending pulls it in
collapsing all the syllables down.


SLAM
In this space the train speeds past simile,
hot engine pushing on
straight into rocking metaphors
this night
IS
a tattoo in the mouth of the gods,
a rumor corrupting the dingy corners of the pantheon
gossip passed between the mouths of Athena & Hephaestus
just before the world tears out your liver.

If we blink the museums might catch us,
and kill the throat-ness from out words
oh yes my friends we must move quickly
keep warm our stages and vocal chords
before our words are made like the older legends
into cold and cracking stones.

Small snippet
I am working on so many poems
they are molding into dead hounds by the roadside.

I pinch my pen like it's the last drag
of a blue cigarette
rolled by the hands of a dying lover who tells you
"I'm quitting tomorrow".

Jars

It comes back in angles you can't quite trust.
Fire truck; reprehensible; catastrophe;
The words are just words right?
and not really our relationship.
Or what you really meant when you read those poems
in that way
(far too tight).
We are not comprised of empty ricochets
or words
whispered across a wide-based library staircase.
I didn't mean to call you out
as echo
when your body left the room

but when your body left the room
My mouth chased the ricochets into the newly empty places
I breathed ghosts into your footprints
and gave in to the limbo encroaching on the other side of the bed.

Our communications are more than just a forgotten turn
signal
stretched out in a lulling down turned position
click
click.
No. We're not like that at all.

We are buzzing erratic
a clock whose schizoid cuckoo
has both claustrophobia
and performance anxiety,
fidgety hands that think too much
and a yellowing face that melts much faster than any mustache could possibly imagine.

But now that your body has left the room
I am catching the ricochet in jars.
Without your blonde body to balance it out
the echoes begin building into a downhill prediction
and I should screw them down before they leave me too.
Jars are good for keeping things in.

When keeping hope to a minimum you must
make sure you've twisted their mouths watertight
like the words you read too close together
(or maybe meant to be run all together
like some of your favorite German words)
echoes need a tensioned seal.
If you put a poem in a jar it stays fresh
and wet with unwhispered ricochets.
When untwisted
the poem empties out
unencumbered
& deaf to the multitude of yesterdays it's been
since your body left the room.

300 word prose poem.

It's funny how the small things can catch you. An itch scratching itself just beneath the skin. Exposed by the curiosity of a lover's glance. And his kind hands pulling your fidgeting habits from their softly frantic dancing interplay.

I'm not doing it on purpose. Or blaming the imbalance of my body.
The fingers just get tired of finding themselves (and begin picking the rough skin away in bits). Each finger is a riddle with reddening jigsaw edges. Ten extended back stories, with their brittleness unhinged. The cracks have got salt in their teeth. Fingertips rip easy as the callouses are whittled down and down. When you open the rind the citrus pores intensify their misty glares. Ouch. Didn't mean to pull it that far. Several seconds of subsequent staunching and the prints begin to close up their red little mouths. So small. So loud.

All it takes is a faucet to get words going again. Fingernails carried away in a dizzy sharpened tension. And there are commas falling from my hands. Gotta keep this list alive, pull out the skin and let it breathe. The callouses make too much of sentences. They dry out the endings, and must be pulled back to a red-line climax. Correction. Some things you just have to cut out. To really get the feel of it I mean. Push the words back from hardening. Sharp red marks keep the fingers soft.

Enough of that now. It's really a nasty habit. Nobody likes a fidgety picker. But the fingers keep finding themselves. How can you keep touch from touching? Let it be. The cracks will know what to do without you. But you have to let them get over you. All over you. Wait out what's brittle. And let the context of your skin stiffen.


Prompt provided by typetrigger. Fresh prompts provided every6 hours.

this poem got left in an open window

It's been a year
and I've still got words by the napkinfull.
Too many notebooks get lost in the move.
sunk between the cardboard cleavage
the crooked pages aren't giving it away anymore
soft blue lines pine sideways after lazy bookspines
These poems need excavation teams
and at least two restoration experts
to bridge the gaps between jagged serifs and flooding narratives
where the steering wheel intruded
and the words began to swerve.

I know

I haven't posted in a few days. I am working a lot but also writing a lot (have about 6-7 poems to type up/edit and post) so yeah finding time for that has been a bit tough.
Please bear with me!
<3

blurts

The mouth is bulging with round words and crowding teeth
the blinking headaches wash it out
and my fingers aren't listening again.



I can barely believe it's spring again
only the music makes it real
notes pulling windows down,
it isn't raining at all.

back date #1 for me

Spring Dialog
The daffodils are gathering in down turned yellow gossip
crowding the forcibly slim
sidewalk trees.
Subliminal roots swallow the years
tickling up
jagged concrete smiles.


More Than Butterflies
Small flutters
start in the mouth of your aorta
and before you know it
you've got his smiles coursing through your veins.

Poets as lovers

There is a precipice of blinking images
in a poem not yet arrived.
The pages hiccup
and release a deep brown smell
that is sometimes coffee and sometimes beer.
The body of text getting less and less incorrect
(which is not the same as getting more correct).

The poets reach out their greasy silver antennae
(nails & pens & graphite fingertips)
hoping to slice through their metaphoric interference.

work

2 windows open
You continue
like an unended parenthesis
an implied curve smiles like a fish beneath the reflection.
Things continue being
regardless of how strongly
the earth disagrees with your feet.


Mileage
The engine churns & rattles
like a crow's angry breath,
leaves the lopsided journey in a lurch.