the Dignity of Work (4/17)

Joints sparked nostalgic
by tragedies personal & professional,
My bones keep cracking
with the weight of the words
"the dignity of work".

Dignity,
as I experience it,
is a rectangular number,
in a rectangular box,
on a rectangular piece of paper
waiting in the rectangular mouth of an envelope.


When I hear those words about
work and dignity
I feel my joints like wet gunpowder
My bones detached with edges perforated.

Under this sort of dignity
life becomes a series of
If; then
statements.

Ouch

Today I practiced my best learned habit.
Overzealous concerns
about money and my body
poured together in a dizzying display
of conflict and gore.
My eyelids droop
at the behest of these two uncomfortable neighbors.

Your Body is Not a Temple

I once had a lover tell me
"Your body is a temple."
He was wrong.
My legs are not pillars
my spine is not a stack of altars
or a series of benches waiting for piled up salvation.
My teeth are not stained glass windows
My body is not storage for the glorified relics of your partron saints
My body's caverns will not tolerate
the crowding of innocent voices.
I am not a house for continual coming and going.

He was wrong.
My body is not a temple.
My body is a religion.
My body is up for interpretation.
My body demands rituals
physical and otherwise.

My body demands that
patellas know the grooves of my name.
My body circulates parables
instead of blood.
Clotted meaning swings my heart harder than church bells.
My body is a collection of unstable elements.
My body is not a temple.

Bathing After a Ride

I am pearling
silt gritty in in the mouth of a mollusk
A tide repeats
washing knee to hip socket
muscles and sinews
hot in the washing water.

Motion

Today I am basking in the idea of sunlight.
Like a theoretical cat
I am learning how to be many places at once
learning to harbor dissonace in the softer parts of my being.
I am jointed together flexibilities untold.

Within the human body there are four kinds of motion possible
bend;
twist;
the same concept polarized by compress and release;
the fourth motion doesn't even have a name
it requires floating bones
kneecaps,
rounded elbow petals,
and pebbles attached to the wrist.

Getting a late start on Napowrimo

4/2
I am a constant interruption,
Haltingly my body ride on the hoof beats of apology

If it's not right I'll let you talk over me
because someone once told me
about how oppressive my voice can be
and ever since
my lips flinching has become an intrusion.

I worry about what is expected
not like the old echo
you see
you say

Now I just don't know
when my moment is coming
like to only person at the bus stop
without earbuds & an iphone
I don't know when it is coming.

My body in an interruption
like a ship creaking across an alien sea,
my rib cage groans
& I let the conversation wash
salty & foreign
through the waxy cracks on either side of my skull.

Poised and indistinct,
the rules of conversation
laugh like wind chimes coughing up April
with too much enthusiasm,
as whatever personal anecdote curdles
& the awkward burbles on my belly.


4/1
I watched her
use her elbows as a metronome.

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

Lost clusterfuck of poems

Assignment Poem:
How can I open to new patterns of observation & obligation?
like a painting devoid of light?
or a body emptied of skin?

This poem just had its sky ripped down,
the fireflies smushed out by a geometry yawning too big for its own universe.
This poem won’t look at the moon
& must,
in the process of gearing up its adages,
lose track of its own fingers.
This poem cannot be a fit of mouthy neuroses.
This poem will not be about itself.

This poem must be emptied of its lungs
as punishment for breathing out
too many overzealous personifications.
This poem won’t be subtle
or try too terribly hard,
you will write it with your feet
while your hands get busy
scooping through sternums
& pulling hearts straight out of their chests
So swift and precise
it’d make magic in the mind of Indiana Jones.

Words Collected on Your Body

essential parenthesis (on your hamstring)
concentric cataclysm (just below the upswing of the ribs)
a curmudgeonly uncovering (running up from your kneecap)
braised unsettling grasp (all along the inside of your thighs)
gesticulate (neighboring your bellybutton)
relapsing empty-mouthed recursion (hovering over your liver)

Excitement
Common side effects of casually popping
the yellow chrysalis past your lips:
butterflies run queasy colors through your belly;
wet wings make their patience;
waiting to float up
& un-crumple in the heart.
In the right moment
The proboscis will uncurl
press the flowering aorta
and drink deep
the red palpitating nectar.

Consider the Following
Consider for a moment
that poetry is living
that writing is a stepping further in,
making words is leaving the porch door propped open
with a bowl of milk,
letting your convertible become a rain barrel.
Poetry does not in itself draw circles,
It’s followers tend to draw concentric paradigms.
Poetry is the backside of recursion
gearing up for action.

Eyes
Your eyes are quicksilver hooks,
their smirking curve sharpens each time I circle back
& your eyes are sideways () smashed together
with a slate geometry living in between.
The look in your eyes is barking with the throaty cries of terrified zebras.
Yours eyes are a lullaby with playful underpinning of revolution.
Your eyes are an invitation with lipstick on the envelope.

Your eyes aren’t blackbirds anymore.
& I’m so sorry nobody has taken the time to write about those eyes.
Your eyes are a thicket with a mouthful of snow.
Your eyes flash angry like brakelights
& when the dusk comes to shut you down
Your eyes don’t move an inch
and begin their solemn task
collecting purple for their underbellies.



Freewrite:
I guess I am going to be writing a lot more about the mornings. How the breath can manage to be just-less-than-grueling; how the busses move much slower— harvesting odors equal parts character & disinfectant. The moon hangs out in rooms I’ve never seen her frequent, smoking cigars and stealing brandy from the file cabinet. She gets distorted on purple. & I am thanking god for the warmth. I wonder if I could make it as a redhead. & I am blessing myself when I convulse(?) all alone. I want to be with the kind of woman who believes our engines can make it all the way to L.A. in a single blazing night. Drinking coffee until it stains our eyes. Her heart is a window into the red eye of Jupiter. A scarlet swirl of 10,000 hurricanes, whose motions pulse older than the concept of self. (maybe even before self itself?).

The Constant Self-Conscious
The churning discernment, and its gears of constantly documenting the dead skin flaking away. Media rushes us into relentlessly turning on. The engine’s scrapping grind becomes a theorem for living. An eye/I that lives parallel to all of your if’s and hovers twittering over your then’s.


02/27
Pickled & prickled
a thistle floats in a jar
at the bar
next to the eggs
& the wicker cradled peanuts

Ink Monsters
I am harvesting calluses in my writing desk.
Constrained by the inbetweeness of raven-ous riddles
the possibilities do not stop
as POE whittles them all down to brightly grumbling verbs.

I am inking holes in this white-lined claustrophobia;
This monster of space untaken.

Open the mouth of your universe
force a space for conversation
vibrate life into being (itself?).


Weighty
My heart is more than broken
it is an anvil
hanging on by a hinge,
gravity dancing down it’s tensioned strings
my veins are laughing red hot with the tensile strength
it takes to hold your love.

Found Poem
You don’t let the weather get you down.
“I never really get sick” comes easy from the lips
As your body runs the gamut on the backburner.


Salt
Secret folk heroes
don wool hats & orange buckets
and sprinkle salt over the tilted sidewalk



All well done haiku
have subtext about weather
it isn't boring.

A heavy-handed norse power ballad

My body was built by the Valkyries.
Ribs spread wide as victory,
then curled together like wings
striking curved against a bloody gravity.
The whiplash began my heart's electric rhythm.

I could catch you in a glimpse,
and long before our bodies even think of colliding,
I've got your battle cry churning beneath the skin.
I speak in raven feathers
and honeyed gasps.

I fill the air after it's been emptied of souls
my body keeps the night from tearing into nothing.