August poems (5)

autumn came yesterday,
golden dress cloaked.

*

rose song

Sweet flower,
make diamonds of
how yearning cools
on waiting lips.

*

170816

let's dig holes through
the days that wait
for us, nest love there
out of time.

*

19082016

you wait for joy like
the moon's gray spots
to fill; galaxies overflow and

spill, child, blossomed
from that dust.

*

where the river changes

I knew you,
River, you were
a kinder thing -

     what sunless wild tore
     your tongue into
     this spitting froth -

     knotted with your heart,

     what swallowed stone
     made home now
     grates to frantic grit

the song that
held me
gently once?

*

july (lack of) poems

july was as silent
as a hand sewing

after the fact

No nightingale,
no pain transformed to beauty,
Cracked tongue lodged in this human throat,
I croak broken notes
to sing of you.

Poetry can be like

forgetting to brush your teeth:
something collects on your tongue
before even waking
an overwhelming need to spit

11262015

Scratched out from a silent womb
I've grown into a tumult:
ever-buzzing roar and whine
of tortured stone, and groans
of men heaving rock. Even in 
the quiet hours before the
engines start, breaths not mine, 
dreams not mine animate my heart. 
What has this crescendo consumed?
I scratch into the womb of
me to find the silence to be.

reminder

i don't want to forget

the precise angle of your shoulders

or the tight curve of your smile

but it has been a while

and the skin forgets its goosebumps

the heart forgets its joys

there is a deepening void, and i cry

I remember! I remember!

pleasing aches and little plummeting delights!

of course! the pain of that jagged edge of satin petals fluttering out of sight!

on a sunny day --

I remember (because i'm terrified

to recall only that i've forgot, 

to know only 

that i loved you once and then i loved you not

as undeniably

as dreadfully

as a dead thing rots).

091712

You knew me
once, the once -
I. I
knew her
too -
her two eyes charged with
violent sunlight
were mine. I remember violence. I remember
breaking
lines but now I shatter words  -
I cling to thoughts wrung out I try to
climb the rungs up, out
I try to shout, but the hand slips.
I'm a tongue tripping up, I watch
the motion of lips
gibbergabbering.
My ears are
old. My fingerprint
decays. I delay.
I've got nothing else to say.

Boogars, A Poem.

I sit here and try to be this thing I was
once - A Poet
- back when i could think and dream and
love.
instead i'm a lonely slug meandering
thick gray head bent eyes swivelling
drivelling, a trail of formless infertile muck i slap a title to:
Boogars, A Poem.
i laugh a little to think of
you reading dried snot like
tea leaves. then I weep
because i crave the touch of a breathing beating world
but all I feel all I can 
feel is the weight
of this
shell as I sludge across the page
and maybe-I-don't-give-a-shit. that's what scares me most of all.

textual frustration

Some men will strip themselves like
dead fish and lay their spines in 
my hands: They want me to stroke their bones, 
I think. I'd prefer if they were octopi
with fat purple tentacles I couldn't fight shoved into 
me against my whimpering objections. 
But no. These men are 
pens: I suck their ends and 
crack them between my fingers when the words won't 
come. 
Is there no load to degrade my hate? 
Is there no man that can break my hands 
so they'll never write again?

the art of not giving a shit

You would be something to me, maybe,
(you would be the world)
if I gave a shit
i would weave you into me
like a priceless
thread of gold across the
tapestry of my history
you'd be
the happy twist,
the thin wisp of a subplot
winding through my narrative like
a thirsty stream
only to explode suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly into the
ocean vast and deep
or maybe you'd just be
my heart's deepest wish
murmured in half-sleeps.
maybe i would love you
more than words could hope
to explain, from a place
limitless in me. maybe I would
love you 'til it hurt. if i could love.
if i could hurt.
you would be something
(you might be everything) 
if i cared at all.
Thankfully,
i don't.
you're nothing
but a pronoun
in a careless poem.

the game (II) -- God stuffs me in his pants before I can figure it out

A poem is a risk, and a temptation.
It begins with God
(a thought has tickled his palm) groping with eager hands
in his pocket for a coin. Then suddenly

Off I go! I find myself spinning rapidly, flicked
on like a light switch, revealing my faces: agony and elation -
oh the torture! oh the ecstasy! I'm a loonie

in this pocket of the universe
wondering where I will fall between
obscurity and triteness

hoping today for the latter like "my love is beyond words."
I would like to be as sincere as my
heart beating
silently,
certainly,

but I settle with a
vague little "flump!" in God's lined palm.
I lay myself out like an X
in some corner of your mind,
and hope you'll find me out 
from the text where I hide 
from the risk and the temptation of
whatever I write.

wisdom of trees

A man who was broken came upon an ancient tree,
and begged, "Great grandfather oak, teach me how to be
stable, for I lack the strength to face this life."
The tree replied, "Climb these limbs of mine, child, and see
whence my strength derives." The man did so. When
his face met open sky, he saw the
leaves dancing like careless children. The oak explained,
"Mid-summer noons, angry autumn winds, jealous frosts, prideful showers
weather me, each as each will. I don't resist,
but move when I am moved, sway when
there is music. In that concurrent movement
is stability." The man, for he saw, leant against that aged tree
and set his heart free, as his roots grew
deep, deep, toward his quiet home.

on a summer evening

on days I love being alive,
i worry i'll get carried away with the wind,
rise from my toenails where
i hang around like fungus ironically
commenting on the smell,
move through my intestines,
wind upwards through the ribs
and get to know my heart
a little. Then I'll float right through
this skull of mine and fly

like a strand of hair, twirled between
the fingers of some ancient, loving spirit,

on a head of 7 billion hairs
that've all felt the wind
and thought poetry of it. 

So i resist beauty.

i don't comment on the stars
although they still my buzzing brain; i try not to mention clouds
though I would like to dangle my feet off one and 
wonder at the world spinning and blinking; i think, but never say,
that we are all notes of the sweetest song played
upon the strings that hold humanity
together like a gift from the universe; and i would never, ever, ever,  tell you that
my love for you is as deep as the ocean,
though it is true. Poets are supposed to be new,
poignant like a death adder strike (so i've heard)

and i worry it's just not very edgy or new
to say "i'm glad to be sharing a wonderful world with you."

trajectory of a broken poet

I salted my wounds, took
mystery from the moon and
spread it like a scab over
the heart but,
so doing, i
lost my art. 

from where i love

I love you from where
poetry oozes like caramel -
the loonie-locket or paper-pocket
of sweetness that nurtures me more 
than spinach or sprouts - from a place where
i'm much more than living it out. 

on losing a poem

How quickly it escapes!

One minute, like
magic, a word
prickles skin,
frizzles neck
fuzz; a thought
charges the heart
to beat from its fleshy casket,
like love,
to startle the appled
throat. Yes,
in that minute,
i AM in love!

but then it fades into the day.
To speak becomes -- oh, i dunno.
Life is neutral

but for the poems
parted and particled
riding the wind like dust
waiting to tickle my nose.

To us!

where is our substance?

when we chant the cat is not
le chat n'est pas
el gato no es,
om for the religiously apathetic
cloistered in wide open-to-the-heavens skulls,

what matters lacks reference.

what matters, lacking reference?
all speech becomes
an emphatic stutter: N - N - N!!!

Does it come to this, friends,
this double-sided coin, our god, revolving
on a pedestal, winking
like a sleepy eye watching coals,

and us wrenching something to call poetry
from the nothing we call all,
from the - the - the -

rhetoric of a blue balls heart

what cruel god creates me
in the image of the paraplegic?
backbone shattered, so,

dimwitted, I tap this
and that for pleasure, forget
deeper chords once struck.

what sets me dead-eyed
before windows and watches
me, so frustrated, fap fap fap, while it

weaves this
widening void where I
grope the wrong end of
the wrench and use
screws as earplugs? what deranged power

made it so that I have a dick but no balls to use it
till I forget the life in me and dully, belly-ache?

on getting things done

Between the forceps of words waiting that heave my eyelids up is

a yellow bird swinging over a horizonless sea, the perch creak-creaking and

her cheep-cheeping and me deep

- deep in so much to do! I rattle the cage and say "what the fuck are you doing?"

she just cocks her head. I lose my -

roll the "cock" around a loving tongue

let the waves take me and make me

a sandwich, eyes closed.

The Word

i worship the idiolectical 360° gradation;

my altar is all:

plato, buddha, allah, darwin, and the

rest that lulled to sharpness gray

matter under mind

and you

and you

when you say what you think you know are

All Mighty.

Neither bible nor textbook can

hold The Word i seek, but i bow

before each

eye that looks and mouth that speaks.