halloween time

of widows

you do not need to shudder
your wings against my cheek.
nor should you kiss the bud
of my neck with a whisper
of memory like needle lace.
i know that i am not alone, because
when i close my eyes,
your breath fills my lungs
like honey--i am unable
to breathe; do not want
    to breathe.

you do not need to show
yourself--you are my eyes,
you are the light that causes
eyes to see, you are the light
that blinds slowly, patiently,
after decades and decades
of seeing.

october thirtieth time

Yawns of light rattle out
like princes among a tense
citizenry of leaves. Every morning
is an opportunity to justify a natural
hierarchy. Does the black soil stew
in its own dankness when a brilliant,
delicate son does not grace it with
a silver sliver of tongue? No. The land
grows. It mosses and mushrooms
and flourishes---it learns to dance
in the dark.

october twenty-ninth time

tender atlas of admiration
painted onto your cheeks
and walls and windows

by a self that knows how to love
in a language i wish i spoke

october twenty-eighth time

idiophone

that night, when the words
were afraid and healing,
i held you like a bell.

i braced your waist
with the palm of my hand,
hesitatingly brushed your lips;
noted the elegant rust
of your shoulder.

i was so anxious that you would hear
your own brilliance rattle
accidentally through your bones.
realize the cumbersome weight
of the yoke. that you would shake
free and forward and out like a thousand
impossible thunder songs.

i promise, i will learn
the nuances of your anatomy.
the bell is a delicate body
and i may only ring
you once, but you will resonate

and chime, and sing.

please, let me catch your tongue
awhile. you signify so many
exquisite and affected moments.

october twenty-seventh time

maggots move like accordions! maggots are nature's way of playing the accordion and disposing of rotting flesh simultaneously

october twenty-sixth time

paper multicolored snowflakes (!) redyelloworange like
the horizon is laced with kite-eating trees

october twenty-fifth time

for those situations that make us
heroic, that remind us to
know our religions and our salves,
i beg of you to kiss
your elbows, pour over
your atlas, and breathe
in a greedy lake of air--
                   to not apologize
for wanting to live--it is a warm
crush of heat before the flame's pinched
out and it spans the blink
of an eyelid. i have learned that the body
softens at death as though it is not
afraid. It is only rigid later
when the Self has eked out
between each pore like something
gently pollinating the earth

october twenty-fourth time

I will know I am content when I find myself both stargazing and cloudgazing

and watergazing

and dirtgazing

and find everything to be whole, even in breathtaking impermanence

october twenty-third time

as an environmentalist, i am glad of artificial sea glass--but the artist in me feels extremely disquieted.

october twenty-second

medusa cannot comb her hair because she would cut the throats of all of the snakes

october twenty-first time

happiness made of glass meringue,
and autumn before it is decided,
and pen ink with a dry sheen.

october twentieth time

On Zombies

Zombies have a lot of crust.
Zombies ooze like pizza.
They might have feelings
if it weren't so draining
ambling and munching all day.
Zombies are like cattle.
They are very aggressive
because their name is actually zonbi
and has been regularly misspelled
from its native Haitian creole
for the past century or so.
Zombies are a prime example
of inattention to detail.
On zombies, there are a lot of brains.

october nineteenth time

despire--to desire desperately


(I refuse to acknowledge that some asshole on urbandictionary.com thought of it first)

(I thought of it myself and I am taking it and running)

october eighteenth time

To ankles!

I see you there--the saddest part

of the body
who spent so many years in comfortable
conservative knits; your curves alluded to
at most. Always dressed in black or white
like pall-bearers and ring-bearers,

Now

I watch you twist and lust about; a
sprawling whoring place. All skin and bone:
no decadence or warmth. Your décolletage--
offensive in all seasons--perverting suspenders
and garters with each

seductive

thrust of ligament. Your

cracks and mutterings; your
persistent and unglamorous

footsies.

Look where you've come.

october seventeenth time

Of all of the things to keep in one's stomach, I love that the majority consensus was that butterflies would be the most appropriate.

october sixteenth time

There once was a frog prince who enjoyed being a frog. He was actually a frog--he was born a frog, and would die a frog. There were frog goldsmiths that crafted his magnificent crown just so because they enjoyed being frogs, and serving frogs, and wanted to support the preservation of their kingdoms through frog rituals like the queen croaking ten times on the night of succession into the king's scepter so that he would evenly distribute material as well as philosophical bounties across the land. Or swamp. Depending upon the breed of frog.


I would like to write a book of contemporary "just so" poems, a la Kipling's stories, but ideally far less politically incorrect. I wish that animals could give me oral histories in a tongue that I could fully appreciate. I worry that, someday, I will come to an impasse in which the ways of translating a cricket chirp will appear to be woefully limited.

(I don't think that I will, really! But I do worry about it.)

october fifteenth time

ways of healing:

freedom to be loud and
building a museum of feathers and
planting a tiny crop
of roses on the head of a nail.

creating movement within
your containment. fracturing
the glass bottom. glomping and
seeping out like a scab
as it grows and hardens.

october fourteenth time

A spider's web grasps at everything
and gorges on its own tendrils.

Its fly husks wave and shimmer
like food particles in a swollen mustache. (!)

It bobs and weaves in wind
like something whistled.

,

Still, its human implications :

To catch a loved one with.
Of formidable strength
and design.

Temporal. Spiritual.

One would think that we
were in the practice of sapping dry
the ones we keep for company.

Of pausing where we fit
easy. Of lying snug
in our illusions as we wait
and wait
and wait for gravity
to pull us down

october thirteenth time

I did not post yesterday--bad news bears! I will fix it, somehow. The below is missing a lot of things, but it is a schematic in my head.

- - -


The most famous song of all circuses
is called "Entrance of the Gladiators".

The master of ceremonies wears
the enormous pelt of an extraordinary
and woe-begotten Elmo. Glockenspiels pant
and jump in droves, hum with
syncopation at the knees of clowns
and babies, but the audience does not
ever take notice. The instruments are a pack
of wild dogs and are not satisfied
with only popcorn and chocolate.

The ladies
shuffle in like playing cards and tier
the seating like a wedding cake.
They wear six rings:
their fidelity changing with the
height of the seasons and width
of the surrounding top hats. The men
bet on their favorite tigers and
press the toenails of an elephant with
their heavy wooden canes.

[There are many necessary deaths
in a circus--some of the anticipated
self; some of the reals
and unreals that die with us.]

october eleventh time

This is an image by Diane Arbus. William Gedney referred to her as "a small being, physically, always weighted down by her equipment, the necessary burden".

George Szirtes describes her (in a poem) as a girl who  …seems to trust everyone and is just a little crazy,  just enough to be charming, who walks between fantasy  and betrayal, and makes of this a kind of profession.  It takes courage to destroy the ledge you stand on,  to sit on the branch you saw through.

And there are all kinds of line breaks in there, of course.

This, and the narratives of other artists that are (and who were) similar, make me unbearably happy and unbearably sad at the same time. I can't rightfully explain it, but at some point, I would like to try harder. It is the most knotted, sinewy... bizarre feeling in the world.

october tenth time

I have decided to continuously edit my entries as I think about them! For instance, I changed the one from yesterday around a bit. So, if you pay attention, you can catch my thought process in real time!

HMMM. Okay. Creative thoughts.

If you Google "Operation," the first entry that comes up is the Wikipedia website for the Milton Bradley game. This game is one of my favorites, because it disguises itself as a highly technical and science-oriented endeavor, but it is actually one of the most poetic amusements in the world.

See "writer's cramp," a pencil in the forearm. "Charley Horse," a small horse resting near the hip joint.




Amazing.


That's all I've got!

october ninth time

I would like to create an edible book because I feel as though nothing could be as satisfying as seeing people become enamored with art to the point of physically devouring it. The words would literally grow with this group--they would act as a catalyst for my audience to become taller, or fatter, or more wrinkly. These people would be forced by their bodies to use my words as energy, and when each reader would die, my words would seep back into the ground.

BUT, the words would then(!) be rich with experience and new minerals and things from the bodies of the people who ate them, and eventually the words would make it back to me because I would also be in the ground, and I would never be lonely again because there would always be this slew of migrant poems and phrases and stories approaching home.

october eighth time

on holidays

skin is like wrapping paper: its design indicates its denomination.
yes, the important thing is what is inside,
but sometimes we break that by shaking the box too hard--

there is so much aggression in the unknowing, especially when
you are a child. when the morning seems so far. it is a tradition
that sticks, and lingers, and burns with us.

october seventh time

This is a poem-a-day blog.

Each day, I am going to write some lines or thoughts or poem-like things (I am hesitant to call them poems... they might be prose-y, or lists, or something along those lines) that have gone through my head. I am not making this public for feedback (though you are welcome to comment, of course! because it is a blog) so much as to provide a space for me to be forced via routine into organizing the words bouncing around. So clearly, if you participate in any type of art at all, you know that the concept of throwing your drafts and bits and pieces of things into the public sphere is a bit horrifying. But! I think that it will be an interesting experiment, and that I will mull stuff over a lot, and I haven't done it before.

So, to summarize--the stuff here won't be even remotely polished, or complete, or particularly well thought-out. But: maybe that uncertainty will make it more interesting, and hopefully it will inspire at least one person. Somewhere! You? Maybe.

So, here is today. (The bottom two things are not related to one another.)

---

Tide Me Over, Moon

balks a shy earth
at her own bareness. Waits
to be dressed in flame, in forest: her
evening epochs. The
attempts at apocalypse every
several thousand years are no
surprise:

it is hard to be alive so long,

to be an edible machine that runs,
that dances, that shudders; knows
loss.

---

she / wet and sullen and waiting /
clicks her fat-gem-heels like a prayer,
mews and brays at herself,
claws up-the-end-street
is desperate and delectable and
runs on oil and slime and
boy, don't act like you expected
a face--you got her
palms with no lines and /
dear,
nothing else grows /
here.