I'm back to writing a poem every day, whether they stink or not.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Second-hand Smoker

Even though I don't smoke,
I imagine doing it as a gesture.
I've learned a sign language
of smoke signals from movies
and from movies through friends,
but I can't use these words.
It's a dying language with no
dictionary, like the language
of hats and glasses.

I've practiced in silence when
I didn't have the cigarette to say
"yes" the way I needed to.
If you whispered "Let's
get out of here," I'd pull
my glasses to the end of my nose
and stare you down, I'd draw
my hat down my brow,
and I'd flip my half smoked
cigarette away with that sharp
tap that sends it out
of existence and leaves us
alone and speechless.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Cuts (this is a second poem today to make up for yesterday)

I found a cut on my arm,
a cut I didn't remember
taking at all.
And I find them
often
when I'm most
relaxed and have
time to look
at what my body's
been up to while I
wasn't paying attention.
More and often and less
I think or reason or know
that my mind and my
body are different
persons and love
each other less
and more
often as the case
may be.
But then
I'm ready for two selves,
One that does everything
while the other does
nothing. One the moves,
one that changes. One
that hurts, one that bleeds.

Mirror and Dance

She stands with her hands lightly linked on her belly
and everything around her is brown and white.
The wooden table and the tall mirror, the white wall
and the floor boards, everything but she, in pink
and black, leotard and tights, tapshoes and ponytail.
She looks at her own eyes the way we all do when
we want some answer, some oracle for ourselves
and wait for it to come like an annointing or curse
out of our eyes or the pores of our skin. We want
to stare ourselves down and know the truth
by the way we look away, or keep looking.
Isabel is looking like that and probably getting less
than she's asking, but I see the way that my own
thoughtfullness as a father, the love that heard
her say she wanted to dance and found the dancers,
I see that it isn't in the mirror.
She is the dancer before the dance, the dance
before the dance. Not the dance the father made,
not the dance he cleared a floor for. She isn't
the girl that might dance. She's the dance that may
happen and she's looking for the dance in her eyes.
I'm the darkness around the dance, around the light,
around the girl who dances for she who dances.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Cycles at the Laundromat

A van with tire-spinners turns into the parking lot
of the laundromat. I'm certain that before I had
tire-spinners, I'd have my own laundry room.

I leave my soap and empty quarter-can
in the trust of the other patrons and go outside
to practice walking like a real human being.

This tree has leaves that look like siamese twins
who've finally had it and have started
a deadly game of tug of war.

Walk across an empty parking lot on a Sunday
afternoon and any town fills up with the ghosts
of unsanctioned coming-of-age rituals.

The woman across the street walks toward the place
I'll be if I cross here. Was I going to cross here? I'll cross
here then act lost and cross back. She's gone.

There's a blue sports car surrounded with children and one
young woman pulling on a shirt that doesn't fit right.
She's yelling at the children. They all get in. No one's driving.

Now the laundromat is filling up again with the usual
lot of magazine ad readings, prideless fantasies, bleach,
and me coming back full of oxygen and yellow exhaust.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Vacant

There is a parking lot on the block where I grew up.
Before that it was a grassy vacant lot with a deep
ditch at one end between two white houses.
And farther back there was a burnt out shell
of a small house that was never boarded up
before they tore it down, and one day
we opened a window and went inside.
Before that there were no trees in the yard.
Once, there were no trees in town and once
there were no trains, and once there were no
roads and once there were no houses, once
there we no horses and once there were
no wheels, and once the state was a grassy
vacant lot, and you could see father than
your eyes knew how to guage and the grass
turned into a gold paved parking lot
just under the horizon, but your eyes
weren't there then and there was no
horizon to surround your body with its
closed windows from where you'd imagine
a circle and a center of that circle that moved
as you moved. You weren't there.
I wasn't there either. And we couldn't
have been because they haven't torn us
down. No one has even thought
of forcing open our painted-shut eyes
and crawling in to find out what happend.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Elizabeth

I read a version of Little Red Riding Hood
that gave the girl a name, Elizabeth.
Here was a girl with a name, dirty
fingernails, and knots in her hair,
and she sat at my table now drinking
a cup of tea while I felt like the bad
uncle who never kept up and didn't
ask questions about Grandmother.
She said "please" and "thank you"
too much and asked for blackberry tea.
While she ate her cake I looked
at the old book of fairy tales I kept
just in case and found her there
with no name but Red Riding Hood.
When she finished I poured the tea
in the sink, picked up the phone and called
Elizabeth's mother to come get her.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Teeth

Teeth are a curse we've earned for the sins
of our ancestors who ate animals with teeth
and beaks, who chewed at each other with tools
and ideas, rules and rebellion.
Teeth come twice and then they stay in
our heads like our first erotic thought
and erode over the grains of each real thing
we feed them.
Some of us chew our teeth to gravel at night
and wake up with new bodies that scrape
our tounges and burn those nerves now out
of their white iron sheaths.
Somehow they're like a key in your fist
when it sweats and you taste metal.
You want to pull them out and run your tongue
over the gums--like a shaved head in a warm
October wind.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Simplicity

Sometimes I clear off my table
just to show off the little print
of a Chinese painting that hangs
just over it. It's a pink flower
in a few blades of black grass.
It reminds me of the kind
of simple way I want to live,
sitting at my table, the chair
faces the wall, the cup
holds the tea, the wall is white
and holds up a single pink flower
at eye level. It's held there with three
nails because one corner bends
to the wall already. But too often
the table's a mess and I sit on a chair
with my pants hung on the back,
I put the cup down on a dictionary,
and listen to the news.
I still think, though, that sometimes
it opens something up in me when
I happen to notice it across the room,
a little lost in the jumbled objects
gathering around it like weeds.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Mouse and Me (a "lower standards" poem, I think)

I'm typing this poem with the same keyboard
that the mouse eats my peanuts on.
I have to turn it upside down
and sweep it with my hand to get
the little bits of red skins and shell powder
out of the keys so my "i" quits sticking.

I baited a trap with a peanut one night
and slipped it into an open bag of nuts.
I listened to him crack them open until
four in the morning when he got full
and ran back to whatever hole he's made.

I even saw him one night. He was standing
on the keyboard and saw me in my bedroom
doorway. He stood still and looked.
I could see he was glad to have this chance
to see what it was he always knew about
but only now had the comfort of meeting.
I could see he felt less afraid and ready
to make a life for himself here, and to lose it
when the force against him finally had its way.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Consumed

In Kansas, you know
that the food chain
has a clasp,
and maybe we
are the pendant
but when I sit
on my porch and watch
the welts form
from the straw
mites and mosquitos,
and watch the liquid
dance of chiggers
on the concrete,
I don't feel
like the eater.
And mayber that
is why we believe
in God here; someone
has to be the all-
consuming,
the unconsumed.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Not Writing Today

I
There is an old woman who crosses this street
everyday in the early morning, with my help.

I eat breakfast on my porch and watch her
slide imperceptibly down the sidewalk and stop

at the curb like an empty train car. That's
when I get up and cross over to her.

She never looks at me, but when I pick up
her big hand she can move again.

When we cross the street, she's the one
who lets go and keeps on walking.

II
She didn't come one day, and I sat there
until noon with an unfinished egg.

III
Today she came back and when she stopped
I sat there eating and sipping tea.

She looked for me once, put one foot down,
and set out like a heavy boat into the sea.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Light

If you close your eyes against
the light of midday, then you see
the red-orange light of your eyelids
almost like the color of the sun
itself, maybe the hue of the universe.

What light could shine though
our whole body and turn it
into stained glass panes of hearts,
lungs, stomach and black skull boxes
of the brain. Only a light
so strong it would leave whoever
saw it with a certainty he's seen
the hue of the universe and every
shade of his place in it.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Evening, September 15, 2005

On this cool summer evening, I smell
hot rubber and deisel fuel
and I don't know where it comes from.
But in this easy breeze when my body
doesn't fight any element,
I breathe it down, good or bad,
and take it as the scent of my city
doing the ugly work it does
everyday, this one too, where I'm
sitting outside in the damp gray air
blowing kisses with every slow breath.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

My first drug poem

There is a chemical in tea,
theophylline, that creates a sense
of well-being, or that’s
how it’s put in the literature
I read. A being-well drug,
as all drugs begin, I guess.
Thus by the end of your jade-green
cup, you are there, being well;
in the midst of ennui, well;
in the mist of longing, well;
in the embrace of rage, well.
And this is slower than caffeine.
Theophylline stays like evening
until you notice its gone
and you can’t remember what
that broad and shallow joy
was all about.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Observer

The tree across the street is furious
with birds. It flaps its thousands
of hands like it's shooing them away.

He remembers that if you clap loud,
the birds stream out and possess
an empty tree across the street.

One flies out and back like a solar flare.

He claps so quiet, only he can hear.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Stealing Pleasures in Hell

Just before you're slid, feet-first,
into the furnace, notice the way
the subtly different shades
of orange flame curl weightless
in the coals. See how the mossy
blossoms of fire bud upward
out of black embers like mushrooms.
Notice the symetry of every split
in the wood, tiny windows
blinking on and off, a whole
ecosystem of firy life. Stop
and wonder at the beauty,
the uncanny order of it all.