Poem-A-Day

Self Improvement

2009-08-09T22:30:00.001-05:00

I'm sorry I barely spoke
over supper tonight.
I'm tired in both lungs.
I'm tired in the tongue.
It's this old divorce that keeps
splitting, splitting different seams.
So I'm tired of reading
poker-faced promises,
of building scrap-metal,
thumbscrew consequences
for her anemic mother-love.
Also:
I'm tired of advice.
I'm tired of laying my life
on the workshop bench.
Tired of the tools
digging their grooves,
tired of the glue . . .
I'm tired of finding
new ways that the work isn't done.
But I am on the bench
and somehow, my tongue
got lopped off as we
solder on new teeth.
Please keep talking.
I'm sewing my tongue back in
with that sour old thread.

Meditating at My House Near the University

2008-11-14T21:17:00.004-06:00

Some mornings I sit on my porch and do nothing
but drink coffee and listen to squirrels chirp,
car brakes squeak, and bulldozers shatter a house.

But I can meditate back into that morning-porch body
in the middle of the day if I listen to my breath
until the greasy machines rattle to a halt.

You know the machines: one practices cleaning the house,
one makes invisible money, one makes love.
One machine splinters a warping wooden porch.

Now the bare ground of my body has a tremor
of caffeine underneath and the engines send up
the last blossoms of smoke over the rubble.

The University is one big Buddha. It’s fattening
into the neighborhood. It’s meditating everything
down into parking lots under quiet lamps.

This Buddha awakens in my direction. It wants
its fields empty. It wants to wake up with the engines
cold and still, the wreckage gone, the squirrels chirping.
.

Poem

2008-11-13T21:25:00.003-06:00

Sometimes a bird builds a nest
in the jaw of the letter “e.”

One could wield a cross like a dagger
and stab a man through the heart.

I caught my wedding ring on a box.
It planed the skin back and left a scar.

Every garbage truck is packed with symbols.
Metal, paper—--uninterpreted

I’m falling in love again.
All the small, solid objects are growing nervous.
.

Consumed

2007-09-08T01:57:00.000-05:00

–after “What Weighs” by Elaine Terranova

Angler–
or football fish,
inky opaque.
Vein to vein, they hold on.

The male, a swimming syringe. She,
wooed by the barbed mouth,
the dissolving head.
Joined by a point of melted flesh.

But, oh, to be taken so completely.
To be scorched to a single
organ. Joining.

One kiss, oblivion.
My eyes melting through
the soft torso to the womb
as they go blind.
But nothing is so fully spent
as the undigested flesh.

Once joined, his sperm
chambered and waiting,
she feeds the piece of him
remaining with her blood.

When she’s ready
their spawn is a soft sheet
of translucent eggs, two
feet wide
and thirty feet long.

untitled poem requiring much revision

2007-09-07T02:22:00.000-05:00

I get these little wounds that I don’t remember taking,
I’ve found them on my chest, a short slash
and the pink swelling edges. But mostly
I get them on my legs. One bled into my sock
and dried before I noticed. I like the way
blood turns hard like lava out of the hot,
weightless core of the Earth.

All bodies have gravity. If we were falling
in perfect emptiness forever, one day,
we’d notice how much closer we’d become
and then we’d have to make decisions.

Like the Earth, I have a core warmer than the rest of me.
But let’s stop there; bleeding doesn’t make new
islands for my body or even my soul (at least,
these quiet little rips and punctures don’t). They
aren’t the kinds of wounds that cool
in the salt-bath of time, leaving a small
rich-soil perch where my mind’s little raft
washes up on the sand.

Let’s stop at the place where the body
is like a planet, and as I find these
tiny wounds, my mind is on that raft,
watching the little sparks dance like
fireflies at the mouth of that crater
just over there on the mainland.

Noticing the Body

2007-09-01T01:58:00.001-05:00

The same way a friend’s hand
laid with fresh instinct on my arm
roots like pollen down to the seed
from which my heart grows—
the pressure of my foot
against the strange terrain
of my floor, awakens me
to the wild fleshy novelty
of being some kind of a
living human thing.

Earning a Wish

2007-08-31T02:03:00.000-05:00

A thousand paper cranes
is supposed to bring one wish, but who
could fold a thousand today and not think,
at least once, of wasting so much;
the trees felled, the fossil fuel burned to power
the plant where the paper’s made, and the gas
burned to bring it near—
all for a single wish for me. It’s surely
a kind of bad karma yoga.

If I met one of these in a dream, large
as an angel, it would strike me
as a messenger of fear: the wildly unbird-like
spear of its tail, the sightless
dagger of its head, and the wings,
and the wings that look bound up by threads
tied to the sky—a marionette of heaven.
Indeed, if you drop one from a high place,
it floats down, slow and straight.

I make a thousand little deaths, let a thousand
small slivers of the earth vanish from my mind.
Whatever strange shape the end takes, it will
strike me subtly as the work of my own hands.

Strength

2007-08-30T02:07:00.000-05:00

I love the way you can
push through a sore and stiff
body whose bones are trying to fuse
and burn it all down into motion.

All the pains of this world
are curling up their creaking knuckles.

Radiation

2007-08-29T02:08:00.000-05:00

I used to open my mouth to the sun
and try to taste its rays.

I’d learned about vitamin “D”
which comes steeping from the leaves of flesh.

and I believed, ever so gently,
in the magic of ancient things.

I didn’t know about the liquid
syllables of “melanoma”

or the cup and dagger dirge
of the pregnant letters U.V.

I knew it was warm and make
my eyes wild with red veins in pink space.

and that the sun
had been there forever.

Killing the Camomile

2007-08-28T02:09:00.000-05:00

The plant began to turn yellow
after many days of rain so
I let it sit leaning over in the heat
until it was a melting tumbleweed
stuck in the bog of the still damp dirt.

I cut off every flower with scissors
and brewed the dusty heads
into a clear gold tea and drank it.
The pot is now holding a tall mint.

I like the idea of the dead flower
that isn’t kept for its ironic beauty
but is drunk down with hot moving water
and breathed out on the ghost of your breath.

That’s how some of us would like to go.
Others want the rest of the garden
to dry up and spoil, grieved in the ghost with loss.

Give-away

2007-08-27T02:24:00.000-05:00

“We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” -Aesop

and who are my enemies?
If that’s you, have as many means
of my destruction as you can carry.
I’m seeking peace, see, inner peace,
and I believe in those scenes
where it all comes down to the gun
held in the good hand—and the palm’s
sweat tastes the metal for the tongue,
and under the open mouth of the barrel,
one heart claws its own arteries
close, waiting for the bang,
and the good hand can’t
squeeze and goes limp.

I’ve lost the heart for all this almost-killing.
Take it all; the only things left are knives I can’t
find, nooses woven from mucus, and secrets I’ll never acknowledge.

Classical Music

2007-04-05T02:49:00.000-05:00

I first knew classical music
through cartoons and movies.
When I first heard Wagner's
Flight of the Valkries
sailing naked from the radio,
I could only imagine flying monkeys.
It was the first time I heard
the rattle of the brass and the clatter
of the keys, and from there
the breath of the players
and the whine of their chairs
shifting on the stage.
I could hear it was a made thing.
There was a mind that heard it first
before any instrument rose to meet the mouths.
Why?
He he imagined a fleet of flying monkeys?
I didn't like it then.
I wanted to see
the monkeys fly again
and rip the straw from Scarecrow.
What else could I do with that music,
imagine my own brand new evils,
animated by the lucid, cinematic
effects of the unfocused eye?

Ambition

2007-04-04T05:12:00.000-05:00

The sky is blue again.
The clouds are white,
painted with a dry brush.
It's the perfect sky
to put over a circus.
The train cars right there
look like elephants.
I look like the ticket taker
but I'm on break.
These two smokers look
like the barker and the fire breather.
There's a new guy today
and we all tell the same
stories again and laugh
right where we should.

No, the circus doesn't stop here.
Not in this town. It doesn't stop
tomorrow either. Always
not in this town.

Manifesto (April 1st, 2007)

2007-04-03T03:33:00.000-05:00

Let the greatest minds be put to this task:
the vilest emissions of the human mind;
the bloodiest tasks ever lodged in the flesh
of the cankered body of human history,
that ever-convalescent ancestor of us all;
all the suffering that ever stopped time for one
beautiful soul and emptied it of humanity
so the pain could replace it all, all
for the love of an idea whose time had come—
let them put it all down in verse.
Forge again the dark manifestos,
hammered with every word set ashine.

Poems have done far too little harm
to be taken at their word by us all.
We need our Jesus with a whip.
Let the best words be as bad as their makers.
Let beauty reap blood from us all.

A Desire

2007-03-15T03:26:00.000-05:00

As a long-lived animal who has seen more snows
than any of the creatures whose small footprints
stitch the ground down into a drunken white quilt
and make meetings that lie to time itself---
I'm certain to make more than love
out of spring.
I've seen thirty springs and made
love and child but my mind is made
to want more than memories,
more than more-to-remember.
It wants to be the recurring dream
of another dreamer.
The mind wants so much more than the body.
The desires of the body are in the world.

Six Recent Poems (two of them about tattoos) with a reading of one.

2007-03-10T03:58:00.000-06:00

Doplar Effect

The blue star on your lumbar vertebrae
moved toward me when you turned around.
Did I lean toward you at near-light speed?
Or did you fall back at impossible velocities?

They say your spine remembers the sudden motions.
The mindless dive to the dirt that saves your life
is chambered in the spine ready to fire.
It takes time for youth to pool up deep enough to drip.

When the madness comes, it comes blue and truthful.
It comes dark enough to stain the skin.
As it goes, as you move away, it fades....
The past is vanishing, rapid, mad, and red.

**********

Valentine for the Hands

In a photograph of a woman's
hands
a man's
mind is free
to feel his whole body
through her.

And how close
to his own flesh could
even a solitary
man be
if not for the
imaginary
hands of a woman
ripening his body
a moment before
her astonishingly real
hands come down on him?

**********

A Poem on Two Spiral Tattoos

This is why the spiral should be on the body:

we can think of ourselves alive a century from now,
getting up from bed another day and going on
as always, in the near-cyclical way we go on.
But we know we won't. We might as well end there
as anywhere. It's just as easy to imagine
all space filled with the one winding arm
as it is to carry two on your body, one on each shoulder,
fetal and unattached, without any meaning coiled inside.

**********

Found Poems

This is one.
They're all over.
And surely someone
has picked one up off the back
of a toilet, or an un-bussed table
and read it--
and it was perfect;
they kept it forever or always
remembered it.

This poem's for you.
Keep it as a little shelf
for the one you're waiting for,
the one that could only
have been written
because you exist.

**********

Valentine for an Ill Friend

How often love and death call each other!
They must be lonely sisters.

You've been rushing from one the other, friend.

I've heard there's a place just over there
where neither one visits very often.

I don't know if that's right. But I'm keeping it in mind.

**********

After Listening to Tom Waits’s Orphans

Fifty-four new songs in my head,
and a little piece of each one is playing,
running a little strip of tape over the tiny
head of the hammer-bone in my ear.
Some have curled into little loops
linked at their ends by a single drum-thump.
It’s an audible confetti in my head.
Still I sing them under my breath.
I roll them out into full songs,
patched and glued with my own words

One is a gun in my sock. One
is a bracelet made of bullets, but
the bullets are too small.
When you pull the trigger,
they just rattle tambourine-like
inside the cylinder.

I sang some “beggars and their papers”
right into a song that once had none.
They came from me rustling their pages
and shuffling their shoes into a song
with no benches and a sky ready to rain.

A song makes the most of me when it’s shout
bounces off the broken faces
of my brain and makes a new music
in the heavy air of my throat.
Now, listening to Tom Waits again,
my songs come apart at the patches.
All my little characters swipe the dust
off their jeans and look for something to do.

Mindful of the Wind

2006-12-26T01:46:00.000-06:00

A shredded black string flaps from a nail in the roof of my porch.
I hammered the nail in the summer and hung a wooden wind chime from it.
It cut itself apart on the ragged edges of the holes drilled for the string.
Even without the chime, the wind blows through that same place.
One of the long bamboo shafts rolls back and forth on the porch floor when the wind is strong.
The string quietly jumps back from every breeze.
This happens when I’m not there.
It happens when I am.

Collision

2006-12-25T00:52:00.000-06:00

All of the other cars
flashing past in the other lane
and the ones flowing
slowly forward and back
along with me in this lane
seem as simple as light.
They are made of knowledge.
Keep a fair distance and they pass
through the air easy as mosquitoes.

Today I made a foolish turn
and all the metal from every
automobile dropped down
heavy on every groaning spring.
The drums of the metal panels
thundered and all the glass
rattled in every door.
I let the car drift to the curb
like a body with a bad reason
for being aware of its bones.

I forced the door open
and took an unsteady step
out into a world stricken
with matter–all of it pressing,
grinding against the rest.

Watching the Moonlight in the Side of a Train

2006-12-21T01:42:00.000-06:00

There's a train painted over with mirrors
making the moon dance like fireflies in its side.
It's a moving lake wrapping up whatever gift
it's carrying across this piece of the plain.

I've got a lake folded up inside of me.
I've wrapped all the other lakes inside of it.
It's the first lake I remember, the one
where I caught a dead bluegill on broken branch.

The lake is an ocean of lakes. It's many
horizons wide and the world goes about the rest
of its business with timeless vigor
when I float at the center in a little boat.

The boat is not a symbolic boat, the lake
folded up inside me is not the lake with the boat.
The moon was never in the train and the gift
wrapped up inside is not the fish or the branch.

A train may carry a boat and a boat may hold me
up on the water at the center of the lake.
When I see another lake, a feeling unfolds horizons
wide while the world goes about it business.

Ill

2006-12-17T14:47:00.000-06:00

My stomach was a bowl
of hot soup burning
itself into a hard
pocked-marked knot.

The stomach sleeps,
gentle, senseless,
most of the time.

Mine awoke in a newborn wrath.
It was my fiery seed, my pit.
The heart, the mind, unstrapped
themselves from me
and the world was the Devil’s
for all my flesh could tell.

Days After the Snow

2006-12-17T14:44:00.000-06:00

Mid-December.
A foot of snow.
That was last week.
Tonight, my coat is off
and the air
wears just a hint
of winter's perfume.
I'll put on my best clothes
and ask my town
out for the night.

Remembrance

2006-12-13T23:31:00.000-06:00

I bought four tiny teacups by mail
and when they came one was broken.

Three white nurses and one sick brother.

It’s silly, but I’ll remember him
when I first sip from the other three.

Poem Kills Man

2006-12-09T03:03:00.000-06:00

How it happened is he read a poem
with a lot of strange caesuras
and subject changes in the wrong
places and just fell dead—
asphyxiated on all those dipthongs
thicketed with strangling fricative
consonants spoken on the dregs of his breath
by the last word of the only end-stopped line.

With his eyes blood-shot and his lungs collapsed,
he rolled up under his desk and died there.
The poet said that poem has always
been misinterpreted; that man
was the first one to truly understand it.

Several poems for November (with a reading of Two Faces)

2006-12-01T02:01:00.000-06:00

Ars Poetica

A poem is one side of a conversation,
one that started with shoes, but now it’s about
the Buddha’s flower sermon. The way
you came is dark and overgrown,
but your feet feel like Lazarus tasting
his first supper after that death ended.

It’s the same conversation to read as to write.
The poet only has more decisions to make.

If you’re both up to it, you stop talking
in those places made for silence.
You leave each other no wiser.
You forget what you talked about
and you walk home, stepping on the soles
of your shoes, walking the shoe sermon.

**********

Anger

All of the old angels had a job to do.
They came when needed and left.
Gabriel spoke, Michael fought.
I don’t know the name of anger,
but I believe that anger is an angel.
His job is to look and make
you look back. He comes like a cat
from around the back of the house
and looks at you with those eyes.

Anger is an angel of truth, an angel
of love and purpose. You look back
for the righteous joy of looking
at the truth, at the love, and the purpose.
You look until your own eyes shine,
with the iron light of the angel’s eyes.

When Anger closes his eyes
late at night, late in the year,
years later, there’s the world,
like a book whose acid is eating
it own pages. The angel has gone,
so you find your own reflection and look
hard something like the truth,
or love, or purpose, or just
the anger to light the world up again.

**********

The People We’ve Never Touched Are Under Water

But once we begin to touch them
pieces emerge
like fossils, one bone at a time.

Our pools turn grassy with protruding shaken hands,
and grow
lily pads of slapped backs.

Everything shifts under the skin of the pool,
refracted,
vanishing under webs of light.

Sometimes a hand reaches out from the water
and rests
a glistening print on your cheek.

We walk with our wet faces to the wind.
Cool gusts
put the hand back. Again. Again.

Sometimes we draw someone out with our bodies.
We begin–
hair with our hands, lips with lips.

**********

Two Faces
after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.

The young man’s eyes are crescent with patience,
as if he's washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from the face,
painted white so the wounds show up well.
He cleans the same Christ whose feet
were washed with the woman’s own hair.

Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
Tungurahua darkens the land with a plague of ash.

The statue’s eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, fixed on a distant fear. This
is the Christ who felt his Father forsake him.
He’s unaware of being cleaned, unaware
of the damp rag and the hand. He’s aware only
of the fiery eye of God and of his own chosen flesh.

**********

Boredom

This is a day of ancient significance.
The mail doesn’t come, you’re boring
your family, and the tea tastes like paper.

Maybe you’ve slept too much. Your dreams
sank to the bottom and you woke up empty-
handed with no hunger for your breakfast.

Your nerves are buried deep and waiting.
You’re the exoskeleton letting go. Your soul
waits like a cicadae to break loose from you.

This is not a poem

2006-11-17T13:32:00.000-06:00

I'm afraid that school is keeping me busy enough that I don't even have time to post the few new poems I have written. I'll try to put up an omnibus post soon.

Work

2006-10-29T03:33:00.000-06:00

You think about death a lot
when you lift things for a living.
I stay healthy and my back is strong
but my wrist is sore from twisting it.

My shoulder blades ache underneath-
I hurt myself sometimes and it’s harder
to work. It’s easy to think about death
when a small piece of you goes bad.

I’ve pictured my knees crunched flat
by the long iron conveyor belt so often
I can feel the endorphins loading
their guns when the belt rumbles by.

The mind/body dichotomy becomes
the rag of the body damp with its mind.
Sometimes I can feel gravity
pooling the first drops up at my feet.

The Plains

2006-10-11T13:20:00.000-05:00

You’ve heard it said that the mountains are topped with cities in the mists of heaven,
that the gods reside as far from us as the heights of Earth will seat them.
I say go down to the plains where the giants cannot hide and so are never seen,
for as long as we’re with them, they’ll stay up on the knobs of the devil’s spine.

You’ve heard it said that there is death in the valleys where the bones are frozen
in the shapes of strange animals that simply quit moving. You’re near the aching heart of Earth.
I say go up to the plains where Flesh and the firmament meet in a shifting skin of grass
where the ghosts are pooling up knee-deep and miles wide with names the length of songs.

You’ve heard that the ocean is filled with the progeny of human wonder,
that your footprints wash out into the water and salt the past with your presence.
I say walk through the plains where tide-less time has absorbed the shore,
where your footprints wash away in sound and the ghosts can barely believe you exist.

Short Poems

2006-09-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

a dime
that falls off
a dresser
and rides the trough
of your spine
into your pants
and sleeps
in the hammock
of your underwear
until it falls
(when you first
notice it, diving
down your leg)
into
your shoe.

Looking for Good Poems in Poetry Magazines

2006-09-26T02:41:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the only poems you can find are cobwebs,
the ones with dead bugs
hanging, but no spider left to bind them, drink them up.
They come off in your hair with a sticky rip.

There’s a phone ringing in a toybox. It’s buried.
We don’t have caller ID.
Imagine,
being a toy in that box–no usable hands.

Once, as a boy, I was so bored I left the only room
where anyone
was talking, and hummed a song that sounded
like boredom. I’ll never forget that.

Night Ghazal

2006-09-25T01:07:00.000-05:00

Your cotton-seed ambition keeps you awake in the dark.
The clay-sod failures keep you awake in the dark.

The burning house down the block makes the trees shine
while the smoke-genie watches the neighbors huddled awake in the dark.

Roaches love street lamp light and bats stream from trees when you clap–
two things to behold when wandering awake in the dark.

Three sets of eyes: the coyote’s, the dead deer’s and mine.
One flees, one flinches, one lies still, seeming wide awake in the dark.

My daughter interrupts her bedtime story, “there’s something I need
to tell you, Daddy,” and falls asleep. I finish the story, barely awake in the dark.

A Common Wish

2006-09-23T02:06:00.000-05:00

If not for the need of sleep
I’d be living twice the life
I now drowse through.

At night, I’d drink my wine,
my tea, my strongest beers,
or just water while I write.

I’d read my shelves empty
on a table layered with dead
pens and one live one flying.

I’d teach myself to dance, to fight,
to paint, to draw, and remember.
I’d read to my daughter till she woke up.

Then all day, with eyes still
light as diamond-shine, I’d make up
for all the lost dreaming.

Parallel Love Poem

2006-09-21T03:14:00.000-05:00

The air smelled like your hair one evening,
the wind carried your perfume to me.

My brain whirred the possible smells around,
My mind searched for it’s origin.

It’s silly to stand on your porch with your heavy bags,
A fool smells the air with his shoulders bending down.

I stood still until my brain quit flapping,
I didn’t move until I could say your name in peace.

I smelled your hair until I thought I might feel it,
I breathed the air until you almost appeared.

Listen to this poem

Stress

2006-09-19T02:35:00.000-05:00

You pocket so many problems and then
you’re standing in the grocery store by the tea
and you feel the minerals start precipitating
out of your bones. Your body makes a little beach.
You’re speckled with dead jellyfish. Your brain,
your captain in his boat of bone is sinking
in water so salty his skin goes white.

That’s the new you for a while now. Don’t forget
to eat or the clothes won’t fit anymore.

A little fresh-water stream feeds this sea.
One day the whole thing will taste clean and sweet.

Listen to this poem

September 11th Art

2006-09-16T03:15:00.000-05:00

Once in a while you get
wounded,
punched,
right in the mouth,
your cheek torn
ragged on your teeth.
But you don’t spit
all the blood out.
You swallow a bit,
not because you think
you get it back,
but because once in a while
you need to get
a taste of yourself,
and there you are,
already open
and running
like a fountain of youth.

Listen to this Poem

Why I Don't Have a T.V.

2006-09-15T03:13:00.000-05:00

Religion and Science are at war in the yard.
Philosophy and Poetry quarrel on the porch.
It’s getting hard to sleep in this neighborhood
with all of the fighting. The coffee and the tea
are arming themselves with mass anti-oxidants
and preparing for battle before the water even boils.

The other day Philosophy and Science allied
against Religion and Poetry in a skirmish over free-will.
They all want me to take sides; each one fights
a little harder when I walk past, tries to look archetypal.
But right now I need the sleep, sleep and caffeine.
I walk past them every morning sipping whatever’s in my cup.

Learning to Tango

2006-09-14T01:40:00.000-05:00

If you don’t dance well
it’s easy to let your mind
slide down out of your head
and go warm in your arms
and belly where she’s
pressed up against you.

Just keep dancing!

You can’t carry her around
inside of you like a baby.
Once you learn this dance
you’ll both disintegrate, anyway.
And then you can do
whatever you want.

Listen to this poem

Wands

2006-09-12T11:55:00.000-05:00

Find it here

An Ode to False Love: Calling the AT&T Help Line

2006-09-10T13:29:00.000-05:00

After fierce phone-battles with endless representatives
strung out in lines of networked webs where somewhere
in the cloud of thread there’s a moth caught and ready to be bound...
I came to Clair. I will call her Clair for her clarity,
because she told me “yes” and “no” in precisely
the right way, and that “no” I didn’t need to pay.
I said my phone battery would soon die, and then it did.
Our love did not end in a reluctant truce of warring hearts.
We were cut at the green root by the mechanical blade of fate.
She is now the rose hung bud-down with the black petals,
but I tell you they were once Phoenix-feather red
and the thorns could draw painless blood from your hand.

This is not a poem

2006-09-03T12:43:00.000-05:00

I'm offline again for a few days.

Three Poems for August

2006-08-30T13:43:00.000-05:00

Love for the Living

"Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same."
-Heraclitus

God commanded the light into being and the shadows came.
Creatures came to inhabit the shadows and began to draw blood.

When we sons and daughters sat on the immense skin of the Earth,
with its eczemas and cancers showing, and tried to make sense of bad,

the universe spun a womb and closed itself inside.
All the sun-lit blood runs inside it. All the broken hearts beat here.

When one of us sits on the immense skin of the Earth and tries
to make sense of bad, you remember them from the very beginning.

**********

Two Faces

after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.

The young man’s eyes droop with tolerance,
like he’s washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from its white
painted face which shows the wounds up well.

Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
It darkens the land with a plague of ash.

The is now the Christ whose feet were washed
and the one who felt his father forsake him.
The eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, not aware of being cleaned,
but only of the fiery eye of God and the One loneliness.

**********

Determinism: a Thought Experiment

Imagine, if you will, a tunnel you run through
blind folded, dancing as you go. It was built decades ago.
You never feel even a finger brush the walls.
When you turn around and take the blindfold off,
the tunnel’s shape is a silhouette of you
running, dancing–a three dimensional, hollowed
out, time-lapse cameo of you, wider by a hair.
You squeeze your way back to the tunnel’s mouth.
You have to pry your feet loose when they wedge
themselves in the narrow troughs where you stand.
When you get back to the beginning, your skin
is pink and stinging from the scraping tunnel walls.
The world glistens with the dewy question marks
of free-will. And your skin grows back, of course.

This is not a poem

2006-07-31T13:06:00.000-05:00

I'm offline at home right now. I'll be back when I'm reconnected.

Kyobancha

2006-07-25T13:17:00.000-05:00

The tea smells like pipe tobacco.
The smoky aroma comes from an extra
firing to which to producer treats the leaves.

My dad smoked a pipe for a time.
Maybe I drank several cups
of that tea out of nostalgia
for an old nausea I’d lost,
one wrapped in the pleasant pill
a deep reaching memory.

My first girlfriend smoked.
You can learn to love the musk
of cold tobacco smoke when it comes
to you in lover’s lust-drunk mouth.

So here’s the cup of displeasure
I steeped from the fallen leaves
of memories that are filling back in
with the stink and boredom that only
brews in the present cup. I drank
it a few days and gave the rest away.

The Cockroach

2006-07-25T13:15:00.000-05:00

A cockroach climbs the siding
of the house. It leans into each groove
and pulls the last long section
of its hard body over and reaches again.
It looks almost human as it goes.

So, how am I like the cockroach?
There’s a poem that writes itself....
Let it!

The roach just reached the porch roof.
It crawls along the corner a little
and snaps its wings sharply open, drops
and flies in an arc to the ground.
Will we climb again, little roach?
Or is this what we’ve come for?
It it time to walk away from the wall?
We’ve got a lot of decisions to make,
you and I.

Saturn

2006-07-23T00:16:00.000-05:00

There's a tiny, overgrown island
at one end of the lake. I've never
stepped onto it, but when the water
isn't too low to take the boat around
I imagine the narrow path that might
run from that shallow inlet, up
to the top where I might have built
a small wooden deck with a single
table and a telescope standing
strange as an ostrich in the middle.

You can look at the pale ghost of a planet
through the lens and imagine your own
spirit unsheathed and seeking shelter
on the terrain not even hinted at
byt he smokey jewel in the telescope--
it's enough to look a the gray gleam
with its just-visible rings and dream.

Often it's enought to look at the bony
frame of the telescope with it's barrel
aimed wildly high to dream your dreams.

Sometimes to paddle a circle
around the wild viney island--
and sometime to imagine the island,
the thin boundry of rippling water
between me and the first of its weeds,
and the way it seems to turn as I circle--
sometimes the lumber lays itself
and the telescope turns on its own
agianst the obscene circling of the earth.

Summer in Kansas

2006-07-20T11:03:00.000-05:00

Summer in Kansas is why,
despite the legislature,
despite the Board of Education,
and the specter of God in politics,
there is space for the atheist.
Argument by design; the perfect
balance of day and night, the fine
cocktail of oxygen and carbon dioxide,
the unaided perfection of the eye;
all falls apart in August
when the sun, the moist smothering
atmosphere and the burning winds
all stand forth against the lives
of every worshiper and every
blasphemer to show us this world
was not made for us, and we
are not so well made for this world,
and the only defense against this creating
is a tiny air conditioner of
decidedly un-divine design.

Water

2006-07-20T11:02:00.000-05:00

When the water main broke, I
had a pitcher in the fridge still filled.
I drank a glass of water and made tea,
and put the rest back.
This is how it is in so many places
where the water doesn’t come to you,
but this would be the happier moment,
with the water in the glass,
the tea still steaming in the cup,
whose handle is still hot–
barely a thought of the buckets
by the door and the long walk
to the river or the hard walk back.
This feels like plenty, it feels
like gratitude. My gratitude
must wait until the river runs
back to my kitchen sink, herded
along the pipes by the men
thirstier than I, breathing
the 100 degree air, making the water run.

Three Cups of Oriental Beauty Oolong

2006-07-15T00:06:00.000-05:00

Three leaves, still on the stem,
are rolled into a twisted splinter.
You could, while drinking the brown cup,
unpack a symbol for a triune God,
but which is the tiny prized bud
and which the larger less useful leaf?
But, oh, it is a cup of blasphemy!

Maybe these are the three ways
I love you: the truth of you,
the woman I’ve imagined of you,
and the astonishing mirage in between.
I want to taste every cup of you
until you don’t even darken the water.
I’ll do it just to warm your leaves.

Each root brown pack of leaves
is a slip of birth, life, and death; but what
does it mean drink so many down? How
many souls do I drink at one time?
Do they reincarnate as often
as I steep them? Who was it said,
“when drinking tea, drink tea?”

Three

2006-07-12T10:57:00.000-05:00

An apple goes bad in the grass;
it goes good for the grass;
it grows well for itself.

My teeth go bad in my mouth;
they go good for the economy;
my enamel is flour for an inedible loaf.

A God goes bad in the grass;
it goes good for the spirit;
grass sprouts prayerfully from the heart.

Feathers

2006-07-12T10:54:00.000-05:00

The wind blew a feather against
the sidewalk at my feet.
It fluttered a bit on its shaft,
and until I looked straight on
I believed it was a bird
pecking the ground for seed.

Sometimes the thought of you
comes, and before I recognize it,
I feel a need to pray on my knees.

Familiar Cars

2006-07-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

I have a brother who's moved away.
He's full of hinges and hooks. Here
he's loaded down, here he's just brushing the ground.

I have a friend with open window and boxes
packed to go, always different boxes.
She is light and a band of darkness.
I almost see her everywhere. I always look.

I have a friend who's never the same.
He's wrecked or brand new, just bought
or borrowed. He's a yardfull of parts
and a history of shifting machines.

I have a friend who is long and blue.
When she moves everything rattles
and I feel it with my whole body.

Old Road

2006-07-07T01:26:00.000-05:00

Strange machines shave the street
down to the original brick in long
ragged paths. They’ve left it open
but no one drives this road because
it feel like driving down an open wound.

You step into it like a river, like you think
you’ll feel fish tapping past your knees.
They’ve taken up the curb so the road
runs up to a grassy bank. Down this far
you wonder what’s under your yard.
How deep down have they pressed
the past, like old cities buried up
to their spires in new earth, like layers
of ages that skirt the hollows
of ancient chapels in planes of colored dirt.

Someday soon they’ll pave it again,
but now I like to step down where the bricks
run wild red with the long claw marks
from the bright machines ripping up
the present and showing the raw, red past.

Letter

2006-07-07T01:25:00.001-05:00

Somehow, by the guidance of blue ruled paper,
small packs of words bear up all the weight
a voice won’t. When you wrote “sweet dreams,”
I nearly felt you lie down beside me.

Yellow Ribbon

2006-07-07T01:25:00.000-05:00

Someone gave me a magnetic star-spangled
ribbon that reads “support our troops.”
The package is topped with a plastic flag.
The ribbon is water-proof, it does not fade,
and it was made in Taiwan. The money
goes to support more ribbons on more cars.
The magnetic silhouette back can look, depending
on how you turn it, like a grim reaper’s hood;
a simple fish with one enormous eye; or
a sack, tied at the top, bulging with its load,
and holding the reaper’s face, the fish’s eye,
or a ghost's glimpse of the empty space inside.

Off to War

2006-07-07T01:24:00.000-05:00

The 891st Engineer Battalion, Company A, Kansas
National Guard left Pittsburg on a warm December morning.
I took my daughter downtown to watch them go.
The streets were clean and breezy. On each corner
and storefront a small group stood talking
and shifted homemade signs from hand to hand.
We all spoke to strangers without asking names.
When the bright yellow buses turned into the light
down the road and came our way, everyone
put their coffees down at their feet, I pointed
and told my daughter that we were going to wave,
and the soldiers leaned out the open windows
into the gentle air of the town and waved
their whole arms, smiling like school boys at us all.

For the Body

2006-06-28T00:12:00.000-05:00

I've crossed two iron arms
thought the air by my heart.
It's not a cross to crucify
or to ward off forces old and low.
It's to feel the mineral moan
in the throat of the iron
when it brings it own bones together.

I've broken my bones over each other
and my throat told no stories but this:
grass stains on the bent parts
of the body, that body badly
shaped for the slatted light inside.,
the ghost holding on in long bags
hanging out of the fracture....

A part of you has seen
the daylight now; the sun
has been inside your darkest parts.
You are sutured-up, scarred, and full of stars

Sitting Outside at Night

2006-06-28T00:06:00.000-05:00

I welcome the air into my clothes. The pleasure moves
through my hair like bats through the body of a tree.

You infested me like the air churning with bats.
We were a cave breathing wing-beaten air.

The cave spills bats like ink into the moon-glow
of the clouds from its countless chambers and veins.

Here’s a red stone from one of those chambers.
It balances on my pulse and dances faster

as I remember the shining blind eyes, the air
between us, and sound still echoing from the cave.

Giving Up on My Eyes

2006-06-22T00:17:00.000-05:00

I’ll let myself go blind by decades.
My eyes are a little less awake each year.
But I won’t get the new pair of glass
every time the driving frightens me.
I’ll bear down harder on my eyes
and bend the world in to sensible shape.
I’ll press them like marbles in my pocket
until they become two oval stones
with hazel-blue jewels floating
in their cracked-glazed halos
By then the light in my eyes will come
from their own molten cores.
I’ll have the visions of prophets
and the world of darkness w
will feed me its dreams through
the thirsty soil of my body.

Love Poem

2006-06-19T23:50:00.000-05:00

I like the last breath of candle smoke
after the flame is snuffed.

I prefer the embers blushing with black
patches to the waving flames above.

I love the prayer that’s spoken
over the grave of a God.

I love you like a heart that’s given up
every idea its ever had about loving.

I love you like there’s no love
left in the world to lie down on.

I’m blessed with the neglect of God
and the gifts of creation to inhabit.

I’ve toppled the pillars of heaven
and the whole thing came down on top of me.

Highway Trees

2006-06-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

The wind breaks planted along the highway look
like the front porch of a forest full of sunlight.
There’s always a hawk dropping down, talons out,
onto a limb in the crown of one of those trees.
You could be flowing down a trench, cut smooth
through the wooded swells of the Ozarks,
but look out the side window and the empty fields
show behind the shallow blind, breathing in the heat.

God is growing along the roadside. The loneliness
of old lovers grows here too. This is a dark
forest made of long twin rails of trees. There are
no hawks standing in the dust on the fields;
they’re all landing in the trees right in view.
Each one reminds you a bit of a tree you climbed.
Each has a wide nest, and every nest contains
an egg already rocking itself awake.

Lament

2006-06-07T12:26:00.000-05:00

This is a season of death but my heart
won’t darken. Oh, Lord let me turn
black and damp with blood. Give me
a handful of nights coiled on the floor
hammered numb with sadness.
Don’t let my heart turn hard and green
like an unripe tomato where the worms
have already begun to bore.
I want the desert and the water.
I need the cave and me eyes
burning with sunlight.
I need my body turned inside out
and the spirit to weep out in the night.
I want to walk back in among my people
with the light orbiting around me
and the power of death turned back on itself.

Prayer

2006-06-06T13:04:00.000-05:00

Empty my heart of dreams.
Lower me slowly into the pool
so the surface doesn’t ripple.
Put me alone in an empty room
where the only light is yours.

May the only sound be my song
and the only words be my prayers.
When I’ve no words left
and my prayers become a clean wind
wordlessly moaning from my throat,

fill me again with dreams;
let passion redden my blood.
Let me out in the darkness again
with eyes that shine and a tongue
like a candle flame burning with new words.

Witless

2006-05-27T00:26:00.000-05:00

I have the wisdom of fools today
and my wit is a cicada in the earth.
We're sitting with our drinks between us
and I want to make you happy the way
the witless and unwise try to make
happiness, out of laughter and long
hugs, out of memories, and floral praise.

Here is a story I've told you before.
You laughed and looked like a saint
when you heard it the first time. I notice
you pretending you've never heard it now.
Let me take the ring from your finger;
here is a ring for you. Here are the best
times I can remember, tied up
in new ribbons and given to you again.
I'm practicing for next time. I'll come
out of the earth and cover your heart with wings.

The Half-Mast Flag

2006-05-16T01:21:00.000-05:00

The post office flag hung at half mast
but I felt no sorrow. Why is my country
mourning? The wind had wrapped
the fire station flag around the top,
the stripes like a barber pole. It seems
the country is divided. All at once,
it’s dizzy in the thin air of pride
and fallen down on it’s hard knees weeping.
I’m here again, impassible and happy
on my porch with a cup of strong tea,
watching the train of my nation pull away
from the platform where I stand waving
at the wallet-sized snapshot windows.
I'll call the post office and ask them why.
I’ll get back on the train when it comes around.
I might even tell the firemen the reason,
and we can all rend our garments
and feel like brothers who’ve lost
something, someone we both need.

This is not a poem

2006-05-12T00:42:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a few days off from this blog. It's been keeping me up too late and I need to get that under control. My days have become short and unproductive because of it. I'll be back soon.

Lights

2006-05-11T01:25:00.000-05:00

I light my room with white Christmas lights
nailed along the edges of the ceiling.
They don’t remind me of winter anymore
except for the shadowless light they cast.
I don’t remember Christmas in their light.
Neither do I think of Christ, the tiny
lights in the sky over the manger,
or the one that showed the way.
They are not a poet’s lights, not
the lights of apocalypse or prophecy.

They are the lights that banish
the darkness just enough to read by.
Some of the bulbs have burned out.
The string has pulled itself off
of a few nails. They’re empty of ghosts.
The eyes that give light to objects
have closed. The light has lost its mind.

Gasoline

2006-05-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

I like the smell of gasoline,
just a whiff, enough to make
you think about the thin elixir
running through the shining pipes
with the gray resin of earth
and fumes on the outside.

But someone parked a car
with a leaky tank nearby
and I can feel my memories
smelting out of my brain
and burning like a new fuel
for America’s engines.

If you’re a traveler, America
is a whirling dervish vision
rising out of the blur of all
the grassy roadsides going by.
The smell makes the past combust
and you live in the present, burning it up.

Fantasy

2006-05-09T02:31:00.000-05:00

If the lightning punches a surge
into the frail capillaries of my computer,
I could lose all of my poems, stories,
and half-built plans for a better life.

I’d stand in the middle of the room,
and, with curses drying up on the floor
and the sweat of helpless rage in my clothes,
I’d put a chair out on the lawn and sit.

I’d look away from the house and try
to forget it exists. The grass would be
a little wet, and I’d let the bugs crawl
up to my knee before slapping them flat.

I’d let the sun set and feel every last
thread of the illusion that my life
just started over, and that it only began
when I fell asleep that night.

Combat

2006-05-08T01:58:00.000-05:00

I’m struck by the clever method of the trap,
the poison a favorite food taken to the queen
who must delight in the first ant to bring
the rare, aromatic gel. The queen, glutted
with eggs, touches the favored ant’s head
with a feeler and sends her back up the tunnel.
The little ant droops to the floor and,
when the ants behind start dragging her body
out of the way, believes it’s the queen herself
inviting her back to the chamber to share
a bit of the golden ambrosia in her jaws.

I feel a tiny red insect of guilt moving.
I’m glad for it. My queen is not dead.
My guilt is wingless and sterile. I set
the traps in the best places for a quick kill.

While the ants find the traps, my queen
asks me about metaphors. Have I
poisoned sweet food for the queens
in the chambers of another’s heart?
Am I the bait, the worker, or the poison?
I tell her the truth, and she takes my food
for the firey red larva moving in my chambers.

Stone Heart

2006-05-07T03:13:00.000-05:00

It is said that if you don’t
worship God, the very
stones will cry out.

I keep my peace
among the stones.
My heart holds my mouth closed.

If the stones cry out
I’ll let their songs
loosen my throat again.

Power

2006-05-06T02:19:00.000-05:00

Back in grade school, I once heard
one boy tell another about the time
he killed a man. He’d been hunting
ducks from a bridge when one shot
missed and hit a man fishing
from his boat on the river.
We learn to tell lies long before
we learn to hear them.

I could feel the warm halo
of death on that boy from my chair.
He had stolen power from the locked
toolshed of adulthood and found
that his hands fit the grips.
When he saw his shot, he must
have raised the sights, just so.
I could not have; I wrung my useless hands.

Poem

2006-05-05T02:02:00.000-05:00

We’ve given God love’s name.
When we feel our prayers
rising into a Godless world,
we speak of love and feel
God turn to hear his name.

Creativity, wit,
passion, strength, and patience
are the virtues we use
to make the hearts of lovers
hurt until even the flesh aches.

He feels uneasy with this name.
Without God the damned stay
uncreated and never weep.
They never look back on love
and wish constant, hopeless wishes.

Watching the Chiggers

2006-05-04T02:08:00.000-05:00

The chiggers like the concrete slab
on the sides of my porch steps.
I often have breakfast out there
where I can watch them up close.
The slab looks plain and gray a moment,
but when you lean close, countless
needle pricks of dancing parasites
draw into view. They move in fractal
patterns of turning and stopping,
and seem never to touch. They must
be looking for blood, but they don’t
act at all tempted by me. My nose
is a foot away at most, and they should
smell the CO2 of my breath and know
there is a bouquet of capillaries
for each one of them in the sky.

I like to watch them and know the trouble
they would bring me if I put my cheek
down on the slab and let them come.
I don’t pour out my boiled water on them,
or spray window cleaner just to see
what it does. They allow me to look
patently at the face of villains, and don’t
we all long to see the devil’s face that way.

Cold Fire

2006-05-03T02:03:00.000-05:00

My daughter stomps on the blue chalk
until it’s a lump of powder on the floor.
She pushes it into a neat pile
and calls it a “cold fire.” The small
toy animals huddle around it
and she joins them, keeping cool.

I imagine a few small twigs
turning dark and glassy, the soft
locks of just visible blue flame
dancing with one toe on the ground.
It draws the water out of the air
and freezes it to the fuel.
You keep it going with wet moss
and green leaves until it starts
to slide of the mound of ice
building beneath the twinkling embers.

And speaking of inverting the extremes
of nature, I could have often used
“hot ice” to warm my tea or my hands.

Imagine a planet like this. You’re welcome
to the arrange the gravity however you like.
But when you come to its inhabitants,
you’ll find their emotional lives identical
to our own. Once in a while, they’ll have
to imagine impossible things to set
the world right in their hearts: fire
that burns and blackens, cold ice,
wet rain, and creatures living lives only
slightly different from their own.

The Curse

2006-05-02T02:31:00.000-05:00

You want to be seduced by the eyes
of pythons; you want to stop breathing.
You want to see the bones bent
over the rocks on the Sirens’ island.
You want your body bent over
those rocks in the burning salt water.
You want to lick the stem of a rose
and grow sick on your own blood.
You want love from the sons of devils
and impossible oaths from their throats.
You want back the blood they took.

It’s in a heart shaped bottle stuck inside
a devil-man’s chest. But you’ve lost
the power to break hearts. Your own
is so full of glass, it can barely beat.

Giving Up on Your Dreams

2006-05-01T01:34:00.000-05:00

I remember that it was this mug
I was looking for, not the chalice
with the stem long enough for the hand
that passes and the hand that accepts.

And I was looking for the cold tap
instead of some hot spring turned
baptismal magic with the salt
of legend and dream-crafted quests.

I need my slippers, which I would
have found by now if I hadn’t looked
so long for.. what was it,
the plane tickets and the frame-pack?

My neighbor is burning his trash
in a bent metal can. I’m certain
he’s done something wrong. This
is the wrong I’m here to right.

Poem

2006-04-30T02:49:00.000-05:00

I grew used to thinking I could heal
the lost and brokenhearted.

I thought the arms of my immense heart
could fill your pillaged spirit with blood.

Now I carry your untouchable pain
like a dead son in my arms.

The Man in Your Garden

2006-04-29T03:08:00.000-05:00

They say he was born an old man
without wisdom and with a fierce
ache in his heart for youth.

He pulls up the weeds and waters
the dirt till it turns black and wormy.
He sleeps in the moonlight.

But he’s locked you out of your yard;
he’s eaten the roots of the new sprouts,
and planted roses on your rugs.

Your clothes are snagged in the fast-
growing trees. They’re turning gray,
and brittle in the high sunlight.

One day you go back to turn him out.
You stand in the wind on the porch
and knock at your own door.

Giving up T.V.

2006-04-28T01:59:00.000-05:00

In the end, it’s just one thing gone.
You know about American Idol;
your newspaper runs urgent
headlines and daily analysis
on the show.

Now you’ve begun to notice
how you use your radio.
You stopped listening, but
it stays on. You’re the silent
guest. You’ve turned your back
on your hosts and let yourself
simply be in that company.

You begin to notice the way
you use your computer, all
your food, and your car.
You might keep going and stop
when you’ve drained the entertainments
from your life and put yourself
inside that running mercury bead
of present time.

Jaw

2006-04-27T02:24:00.000-05:00

The walnut bag contains shells which
can crack your teeth, depending
on the strength of your jaw.

So many things are like this;
one bad bite and you’re changed,
just a little, forever.

Give me false teeth, an honest tongue,
and a stomach full of walnuts.

How about love that comes out
like a baby from its mother, with pain,
with labor, with new life and need?

Your teeth erode like tombstones.
You’re buried under the jaws
of white mushrooms chewing the sky.

Habit

2006-04-26T02:19:00.000-05:00

The nearly-ex
husband has gotten
used to fidgeting
with his ring.

It left a smooth
loop of soft skin
around one finger of
his worker’s hands.

He won’t keep it.
He has a daughter,
and photographs should
he ever want to remember.

Still, there ought to be
a kind of ring that means
nothing, one
you can still

twist with your
thumb and not
invoke the ghosts of
any old promises.

The Coffeeshop's Last Week

2006-04-25T02:01:00.000-05:00

The manager says they can’t make money.
Business is slow and the construction killed
what was left. He scrapes the dregs of tea leaves
from the bottom of the jar and make me a cup.

The machines tear up the sidewalk outside.
The back door is the only way in. Here
at this table, you can watch the yellow
machines work. It’s a good view.

You watch the sidewalk and the street
disintegrate under the machines.
They eat at it like bacteria, and you watch
pleasantly from inside the dying body.

Lost Things

2006-04-23T22:34:00.000-05:00

You’ve found your pencil tucked
neatly behind your ear. You’ve found
your hat on your head, your glasses
on your face, and your keys in your hand.

Little pieces of your body go numb
once they’ve got their flesh pressed
with crisp, vigilant, purpose.

You’ve fallen out of love this way.
You’ve lost God this way.
You’ve given up on your dreams like this.

Your hands moved up to your face
charged with purpose and found it
vandalized with pen, pencil, hat,
glasses, earrings, and a cigarette.

Your hands took them all down
and held them up in a pile, while you
waited to remember why they were there.

Driving Tired at Night

2006-04-22T01:58:00.000-05:00

You’re floating down the city’s throat
and your dreams are filling your head
like water and your rubber skull is stretching.

Balance your car like a plate on a stick.
The illusion of lightness burned off the car
and even your body feels as heavy as it is.

You have the momentum of a pulsar falling.
If you crashed into the ground, you’d bore
a vein through the earth and come out weightless.

Ecdysis

2006-04-21T01:44:00.000-05:00

In the summer, the trees scream with cicadas
and their amber shells speckle the trees.
Few of us ever see one emerging.
But we’ve imagined them inside and wondered
how they squeeze out through the neat split
in the back. And suppose we did the same.
Imagine your neighborhood studded
with the fragile statuary of shed skins.
One of them looks familiar, and you knock
on the neighbor’s door to find out
how they’ve changed and what they expect
this stage of their lives has armed them for.

Work Routine

2006-04-20T01:29:00.000-05:00

Sitting in the bleach-blue glow
of the florescent lights, a worker
sits busy on his break listening hard
to the slowly paced stories his boss
tells with practiced accuracy.
He looks like a movie through
this window, flickering
in the sick light. And the glass
is glazed with tape and stains.

This is how images disappear.
The light goes bad, the glass turns
opaque. Your glasses are dirty
and so thick you can see your eyes
looking back in the reflection.
The air is so thick, your ears
can hear each other listening.
You hear the worker laugh
at the end of the boss’s story.
Now it’s time to work again
and you look back out on the world
with its images clunking
loosely back into place.

The Imagination of Fathers

2006-04-19T01:27:00.000-05:00

A father's mind conjures up terror
that barely seems survivable.
Behind a varied door in his heart,
a flickering screen in a theater of fear
plays the latest scene for the demons
who work there sleepless and inspired.
You've often sat in the sticky seats
with them and watched the same piece
dozens of times without remembering
how you came here or why you stay.
On the screen is always the same child star.
Often you've walked back into the world
shining with ridiculous tears and ready
to walk out of your absurd job, go
hold your startled child, and walk
back across the vast circles of your heart.

Ugly Days

2006-04-18T02:15:00.000-05:00

You don’t look good, some days. Or
you have a stink of ruin and malice
which alerts everyone that you
are a turn of events, a bad decision,
a mistake for someone else to make.
The grocery store clerks’ smiles
drop flat with eye intact.
Your glands are damp with new
pheromones of failure and plague.
When you get home, you make
villainous faces in the mirror.

...But the Rent's Low

2006-04-17T00:28:00.000-05:00

The house is made of arsenic-laced
lumber and a mosaic of crumbling
lead based paint.

The porch is creased on a diagonal seam
and the boards end in jagged jumbles.
The insects come and go through their own
ancestral openings in the linoleum.

There's something life-affirming in living
among the poisons, wreckage, and parasites.
You stand there very aware of your own body.

Poems That Fail

2006-04-16T03:06:00.000-05:00

Some poems start as the piece of road
that, stone by stone, inherits the ghost
of one that crumbled underneath
the dandelions ages ago.
But then it moves to the steady cows
by the roadside and the gray pond
with a reflection of some
invisible hawk skating across
its smooth, windless skin.
Maybe by now you want to know
what happened to the dandelions
and where the old road with the ghost led.
Well, the dandelions grow
by the cow pond in the field by
the side of the new road. Dandelions
are growing over the sidewalk outside.
And the new road with the old ghost–
which isn’t hosting a ghost at all, but is
simply allowing you to let it
represent the “ghost” of the old road–
doesn’t go anywhere that would make
you think of the old road at all.
By now you may not trust this poem.
Something vital is missing from it.
Why the pond and the bird at all?
And why can’t you see the bird in the sky?
And what is that hanging from his talons?

Creation

2006-04-15T00:52:00.000-05:00

Isabel plays games with crystalline rules.
She tells you what she will say, what you
will say, and then what will happen due
to what you both have said. Ok? Go.

You get bored quickly playing these games.
This is the fear of lacking free will.
This is why a creator God makes
no sense to us. God must be unborable.

This poem was supposed to be about
the winnowing of wants as we age.
This began as a Godless poem. God said,
“Let there be light,” as if He were beseeching.

Hometown

2006-04-14T00:46:00.000-05:00

Your hometown is there like a holy land.
When you’re living far away, you always
know which in which direction it lies.
You want to aim yourself like a laser
toward its white water tower and feel
it like its looking back from its flat
plot a land that’s still a little wild in its yards.

When you meet someone from your hometown,
someone you never met when you lived there,
you both know you need to break bread.
You’ll go to work late for it. You’ll miss the bus.
If you can tell you don’t like each other,
you still remember the Plaza Café together,
a shibboleth. Somehow, you owe each other something.

Acceptance

2006-04-13T01:35:00.000-05:00

The rising and
falling white
noise of a car
passing by unseen...
you can fall
asleep to it.
It glides
past outside
as the wind itself.

Inside, the driver
might flail in the seat
of his worst
day on Earth, but
the car makes the same
liquid noise.
And from here inside
the cool
walls of your home,
the Earth is tiled
with good days.

Losing the National Debate--A Consolation

2006-04-12T02:09:00.000-05:00

One day you learn you’ve lost. Now the country
is a little less like you in it’s character, it’s dream.
Yes, America likes dissent, and that is you, but
it’s getting to where it likes the idea of you more
than the reality of you. America is the church
that’s singing fewer and fewer of the songs you like.
It’s the Superbowl, and your team’s not playing.
It’s your hometown after the factory closed.
It’s the ice cream that doesn’t come in cones, now.
It’s the girlfriend who didn’t know you were steady.

You know your country has a place for you.
It wants you in its yearbook, because it needs
every possible kind it can get. It doesn’t feel
right without you somewhere in town where
it can wave from the car, maybe honk twice.
Without you, we’d be unanimous, and then
we wouldn’t need America after all.
Without you–you know, the general, ideal,
Platonic form of you–there’d be no America at all.

Responsibility

2006-04-11T01:48:00.000-05:00

The first time you’re taught the structure
of the atom, you don’t miss similarity
to the solar system. It’s so
clear, your teacher may have even said it.

But no, electrons don’t circle.
They orbit not in rings, but spheres,
much less in smooth loops, but
in uncertain, barely measurable ways.

You don’t, though, quite know
where the planets are just now.
You don’t care about the speck
of dust on the policeman’s jacket.

You care about the universe
of your body, and since you were
feeling good that day, you whispered
reassuring things to the dirt on your hands.

One Man Down

2006-04-10T23:39:00.000-05:00

Underneath a sickle-moon
he retched over the bow
and saw a mermaid in the sea
bid him to her now.

His candle shown like starlight
in the midnight of her hair.
He tried to jump into the ice
and find a true love there.

I will go down with you
to the bottom of the blue.
And if we don’t return
you can have what you have earned.
My bony smile’s for you
when my body’s rotted through.

When he woke up on the deck
he steered his ship toward shore.
He vowed to find his wife and kill
the man she’d left him for.

He’ll say to her “I’m leaving you;
this will be our last fight.
I’ve found love in the icy sea,
I’m going there tonight.”

I will go down with you
to the bottom of the blue.
And if we don’t return
you can have what you have earned.
My bony smile’s for you
when my body’s rotted through.

Influence

2006-04-09T23:56:00.000-05:00

The tire has a nail in it. The head is grooved
and glistens. It’s been run over a million times.
The nail’s point is safe inside the tube. The hard
air comes blasting past it’s throat.

A tree has grown up through the fence.
It’s bark is scarred with a quilt of diamonds
and the metal still runs out of both sides.
You imagine being buried in a tree.

Your brain is nearly the shape of your skull.
Your hands are cast in the space that isn’t your work.
Your heart is not blood, your blood is not love.
You’re neither nail nor fence. You’re the warp in the wood.

The Workers Wait Out the Tornado

2006-04-08T01:18:00.001-05:00

Jack Mayer stood by the conveyor belt
and read the rain’s palm: it’s falling
sideways, he said to the spray on the wall.

Steve Deb walked a beat from the door
to the shelter under a narrow I-beam
and only breathed at each stop.

Matthew Sheets couldn’t stop talking.
He belched out well-spelled laughs
and called everyone a bunch a girls.

No one could find Jason McBane
until they saw him working the lift
with a choreographed calm and fixed eyes.

Burt Davies said he’d like to kill Matthew,
and the rain in his black hair
looked like silver when he said it.

When it was all over, everyone stood out
on the clean, wet dock and one by one,
all said something about the color of the sky.

Violence of Mind

2006-04-07T02:34:00.000-05:00

Whatever the cause, we have imagined
hurting someone without stopping.
Maybe at the top of a switchback
staircase, you created a you that jammed
a claw-hand into someone’s soft throat
and spun them up over the rail and let go.
You’ve imagined a reason to be so angry.
You know which chair you’d use if
someone had to be tied down. You know
which instruments you’d use from the knife drawer,
from the toolshed, and how to use them.
You’ve had moments where it’s gone that far,
where you’ve thought it through to the end.
But they aren’t alone. Most of us have had
our own ghosts thrown underneath a car
and run over in forward and reverse.

Get out, now, from under the wheels.
Your figment self has business elsewhere.
Someone else is waiting for it at the top
of a spiral staircase so they can walk
you down and, one by one, make
every dream you might have come true.

Love Note to Me, from Me

2006-04-06T01:39:00.000-05:00

You’ve been thinking of yourself a lot.
I want you to think of yourself. Imagine
yourself any way you want, it’s ok.
You may give yourself brown eyes, which
I know you like. Give yourself the dark
or the red hair; I know you like them both.
But leave your voice the same, that’s for me.
You’ve been too tired lately; sit here,
let me close your eyes. If you fall
asleep, dream of me. Dream of me
from a thousand angles. I’m your
reflection in the dew on the leaves.
I watch you with thousands of eyes.
Don’t think lightly of me. I’ll go
through death with you and on
to whatever you find when it ends.

Arguments at Work

2006-04-05T01:36:00.000-05:00

On break at work they divide
the good and the bad, the more
and the less, and wear them like
epaulettes. Work is the more and
the good–farm work, you
couldn’t do it. You’d keel over.
Graveyard shift and lifting freight
hung over on a mouthful of sleep.

They stand the quarterbacks up in rows
and rank them by good and bad
before they bother with in between.

They talk about the moral fortitude
of pizzas and prices and usually
end on an uneasy truce.

I’ve heard bars stood up
to one another and wrecked together
with a crash of glasses and chairs.

When break ends, we go back to work
with all our small preferences
shining with a new identity.