Tuesday, April 30, 2013

NaPoWriMo 2013, # 30: Nostalgia


In madness and in hell the circles, though they’re round,
have infinite sharp corners. I like ceilings I can touch –
above rooms in which the windows are cranked open,
paned with an ancient, wavy glass that puts sad feelings
on the garden paths, the trees, the grass, the sundial –
I look out my eyes, in other words, as if from a cottage
where Coleridge soothed his baby Hartley, or Hardy,
decades later, mourned his dear departed wife. Make me
of amber, whalebone, scrolled cherry, or maybe
scrimshawed ivory. Ban me; make me rare and grained
with life and death. The instant I make sense,
skin and bind me as a book. Plant my words
in terraced rows. Sentence me to florid prose.

Monday, April 29, 2013

NaPoWriMo 2013, # 29: In My Head


The cosmographer in my head sings numbers to the stars.
In his singing, stars are multiplied like gifted offspring
who sing of father and of farther as the same sad thing.
The many rooms I think are vast. They hold more corners
than geometry allows. They are inhabited by shadows
of balletic grace and cast. Those shadows eat both dark
and light, and all the meatless weight of what I mean.
The year is young. It slides its way through you and me
as if it had somewhere to go. It hatches eggs like moons.
Kill the tyrant in his shell, says Shakespeare. I flail my arms
and oceans come. Avoid the land: its only fish are dead.
Let April be the coffin nail, let May the sail. My eye fell out;
now all seems glowing. What I broadcast is a seed and grows. 

Sunday, April 28, 2013

NaPoWriMo 2013, # 28: Fries


- for Mike

When I was young and hungry I married my waitress.
She brought me French fries. I hadn’t ordered French fries.
She ate two or three on the way, sat down, propped her chin
with one hand and stole more fries I hadn’t ordered with the other.
I hate French fries. We got married. It was a beautiful,
it was an amazing life for a few years, a lot of years. Then,
she got the you-know-what. Cancer; she got cancer.
She died? Yeah, she died. We were married. French fries.
She ate my fries and I was in love like you wouldn’t gather.

Friday, April 26, 2013

NaPoWriMo 2013, # 26: In a Simple World


In a simple world, Mr. would marry Ms. Universe
and she’d give birth to a little earth. Handsome
as a square, beautiful as a circle, the two would be
God in duplicate, Omnipotence, Inc., no absconditum deos
but true-blue parents tending our every days, our heres
and nows, our overs and agains: jewelers honing
our genetic facets, engineers tuning our mechanical facts.
Hell’s harms would only seem eternal, a time-out
timed to make us think; heaven would be when it ended
and our loving parents folded us in their infinite arms.  

NaPoWriMo 2013, # 25: Meditation


The leaves of the cottonwood applaud.
The theatre of the world takes its encore.
Day after day keeps coming back.
Everything’s accident. In the leaves’ sound,
answers to questions. Then the rain:
questions drown out the answers.
The rain ends, the air is calm. Stillness,
neither question nor answer. Such silence
our method; such absence, our god.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

NaPoWrimMo 2013, # 24: Thistle


The last arrogant thistle stands in my path,
its cyclopean blossom hung low and glaring;
its stem so prickly the air above tingles
and my eyes itch staring. Bullheaded
or to put it more frankly dumb as a weed,
I have been pulling its brethren all morning
bare-handed. My palms hang raw and electric
with pain, stained, splotched, proud
and done: they refuse to take this one.
I leap it nimbly on my way inside. 

NaPoWriMo 2013, # 23: Mosh Pit


We go down to the Chamber Music Festival,
we get a mosh pit going, me and my friend
and some ace who claims his name is Mauler:
a three-way smash, set to a Schubert quartet.

Monday, April 22, 2013

NaPoWriMo 2103, # 22: Turtles


- for Robert McBrearty

Has anyone told the turtles it’s turtles all the way down?
It must take every turtle ever born, and most of the tortoises
and terrapins as well, to make it all the way down;
it must be cramped and dark the further down one goes,
down and down, to that First Turtle, the Unmoved Turtle,
who must be huge and old and strong. Has he ever seen
the bewildering, tragic, wondrous world he helps hold up?
And yes, of course: what the hell, if there is or even
if there isn’t a Hell, is that Chelonian geezer standing on
himself? He must be where the Champion Counter,
the most stubborn skeptic in all of human history
up to now, simply gave up counting. It’s just
that no one has yet checked under Turtle Number One
to see that in fact he (more likely she, I feel)
is standing on another turtle. I have worked in offices
and warehouses and restaurants and other places –
I’ve had lots of jobs, probably like you – where
there was practically always some mean old geezer
who seemed to have been there forever; he
(it was usually a he) seemed to know everything,
was cranky as hell, not smart and not exactly dumb,
and was, you might say, something like the Hedgehog
and the Fox, together: he knew about a gazillion
little things, like the Fox, but also the One Big Thing,
at least as far as restaurants/warehouses/offices
were concerned. Usually, though, it was just the biggest
of the many little things: “NEVER push that button there,
for ANY reason!!” for example – and  he would usually
pull out the Big Thing, or one of the more arcane
Little Things, when he felt like humiliating
whoever was new. The old geezer, in other words,
was a Huge Asshole – sort of like Yahweh; but
he generally knew more than the Manager,
even more than the Owner (who was rarely around),
so he was never let go. It is, I think, good exercise
to imagine, or at least try to imagine, the geezer
when he was young; to picture him arriving there
in the office/restaurant/warehouse, shy, tentative,
even afraid, certainly humble; and while we’re at it
let’s say his life was full of promise as well;
picture him there, a skinny kid, bad skin, greasy hair;
he knows little about the world, and nothing
about the New World he’s stumbled into.
But some old guy, The First Turtle minus one,
is there to teach the youngster; and let’s say at that point
in the history of the world, or at least the history
of suck-ass jobs, everyone was doing his part equally,
and no one was standing on anyone else’s back.