Refuse/d words built into infinite forms of bodies. This collection is unedited; done in one sitting; sometimes daily, frequently infrequent.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

(untitled)

Anemone in the space
between stones is a
soft wound.  Creature
like fingertips feeling,
a wonder in the deep green.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Anniversaries--- Anni Year and versus To Turn


The same Date every year
Is not the same date every year.
Babies, lovers, ghosts
I lose track of each date
you meant something to me
or corrupted sense
or disrupted control.

Each signal day
allows you an hour of
concentration-a wide
yawn of remembrance
an almost return trip
through time.  Really,
my dripping saints,
I wait on these name days,
I whisper.

plant lore


Beneath diseased hemlocks
the soil is soot
and laying down fence planks,
we have a home.

Within the gabled
green we speak
like children
and truth drips inevitably
in play.

When the rain comes
it’s a fog first beneath
the trees, not quite a roof
but a root protection
a wet breaker of the wind. 

Friday, December 24, 2010

(untitled)


My compulsion is to write everything down.
Sometimes I write furiously
And then ignore the passage,
Destroy the passage.

The idea of people scribbled
Cheapens
The people I love
Thriving like angels within me always
One of many phenomena that defy
Description.  

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Origin myth, part I.


The first village is moving
and we eat with gnashing teeth
The lion’s leftovers. 

When the snows come,
we peek out from earthen caves
at the wonderment of land.
Our necks become thick
and we warm the winter air
as we suck in breathing.

We begin to notice one another
and wish we didn’t die so soon.
Feeling absence like the heavy dark
we mourn before sweet-smelling fires
And send our friends to bed
with smoke and flowers.

Days change in the infinite deserts,
and we leave footprints in the sound mud.
Starving together, we organize ourselves
because children hold us accountable
in our teaching.  Sometimes valleys
catch us like a river bends catching sand
and we settle.   Wherever we are, we live
in the perpetual movements of collection
and ingestion.  And we thrive through long
suffering and conversations with the broad sky.
We carve and paint with our mouths,
make pictures in our likeness, victorious.
We remember stories, because the steep dark,
the monument of time, is terrifying.

Spreading across continents
The challenges are slow and the
Solutions are spread out over generations.
In this process we are made human-
The one, long memory shared, folded
one life into the other, speaking like ghosts,
like companions.  Each art is the conversation
we have with ourselves, the future, and the past.
We make a continuous river out of colored cloth,
out of poems and pictures, out of necessity. 

We become many, and the challenges become greater.
The fires flare hot, and the slow burn of learning is left
to warm the lonely and the patient.   

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Everything is based on a true story.


Someone who expresses
Never can suppress
The severence between people
The profound binding
Of bodies. 

I am stained like everyone
With richness
With pictures and panic
A fleeting idea
Hope and sureness

And these memories
And histories are the rubber
Faced stamps of writing machinery
The wet swath of paint brush
The blueness of conversation,
Even if all names have been changed.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Men I don't know, part III.


Jack survived off secrets strangulation And died when he fell off a ladder in California, painting the sides of a church seeking forgiveness in hand-strokes I do not forgive you  All over the American west running group homes A teacher Rape is a four letter word in certain vocabularies of incest Did you know time keeps track Burdens of family, the circus tent of children And now your son deconstructs himself daily What did they learn Teaching how to grow their own vegetables, wards of state And the barren landscapes of desert limit hope in the harvest Digress grandfather I hope eight years in prison broke you Your forgiveness the sultry stain of fear Know my children won’t know your name They won’t paint the sides of churches Strokes of foregiveness Teaching family secrets and surviving A circular circus Saving him Silent and forgiving Silence in circular seeking.  

able-body


My body is limitless
the curvature of female.
My body is sanctified
by all the hopes of childhood.
My body is a tune
a true turning of a phrase.
My body is favored
and forgotten
felt up, and imagined.
My body is freedom
and convention,
a singularity composed
of each Body before mine. 
My body is my land
my harvest and sickness
the peril, the poverty
the treason and judgment.
My body is a coffin,
My body is a home
My body sets a curfew
for the children of my soul.
My body lends me time
and takes it steadily away.
My body offers answers,
it calibrates the days.
My body is my safety
within the boundless noise.
My body is my person
My person is my choice.
My body arranges meetings
it flounders and it thrives.
It reports with intuition
with sweat, and aches and sighs.
My body is a god of feeling
and demands I take my time
so that every walk through turpid city
becomes a prayer of grime.
And when it comes time to rot and wane
my body will be with me
pulling, tugging, pleading and bleeding
Until I exit time.



Hot ale

Beneath the purple wood of the bar,
greased by so many seeping hands,
Are one pair of boots after another,
heavy heeled and sleeping.
Youth is rubbed down in the yard,
the gleam of wide-mouthed glasses
mimics young men
and creates the shape of their death.
Their likeness is amber foam.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

(untitled)


When the women go to the island
to prepare for the olives,
the pulp of the house is taken out.

Grandfather and the boys are left
to their own devices, tinkering
in the laundry room
and staring into the pale cool
of the refridgerator.

None of the usual rooms
are curved, a catching spot.
The chairs are empty and the clock
ticks in the hallway.  The streets are
suddenly filled with strangers
and the market does not sell
the usual things.

When the women return,
everyone casually smokes cigarettes
and drinks coffee in the kitchen,
laughing as if the last week had
been a welcome pause. 

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

progeny


You have your own methods of survival:
Nice suits
Clean bathrooms
Hidden, licensed handguns.
A litany of human resume.
Proofs, zip-locked evidences
Of normality.

You are afraid you are not fit
And that the imperfection
Will be bred out
In the next generation.

Bleed out,
Once.
Rescind your request for forever.
Sidle into sun
Bake in the short day.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Customs


When I come back to America,
I am on a high for a day
Before I settle back in.

This high is fantastic:
I am defined and feel
With intensity my youth.

After that, nothing tastes good,
I lose my appetite completely for food
For fantasy, for anything electric.

I make a list of the ways I can
Adapt the culture of the house
To keep me feeling present

But I can only affect myself
And I know I will have
No company to buy into my cross-breed.

Nowadays, lands of opportunity
Are those that limit-
Places we can challenge.

Containment
Makes the frontier
Turn inward.
A universe that sits down
To breakfast
Hungry.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Men I don't know, part II.


Senad’s father died after he came and had a drink with his son What is the appropriate way to die He told two jokes then went home, and he was tired so he slept Away he goes into dreamland In sleeping, he died and the story is so simple and complete that I mourn Senad with green eyes smoking beneath the eaves Jelena thinks that she loved Senad’s father more than Senad He was so charming Decide what is important, charm and joke-telling Senad is the shape of a man, when he drives he is sure on the narrow streets Bosnian humor Value the joke-tellers, the charmers He came to have a drink with his son, at the bar Senad works The phone rang once One drink after playing hockey a slow sweat left-over exertion A lifetime of driving around in beat up cars, the old forests, sheep herders, fresh bread from the bakery, just sitting, cigarettes and coffee is enough and he drinks a beer, tells two jokes, and goes home and goes to sleep The most peaceful and appropriate Senad’s father goes to sleep after two jokes and dies What would a perfect death be But with two jokes and his son, one drink and sleep.   

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Out of Office Reply

I have been slacking on my entries and now I will be in Croatia for several days, but I Promise I will catch up on all my wordage, worthwhile and otherwise.  Thanks for reading.