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

Sunday, December 16, 2012

life longing


red and uncovered skin,
winter-stained
his face is the skin steppe of his life,
the ground upon which
the sun has stretched and set.

Hollowed out by wind
and work, he is the bulkhead
of a freight ship
with its heaving glide
through infinite arctic pools. 

Saturday, November 17, 2012

second person


Religion is routine,
Bringing gods into your apartment.
Their shadow forms dance on the walls
While you sweep and mop,
While you clean urine off the toilet seat.

These gods follow you and chatter
Like children, they play tricks on you.
They are good, troublesome company
Knocking pens off the desk,
Fidgeting with costume jewelry left out.
They pull the cat’s tail,
They make the trash smell sour.

These gods understand
the helpless; the absurd and ridiculous.
They vaporize and inhabit us
Joyfully. They are
cryptic, and spindly-handsome
they eat mood, and lick dreams.
They are frightened at the movies
And weep at funerals, for
Only they know how final
Death is. Gods don’t have voices,
But make creature-sounds.
They are at home always,
Travelers constant, thieving, and
Generous with stories.
They fly, they manipulate physics.
Gods know the similarities between
Science and poems and necessity,
They don’t need to read, or think,
Because their bodies are their mind’s eye.
Gods ransack confidence, add disease,
Pockmark our abilities, so that we see
Our selves. They are tiresome,
they make us brood. We benefit slowly,
with bitterness in our mouths.

But eventually, rescinding our
slavery to pretense, we appreciate
gods. They are not solemn: their noise
is constant, their fingers reflecting ours,
playing skittish, brazen, haunting games.




Thursday, November 8, 2012

boatman (Ori Gersht)

On still film,
the boatman is suspended;
banished and paddled
into the bareness of alone.

the deep richness of gray
painting him human
like the whole layering
of the world. And beneath-
the meaning, the endlessness
of meaning in his reflected body;
him, himself existing, doubled, the doubling
of this place and previous place
a hall of mirrors, infinite.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

No room to paint in.

crushing charcoal against paper
the slide of acrylic in plastic colors
pastels wetted and widened
shaping and shaping,
scraping and cleaning,
the adding and subtracting
of art is like breathing,
like seeing,
knowing the value
of fog, the thick moisture
of memory and touch,
a translated text
heard in its first language.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

fish bowl poetry II.

The scare-crow is strung up,
sullen in the bled field.
He is bruise-packed; soaked and seed-shedding
in the wet, tangerine night.

The rain runs down fence posts,
and collects in the road.  The dog
sleeps on the covered porch;
somewhere, the cat listens.

The grass around the driveway
has grayed and bends low,
The tractor like a tin drum.

A torn, disintegrating tarp
in the rafters of the barn
moves in the wind.

The children have left
little things:
buttons, a thimble, bread crust, rust pennies
in the scare-crow's pocket,
the keeper wordless
of the un-bound earth.

fish bowl poetry I.

Cupid prayed!
          -ugly and round like a trampled peach-
that love would come his way.
          After so many affairs started-or ended-by his arrows
Cupid had created a confrontational love-world, little islands
          of doubt and playfulness.
Cupid hoped, bursting from the window into his new life,
          that owning himself would be sweet and selfish.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

s p l i n t e r i n g t h i n k i n g


why do I feel dead; or a hundred
people at once,

a hundred stories
and a hundred feelings.

did I already live?
A hundred years ago,
with white hairs like thoughts silvering
and thinning and burying themselves beneath
a heaving and sheltering earth.

Monday, September 10, 2012

welcome, autumn.

binded black-tied
into friday night
I gallop in streetlights
like the cooled sun
sunk into the folds
of my coat and seeping
skin deep
until I am night-warmed.




Saturday, July 14, 2012

VI.


I do not want certain things:

I do not want the sharp shapes of sick, of dying, diagnose me.

I do not want leaving, and being left be at the center of me.

I do not want all the bitternesses, the second guesses, the stone
            of experience without post-script consuming me.

I do not want to want calm without clarity,
            the city beneath the soft salve and slavish haze.

I want to lay in a whole chapter, a word-hoard of sense.

I want a sifting, a picking and choosing of sound or soundlessness.

I want my sameness, I want some sweet alienation-
            enough to make moonscapes out of leftover moon rocks.

I want a language that ripens in my lifetime and hums in my family’s throat.

I want to see everything, over again, first, last, and future.

I want all the suicides of a day, the syncopation of thinking, 
                      the fullness of arriving.


Thursday, July 12, 2012

V.

Our ship
           slides warm and wasted
into the sea.
           Now, a new hovel built
by mud scratchings and the whip cold
           keeps us here, howling;
kept and waiting tongueless
           in the tangle-land.

Monday, June 4, 2012

IV.


By the pool,
With the meat of cherries
And chlorine in my mouth,
Skin sun-plastered
And young, impatient
My fortune of memory
And fable future
Suspending me
Still, safe,
the anxiety of new.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

III.

The breeze
is earthen and smells
like camomile-
those flowers
yellow, dried, and seeped
into waiting throats,
desperate for home
lacquered in honey
and bitten in lemon aids.

II.

wound clouds,
scraps of drift storm
move like beasts
across a graphite plain.

Over the city they migrate
the disentangled motion
allowed to the sky.

And myself,
the city, slick river,
cars, sick grass
crumbs of glass:
all nonsense,
all gone in an instant.

Friday, January 6, 2012

I.


The truss spanning-
a sweet bridge
Over silent water pooling
The sanguine river locked up;
Rioting, sleeping, in the deep winter.