Beat

Not so well thought out. Tough day.
Epic Man
Rock wall on your left, river on your right
Right hand full of vitamins, your jumbo
Coffee in your left. Rolling down the highway,
Steering with your knees, oh, Epic Man.
You may call me a train wreck,
But my broken scrap is going for more than your
BMW in this market. Epic Man wants to show me
Everything I've missed. I'd be raking it in,
Hand over fist. A romance for the ages.
I'd be in a granite castle now if I'd stuck with you.

Image: From a really nice website about the gardens in Albi.

Mission of Burma

Today's prompt from NaPoWriMo is to write a Burma Shave poem. This is handily done from my phone and a good thing too, because the pay work is hell.

Contract Vehicle
"This plane's the bomb--
"You're dyin' to try it!"
I write these ads
But who will buy it?

Image: Me. Not making someone else do the work for a change.

Safety Is Joy

Encryption
They’re putting up a new tomb across the street;
It’s bigger than mine. They all are, these days. Good times!
Say the bearded boys as they clink their beer mugs.

While I can’t decipher the surveyors’ neon calligraphy on the streets
I do get the writing on the wall. It’s more than 10 feet tall.
One of those new pharaohs. He’d like to get us in there
But only if we make the cut. Bless his munificence;
He’s given the bums a new place to piss.

Old men, idling, speculate--
Guess how much bone is in each brick,
How many eyes wired into the walls.

For us women, it’s just another hazard.
A place to catch a heel, or bump your baby awake.
When it’s standing tall, and when it falls to ruin,
It’s all the same. It's another place to hide us.

Image: St. Cecilia, Albi cathedral

Jamalot

So I had in mind to write a country song. Maybe, if your country is Westeros. Verse, chorus, ran out of time. Back to worky work at the jobby job.

Fall
Building a castle to keep your sins
Stacking the bricks in the wall
Scaling your way to a lofty perch
You've only got farther to fall

Mighty and high is the rampart view
Keeping an eye on us all
But the number of backs that you climb upon
Are the number of miles you will crawl--
You've only got farther to fall.

Sufficient Unto The Day Is The Evil Thereof

Really sick today. Need some of the above. Left work early, and I don't know how I'll finish up. But I am keeping to my one-a-day pledge. Where are my priorities? How dare I write poems when I should be working for the Man. And if I have any time left, I should be serving someone. Who do I think I am?

But the truth is, poems are short, and this took about 10 minutes and likely shows it. I took the first words down the page of a book by the bed and shuffled them around.

I started writing poems instead of fiction because they're short. I could write them on scraps or on my phone while my child was playing, and no one would be the wiser. I hardly ever rewrite or revise, and I usually take about 10 or 20 minutes to write anything. Part of this is being an impatient, careless person, and part of it is having only scraps of time to work with. There are a lot of us in the same boat.

Tonic
Bordering the island, we made fast the preserve,
While eight gazed in such short formation,
Mobile but straight on this side. From
The deserted city to the cold brook wheel,
Gone, run down the blue winter road.

Image: Culpepper. British and from the wrong century, but rights-free.

Past These Mountains And To Seaward I Am Called

Warning: In days of old when knights were bold they had some filthy language. If that troubles you, the poem below just might be best avoided.

Me, I'm just going to watch the Blogger analytics hit the sky and tell myself it's all thanks to my irresistible poetry.

Courtly love was not much of either, but it sounds like it could have been fun. Here's a link to a lot of poetry about courtly love in English translation. Another thing the Albigensian Crusade did was put the clampdown on this whole elaborately drawn out system of fun and games. F the PoPo!

Denial Being So Fully In Your Fashion
Denial being so fully in your fashion--
It's the only way a woman's given
To direct and deflect the winds that push her--
I won't turn against the trending here.
If all say to close my ears to all entreaties (but their own to attend),
And I say this pierces my heart, but I am told
How it should not, and that I must improve my understanding
And feed not pity (but bring the dish to them), nor see your eyes that want,
Rebellion won't serve me, nor pass a glass to you.
Let's tie our hands ourselves and save them the trouble.
I will teach you as I have been taught. Repeat:
You do not want this. You do not want this.

Below is by Guilhen de Peiteu He was quite the Drama King. As the name indicates, he was from Poitiers, but he did a land grab on Toulouse and was himself a crusader. Lots of troubles with the women. Ezra Pound, that asshat, liked him.

Comrades, I have had so many bad receptions
that I cannot do without singing and grieving about it;
however, I don't want people to know my business in many things.

And I shall tell you my opinion about this:
I don't like a warded cunt nor a pond without fish,
nor boasting of base men, as if there weren't records of their actions.

Lord God, who are refuge and king of the world,
why didn't the first cunt-warden drop dead?
Because there never was service, or watch, worse than that.

Therefore shall I tell you the Law of the Cunt,
as a man who's done badly and has been repaid worse:
if other things dwindle when you take of them, the cunt grows.

And he who will not believe my teachings,
let him go see by the wood, in a reservation:
for each tree people fell, two or three grow.

And when the wood is cut, it grows back thicker
and the owner doesn't miss his profit, nor his income:
one complains wrongly about the loss, if no harm is done.

It is wrong to complain about the loss, if no harm is done.

Image: Courtney Love photographed by Paola Kudacki for the Fall 2013 Garage magazine. Yes, that's her today.

Secret Supper

I'm so demanding. I want to know everything.

Interrogatio
He said: Ask me anything. Ask me
Who will betray me. Ask me
How good he used to have it,
And how he liked those fancy clothes.
Ask everyone how much they owe me.
No, him, him too: Ask him how much.
Ask him what he does when he has no hope.
Ask him what he thinks he's doing,
Turning everyone against me. Ask me
Where he went after I threw him out.

He went off and he built himself
A whole wide world, and through
All that time, no one
Asked any questions.

Then I asked him why people
Talk the way they do, telling
No account stories. And why they act
The way they do. And I asked
How long this would go on,
And what it would be like.
I asked him why people believe
All those lies, and why they won't believe
What he says. And then I asked him
If love is always like that,
And I asked him when all this
Was going to be over.


Image: Can't track the sucker's source down, sorry.

My Heart Is Cold

Not a good day, health wise. Not a lot left. Still a lot of paying work to do.

I am babysitting two girls who just made up a poem over their pizza:

My heart is cold
Because I left it in the refrigerator
I'll heat it up
And eat it later.

I would like to claim it for my own, but that is not the poem of the day. The NaPoWriMo prompt is a lune. I hate lunes.

Little Ice Age
In the warm
Years, the wheat grew tall.
So did shadows.

Image: I have no idea where it came from or if it's even real. I liked the stars.

Let's Hear It For The Heretics!

Most think of troubadour lyrics and imagine songs of love, but political satire, or sirventes, were also popular. This might have had something to do with the troubles.

Routiers
I'm not qualified to talk
Of our Emperor's mighty forces
But I'll give it a try. He drives such
Droves before him, and with such
Eagerness they go, that they are often
Several counties ahead, while he surveys,
With the eyes of eagles, from a vantage
Sometime thousands of miles away.
Overlooking their homes, their children
Who turn the dirt and throw stones,
In eager practice for the day,
If they live to see it, that they
Might join the next crusade.
And know he keeps his forces
In fighting trim; no fat duck,
No boar, no honey for them. Our Emperor
Reserves these to his table,
Thus preserving the sharpness
Of their palates for blood in battle.
The wisdom of Our Emperor is clear:
Just look at the numbers that advance him!
See them teeming forth in such abundance
That it goes unnoticed when some fall,
Drunk, trampled in the roads, or fall
Mad with fever or the flux, or fall
Upon their fellows with their knives,
Premature to war, and kill their own,
Or adorn the trees at the end of a rope,
Or scatter their bones on the mountain crags.
Nevertheless! Their remnant marches strong!


The Song of the Cathar Wars is a puzzle in itself. The epic (written in Occitan in Alexandrines) detailing the conflicts of the era has two distinct authors. The first third is attributed to William of Tuleda, who took the point of view of the Crusaders and the Pope, a prudent if still contemptible choice. Then, two-thirds through, an anonymous author hijacks the manuscript and turns it around, and the rest of the story is told from the point of view of an author sympathetic to the people of the region invaded.

You can see how this chunk of the Songs (trans. Jan Shirley and posted on the amazing Midi-France website) does that turnaround even within itself. It tells of the death and remembrance of Simon de Montfort, the crusade leader whose actions included burning 140 people at the stake. It refers to his original tomb in the Carcassonne, where up to 20,000 people were slaughtered.

"The epitaph says, for those who can read it,
That he is a saint and martyr who shall breathe again
And shall in wondrous joy inherit and flourish
And wear a crown and sit on a heavenly throne.
And I have heard it said that this must be so -
If by killing men and spilling blood,
By wasting souls, and preaching murder,
By following evil counsel, and raising fires,
By ruining noblemen and besmirching paratge,
By pillaging the country, and by exalting Pride,
By stoking up wickedness and stifling good,
By massacring women and their infants,
A man can win Jesus in this world,
Then Simon surely wears a crown, resplendent in heaven."

Image: Discontinued, but I bet you could get it on eBay.

Nice Red Uniforms

The Language of No
I'm standing in the square
And I'm thinking, there must be a way
I can game this.
Even a child knows what they want to hear.
Even a child knows that old trick, too:
If you just tell the truth
You won't be punished. If yes,
Then penance. If no, penance,
And where is your brother.
Advance to the second round.
No child can point and say
Look, he has no clothes--
This time, they have stripped us.
This time, the square is smaller
And the sky is the top of a box,
Coming down. If yes, death.
If no, death, and where
Is your sister. The sky
Is a stone slab.


The Albigensian Crusade saw the development of the systematized, capital-I Inquisition, with sets of rules that could be applied broadly and were designed to ensure any action on the part of the accused or not accused would be a losing move, and the Inquisitor would always win. The invaders first came in and asked for simple public confessions of heresy; if you confessed, you would receive a minor punishment, but the punishment for a second offense was death, and refusal to confess as well as refusal to implicate others was an offense. Pwnd!

And it was all, of course, quite unexpected!

Will leave you with a found poem of sorts, from the translator Jan Shirley, also apparently the only translator into English of the Song of the Cathar Wars, a poem with a whole backstory in its own right. Maybe tomorrow. This is from "The Inquisitors Guide," written by a professional inquisitor, Bernard Gui, who plied his trade about 100 years after the crusade.

"There are some among them,
As fraudulent as they are cunning,
Who in order to mask
The truth and conceal themselves
And their accomplices
So that their error and falsity
Are not discovered, give ambiguous
Or obscure answers, reply
In a general and confused way,
So that no clear truth can be gathered
From what they say. For this reason
The inquisitor must use energy and skill.
People like this can and must be forced,
Compelled, to respond
Clearly and to say
Exactly what their answers mean."

Image: Wiki Commons, Expulsion of the Albigensians from Carcassone in 1209. Image taken from Grandes Chroniques de France.

Well, I'll Be Damned.

I'm STILL pissed about the Albigensian Crusade.

Albi
Brick is the characteristic material
Of the bishopric. They stacked that shithouse
High and millions strong,
The buttresses submerged in its mass.
Every effigy he could order
Stood up like fence posts against the walls,
But dig as you might, the Tarn won't
Shake loose one useful stone for your purposes.
Lots of jobs in erecting that fortress,
And still no shortage of fortresses
To storm. But you know,
He couldn't get anyone in to paint it.
Had to send pretty far afield
For the anonymous masters to conjure up
The torture scenes for the walls.
These parts had seen enough of that.

Poor Cecilia, sweet fake saint;
They say the stroke of the sword
To your neck birthed harmony.
What a laugh, your castle, what a big
Joke! 8 million bricks, and it's not over yet.

Here is the song she sang for her supper:
She would meet the angel in secret,
At night, on the road, meet him
At the third milestone, but she will not wed.

The inquisitor clicks his castanets.
You're like every daughter
Of this county; he will have you
Sing for him too.

Image: Albi Cathedral, Wiki Commons. Big boy, huh?

Time Is A Flat Tire

What happens is I can either lie in bed from 4 a.m. until 6 a.m. thinking about how my prick boss and half the drivers on the Beltway treat me like I'm a paper bag full of old lady germs and cataloging my health problems and insurance bills, or I can write a poem every day of the month of April as part of NaPoWriMo.
It's a ritual. A big, bad, fuck you ritual that ranks somewhere above sitting at my cubicle whistling the merry CeLo song and somewhere below quitting.
All respect, I do love you guys. PJ sez: you're not rid of me. All it ever takes is one word of encouragement. Let us hope that one word is not "regret."
I was going to say, there's nothing stopping you, too, from participating in this ritual, but that's presumptuous of me. For all I know, you could be trapped in an abandoned subway tunnel wearing a Cthulhu hat. But there's the link, if you wanna.
I'm not sure if I can do it. My brain is not functioning like a product of the divine clockmaker these days.
But I'm still running. Whenever I can get the aforementioned motherfucker to stop piling the work on, or when it's not as cold as Appalachia up in here.
Somewhat anticlimactic, no? You were hoping for something more cosmic horror? Next time.
Image: True Det, Bro.

Lion, Lamb; Farmer, Cowhand; Me, Gnostic Overlords

I haven't wanted to write much of anything for more than a year now, ever since I went to this editorial speed dating event sponsored by a literary magazine and one of the editors, a young woman, told me rhetorical questions in poetry are passive-aggressive and another editor, an older woman, told me how wonderful it is that I have "an outlet."

I get discouraged terribly easily. I was conceived unwanted, and things have improved only slightly since.

So I pretty much stopped everything. I've been thinking of telling various people and crying and such over the loss of writing but I just stop and think, you know, nobody gives a shit whether I'm writing or not. This is just something I'll have to try to accept with grace.

This morning I was lying in bed playing with my phone and I visited the Bibliomancy Oracle, an oracle device that uses lines from poetry, and this came up: "Do you relate more to the dove or the snake?" from the poem Form by Louise Mathias.

I thought: "Oh lord, neither," and then the rest of this poem happened. I've been obsessed for years with wondering whether the universe wants me to do any one thing or another, and it is pretty obvious that the universe does not want me to write poems, because as I was writing my daughter's shower caddy fell off the wall and my husband came in looking annoyed that I was still lying around in bed, and someone I'd been having an email dispute with buzzed me. I am also kind of an awful person (but not for any of the reasons my resentful stalkers think). But this still happened. Passive aggressive rhetorical questions, BAM!

The Dove or the Snake?
Oh lord, neither. They say they were once
The same thing, anyway. Every last animal
Presents an imperative: I will be here.
And I have no such thing, no such
Thing. I must excuse myself
For every fraction of an inch
My ribs rise with every breath.
The birds take everything:
I tell the pigeons in the parking garage,
Shitting on my grocery bags,
You do not belong here,
These are not your caves,
And the swallow flittering, scattering his lice
Above the salad bar at the Whole Foods:
Will no one put him out?
Must everything poison me?
As for the snake, agonizing over his skin,
Oh snake, nobody cares what you wear,
Nobody cares what you look like or
Whether you even show up.
Maybe a boy will poke at that
Yellowed translucence you shed,
Because children aren't afraid
Of garbage, what gets left behind.
We don't see that they've stopped
To examine it, and that shames us,
Both their license at picking at it
And the way that we walked on,
Talking, and almost lost them, again.

Here's the full Matthias poem.
Image: I stole this from an evangelical site. I don't understand why all the references to a verse about "sheep among wolves" are illustrated by pictures of a wolfj among sheep.

Dazu, Bless You

I like watching people I love when they're asleep.
Does that sound creepy?
Don't answer that.

The Sleeping Buddha
Such envy the pale segments,
Those eyelids, inspire,
Such peace, little slices
Into the dark and day, what they
Shut us away from, your dear dreams.
Would I were there in those waves,
Sweet sleeping one, how I would
Venture. Your serene lips, lids, closing
Me from your visions. Where do you fly,
Sweet baby, so late all my own?
What tugs the edges of the skin at your eyes,
Your mouth (I helped form them),
What happiness am I outside of?
All this about you is only mine
To marvel over this night.

Cargo Cult

I've become one of those people. The kind with a zombie blog.
Hello Russian women. Put on a balaclava and we'll meet secretly at the airport.

On the Box
After you drowned, your life
Was magical for a while, wasn't it?
Sexy portents, synchs, a couple
Of events some called miracles came
Easy as every breath. I could swear
I even heard a soundtrack. I know,
I was there, front row at the luau,
Picked from the tourist audience
For the cultural exchange demonstration.

Now it's all back to daily fucking bread.
And the chief, drunk on washed-up hooch,
Doesn't always remember to throw
Even that much out on the rocks for us.

You won't be happy until it happens again.
So you stack up your scavenged crates
And climb to the top and stand there.
All your calculations say
The big wave, it's on its way.

Photo: Poor, but Kathleen on the head of Shiva from the 1976 The Last Tycoon.

Paging Dr. Zhivago

Blogspot gives you all kinds of baby analytics now when you just push a button. They're apparently just wild about me in Russia. Hi, girls--you're cute! Wanna get gay married?

Unbidden
Determined to run even
A ridiculous slight distance,
And here it is: An argument
Conjured out of mud and shuffle and breath:
Poetry. Proving the mystery of art
(And love) mechanical, after all:
Insert the right amount of change
And that weird candy bar,
(Laced with synthetic vitamins and essential acids)
The kind they can't sell anywhere else,
Pops out.

Queen Bees Knees

Taken almost three months to get through Kathleen Spivack's "With Robert Lowell and His Circle." It's just a thin thread keeping me attached to somewhere besides work bed work bed work. The book is terribly in need of an editor; full of redundancies and cliches next to astounding observations. And hilariously funny in many parts. I love it; you should read it.

Despite an acutely rendered scene of afternoon tea with Mr. and Mrs. Hughes (the big dark brooder stuffed himself with tea cookies and the two carrying on a muffled Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-ian vaudeville), she's one of the few who has some sympathy for Sylvia Plath. Here's one of those artless and absolutely on-target observations: "Sylvia had no sense of humor. Ever!" That's about the size of it.

You know what Spivack gets here, she gets the money thing. She gets that Sexton used her grant to put in a swimming pool and that she caught a lot of crap for it, but that swimming pool probably did more good to more writers and artists than any fucking Intensive Program. I'd do it if anyone ever gave me a dime, which they don't, and I'd call it the Sexton Memorial Pool besides. She gets the money thing:

"According to Anne Sexton, Sylvia was paid $50 by her publishers as an advance for her first book, The Colossus. But follwing her death, several publishers advanced prospective biographers more than $20,000 each, an unheard-of sum of money in those days. So suicide increased Sylvia's worth, much as she could have used the money in her lifetime."

She gets the exhaustion, too. At a certain point, you'd just do it to get some sleep.

Golden
say what you will about her making her own bed
and making her own bread and lying
how she was so mean she wouldn't get stung
by her own bees when she yanked their honey
right out from under their bobbling asses.
she sure could have used that money.
i will tell you that money damn well does
serve to keep a woman alive in winter
with the diapers and the rashes and
her head full of pus. that money,
once, it meant coming home with her hair
fresh golded and twined goddess and
yes, he'll see me, he'll see, he'll see,
crossing paths with him, and that
as much as you'd like to say poems
and clean living and keeping an even
keel and as mad as it makes you to be
above it all like they tell you you should
even when you're on that floor that will
never come clean and as ashamed as it makes you
to admit it damn you new clothes and
smooth hair and money yes the money
yes the money would have kept her alive,
liar, it would have taken nothing more,
and that fact doesn't make her less.

Image: God knows. Her father was a bee expert, you know; she raised her own honey.

Sweet Baby Jesus, It's The Sort Of Annual Charity Poetry Contest Again

My mom sent me a check for the holidays, so I'm doing the charity poetry contest again. Here's how it works: You put a poem in the comments section. For every poem, I put $5 in the hat. When it's Dec. 25 or I run out of money, whichever comes first, the contest is over. I decide the best poem. The winning poet gets to decide what charity the money goes to.

Here's mine, and it just might win. So there.

Tantrum
Why didn't I get the shining snake?
Why didn't I get the sweet call, what's wrong?
I got the pencil stub, the vending machine crackers
Settling in my root chakra. My stomp
Sounds like why. Why. I didn't work
Enough, I didn't stand up, turn my back,
Raise my hand, just stop working.
Dance. The gun's always aimed at the dirt
At my feet, not at my feet, you know it,
I know it, why fight it, why ask?
I didn't spend enough time with cold hands
In cold spidery rooms, I spent too much time scratching,
I spent too much. I didn't buy the right presents.
I was breathing way, way, way wrong, you know,
Yes, no, I don't know where I went
Wrong. Nodding. It was that night
I drove home and in that overturned bowl of stars
The road dipped under, my hands reached up
And knocked at the sky, smacked, banged
At the sky, shouting, let me in, me, me, let me in!

Photo: Still from an animated student film from Newcastle University of The Little Match Girl, by Lulu Su and Yajing Cai. Isn't it like the most horrifying story? Especially when she just says fuck it and burns them all.

I Immediately Fell For The Wicked Queen

Watched "Snow White and the Huntsman" with DD the other night. Charlize Theron is great and Ian McShane is a dwarf! I got to wondering about the backstory on the mirror.

The Magic Mirror

The true treasure of our kingdom, they all called it,
My flawless honesty, and didn't they realize
I'd know their admiration was a lie? It was a birth gift
Doled out by a bitch of a godmother, double-edged--
It was the closest thing those women could do to fighting,
Of course, throw a curse in the guise of a blessing:
She will be untouchably beautiful, she will be above
All others all her life, he will understand the true meaning of riches,
That sort of thing. He will be ever-honest, that was mine.
Drove a few tutors mad and two wives away. Then the new queen
Came along, and clapped my spirit under glass. Gave me
The one gift I'd never had: He shall reflect on things
Before speaking. Her little joke. She spends most evenings
In her chambers, with me; I remember what it was like
Not to get invited out much. She'll never abandon me.
People pity me my enchantment, but I pity them
Their enslavement: I am the only one permitted
To tell her that she is not fair.

Uncertainty...

Overfull

This is not the time
For what we had once.
The vessel would crack
If we tried to fill it now,
Even with smoke.

They tell me I must let go
To let another in,
I must give something away
To receive, but you know how
Exclusion breaks my heart, no,
It's a heel trying to claim
The space that muscle of blood
Occupies, all winter long,
So stalwart, no matter the weather.

Here's a particle of hope: spin
Against the clock, and two
Can live as deeply as one. Prove that.
My thoughts attempt to coil
Around these principles,
But none my mind can master.
But no one's arms encircle me now,
At the crossroads; what I observe gives the lie
To all this. Yes, there are two
In the same space, in the same time.
But when I turn my back
They go in the same direction.
But I can't live like that.

Split

People keep comparing what's up now to the Civil War. I've been writing some stuff about the Civil War for a while now.

A Photograph of the Company

Quite altered--yes, yes, I see
You find me so, I know,
The needle and thread that draws the clothing in,
That pinches the skin. And hidden
In the folds, this image, imprinted--

The line of those once loved. Their hands raised,
As if to fling at me a sentence of exile,
Shock after shock, how many a body can bear,
I believe I know, but cannot tell – that last betrayal,
The gesture like a wind waved away my breath
And now I cannot gather myself. I am lost again.

Arms brown and pale, thick and kindling-thin,
Split rails propped and woven for a fence
That keeps them free of me. All kin,
Yes, they are kin, arms raised to keep me
From getting in. Brothers and sisters in arms.
Sky icehouse-gray, dawn or dusk,
Which is which. The treeline on the ridge.

Breaking The Fast Early

Poppy seed baked goods lend themselves to the whole contrast, spiral yin/yang thing, don't they?

Broadcast
When my finger rips the paper packet
Seeds burst out all over my hands, no matter,
You always say it's better
Scattershot. These hands, oh how I wish
These were not my hands, crabbed
And cracked, their grace a ghost.

All so tiny, so tiny, I wouldn't know where
They fall even if my eyes could make out
Where they fall. What kind of seed
Would demand a fall planting?
I'll buy the lie of freshening air,
Pretend this is a place fit to begin.

There, there, find a niche, little spill,
Frost, earth heave and crack--
They say you want to be broken like that.
It's hard to believe. In summer,
Skin-thin wrinkled petals, a fat
Sac of sap. If this works, next fall,
Your pain will be nothing and your vision
Brilliant and it will feel like it will never end.

Star Spanked Banana

I've been celebrating the anniversary of the War of 1812. When was it again?

The Foe's Haughty Host In Dread Silence Reposes

It's not that having illustrious ancestors
Turns you into a drunk. It just gives you that push.
Illustrious drunken ancestors, now that,
That'll do it. Lost, genius, dead young.

Our anthem is a song beloved of none
But delusional divas, clutching
Their way up the staff to touch free.
The tune, a gentlemen's club drinking song.
In its slumping waltz you can see
The robust arm of a tavern slut
Slinging a mug, swabbing a counter,
Milking somebody's trousers.
The words, a back-of-the-envelope scribble,
A bit and a piece from here and before,
The fruits of your inspiration
A painfully drawn out interrogation:
Can you see? Can you see?

Of course you'd never call it poetry,
But it made you feel like somebody,
Thinking that's where you came from.
A name like that, to you it's worth
Any number of beautiful, beautiful shirts.

Photo: Still from the version of Gatsby coming out this year.

Without Further Adieu

And another thing...

I was so pissed about health insurance that I had to come back and start this shit all over again.

Here's a poem about peas.

The Devil's Truck Garden
I pretend I'm idle to allow my hands
To play among the vines. By the time
You're off to the desert in August,
I'll be putting in the cold-weather
Greens. With the seasons askew,
Every damn plant is bolting and bitter
Too soon for my taste. I seem to be the only one
Who eats the peas. I'll pull them up.
Three people and a hill of beans:
An unbalanced equation. Two plane
Routes wrap the map without enough play
To meet neatly on the other side.
I'll plant seeds in the damp soil;
You, fire on the dusty rock.
You pretend I'm in Antarctica;
I'll pretend I'm not in hell.

Photo: Bogart rides his bike to work. Man up.

Dark

I'm too dumb to know how to do it, and I'm grateful to the smart people who make it so easy for any fool to publish, and no one is reading anyhow, but consider this dark.

The Beam And The Mote

This is not the way the card is meant to be interpreted. It is actually a very happy card. I am constantly accused of "seeing things the wrong way."

Four of Wands

Fukushima

It's so hard to catch my breath,
Coming over the ridge. Panting.
They say that's normal. The atmosphere.
My skin the soft, deceptive blush
Of the newly burned. Thirst eclipses all.
None of these sensations is unfamiliar.
Insert joke about finally using what
You've been trained for here.
That's what used to pass for dark humor.

Then on the bluff, towers, a colony.
The fires and floods must be behind them.
"Not waving but drowning"--?
Beckoning. From here, they look whole.
Approach the gates and you see
Robes, rags; hair, strings; eyes, blood-rimmed:
But smiles, welcoming.
They have been hungry for so long.

Down For The Count

When I lost my phone recently, it had a lot of my personal info in it, so I've been advised to abandon a lot of my online presences and emails. Hope to see you in a couple months in a safer place. Thanks for understanding!
MP

Tear The Roof Off The Sucker

I bet you never thought you'd see Spraycrete in a poem. Mwah-ha-ha.

Four Seasons Storms

We were warned to expect extreme conditions;
We decided to ignore that, and create our own.
Nature's forces executed a home invasion
In every space we tried to occupy.
One a sauna crackling with static--
It killed all connections, took out the tech.
We were racing to get to the plane to the desert
When the hurricane winds tore the roof off
Another haven, and the rains sluiced in,
For steamy weeks. Now there are mushrooms
Growing through the floor. We boarded
The life raft as the humidity rose and the chill
Spraycrete ceiling dripped stalactites. I know
It's your sweat or your spit only by its warmth.
I could stand back and admire for a while
The Pollock palimpsest the weather has made
Of the walls, or we could run for the open
Field, when the lightning strikes--Here.
They say to lie flat. I'll cover you.

Situational Awareness

The Recurring Nightmare

The forest is burning,
The street is heaving,
The plane is crashing,
The tide is rising,
Again. Very bad-cat-at-the-door,
The way it comes around, right?
Home to hack up a bit of
Undigested bone, from some poor
Creature he shouldn't have eaten.
Some petting and pills, and the house
Is quiet again. Oh, our dear fond
Fears, our familiar terrors, the threats
Any reasonable person would run from,
The typical villains on the lists,
The shades and shapes and eyes
We've been taught to watch out for--
Oh, we're ready for that.
We've been practicing our whole lives.
We put our faith in preparation.

And then, one night, on the horizon line
Snakes the long black neck and ragged
Feather form, black against the sky
That never really gets dark anymore.

Solace With Saturn

The Singing Acupuncturist keeps quoting a Browning poem to me about "love me for love's sake," part of the ongoing campaign to get me to think of myself as a spirit rather than as an object that needs to lose ten pounds and get a pedicure. Of course I'm still dwelling in the sense that it's all too late for that, that I've run out of time or spent too much time Doing It Wrong, and a salon blowout might be a better investment than any amount of cultivating inner beauty. Time, as always, will tell.

The Store of Breath

Can those who never knew love as children
Ever truly love others? They tell us no.
But they've always told us no. We've never listened.
I remember times strangers set to care for me
Would try to tempt me with food, and I'd refuse,
Thinking it a trick. I am ashamed now of my rudeness,
As I was then of my need. Could this have been
A pleasure for them, I wonder, like the cat that pushes
His head into your hand, yes, he is wild but soft,
And he believes he's the one who has surrendered,
But it is your hand that delights, you hold the secret
Of that moment of trust, it is a triumph and testament
To your patience, your even breathing, your ability
To keep a soft, appealing tone. You have gone back to dreaming;
It is where you do your work, and you growl
At creatures you chase there. I slow my breath;
And smoothing my skipping pulse, soothe yours.
No one has truly loved us but each other,
But within us we hold centuries of lives, the source.


Here's the Browning (Elizabeth):

If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say,
'I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

And the Browning I like best, Robert:

All, that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

Photo: NASA

Rememory

As always, My Special Camping Trip provides much inspiration. Hope some happy ones will follow--it was a good time, tho you'd never know it from these lugubrious lines.

Four Desires and Forgetting

That burning cross becomes a decoration to dance beside--
Dancing, my hair whips, free, a transgression,
Our naked feet on the grass, another kind of transgression,
WIth every step another rule is broken; every breath, stolen.
My desire is to dance. Not to know.

It's a hard job to find a mirror in this place,
One that isn't dark, clouded, or even flecked with piss.
My desire is to be in the place past caring.
Because it will always be denied me, it has become
My greatest desire. How by some physic, slant or blessed,
Has the sharpness of the word and symbol been blunted?
A toy weapon, then a pencil sketch of the weapon,
Then a crumple of paper to ignite a bit of tinder.

On the second day I tell you I will do anything you desire.
Forgetting your own desire to follow another's feels like freedom.
This finds me on the most holy day a little drunk
And following orders from a German. I am myself a German.
The third desire, I grasp at every day:
I want to have no part in them. I want to call another
The other, to draw a hard line in the sand.
We all know what happens to sand.

We have forgotten more atrocities than it is possible
For us to mourn. We could look at the grass beneath
Our bare feet and see symbols of each one, and
Numbers, too, see them, there in the crushed blades?

On the first day I was on my knees on the splintered
Rough wood floor of the uppermost room in the hidden temple.
In transgression I fulfill the fourth desire: To increase the store of bliss
Until it is numbered in the stars.

Who Am I?

Another drive-by record review from the Half-deaf Music Critic, on the road with her family during a trip out to see friends in the far suburbs.

DH (turning off car CD and plugging in phone): I want to listen to this new J Mascis.
DD: Will you play Who Am I?
DH: Yeah, OK. Are you a person, an animal, or a thing?
DD: Person.
Me: Which one was he, anyway? I get all those quirky facial hair guys mixed up.
DH: Who? Are you Michael Jackson?
Me: J Mascis.
DD: Not Michael Jackson.
DH: Dinosaur Jr. Major guitar guy. Hey, he just did a free show at the Kennedy Center. Why are you asking about him?
Me: You said this was his record.
DH: Are you a president?
DD: Yes.
Me: (grabbing DH's leg) Ha! Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson?
DH: This is Stephen Malkmus. And the Jicks.
Me: Ohhh. I thought you said J Mascis. That's the Pavement guy. He's still really cute. I like that button-down shirt thing.
DH: Are you an inventor? See, I'm not just asking are you this person, are you that one. I'm asking real questions.
DD: Yes. I am an inventor.
DH: He said as soon as you're past the lake, you have to make a sharp left. As soon as you see the lake, put your turn signal on. It's on the left. He said put your turn signal on as soon as you FEEL the lake.
Me: I can't hear anything anymore. I can't see. Screw it, I'm old. I'm putting on my turn signal RIGHT NOW. I'm gonna leave it on the whole way. You know, I haven't heard anything that's impressed me much. This sounds like one of Beck's acoustic albums. Remember that show we saw in Miami? That was really good, but it was mostly because of the element of surprise. And all those kids in the audience who wanted to sing along with cheeze whiz. Thwarted! This just sounds like old quirky hipster stuff. Beck's Modern Guilt sounds newer and more interesting than this. And that one was from, what, 2008? I still put that on lots of mixes. It was haunting.
DH: This isn't a Beck record. He just produced it. Are you Benjamin Franklin?
DD: Benjamin Franklin isn't a president! Just because you have your face on a twenty-dollar bill doesn't mean you're a president!
Me: Jesus, there was so much hype about this record. I'm reading about it everywhere. This one has at least got something interesting happening rhythmically to it. Maybe it's just too subtle for me. Hey, that trail looks good.
DH: That's a really good trail. You know what you need to do, you need to go over to Ben's place and get your rollerblades, then practice up in the parking lot for a while, and then you and DD can come out here and do this trail. She can ride her bike. She could get rollerblades.
DD: I want rollerblades too. Can I get rollerblades?
DH: You need to give mommy a little time on them first, then we'll see.
DD: Mommy needs more help than I do.
Me: I have to give it up to Pavement for saving my life in Miami though. Underused. You can say that again. Not feeling like that anymore. Except at work. Wait a minute, is Thom Yorke on this record too?
DH: That's the CD that was in there before. I just unplugged the phone.
Me: Oh.
DD: I feel the lake! I feel the lake!

On the return trip:
DH: Do you want to hear the new Neil Diamond?
Me: Ummm...OK. He just got a Kennedy Center Honor award.
DH: Dave Alvin?
Me: Neil Diamond.
DH: What?
Me: I thought you said Neil Diamond.

The new Dave Alvin is very swamp-stompy and has a great song on it about Johnny Ace. He's a poet. He doesn't really stretch out his voice much. Also, the new John Hiatt is a knockout. Overlooked songwriting from both--when someone picks up a song from either, they can really run with it. I would love to hear two woman musicians I know cover almost anything from either of them.

I Mean It!

This one's inspired by the GOP and corporate executives and all the rest of you out there who bravely bear up even though everything and everybody is against them at every turn and persecuting them, and they're really not feeling very well, either!

Turkey Vultures

Your cry attracts more scavengers
Than rescuers. The swing shifters
Shake their heads and sigh.
If you've got enough breath to complain,
You can wait for fresh heroes
To haul you up. We're off. We're done in.
They trudge off to have a drink and forget you.
It's easy. Laughter breezes in without you,
All the ones like you, left behind again.

Maybe there's one who stays and waits with you.
A matronly type. Secretly, you're disappointed.
You think you're entitled to someone more in your league.
A handsome one like you are,
And still not yet middle aged.
You smile yet at her kind hand-holding
Out of habit. It never hurts to get your hooks in.
You might need her someday.

She leans close to talk, to help you pass the time.
She tells you: "The vultures, you know,
They're so much more sensitive than we are.
We hear a stifled cry, a brave protest against aid,
And we rush to reward you with more
Admiration and affection. The tale of your courage
Makes you twinkle like a star.

"But the birds, all they see is your weakness.
They don't know from fake. You lie there
And they see: You're weak, you're ripe,
You're going down. Careful what you wish for,"
She chuckles, tucking in the blanket.

You'd smash her teeth to shut her up
In an outraged flash; but no, that was
You years ago; today, you know better.
You put on your best wounds.
The dignity of your protests is impeccable.
You are deeply sorry that she has misunderstood you.
Perhaps it is her plainness that has made her so mean.

She tells you:
"As soon as you asked for pity,
It was a signal to the skies: You'd gladly die
To get one desiring look. Here they come gliding.
You're so sweet to them. If you stood up now,
How disappointed they would be."

The Post closes its suburban bureaus to save on leasing and equipment costs. The reporters will pick up these costs individually, and they will not have a moment they are not working. The 21st-century news business is now just like the 19th-century one. Every man for himself, and glean your own straw.

Photo: Entrance to Abita Mystery House, Louisiana.

Civil War Surgery

Sorry to be such a lameass correspondent. I was traveling -- road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Va -- and then to the beach and then camping and then the hospital. Appendix is gone and I'm happy about it, I really am, and I hope it will be happy wherever it goes and I don't bear a grudge in the least. I just want us both to be happy now. But I didn't need the pain. It was too much. Sometimes you just have to let go, even if it is a bodily organ. Just tell yourself it's vestigial, and make that clean cut.

I have a bunch of stuff I'm writing about civil war sites in Mississippi and Tennessee. Very haunted.

If you're in Annapolis, I'm giving a reading Friday at 6:30. Details here. It's an open reading afterward--why not? It's an easy crowd, believe me. They're all hopped up on those oversize chocolate chip cookies.

Cosmic Hump Day

Cleaning Out the Attic

It's the cosmic hump day, the sun's spike,
The midpoint. Quarter and cross-quarter
Days slice the sky into a pie. I can't let this
Day pass without thinking of Daisy:
Do you always watch for the longest day
Of the year, and then miss it? We almost missed
The window for spring cleaning.
But it's not too late to get a fresh start.

We keep moving our shards and scraps
From one side of the divide to the other,
Kidding ourselves that we'll sort it out
Someday, but today there's light enough--
Let's take it all out and get a good look.
Sigh. For the rest, it's all berries and gingham,
While we work, our hands accruing
Dust and spores. Fans fruitlessly
Push waves of humidity around the room.
I kneel before you in this inherited kingdom
Of mosquitoes and mold. Old letters, ragged bits
Torn from old notebooks. Water-painted photos.
Full baskets, empty suitcases.
There might be something here.
Something we can use.
Even when the room goes dark, I stab
My finger at the square of light that remains.
Love's amateur archeologists, that's us.

But in that fragment of a moment
Comes release. Let's wash our hands.
All we need to to carry us
Until the longest night is all
We see in each other's eyes.
Let's go to bed now.

We long for a holiday, a walk in the sand,
But in the peace of escape, you find still
Tugging at your ankle, a string of seaweed
Charmed with rattling coquinas.
Pull it loose and let it go.

Bubble, Bubble, Barney Rubble

I've been telling people this for years. Demographics are not dollars. If newspapers, which used to provide something of value and still do occasionally, can't find a way to "monetize," how could social media possibly do it? LinkedIn is a ghost site making a cash grab. Groupon should have sold out when it had the chance. Now there are scads of imitators, and Groupon's only strategies are to divide into areas of concentration and/or go microlocal and/or buy up the others, all of which will cost more than they have, even with a vastly overvalued ipo. Or they could hang out and wait for the competition to myspace. That's "myspace" as a verb. I would have said "betamax," but you're too young to get that, I bet.

Actually, hidden in that linked story is an excellent look at why advertising too is dying. Only a few rich people have anything left to spend, and it doesn't take too many people or much imagination to pitch to them. Most of the advertising I get paid to write is pitching the federal government, who's a rich guy no matter what he says.

Sorry, sometimes I have the illusion I'm still in business. I'm fascinated by what the world values and doesn't, and how it assigns these values. Because nearly everything I value has no value to the world. Like right now, I should be writing for pay but Ima write a poem. And speaking of young folks.

Bikram at 50
Beware, young women, beware. I dare
To place my mat square in the front of the room.
Every pop of my knees and hips reports
Like a shot in the dead of night. I am your
Gray and sweaty wake-up call, girls.
I come from an abundant, careless time,
A time before we knew that none of it was good for us.
Weak weed, full bush, lead, white bread
In the balloon-festooned plastic bag.
Bowl after bowl of eight essential vitamins.
Sucked dry by Count Chocula in the heavy metal parking lot.
And look where it got me. A pretty young thing
Orders me: "Down, dog," and I obey.
I am the memento mori among your still life
Of flowers, ripe fruit, shimmering, freshly opened
Oysters. What a spread those old masters
Used to lay out, didn't they? They knew how to live.
But there, in the middle, they'd place
The grinning skull--skulls are forever
Grinning in bad writing, aren't they?
You smile at me and tell me:
"Keep it up. You're doing great."
I grin back at you.

"This One's From The Hip"

Usually I come back from my special camping trip with short, simple, amusing poems. And lots of em. This time, I get long, drama-laden, prosy stuff. And thank the gods there are not lots of em.

The Great Celebration
I.
When the world failed to end
On the day the preacher said it would,
The day went down in the books
As "The Great Disappointment."
Here's my proof, as if more were needed,
Of how much we humans fear being alive.
Better the devil we know, we say,
Than the angel we may never meet.
Living means not knowing
The appointed hour, and so much can happen
To hurt a soul in an hour.
How often, maddened in love, have I said:
I could die now.
Beneath that pure lotus of acceptance
Spreads a swampland where an
Alligator swims. I'll name him "Wish."
Take me home now, before the party dissolves
Into cigarette butts and muddy footprints.

II.
A year and three nights
Of drums and frogs and
Our sweat fusing our skin.
It's summertime, and the living is easier
When you don't always get what you want.
You can be certain of me now:
As certain as you were that you would die young,
As certain as you were that you would always be alone,
As certain as you were that the world would end.


For Those Who Won't Take Their Medicine
What I wouldn't give
To give that man a handful
Of something--god knows what
He could use. I'd find something.
I'd take what he gives me, and then--
The direct route. A bungee jump, they tell me,
Into the abyss and out again.
A lifetime of digging done
In a puff of smoke. Take this,
And you will push through
Fifty years of pain,
Just like that.

But the man with the medicine
Won't look my way. And that's okay.
Because it's my way, the hard way.
At the end of the day, my legs trembling,
I sit at the table and struggle to scoop
A small mound of rice with my broken hands.
Damage strengthens muscles.
I train my hands so they will be strong enough
To dig myself out of my grave.

The world conspires against
My ease. I won't be allowed
Pillows and stroking and tea and friends.
These are things others are offered freely
But I can't even bargain for.
The arm, extended in welcome or comfort,
Will not find my shoulder.
If I crumble, not one of you
Will pick up a single piece.
I've always known this in my bones.
My only medicine is the breath of the trees,
Harvested by my own hours spent running, running.
Each journey I make alone.
Each day, I will have to sweat,
And plant seeds, and wait for them
To sprout. Many of them die.

They Smile In Your Face

Ten of Swords
Wounded Healer

It's been a while since I've kissed the scars
Of someone I love. The indentation in your leg,
The star shape to the left of your navel,
The weal sewn over your heart. No more
Delicate fingertips and wide-eyed awe here.
When you first know a body, you count the scars,
You wonder over them, you hear every story
These marks tell. You are hungry for the news.
You would push the point of your tongue
Into a tiny, still-red canyon, mining
For information, for emotion, for the undeniable
Truths of the past. Now it's an act of faith
To overlook what hurt you so long ago.
It's tempting for us damaged
To worship the wounds, you know.
So I resist, slide my lips quickly over and past
Those places, over and past for you.
These next few moments are what I live for.

The interpretation of this card, counterintuitive as it may seem, is that this could be the card of highest revelation and enlightenment in the tarot. The woundedness forces the subject into deep inner knowing. Think of the swords as acupuncture needles along a meridian, and it makes more sense. His head is turned away from blame or martyrdom and toward the clearing skies.

Let My Freak Flag Fly

Mother's Day means I get all the real grated parmesan cheese I want on the pasta, and that I can get up in the middle of dinner and add some lines to a poem.

Entanglement

I.
I always read while I brush my hair.
It keeps my mind off the pain. I used to cry
When my mother used to brush it,
So she started taking me to the Navy-base barber,
Along with my brother, to get it all cut off.
"Pixie cut," they called it. I looked more like
My great-aunt's skinny chihuahua, shivering
After a dip in the deep end of the pool.
(Oh, for heaven's sake,
Yes, let the record also show that
My mother had five children and a job,
And found time to sew our clothes
And matching Barbie-doll outfits
And crossed the border to Tijuana
To get us the prettiest birthday pinatas.
The fault is not with her, but with me,
For never being cute enough
To carry off short hair.)
I am reading, or trying to read
"Annals of Science" in the New Yorker:
"Dream Machine: The mind-expanding world of quantum computing."
I never took math or science past 10th grade.
My mind leaps to the easy part:
Play with the words, think about sex,
Wonder what this science might tell me about love.
I learn that like a poem (you saw that coming)
No one can really say
What a quantum computer is good for.

II.
We are sweating in your apartment
Over a canvas so large it fills the floor.
You have just moved in, and there's no furniture.
You are trying to show me how to draw
A perfect circle, using a string and a pencil and a pin.
The cord knots up on itself and the canvas
Wrinkles and I give up, tell you,
"I can do it, I can draw it freehand."
And I do. The circle becomes the sun.

III.
My solipsism is not a closed circle;
I am open to new experience.
If I am only just bright enough to learn through my senses,
I would pray you admit that there may be
More of these than five, and I (and those like me)
Might understand in ways we don't yet understand.
I live by language, and today I find myself
In another world, where pronouns
Are entirely ambiguous. Who are you?

IV.
I read: "a brilliant and distressingly thin physicist"
And I feel my hands pressing for (and not finding)
The place in your shoulders where the pain hides.
I read: "The fabric of reality" and I see my hands
Slipping under your shirt. I read: "Quantum mechanics
States that particles can be in two places at once"
And I see the faces in the firelight, and those
Sleeping at home. I read: "two particles can be related,
Or 'entangled,' such that they can instantly
Coordinate their properties, regardless of their distance
In space or time," and I remember staring
Into your eyes, and starting to cry
Without knowing why.

V.
"Einstein found entanglement
Particularly troubling,
Denigrating it as
'Spooky action
At a distance,'
A telling phrase,
Which consciously echoed
The seventeenth-century
Disparagement of gravity."

Of Safety And Surprise

Of course it's not really the end of anything.

Celebration

So this must end
And that must end and
The other must come
To an end as well.
Even a rock will crack
Under such seepage,
Split as sure as rot.
Under a dark moon, void
Of course, here's
The formula, the slime
And vine whose twist
Found the fissure and
Pulled the granite
Beneath the creek's surface.

Photo: Legit and my own for once; Sunday run on Soapstone trail. Nine stream crossings in .9 miles, big fun.

Your Tulips

Got five minutes to write the poem I started yesterday!

Thanks to all who voted for me for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere(R). I love the registered mark. I'm going to put it after damn near everything from now on. I was not a Winner(R), but I feel very warm inside(R) nonetheless.

Beltane

From early on, I stopped paying
Attention to the numbers
Of books lent, kisses given
And received, numbers of nights spent
Crying, either on each other's sofas
Or in each other's arms, or beers,
Or any rounds passed around--
The return on keeping
Track of these is mean.

But track I did the phases
Of the moon, the path of sun,
The rise and fall of bodies
Of water, the week to expect
Certain fruits and flowers,
When to look for mud or drought
Or storms. The earth's clockwork
Fueled my faith in abundance.
I knew more would be given.
On Beltane, at my feet lay
A nectar-sticky tulip poplar flower,
A full month before blooms of other years,
A full month before the bees
(Fewer every year) come to harvest,
And I felt the outrage of betrayal.

A Vote For Me Is A Vote For Strippers and Chickens!

So inspired because my friend nominated me for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere(R)! Go to this link and vote today because this is your only chance! Vote for me, Maria Padhila, vote for one of the other nominees, check out today's poem about chickens! You will just love it.

Shadow Floyd

He didn't know the word
Shaudenfreud, he thought he'd heard
Something else, under the music, and he looked around
Wondering who I was talking about. That guy
With the powder clinging to his pornstache? The glowering one,
Or the old man wheezing through the plastic tubes,
One hand twitching, in a weak, repeated beckoning?
No, they are themselves, not enemies,
Not projections, not paper targets, not yet
Beings of light. The young man has, like me,
Wanted the curve of her hip under his hand,
Wanted the music to go on all night.
The old man is not like my
Father, who will have the grace
(And let's not forget the money)
To vanish quickly and at some distance removed.
This old man, this young man, will go on and on,
Peeling off bills for the strippers,
With every huff getting thin enough
To pass through the eye of a needle.
A wave goodbye would knock them over
And yet here comes the force of the whole sea--
Overkill. This is where I defy god and say:
Let the angels sing. The song
Is a beautiful mercy, a gift
As they are rocked away.

Image: A detail from Fred Folsom's famous Shepherd Park painting used completely without permission. If you know and love this one, you should check out his recent work on his site. I wish I could buy one. Maybe if I become Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, fortune will follow.

Update: That old subject/verb agreement thing. Correction made.

Desert Island Dicks

Dag, should wake up early for yoga, nope, writing this instead.

Caesura
"It's easier if I pretend you're on a mission in Antarctica." --Christopher des Sots

I have cultivated a smile that smoothes time over,
Glosses the inevitable awkwardness in the shuffle
From you to you, the span when I am on
My own. I compose a way to face
Not knowing, and hope this calm mien
Will someday be mine, naturalized, spreading
Bright serenity like the daffodils on the lake shores.
Stupid flowers. Tinny little bobble heads. I could sob
And lie down in the mud. But I will frame kind words
And thank you notes, something I never write
Enough of, my gratitude, truly, profound enough,
These days, to shock me, to give the sense that it
Grows outside myself, yes, it dwells in a hole
In the center of the deepest part of the lake
And a stone tossed there would never be recovered.
This is how much I love you (and you, a plural pronoun)
For what you have done. You must know.
I run the caged ramp, around and around,
Up to the caged bridge over the train tracks--
Fences surround me, and looking back,
Well, there's the lake, small and far away.

Tea Party, Donner Party, Hurricane Party

For Preventing the Rich from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public

It is a source of sadness for those who walk our cities or travel in the country when they see the streets, the sidewalks, and the buildings crowded with people wearing Louboutins and Armani and driving Mercedes and BMW cars and SUVs. These people, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in aimless shopping, cell phone nattering, and bribery to protect what they believe are their entitlements.

The numbers of the rich do to the present deplorable state of our country a great additional grievance; and therefore, whoever could find a fair, cheap, and easy method of making them sound, useful members of society would probably end up with a building, or an airport or two, named after him or her.

The problem of the rich has proven singularly intractable and has only worsened in recent years. First, there is the matter of their children, who should probably be removed from rich families at birth, if it cannot be that sterilization is applied before the fact. The children of the rich, neglected as their parents pursue their whims and addictions, are uniformly warehoused in a series of schools whose administrators seem to care little how well children are educated. The only concern in our country's schools for the rich is to move the children on into the next class, and the next, on into college, regardless of how they might have failed to earn such advancement. They then emerge to become a drunken menace on our streets, a burden to our hospitals, and spawn more generations of profligacy with their indiscriminate, promiscuous breeding out of wedlock. They rarely excel in any area, from science to athletics, but continue as a drain and burden on society. We who work--in the government, in services, in small and large businesses--can no longer carry these bloated, irresponsible sons of CEOs.

Not only the children of the rich, but the spouses and the rich themselves seek constantly to further enrich themselves through schemes that suck our government dry. Two of the most prominent of these are the establishment of the "clothing line" and of the "foundation." While there are honest tailors and charitable organizations among us, the rich have been permitted to evade paying their fair share through these types of "make-work" enterprises, sucking money away from community organizers, fair housing organizations, family planning clinics, and others who are actually trying to improve the world, not simply putting up a show in order to avoid taxes.

If the money the rich thus procured were put to any decent use, their schemes might not be so galling; but it has been shown throughout history that most rich people simply don't know how to handle money. Much of what they have appears to vanish. They are like children, stuffing themselves and their homes until they are sick. Our government shows its foolishness in giving money to the rich. The rich promise, over and over, that they will spend the money to make jobs for the many, but again, like children, they forget these promises or slyly lie, spending the money on handbags.

And the burden on our health care presented by the elder rich is greater still. We pay over and over for their surgery and transplantations and tucks. Rare is the rich person who has the will and strength of character to work for better health--they look first to the knife, and ask us to pay for their mistakes and poor decisions again and again. It is not unusual for a rich man to have had three or four heart surgeries--not due to any inherent weakness of the organ, but only to his own weakness for food and drink and cigars.

For this reason, the first proposal and the one that seemed most fitting, that rich people be used to avert the coming food shortages among us, had to be abandoned. They simply are not fit to eat. Their bodies are crammed with toxins; they would, continuing true to form, do more harm than good, even as fodder for animals.

Nevertheless, something must be done with them before they ruin us. I now humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. As global climate change continues--a fact rich people also foolishly spend money in order to try to deny--and the waters rise, entire nations are at peril of destruction. But the rich of each nation and their possessions can be removed to the shorelines, forming levees to protect the land of the interior. I have been assured by a very knowing American that the tiles and granite of a single McMansion can easily protect a mile of shoreline, and doubly serve as mausoleum.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, not myself being rich.

Painting the Roses Red

Lugol's Iodine

First, I trim and paint her toenails,
A coat of sparkle white covering
A coat of sparkle blue varnish. Her choices.
Then, while she's still sitting in the big chair,
Her legs stuck out straight, legs still
Too short for her knees to reach
The bend in the chair, I kneel to her feet
And paint her soles with what I am told
Is the right solution. It smells so clean.
I remember the painted gash
Across my own belly where I was
Opened up twice, once to save my life,
Once to save hers. The stain
Is a soft sepia, the tint of nostalgia,
Of spilled tea, of the evidence
Of a leak in the ceiling, something
You watch spread a little bit each night
As you fail to fall asleep. Is it getting worse,
Or are you just imagining it? You really should
Do something about that, it looks bad, but what?
She wriggles as I hold her
Foot and laughs that it tickles.
She tries to pull away from me,
And I let her foot slip easily from my hands.

The Last of the Seersucker

Season Finale
It’s time to find out what happened to your favorites.
Under a sliver of that song you couldn’t get out of your head
All last year, their futures unfold in artful montage.
All over the world, people are watching. They’ve set
Their clocks and arranged their schedules for its sake.
Some, and their number might include me, took time
To compose responses previous to this episode.
Don’t let them fool you. Most of them don’t know
Any more than you do what will happen.
It’s just an old habit of those perpetually
On deadline: Be prepared. A few lines,
A frame, even a full scaffold on which to hang
What you’ll have only minutes to get out there
Once it’s done, can serve you, they say.
But here’s a funny thing: I’ve always trashed
Anything I’ve written in advance. It doesn’t
Measure up to the moment. I demand
Fresh language and images from myself
Even as I’m secretly amazed to see just
What I’ve anticipated unfold. See? I knew it!
With everyone else, I watch the fragments:
The ship tilting, the muzzle flash, the crash,
The embrace, the solution, the hospital bed,
Hoping we will learn everything we want to know
About what happens next. Like you, I will not accept
With much grace a finale that offers us less than this.