i said i was gunna write about nature, so i did.

I like sunflowers, so I put them in different colored bottles
and place them on my flesh colored desk where I write.

its getting cold now, and there isn’t enough sun filtering
through the smudgey glass window or screen

the petals were getting whiskied and wrinkled
and the yellows were circling on the table like synchronized swimmers

so I threw the stinky things out
except for one that was still dreaming and looking up.

I put him in a green flute
and opened the window to give him air

he stared at me all morning
and while I stewed apples

and he looked so singular
wide eyed abandoned

his hair is getting thin and flat
and his throat is hanging out like a tongue

he is stretching neck outwards
as if to be noticed in a crowd








wait!
he is trying to say something.

doubt is the epidemic of poets and we will all die on cinco de mayo

I am feeling again like an island far off in the lonely ocean; far from the rest of the poetry community. They want procedures, and I want messiness. They want found language, I believe that my own language was found--a treasure even, buried deep within my neuroses. They want statistics and multiculturalism. I think stats are an invention of the past because they only tell lies, and sometimes i think that multiculturalism was a word made up by middle class white people so that they could endorse cinco de mayo. i believe in knowing and navigating the world by looking within. looking out towards the external world i see nothing but fragments, and distractions, and noise--who can get anything out of it? They want innovation. I say innovation is driven by greed. People at the Mac store use the word innovation. What's wrong with tradition? What's wrong with using what we know, which probably different than what anybody else knows. I want to write about Nature damnit... and I want to use the pronoun "I" too AND mean it.., damnit. I am afraid, a real white-girl fear, that if we only use appropriated language, if we only want to use math and science and made up fields like sociology to speak in our art...we will not only forget the under represented humans of our earthly family, but we will forget that WE OURSELVES are humans. We will forget the parts of us that make us beautiful. I am really nervous about living in a world where all the art and poetry will be only created by a addictive desire for seeking out the new. This is the same mentality that people have about their possessions. The desire for newness is toxic for us. I say lets look to the eternal-- if nothing is eternal, then at least we will stop trashing the planet with new things.

here is a series of questions that i posed to my classes. So far, No one has responded.

warning: this may be unnecessary and otherwise.

I'm thinking about the words...research...representation....and emotional:

1. I've been thinking about using research to represent the other, instead of using the internal landscape ie experience/ emotion/ insights.

2. I'm thinking about how statistics have often been used in history as a way to persuade us into ideologies that are often driven by racism, misogyny, fear, and discrimination. How can we make someone more human in our poetry by using someone else's numbers? How do we make other lives have their own voices?

3. I'm thinking about narrative poetry when not examined while its being crafted and how it can also be dangerous.

4. I am thinking about different knowledges (ie. wisdom versus knowledge or religious/anncestral/metaphysical), and if a person can examine their internal landscape deep enough past the surface of our cultures influence past the breakers of our own paradigms and penetrate into a place where there is no "other". And/Or how can I let multiple kinds of knowledges come into my poetry?

5. I am wondering if i will ever feel _okay_ with representing the other.

6. If our poems are coming from the funnels of our perspectives.... is every poem that is transparent about the funnel labeled...emotional?

***I am sure that these questions are problematic, and loaded, and clumsy. But I've been thinking about them with limited language to express them... and I wanted to turn to you for your thoughts about these ideas/language.


PLEASE, if you have ideas about where and what poetry is and should go or do, why you write, and how you feel about writing about people who are different from you... comment here.

for the boys

it is cold outside
and i am on the floor of my old room
one cloth knee tucked in
one leg stretched out beyond the books and carpet
the boys are in my doorway again
holding twin beers
and leaning on opposite sides of the wood

One is seven feet taller
than me
with a chin like a good pork roast
and the long face of a lumberyard
his socks show, because his pant legs
are short, and his teeth show
because he is happy.




the Other is
looking up to him
and grinning
he is barechested
and showing the way muscles wrap around
his shoulder
that he has leaning against my door.
his curly gold hair absorbs all the light
and the room is a little dimmer
because of it.

new poetry

I am writing for the first time... every day, and the words are changing their metallic flavors in my mouth as i am writing this. the words i thought tasted like pennies, now taste like soil. others that tasted like milk, now taste like rubber. who knew this could happen again, anew in existence. i have a whole world, cities with buildings and pedestrians, and cattle rolling around in my hot mouth, over the tongue. is this heaven?

fall number 2

Fall
how luminous you are:
a bright green door thinking
during a pickled morning frost

the gray morning sky
the same as the evening
Time has hushed her hair and mouth
clouds turn
placid tentacles
of silver milk placenta moving
like seaweedacross the tall horizontal plain


contrast

ignites the treehills on fire
with electric green from the october coil
green white yellow hum
charred the light and infused it
with sun from a wild dream that smelled like Jasmine

and the smell of stamped
wet tracks; the red rusty footprint
of the dead old pine needle
on the damp black pavement (slate oil)
(in a line they look like racoon hands painted autumn

the sweet dog smell of rain
skirting the road, you know
the trees love this smell
and they quiver in dazzlement
of their new radiance
against the brood





the light through glass
makes translucent lace
by shadow dance
on the bright cream wall.