breath, inspired by sarah

breath, an ocean cave
echoing inside me
and i can get a sense of the container
each bone a surface for vibration
each breath although thin and transparent
is a bivouac of memories
an old letter of roots or antanomy
with phrases
than can unbury the dead
unceal tombs
open into a field
the hollow of a bell
wind through a window
billowing up the armpit of a curtain
the edge of a pillow case
flute inside the green bottle on the nightstand
sweeping the floor like a spreading river

Hymn / Poem of the Day : The Poetry Foundation

Hymn / Poem of the Day : The Poetry Foundation

summer day

birds and leaf sieve
milk sun for the ears
(even insects that land on the skin are harps)
the blue hipped glass is dripping and making
a dark wood circle print
for us to live in

try (here) to ask what you need,
is it the tan leg that stuck out of the sheet this morning
is it to be a better person (someone who doesn't have to remind themselves)
more jam more art less art more intimacy
is it a capability for air

Studying

I want to teach like roethke
love myself like Whitman
love fish like bishop
love men like Faulkner
love lonliness like Rilke
love ambivilance like dickinson
love the day or the sea like Neruda
love desert like ondaatje
love desert like okeefe
love my family garden like kingsolver
love my wife like Oliver
be and write my dreams like Henry house/Berryman
be a dick like Lowell
become captured like muir
brave like Howe
brave like Merton
smart like chodron
sad like sexton
happy like Blake
hardy like Clifton
empty like Lao tzu
sweet like I am forever.

Poetry is Itchy.

I've been posting only poems because I wanted this blog to be no bullshit. I wanted it to make no claims. I wanted it to be kind of home-madesy. No criticism. No whining. No stories. I just wanted the poems to speak nonsense for themselves, like teenagers or toddlers.

(But)

I realized that something was growing inside this intention of writing poetry. Something potentially malignant; some sort of a confession. I don't think its a flaccid one either, a middle class middle aged confession. I think its real, like when you wake up from a dream and your holding a shovel, and your hips into a hole which is your own grave. I won't beat around the bush: the confession is that i don't really like poetry.

I have a hunch that its this preamble that is going to make a poet in the first place. Poetry isn't healthy for me. I do it for all the wrong reasons, all the reasons that Rilke tried to dissuade that young poet from. Like temporary pleasure, and ego, and power, and thrill. I'm an addict, with the anxious reactive mind of an addict when I write and read poetry. I feel ill lots of the time. I am disappointed. (and I wish I could explicate how these things are true and work). (i'm gunna try

I want to be good. I don't know why I want to be good. Usually I'm not ambitous, and I still believe that what you do won't make you entirely happy. But I feel like if I am going to be good at anything its going to be this, so its my last chance. So I read other poetry to try to see what's good, and most of the time its not. Not even the ones who everyone says is. I still see through it. Through the arrogance and insecurity of it. So many poems seem to be written by people like me, who just want to be good at a thing. But sometimes, often only in a few words or lines at a time I think, That Is Good.

If I were honest, I's say the real thing, which is that the words or lines that are good. Are actually God. That somehow this author has for a moment seen through the illusions of life. And if I were really honest, I'd say that the reason I want to be good at poetry, is because I want to shred through the illusions of life, I want to be on the nail when the hammer comes down. Right in the center of everything.

But, as I am sure you have already guessed: I am naive. I never feel in the center of the heart of things. I never write out the lines that ring inside my teeth the way they do when christians go to church. i write a lot of boring lines, and I read a lot of boring ones too. I read pretentious ones, and misguided ones, just like the people I meet in my life.

So I guess what I am saying is poetry for me is like life, or the people inside a life. It's itchy. It's unfair. It's full of ideas and no action. And most importantly, it doesn't give me any of the answers that I want. But also like life, I am committed to it because I have to be. Even if I have to wrestle myself day in and day out until I die. Poetry for me is just like that inexhaustible completely horrifying energy I have for finding what my tiny stinky life is about. And sometimes, I think this is why Camus suggested it, I want to be poetically suicidal. Because I know poetry can't make me happy (or another way of saying this is: erase suffering) just like I know I'll never find out why I'm here or the right way to do it.

I wanted to write this down for myself so I can remember it. I wanted to write this for anyone who is perpetually frustrated. This is what art is. This is what life is. Until i decide soon that its not.

when what happies you sits on you

tap the heavy until the nerve knows no pulse except buzz
chew up its flesh into a wad and roll it in between to fingers (like a dust snot)
cry when it doesn’t respond dead beat planet
its gone quiet, like a full stomach thick and bloodless
so blue
bullets can’t hardly move.

i remembered why i'm against hipsters

running horses with muscles like topographical maps
lights shooting out in bright lines
and cross-hatching up the disney sky
one giant mixed up loom of
caffeinated rotted undercare bodies
missing teeth floating like air pockets up in water
with nothing to sink into
no density, just more sky waves
just more clay to slap on
more dancing material to hide under


too much sound buckles the legs
and avalanches our broken corners
like a doll in a bounce machine
too much language grinds the thoughts
into sand and tilts the mind forward
on to the street
there are no trains of thought anymore
just dizzy swarms of bees and pixels
moving electrons around the heart of the matter.

that is where living is
in the unchanging center
every piece is bled together like watercolor
by a gravity stronger than
intellect or progress
scraping out every particle
into pause,

June 1968 : Poetry Magazine

June 1968 : Poetry Magazine

Congratulating Wedge by Alice Notley : The Poetry Foundation

Congratulating Wedge by Alice Notley : The Poetry Foundation

alice notely, just under the skin of left leg

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/notley/leftleg.html

as i lay dying.

waterfront night
put his feet on the cold stressed wood
inked with rot in some places
tell him a coffin
rolls out miles
of sunny tuffs of hay
arms legs star spread
his organs shallow and tolerant
of the packed down dirt
his muscles smoothed young again
nothing left in the eyes but nature.

linda bishop starves.

1. the rain is punishing the flat top roofs
i watch it, and feel jealous of the sky's open mouth
gums and tongue and bones showing.


2. the apples are heaped like gold
in the corner of the attic
red and pink shiny rubber galaxies
the white dead sun is coming in at an angle
and bleaching them

I am down below
behind the stairs
hunched over the old heater
arms curled like horns
over the rambling metal frame
12 apples a day, until my love comes
I whisper to myself, looking at the nest
I've made for a small bird, next
to my foot, where my hair has been collecting
a little thumbalina bed of gold gray hay
i watch how the strands are leaving
the shores of my scalp
and i watch them dancers all the way to the wood
12 apples a day until my love comes.
and the rain sounds good.