poems are made of words, words are made of

 did you think words come from nowhere? that they are not made of the same matter in which the entire cosmic creation was made? what did you think they were... ghosts? words have matter, they have shape and weight, they vibrate differently, they have different voices, different religions. words make different colors when combusted, they stink. our poems are not without us, they are not without our breath, the grease from our skins, our baggage, our tiny stupid paradigms. they are graphic, they only exist when we can see them, when we can build them. they have to be made by us. did you think words lived without the fleshy mushrooms of our brains? did you think they live without the fibers of the forest? without oxygen? without history? our poems are made by 100% recycled materials. they are made by the dead bits of our ancestors. words are our limbs, they grow out of us, the way our legs grow cumbersome. see now, look here and see how the word is not unfamiliar, it is not strange, and it is not isolated. we cannot separate ourselves from our words. they are us.

winter warm

glow:  a dull, steady light, for example light produced by the embers of a dying fire.

warmth comes from the coal night chalky frozen
inside puffing stomach of train, the black is transformed to a red bulb

the air is  cold the body is

panting on the mist slope

the land is winding down but the body is

a furnace. This is winter:

when black is lit, it reveals it has always been yellow.

brilliant strands of racing oysters

underbelly silence balloons

a shore stroked through screen

and for a moment hovers in worn scraps

sweaty animals

1. all plants sweat
2. all animals sweat
3. anything that unabashedly sweats is an animal and should be hunted.

molecules 1

if A is: our organs are made up of molecules 
            [drops mucous liver onto floor]
and B is: smells are made up of molecules 
    [shoves bushel of lavender into face and squeals]
then C is: our thoughts are made up of molecules 
        [so why aren't they more smelly?]

chemical reaction

chemical reaction: 1. adultry.

ions

ions: 1. a. those of us who are spinning by the alchemy of our childhoods.
             b. those of us who are walking with a gimp

if i am writing poems

can a poem do what hands do?

can it reach?
hold someone?
kill someone?
hold on for dear life?

if i am writing poems, know i mean to be writing hands
they are the things that do the real labor around here

winter

what a relief the bare lace of winter trees.
brings the breath back to bone
back to silver back to granite
watch us: the chimneys and I are huffing quietly

atomic hypothesis

there is no such thing as body there is only movement our bodies are like a windowless room filled with brightly balloons, except the walls of the house are made of balloons and so is the space between them, those are balloons too and when we heat up by our dreams by the radiation of each others souls on fire we jiggle about like singing tonsils bumping into each other like the running bulls swinging balls and we are attracted to each other in the dance, our brightly round bellies rubbing up against each which explains why we cant help suck the pulp out from each other's memories and fantasize rolling our green cold eyes inside our warm purple mouths or stick ourselves into each other into the viscous moving balloons of each other just to glob right on and become each other like mold

pac-man bit

the smallest chunks of information are bits because of the way the gnaw on the brain they enter the brain tube and mutate into fish mouths with the stringy razor teeth, little silver pac-mans coming with jaws open

i have to eat hamburgers because to use the brain is to make it run on its legs which turn to jello things and its stomach full of gilly toothy bits turns over too like a cake and the soles of its shoe are worn down like sardines.

spacetime 11.27.11

we do not know what time is but it kills us nonetheless it moves us forward towards our curled gray bodies, even though it itself moves in any direction it wants time and space are cold and blood and if one speeds up the other slows down we are moving away from our wholeness in a stream of the cosmic birth always moving into lonely spreading chaos, and never into butter gut our church house has no roof and is made of entropy: the wild fling of it and the body of spacetime is splitting by the shred of antigravity so soon time will decay like us into black but our jaws would have rotted away by then.

if  t v wrote a haiku

the way to happiness

                                                is a good solid ego

& trivial sex.

reincarnation

Somewhere else I am a gob of branch and wind rocking glittery leaf. I am gray field that moves a sea, my body changing light with current. I am the thin ray that bends to stroke an old face. Nursing each groove of it like water over stone. I am also the face hot and rough but loose under the hair; two open palms for its squat neck.  I am eyes closed, mouth parted to exhale sandalwood and smoke.

sarah showed me this

http://m.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/poetry/atlpoets/howe9404.htm

new form i'm trying out.

coffee                                     shop                                         talk

He sits at the coffee shop and listens to the bees of conversation swell and collapse. At first, he thinks, to the untrained ear it sounds like a game of catch. Throwing and catching the golden scorched orb of ideas. But as he listens he realizes that there is no understanding that pendulums between the thin pink brains, and no one is talking to each other. Instead, our ideas, which convert by the heat of our wanting into the lava of language shoots up from our heads in a violent pillar into space. The paths of our speech are parallel and never meet; they are infinite orchestras simultaneously growing tall. There is no listening, he thinks. That would require a cross of or a touch of something with body. Here we are, he thinks, arguing and agreeing on what we think is meaningful or important when actually the hands of our tongues never hold each other. He imagines himself running for office where his platform is conversation alone. He will pass laws that restrict people to conversate alone in their closets. “Only then can our city of individuals pay attention to the winter storm of their own ash blowing down from the volcanoes of lecture. Only then can we read omens when white word-ash falls down

dream II

In my dream, I hold her beady waist and know her by the dense bones of her back.

But we do not chase this story because it is strung too far into the cosmos for us to travel. If I can’t find the fetus of our love, then I can’t have her in my hands.Only in loyalty, or in dreams, or in our DNA.

History streams inside us where vulnerabilities have been cemented into flesh, which has grown a bridge between us attaching us by skin. I feel her moving in the night, which strains my body and still I cannot have her. After we bathed under the fig moon I traded my soul in, I traded in my hunger for insurance.

April 13, 2007

In a first step towards creating artificial sperm cells,

researchers have turned human bone marrow tissue

into primitive sperm cells.—The New Scientist

Scientist:

I give up marrow for her. Let me see her as infant—her sand spots dressed on the tiny bag body. Take the white of my ridge and make the white of her brain glow up in our wombs. Unfasten this helix; tangle it on your dishes under your lamps so I can see how I fit inside her. So I know what this love is made of (bone). Let me see our tiny ten cage her pearly blood inside our frankenstein. 

Mirror and Scarf by Edmond Jabès : The Poetry Foundation

Mirror and Scarf by Edmond Jabès : The Poetry Foundation

our bodies spill out destiny

liquids and meats full of luck

we can swell up with an animal

capable of emotional memory

our bodies and spirits are the guts of god

like the moon hanging low

and tugging on our tissue

like prey in the jaws of a golden lion

the traffic of our skin can cause life

to grow inside out

wrapped in promises so tight

a shelter is grown for our sleep and our fires.

Life cannot be measured despite the sense we get that measuring is the only thing we are wired to do. We cannot train ourselves to invite more life in, either it comes in ways we didn't intend, or we acquiesce and it can come in to our loose mouths. We cannot describe life. We cannot mimic it.

Color which is so wild and has its strong hand on the veins of our subconscious can destroy us or can touch us inside our cells

Sound, also shows us how our spirit is a cave that echoes for 1,000 years. The vibration is so extreme that our marrow is hardened from its gel and turns into a can of bees.

We have no idea how life has a grip on us--no for certain, it is not the other way around. I am tenderized by pain and for a moment know humility. It has charred away the reptile skin of my will or my judgment or my morality ( I have not felt the sun in years)

Warmth must be felt from the inside out. To love is to thaw out and it cannot be built or broken.
I am in love with the sun, how she has no self-consciousness, how it is nothing but her own body that cooks our hearts until they are soft.

I am riper than an august fruit.

ode to brussel sprout

little lime bud
alien heart
in half  I can see your yellow brain
but cooked you are a glossed green iris
whistled sweaty and softened

Delight

I am not laying each dark brick. No
I am letting the wind blow a ruin
& then I'm going to join the wind
in it's empty spreading
across surfaces indecriminately

pavlov vs. insomia.

For my father and his impeccable genes:

wild clock 

distended

                        populates

your padded night-land

grates the dark

sound to cinder

packs your black mouth

with prayer-bargains

but you know already

you can't condition

rest to salivate.

best poem i've witnessed in workshop so far.

oh bitch you worry bout' dying

oh bitch you worry!

ohbitchyouworry

obituary

they miss its black wings

laid inside their glowing drawer

embalmed fear is

a shiny nub of hope

like carrying a lamp in broad daylight.

caught in the sun

the way a woman’s hair

flips the heat out from its cold

a glittery cement after rain

for when britt got her new car

today notice how proud we are of each other.  we have each raised one another and today in our faces you can see it. we’ve watched how we have gotten mellow and faithful behind the face. how our bones have brightened. each of us has a little bit invested in the outcomes. if we succeed to grow happy and thoughtful; sharp when we need it, and receptive when we need it. if we do what we say and build something healthy—this will be enough to feed our whole family.

Theses Feces.

Thesis work is kind of like deciding to get married. It has littler to do with what is right for you, and more to do with your bravery--all the sudden, which you have grown into-- for all the things that may go wrong or  right, or to somewhere you had no idea existed. Commitment is about bravery and faith that you have hands that can hold more than you think.

Here is an example of what my Thesis might look like:

the rays simply,

the membrane kiss that

when it happens it all becomes wax—

when everything is made of skin

every stage a greater diminution of light

reptile brain beeping cheerful glyphs

opens completely into two

this turbulent space is a clean

hammered sky well

spilling into the middle when there is none

Crane Creek

I watch the sun run a sleep hand over her neck, all the blond hair running one way, illuminated. We walk between dry hills inside fields and decide together that the air which has brushed over this land for so many years has picked up something citrus, something fermented, like the tip end of marijuana or an old wine rim. We agree that it must be the combination of cow shit, the heat inside trapped in the rows of vineyards, and the dry grass shooting up wherever it can. The dense california soil underneath its fruit lets us use our whole palettes, we can take in both the deep and the shallow, both the bright and the glue.

As we walk, I handle the weeds. These tall grasses are capped with heads that mimic insect bodies. Some have small bleached bee heads, others have the long-dead-wingless dragon fly bodies. The last, some kind thistle, are dried out giant house flies, pears with tuffs of broom-heads coming out from its skin. Together these weeds blow magic into the eye--what a floating texture! It's too complex to see at once, we only stare at one patch at a time, because when we try to take in the entire space this nomadic tribe of blond whistles bowing and raising, causes the eye to melt into syrup until we have glazed faces.

We walk back to the car on the eroded road next to the vineyards.  She tells me a story of a women she met abroad who had orchards and vineyards and table grapes. They ate the grapes together out of a blue ceramic bowl--the grapes neon--yellow and red and purple. Each one tasting like a plum pregnant with a lime, or at least that is how imagine her face to look when she popped the pearls into her mouth. We stop fifty feet away from the car by the creek, where a beastly bush of blackberries is growing over the cattle fence. She is taller than me and can reach the top of the bushel, where the big bloated ones are waiting to be snatched by birds.  She bites into them like tomatoes, and I watch the spread of liquid purple river down her palm and puddle on the top of her canvas shoe. I wait for a sour one, but no come because there are no sour ones today; only sugar cubes--i imagine us with the straw mouths of hummingbirds, sticky and wet.

I stop to pee behind a lichen eaten oak and I relish in the event of peeing outside. It's something I love, the sound of the metal belt thudding against the dirt. I prop my self by palming the dry ridged skin of the tree, and watch tenderly the grass below me dance under the yellow-eyed stream.

mantra

i am a child forever.
i am a child forever
i am child
i am a child inside the sycamore
swaying with wind as myself
i am a child.
i am child forever despite God.

mariah in a free write

when she is in the kitchen the movements are slow, as are the breaths, the exhales are long spoons. she knows a bean, what it will make in our bodies how it grows she washes them and the pleasure is in the mystery of sustenance nothing about sensuality or thrill. each plate has color, fills it up like cattle in a pasture. no plate is wasted. her side of greens looks more like she is making temporary shelter heaped tall and built up with pieces of other scraps, carrots, onion. when we sit down to eat she looks into me before eating. settles the bones up against the chair. she lets me chat my way out of my nervous animal body. when I have found my mouth, and hands, and bare feet—she can begin her story of the day, which is usually short and funny and sturdy as if she if building furniture for her mind to sit in. so far my tasks have been to light the candle on our table, pull out the chairs, and stack up our day in a corner so there is room for us to sit. when we are done, I put away the spices and sauces, she without any language at all picks up the sticky silverware and plates and takes them to the sink where she will end the ritual. I won’t ever get myself to like the fermented smell of dirty dishes, or the grime under my fingernails. The act seems to be a separate and not of the whole and so I want to rush through it so I can land again. But she runs the water till its warm and suds the plates as if she were bathing our children’s backs. I leave her, and piddle around our room until she done. Before bed I count the day winding down to its lowest volume by the code of zippers and Velcro and the sweep of fabric on the wood floor. She is packing her lunch, her bike locks, ironing her shirt and pants, and then hanging them on the knob of the front door. all of these steps so that she can slip out the bedroom door at 6:30, with no sound but socks, and leave me heavy and stretched and sweaty in our blue sheets. The sheets that in the morning I will air out its bed breath, caused by its tongue of two warm bodies by pulling them down to the floor and opening the window as far as it can go. Before I get up, I roll over, instinctually I guess to the side she has been sleeping on. Her side always seems less tight, more worn, and smells like her hair and her face, almond and citrus and bright salt. She gets up and stretches the miles of her limbs out on the floor of our cold living room until the muscles have warmed and opened their eyes. She puts on her work clothes, followed by the reflector vest that she wears on her bike. She ties up her hair, brushes her teeth slow and gently, then using her pink rubber gum stimulator in circles over her bubblegum pink gums. Her mouth is a temple of clean nuns, each tooth is a face of paper. Her mouth is so tidy, I look into it and make plans for a bed and a desk inside a shell. Night is time for my mind sneak out of its room and roam the places it sholdn’t; I heat up with worry, I am both the teenager and the sick mother, splitting like wood from each other. I’ve tried sleeping pills, all sorts of pills, aromatherapies, watching movies, reading books. but at night the mind winds up and spins like clockwork. when she gets into bed finally, she picks up her book, lifts her elbow and lets me in to the triangle of her arm and shoulder and torso. This is the only place where the mind will rest.

dream

I see her hair blowing—that’s the first thing I see. I see her tan shirt blowing over the tan sand. She turns to me. My skin has finally unclenched the fingers of its seems. My eyes have misshapen back into water. My mouth has gone to its childhood, transported back where a mouth was a red leather. I’ve spilled, running through a granite groove. the mind has been evaporated leaving only the warmth trapped in by the sun and the window, and not the window itself. Nothing but convection. she turns to me, and every word between us is spoken in the loose fabric wrapping, the shoulders a perfect arrow and the chin a compass turning the day into night. my feet are at her feet and I reach out for her but she falls into me. the way you tug on something ripe enough so that the gesture of the reach is enough for the give. I kiss her. The movements are from one source, one movement. And I am kissing the darkest part of origin of myself. I am kissing the beginning warm and old without anything to hold it or hold on to. I m standing in the center of the center. The sand is drained, I am drained. I am joy, I am resolved. I’ve let go of the deep wish that would have risked my life had I let it speak, the secret that I kept in the gel of my atoms where nothing was sharp enough to rip. I’ve let the membrane get thin by despair, I’ve let myself get soaked and thin so that the wish could leak or fly. I kiss her. I’ve consented to disappear. I’m gone/ I’m home.

away from self

again the window is not her skull in white by the railroad yard forgetting how to eat fire eat the ageless bodies in alchemy waiting for the hunk iron bashed open sailor to relieve the tight sewn memory the skull is dense it traps sod the brain a little brown fruit & knows fully it is far way from the shape it was born

What we all hope in reaching for a book, is to meet a man of our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us. To merely add to our store of knowledge or improve our culture, whatever that may mean, seems worthless to me. --Henry Miller

craft

The word craft is such a euphemism for what we actually are doing when we make decisions about our art. The limited definition of craft, in the way I understand it, is the choices an artist makes to shape or manifest their work. The things that they do, and the steps they take to do those things. There is also a critical flavor to this word because there seems to be more favorable choices and more favorable sequences in different genres of art (even though as Rilke has pointed out, we have to as a breed of artists (divided by our certain schools), manage to forget that our tastes are dependent on the time we live and the climate of the world). When thinking about the word craft, I imagine two young artists standing in front an iconic painting and agreeing strongly with each other that, “this piece indeed has been crafted.” But I think that we are looking over a big part of the artists’ process or their craft when we see it in this way. “This way” meaning that the artist is in total control of her craft. That she is the only source of vigor which directs the creation of her work. So much of what we do, whether it is creative or mundane, is driven by what is away from us: the wild jungle of our subconscious, our oppressive histories, our ghosts and traumas, our divinity. Our craft, like our lives, depends mostly on us but also depends on the weather and all uncontrollable forces of life. It’s a play between our mortality and our ability for transcendence. It’s a game between our fate and our will. Of course our choices, our techniques are an essential part and I want to acknowledge that. Here, I’ll try to qualify how I think craft can be developed, and why some art seems to be more crafted than others. If an artist can match the tone of the outside forces, (the element of chance) with their own voice, then you have harmony. When the artist is listening as much as she is expressing, then that is a crafted piece. In order to listen this way, we have to slough our fears and insecurities. We have to keep open by not clinging to ideals about art and allowing inspiration to be a primitive experience. A total unique experience. When the artist gets away from judgments and the idea that she control her art, then she can channel the wonderful, powerful wind with all the debris of life and the supernatural—straight into her work. This is where I am trying to live as a poet, somewhere between belief and humility. I am trying to speak, after a long period of listening. To be aware of the swerving nature of being alive and invite that in to my work. To know that although I have lots to do with the manifestation of my work, I also am guided by things that are unknowable, fantastic, and heartbreaking.

mom's bio

I work on smaller pieces one at a time, pouring into them what I know and love. But when I leave each of them alone together in my art room they secretly congregate. They build a culture, some of them find life partners, make laws, draw communities. When I come back to my art room, I find a whole planet of life, using only my subconscious and my deep love as its beginning cells. This is how this compilation grew; it has an anatomy of serendipity.

errands

so much of my life isn't it it's an abstract thing i know but when i think about life when it comes to me i see a giant sapped tree aching with its weight moving towards sunlight moving in any direction it glows spreading wide its root fins all limbs, no brain not much in my life seems anagalous short breathed, lips like raisins shoulders squenched in as if someone has pulled the threads of the muscles to tightly puttering, muttering crossing out lists and writing down more watching the clock make a circle what am i planning for? who am i cleaning for? the crumbs, the stuff around the drain moving around stacks of things as if they were game pieces tomorrow the drain will have bits in it tomorrow there will be dishes in the sink again there will be errands to run but where is the living? where is the blood melt the throbbing or shining when does it pay off?

i held someone else's baby in one of those fancy canvas frontwards backpack baby carriers on a hike. the kind of carriers that I used to put my nose up to because they seem something only rich greenwashed americans buy for their baby because they are to lazy to carry their child, and too snobby to get something cheaply made. He was a sixth month old, soft headed like cheese too big for his body. He was coming in ginger blond and had big blue eyes that looked at you the same way they looked at tree branches. When my friend strapped in her nephew to my chest, she and I both knew I was nervous. While she was carrying him, hes head flopped to either side withe every stride wondering and investigating both sides of the trail. His eyes were wide and his legs kicked. Within five minutes of being strapped on to me like a tennis ball to its velcro paddle, he was head in, eyes closed, big deep breaths--the kind of breath I am constantly wishing for with nothing attached to it; an empty fish line snaking its way through clear water.  And I knew it was because he was reacting to my vibration, a chemical change in his oxygen. He was absorbing my wishes for slumped neck rest. He was connected to me, to my exhale out in the forest. We weren't there to energize, to loose weight, to clear our conscience. We were there to be lulled by the temperate and sustainable faces of trees. To be relieved of our thoughts with each plush crunch of the sod under our rubber soles. We were there for no reasons, to let go of our reasons. I had put a spell on him, and has his warm little pocket of a body throbbed with my steps I couldnt help but stare at his giant clean crown; the skin under the thin silk wheat of hair, pink white --what i imagine the beaches on the moon to look like. I held his potato head in my curved palm and I felt more like myself than I had in a long time. When i got to thinking about the last time I had felt like that, wholly myself, every molecule hammocked, I had to go way back. Nothing like that had painted me in any of my college years, none of my high-school years, not with the girlfriends I had, or lessons I have decided on. No it was something that could only happen when the thoughts weren't formed into language, before then, where you are smaller then your mind before every thing you think of can be handled by you. Thats why its hard to remember those times, because you are not aware of your surface discursive thinkings, you are settled deep in the middle of your life, where everything melts over you.   I have no real memory of these moments. But I know where they come from. I knew who they come from.

mariah, again

every dark grain of our love
spills out and hits the wood
fast coffeed rain the texture of bees
I'm yours again
the parts that have been dried out are flaked off
leaving just the wool.

they see each layer of the earth
in different colored and shaped anatomy
see the soil shift
knees under a blanket
the zip vibration of the teenage cicadas
the mule slump of the moles hips
chicken feet of rats
the carnal slurp of roots
millions of eye lash legs
digging through one grain at a time
the whole wet galaxy sifting
into the funnel of gravity

we know a version of ourselves
no word is folded into sound
not one phoneme is brushstroked behind the nose
the brain is a watercolor
as june sprays into teeth
two waterholes for eyes
where absence of will can be seen at the bottom;
it's her feet that the dragongfly lands on for a moment
and recognizes itself.

preacher 1

the unalloyed joy we want to surgically unthread from our childhood past is impossible
it's not that our ability to rest our worried mind or open our hearts like
a hungry mouth, has weakened the way our joints and eyes will
we haven't rusted inside the pipes or anything
its that the system of caring has gotten even more complex
that we have grown even more bones for deep love
so that when we get close to what we love, when our dreams
begin to crystalize, our hearts simultaneously begin to break.
because now, as adults, with 10,000 meticulous veins for love,
we know how precious our love is. we've seen enough to know
how miraculous a moment of luminaria heart is,
and there comes a terror for the moment it will go out or harden.
the crackling of worry and the paralysis of terror
is the spirit's biology signaling to us, that indeed
our joy and our hearts are working.

myth 2

each citizen will turn ill
their self laws heaped inside of them like meat into a drawer
clouding their air with brown heat
they sit waiting for the sky to wash them out
the rain to run the muck into the borders of the country
so their dreams will grow fins
and swim out of their ovens

so they can again have eyes full of fish scales
paper layered pennies
mouths a bundle of lime
waving open like sea grass
with their sour fresh limbs
so they can have hands like glass
which can only catch for a moment
the dry toothed light

in church and buoyant with prayer
the towns people can see
the devil's texture of their earth
finally run their minds over the impossible ridges
of their wood, their eggs
and can imagine how many hooves
rattle the mind of the universe
the shabby animals eyes open in birth

when they can join spirits and sing
the wrestling under the grass is known
the land moves the way water does
pulsing and spreading out
the bits that hold their children together are turned loose
and everything breathes and can be moved through
with a hand.
the unbalance of change is no longer a scare for them
because there is no pause no one to grip to
they welcome all weather
and feel pleasure in the bleed

myth series

grape tomatoes are floating in the puddle garden
all the women are baring their muscles
crystal deamoned and chewing
every bright bite of high water
cutting through our skin of earth
a peach; slobbered sunset gut.

if the earth were smooth, our brains
would be spoons
could be licked clean of its stink
our memories sliding keys
all music echoes in whales
and we could lay the tin things out like maps
make better decisions and color in
the lawns

fish mouthed, we screamed in
the homes of our lives
our guts filled with red clay
grasses and shoes
tables and spotted animals
digested or cremated into every cell
floating inside their lakes
are ten thousand birds
and families holding down their lies
their flying directions.

the fathers give like water
rising slowly and then carrying everything inside it
bones become pulp
our ribs are rainbows over their shoulders
our feet inside their hands like coins
everything is held in fiction

he caught a ladybug in his beard
and then everything set forth automatically
each heart he grew mutated into a sun capsule
a glass bead which made it hard for his feet to stick

blue blurred field

whips a ship without shape

when it catches me

I believe

I can talk to ghosts

drift away from town

further west into the  forest by the sea

a flute for the wind

playing the sea  through

its glass throat

and when I’m there

a knife inside my heart

where all things that can’t be said

are known

will glint its bouquet light

onto our feet

to live inside you

1.

i cant live inside a person

feel their internal temperatures on my face

or brush their tissues through my fingers

when i'm dead

i'll shrink myself

and make a temporary shelter inside the goo

pick up stones

look into the back of your brain

they way i look to the sky now

to feel my tiny mortality

or to ask for help.

2.

drop the sack of potatoes on the floor

pinch a child

drop my change down the drain

hold in a goggle breath for a while

blow it into a loose necked bottle

throw the breath bottle in with the laundry

watch the whites and the green become a fin

jump through ice

and wave off my beliefs like a dog

hot skin no skin

1.

        The heat is needed

        So we can know our bodies

        Unfiltered hang of an arm

        I watch the skin of it

        adapt like an animal in it’s new climate

        wrapped like a basket

2.

        unweave this DNA

        wag open the boxed bird

       set it out in random weather

        our house lifted off its feet

        somewhere  in the middle

        the femurs in Kansas

 still sticking out like the vultures had stayed.

        no bees

        only open wood hive left

        waiting for its first feast of rain

        the stomach of this city will now look like

        a leopard field of dark cavities

        all blood drained

        a trail wet orange peels left on the grass

I don't like it.

I said that i didn't like poetry, and I meant it; I don't. I probably won't like my children very much either. not the way they crowd up the living room, even with their limbs tucked in like unformed wings, their ribs like the spines of music books. They will still take up to much room--with their loud minds and their tiny pieces of cheap toys all over the floor like a galaxy of colored cups and corners. I won't like how they will ask me so many questions and not be able to know when I'm too tired for even any words at all. I won't like them I won't like poetry. But I cant stop coming back to writing it (it may not be any different than addiction) I cant stop forgetting how much it annoys me. I just keep doing it because its the only idea that I have to do. It's the only place that my river of moving threads will pour into.  And I imagine this is how I will love my children. That they are all of me, all I have to know this world, comparable to our meager five senses. They will be the only thing I have to be myself. I guess that 's the thing about poetry is that it reminds me too much of life. It gets under my skin in the same way. Just like in life where there are no straight answers, and sometimes it so disappointing you wish you could give up on it. But you never give up on it. What is with that? You can't give away the thing that wraps you in grief the way a coroner wraps up blue bodies in the unbreathable plastic sheet. The easy answer would be that it's because its also the thing that fills up the mouth and the eyes with things that could make stars birth litters of star puppies in all different colors and sizes pulsing together  like a mice heart symphony. We just can't give up on the craving for sweet plantains, or miles so long of green water horizon like a bowl the size of all our dreams stacked up, or our bodies so immaculate with the mass and shape of a leg, or the tiniest prick of a vein, cells moving like a sea of bullet fish all together with light flicking them in unison. I cant give up on that, just like you can't. Even if I don't like it. Only when I'm ready to die, and let everything fall out from me will I give up on my first children. Only when I can't expand with the giant breath of poetry flinging me about like a tight skinned rainbow striped beach ball will I ever give up on it.

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.

for my family, from American Life In Poetry

Joe Paddock is a Minnesota poet and he and I are, as we say in the Midwest, “of an age.” Here is a fine poem about arriving at a stage when there can be great joy in accepting life as it comes to us.

One’s Ship Comes In

I swear
my way now will be
to continue without
plan or hope, to accept
the drift of things, to shift
from endless effort
to joy in, say,
that robin, plunging
into the mossy shallows
of my bird bath and
splashing madly till
the air shines with spray.
Joy it will be, say,
in Nancy, pretty in pink
and rumpled T-shirt,
rubbing sleep from her eyes, or
joy even in
just this breathing, free
of fright and clutch, knowing
how one’s ship comes in
with each such breath.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem]

“Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem]

ancient darling clue

the eye of the darling said a clue


"sorrow upon stone",
the old bear told me, his
spine battered into moss
under bright whistles of stars
among the swimming fish
the warm black opens
like heat of voices within the bark
like rough bones poking out of the sun
long sick rays of music
suffocating the soldiers
like honey over a burn
like the enduring buzz of markets
stuffed with hats and shoulders
deep under the clouds with wilting skin
over jagged monasteries and goats with bells
chopping up our knowing chunk by
chunk"

dreams of customs

i once went to a town
where all the girls wore
their wedding dress until they were married,
they swept the city like
an infestation of winter owls.

well of cellos

the well of cellos
howl into the night
and keep up the farmer

outside confused
in his ghost
he tries to tighten the faucet
of his mind
the birds together with gaps
lace or a war time roof
play shadows over the
his long goatskin face.

smokes

an afternoon of ancestors and lemonade
cold hands dipped in salt water
and then night came with its
bitter ashy tongues
with hairy footed fire inside our throats
an old globe of gravel and lava
lit up the cavern of language

ourselves

1. we are trying to learn ourselves
(so moon dreams leave greasy trails behind us)
put your face on my face
pressed linen bridges
to smell for sure that you are the same
burnt up pulp
like moving mud in what we know


2. we are not mostly ourselves
all kinds of wiggling isms
tied together by cell strings and meat
it's our diets of lightening and star glass
that cause these flocks of birds
to package our bodies our weights.

medical

anatomy rumpled up like paper
hearts and bones blotted out by tears
or rain; so smeared together
letting go a mesh of eyelashes
and fish as way to map our bodies.

5pm

bartender

i park my car in the same gravel
every night watching
my USA flag colored pine tree freshner
twirl back and forth
in last fingerprinted sun
thinking about wet hair
and wet elbows

accordion poem

a knowing fish hurled into a bears mouth
cheese boiled down and molded into hands
and given out to the greek colony of handless men
a house made of spoons and flowers
even the beggars beds are beautiful
the woman in india who sews her own wrinkles
into blankets for the children
all the fat children holding
hands and feet to make a raft
for the abandoned wet dogs
caught in a flood

antique

last night we turned a plate
into a house
walls with spine of an open dry sail
the moving sea
a stomach around its porcelain
waiting to be splayed out like
broken window into the open lap
of a desk drawer

5pm series

bee keeper

in the early morning i watch the euhphonic
coins of light in a cloud
and in the evening i watch the one
floating molar wheel the old wood hive
& i hear him call out to me,

astronomer

i watch his giant eyes twirl around the table
and i know that the cornbread is orbitting
the potatoes. i know our children are two bee hives
of moving atoms, and when they speak up hears
sheet music being erased back to the beginning.

dusk

I ache for dusk,
everywhere I am,
and every day it comes.
but mostly I ache for it here on the lake,
it is the time for simultaneity
it is the time for the sweet sort of death
with the harmonies of cries
from all of us who reside in both
spheres of the heart
"please don't let this day end"
"please, god, let this day end"
and in this moment, in this alignment
of the sun, each prayer is granted.
all prayers are spoken and granted
by tired hearts with tender eyes
that is why i can look at you
and be looked at by you
because we are being lulled by
ten thousand exhales.
both the grass and the wood
are breathing out their last
bits.
i can hear so much music then,
but i can also here the hollow
of the bowl,
the hollowness of our dreams emptied
and i want to tell you,
old man, fragile woman,
you sorrow is singing
in unison, and it is glowing
like the lit buildings.

jack-o-lantern

pain that sticks with you
a friend from childhood
a low grade fever
keeping you just damp enough
with slow erode melancholy
each ear an engine
grinding sand in between

makes me need wild flowers
it gives them purpose
they are not just for decoration
anymore
they are graffiti
total arbitrary compassionate faces

disappointment is combustible
when in contact with relief

ignite these flowers
lightening inside us for a moment
illuminating our dark organs
just enough time to reveal
the houses built there
with reflection roofs
turning the stomach into a sun-doused penny.

reading rilke

our friendship is worth more now
that I don’t know anything with my eyes closed
or without a rationalization
the trees of my home are coming down too fast
showing the baldness of my unknowing.

but I know you—
the way I know climate of my own blood
the texture of my own love breathing
I remember how much I love you
the way you remember the shape of your own name
it’s precious, you see that now,
to know something with your eyes closed
without the luggage of language or our beehive mind
inside is its knowledge a working heart.

zen poem

bird is prophet


as is the whisper tree
olive and gray
with hands like books


wind is the beard of god
wintered and full of song


i am in one moment of flight
we are

the pillow by charles simic

are we still traveling?
whiteness, you come out of a dogs mouth
on a cold day. apron,
i lie within you like an apple.

i love when the wind talks to me
other peoples lives are so clear

nose; series; 2.

Gilman Street

lit up oil
wet wood's back up against
wet metal's
fresh corn tortillas
unrolled open
steamed rose
over chipped fence
orange barley &
old papers with ink
stacked up
dog leash

nose; series; 1.

Santa Barbara in Spring

pinch adobe wind
sea salt
hot closed fist with grass in it
mint
rosemary wheezing
under baked dust mud
clay apple
jasmine haloing like fog.

norman dubie what did you say?

Poetry Foundation

sex list. death list: a poem out of UNdoing Poetry

deep red animal
you are a lonely
god
a wonderful skin chart
of black brain/
woman puff or man hunt
what charm your breath has

a guess or a fruit
a loose swim
across children and dirt

bodiless stars
a blossomed open mouth
fragrant laughing

ode: on getting older

so here we all are at my funeral
watching the raise up
watching these tattered blue hands curve
back into berries
spinning so acutely with so much speed:
an atom, or planet, or clock wheel
watching these little piglets entwine
with those old rough sticks
the gray and gold woven
loose like a fertile blanket
and I ache so hard to be
that age again
because i loved you so much,
was a thin melon sliced up
easy
and sogging up the napkins with harps.
i was a fool, a flappy tongued fool
who had torn bruised knees
and sweet open eyes
a green topped summer lake:
the shore as anxious for tan kicking legs
as i was ready.
when the hunt still warmed me up
and i could feel the knock-over
like a cardboard house in wind
when i courted you
now there are enough shadows
in this skin, you could sew
a book of pages together
and these eyes
are small hard beans
but my chest is still open and
facing up.

kabbalistic earth

out the magenta throat
billowed music
from
an incandesent yellow orb

where voice becomes light
a holy sun meets
birth thickened into objects

& voice once weightless and moving
finds its texture
each letter growing into image
their shapes: stubby or sworded
arm and legs of skilled dancers;
these need both hand and throat


woven together tightly spinning
like bees or science
this voice made of light
and dancing drawings

speaks up a lake
thinly dressed and wet.
or an old porch splinter;
giant masculine mountains or
all kinds of hats. And
if unwraveled will
spill out honey viscus song

all things
curve by breaths.

a birthday poem

you scored a pair of
opal gills

and had I not met you,
I wouldn’t know the zest
of cool
brackish air that
rinses the braid of
dead horse kelp,
shamelessly sprawled out

over the pale morning bay

for the mark on my hand.

sweet burn


palm impregnant
indigo green
with membrane seed, I
trace your belly
as if a fetus slept there
heart beat like cabin
in black harbor
put ear to your grape skin
listen to the fluid music breathing
island shore rose with blood
say good night to you, turtle
& ruffle the white sheet over
your new pearl figure—I
love you this way; in this

maybe a series?

Y & M story: intrusions.


Y let M see three handwritten lines and then M window was splattered all over the seat.

birthday wish

I want my poems [life] to be

i heart huckabees
Croatia meets caribbean
meets motzart over
steel drums
rainer maria rilke
and leaves of grass
a giant rothko
broadside
bark thicker than blood
and each scale printed in like braille
or ancient stamps
bones and feathers
and bells
mason jars full of water
and fish bowls
hanging from the oak of myth
like kaleidoscope
shakers in bonnets
and Buddhas
sleeping in giant white barns
lanterns strung
empty night in the mountain
limes
and roots
as deep as god.

sneak preview.

want to see my daily poems? this is a collaborative project between me and the english patient. Michael Ondaatje i am yours.


like a lovers name, are carried
blue in your hands



you are cartographer
drawing wormy rivers over our backs
and picking them up like
tea cups

magic or mad

first poetry workshop 3.31.11

we could know this better.

Pema Chodron - Maitri

art 21

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hamilton/

turban

adulterous magenta
fidelity wrapped
around sleeping serpent
coiled in ice-creams
bandaged wound
or maybe an altar
dancing god,
the airless secret bound
braided sword
starless sea:
a universe of
growing limbs.

the man moth, i am a moth too.

The Man-Moth

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.