Wednesday, November 30, 2011

November 30 2011 A Sistine Chapel Kind of Morning

It is no surprise that I am a fire
raging without any borders, consuming land
at a heartbreaking rate, devouring the
loose timber within, exhuming the heat that
abides in things, this polished ruby of flame.
What is shocking is the spark that smolders.

Everpresent & the abundunce of dry
kindling that propels me. It is God's breath in
my nostrils feeding it, needing his lazy touch.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

November 29 2011 The Stars Are Either A Giant Word Hoard of the Universe or Venerable Ancient Monks

Into
The
Taciturn
Blue
Black
Sky
Speak
Your
Piece
Stringless
How
We
Were
Meant
To
Pass
Unafraid
Automatic
As
Swallowing
Face
Them
Stars
Child
Them
Yellow
Winking
Monks
That
Glare
At
Our
Monkey
Brains

Monday, November 28, 2011

November 28 2011 Prayer To A Pomengranate

the pomengranate is my patron saint
the one i bow & pray to every night,
who grants me every blessing,
the one who assuages my every sorrow.
These folded hands, bloody red, are my witness,
marking resurrection of all fruit within.
I twist it across my rough hewn hands
calloused by years of labor over the endless green
of cucumber, tobacco and thick fisted corn.
Her seeds catch crimson in the gaps of my teeth
Pink dreams run down my ruddy cheeks, its stain of grace
rolls off as I savor the purple bitter bite.
Each pit is spit out like a new commandment.

You and I are brothers, so i share my half of the
shrunk gift, vermillion lipped, rubbed bruise raw
across the shredded meat.
This is a communion of a stolen tongue,
& a frantic heartbeat that burns within me.

November 27 2011 :

Sometimes i get tired of the sound of my own voice.
i just know that the end of a year brings more questions than answers.
where does spirit go, uncorked like red wine that spills all over everything?
What now are we to make of the sullen cornfields?
Can anything grow in this waiting season?

Sunday, November 27, 2011

November 26 2011 : Autumnal Poem 2011

Be mine
Brightened light
Drown to yellow autumn
Nothing held back
Swim in the black
Cunty smell of leaves
Below worms toil
Turning soil like
Corkscrews eating
& shitting dirt
What burrows deep
I am a harbor
Nurturing it as my own
Brother sky
Sister earth
Gaze into my face
With forgetful eyes
I alone nurture the lies.

November 25 2011 : Erasure of Cormac McCarthy Introduction to His Novel Suttree

Dusty hours streets go forth
Drunk and homeless, go highshouldered
In grim perimeters, sootblackery
Stones unplumbed, scarabs and rain worn
Dim with years, packed, dirty bones
Under blue lamplight, run on darkness
Into the pinchbeck steel leaks.
Past sandy cinderblock
Sumac and pokeweed withers in clay banks.
Vines coiled in sprout shapes from cinder
In abandonment
Past lamps
Past oblique china
Painted where dirty flowers rent with rum
Cross from hobbled bottles.
Toys of the damned
Where lepers and the improbable
Bass moon clouds run like ink,
Stamped against a rampart
Farther, forsaken
Forgotten miles, earth clings
A mongrel architecture.
Works of Man
Aberrant, disordered & mad.
The sap of a factory wall runs
Tracking weeds of foul blue.
Filaments nameless in the current,
In glass window frames, a
Moonshaped globe provides a constant helix
Of faint burnt fields
Mud deltaed
Its rich alluvial bones of cratewoods
& condoms and fruitrinds washing up.
Old time, near the fecal mire of a trackless dementia
Is shorn, skull colored, bleached
& bloated,
Mooneyed birds, sluggard ooze from
Rain flattened riverloam.
The neap flitch of foundered fires,
The dying incandescent eyes,
The wave of the violent & the insane
Living on drama and parable
Longing in dark’s restitution
All within alien reaches
Interstitial and illshapen, a
Fugitive of order
Quiet like a camp the night before a battle
Breast beaten like a heart
Beset by the sea, gate, walled shut,
All kept by the bloody carder of the world,
These bone horses,
Rain splattered by
Rain you can see falling slant –
The river seems a gift
In gifts from stone to stone
Webbed in duel the
Jointed fool dangles a bone
Pendulum in motley shapes
In tender presentations
And in ruder forms

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

November 24 2011 : We Are Buckshot, Returning To The Barrel Of the Shotgun Which First Scattered Us

[Let’s all migrate & become nomads]
[Let’s pick up our heavy mortgages & those commitments that hamstring us]
[Let’s gather up our belongings]
[those things we will someday sell at a tag sale]
[those things that we will pay someone else to store for us]
[while we work extra jobs to find the money to buy larger houses]
[with more cavernous garages to store all these things]
[Today is an implosion] [a beehive of collapse as we scatter to gather]
[Scoot home little children]
[This season is as slippery as turkey gravy]
[Run home] [collect yourselves from the coasts to the midlands]
[From the deep boasts of the mountains] [to high-pitched briny beaches]
[Try uprootedness] [bake too much] [drink too much]
[watch too much football] [& recall a grievous childhood]
[It’s time to dance the dance of memory]
[We are geese making our way in V-formation]
[Remembering routes home as innately as to our fathers’ graves]
[Collect fallen leaves from denuded trees like spent stars off the ground]
[Paste each leaf back onto bony branches]
[Gather] [Undestroy things][Undarken night][Redawn the morning]
[We magnetic filings have our poles reversed every year at this time]
[Travel by the light of instinct] [use them all]
[the ones we use when we hunt] [or during sex]
[or when we just breathe in the unspeakable parts of a poem]
[Go home]

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

November 23 2011 : Welcome The Pilgrims

Take the rough hewn timbers of us
The boards with upturned rusty nails
Just begging for a tetanus shot,
Take the flecks of paint & the skin-pricking splinters,
Sweep the saw dust & dust bunnies that
Scamper under foot,
Unbend each & every eye hook,
Smooth every hole punched wall,
& screw in each dangling ceiling tile.

The weather has changed & the geese
Call out to you.

Return.

Travel if you must.
Bake pies, let spirit take the form of the aromas
Of cinnamon and cumin.

We have been on the road so long, now,
We sometimes lose our way.
We still have a ways to go to discover a freshly baked smile.
Lower yourself into the open hands of others
& return unto the lands you never really left.

Tomorrow is a prophet & sunlight, its prophecy.
Just pack up & go. Leave the shadows behind.

Monday, November 21, 2011

November 22 2011 : Dedication

Have thanks
And all evil will be exorcised from it.
Blessings sank upon your heart
Have thanks
& Freedom drinker
Amethyst cutter
Bless the drink
And all that we touch
Have thanks
And do not suffer for you
Are far, far from me.

From Translation of Richard Straus’ “Dedication”

November 21 2011 : The Swan

My fearful singing swan
so mindful yet forced silent
By early white plumage,
elves glide on blissful song in the dell
Parting false company, but only by
Listening you died betrayed & sang
Aways in circles, where the song faded away
You were such a swan then.

From Translation of Edvard Grieg’s “The Swan”

November 20 2011 : Who Is Silvia?

Who Is Silvia?

Who is she that fair heaven has graced
That we might admire her beauty?
Kindness repairs blindness
And inhabits each mortal thing,
The dull earth dwelling brings forth garlands.

An Erasure From translation of Franz Schubert’s “Who Is Silvia?”

November 19 2011 : To the Distant Beloved for Pity’s Sake: There Never Was A Shade

There never was a shade for pity’s sake
As my idol awaits,
Languishing beneath ardent rushes
For the sound of love escapes
Through every cell, and every plant proclaims it.
Love knows, the gods know
Into blue hazy lands we travel hills and valleys
With our sighs that speak of our pain:
Love reaches for what love has concecrated.

From translations of Handel “Ombra Mai Fu” (“Never Was a Shade”), Vincenzo Bellini, “Per Pieta Bell’idol Mio” (“For Pity’s Sake”), and Beethoven’s, “Auf dem Hugel sitz Spahend” (“To The Distant Beloved”)

Friday, November 18, 2011

November 18 2011

Each time I am distracted, a piece of my mind is torn wide open like a bag of kettle cooked potato chips.
Each time I must drag myself back, life drains out of me, a blood donation gone awry.
It’s easy to say that an even life is the best path, but sometimes deep breathing leaves me empty.
Finding poems like really cool rocks, is more a matter of luck than observation
Like spotting that black girl at the crosswalk tonight with square hairstyle, wearing a green orchid.
I can’t make this up especially when inspiration drains from me like dinner sunlight.
Poems dragged up from god-knows-where: that is slave labor.
But the sparkly garnet ones, the ones that are secrets,
The ones that gaze at our faces the way stars gaze at our poems,
seeking constellations in syllables and rhyme, is just like fishing,
waiting for the unspeakable that lurks just below the water, tugging at your line.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

November 17 2011 Instead of Coffee

The clay is not what you think it is. It is breath pushed upon us by the priest at the baptism of a fool,. The Lord, God, breathed directly into Adam’s nostril never removed his chewing gum. Make mussels in tomato for me and I will make gespacho, balancing heat and cold. Boil the linguini al dente just the way you like it. I am no addict but I have things hidden in my attic that would shock others. We strive so hard to look for that moment when the great God leans into our ears and whispers us the great secret. There is no secret. Sometimes instead of coffee, this is what I do: I sharpen a paint brush and leave myself in skidmarks across the page. That is it. Make your enemies and your alliances. For chrissake sake, open up what you think you know and dump it all right out on the table like emptying a handbag. Keep your head in a bag if you want courage. Keep it in a key spot, under a rock for safe-keeping, for when you need it. Really need it. Some believe courage is for any time but I don’t agree. I want you to know who I am and I want our love story to be filled with questions and color.

November 16 2011 Grapes

She stands out in conformity
The skin-tight green hangs tightly to formation.
“hold on, hold on,” she whispers to me meekly.
A coxcomb flap holds all its sweetness inside.
“Crush me and I will yield everything to you,”
She says with drunk eyes sparkling from possibility,
Her sticky sweetness a dangling smile,
Contrasting her thick pudding skin of earth.

November 15 2011

A feathered grain of sand, my friend,
you are a shard of sunlight with wings
Singing in and out of view.
Clutch the bark, frail seed-hunter,
Let me write the life story of your sparrow life
In commas and ellipsis on
your paper-heart that flutters bright,
a kite wrapped up in twig-boned softness, shy as any dark.

Monday, November 14, 2011

November 14th 2011

Little monster is what I call you
Bring that snakelike heart over
With you, giftwrapped to the

Yankee Gift Swap you call friendship.
Hold the poisonous tongue
You tell yourself is a shield,

& like Captain America
You, a hero, read from a script,
Rehearsing home everywhere.

In the palms of sawdust hands
Each encounter is a threat
And every threat, unnerving grace.

You will find a treasure in every face.

November 13 2011 Dear November

Dear November

I have seen warmer days than you can throw at me. You can’t quite make up your mind. Your idle threat of winter is amusing and has buttoned up all the fields & browned everything with just the hint of a stir-fry. Chasing light is no way for a month to behave, even if October did begrudgingly hand you Halloween on a silver platter with that freak snowstorm, all those little trick-or-treaters dodging the witch hands of felled branches & the thrumming danger of downed power lines. It’s not seemly for a month to lard itover others like this when you are best known for turkey & turnips, for college football and pumpkin pie for god’s sake. I have known you to dress like summer on occasion but really, you don’t have the legs for it. Bring on whispery light, I can take it, though I can’t feel my fingers wrapped around the warm paper coffee cup and stop dangling Jupiter like some engagement ring. The moon, Jupiter and Pleiades cluster as evening falls still, the quiet spills out of your pockets and ends up everywhere: of all the months to harbor silence, you do it with a slight-of-hand, that makes you a magician with a secret doorway into winter, full of abundance & food & gratitude & the Spartan barrenness of tree bark, the sickly absence of leaves, the throaty musk of flaking wood, the slickness of decay, the vanilla-like aroma of mildewy breezes.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

November 12 2011 My Theory About Extreme Athletes

I have this theory that all extreme athletes -
marathoners and Tour de France cyclists -
are driven to perform such events by
a lackluster sex life.
Why else would someone sit on a bicycle
ride one-hundred and fifty miles over mountains?

In the same way, only those without any
lives at all engage in writing poetry.

November 11 2011 Old

I cannot wait for the day when i am old enough
to say whatever is on my mind
and not care one whit about who hears,
to never have to look around and wonder
if there are children nearby.
When I am old, senility will just be the giant
felt tip marker everyone uses to fill in the blanks
about my aberrant behavior,
To be able to say whatever goddamn thing
i want whenever i goddamn want
and not care if it's right or if it's profound,
or if it's just a load of crap.

i would not want to be hurtful.
people are so damaged these days.
so raw.
i would want to register others' feelings,
no matter how old i got.

Sometimes i am an ambulatory hospital for those who have
lost the spark for their own goodness.

Maybe i should just sit quiety by
scribbling these bone fragments onto
paper and keep my goddamn mouth shut.

Novenber 10 2011 Murmation

without a word i will move with you
to become black cream in white coffee

against a lead sky with you
my wish is to blur, to remove

sharp edges of what it means
to love another, your eyes are a swarm

shedding boundaries, stripping the
lines around my starling soul

that feasts on a jazz that is the
flight of a solitary bird,

spirit is the collective
consecrated as it blots out the sun.

blackened by simple all consuming joy.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

November 9 2011

Toward the ocean, nearly
homosapiens growl.
the groupel is a festooned phenomenon
the velvet grumble of thunder,
the blessed sign of the cross
made by zig-zag lightning.
There is nothing like the romance of a plain.

November 8 2011

Coffee could not wake up
Cup waited patiently
a night in the cupboard
requires the patience of a tree stump.
Clock counted down the minutes
when Pot would empty herself
kept awake by the scratching of Insomnia
Cup could only shiver a china chill
Daylight stormed around
the room like appetite
Sleep just buried her head
No one ever considers
Cutlery in the mornings
Crying finally woke up theCoffee
who grumbled about not being able
to sleep in such a noisy place
Noise looked away in embarrassment
Bacon sang a duet with Eggs
& the mellifluous scent filled the room
making everyone hungry
There was work to be done
& Sunlight was a petulant master

Monday, November 7, 2011

November 7 2011 Planting Tulip Bulbs

Yesterday, i dug eighty holes all
cylindrical and eight inches deep
the maw of the tool hungrily chewing through the
meat of cold soil.
I turned each tulip bulb, pointed side up,
Then tossed in bone meal and earth, and tamped it down
with acorn sized knuckles.

I pause to consider the cylinder of my mouth
as it covers yours, and push deep
the bulb of my tongue, pointed side up
into the heavy history of our soil
we both await the chick down fur of spring.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

November 6 2011

Its all over
But for the torrent of numbness
The longing
The absent crooked smile
That held everything
Pinned kestrel-like to the dumb blue
Mornings.

November 5 2011 Easter Breakfast

Yogurt with fruit
Buttered matza
Sliced hardboiled egg
Tinted azure and peach
Mustard on yolk
Dipped in sea salt for bite
Breakfast transfigures
The sagging morning
Drop a penny into the vase
Of mourning tulips
And watch the stones
Blanched perfect white
Round for rolling
Pushed away by the light.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

November 4 2011

1. The best thing you can tell a man is how he reminds you of Steve McQueen.
2. Resentment smells a lot like paint.
3. Only a poet notices a famine of silence.
4. It's important to reorganize your wallet every so often.
5. Be indebted to ignorance your very first teacher.
6. Witness and march: both!
7. Hand your relationships over to art.
8. Man up and admit you don't know what you believe.
9. Cultivate the endurance of wild, migrating geese.
10. Welcome the disappeared of your life.

November 3 2011

those days when sunlight cracks wide &
spills like egg upon the river, it stings my eyes
We pause to consider the shoulders
of roof tops, straigtening themselves upright,
preparing for the onslaught of snow.
The fog has eyes and watches, still as a cell tower.
the jets overhead scratch at the stone blue
sky, like fingernails etching into ice.
The corn has browned, its wrinkled face remembering
every verdant moment.
amputated trees, tossing limbs everywhere
no longer gaze upward and pray.
the agnostic cold has settled everything.

November 2 2011

"what seems real to you, Marcus
and what is a dream?"
this life that blows by
us is this effervescent sky
children in laps lean in with their chins
their dreams are what was put deep
within so long ago.

"And what was placed so deep inside you, Marcus?"
capacity. volume.
cavernous space.
a penchant for awkwardness
a place to store whatever comes my way
for future reference

November 1 2011

because i like how the soft of you
accepts the hard of me
because the "no" of my tongue
cannot hold all the weight of the "yes" of you
because memory is not something i trust either,
like history, or math, or geography.
Nothing holds my breath as you do
with soluable edges mix-
ing the jelly of everything