Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Monday, December 17, 2018
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Starring The Murk
You
put your hand in old water and pull it out, rattling little stars. The water
was made of earth, before it was blue night. Something there? A
bottom-glinting, a coin or an eye. Humble fish slip, freaking in the low
oxygen, dumb laughs stifling everything. This is not hip or good. The fish are mainly
dogs. One made you his companion and you spent the whole night wandering
sleepless, fake-lost, telling yourself that you are yourself, just so you could
have a plan.
No
one is here with you, your family is here with you, they go to the places where
you wander.
Then
the light got in and you tore your hair and clattered to the floor, necklaces
scattering all over, your skeleton. That frame of things has its way of seeing.
You solve it like a puzzle and it jumps all over you, a family of mudsharks,
or bears, or not yes, but surely a harrowing moment, thin in the air. Then the
water ripples again and you see edges are crackling things, edges like the slim
silver trails that made you. The bright broken fantasies, like the outline of
horses, that bore you to the flood. You were delighted to be heavy.
Why
do your joys feel like they don’t belong to you and yet your fears you own?
Then
the bitten thorn of youth trembles in the skin and the bungled world engages
you, riles you up, trips you in the murk. The murk is your land. It is all dim
and a triumph of fog. Your inky body, your tumult. You foam the murk with your
eyes and hands and can’t deny the damp breath of dank things.
That
had a ring to it, when you closed your eyes back there, and shifted to the
sitting still portion of your adulthood.
The
fire went up and we were something like alone with our thoughts, and our
waiting. I am alone with my waiting, and it’s good. It’s at least an oval. And
then the hard breath comes, us falling in the drink of salted slush. Us falling
forward and back-masking even these stymied words.
Tuesday, September 04, 2018
Meteor, Meteorite
To hell with history and the sense of history. The law is
telling. The law understands that you are going to hurt yourself as badly as
you possibly can. The law knows that you will punch your neighbor in the face
after you sleep with his wife. The law knows you will get your act together
only after your worst loss. The law doesn’t care what that loss is. And it’s
not the law of Moses, or the law of Charlemagne, or even the law of Lincoln,
Nebraska. It’s only the law of the moon…the law of the tide. Its window is what
you call your window, when you can’t sleep and you remember those few moments
in your life when you could have made a great decision, could have beaten that
addiction, could have been a better demon.
The Poem After The Poem
So what do I do
after
a poem like that,
when
I feel so satisfied
I
could jump?
What
do I say
and
what dreams
do
I go back to?
Those
are the kinds of days
I
want to have.
Those
are the kinds of feelings
on
the ceiling.
Those
shudders date back
to
some dark month
when
I knew the world
and
the world knew me.
When
things could be discovered,
and
the atom was still
an
amazement to me.
Why
so jaded in the sun?
Why
so lost in the script,
looking
for my next character,
her
next line?
Why
make the structure
of
the question
the
answer?
Why
make mystery
into
myth,
doing
my thinking
on
the page
in
runic séance?
Friday, May 25, 2018
To Give Away
The right breath is everything. You put your hand in front
of your face and you run the programs back again, looking for “azure,” or some
other more-than-nothing word. You collect time in a bucket and chill. You
wish away the slop, the lamps, and even the bulbs they held. You try to eliminate
articles, pronouns, whatever might have been in between you and that thundering quiet. Your
hands wait to hold each other. This is all a lonely
enterprise that you feel clear enough to wait for, from a distance. This might
be—dare you think it—the idea. No. It’s gone, and you with it. You thought for
a moment but you had to give that away. Say goodbye like a passenger on a ship.
Wave with a silk scarf: a scarlet or an azure scarf. That’s it. It’s gone now.
So sit and be refreshed. You don’t have to think. You can eat or just watch the
screens that make up your life now. Don’t fret over any of this. You have the
confidence of your soft carpet, grey and unobtrusive. It has learned you and
you can sit. It has veered back from somewhere: your sense that something should be done? No, that was gone from
the day you chose to lie down and just watch the river of huddled people flow
by, their dumb belongings strewn across the fields, under an azure sky.
Thursday, March 15, 2018
Oracular Theme
Send out the rocket dog, send out the ending. When the end
ends we are all busted up about the death of myth. There’s no one to check if
this hangout is dreamers all the way down. Me dreaming you and you dreaming the
dirt I thought I walked on. And the world dreamed by some blasted leaf.
Oh collection, oh page fraught with tedious wonder. Or is it loss?
Who am I even asking?
Our fingers test the
flight from which we wrest our gods. All days are days of special finding,
and every place a finding place. Can’t all skies look back down at us and
ask? I’m the same light I’ve always been, only I’ve lost everything but my
way.
Thursday, March 01, 2018
Winter Waves, Ice World
I’m finally full
of all those things. Bold numbness that I take pride in, rattling both my hands.
I’m my own companion, whispering “someday” in the night. As I drift along your wet
hillside, I hear the dogs and the rifles and I want to run. But there’s no
continent without time. I’m the gutter and the aching cheap smile, wishing for
a more tender history. How I work the ghosts in me, shout at them to slide me
through the missile tube. Point me at that moving shadow, those drowning eyes.
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Friday, January 05, 2018
New Poem in Matador Review
Hello friends.
Happy New Year!
I’ve just had a new poem published in the Winter 2018 issue of Matador Review.
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