Sin-e-cru--cured

all the blasts have come and gone, save me for your headaches.
tomorrow's night cannot be long while the lights are steady.
referees in t-shirts, samples made of cake frosting,
a hat for all the snow to catch, a wistful gong forgetting
what sound it sung back to its hooks
what laugh you've lost to the kitchen nook

here a piece and there a piece and nary a sound is left
there a scrap and here a nap when all the floors are swept.
off with your head and off with your head and on
to the fallen soldiers. their hairs are long
when the keening's done, they leap from their bodies
like mash in the sour wood--flame licked and tame.

i'll not boss the forge, i'll not anvil the hammer.
i'll not wash my hands, they'll stay dry forever.

Fun with cold

Wearing very little, but a lot of very little.
The hands come fast to freeze.
A sweater on the corner is the man with his running suit, his folds of skin.
He can run 18 feet. At estimate.
My own feet, blistery.
Plug sound into the ears and there's a new advertising method that involves sticking your headphone jack into a hole in someone's head to hear their thoughts. The other person is electronic and two dimensional. People run into each other trying to stick their metal parts into other flat people's holes.
A bottle of milk on the front step turns into ice cream in 1948. Cream that rises and undersweet.
Clouds. Breath. Clouds. Cloud. Breaths.
To make a telephone call, shout into a piece of mail and then rush to a postbox. The cold will hold your voice slowly. Tender in its knifelike hands.

Here is a picture of deer in icing:

Could we talk with the politicos?

If caught in camera. If eyed and stammer. ID. Lean-to


And this is a wooden robot built with Jenga blocks:

Only slightly more wooden than David Lehman's poem for Barack Obama. Did I just say that? I guess so. Happy monday!

New year, same windows and doors

I wrote a poem about being in Atlanta, kind of. I can't yet tell what it is. Have been playing Wii and recovering from eating my way around the south. Pizza the size of small children. My camera's gone wonky. It won't zoom past 1.7 and the limited warranty is limited enough that it ran out and screeched down the street better than a month ago. I'll have to get very close to things I want to take pictures of in the future. Penn State was disappointing and then Ohio State was as well. The whole of the Big Ten.

[picture of a picture in a box]

That's what investment in futility breeds. So on to Pitt's newest number one ranking and fitness and trying to write daily and plans for future classes and other things that happen beyond today. The window here is covered and steamy. Heat pours over my left side and distorts the little humidity gauge on the windowsill. It says we are in the comfort zone.