Wednesday, April 6, 2011
5:40
the signature is a new average
take to the hills with your walking and sticks
all the animals won’t bother to meet you here
nondescript pastoral experience gloats over
the film of your eyes, a reel burning there in the light
sing your favorite song quietly while commuters
also sing their favorite cursewords
god loves a man in shoulderstrapped gun
loves the angry carriage of noon
high-beams traipse across the median
as the warp-speed snow gathers brown
it seams onto the edges of the causeway
over these abandoned townships the sky limps
each doorframe a measuring block
for removal--what sound crisps
in the fame cage is not the youth gone wild
it is the lack of pinholes in the bottom
of a beer can that makes the liquid stable
and a whole case of ponies is calling
from the trunk and our better judgement
loses to the distances we travel
and where we set each heart is a trophy
and the land will get us there
we just need to erase our way through
Monday, April 4, 2011
8:12
I will die in a fort of strapture, fit with laughing
I will die without punctuations or monetary curbs, cures, curves
I will die in a town named after
I will die a thousand times a sparrow, but once a corvus
I will die with my love bound up in books
I will die with my hand bloated and trapped in ink
I will die in the eyes of my wife’s fast blinking
I will die in the throat of my schoolchild as she learns her alphabets
I will die in the band sounds stilled beneath the metal bleachers
I will die in the keys of the janitor and the pressed pedals of the upright piano
I will die on a midwinter’s day and on the afterpolice shot of summer—walking on the moon
I will curl up into smoke and Dramamine and the goats will eat their cans and chew the grass
sprigs from my sockets
I will die with my family’s crest—a series of spaces between the waves
I will die in the cornucopia of a faltering national identity
I will die tomorrow and tomorrow and the rest of them will come to take you to bed
I will die a manor and campfire
I will die on the off-ramp of an odd numbered highway with salt still frosting the lines
I will die with my wife’s fear of dropping out of the sky and my own fear of finding another me inside these dreams I’ve signed
I will die of long-in-the-tooth, of rickety-rails, or choose-your-own-adventure laid out for adults
I will die sweating inside a handshake, the palm and fishlike
I will die in every curtain of lakewater interpreted as a walkable ice-way
Sunday, April 3, 2011
6:44
and i will never die
the horse of carting and the field of listing out demands for terminally ill patients in hospice care, who only want to swallow that last bit of food without interruption and with a swallow of stoli from a martini glass, up with a twist
and i will never close my right eye again in measurement of distances
the flowers drowned along the edge of the tidal basin with sunblock in their buds and paling which corroborates the similarities between work that has moved from the land into the stack of boxes labeled with light and glass--pale blue filling with white and then washed to grey
and i will never lift my hand with a shovel, i will not pare the bended branch, i will not leap from the road's edge into the paused traffic like a signpost felled by a strong wind
the satin touch of a young machine as it spins its gears and produces something you know you never can live without and how this item gets transmitted through time and space repeatedly to wind up on your television screen on sundays and in the morning hours of the lesser week
and i will never part with my folder of interminable diagrams for how to earn an education
there are photos i wish to recreate and ways of stalling in conversation, i hope this lever reaches you way out on the form--the harm--the flame of a cloak and dragon
Saturday, April 2, 2011
4:51
things you can't help
but think about--
The quality of water reportedly repeated
in poems the new yorker publishes
one can guess brackish, thorough
is the listing a series of pauses a form
of entrance or do we inherit
the stalls our thoughts program--see the source
is master and the master is a set of chairs
empty behind a curtain--strong must rising
One fires their friends after
years of groveling for affinity
and on
with the tempering of metals
softer than the teeth. Tuned radios, too, command
attention. What's received, what's blasted
from the pill gun and shushed beneath
the table's cloth. Food in scraps and tapping.
It takes 5 minutes for the water to drain effectively
from the page. All the words a-smear and mention of forestry
in ranges of syllabic meter will not help.
To mend the floorboards or the industrial fan
might require a sketch
to compile its parts for fixing. And fists
are not good instruments to bludgeon
with. I learned this from fiction--another use of the forearm...
there's less intricacy there, or the forehead.
But drawing requires a deftness
that can be turned over
at least a dozen times while sleeping.
Remove all references to lakes
and swimming from your life
or reconsider the use of fins in film.
The use of fans in blading,
the use of floors in waiting.
A separated body pours into the glass.
A need in noon to track heads fast
down the draintrap.
Friday, April 1, 2011
5:41
this day is formulaic
and the birds are not a chorus
but you can silver your bullets
and cram another mouthful of grapes
i mean more on, more on than this
i lost the will to open the mailbox
and the key is another instrument toppled
by excessive use
just think of all the empty shelf space
in detroit and how a cat can
manage its daily tasks
with no shortage of complaint
i will go tell a man my waist size now
and flock with the other cars
and eat the raw potatoes
and climb a numb moment, a flight
with scissors for its cutting hair
and the monuments will still be
washed before they're reconfigured
no more stone in the suit
a flank made out of pockets
and to find the hole inside your year
where you can stack things like this
like so many beginnings and mysterious pranks
take the one with the back seat
and the thousand gallon sink hole
or the fist tanking your eye
until it can only hold banks and blanks
like dollarbills and sighs.
i am not compute, will not make this model-truth
Thursday, March 31, 2011
2:57
revving up for the month of april, where i intend to post a bit each day under certain const(ime)raints. this will mark year three of napowrimo, which before this year didn't really realize was a thing. yesterday i learned what a wombo was. i'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes. today i spent time at the library and sorting through clipart and doing the new-ish office job. happy to be a workin', even with(in) the rain.
in preparation, all the nude accordion
players gathered, their boxes squeezable
their hands and harmonies (hormones) at the ready
it wasn’t too abysmal for the end of matches
some burning thing and then a quiet pause
a forest called for the end of trampling
the seats you were supposed to bring
are all garnished with rest now, no creek
to wade through, no separated shoulder
or rave to scamp with glowsticks.
I was partly myesh, or slef—keyed
into opening like a cabin
and the slurs were easy to roll out
a noodle-like rope slipped from the trunk
of the car back into the home you left
another type of fairy-tale trail
that would be eaten by good intentioned birds
and the madness we suffered was called adulthood
a cheap fixative to ply the calendar with
sticks in all the stone rolled quarters
and nowhere easy to lay one’s head down
for a song—even if it was limber
and galumphed from the wrinkly hands
and worried bodies of poorly trained nudists.
so last century with their concerns
for authenticity.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
gears and upping
so bet your better parts, sew buttons onto the traffic standstill
and for what comes back to bite your ass
there's a mirror to look behind you set up just in front of your face
and the aces are all buried in the deck
some swift handled-barmaid may come along to watch your dealing
or guess how much to lose and sidebar gambling
is a product of illy wrought children
i'm trying here to not notice what the season will be up to when it closes
or how the better pitchers always end up
full of the wrong type of beer
or in the wrong league entirely
come april and the spittoon of fakery
come all you burned ghost factories, spitting new clouds
and bird-shadows into the sky
some sun work is backwards and the retinal cues
a photograph captures will mark each pupil bloodstained.
this i learned from my future
father-in-law
while waiting to fill my jowls with cake
seagulls chased a crow until it landed in home base
and everything went quiet.
trees storing up the sun
had begun to spit up green parts and flowers
my tenses kept catching--