Memory Is A Ship In A Bottle

didn't make it.

2009-05-01T00:51:00.001-04:00

Another one bites the dust. I did make my middle school students write copious amounts of verse.

Spelunker Becoming Machine

2009-04-19T00:35:00.002-04:00

Start anything flesh,

a dragon, or a deer,

listen to your hart (deer),

start animal, the grass

under your feet, think

we too must have evolved from pigs,

pigs root & seeds root,

but only to be.

Start composed mostly of water.

Seventy-Five percent, or whatever

the statistic is today. Drink water.

Need water. Dream water.

Go swim in the ocean.

Start something flesh,

start fish, become dolphin.

Ignore angry articles about

the anti-social behavior of dolphins.

You have beautiful hands and arms,

but it is never enough. When you first

entered the cave, you found the fire

so beautiful you thought it best to touch.

The fire is still beautiful,

ever cave an epiphany, we only see

your shadow after your descent.

Each turn a new chasm. We can only

assume your shadow still follows you.

the music of dirty magnolia trees in april

2009-04-18T22:51:00.002-04:00

This boy is supposed to be

tall, dark, and stone wall

no more turtle-necks,

pink polo shirts instead,

chasing ice-cream trucks

on a dog-towed skateboard

Poughkeepsie girls are

as attractive as Binghamton girls,

but only idling around the fountain

in Soldier's Park.

What does one expect from

a city that replaces Tokyo's

cherry blossoms

with these dirty metonymic magnolias.

The thermometer on the dashboard

of my new car is accurate in cold weather,

but always five degrees more hot when it swelters.

I say "when it swelters," and not "summer,"

because it is April, and the heat-wave

is Eliot's extra British 'l' ...

the difference between the cruelest season change

and the cruellest.

There's always guitars, drums, and screams

pouring out boiling April

car windows like breeze,

and somewhere, there is a girl

who might play rhythm

to my son's lead.

How To Save Money

2009-04-17T22:19:00.001-04:00

bottlecap

broken paperclip

infinite jest

microphone

fan

When you collect empty bottles

to return for five-cent deposits,

save the bottle-caps for a makeshift

tambourine.

This is Plan-B, of course,

and it assumes you don't have

a bulletin board that charts

the national debt.

It assumes your financial records

are scattered, in the middle of an empty room.

Take the broken paperclip

and scratch your name

in the western wall's paint.

By now you should have rhythm,

and a name to save.

Remember your first babysitter,

how you wailed as your mother gave

her instructions: bedtime, snacks, et cetera.

Remember how she let you stay up late,

to watch Macgyver, and how you

basked in her infinite jest

and most excellent fancy,

backlit by television.

Now take the tambourine,

and tap four times. Repeat.

Put your mouth near the microphone.

Closer. Eat the microphone.

The microphone is the stillness

at the center of a window fan,

the unmoving origin of all whirring.

Sing your name;

record to save.

Fire is My Favorite Number

2009-04-16T13:44:00.000-04:00

Gun, matches, bullets,

and half a pack of nails.

She wrote letters on my back

that burned like math.

She once read me a book

that laughed like a candle.

She'll never get that book back,

and its ashes will never have the last laugh.

Fear of Death Poem #3

2009-04-15T13:50:00.000-04:00

My grave is the dog barking at the mailman, her whimpering

when I shut the door behind me, a lost moment spent chasing

the robins in the crab-grass dandelion park near my apartment.

My graves are the shadows that fall over the mattress on the floor, and the

books that are too numerous for the shelf--so line the walls in stacks--give

each shadow the promise of a bedtime story.

2009-04-14T08:21:00.000-04:00

My soul sinks slowly down this river valley,

from the mountains to the river, it repeats every day,

My hovering heart floats down the tidal river to the sea.

The mountains host the ghosts' bowling alley

that still thunders down on me today.

My soul sinks slowly down this river valley,

Something pulls me down, my soul becomes an tributary;

my body, invisible; my joy, a causeway,

My hovering heart floats down the tidal river to the sea.

I can feel it best in the City of Poughkeepsie,

when walking songs of westside nights away.

My soul sinks slowly down this river valley,

400 years after Hudson prayed his name be

"carved upon the tablets of the sea," I pray

My hovering heart floats down the tidal river to the sea.

2009-04-13T08:21:00.000-04:00

The hard lines that separate my face

from the rest of the world begin to blur

as my hairline recedes.

Whiskers become stubble becomes smooth skin;

red spots come and goes like seaweed.

I remember my first time,

held in Mom's arms,

how she pointed and said,

"there you are."

I'll admit that "you" is a pretty heavy concept,

heavier than the skin of my neck

that sags under my chin.

Now there are two images in the mirror,

and beneath my face, wet with shaving cream,

my son's hairless cheeks begin to change

under the gaze of his widening eyes.

Everything Is Shared

2009-04-12T08:20:00.000-04:00

My songs climb trees, and are made into oxygen by leaves.

This is how I write music: I go for a walk, and scream to the sky.

Whoever answers is the name of the song.

The first verse is their mother's maiden name.

The chorus gets bigger, like a balloon,

and the bridge rises until you can't see it anymore.

The second verse is all blue, until a cloud appears.

If I see a motorcycle blur past, bam, there is my bass drum.

I'm going to need three more motorcycles.

2009-04-11T08:20:00.000-04:00

First Time: etherised upon a table.

It probably was not worth feeling anyway.

Second, Third, & Fourth Time, during an evening,

morning, and afternoon (respectively): with coffee spoons.

A tool to sweeten a bitter experience.

Fifth Time: pinned and wriggling on the wall.

You might as well try to enjoy it.

Sixth Time: after tea and cakes and ices.

Nothing screams romance like desert!

Seventh Time: squeeze the universe into a ball.

Come on, it'll be worthwhile! Do you need another drink?

Eighth Time: Lick the fuzz. (Of a peach.)

When Caring Becomes Controlling

2009-04-10T08:19:00.000-04:00

When my hand stays yours

from its attempt to sink a

knife into your breast.

dream dangerously

2009-04-09T08:17:00.000-04:00

after:

"if a dream is a construction, then what is not a construction" - Brenda Shaughnessy

Let's ask a dreamer who has lived through this before.

Someone who can ask us a question,

subtract a consonant to write the word.

Some dreams have answers anyway.

Each answer leads to a firestorm,

a candlelight brassiere, falling, frozen in midair.

The dreamer is sure. We are congested with answers.

Candlelight is poetry. Fire isn't.

I see how it is for you.

I freeze myself to obscure my image,

to observe the next.

You see me clearly anyway.

An inferno confuses better,

the skeletons burning in my closet,

becoming boneless, headless.

It's true that a fire is blue at the base,

and white near its edges. But that is permanent.

What changes is the flickering orange,

only the sulphur, the chemical transaction

between matchstick and nosehair,

and light. Flame consumes all,

all upon all upon all,

is a solvent for fabric and flesh alike, for living,

for seeing the slanted body, perfect only

in the half-light of candles.

We would still thirst

for orange communion.

Millions of thirsts to damn us with flames.

We quench them.

We are divine, light with salt, cold to freeze it.

Anyway, the answer--

Poetry is not a construction.

Fire is not an obstruction,

Fire is not fame.

A summer stage of worthless salt,

immutable to even a spotlight,

crying for a star.

Oh idealists! Acting on ideas matters!

If we write of fire, of fame and flames

to salt the backroads of our dreams,

what worlds burn, that destroy us that we keep

destroying and destroying to remove the writing at last.

To start the pleasant writing.

Meeting New People

2009-04-08T08:17:00.000-04:00

About entering the backyard, the stripling was hesitant.

He would poke his toe out the porch door,

and sink into the outside air.

He loved it, though, the backyard.

He loved the stones that lined

the eastern border of his parent's property.

Each day, he would turn one over,

and trade the smooth gray

for the teeming brown,

the salamanders and weevils.

A Heterochromatic Minnaloushe

2009-04-07T08:16:00.000-04:00

The moon rose late last night,

a top that spins odd-eyed with the sun, still,

light spread, the mottled canvas of

the sky cried to the Poughkeepsie alley-cat.

Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth to

the grass between the sidewalk and the street.

Feet pattered, with the mouse corpse in her mouth,

she danced up the fire-escape. Dappled fur,

a fashion that mimicked the moon,

blurred with the turn of the dance on rusted iron,

against brick, to the silver place, to the golden place.

The change of phase always on her face,

and as her diligent pupils scoured the rooftop,

and as she offered the corpse to her crescent mother,

her eyes spun like tops, the most important cat (to the moon at least).

2009-04-06T08:16:00.000-04:00

One. I hate when you drink without me.

The ice cubes in your glass will continue

to melt faster each year, until our bed

is entirely submerged in the Atlantic.

Two. Your hair is the color of a blackbird's nest.

When I twist it around my fingers, near the knuckles,

and pull, the wings of fallen angels flutter.

Three. You are not as tall as god. Actually,

you are quite short. As short as a dandelion

that grows in the crack of a wall. A child plucks

and pulls you to her lips. She blows.

2009-04-05T08:15:00.000-04:00

The black and white picture

of a tiger clipped from a nature magazine

that you left on my coffee table

still frightens me three years after

the last time I saw you.

The details escape, but the growl

of loss is stark against men's magazines,

keychains, and scented candles.

2009-04-04T08:15:00.000-04:00

It was the scent of gasoline

mixed with fresh cut grass

and the oil-stained sawdust of decades past

in a friend's Poughkeepsie garage,

helping him move, that took me back

to a spring ten miles south

and twenty years past.

The sun set just after seven.

It was my first time mowing the lawn alone,

and the world still roared with the whirl of the blade

for a few fat moments after I shut the engine down.

The shadows grew like weeds from the fertile clippings

I had just created as I wheeled the machine to the shed.

The door groaned against my heaving shoulder

and the cement floor absorbed the weight of the mower's load.

I muscled the shed's door closed, listened for the lock's click,

and bolted toward the front of the house. As I turned

around the corner, the silhouette that greeted me

spooked the sweat clean off the back of my neck.

My father's uncanny voice called questions

as I cowered back against the fence and slumped in fear,

and he scooped me whole, and the air pumping in

and out of my lungs released a sigh of recognition.

My father was never as tall as the shadows I watched over

his shoulder as he carried me into the house

that evening.

We Mean You No Harm

2009-04-03T08:14:00.000-04:00

The lady in the park walked her baby girl in a stroller

and shrieked when she looked to the heavens

and saw what could only be an alien ship.

"To you our lasers have photon-filtering lenses,"

said the aliens.

Amen

2009-04-02T08:14:00.000-04:00

The wafer dissolves on my tongue

and thirty minutes later among

stacks of books and a lonely ashtray

the song pushes out a heavy lung.

I believe in creation, even though

god appears to me as real as a dead crow.

I take my son to church every sunday.

If god were real, he'd want it that way.

2009-04-01T08:13:00.000-04:00

The

wax,

sappy,

drips down trunks,

from outside candles

that cover the soft pinkish clouds

like potpourri against the chemical dryness.