Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)
I took my bearings from
a tattered map taped to a lamppost
turned left at the inside-out umbrella
propped against a dumpster
& continued straight past
the strip malls
& the self-storage units
until I reached open ground
contoured with corn stubble
a crow on pond ice
the blue trees of distance
I walked into the wind
sleet stinging my face
& shook my head at every driver
who pulled alongside & gestured to get in
this was where I’d been going
I was looking for a reason
to turn back
The wound wells like a mirror
with the squandered coins of younger,
more legible selves, which otherwise
would’ve dulled from daily transactions
with weather, lovers, commerce.
A wound is the only way to wear
the heart on the sleeve again.
It salivates, eager to fold in upon itself
& complete the feedback.
The shadow of a butterfly shrinks
& vanishes in the middle of the field
& you turn & raise one hand against the sun,
unreachable in its crown of blazing thorns.
I have been capturing darkness from all corners of the sky
& passing it through the negative lightning of my body,
pressing hard with my one free hand to keep the earth
brown & solid beneath us, honeycombed as it is
with metals & aquifers & the pale shapes of our forerunners,
who burgeoned like gastropods from a single foot.
I have been taking notes in the margins
until the book is more mine than anybody’s,
& deserves an altar more than a lectionary.
My millennia of commentaries are dry as punk.
They will flare at the slightest spark & rise on black sails,
astronauts camouflaged against the missing dark matter.
I have inserted myself into your simple narratives,
the foil for your straight man, the chuckleheaded peasant
in your tragedies. My waistline expands like an empire
out to conquer the demons of appetite through assimilation.
The shortest distance bends & blurs. You can’t get
from Point A to Point B without doubling back.
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the tree at the center of the cosmos.
Don’t forget to submit tree-related posts to the Festival of the Trees, which will appear next month at the outstanding science blog A Neotropical Savanna — details here.
I went in the booth
to be alone with you lot,
my fellow citizens.
Feel free to leave your own Election Day haiku (or American sentence) in the comments.
Skullfinger ribrattles banjo my nightjar lids,
those fictions, those nictitating membranes
stretched between the Pleiades. (Say what?)
I will make of my Adamic rib an ivory toothpick.
Look, there’s little else you can do with such
bonewhite lies as I am heir to. (Soup?
Scrimshaw?) I mean, sure, a skeleton’s O.K.
for morality plays. But the inescable
optimism implicit in my barebones grin?
That’s not me. I am what I ham what I eat.
*
I go slow because I can,
practicing non-attachment:
pieces of me break off & stick
to anyone who gets too close,
& I’m not responsible for
whatever happens to your wet
nose next. Let me be.
Trees are my only love.
You may have seen me high in an elm,
sihouetted against the night sky
like the moon’s bucktoothed uncle.
I find a mate once a year
on the coldest night in January,
& our fierce cries make even the bears
roll in the graves of their sleep.
*
House, my ass!
It’s a carapace
to which
I’m stitched
& welded
& I can no more
leave than you
can enter
these six doors
with no locks—
which are all
one to me,
headless legless
round box
turtle.
*
One Sunday morning
kids sneak onto the construction site
nothing but a cage of studs & trusses
with a floor they play upon for hours
running from room to imaginary room
the whole world close enough to touch
__________
In partial response to a ReadWritePoem prompt, “peel the onion.” It’s another experiment in open-content collaboration, which I applaud despite being too much of a loner (see above) to engage in true collaboration very often. (And I should add that all my poetry is always available for creative remixing, as the CC license on this site makes clear.)
The sea beneath your minimal spacecraft turns adamant, grows scales like a lizard. A superhero saves you from a swarm of devious roses, cape flapping melodramatically, his last client still clinging to his side. A green-skinned native emerges from the shelter of the trees, offering to wrap you in the flag of her country. This is clearly a very dangerous planet for a would-be goddess. Everyone wants to enlist you in their battles, & I have a suspicion they won’t take love for an answer.
My response to the Venus Poetry Project, an experiment in anonymous, open-content poetry composition. (Thanks to Dana for the link.) Since I posted this three days ago, someone has already reworked it, with interesting results:
The sea
beneath your minimal
spacecraft turns adamant, grows
scales like a lizard. A superhero
saves you
from a swarm of devious roses,
cape flapping melodramatically,
his last lost cause
still clinging to his side.
A green-skinned native emerges
from the shelter of trees, offering
to wrap you in the flag
of her country. Dangerous planet
for a would-be goddess. Everyone wants
to enlist you in their battles.
I suspect they won’t take love
for an answer.
(To make your own changes to the poem, go here.)
For a day and a half, due no doubt to the rain and snow squalls, high-speed internet access here on the mountain varied from brief and intermittent to non-existent. I was forced to resort to dial-up, where it can take half an hour to complete the simplest task. No chance then of my attention leaping from site to site; I became as slow and single-minded as an autumn cricket.
When I step outside, mid-afternoon,
my quilted shirt turns white
with sudden pixels.
I blink like a cursor.
All the dried goldenrod heads
are blossoming into a second, ghostly life.
Two garden seats, side by side:
one is full of leaves & the other, twigs.
It looks like an amicable division.
A spam comment touts Extraordinarily naked people.
I hear a train whistle & remember
the beast that stalked me in all
my childhood dreams.
Up in the attic, a freshly shed snake skin
is stretched across the pink fiberglass.
Such separations must be wrenching, however necessary.
A bluebottle fly clings to the top
of an empty water jug, immobile
from the cold. It’s a bad time of year
not to be warm-blooded.
I eventually figured out that I was simply
in the train’s way, & if I laid down
& flattened myself against the ties
it would thunder harmlessly overhead.
Perhaps those nudists too have mastered
the art of getting out of the way,
& their bodies are not merely unclothed
but transparent, so that you can see the food
dissolving in their stomachs & ideas growing
in the reptilian coils of their brains.
There are protocols for everything, even in the garden.
The wind is a very particular host.
Poll link for those reading via the feed.
All news items gleaned from the web. Thanks to Ernesto Priego for the idea to use PollDaddy and ReadWritePoem for the prompt.
It’s worse than you think. “The witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected.” Getting up at 3 a.m.? That does sound hellacious. “Obama’s grandmother sacrificed a black and a white chicken to the ‘goddess of the river’ so both whites and blacks will vote for Obama. All Islam loves and worships Obama.” Muslims praying to the Goddess? These are witches with a devilish sense of humor! “Dick Morris of Fox News was sent to Kenya to help Odinga run his campaign! I find that unbelievable.” You and me both, Sister. It’s almost as if they’re no longer fair and balanced. A sign of the endtimes, for sure.
The occultists are “weaving lazy 8’s around McCain’s mind to make him look confused and like an idiot”. Bree K. said we need to break these curses off of him that are being sent from Kenya.
I read a portion of “Obama Nation” book and looked at several websites and found most of this information to be true, all except the curses part, of course….
Um, not to be rude, but I think those damnable occultists might be weaving a far wider web of confusion than you realize.
Don’t forget to visit Postal Poetry. We’re publishing on a twice-a-week schedule now, but could increase it to three again if we get more submissions. We’ve chosen six winners from among the entries for our first contest, and will post the first of them on Friday. We’ve just kicked off a second contest. But we also still welcome any other submissions that fit our guidelines. Don’t let the demons win! Make a poetry postcard for Jesus!