Me and poems and whatnot

If you've come here via some poetry-related link...well, I don't have an ending for that sentence. Like everything else here, this post is a work in progress.

I've used this site whenever I've done a poem-a-day run. I often do the challenges in April and November at Poetic Asides. (I did the April 2011 one, but I'm having trouble posting my poems; maybe I'll go back in and post them when I'm using a better browser.)

Anyway, this stuff is pretty rough, in general. I've had poems published in several places, and I'll try and get those links up here.

And now...back to my day job. Cheers.

The finish, for now

Yeah, I'm running late. I'm in New Orleans, at JazzFest, overloaded with images, underloaded with energy.

Unsure of how to create the last poem of April (well, more or less), I pulled a random tarot card. Seven of wands.

The Day Before May Day

Before me, a serf wields a flowering stick,

half carrot, half bone. He does not look at me,

but at the ground next to my right foot. Between us,

more wands rise from a precipice. His world

is mostly sky. What feeds the branch he holds?

What is his purpose? Is he ready

to fight impediments, or

is he the impediment?

Maybe he’s yanked out an adolescent tree,

nipped it in bud. If so,

he’s got much work ahead.

They keep coming.

You are never the youngest for long.

I give up. go to the magic book

provided by U.S. Games.

“It is a card of valor.” “Six against one.”

No, I will pretend, against evidence,

they are an advancing morris side, ready

for a stick dance. They rise from death

up to this windy precipice

and though he meets them with fear,

they will teach him the old moves,

if not the old secrets.

Prompt: "And Suddenly..."

And Suddenly My Yogurt Bit Back

Down below the part that’s healthy, the ectoplasm
where industrious bacteria feed and fuck,
there lies the prize, the bliss-rising fruit
of the cacao bean, that dessert for the virtuous,
ambrosia for the fauxhemian saint. Yesterday,
some full-grown coworker asked me
“What is macrame?” The cutoff date: 1965.
Born later, and you missed everything.
Still, these tall kids in the office, with their
earbuds and tramp stamps and superior hair,
they’re buying the same stuff as me
these days, the organic-guaranteed brand
with the mellow brown cows on the cup. They’re
sucking up the same mind-altering sweet bugs,
stirring and stirring until the nutraceutical goo
is engulfed by the good stuff.
Chocolate Underground, baby. Dig it.

Run on, brave sentence, run on....

This is a quickie. I had to work to get the meter more or less right, and in the process I've left some lazy language in there ("bright" needs to be swapped out). But it meets the Brewer prompt, which is "end of the line."

The Neverending Fender Solo

What matters isn’t that he plays it loud.
What matters isn’t speed. What matters is
the way, when all seems done, he comes around
to find a lagniappe, a hidden clover
bearing four leaves, deep buried among threes;
as if God gave him elemental breath
attenuated, never labored, bright;
as if each of us dreamed of being trapped,
our streetcar barreling down Lombard Street,
with switchback after switchback bringing thrills,
or fatalism, fear, raw ecstasy,
and when it seemed we’d hit the water’s edge,
that trolley would create another track
stretching before us, unbelievable,
longer than any one of us could breathe.

font problems

I need to sit down one of these days and figure out why the fonts in this blog are so wonky.

Seems like the only time I sit down, when I'm not at work, is to write poetry.

Oh, right. And to watch Law & Order. And eat macaroni and cheese.

Anyway, if anyone reading this can offer me advice on the fonts, have at it.

(And no, this isn't intended as a poem, even though the layout kinda makes it look that way.)

Never too late for hope

Hope, Northeast D.C. Style

Hubcap hung from a tree

catches sunlight, headlights,

blends the blinding

and the beautiful.

More than five times

Stealing

The first time,

I was four. Mom took me on a walk,

and just over the District Line

we found a tree shedding sweet

persimmons.

The second time,

I had a yen for the three-cent sinker

in the fishing aisle of

Youngblood’s Hardware. That, and

the bright green filament line.

The third time

I gave, letting Lena Walters

see my answer to the question

“How many candles fell

in Miss Havisham’s rotting parlor?

The fourth time,

it was a kiss, under the rampant horse

in Washington Park

with someone else’s

husband.

The fifth time was yesterday.

Or maybe there were six.

It’s hard to remember, to number

such sins.

Running to stand still

This is for yesterday's Brewer prompt: a poem inspired by a song. I'm not happy with it, but I rather like where it's going.

From the Wolfhound’s Companion

“and I said that we might settle down, get a few acres dug…”

--Richard Thompson, “Beeswing”

Together, we tasted like grass, new-mown,

a hint of wild onions. We grew in the earth we lay upon,

under the rough army blanket, stars in our hair.

He was a ginger, with the face of an eternal boy.

Our children would go off with Peter Pan—

but they would come back, take that bespoke suit

and the mortgage, bury themselves in Bank Street.

I could see how his green eyes sparked

when he recalled Comp Lit, the hesitation in his hands

when picking up the quail I caught for supper.

He could not bear blood—and he would never be

the one who spread his legs for his pretty heirs.

He was not meant for this place, and what

he tasted in me was what he wanted to taste:

that curry-combed show-wife, bound in pink ribbons,

fine as a bee’s wing.

The old up-and-down

The Word “Evening”

God forbid God

should slam down the garage door,

shut out the sun. No one needs to be scared;

we will go gently, with plums and grays,

until all is reversed and indigo holds sway.

It’s tepid, tame as a cardigan.

So God does not explain Led Zeppelin,

whose song tears through like cadets in training,

all sweaty rubber shoes and chanted pain.

That rhythm, up and down, sure as life.

Jimmy, honey, that’s not “In the Evening,”

that’s after dark.

The prompt: "exhausted"

Exhausted

There are tunnels through my brain, as if animals

have traveled through. Or so it seems

when I’m this tired. I reach for a thought

about the word yeast—singular or plural?

I grasp the memory of Oliver’s fiddle

in a hotel room at 3 a.m., music that foretold

his eternal spirit. I look for my driver’s license

and find instead the smell that smacked me

the first time I descended the subway stairs.

Where have my aunts’ birthdays gone?

Gone to crows, fled south for winter.

More autobiography

Dirt

You gotta eat a peck of dirt before you die.
This was my grandmother’s adage,
told me by my mother. I remember Grandma only dimly:
after a visit to Natural Bridge when I was three,
where I fell and cut my knee, she bandaged it
as I wailed.

No. That, too, is a memory that was told to me.
All I can see of her, truly see, is a shape under sheets,
too scary for an eight-year-old to approach,
as she lay dying of cancer in Aunt Cleo’s bedroom.
I knew her best by the things she owned: the waterfall furniture
in the room where she last breathed, the brown jugs
that held lemonade at the family reunion.
Her golden slippers, small enough for me to wear
after she died.

I know stories: how Granddaddy loved her at first site
in her mother’s boarding house, how his hands
just spanned her waist. I know love leads inexorably
to death: within a year after they set the stone,
Granddaddy visited each of his 10 children and then
joined her once more.

I knew her by words. Mama called it schmierkase,
Mom said, scooping cottage cheese. I knew her picture,
hair pulled back, thin metal glasses softening her,
looking so much like her daughters, so little like me.

Daughters withering like daffodils, worldly goods
gone to estate sales, memories fading: how deep
would I have to dig in those mountain valleys
to find who she was, as everyone who knew her
is swallowed by the earth?

Sometimes it happens...

April 21

It’s a day that dreams died. If I could learn
to confine all mourning to twenty-four hours,
this day would be the one: amid spring,
as like to shower as shine. Here, I have inured
myself to the joyous redbud, another year
my mother won’t see it. Here, the pollen:
fecund, throat-clog spume across the blacktop,
here, road workers set up their fruitless repairs
(the storms of winter will again bring potholes).
Here, in this particular place, I am pricked
by recollections I want to wipe away,
phantom pains in places I’d forgotten.
Who knows where the time goes? I do.
It doesn’t go. It lingers, festers, flowers, falls.
My wounds and sorrows are so small;
why must they swell in April? I reject
that folderol about the cruelest month.
I sleep with my window open to the bay.
The courting birds cry at night, emotions
and species I can’t discern. Life renews.
Not for all, but for some lucky few.

Forbidden words

I tried to get my Facebook friends to remind me of words they'd been told should never be used in a poem. Some of their forbidden words are below.

Workshopping

According to Melinda,
art must be beautiful.

According to Jake,
each line should begin with a capital letter.

According to Rainer,
a poet who has not loved, lost, drunk, drawn blood, seen death,
and ideally done the killing is no poet at all.

According to Justin,
women can’t be funny.

According to Alex,
true poetry died with Sinatra.

According to Leona,
the letter “t” always symbolizes the risen Christ.

According to Stacy,
black is slimming.

According to Tina,
a line should never exceed eleven syllables.

According to Lucas,
one must never use the following words in a poem: heart, soul, moon, sun, languid, orange, moist, Nantucket, uterus, wine, couple, poet, poem, poetry, poesy, rose.

According to Carmen,
rules are made to be broken.

Also according to Lucas,
a poem should not mean, but be.
And it should take off the top of your head.
And maybe something else. It’s in the notebook somewhere.

According to Warren,
ignore the stuff you hear in workshops.

Brewer prompt: Looking back

Oh, this was great: just as I started to think about the prompt, KHUM's interview with Wavy Gravy came on. So I scribbled as I listened. This is not about Wavy Gravy, though two parts of it are inspired by things he said: one about "hijacking" a plane, the other about telling kids on a bad trip that they should go out and buy the ingredients for a root beer float.

Noisy Karma
for, but not about, Wavy Gravy

All that he did was money in the bank
for this ragged old age. Time was
we hijacked a plane, with love and hugs.
It’s our trip now, we said. We hung flowers
around the stewardesses’ necks--
you know, they all got lei’d! He rips a fart,
mutters Sorry, like respectable company.
There were even boy stewards.
We didn’t care. He hacks up
a few more memories, deep in his chest.
We never dosed anyone. Those were lies.
You make your own karma. We never wanted
to hurt anyone. Some boy with a bad trip,
we’d give him ice cream. It’s OK, kid,
you just swallowed the snake.
It’ll come out the other end, you’ll be fine.
Big cough now. He pats the sunken Zig-Zag head
between his withered nipples. We always said the weed
wouldn’t poison us like nicotine. We were wrong.
Asked, Do you regret anything? he brings a knuckle
to the place where his right eye used to be,
gives it a twist, winces a wicked grin, says,
I wish I’d given those kids on the plane
more than flowers.

another name poem

I wrote this one first yesterday, for the Brewer prompt on names. Then I set it aside because I was hoping to revise it before posting it here. Alas, I never got back to it, so first draft it stands (for now).

Mick Jagger

God made him from rubber clay,
stretched and twisted, set to spring
but who could see, back in the days
of schoolcaps, of knee pants, the
pop
that cracked the world
bent the frames, made the moon roll
such a fire needs fuel
booze and breasts and boasts
charlie, chewing gum, china white
burning to black
black
till black lost its meaning
what a machine
to keep that jittery, unsteady roll
down years, not gathering moss
but shedding all but the essential
one
great
clay mouth

People poems--part 1

Gertrude Belle Elion

Who would have expected genius from Gert?
That name so squat, dull as soap,
the face (some would say) likewise,
even the Belle couldn’t help. She never married.

Daughter of a dentist in the Bronx
admitted free to Hunter College with the other girls,
she missed the slot for nursing school,
was denied a graduate assistantship.

A lab tech’s hands thrust deep
into assays and poisons, dark steams
and cold glove boxes. An academic mind
formed microscopic military strategies
to kill the enemy, spare the civilians.

An upper-class Jewish suburban life:
opera, vacations, playing with nephews and nieces.
She never had children. Between everything
was work. She was Dr. Hitchings’ assistant.

HIV pushed back, pathogens held at bay,
liver transplants thriving. What did she see
as she dressed for work each day,
combed the curls, fastened the brooch?
Was she a role model? Was she happy?

In 1989, New York Polytechnic gave Gertrude Elion
an honorary Ph.D. It came a year
after the Nobel.

Been there, done that, got the shirk

To Shirk

It helps if you can shrink,
fold yourself into the corner of the envelope,
maybe under the stamp. Or work

your wormy way under the jars
under the sink. You might slide
down the drain—things get lost there—

or climb the walls to hide
atop the blades of the fan.
Sometimes avoidance can be work.

The house is your burlap sack.
Don’t answer the phone. Let it shriek.
Let the birds, the cats, the kettle shriek.

And you? You laundry layabout,
you call in sick to work
for want of a shirt.

Wordplaying

That’s Why They Call It a Band

The bells knock heads

when you’re not looking

and the guitars neck

the bongos bang, the castanets

cast about for company

the maracas make faces

the harmonium hums,

disapproving

the harp holds hands with the pipes

and everyone dances

but the Symphomatic LX-13B

standing in the center

waiting for someone

to turn it on

Still running to catch up

Yesterday was supposed to be a "science" poem. I keep trying to write about snails. Here's a half-assed effort to do so. A cursory glance at Wikipedia suggests that snails don't really use a foot-mouth, but what the hell. They don't build shells out of fear, either.

there is a snail in Catalonia

that builds its own shell

from slime, salt, and fear

from naked birth it runs

in ever-tightening circles

until it can’t get out again

no more than two beady eyes

that look at what it can see

and one viscous mouth/foot

that swallows the unseen

it is bitter to eat

better to avoid

Running late

Yesterday's prompt from Brewer was "death." Honestly? This depressed me so much that I adopted a denial-of-death posture and went about my day.

Today I realized I couldn't dodge it for ever, so I wrote this poem. I hate it. I don't like quips disguised as poems by line breaks. Nevertheless, if I don't get it out of the way, I'll never get on with the next one.

So I'm neither the quick nor the dead.

Thanks, folks. Tip your waitresses. I'll be here all week. Unless I die.

Dead Letter

I never remember whether “dearth” means

too much or not enough.

May it be the same

when fate removes the “r.”