Art

Art is the ugliest word, isn't it?
Here is an uncropped picture of a print done by Russ Jensen in 2005.

Short, weird poems

These last four poems are not something I usually write, but I was on a bend the other night. I rather like them. I'm trying to be more concise.

I want to move to Scandinavia

without telling anyone.
and throw my phone in the trash.
Then at least the garbage
will have a new friend.

I heard your grandma died.

I’m sorry.
I liked her.
But you’re here now
And someone
has to empty
the house.

If you have to read a book

I have two bookshelves of
things I used to look at
and used to like.
please don’t add
another.

If you are going to get married

please don’t do it to me.
don’t dress me in that dress.
it’s too white.
and anyway,
you make the coffee too strong.

Here is where I grew upwards; Here is where my roots grow down

My dad lit a woodfire
before going to bed.
In the sighing quiet
of the night, I decided to
let the dog in to warm himself
while I read by the
living light of a treestump
that had sprouted a hundred years
before I was born.

I stepped outside the box
of the home I grew up in
to call the dog in a whisper.

My body weight packed the gray snow
as I waded away
from the orange-lit windows.
Farther and farther
with quivering skin.
My breath was the only fog
between me and the black, black
distance of the extinct starlight.

I heard every whisper
uttered by the bare purple lilac branches,
the waist-length grass of the field
burdened with snow,
the centenarian cellar deep below.

My dog approached me, having heard
my footsteps.
He watched me for a moment,
both of us sharing the same
cold air tonight,
both of us revolving
around the sun.

I smile and he trots over,
wagging his black tail against my thigh.
I want to stay out here and do
as dogs do,
running from field to field,
sniffing low to the ground
and finding the woods behind
the house an alien planet
with a familiar geography.

But I’m cold. I will never
live here and my dog’s
brown eyes wait for me to move.
We were both born
into an old world,
yet you can hardly
call us children.
How did we begin
to call this place ours?

My Body is Named With It

My joints creak with your
absence as if I am years older.
Bones meet,
crippling themselves with their
own mechanism.
I click when I walk,
the pocks in my sockets
rap a staccato rhythm.

Aching marrow inverts the
dark hollows of my body—
atriums, wombs, cavities,
sick puss suddenly released
into my blood.
My tongue tastes
the bitter vinegar of loneliness.

The cool spackle on white drywall
feels like diagrams
under my fingertips
that map my biology—
Pelvic.
Bowls and floors.
I can no longer eat.
My stomach shrivels acidic and dark.

These sockets are empty.
This coupling of bone
on a hinge has grown hard.

Two moving planes that
meet in one place—breaking.

Nature's Laws are Constant

and this has always been always.

When I was a child,
I was afraid of thunderstorms
at night
and I would look to the
purple horizon
as it quivered with lightning
and think it
was a hand reaching
for me
out of the soft
veiny folds of the night sky.

I was aware of my wet brain
and spindly limbs
close to the ground.

Now, I want
to stand exposed to the storm –
the clash of thunder
the thrill of being so small,
just a wet brain in an empty field.
Now, I want
to feel those arms around me
and forgive them
for what they have done.
For lighting that first fire
in all of us.

A Funny Logic (Revised)

Summer made you drip
and sing wind
like a leaf on a tree
like a leaf on a tree
Your body has to run inside these colors
It has to exhale
flocks of sparrows
from a bough
that shudders

Sand in my hands
cupped like the bowl
of your hips
Our bodies have to ripple into waves
You chose me
You chose me
to jump with
and hold our breaths
like a leaf on a tree

Treatise

A found poem

I.
I carried Wordsworth in with me
and carved it onto the walls
of my dark prison cell
so we could surround ourselves with love.

II.
We: me and the others
who will live here after
I am no longer on Earth.

III.
I want these words to revolve
around the sun
like the moons of Jupiter.

IIII.
Even though no light
could ever touch these walls.