Thursday, December 23, 2010

Looking for Believers --After Jeffrey McDaniel

If you chop off your arm or a finger or a hand when you are, say, sawing boards, you look at the limp piece that was part of you a second ago and scream, right? Not from the pain. From the horror of the thing-that-was-you now only a thing. I wonder if it is like that on the way to Heaven.

How to Rehydrate an Old Relationship

1. Cut off any rotten parts, freezerburn, or mold. 2. Chop the relationship into 1-inch pieces. 3. Heat a pot of water until you get a rolling boil. 4. Add the relationship to the pot and boil uncovered for one minute. 5. Remove from heat and allow to completely cool. 6. Repeat boiling and cooling. 7. Repeat steps 1-6. 8. Repeat steps 1-7.

Lessons in Housebuilding

I built my house
from my parents’ bones.
Every wall that sagged,
they extracted a bony pillar
to prop me up,
kept my crags from cracking,
crutched me under legs.
Soon I was the roof
over their heads.
They crawled under me,
rolling like deflated tires.
I tripped over their
sad rounded backs
with my bony stilts.
They said they couldn’t
see me way up there,
so I ripped apart my frame
and took the bones to the trash
like yesterday’s chicken picked clean.
I wobbled on the rubbery red
ropes holding me together.
I learned to stand all over again.
They watched me walk with such pride
that I bowed
as they showered me with the nails
that had once held us together.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.

Possible Reactions to a Poem (acrostic)

Vehicle of mouth, lend me your
Open gates! Spew from the tombstone teeth
My every ugly lie and with
It, every ugly truth that lives
There, shaking the bars to get out.

Crack your damn eggs if you must.
Release your deadborn insides, the baby of
Your newborn soul wet and naked.

Lower your bottom jaw on its hinge
And empty your lungs to the sky.
Understand one thing when it comes,
God had nothing to do with it.
He didn’t make this storm. I did.

Sorry to hear about your outbursts,
Lady. My face hurts but yours is killing me!
And mop up the stink you left in the room!
Please. Thank you. Don’t come again.

Crinkle cheeks, stay away.
Raisin yourself in the sun.
I don’t want your sour puss.
Neither does anyone, even
God. You get out the door.
Everyone is catching on.

How the Magic Gets In

It’s here. Right now. Sitting in this room.
Stuffed between these two lines.
And these.

It’s in a photograph
of a smile that’s now
buried under Eastern Europe.

It’s in the Eucharist
when a bell chimes
three times.

It’s in the kitchen
before we blow out
the candles.

It’s in the eyes of lovers
when they know
it’s no one else.

How does it get in?
Does it settle like fog,
or sunlight on a seed?

It comes the way
open pipes breathe
into the kitchen
and the bathroom the earthy
scent of rivers.

Everything
drains in a second.

But it’s not gone.
It goes to live on:
underground,
in our bodies,
in your pages,
and every other elsewhere.

When Poetry breaks in

at night, it won’t want to leave.
It will crawl into your bed
and when you go rigid and say:
My mother warned me about you!
Poetry will laugh and say:
Baby, how do you think she knew?

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Bellows

I am the faded Mexican flag draped across a window, I am the red and yellow leaves skimming across the pavement, I am the greasy fried food on the corner of Mission, the young man on a bike racing past cars that got the green, the Laffy Taffy wrapper clinging to the drain, the marijuana smoke wafting from a basement-level apartment, I am the piles of dog shit drying inside the white fence, I am the ceramic carousels in an old lady’s windowsill, I am the day-glo orange WIC ACCEPTED sign on a gas-station door, I am the air curling in an empty dumpster and lifting to frost the tips of trees, I am the stones folded into the pavement, so tiny and so many.

Your Corduroy Pants

at it
all day

that noise
all day

you move
they move

one sound
each way

two sounds
these them

you are
out here

cold air
dead here

dark street
one pair

Covered Acrostic

Cock calling in the ay-em fog that’s settling
On overlapping blades of grass:
Vespers for the coming sun.
Evening turning its back,
Rowing out to sea.
Even the red barn has
Drowned in this thick lake.

Massey-Inspired Poems

cat, your belly falls
and rises like a bellows
blowing some kindling of whiskers
* * *
every circle in my room
is a clock
when their faces dial on mine
* * *
A desk crafted last century
has its knuckles
cracking. If you listen long enough.

Back to July 4, 1994

Colors bloom in the sky.
I am six years old
and parked in a folding chair
on the neighbor’s lawn.
The hill ahead of me rises
into soft lines against
the black backdrop.

Before the next explosion.
Before I drive past this hill ten years later and go cold.
Before I pilgrim here the next year and sit where it happened.

I am six.
I have never seen the sky
so beautiful
and terrifying.

Before your blood soaked clothes in a paper bag,
when mom showed me the visor of your hat, the splatters there.
This is what happened to Dad. This shirt is green, not brown. That’s the blood.
Before the years of flinching.
It felt like a sledgehammer hit me in the face.
Before I thought of my eyes as popable balloons of fluid
and yours the dice of snakes.

The sky lights up in one final show:
a red beacon back and forth.

My mother runs up the hill,
her chair toppling.
The sky hangs black and silent,
the hill swelling like a wave
that will cap and wash over me,
tumbling my parents
with its muscle
and burying us in its wake.

The Afterlove (revised)

is the pulpy red organ
born after love has been
born and died.
Your body coughs it up;
glopping red on white tile.
Nobody talks about it
but it is there.
Not even you know
it is there until
weeks or years later
when you hole your fist
into its cave in your chest
and feel the familiar weight
that used to sit,
hear the echo of its beating.

All this time it shriveled
behind your bed and the wall,
waiting.

You wake up swallowing
something that crawled in your mouth
and slid down your throat
while you were sleeping.
Are you imagining it?
No. You feel it, moving down,
as it becomes a part of your body now,
as it blends with the other red pulp inside.
You can never separate the two.