Libraries Without Walls / the first dream

Two blackout poems borne of the same text - sisters? brothers? siamese twins?

The Whale Less Traveled

Just another silly piece of writing about whales

Two whales diverged in a forest
and sorry I could not follow both,
could not watch these great transports
of song and common breath, could not
swim beside them lumbering and gliding
all at once to the lengths I'll never know,

I dove, swimming deeper into the same
axis point from where I saw the whales
push off, tails like continents pumping
the water behind them. Neither whale
to follow, I followed no distance and sought
instead the depths of where I already
was, depths I had no breath to reach
but pushed until my lungs began to find
the oxygen in the water, until my fingers
webbed and my feet stuck together like
a continent and I doubted if I should ever
come back. If I should ever turn back.

Two whales diverged in a blue forest,
one whale submerged into a wet-born breath,
one man lost himself in the airless depths,
one man, one whale - and that was all
the difference.

Talkbox

My roommate built a talkbox.

Now I spend large chunks of each day 

trying to speak like a robot.

The plosives are simple,

but "s" and "x" sounds are

another matter altogether.

Funny, how Blade Runner led me astray.

Those replicants were so well spoken.

Armor

[My blackout poem]

Moth, The

Studies find moths not nature’s creation—
They are figments of a lamp’s imagination.

The #2 in Santa Fe

Here is where the dust settles
the sighs escape
the shoulders droop.
Here, everyone knows
everyone, knows everyone's
business. Which is alcohol,
the woman wearing dusty beads
who unwraps stories like cheap toys
and holds them up in the dark to see,
or the one who takes them, shakes them
like a piggy bank, and laughs
when they are empty?
A man professes his will to teach
someday, that he will teach
a lesson longer than this line,
and one that doesn't end
where it began.
Sage fool, I think.

Here is where words dissipate.
I hear a man
who speaks a dream
will watch it fade
into the fumes. Push it
forward, slur it
down, lurch it
back.

Pickle

You would be a lovely thing
to pickle and keep on a high shelf.
I would spend my time
looking at you from a distance.
Stepping back to step forward again,
to see how you change, if at all.
I would only drink
the brine in the jar,
and seal my lips with a closing sip
after I drink deep deep.

*A man waiting at the Davis bus stop told me I would be a lovely thing to pickle. I still don't know how I feel about this.

Neato! (a pop culture collage)

Greedo

Magneto 

Holy Toledo

Speedo

Dorito

Obladi O

Blah Da.

Binomial

How when in need of names
those dusty scientists found
among the options of nomenclature a
poet to limn the borders of what
we call the animal not alone, the even
wandering ones we hope find
another, someday - a pitying
of turtledoves, a siege of herons -
and how when I, my hope
lighting on the end of wandering
on some bright afternoon I call
the I not alone Us.

A Public Service Announcement

This is a friendly reminder
To shake your booties



Not your babies.

This Is Just To Say

I got the idea to loosely imitate the poem "This Is Just To Say" from an episode of This American Life that I listened to yesterday:

This Is Just To Say

Roommate,
that I have taken
to a party
three bottles of Miller Lite
from our fridge

which was okay
I thought
because they were technically mine.

I left a half-dozen
to drink at another time

during a hockey game
or when I felt like having one
but now they are all gone

And I'm wondering
why did you need to drink
six bottles of beer

of my beer

on a Wednesday night
alone
anyway?

I, So Tired, I

want to sleep in my clothes
and give myself away
to no dream but find purity
streaming blankly across
my mind and then nestle
into the dark emptiness
of no one

Unicorn

What I truly desire out of this art:
You

creature loping out of myths
into the white white clouds

your grand wings of White,
all of you

into the white clouds white
with your white white body

perfect, in another word, with your
single, magnificent, white

horn running through our
insides.

A Poem of Circumstance And Collaboration

I want to play Wii,

If the TV is free.

That's fine with me.

Rhyming, are we?

I just remembered,

I have to write a poem.

POETRY CHALLENGE

Alright gang. This week's challenge is going to require a little extra time commitment / technology commitment, but it is one of my favorite types of poem so you should try to do one.

BLACKOUT POEMS
Blackout poems are created by manipulating pre-existing texts into compressed, tightened new meanings. I like to use found documents -- things from the scrap print pile at the library or newspaper clippings. The idea is to physically black out all but a few words and phrases, and let that remainder be a poem. I'll include a nice example below. If you'd like to do a variation on this type of poem, such as one that moves it to a digital sphere or just plays with the idea of positive and negative space, compression, etc, that's cool too. I love this form because it forces you to work with a limited set of words and find the most fruitful combinations and meanings in a fixed space, and because it has so much to do with space, the black expanse.

Happy poem-ing!

Face of the Earth, by Austin Kleon.

Roses I had thought

might be nice at school in the room
that is a box, the length of a bed.
They were leftovers from Easter.
Ivory half opened and half
used, wholly unwanted. Rarely
do we crave what is slightly off
the edge of death. It might as well
die upon infection or infected
we will feel with fear. The passing
of the moment for passing, between
to pass and past, between
the voluptuous blossom and the hard
fragrant head held later is worst
to endure because it is the best
collage of where once we were
a mystery and where now one is
thick and grown over with clarity.

Dead on the Page

I have dragged my chair
Out of line to peek through
Towering heads on green
Bean necks to watch the mouse
Man read his poems in the quiet
Breeze that is his own echo.
I am curled tight, clutching
My knees to my lips, while
My friend of the long legs
Stretches them in the absence
Of my proper place. Together
We struggle against sleep
In the warm wind of voice,
Lulled into the invulnerable nakedness
Of an unthreatened audience,
Barely registering the touch
Of the dead poet of the page lapping
Flaccidly around our calves.

Crackers

Crackers, crackers everywhere

but not a drop to drink.

Like a River

[Again, this would/should have occurred last Saturday]

What in the hours was preparation
In the emptiness was forgetting to eat

We stared through the dust
And counted the years of

Preparation the years
We were dying through

The dust

The Poem I Won't Be Reading At My Sister's Wedding

Love is love, love, love,
so love is love is love,
somebody loves loves loves loves somebody,
so love, love, love,
if somebody loves loves somebody then somebody loves someone,
love, love, love.

*directly taken from my Intro to Elementary Logic lecture notes.

The Evolution of Our Being

[Technically, this should have been written and posted on Good Friday]

Yes, he had already exhumed
the final pocket of living air from below
his chest when the night had started to fill
the empty spaces without stars.

Late, it was acknowledged.
Time to go, yes.

No need to break his legs and slump him
into the weighty breathlessness of broken supports.

Yet there was a spear, yet
it opened his side where there was

blood and water like a river.

Planning for the Future.

“Times are tough,” the voices rang
from out my television,
“A war is on, the world grows hot,
propriety’s in rescission.”

It is today my search begins
for what, oh what, comes next.
Alack! This market's dearth of jobs
has found me quite perplexed!

I cannot be a banker, for
the banks have all been shut.
I cannot be a lawyer, for
I laugh when I rebut.

It’s no time to enter business
and besides I lack the skill
to sell you sweater blankets
or a new George Foreman grill.

I haven’t taken science since
around eleventh grade,
don’t know a single thing about
how guns and drugs are made,

I haven’t got the wit to write
for pithy, poignant blogs,
and I’m far to small in stature
to walk all the neighbors' dogs.

Whatever shall I do! I cry,
and throw my hands above,
when at once the answer hits me
like a leather dueling glove –

My path is clear, the challenge set,
now that I finally know it –
the only job for times like these
is this: professional poet.

I’ll use the word “Diaphanous”
(though I do not know its meaning),
I’ll let me studio go grey
from months of never cleaning.

I’ll write the tale of Orpheus,
(that’s one you’ve never heard),
I’ll write about the Writer’s lot
(the burden is absurd).

The smoke of a thousand cigarettes
will curl around my face
grown wrinkled far before its time
with haggard artist’s grace.

I’ll write in odes and ballads,
here and there the odd Haiku.
If your culture has a subtle form,
you can bet I’ll steal it too!

I’ll write my dedications
to the poets of the past,
with all the cheeky knowledge
that my skillz have theirs surpassed.

And when I die in poverty,
as all great poets do,
I’ll do it with the knowledge
to mine own self, I’ve been true.

For it takes the greatest courage
to compose in metered lines,
and all my greatest iambs will be
summoned in their time

To take the boldest statements down
in bile and blood and ink…
just please don’t make me get a job,
it’s clearly going to stink.

The Grape

the bug sees as fractals
and dreams of apotheosis.

The Shapes We Inhabit

[This is probably a multiple part poem... And this part probably should have been written on Thursday... Oh well]

What we did not know we
never knew but in fragments hidden within the deep rivers
that thread our bones together into what
we have always called human.
What we did not see was the emptiness
between our feet and the pavement, that awful
emptiness between so much, shivering
the supports of the world until shaking they
in their splinters tell us what we did
not see. What we cannot believe we can
put off into the decades until our
like every other mass bodies fling off the atoms one by one
leaving us not, not at all. Yet, far beneath

the blinking heartbeat of the moment's
wholeness is another pulse of a man who was a son of men
who knew that far beneath the blinking heartbeat
is inscribed the signature of divinity, a man
who could not believe in the flinging off of atoms
one by one leaving us not, but in leaving us not yet,
leaving us broken glass waiting to be melted
and blown into the shapes we were meant to inhabit.

And yet he heard too the heartbeat,
two heartbeats. And yet he heard too
the pain, and the glory. He heard too the high
evolution of our being.
And how clearly we could not.

Kinks ii

[An oulipo poem, in which for nouns, n = 7. I don't own a dictionary and the OED is crazy. This poem ended up delightfully critter-heavy, just as I like it.]

The dazzle two wombats stood before Solomon;
it is not true that they held a chiliahedron between them.
They held twocker.
One chiliahedron had died in the nigonry,
his tiny lunist contracting
mothless fleur into his movable feast
instead of airgonaut,
a wrinkled facet rendered the same
indigo as the kink's
robin. This chiliahedron as well
as the living, screaming onerosity
bound the wombats
to that dazzle in couscous
and hung heavy
in his slip-knot between them
as they asked the Saggitarian:
Which of us is truly mothless?
Solomon could not speak
of the wombat who loved more
or the wombat who loved better --
only of the wombat
who understood the justification
of a griffin that rends the sound in two
and willed it shared.

Revolutions

An Oulipo Snowball poem

We
are
dark
moons,

unlit
lights
rolling

nowhere,
dreaming

lanterns
searching
the borders

for centers.

Game #2 - Oulipo Constraints

I am so pleased with the results of the first game! Everyone's poems are absolutely wonderful, with a great mix of emotional depth and clarity. Because this was so well done, I'm going to move in a completely different direction.

One of the things I loved learning about in Creative Non-fiction was Oulipo, or "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle," which translates roughly as "workshop of potential literature." Because their mission is to seek new structures and patterns (or constraints) which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy, I thought it would also fit well into our mission of Poetry Month.

I chose two constraints that are specifically used for poetry. Feel free to do both of them if you like.

The first method is called the N + 7 Method. For this method, you would take one of the poems you have already written and replace every noun in it with a noun you find seven entries later in the dictionary. (If you don't like the number 7, you can choose a different number, just keep it the same for every noun).

The second method is called the Snowball Method (at least on the English Wikipedia page). For this method, you write a poem where each line is a single word with each subsequent line one letter longer than the one preceding it.

I don't know if these poems will be as great as the cut-up method poems, but they are sure to be interesting.

If you want a reference page for Oulipo, check out the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo) which also has links to more in-depth sites.

Happy writing!

Notes from a bar where I sat alone drinking a Guinness (not a cut up)

I never liked solitude. The vast space around me filled with atoms.
Unseen, I flung my limbs from my father's arms,
my body stirring enough fury for the beginning of a universe.
Today is different though.
Today, my atoms assembled themselves
in a space where I sat alone watching music.
Alone, for the first time, I felt a peaceful dissolution of atoms into atoms.
This was solitude.

Cut up of Dinah's Poems

The girl, sleeping on the escalator,
is trapped by metal wisdom -
its inexorable motion
pumping hollow
the gritty happenings
of flesh.

The girl, pressing on its membrane,
would not wake in prayer
of industry, compelled to smash
the speed
of art.

The Room that Bodies Lamp

Hungry ribbed men
are lured naked into a box
surfaced with stiff faucets,

see their hard reflection turn
thin like ballerinas,
and change as the smell of gas

runs like perspiration.
Their grunts spit into music;
howls up, for security,

from bodies coursing down—
the dicks of history. Locking all
to mirror the make of a porno.

---------------------------
(cut up Eric's)

Watermelon (Cut-up poem from Tim)

I ate a watermelon, the seeds slipping between my lips,
And remembered a plumb memory:
A boy once told me that any watermelon seed I ate
Would sit in the dark of my belly, that internal darkness,
And the seeds would wait to grow, to spindle in my abdomen.
They would stick until I opened my mouth,
For sun to shine and cast lines of shade and light.
The vines would soon grow, furling and tucking,
In the darkest and softest areas of me.
And once skin spanned, alive in the lack of what I never truly knew,
The boy said that one day I would give birth to this melon,
And give it a name.

A Madden cut up

How the sun looks now,
Proud and present
She saunters silent into the room
And leans against a counter.
6 foot tall and pregnant,
She fills and fills and fills
The room until she is
Spurting out of my nostrils, ears and eyes.
In the haze of her ebbing
The kitchen glows
Violet in the darkness,
Every horizontal surface sighing
If only I was happy, if only.

Partial Blame

A Poem Cutting Up Taylor's Posts

Could I know
the clay from the loam, the quicksand
from the soil? Maybe no;

that red red soil, that red red
snow, that red red - but it's nice
to know the fireballs this evening,

the red red fireballs furious,
out with a red red pail to eat
the clay, the loam, the soil...

I won't
go out this evening
anymo'.

Body Bag on the Runway

No one cares much for the doctor
Or the nurse when there is a lady
Following with an alligator purse.

Even the child imagines the bag
To be a prize, with a wide-eyed
Gator head and leggy extensions,

Before knowing the price of real hide.

A doctor or nurse I would care for
On the street where there is a lady
Turning her magenta scarf into handles

To drag a dead dog from the street.
He hangs on her like a purse of cement
As if he were wanting still to stay

A blockade in the traffic of other bodies.

He reminds me of first carrying you
And the thought that if the doctor
Or the nurse had come in, into war,

There would not be a third, a lady
With a body bag--her purse full of you,
Who had gone, blown to once, and sent in letters.

You are well in death, a glossed hide
Having and hiding tight some lady inside.

The Crying Spider - Odilon Redon

For lack of eyes the sockets have plumbed the abdomen for
the internal darkness the tears have spanned the moments for the past
not forgotten, the past once alive between the stone lips slipping
into the black fur where fangs wait to stick through the once skin for the
bright memory of I lost in the spindled hairs of the hidden I that has not
been anything but I from the first moments, the bright past, and
the crying present, for underneath the lines there are the shades that
for I are not ever truly ever, known.

du mal

Barbey d'Aurevilly, that grand decadent,
Told Baudelaire that his blood must be spent
At the muzzle of a gun, or the foot of the cross;
Since the Fleurs had bloomed,
And the coeurs were lost.

Stand Right, Walk Left

It’s the simplest rule of travel,
And also the most important
For surviving a trip to my town,
Where the escalators climb
Endless in their scale as in
Their motion. For some
This inexorable metal push
Towards the sky is enough,
But others like myself
Are compelled to apply
The pumping weight
Of thighs and barreling
Flesh to the pace of
The gnashing teeth of industry,
Cranking ourselves up
The concrete tubes of the subway
Stairways with a speed
That is superhuman
But also supermachine.

Burgers

Burgers, burgers

nice to eat.

Burgers, burgers

red red meat.

Burgers, burgers

such a treat.

I like burgers

they're so sweet.

First Game: Cut-Up Poems

The blog has been up for a week, and it's time for a game. Our first game will be creating a Cut-Up Poem. For those who aren't exactly sure, a cut-up poem is one that uses the words from somewhere else and then builds a poem from them.

Our game will come with a twist: your source of words must be the Catalogue of Poems from another writer on here. So I could write a Madden cut-up poem, using whatever words I want, like Penguin and fisherman, from her past poems.

Now don't get ahead of yourself: I'm going to set April 10th as the day when we will all post our cut-up poems. This also gives writers who have only posted once the ability to get another poem or two in before that day. Also, be sure to add in your post whose poems you are cutting up.

Finally, does anyone want to take charge and come up with a game or challenge for the Ides of April? You can post on April 10th or so.

[Administrative Note: remember to add your name as a Label when you post a poem. If you don't know what I mean, just look down through the poem posts, each one has the author's name as a label so we can search by author by clicking on the relevant links on the left hand bar]

Fragments of Hosea, continued

VII.
Here is the net to catch what love though you may will
through the holes of whatever net escape –He commanded knowing
what is let go of and what cannot be restrained do not burn
the same.

We are Fishermen

There are times I wish I could say we are all fishermen headed for the sun,
But I am simpler than that.
While you might think we spend our days watching tides,
I feel like I've been taken miles away
to a deep sea
where it is just becoming night.
We're on two ships,
and in the haze
they come so close
as to barely touch
before they move on into the violet
or is it violent?
darkness.

In a Box, With A Pail

Today I realized,

while looking at my notes,

that poem rhymes with loam, and

loamy soil was my specialty once.

But some days, I was partial to clay.

Why?  Who can say.

Could I stand to play more in the sand?

Maybe yes, maybe no;

though why do I like rhymes so?

I blame the Beastie Boys.

Knievel

When younger, “nothing” was the end
of a perspective question: “What is between
you and me?” “Nothing.” “Then why
aren’t we together?”

But nothing can hold a place
like a full rest
or the emptiness between cliff sides –

it is the delay that matters
for what is between you and me

is two seconds, a step,
and what is between the music

is a mental tapping of the beat
and what is between the cliff sides

is a motorcycle sprung

by jet engines

into nothing.

To the Teeth

I like it when my gums hurt.
After the dentist
The pain sits right below
The surface of that pink
Membrane and pressing
Against my teeth
With my teeth draws
The faintest memory tangs
Of blood. I like it when I remember
Really stupid things I did,
Like smash up the front
Of my car because I was too
Busy looking at the girl in
The passenger seat who
I never saw again after that night.
The pain sits right below
My tonsils like I could
Cough it out if I tried real hard.
I like it when I’m petting the cat
And she suddenly decides
She doesn’t want to be touched
Anymore and there are claws
And teeth in my arm but only
For a second. I like that she
Has the right to decide this
At any time. All this pain
Of close contact lights my skin
Up like current, pulls me right
To the surface of my being
And taunts me with the possibility
That it might never heal.

Snow

Snow? Whoa!

It's nice to know

I won't have to go

out anymo'

this evening.

The First Person Under Foreboding Times

by Jack Eichorst, Colin McGrath 2009

Penguin, why are the mountains looming
And pushing children down into trenches?
Forlorn, I question not the quiet crooning
Forlorn, I wake to frosted and lifeless benches.

Across the callous tundra I seek my only equinox.
Billowing snowdrifts and weeping ladies litter the ancient streets,
While I sigh sweetly at thoughts of masochism.
Only yesterday did the sting of inimical bedlam wake me.

Penguin, why has the clouded morning transcended the forests,
Breaking into the crust of time with no apprehension?
Forlorn, the panda crawls without his supple dignity,
Forlorn, the most ignorant species will nonetheless search for honor.

Father time: whence the church bell that rang in my captain's ears?
Without it he is overcome by eternal damnation.
Tarnished and rotting, he satiates the serpent's appetite.
Whetting its desires, he tastes the acrid rain upon his forked tongue.

Children, how do all antiquated forms consecrate our daily expulsions?
Bliss never is what seeps between the sheets.
Sullen, I caress my shattered and trembling frame of hopelessness.
The only solitude we share today under false skies is calamity, Penguin.

Clamp

It was a Friday night, I don’t know –
I hadn’t done anything in so long and
Tantalus told me about some new bar so
I went. Nothing special, I had a drink
with the guys and missed all of the usual
imaginations but I’ve got a while to
think about it, that’s what the bartender said, that
son of a bitch.

Mrs. Koala

[When I publish my first Ogden Nash style book of children's poetry, this will certainly be included with a better illustration, but I wanted to create some ambiance.]

On the day we met Mrs. Koala
Her demeanor was quite hard to swalla’
She could easily have clipped us
Some nice eucalyptus
Stead of sending us home to eat Challa.

Poem I wrote about 3 years ago

I wish
you could see
how the sun looks now.
Sitting here,
through glass you would see
an orange orb
being squashed
by the earth's rotation.
Behind green trees
it's actually quite beautiful.
If you were here,
you would see it flatten as it does now
The last ray
-gone-
And still,
I had not enough time to say goodbye.

His Early Ministry 2

II.

All of the clouds were doves
And the palm trees bent

When he said he was the Son of Man
As if we were not

Were we?