taconic state highway

Bobby, you were six. Camping is the coolest, Mom, camping is the coolest--jumping around her as she walked, stoic and bleary, to the van. I love, love, love camping! And you haven't been this effusive in days, after that rocky start to kindergarten.

You sure as heck aren't getting in that van without a struggle. Look at the outdoors! You smell the air, of course, but the people, the musk of all the people around you--you are wild, wild, wild with the sight of the sky and the smell of the people around you. Around the bumper, Bobby. Run around once more. Steady yourself, little body slanting sideways with the force of your run, against the greasy bumper. Get in the car. Oh you can't even sit still, little fast-beating heart, believing at that moment you would still die happy.


A Long Island mom guzzled vodka and smoked pot in a minivan packed with young kids before speeding the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway, sparking the head-on collision that killed eight, authorities revealed yesterday.

sierra nevada

i met in the emerald river some panners of gold, culling the water for flecks which they feel in their bones. i washed myself in the river with eucalyptus... the men look for gold, they have for years, live in their cars, smoking like lunatic herbovoirs pouring juice in their beards. gold sivvers are like pan handlers without the pleading eye or rusted saxophone or sidewallk. say wiskey they say, meaning smile. this river is hidden by cliffs life or death or long needled pines. we scream at the rocks, deal with things on our minds, while the soap sleeps alone in its dish.

I'm Sorry W.G Sebald

When I pick up The Rings Of Saturn
I fall into a horrible pattern.
I open the cover and see the first page--
That net-covered window, that comfort cage,
Is maybe the only image that I understand,
but my eyes lose focus and can't see a strand
of the words you put one after the other
in sentences that seem to go on forever.
I always fall asleep at the same part,
the page with the cadaver and his open heart.
I'm trying my best to finish but perhaps it's not too dire,
I've tried to read you more than Nabokov's Pale Fire.

I'm writing a novel. Here is Chapter I:

Earl was the young, lean, and only son of Matty Bear, a bereaved (on account of her dead husband) woman. Earl lived with Matty on a large farm which had been in the family of Carl, Matty's (now dead) husband for several generations. The fields of the farm stretched out into the distance. There were stretches of corn, and other stretches of lowing cattle that were constantly chewing up the grass beneath them with their flat, yellow teeth. Consequently, the grass was always too short, ripped, and harassed-looking. There was a white farmhouse on the southern part of the property, with a porch on which Matty sat in the evenings, pockmarked, looking out at the distance into which the fields stretched.

Matty Bear had, in her youth, been an attractive woman. In the photographs Earl found in the attic's tin box covered in mildew, previously hidden, but now discovered and easily opened by way of Earl's lifting of a small, dull, silver clasp, Earl observed, with surprised satisfaction, the shapely bare legs of his mother, then not a mother, but seventeen, about, and just married to Carl Bear, Earl's father. Matty Bear had had flax-yellow braids, long and thin, resembling the strands of a weeping willow in August. Her eyes were beautiful, if a somewhat common, cornflowery color. What Earl noticed, however, most, were her plump, white hands which, in the photograph, were in a perpetual state of rest at her sides, beneath their white cambric sleeves. But now, Earl thought, somewhat perplexed, as an eleven year old often is (and aught to be) with regards to questions concerning the Impermanence of Beauty and the Inevitable March of Time, his mother was not something at which it was extremely pleasing to look. In the evenings on the porch, her cornflower eyes gone to seed, so to speak, and looking off, and un-hearing, un-answering, she was decidedly pale and slack-skinned, as a chicken before roasting. She had no longer that firm, robustness of youth. Her once milk-white hands were red, and worn, as chewed upon by chores as were, by cattle, the near and distant fields. Now Matty wore a plaid neck cloth. She wore a checkered apron. She wore low, rubber shoes without socks. Around her porch swing, among her swinging, sock less, rubber shod, feet, the house cats were littered like so many wads of newspaper. However Matty did not see them, just as Matty did not read news papers, wadded or smooth. Matty kept her eyes strictly on the distance, as if it were a fascinating action movie rather than a a green, unwavering, line.

One warm summer afternoon, Earl sat below a large yard tree, singing a semi-merry song, and skipping stones across the yard in order to more thoroughly pretend it was not a yard, but a cool green pond with swimming fish. Sometimes, Earl wondered about the world. What was it like? Out there? Beyond the distance into which the fields of his farm stretched? Perhaps that was what Matty Bear looked for, too, so carefully with her faded, blueish eyes. Yes. What was the world like? Oh what. Yes. Oh What. Earl clucked and sang, ignoring the ants which raced up and down his thin, hairless legs. Eventually he ran out of stones to skip, stones, which he had gathered into a pouch from the gravel road. Now the pouch lay empty. Earl threw himself onto the grass, pretending, still, that it was water. That this, what he had just done, was a belly flop. He made a sound to resemble a splash of lake water. Then, presently, lying there, looking up at the filter of leaves hanging from the tree like a symposium of sleeping bats, Earl began to think about his birthday, which was encroaching on him. Any day now, he would be twelve. He then thought about that number, twelve, a seemingly solemn one. Solemn, like a slow march, a funeral march, one, two, one, two, everyone in black on a summer's day, with a bagpipe's out-of-breath wheezing at the back of the black line one two one two, one two.

When the tail end of the funeral had finished its march, Earl switched to thinking about the slice of pie he would buy himself on his twelfth birthday in town, as he had done last year on his eleventh ; a slice of pie which he would wolf down, but at the same time relish. He imagined each buttery, crumbling bite of crust, and the bright, oozing triangle of congealed, fruit. Unconsciously Earl licked his thin, hairless lips. He tasted salt, always salt in summer, even moments after a bath, the heat pulled it out, it seemed, the salt. At last, in the grass, or pond, depending on who's point of view it was, Earl, thinking of his birthday, fell sound asleep.

Spam (a poem sent to me by a spambot)

shrink pant.
module bingo seer ladder.
emir budge oakery mix?
glover voter zoic.
feed moving reflux renew?
lives cue elan sin?
gasper zoic luting gird!
shrink swathe.
hubby blase outre.
thyme gas blase flake!
morgue oakery fiber smelt.
public agile chose nimbus?
pant morgue mix lives!
bled chump lumper morgue?
sin module.
fetid cue.
flake ragout ragout.
bingo feel grouch pink?
ladder large.
morgue shrink glover.
nibble farad morgue gird.
chump voter sap.
farad rococo pawn thyme!
graft module feed gooey?

The Bird I house free

with the second
I burst to yellow

an epiphany and the beak
breaks my chest

I feel the world rupture with song
from a lone wooden one

who knows everything opens
from nothing to then stop

with an apology of silence
and once closed inward

tucked with darkness
behind the door of its chamber

does then resume counting
the sound of its pulse

I love sneakily reading this blog and miss you all

Rough Draft of a Folgk Song I Wrote Today
(When the music is recorded, I'll post the song)

Lookout Mtn.

I watch for you
waiting by the window blue
and I know you're there
on Lookout Mountain...

I hope you're heading home
not out on the roam
for a treasure you can't find
on Lookout Mountain...

Look for me on Lookout Mountain
Find me among the pines
Wait for me on Lookout Mountain
I know you've got the time.

If you've got to go
Please make your way back so
I can run to kiss you
on this mountain.

'Cause I'm still here
waiting for you
though the sun is gone
because I hope it's not gonna be long
before you come home
home to me on lookout mountain.

So remember to look for me on lookout mountain
You can find me among the pines
remember to wait for me on lookout mountain
because I know you've got the time.

Noon

No one was mowing,
Nothing held the summer clouds.
Then a hawk flew down.

Days of the Week Underwear

Her belt was a little too big. So for the whole date she had to push out her stomach to keep her jeans from falling. Uncomfortable, but she figured if he likes me like this, I'm golden. But the real reason and the unthinkable outcome was that she was wearing her Wednesday panties on a Friday.

Transfer Student

Jens walked down the sidewalk in bare feet, letting old leaves crack beneath long, Danish toes. He liked the slow hardening of his feet beneath him. He sang, in elemental English: Why she had to go, I don't know, she didn't say. I said, “Something's wrong!” Now I long for yesterday. He was experiencing a rapid series of new thoughts: Every man is all men. In every organism, there is a microcosm. This sidewalk may still be warm from the passing feet of a beautiful girl. Then he stepped on the band-aid. It wasn't a normal band-aid, warm from the passing finger of a breathless child. It was a band-aid specifically for knees, a huge, pentagonal band-aid with a soft heart, a heart that held the yellow and blood of a serious wound. “Jeg bande den dag du var fodt!” he snarled. “America!”

Metro Sex Ad: Whats Ur Coat of Arms/ Touch Me

(for eric)

hey i'm a suit of armour, right
from 1300 after christ!
i'm on 5th ave, i'm in the met,
and yeah, i'm missing one gauntlet
but OMG my greaves r great
(just FYI no chain, all plate!!)
my nipples r bronze and erect
a sword on me's a sound effect.
like grls or guys whose lips r soft
who like art/ go to the met often
touch me; set off my alarms
but need 2 c ur coat of arms.

Hard Work

A cache of berries!
So much trouble picking them--
And they taste like shit.

Where the Torso

All the fingers that hang
are branches growing out
of the surplus of a season,

and away from recognition--
that still they arch from one

The Glass, Having Broken

To Hover
To Want
To Burst

And Two to Hold

I feel often my hands are not
but made of wooden spools.

Bare and dry, these two hold
nothing and cannot know

any texture of another.
Until you are thread wound

like a corkscrew, dark in bindings;
defining movement and history.

Hunter

It sounds like rodent burrowing inside
a tree or someone unfolding
dried petals of a rhododendron,
whose lips are always bent
upon dissolving--

But it only you, as a child who digs
with a stick, deeper, closer to the minute limit
that an owl pellet circumscribes.

Each stab erases exactitude
of what the owl was, of the remaining whole
existence of the organism. Wondrous are
these cracks made now in decimals of bone
by you, merely touching

anything and nothing; so pure with want
to derive what color lines, like bark
the other side of someone's skull.

Mowing

I have stepped    the soil
Of every damp foot    this lawn --
How many fields    more?

Ant Hill

I pulled the weed that held the hill of ants--

it was a common blade of grass.

Unplugged, they all erupted and

I raised the green, un-rooted sword, and gasped!

They bit me on the ankles,

and danced across my limbs.

I brushed them off with both my hands. They fell,

split open on their hill

like soldiers dying on the field

or filaments of plums dropped in the sand

op. 130, Cavatina

This is not the first time.
Not the last, either. We will spread
our butter over our bread thin
until it scrapes out and all we have
left to spread are our shadows.
We will spread them, too,
until we haven't any left.

We will run
the shadows of every
piece of cork board, torn movie stub,
and rubber band onto the earth
and then into the earth until they,
the heartbeats of our worlds, cease.
Are no more: these things like the footprints
of God go on.

And in the fourth minute
of our lives, when everything has been said
and what hasn't been said has
been heard, at least, all will wait in silence
for the violin to wander the new earth
we are leaving behind, searching our pockets
and deeper things also. Hear the violin.
Your pockets, your fingertips, the scar
you etched out of sidewalk. Isn't it

Prehistoric Love Poem

Here, my best bones in exchange for your fern
And I’ll touch your spine with my fossilized bird.

I still feel apart with our jaws interlocked
I want us to be the same sediment rock.

I think we are wasting our time eating leaves
Come, go extinct in the amber with me.

Verse (a)Verse

Hello writers (and readers), and welcome to the new day of the blog. We Are Not AVerse is meant to encompass all kinds of writing, and all kinds of writers. So, feel free to invite whomever (or if you are reading and want to be writing, invite yourself!) to become a contributor. Also, remember to add your name as a LABEL to any of your creative writing posts so we can rifle through them. Finally, let me know if you want/don't want your personal blog to be listed under "Contributor's Blogs." So far, I am just stalking you all and adding what I can find.

Go, Write!

Rose Awards 2009

A month is gone, which is long enough to determine a few awards for our heroic Poetry Month efforts. I have unilaterally decided these award winners, so if you don't like 'em, deal.

The (un)Poet Award: Taylor Dearr
Taylor's remarkable 14 posts were second most, and most among active students. This fiction writer demolished all expectations turning in brilliantly, and often food-themed, poetry. For Taylor's efforts, he receives an award signifying Poetic Expertise from an Unlikely Source.

Untapped Poet-ential: Bridget Mendel, Willy Nast, Tori Telfer
Bridget, Willy, and Tori all turned in a few (or one) poems after entering the contest in its final days. This award signifies a future as bright as a moth dream.

Most Scholarly: Eric Dean Wilson Madden Swan
Eric and Madden began with a bang, and their production dropped off accordingly. In order to make this something other than a rebuke, I am assuming that they turned their energy to school work.

The Roses: Lauren, Dinah Fay, Jordan Shuler
The trained poets flexed their muscles at a good clip and presented consistently challenging poems.

Show Don't Tell: Jordan Shuler
Jordan's blackout poem was phenomenal. Nuff Said.

Best Poem: Nina Yun
Nina's "The Poem I Won't Be Reading at my Sister's Wedding" is one of the best pieces of existence created in the 21st century.

Congratulations!

Well we have sufficiently handled National Poetry Month, and I for one am pretty impressed with the amount and quality and diversity of the work posted in the last thirty or so days. But, i am sincerely hoping that this is not the end of a communal web space where we can post minor parts of our writing and keep in touch through our creative efforts. Therefore, two things need done:

1. Name Change - Because I know other writers are just as sensitive as poets, I think it worthwhile to change the name of the site to something more universal and inclusive. So, reply and post an idea, and we can vote on them. I've vetoed, from the start, Leaves of Sass or anything else that predetermines the tonal quality of the work. You weren't even that sassy, Dinah.
2. Others - Feel extraordinarily free to invite others to the blog. Just have them email me and I can add them to the roster. As a communal space, the more the merrier.
   

Ok, that's all for now. Perhaps Rose Awards will be posted soon...

Visions of Hosea

[I know, write about something else, right?]

Married to a prostitute Hosea sought the beds
Of others, authored his dowry
*
His wife [...], himself a prophet, he chaste,
Eyes closed, knew each night, before, during

He spoke to her You are my wife I am your
Husband, wrote homilies on fidelity, tried
*
Your means, he said and trained the cords
To loosen in muscles when [...] her work
*
Stay, he said, Don't go, she left, he
Ate alone in the mornings
*
Nothing said, something understood between
them, always [...] welcomed back
*
Let me not, he prayed, See, hot coals, his eyes, no matter

What We Haven't Done

She, black, sixteen, the back
of the El, legs folded,
he facing her from where he sat,
wide wide apart his legs,
sweatpants rolled up, eyes,
his eyes, "Almost," spat,
muttered bold, "see her cunt," my
ears, my body right there, "What?"
she said, loud, "I'm sixteen"
the metal scream, the next stop,
doors unshut, can't, he, black
giant, cursing, she so old, so old,
"Your momma," advised, "Ought
to have taught you better," her eyes,
straight into his cursing, "My
momma had me," doors shut, unshut,
"she was sixteen," my body, me,
"Get out," she said, "Get out,"
he, rising up, a djin or a
doubt, a tornado, me, sitting,
I twisted the cord of my headphones
around each of my fingers and,
he whipped around, left, her
silent, me silent, "Get out,"
what I never, said, me, silent.

World Without End

From the edge to             grass-blade

Edge, endless edge of     grass-root
Shape upon boundary-   grass-seed
We run fingers along      root-heart
World growing in           seed-heart
Palm, eye, mouth,          blade-blade
And word of                   heart-blade
                                       grass

Untitled

No one embodies a metaphor
for sleep better than a lover
or my fish, Hamlet. In the dark,
he sinks beneath his flat eyes.

Poemism

Chips, Starburst, Nutell-
a, and icing with a spoon
is how I write poems.

Steel and Wire

Gum, metal, and bone
I run my tongue along
the back of white enamel
and swear I can taste blood.
The gleaming brackets plump
my lips and people say,
"Look at that mouth,"
not knowing that I carry
steel and wire on my teeth.

Vandalism

I have slashed the screen
to reach the bush of lilacs
outside my window.

Nice Legs, My Friend

"Can you come outside a minute?" she asked,
On the first truly warm day of the year,
Wearing a corduroy skirt high above
Her knees. Her sunroof would not open.
"My friend," she said, whatever that means,
"Had it working the other day, but now
It's stuck." Seated in her car, her skirt exposed
Even more of her pale thigh. I often told her
that she had nice legs when she was not just
My friend. I poked the sunroof with my fist,
It slid open, and I went back inside,
Feeling victorious.

original sin

I don't have any poems yet (that I like). But I have memorized, due to my mother's consistent quoting and re-quoting, my supposed "first poem." Does it count?


Pens, pens, pens
Birds, birds, birds
Me, me, me, me.

Uncollege

I was always told that I am
who I choose to
be
- some kind of vestigial
anthropology where we close
our eyes and
fill in belief with the niceties of infinity. Well

I've felt the swallowing
drop, the hardening concrete around every single
choice

that I have made that has made me into
what cannot purely make myself into
whoever making whatever

but me, right here. I am who
I have chosen to be.

For the Flight

She is riding far too far away from us because she is yours,
your Cordelia. And she yells through curls
It is the cars, Daddy. Daddy, look at the black!
She is riding from them. What I would give
to catch her; I think I would let you go and would leave
you. I think I will go now and go
through cars and bodies for years. So often you, as anyone,
I have thought of what I would give
and tried often to make you have
entire drawers of me
paltry things I had wanted to have. You would remember
the bird perched on brown knotted leather,
kneeling and never ready to steal
itself away from your breast because you know it
for what it is and know it is not
a thing that is best. It is felt on you always
for the distance that exists. And we learn
a little more each year how to exist by giving each other less
because giving is baring us
as a confession. We are learning to love
turning ourselves into our opposite.

Saturday, Night

Let us now waltz down the glimmering streets until
Rising, a stained sun enamels our feet.

My Saturday Night

Gran Turismo,

how it blows.

License tests,

hairpin turns,

realistic

car physics.

It's shit.

LA woman,

playing behind,

makes it slightly

tolerable.

Gran Turismo,

how it blows.

Mr. Mojo,

risin'.

Face

Face
Face
Face
beauty Face
fashion Face

Eye
Eye
Eye
produce Eye
construct Eye

Leg
Leg
Leg
transport Leg
bouguois Leg

Chest
Chest
Chest
poem Chest
mortal Chest.

this poem brought to you by RuPual's Drag Race.

What Work It Was

It is funny to remember what walls
the mind silently built around itself
placing each with the attention of one
working out the layout of a labyrinth
and with the attitude that this is
what is delicate and so far beyond
what is sacred that it is only for one
to ever want. It is humorous now
to find, where once one lived, is nothing;
only the room inside a dime-pocket.

There are dark rooms, cavities for the soul
that unfold to bare one's whole existence
for as long as one is willing to stand
senseless and ignorant inside of them.
They have doors that look like mirrors inside
a line of mirrors. These are the doors to forever
close or affix open; either affords more
and more hinges to be used for change.

Grill

Here in the infinite breadth of the moment the sun in every space
as if it had always been we ate and spoke the possible memories
away. Gone as if they had never been and they never were – lost
in the corners of dropped sandwiches and jokes held too tightly.
Of course we never knew them and never will. Gone, such excess.

Ode To A gChat Onomatopoeia

What sound 

does a gChat make?

Thoonk?

Suunk?

Dooonk?

It is subtle,

a small variation,

in consonants 

and vowels.

Soooonck?

Foondk?

Loountk?

Does it matter?

The tiny differences?

I say yes.

And I say,

Ptoonk!

Oda al queso asado

Did you know: April is also National Grilled Cheese Month. Fact.

The grilléd cheese
of yellow heart
formed an embrace,
hugged itself
together,
kept itself
from melting
over the
flame,
while outside
fat raindrops
hit the windowpane,
snaked downward
like beads of sweat,
in the heavens
the lightning bolt
looked for a place to land,
the thunder
rumbled
hungry,
the clouds
busied themselves
in bunches,
the air
grew thick
and the cozy
grilled cheese,
there in the kitchen,
content
in its
pool of butter,
sizzled oblivious,
until the time
with the other grilled cheeses
on the great iron
skillet,
it traveled on a spatula
to realize its dream:
fill someone's tummy.
Stacked up,
it was never so appetizing
as on that plate,
the children
at the table
with sticky hands
were
gods to be fed
grilled cheese sammiches,
demanding,
with whining voices,
and the sight
of a golden-brown buttered thing,
but
then along
comes
the dog
with her nose for food,
sniffing
the grilled cheese,
bold,
she examines and observes it
as if it were hers,
she jumps for it,
but misses altogether
in her haste
for a taste of ambrosia,
receiving a reprimand and a
shoo
from the room
until
each child has gotten their
portion.
Thus ends
in safety
the career of this treat
called grilléd cheese,
then,
crispy bite by bite
we eat
this delicious morsel
and swallow
the gooeyness
of its yellow heart.

Points to anyone who can name the poem this is modeled after.

Rose

The loaf of bread,

full of yeast,

swells its head.

Rising up

and up

and up.

Up 

into my mouth.

Down 

into my tummy.

Yummy.

Not Roses

Whore tea cult chore

Roes of row says
Buck cats foul of day seas
Mount hands Hiawatha sale Jas.

Eyed bayou flue errs
Button steady rote averse
Toward dent euro fecht shun.

Dudette fork?

A Rose Is

not a poem
or even prose.
All one writes
about the rose is
what it is not.

Roses

Deep in his heart a poet knows
That roses are not poems but prose.

A Rose

It is the hundred thousand symbols
caught in the ironed silk red, red through,
curved around the fingers that are not
dipped near the stamen; the space left
by the fireworks burning out the space
before the ash feathers, manna, along
a thousand invisible stalk-lines; what
we expect buried within the hip and
time; what with attention we stretch
into both what we knew it would
become and something much, much,
more the way all colors are when they
are bound in the fleshy crystal of a petal;
what it is is not the fibers wound
for the sun or the air or the eye but the what
it is, the Rose, is a poem.

Whether

Whether or not it is right,

I feel like a bit of a trendsetter.

Whether or not it is right,

I feel a bit proud.

But honestly,

who cares whether or not it is right.

I'll still feel proud.

Hubri-fic.

Weather

I don't like it, she said, How
it is always rainy somewhere
and how it is always here.

I think, he said, you've lost
a letter; this isn't very climactic at all.

Weather

He knew the weather by the drops
on my glasses as he glanced
up from his screen for the first time
all afternoon. It’s shit, he grizzled,
shaking his head in the fluorescent buzz
of the library, to live in a place like this.

Weather

Oh boy am I sick of this rain.

My squishy socks sure are a pain.

Just two weeks ago,

I lamented the snow,

now I wish it were here once again.