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.

New Town

There on a north bend of the Missouri where it is fat and
swollen with dams we built, dams that flooded the early white
town of Sanish and probably a majority of the Hidatsa, Arikara,
Mandan villages as well but it is hard to tell since we just don't
have aerial photographs of that time, but I can tell you that there,
buried beneath the water and the long bridge across to Four Bears Casino
where white men and women wear credit cards affixed to necklaces,
there you will find the kind of remnants that built towns worthy
of the name New, homes and hides that cut the first stretched
scars of people lining the North Dakotan poor-cell-reception areas,
places not where the refugees of the past have huddled cold and
in their coldness built a history.

Montaigne in April

Pitched by wind this spring
Again, against the gray church stones,
God is in the magnolias' waxy blooms.
I intend to memorize their stems,
Though their language is dead.

I Feel Sorry For Broken Umbrellas

buoyed bellies burst

in a rush of air

spindle-limbed urchins

wink in the street

Fish

My fishies have been swimming upstream,

splashing in the faces of the nay-sayers.

Glug, glug, glug.

They lug, lug, lug,

their leaden bodies

toward a promise of happiness.

Prosper

Oh is it so
bad to be strung like a clothesline
and bent weighted
by the wet what, what really?

No sense in believing in the reality
of things when weight is
weight and to be strung out
well we all have our

idiosyncrasies.

For Good

At night Adam rolls over
to look at me, looking where
his rib is and softly tells me
he would like to have it back
by morning before he wakes
and remembers for good.

A Triolet About Knowledge

I want to find the final step
That under every step supports,
This strong foundation finely pressed:
I want to find the final. Step
From warmth, this fetal nest;
The more the cold the more, the more,
I want. To find the final step
Look under every step's supports.

Wish List

after "God's Ear," a play

For Halloween, I want to be
an exception to the rule.
I will wear socks
on my ears and gloves
on my feet. I will smoke
cigarettes, and swear, and
smash things with my hands,
but people will nod
and understand.

For Christmas, I would like
a master plan.
I think it would be fun
to play with, to carry around
and show it off, to bounce it
off the wall or stomp on
if I felt like it. And the best part,
it would never break.

For my birthday, please, I want
an exit strategy. It's a useful thing
to have, and I could use it
like a rope to pull myself
out of a quicksand pit,
or like an eraser if I didn't want
my name on something after all,
or like a pair of scissors
to cut the tie between you
and me.

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.