Why I Hate New York, by Mariah Beth

[Note: Instead of writing a poem today, I celebrated National Poetry Month (the cruelest month!) by helping my sister compose a list poem. She is 15. I think it’s pretty darn good. Suggestions for revision are encouraged!]

Why I hate New York

Smog
People
Skyscrapers
Litter
Gum on the sidewalk
The antemath of bruised flip-flop toes
Negligence - ignorance
Penthouse people plowing past the homeless
Heat of the Crowd
Screech of the Birds
White of the Walls

I don’t like people. I really
don’t like people.

Merry

For Tim

Merry, merry, merry,
merry, merry, merry, merry,
merry, merry,
donut.

The Adoption

They were beautiful, and barren, blithely fishing.
The woman was wading in the water.
In the shallows of a sandbar, caught my brother.
She adopted him, a son, like a fish pulled out.
She saw nothing but silver in the fish, nothing else.
The man with the face planes I would inherit
Idled his fingers in the country's long water.
And he thought of nothing. He was watching my mother.
The fishermen's wives were silent to the strangers.
They mended the nets that my brother had broken.
At the prow my salted brother was drying in the sun.
They took him home and life as he remembers it begun.

Numbers

Numbers don't work well in poems.

They trudge along, 

all with the same rhythms. 

One, Two, Three, Four,

dum, dum, dum, dum.

They are all predictable,

concrete. Difficult 

to bring to life.

You can't make a number dance,

only plod.

Except for seven.

Seven.

Two syllables in a sea

of monosyllabic dreck. 

You see,

Seven can fly, 

Seven can sprint,

Seven can waltz across a room.

Perhaps this is why it is lucky.

Come on,

Papa needs a new pair of shoes.

Weary

For Nina

Weary, weary, weary,

weary, weary, weary, weary,

weary, weary,

weary.

The Terms

For the past nine months
I have shared my body with this city:
allowed the ground’s tremors to rumble
in my chest, the skyscrapers to steal
the sun’s warmth from its rightful place
on my cheek, the heavy air to weigh
my lungs with curry, musk, and garbage.

For nine months I have incubated
in the small rooms of Harlem, Dumbo, Hell’s
Kitchen. I have relinquished my unfettered
right to the sky, accepting the airshaft
and a stolen Central Park afternoon as enough.
I have learned that no space is mine alone.

In the springtime, expecting to come to term
as the perennial flowers do, I found no change.
No great labor to render my body my own again.
No epiphanous pain that ends in joy,
No sudden, primitive love for her.

So I boarded a red bus like a tourist.
The second story retold the city's face
as that of smirking gargoyles, stained
glass jubilation, and proud topless mermaids.

Why did she never reveal herself to me
when I came offering full devotion of body
and mind to the Bacchus temple of her boroughs?

Today I checked my map often and thought,
I am a stranger in a strange land.

This city answered, now we can begin.

Squinting Without My Glasses

This crazy moon lights up like a kaleidoscope,
I see moving constellations in the dotted ceiling--
Orion's belt unbuckles into Cassiopeia's upside-down head,
and I make the Seven Sisters sun sick from their own light
that they burn and combust into something
that looks like my first grade teacher--
and soon the pupil of my eye has reached its limit
and I can't see what's waving in my face.
It never touches but the motion makes me sneeze.

the violet hour

he speaks the liquid grammar.

the tumbling syntax of a bartender

with bitters in hand, playing shakers

like instruments and separating 

a raw egg in a single hand.

he drains it into stainless steel,

the violet hour come round at last

shaving the peel in silence

off an orange

like a scalp.

thin, taut skin – an open blouse

bares no extra fold of flesh 

across her freckled 

synthetic chest.

it is as bare to the world as 

she is barren,

wrinkle free like warm cotton, 

fragrant and washed 

by others' hands. 

                          this woman avoids

the brown liquors 

(they cause wrinkles).

"a vodka drink," she says.

"with pineapple juice

and you guys usually put something special in"

a manicured lawn for hair: 

fungal blond foil highlights

Singer threaded eyebrows.

thin lips let drip her flat free words

she talks of metabolism

factual as politics:

the dirth of annualized ingredients,

the danger of calorized drink obligations,

actualizing her asset-backed securities

from a spineless barstool

while somewhere in a far off bungalow

sitting on its own in an acred lot

or underneath clean sheets

the ceremony of innocence 

drowns.

at least we all agree 

that the proper word

for what's slung round her neck

is choker.

Pantoum For The Day Before Easter

The day continued like clockwork –

Boring, and yet too intricate to explain;

A world passed underneath as we missed

An invisible struggle too quiet to hear.

Boring, and yet too intricate to explain,

The day continued like a clockwork's

Invisible struggle. Too quiet to hear,

We missed a world passing underneath.

Soup

Last night I dreamed of spilt pea soup.

But I did not drink it. Instead,

I carried it, sealed

in a a thermos.  

Or was it an urn?

I couldn't say.

The vessel was smooth,

metallic, and cold,

and stayed closed, 

tightly.

I kept the soup pressed closely 

to my chest, 

like the ashes of a loved one.

And I cared for it just as deeply.

What did this mean?

What was I mourning?

The loss of something

profound?

Or, like Scrooge,

was this simply a case

of undigested food,

a "bit of beef, 

a blot of mustard"

a phantom

"more gravy than grave"?

This seems likely,

because, in the morning,

I woke hungry.

I slaked my yearning,

with Rice Krispies. 

A food my grandmother derides

as empty.

But with each crackling,

snapping, spoonful,

I felt fuller,

if only for a moment.

A Collaboration

Crickets chirp
But it’s too late for me to
Eat them.
I might get a bellyache.

i can't do long

it is the season of shorts

Holy Terror

“All miners name their mines after their wives,”

so complained one wife to her husband in an old

story from the Black Hills during the rush, he complied:

today an antique store carries the name in Keystone,

the home of Mount Rushmore – once Paha Sapa,

the sacred hills where Lakota boys would camp

to dream of the Great Spirit, Wakan-Tanka,

and in the morning wake in a holy land

that by night had made them men – Holy Terror:

a joke to the miner who did not have to watch

the bounds of holiness collapse into wear, or

rock-blasted into the faces of men who taught

a country to walk too well before it came

to the borders of a land, and a god, and their names.

Stuck

If you're writing a poem and get stuck,

and you try and you try with no luck,

you can keep your mood fair,

and try hard not to swear,

or write a limerick and say, what the fuck.

In re: Can Animals be Gay?

Note: Reference is a 10 page NYTimes article under the above title, which can be found here.

Darwin, Darwin, man of birds
wrote a book of many words
describing finches, tortoises too,
a book that’s since caused much ado!

‘Teaching theory!' Masses cry,
‘Is blasphemy that doth deny
creation’s certain spontaneity
by hand of our benevolent deity.

And furthermore!’ They humph and scold,
‘Old Darwin’s theory’s full of holes.
It can’t explain the cell’s complexity,
nor man's desire for safe sex-ity,

It has no answer to our query
on the queers, and their cashmerey
decadence! It can’t be true!
Harumph! We will boycott the zoo,

the school, and other institutions
who push these spurious conclusions.’
And that, my friends, is how we lost
this battle: to an albatross.

I've got more poems in my poem-maker than poem-makers can make poems.

Shutter Open

When I see the half-moon, I want to slide
the dark away with my finger like how I broke
my father's camera by placing my finger on the lens
and forcing those shutter eyelids blindly open. Slide
and click, shutter open, to reveal such a solemn blank
face. I saw my reflection, waxy, smooth and irritating as fog
on a winter windshield, and I broke my nail on the image
of my face, and so I dragged my thumb to make it disappear.

People People my People People

Where oh where has my little
god gone? Where oh where can He
be? I was told He was in everything,
in every leaf of grass and every whisper
in the back of the Synagogue reflected
His mightiness.

We were once called a stiff-necked people,
but we have gone soft and well-clad.
Necks become stiff from the act of sticking
them out too often, from righteously placing
the body before the machine. The office chairs
at Goldman Sachs and Fried Frank have round supports
for the lumbar and neck, to keep them supple.
It’s the ones with the stiff necks we watch for now:
Madoff, Wolfowitz, Leiberman, Libby.
The best among us lack all chutzpah,
while the worst fill their mothers with passionate tsurres.

Where oh where has it gone, this God of mine?
This God who taught me to love a good argument,
to favor David over Goliath,
to count myself as my brother’s keeper?

My Rabbi asked me once to prove that we are the chosen people.
I could not, because I did not believe it.
He opened his laptop and typed the words into google,
and hit after hit revealed it to be true: the Jew.

Simple Pleasures

Fuck cars,

Fuck poles,

Fuck parking lots.

Fuck dings, 

Fuck dents,

Fuck parking, a lot.

Fuck buttons,

Fuck thread,

Fuck holes in my shoe.

Fuck Sting,

Fuck The Police,

Fuck "Synchronicity II".

Yeah, my car turned too slowly,

And my clothes are all wearing,

And my deskmate has headphones

That he never thinks of wearing.

But on a day like this

When I can't catch a break,

At least I can end it 

With a coffee milkshake.

The End of the World

came and went with little forewarning
and less recognition.
A car in Rogers Park failed to start
and measured
tragedy
distracted everyone as last year's actress
died from an overdose. March 25th
was the same as March 24th in almost
every way, except
warmer. We took our coats off
and sat on the rocks
overlooking the lake and did not
speak. We watched a leaf
for metaphor's sake. We napped,
exhausted
at being meaningful.

National Poetry Month

Begins NOW.

One poem a day.

Or at least a sporting try.

Enjoy!

Grandma Clementine

Young hands to old hands like the skin of a clementine peel--then peeling and then drying and then cracked. I've been crumbling dried clementine peels and smelling my fingers for the catches of dying scent. Her hand moving, patting my palm and plucking at my fingers. It was only then I realized the difference between touching and being touched. I left one peel by her side. I broke it evenly into dried pieces that smelled like candy and left them there. I know I cannot save them.

Blue and Cyan

A feather carried by a current I was,

Hair unspooling like so because,

•

And Underneath it all the brush,

And us.

•

Weightless, lifted, pinioned,

Strung and pulled, unbuttoned,

•

What we edge, have edged, and halved,

Is yet the steps we have not pathed.

•

And underneath it all the shadow,

the blood, the bone, the marrow:

•

I will meet you on another day,

When the air is warmer, when the sky is gray.

•

The river hides us, though we pass,

And underneath it all the mask.

[the poem takes its name from the accompanying beautiful painting by my friend Maria Dimanshtein]

Fin de siècle

When we walk at night, the wind sharp as

cool wood splinters, we see nothing but the ebb

of our shadows from the pacing streetlights when

all at once a great black beast of a shadow

whose approach we did not hear in our study

overcomes us as a steel wire of fear is plucked within,

buzzing until we are a cold shock of edge, and we

watch the bicyclist whisper past. Or else

we do not watch: we are yet clenched in the tightness

of everything lost even though it isn’t, clutching

what we possess into our hearts and digging

our chins into our chest bones. It was warmer

back there, back in the café even though we knew

it was cold outside, or back yesterday, or back

a season ago: yes, then we walked about without socks

and once in a while ran our hands through the grass.

How we would sleep there, never to rise again,

if a single blade would push its way through

the tundra that we knew, we really knew if you pressed

us, was coming. Now there is only ice and the promise

of ice, and the sick lights that carve mirages along

the sidewalks good only for predicting the horrors

we are too frightened to turn and see as only a

bicyclist. Here is where we live, on the cusp of exhale

and the moments we we will not remember in

the peace of continuity, without knowing it because

even if our past has taught us all we will ever need

to know, we will curl beneath the shadow and wait

for the consequence of every sin that is as real

as the end of time, except that when we walk at night

only the wind is sharp, only the lights move

since only we move.

The Most Important Attempt of All

And what had we decided? Oh,

a great number of things – this was

the problem, this out-stretching

of our wills past time and the very skin

that should keep us well-enough

informed of ideas like limits.

If only we had not evolved past

the days of ideas: action

was what mattered, everything

else just cloud and waiting, and we

were done with waiting.

Some ideas hung around like ghosts

or model homes, unsubstantial things

that we assumed were real or else

were always this light and fragile.

One was revolution. Another was

justice. We wore them like the robes

of kings we had never seen except

in great myths and we sung their

liturgies as if we knew exactly

what we meant but at the end of the day

only our throats were sore: the blood

was still threading the course of our

bodies, the bones were yet intact,

and our homes shown like lacquered

paper, glowing warm and incandescent.

Nothing was lost except for what we

had not lost. And that, too, was gone.

Tomorrow we will be angry – or how

could we remain so few seconds before

every exhalation? We will pretend to live

in brighter days where ideas enfleshed

the spare forests we will devastate

in our quiet studies and we will call

our imagination passion, and later,

the most important attempt of all.

And in a magnificent frenzy of every

tension scraping its plate with every

other brittle mockup of emotion

we will strive and yearn and finally

beneath the stars we still see through

our own putrefaction we will climax

and fall asleep.

All I really, really want my love to do

My greek teacher told me over and over
          Repetitio est mater memoriae
Only he wasn’t a greek teacher, just a science teacher with a love
of Greek and an excuse
to repeat with us the alphabet that runs from Alpha to Omega.

My mother would scream to me that repetition
          was the mother of insanity, if one repeated expecting
different results. But she was speaking of actions,
of relationships and sacrifices repeated, of the relentless
way the phone rang with relentless attorneys on the other end
repeating hostilities from the father of insanity.

I can’t write except when I’ve got a song on repeat,
          a song that’s nothing to do with my subject but everything
to do with the loop of instrumental, vocal, crescendo, fade.
Something with a chorus. Not the Greek kind
but maybe something Aristotelian, with a climax.

Gertrude Stein told me once that
          Loving repeating then in some is their natural way of complete being.
Loving repeating, repeating expecting, expecting memory,
all this to say what if there is no repeating
because every time the meaning shifts a little
or the being shifts a little
and so expecting repeating, memory of repeating,
believing repeating and repeating belief is the mother
of insanity, but loving repeating
loving repeatedly
loving repetition
loving repeating
is the natural way of complete being
is the natural way
loving repeating is loving, repeating, loving.

The Old Woman Explained, Pulling on Her Sweater at a Red Lobster in Plantation, Florida

I don't wear it for the warmth;
I wear it for the color.
This color gives me life.
Only it's so heavy! It practically pulls me
right down to the cellar!
But this color. This color
gives me life.

The Silver Face

Buskers came and went, not worth
writing about really. Jazz trumpeteer,
soul singer, Hendrix style guitarist who
staked out the Jackson stop off the blue line

and fumbled along blues chords. The good
ones closed their eyes when they played
and the bad ones did, too. In between were
the ones who nudged their open cases and
roped eye contact with a lasso. Just lives

like any other who passed by and gave money
or didn't - blinking lights in a tunnel or
split vocal chords looking to shout some
kind of noise into what is only silence ever,

the hum rumble of the trains that devours

everything. And if they do not sing? If they do not

play or burst? Suppose he stands in quiet grey

painter's clothes wearing kneepads and black boots,

boxes of junk arranged about him like an insect. His deep

gloves hide silver fingers that splay and clench

at the end of an arm akimbo, straight, akimbo

again to the silent rhythm of Billie Jean from unseen

speakers. Suppose you see all of this but you do not

really see any of it because of his face. It is silver

like the fingertips you can just make out, too

silver. You wonder at the hope that it is paint

as the contours which make a face disappear

beneath the smoothness of silver. You see hollow

slits above the nose that fill with silver at each blink,

the thin line of a mouth closed tightly, a patch

of stubble breaking through the silver smooth chin.

Suppose he does not speak. Suppose his face is set.

Yet he dances. There is no sound anywhere

but the echo of distant trains and there is horror

as you knock the face from the body and watch

it shatter, like glass.

Haiku Haiku

I have to tell you,

it is easier to write

these in Japanese.

Miami Haiku

Forty-Eight degrees.

Miami folks are confused,

now coats are sold out.

Moon Shine

The moon has a fat belly tonight
And I can’t decide if that makes her a slut,
But I sit in her light anyway.

Lune

Yo, writerly friends.

SO! I wanted to hop back on the poetry train but was having trouble finding a station. Lucky for me, I work an arts admin job and sometimes they send me to seminars and often those seminars begin with creative activities because that's how we prove we're arts administrators and not pedestrian heartless sellout administrators.

Anyway I went to this meeting tonight and the opening activity was to write a very short poem called a "lune." I have not researched this but I assume it is a basic American bastardization of the Haiku. Here is a lune that explains the composition of a lune:

Lune
Three words here
Five on the next line
Ends on question?

I thought I'd tell you about the lune because it helped me write something creative today for the first time in six months, and maybe you would like to write one with me. Here is my lune.

Decisions
Clarity isn't transparent.
Rather: one solid, firm color.
Is that unclear?

Anyway, hello poets. I'm back in your world now, play with me.

pardon this brief interruption!

I wanted to point out a silly & ridiculous blog I'm writing with my roommate Tate, which is simply pictures of models in the "fashion Vogue pose" or, as Tate calls it, "the bones pose," because "regardless of what you're wearing, you have nothing if you don't have bones."

It's called the Bones Blog.

Thank you.

On with the show.

For My Love, Whom None Can Bottle

If love were a mustard, 

I’d call it Dijon. 

For they make it in France, 

Tres romantique… non?  

True, sometimes it’s hot, 

Spicy, and bold. 

Like a bright-yellow English, 

The variety least cold.  

And like honey mustard, 

When I’m with you, life’s sweet; 

Curled up beneath blankets 

My hands warming your feet.  

Also, love can be rough, 

Like a coarsely ground Meaux. 

And all the tough bits 

Cause the flavor to grow.  

But more often than not, 

Like Dijon, our love’s smooth. 

Hearty and comforting, 

It warms and it soothes.  

Indeed, love is a mustard, 

And, I know our love’s true,

Because standing at the fridge, 

All I can think of is you.

New Year

Two on the table. Forgot all about them

for a hazy three hours laughing with former

friends in a bright cheap bar through beer

squeezed from a sponge like vinegar. Drank it

anyway; had to. Laughed at futures

and stalled futures and the way we talk

about the past as if it’s the future. It never

has been – never will be either,

not even when one of them lights up about

cosmetology school and her new

passion as if it wasn’t all just vinegar

and beer thrown up onto the bright wood

floorboards. Counted it on too many fingers.

Came to what was called home and look,

it’s been months since I’ve used a personal

pronoun. Sometimes I can’t hide and so

I’ll just say it:

I came home and saw two presents on the table

and I was drunk and I had forgotten.

I had forgotten they were there; was glad

to have forgotten; forgot to forget them; saw

them again. Three hours earlier in a dark

brown living room a man who used to have

a family stretched out his arm with two

presents for a birthday diminutively set

between Christ’s and the year’s, presents

he had chosen by himself for the first time

because who could help him? Saw them,

saw them again three hours later, saw by

their shape a calendar and a dvd. Thought

to open them, the gifts from a man whose

name was known once. Thought:

the doorway to an infinite sadness is here.

Thought: it is too dark here. Turned off the lights

and sat at the table. Did not open.

Upon Putting Away an Old Coat

I cannot recall the occasion for the card,
Or whether the picture on the card
Of two bowls of blueberries
Held any significance,
Or what prompted her to write
"I feel I've done nothing for you."
I only recall slipping the card into the breast pocket,
Forgetting with intent, so that on this day,
I could discover at once
What I have carried all along.

HI EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's what I wrote/partially helped record this summer: (It can be found at http://madswan.tumblr.com b/c I can't get the link to work per usual. It's the post from Thursday September 24 - which would, in fact, be today)

Also, my dad requested a sci-fi and/or fantasy short story for x-mas so maybe I'll post some of that...mostly just for Timothy Star Trooper DeMay.

-A BIG HUG FOR EVERYONE!

September

The stars hung upside down,
Bright, blazing bats
On heaven's dark rafters.

Psalm 88

I was the dust

Wanted to sleep, couldn’t, remained in
step and some outside observer would
never have guessed a dead pigeon on the edge
of the sidewalk, neck stretched and beak open as

if a sleeping Madonna undisturbed by the cars
or the feet that swept the dust across the body.

In the opened cloak, on the sandal

In time there are no farces only parables:
last night, woke to spirits bargaining. Over
souls. Over mine. Turned to my side to sleep, thought:
if demons cannot win it by day then surely

Shaken off, I was

by night. Woke fully. Thought:
faces rise up like waters around me.
Had sat on a rock, had seen the waves flung

like the dust from a shaken cloak.
Generations rise up like waves around me

The dust

thrown in a curse.

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.