I roll restlessly on carpet
In a house you’ve never seen
Scaling rungs of a ladder
Gray and splintering
But it’s the ladder you built
In photos, I lose my life
Sucked dry and seen only
In pixels, pasted and stamped.
I have goals and knowledge, tools
Like gloves and buckets
Gazing at plums and forgetting
How to pluck them
Fine motor skills that need tuning
No calculus required, but
I am rusting in disuse
A canopy destroyed by hurricane’s gale
Being pampered and powdered
Taught us lethargy
Our skills of discipline are
Wanting, on indefinite furlough
In this imitation Mecca
We sow energy and seeds
Our liberators, fuming at the decline
Retail and dollars and budding consumers
And I sit vacant
I need Colorado peaches, dripping
Down our chins and staining our smocks
Sticky fingers kneading shoulders
We’re hair and coffee and indecision
Canvassing the town and scouring
For what,
I am still gathering.
I erase all anger,
And I am curious
At the ease.
My Lover the Magnate
Judging my Muse, she is but one piece of scattered wits
Her adequate description of
Barbed misery is quite aesthetic
In best practice, one flees comfort simply to sense, and sense
In a manner acute
My fatal flaw is how I love to feel
I am angry with her, collecting bottles of distilled self, shutting down
And spurring on
Sorrow is dark green, death, blue glass in the riverbed
We are deluded, diluted with equal parts apathy and need
You lofted my blanket just so
There it loiters, teal gauze on metal
Who can predict the forecast
It is upper thirties out tonight and
I will be sleet-pounded and bruising by daybreak
Joining my song is no crime tonight-
Leave it all, three lazy blocks behind
Come and share my bed, you restless sleeper
I need someone else’s skin here, muddling heat, hoarding resource,
Congested in the finest way
You couldn't know the difference
Let us go back in time, I say, forty years or so.
There they cannot pity my technology
I’ll meet you there but
What wouldn’t I do
24 March 2009
Her adequate description of
Barbed misery is quite aesthetic
In best practice, one flees comfort simply to sense, and sense
In a manner acute
My fatal flaw is how I love to feel
I am angry with her, collecting bottles of distilled self, shutting down
And spurring on
Sorrow is dark green, death, blue glass in the riverbed
We are deluded, diluted with equal parts apathy and need
You lofted my blanket just so
There it loiters, teal gauze on metal
Who can predict the forecast
It is upper thirties out tonight and
I will be sleet-pounded and bruising by daybreak
Joining my song is no crime tonight-
Leave it all, three lazy blocks behind
Come and share my bed, you restless sleeper
I need someone else’s skin here, muddling heat, hoarding resource,
Congested in the finest way
You couldn't know the difference
Let us go back in time, I say, forty years or so.
There they cannot pity my technology
I’ll meet you there but
What wouldn’t I do
24 March 2009
And Back Again
My handwriting is messy
Certainly not clean and black
I have lukewarm tea to drink
We are far from what we lack
I remember, it sounded rough
Three and a quarter centuries past
For me, it hasn’t been long enough
I scribble a dreamless record
Eating fragments, seals of wax
Conceived for nothing but indulgence
Mindlessly discarded snacks
I am far from flaxen, steeped in smoke
And will be further before we’re done
Overheating, saturated, and broke
I had nowhere to turn but skyward
Your lizards splaying spread
Two were fighting rancor-bound
One desired my heart, one my head
Bend fresh pages, for shame
Say goodbye without a siren
Cry, allow your swollen self to drain
23 March 2009
Certainly not clean and black
I have lukewarm tea to drink
We are far from what we lack
I remember, it sounded rough
Three and a quarter centuries past
For me, it hasn’t been long enough
I scribble a dreamless record
Eating fragments, seals of wax
Conceived for nothing but indulgence
Mindlessly discarded snacks
I am far from flaxen, steeped in smoke
And will be further before we’re done
Overheating, saturated, and broke
I had nowhere to turn but skyward
Your lizards splaying spread
Two were fighting rancor-bound
One desired my heart, one my head
Bend fresh pages, for shame
Say goodbye without a siren
Cry, allow your swollen self to drain
23 March 2009
Stepwise
Tomorrow I’ll take a drive
I’ll be a dusty slate erased
Southeast as the crow flies
I hope the grass is dead
I am adrenaline panicked, holding headboards
Yours are such ordinary objects
Glory mornings stamped winter white
Standing in a sea of garbage
Crawling in time, imaginary in space
I would like to cruise helmetless
To scrawl illegibly
To expose my cracking ribs
It’s all too literal, angular
Living in a box like an oven
On a catastrophic delay and falling
Asleep early, for health and virtue
Here is the breadth of conspiracy-
You’ll find freedom in chains
Lick the floor of sand as the sea
Be provided necessities at your leisure
When ignited, I sink,
But the Din sustains
I’ll be a dusty slate erased
Southeast as the crow flies
I hope the grass is dead
I am adrenaline panicked, holding headboards
Yours are such ordinary objects
Glory mornings stamped winter white
Standing in a sea of garbage
Crawling in time, imaginary in space
I would like to cruise helmetless
To scrawl illegibly
To expose my cracking ribs
It’s all too literal, angular
Living in a box like an oven
On a catastrophic delay and falling
Asleep early, for health and virtue
Here is the breadth of conspiracy-
You’ll find freedom in chains
Lick the floor of sand as the sea
Be provided necessities at your leisure
When ignited, I sink,
But the Din sustains
Hard Case
She was colloquial by choice
Causing nothing but damage
It is deep, aching in sobriety
And makes me want to sing
She sat at the upright, her
Heel on dirty linoleum
Preparing to flippantly crush him
She, the high-functioning placebo
Do you need to taste cotton,
Touch denim, smell a dream,
See what is growing in two hearts?
The visuals are phone calls
Hammering an old bell
My heart is not young, halting in
Weak moments and
Running in a land of cars
Perhaps I self indulge, I leak words
In whirring silence
Here where I read and sleep
Here where I unzip my dress
I lace up my shoes, sudden haste
Raising happiness from sand
I round the bend sprinting-
He’s out on the corner, pores open,
Reeling in the rain.
Causing nothing but damage
It is deep, aching in sobriety
And makes me want to sing
She sat at the upright, her
Heel on dirty linoleum
Preparing to flippantly crush him
She, the high-functioning placebo
Do you need to taste cotton,
Touch denim, smell a dream,
See what is growing in two hearts?
The visuals are phone calls
Hammering an old bell
My heart is not young, halting in
Weak moments and
Running in a land of cars
Perhaps I self indulge, I leak words
In whirring silence
Here where I read and sleep
Here where I unzip my dress
I lace up my shoes, sudden haste
Raising happiness from sand
I round the bend sprinting-
He’s out on the corner, pores open,
Reeling in the rain.
My Terrarium
All the trees might be dying
Aborted for shutters of pine
Ingesting spores which travel westward
She will always be a vacant figurine
I dolphin kick with vertebrae of opal
Growing like a boisterous lily
All these ancient trees are dying
Processed by misers highly consequential
Molten brass deals lopsided light
I tunnel into the productive earth
Like a fiber-optic worm, freeze dried
A lily fueled with personal belief
These trees will die, hanging in sorrow
We are stringing up the terrified future
In the single pane glass my cheeks are wet
I've been found, located drunken
Allergic to speaking vegetation
And persistent liars
11 March 2009
Aborted for shutters of pine
Ingesting spores which travel westward
She will always be a vacant figurine
I dolphin kick with vertebrae of opal
Growing like a boisterous lily
All these ancient trees are dying
Processed by misers highly consequential
Molten brass deals lopsided light
I tunnel into the productive earth
Like a fiber-optic worm, freeze dried
A lily fueled with personal belief
These trees will die, hanging in sorrow
We are stringing up the terrified future
In the single pane glass my cheeks are wet
I've been found, located drunken
Allergic to speaking vegetation
And persistent liars
11 March 2009
The Anti-Carry
Pack up now please, boys
Girls want to go home and play
Much waits for us there!
Guest post by Kari Woodard.
Her first haiku!
Girls want to go home and play
Much waits for us there!
Guest post by Kari Woodard.
Her first haiku!
Elegy for Living
Professor of crackling life,
Spokesman of camaraderie and trade
You barter stability for solidarity.
You pace, driven, wiping your beak
On greasy feathers, soldiering on.
You scale twisting, white-washed bark,
And upon your arrival, you are free.
You juggle eggs, and allow
Each one to sink,
A lipid mess on the sidewalk.
Leave the multitasking to me.
You take the stairs in leaps
And trip, springing to
The summit, overexerted.
Your tenet of simplicity
A freeze-dried excuse
For equal and opposite gluttony.
The symptoms have been diagrammed,
Medically suffocated and immersed.
You love, practice duplicity,
Deface and devour me.
You prick lacy corners of me
Long-lain bandaged, for fear.
Your nape is cold and wet, sonorous,
Lips and eyes seal wet as petals
I read your couplet,
Erased but for the semicolon
That is dusk, a wrought-iron outpost.
You are but a madman,
A tightrope walker,
You trade the common need for love
For self-deprecation and sedation.
You have been coddled, roots-up.
Stop off in the lot and come to dinner.
I will feed you that which I cherish.
We are both scaffold and buttress,
Springing at the sky, made of stone
Avoiding jet-engines with lungs of turpentine
I am in rapid pursuit, taking this on.
Please, wind me and set me rolling.
Our brains are novels, battered textbooks.
For now, we suckle at the garden hose,
Cultivating green and waxen fancy.
We will curl underfoot, brittle, by day's end.
Spokesman of camaraderie and trade
You barter stability for solidarity.
You pace, driven, wiping your beak
On greasy feathers, soldiering on.
You scale twisting, white-washed bark,
And upon your arrival, you are free.
You juggle eggs, and allow
Each one to sink,
A lipid mess on the sidewalk.
Leave the multitasking to me.
You take the stairs in leaps
And trip, springing to
The summit, overexerted.
Your tenet of simplicity
A freeze-dried excuse
For equal and opposite gluttony.
The symptoms have been diagrammed,
Medically suffocated and immersed.
You love, practice duplicity,
Deface and devour me.
You prick lacy corners of me
Long-lain bandaged, for fear.
Your nape is cold and wet, sonorous,
Lips and eyes seal wet as petals
I read your couplet,
Erased but for the semicolon
That is dusk, a wrought-iron outpost.
You are but a madman,
A tightrope walker,
You trade the common need for love
For self-deprecation and sedation.
You have been coddled, roots-up.
Stop off in the lot and come to dinner.
I will feed you that which I cherish.
We are both scaffold and buttress,
Springing at the sky, made of stone
Avoiding jet-engines with lungs of turpentine
I am in rapid pursuit, taking this on.
Please, wind me and set me rolling.
Our brains are novels, battered textbooks.
For now, we suckle at the garden hose,
Cultivating green and waxen fancy.
We will curl underfoot, brittle, by day's end.
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