Space Trash or a Star

Prompt #9: Jezqi

2011-05-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

Of Rivers & Respiration

It's April & you're going home.
I'm breathing you
out into the night
as I watch you from upstairs,
after I gave you back
everything
I still could. I once took
you into me. Now, as you pass
under my balcony I'm looking
out into a rainy darkness just
cool enough not to be summer
yet, as the Merrimack sighs
contented & wet,
fills the air with fog.

I wonder what you're feeling--
do you now understand why
I smoke? How else could I
see, quantify, a sigh?
A poem? No--though
it swallowed my heart
every time you'd sneak
your arms around my hips,
it is a trite image not
a Speaking Occasion. Muted,
I could only blow that hope
into the air
& watch it hover around us.

I'll miss walking
you to your car
in a light mist,
how the river thickened
the air
as if it could convey
that lovesickness
of the departing--helpless
surrender that felt deep
& broad inside me, epic
even in those old
overblown roles
(departing, forsaken)
& the clichéd setting:
the dark being so much more
beautiful than a clear night.
A sigh of the flowing away, more than
love, more than hope,

& what swirls around me
tonight is quietly shattered
fragments of everything I
ever felt in my life--
all at once & puissant--
still hoping,
still worrying, a cloud
in the night air.

oldy but goody

2011-05-03T11:38:00.003-07:00

Stop the Car

I'm on route 20
and it's dark with a smattering of headlights,
dots shining on the radar screen.
The cold steering wheel hurts my hands,
And it's 28 degrees, the radio man says.

In Baghdad, it's 28 degrees--
Celsius not Fahrenheit.
A despot is condemned to death,
another raindrop in the monsoon.

My eyes wander off the road
and in the midnight sky a flash
and a trail of a falling star, but is it
Space trash or meteorite?
These things don't matter much,
I still make a wish.

28 degrees?
It's cold or it's beautiful--
Saddam is dead?
Sunnis break their curfew to vow revenge,
Shiah break their curfew to shoot their guns
in elated joy. Both sides will explode themselves
the very next day.

I stop the car,
and call you, my love, just to listen
to something besides the radio voice drone,
because it's cold and I'm lonely
whether I saw space trash or a star.

#8- Arthur

2011-05-03T11:38:00.001-07:00

Years, Buried

I was never that aware of root vegetables,
unexpected sweetness of a beet
melted into a dish of yams—
the only hint it was there
the red-purple tint of the dish,
the surprising fuchsia, sugary taste.
I was never aware things could
taste red or that buried things still
matter, but people are of the Earth.
Unburying stores in us is wholesome
& nourishing, too. Time uproots
what we shied from showing.

I am finally holding this up,
looking at what I carried
so long under my coat, considering it
never: years later, in Salem
as I’m walking the historical tour
painted a pasty red-purple
on a sidewalk. Some city worker
has lifted sections of the line up
with manhole covers, put it
back crooked & in pieces
with little crosses & tangents along

the way—it reminds me of a time
when I readjusted all my covers,
attempted to walk my line more
straightly—lost contact with tangents,
which were present only as stories
over wine at a soiree: travels.
Places seen or found or felt.
But what matters? A rose garden
in Utrecht? Or what was said there,
or a philosophy hand-written in a letter
& sent overseas to me explaining
what would make people like us perfect lovers ,
or the time I saw the shy girl
obscuring her face but laughing at a camera.

Being what I am, a digger,
I wonder over every askew
line I might’ve followed
into an alley just once—
with that one girl I thought was
opaque even as she let me see
her dreams

over hours of talking, then I changed
my diet
but I couldn’t change the pang
of some feeling I knew was
but didn’t know where
because that deep, red
place in my heart wasn’t marked
on the map or in the garden patch.

#7: Mareike

2011-05-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

The Spleen of U-----

Mr. Utterson was a man of a rugged countenance
but so would any of us be, dear reader,
watching a friend disintegrate
like that biblical shadow,
Lilith in Dys, once willing to be equal
of men, then queen of the unholy
urges & oddly nourished by evil
appetites. Were Jekyll but a fallen
woman U----- could ask, Wench:
have you been entered
by a demon?, but instead he must wear
a gentleman's aloof cheer
& a ragged beard the only shadow
darker than the night he walks with E-----.
What trifle could U----- be
about at this hour?
They say men aren't affected
by matters of spleen as women
are who swoon in the whalebone
scaffolding all the time
but then what is that dull ache
near U-----'s stomach about J-----?
This is sympathy among gentry,
allowing the accident one knows
will happen--arms crossed,
look wistful until Hyde bursts
into the room & shakes them awake.
It reminds me of something
Lilith's favorite nephew said,
arrogantly squinting into God's face:
Am I my brother's keeper?

Prompt #6: Liz

2011-04-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

Paperweight

Finding solid ground in
this bittersweet
symphony I
found you.
When we had a party,
a cookout in our
new yard, you
carried you
lifted, I watch rapt
as your body moved
fluidly, your hand
gauging the weight
of a watermelon
while the other pushed
a large knife through--
when it split
the meat, a cavity in the heart--
we ate the heart out
& your heart? I
heard the blood
pump through your
chest, the relief you
supported my head,
supported weight, the push
like a knife through
the crowd to the front
of the concert hall
where the blue lights fell
right on the crown
of your head, we used
to arm wrestle, you'd
lose, we screwed
kitchen cabinets up
& lifted cups
into them, the soft
little clink, the pleasing
of placing life,
our grails on shelves
fastened
firmly.

Prompt #5: Jenn-Jenn

2011-04-19T13:49:00.001-07:00

The Problem of Knotwood

In the garden of bricks, mortar, & bamboo
a rockwall lay toppled & scattered in knotwood
stalks rising up to our chests,
granite markers in pieces
like the remains of a distant war,
of human works that crumbled,
covered by time & reclaimed by earth.

Reclaimed: the bamboo slashed down,
we remade the rockwall with stones four of us
hoisted together & laid sod there
on a grey day, making it the deepest green.

Reclaimed: Jenn bought this house to dismantle
the destruction of a slumlord--the neighbors
were anxious, then watched, then brought pizza
as a gift for her replacing the jungle next door
(where the tenants used to slaughter
chickens in full view of the children)
with a lawn.

She said, I've found a calling I can
Live inside. It's the shadow
of her own monumental undertaking--
when one works, one gets
to go home at the end of the day,
whereas she lived in this mess,
one floor up from torn up floors
& FUBAR subfloors. How can you sleep?, I
asked & she said, Sleep?

Yes, but the house morphed
into this beautiful place--French doors,
new egress, responsible tile,
even a baby stumbling around--
I almost wish the Ecuadorian immigrants
who trashed it had lived in
this incarnation: they might have
sat in the backyard & felt the grass.

But no, their roots were shallow,
replanted where the jobs were, or
where the feds wouldn't find.

Knotwood is an invasive species
like slumlords in a neighborhood,
bedbugs in an apartment across the road,
they had to throw out all,
all their belongings!
The only solution to the problem
of knotwood is to pull out the bad
roots, plant something stronger
in its place.

Prompt #4: Dan

2011-04-13T12:30:00.001-07:00

Dear Postmodern Slinkie

One time, I saw a slinkie in an elevator--
trapped in that metal box, a forlorn
mortal coil, such metaphors were obvious.
It reminded me how I felt tricked
& trapped at a Palm Sunday mass
& you could've stamped JEW
across my reddened forehead
as I was told at length how my
people did awful things to Jesus--
How I clung to a palm frond
like a crucifix! If I'd only
had you, slinkie, to keep me;
we need to stick together.
Dear slinkie, I feel kinship
with your awkwardness,
your lack of context as none
of the yuppies who scatter
gum wrappers around you
will stop to reassure your anxiety.
If there be a heaven (once
maintanence throws you away)
let it be the grandest staircase
steeper than building code allows
us on this mortal plane,
you deserve it for affirming
in your small, cheap-metal way
that postmodern angst
should not turn us into solipsists,
should not turn us from
a slinkie-like heart of humanity
that expands & contracts
when asked by circumstance.
I'm sorry, truly sorry
for not picking you up
& releasing you down
a staircase and into the forever--
like opening the butterfly jar
or uncaging an alligator
it could've been so beautiful
even though I know you'll never
love me: like the wild
don't you just want to be free?

Prompt #3: Lillie

2011-04-12T14:27:00.001-07:00

Of tepees & taxes

It's tax time & my head hurts
while cherry blossoms pop over
Washington, over the heads of men
who can't even agree how to spend
these monies. Supposedly, April's
idyllic in the pleasures of unlocking,
from the trees rousing, shaking
sleep from their twigs in the wind
& bursting spring fever out their fingers,
to the squirrels accosting each to each
twitch of one psychotic tail to another,
but I sit here-- stoic--

I had a dream of a vegetable garden
& a tepee on an acre of land
somewhere with no cell phone reception,
then woke to a house that once burned down,
an abeyance of a path behind it to a lake
still moldering in flaked, airy ice crumbling
at the edge. The neighbor's kid tramps
the white chips with orange Crocs,
a symbol of the tackiness
of modernity & its

form of institutionalized selfishness.
According to a W-2, most
anything can be owned except dreams,
& as I'm busy quantifying my life
here's my son chattering in a blanket
lying, crying in the office
waiting for mommy to finish
this form.

Prompt #2: Therese

2011-04-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

Ode to Girl!

I once met a girl, her name was Falafel,
all she had to do was laugh at my reaction
in a terse, but wonderful giggle
& at once it consumed me how to
put my mouth on this sweet chick
pea with the olive skin, almost
slightly singed in it's deep color
such a delicious intersection
of femininity and cuisine, so like a man
who after crashing his car stumbles
into a field of African Violets
I forgot what I had come for, mind
turning to the channel where girls
named Vixxy or Violet roll
their tongues over stuff--then
I remembered the advice Lee gave me
on the bus, just outside Be'ersheva:
Joey, she said, Its not ful-AW-full
it's fah-lah-lah-lah-LAH-fehl
and at the expert delivery of this
I received a hint of a smile,
the first little twinge of friendship, or?
Oh, my dear thing, I'll bet you're
all the way to Kathmandu by now
but still I will always call chickpeas
garbanzo beans, doesn't that sound awesome?
Sweet language of exotic names,
sweet mystery of hope, why at
the drop of a hat-- just a small smirk!--
I might jump off the peak of Masada
for you.

So if Chemists can specialize in Food Science, is this Food Art?

Prompt #1: Nance

2011-04-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

for this prompt & those that follow, the bold type is the initial prompt

Ode to never seeing her again

I look inside the autumn sunset of her eyes--
eyes fogged like the first cool
morning of September. Eyes brackish
as mulled cider. In her eyes, a cloudy
dimness at dusk, visibility falling.

The flecks of red in her eyes like leaves
falling around a maple, bricking
the lawn with itself--how that
senescence consumes the world!
How beautiful & tragic
to scatter about what it nurtured,
&,having drained it of capability,
to discard it!

So this I wonder at
this red brick countenance of her
stare. Hardness, but what we have
managed is a ceasefire. This last meeting

is autumn foreshadowing winter
& a sunset is a bachelor's party before
night, the beauty of which comes from dust:
Oil in a puddle reflects a rainbow,
dirt burns on the horizon at sundown,
her hair frames her face finely.
Windswept & wild once, now it's shorter
so I, dully & lamely say, You

cut your hair? Mutinous.
It had once wound around her as ivy,
like leaves once dyed pink
then blue,
then she grew up,
then grew it out, outgrew, went grey
the same way sunsets
fade--the way a tree, feeling the first freeze
coming sheds its leaves:

Now I think I will think of
her when I smell the musk of dark
leaves wetted after a rain.

B'reshith: In the Beginning

2011-04-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this blog starts with a promise to myself, to write more poetry. To make time for poetry every day. The first task was to get into a groove--shake off the miasma & write, write, write with abandon. & so I reached out to my friends to give me some prompts: free first lines for prospective poems. What follows is my attempt at completing these poems started by some friends I dearly love, some family I even more dearly love, & a few lines I'd overheard in random conversation while lurking in the corner at a bar with a notebook.

& from there?