amysimone

Gentilly

2007-01-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

A black crow flies
over the gutted innards
of another home
determined waste.
Feathered space,
holes in wings
and the golden arches
of a flooded McDonald's remain
(how many served (?): negative,
a problem unannounced).

"If I had" hits the floor
when "a hammer" only moves dust -
air thick with what cannot be shoveled.

Training to take advantage
was to no advantage.
We've only become wealthy
enough to be cheap
with national byways clearly labeling
who to abandon -
Next Right Baton Rouge
in another forced exodus.

Where Things Go When They're Gone

2007-01-10T08:38:00.000-08:00

There's no toast for breakfast,
the freshly baked bread is in your stomach.

The fresh scent of what could have been
gone. Write it off to sustenance,
bake another loaf, smell the yeast,
learn to like bitter chocolate,
exercise.

The recipe's old,
let it sustain you.

Don't Fold

2007-01-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

Why do we do
what we do
the way we do it?

Because we start young
and the brain has many folds
so we accept that it gets folded
here and there by other hands
because who wants to be
responsible for so much.

We don’t walk around with our heads
open though – often anyway.
Imagine the sutures and the knives
and the cleaning necessary
of the operation room
before you allowed
someone to tear
in your child’s head.

Tomorrow when you walk
down the block
imagine that building
(an alien thinks is prison
you know is school)
as the operating table.

Why do we do
what we do
the way we do it?

Belly Button

2006-12-30T23:01:00.000-08:00

There is never much
hope for independence –
attachment starts early
at the umbilical chord.
How strange to go through
with a hole in the center.

Lint musters here,
a left over vestige
gathering for the next void.

Late

2006-12-30T22:59:00.000-08:00

Late at night
breeze comes
to take sorrow away
from those who wait.

Maybe you could tell her
to wait a little longer.
Maybe she would,
knowing you
are somewhere
waiting with her.

Premeditation

2006-12-30T22:57:00.000-08:00

Before disquiet, ears cringe
like trampolines under children
yet to learn fear.

Ad nauseam the birds
chatter on flowers
while creaking stairs
insure household splinters
and fascination with injury.

Sense, spring and the earth on its axis
seduce our breath, our pulse, our need
to reproduce the mechanics o premeditation.

It’s no wonder screaming headlines
interrupt little on kitchen tables.

Hopeful Love Later On

2006-12-30T22:52:00.000-08:00

On the beach
we will still
cartwheel till
falling down in French music
making love lips shaking shoulders
out-tapping the piano
with our laughing hearts.

No wine sir,
just you and me
to thrill each other
like children and the waves.

Oriel

2006-12-30T22:18:00.000-08:00

Window, you box wonder so well
giving the outside world its life
of warps to twirl
a girl in a skirt
who merely sits within.

Just today, would you work
the other way? Shine on
what I know, what may stay.

It’s cold out there you know
where you dare me to affair
with the breeze, in my hair.

You should be barred!
Or opened.

Window, I want
none of your distortions,
only fresh air.

No Abandon

2006-12-30T21:38:00.000-08:00

In moments before sleep
a tuned lullaby undoes today.
Backwards counting taught to us
the homeless heads
of mouths half-full.
A taste of tongue we take to teach love,
or learning to enjoy the air pocket -
the anti-womb;
the perfection of fetal position.

In the darkest moments
we cannot abandon
rehearsing how to undo, ourselves.

There is no abandon in endings.
There is only here.

Gini Age 5

2006-12-30T21:33:00.000-08:00

Very seriously:
what does “believe” mean?
Then she cried
because she spoke German more
and English less and
confusion is upsetting
it’s true.

Tripping
on words many times
before settling on:
it is,
thinking
about something,
a lot,
caring
about something
a lot
willing something
to be, hard,
like flight
when falling
from a building.

Does it happen?
In English,
no.

Why is it a word then?
Because we want
it to be.

Ode to Shadow

2006-12-30T21:28:00.000-08:00

I.

You do not want
to know me anymore.

This is wrong
(you say).
You do not want to know
me anymore this way.
This way?
Too many ways
to qualify this way
or that way.
If we had only
one way streets
we would never be
here, now
would we?

But, in a way,
I do not want to know you
(In that way which may mean
I won’t see you
in any way today).

Anyway,
you should know
I hate you
in a way.

And if I love
it will be
in a way that has more
ways (and turns and pirouettes).

So, if in a way
you love that,
it doesn’t mean you love
me. More it means
there are many cities
to loose ourselves on
corners and sadly
I’ll always love you
when I’m turning
(in a way).

II.

We are united
in forgetting
what is not meant to be
remembered,
raised to not
expect what we learn
to live without —
a lot to live
without, history
paltry evidence
at most.

Past passes already
while morning makes us
ravenous, termites
praying on roots —
what for? To learn
once more, the imbalance
of will and were
of words and feelings.

Trauma comes,
(a hulking sloth)
resistant to
articulation making living only
a formaldehyde insult.

What a dynasty we make
of eyes and ears
that can’t be
the things that didn’t;
all aborted;
coming to nothing;
the conditional,
creaturely forms we are;
roots, urge, blood;
the energy that hopelessly is.

Defeated, defining
by all we have,
not by the nots and not yets
of nights and bedtime’s
unrecorded dreams,
when everything possible,
nothing dread.

World where did you take
the not of shadows?

To love — world
you took, tormented, turned
the space of not
into love.

What once was
chrysalis enclosed
now the incest
of need and void
to fill before and after.

The maintenance of what is
coming at the expense of what is not.

Love can never be
in every way
to apologize
for what always is.

What always is not
still remains —
still my shadow,
stay still shadow
so I may
harbor hope
in the empty darkness.

III.

So hard on ourselves
in this journey,
land to sky.

That is all it is —
here to not here
without a ladder.

Much time jumping,
stretching, straining,
wishing love were
my shadow
so I might make this
in between more
momentous.

I wish I knew
how to hold myself
while stepping.

Tourist

2006-12-30T21:25:00.000-08:00

On a tourist excursion
there is always a vista
where someone stands
on the summit.

Who it is, is irrelevant.
“is,” is just a word
and “was,” just an impression.
Loneliness grows as the action goes
further into the past.
(Below the summit
falls the ocean
flecks of chaos foaming
the ocean and sky
drowning each other
reflection in blue).

The tourist takes
a pronoun: you,
once the impressionist painting
that cohered to yesterday
is tomorrow too
you. The dots, the ocean
the world unable
to repeat itself
only able to be
endless
with no chorus
over and over
dots crashing and cradling
the pronoun for the world
I have learned is you.
I learned is as you.

The you is love
the point is made
the drowning begun complete
a drop on the horizon no more
the world is
there is no was
but what is now
you.

A Toast to Sunlight!

2006-12-30T21:20:00.000-08:00

A young man sharpens knives
over the meat display
A woman’s chest
falls heavy on the counter -
no one to straighten up for -
her strollered baby cries,
bypassers brace
a smile.

Watch the steam rise off cups,
disappearance to the madness of the mundane.
It is morning again,
compelling us to fulfill
our mugs.

Flicker

2006-12-30T21:18:00.000-08:00

Like a moth to a flame
you make my madness.
Heat becoming, coming closer,
sweat easing, in and out,
drunken pores, pouring me,
in between, fingers where
wetness wants to stay inflamed.

There seems no such place
where wings never were,

till you come on.

Aloneness

2006-12-30T21:17:00.000-08:00

I saw it torment
the small of your back.

The sun you love, burning
what you could not reach.
The dogged days branding
you, scars of derelict maps.

Recurring Nightmare

2006-12-30T21:13:00.000-08:00

This is the dream I dream
again and again.
It is late when sense, long since
sleeping, loses consciousness,
buildings fall parenthetically
and your face appears in the derelict windows.

Worse, there are no words
to say sorry or anything
in need of saying, leaving me
wanting the one impossible possibility:
not to watch you in pain again,
to be the one who comes undone.

But with my secret thanks, morning rises
an epitaph for a dream —
the guilt of existence recurs,
no way to undo what is done.

Scraps

2006-12-30T21:10:00.000-08:00

You always called
dutifully, during dinner
inevitably interrupting
what nourishment
we fostered
without you.

The sweet dreams you sent
over a telephone chord
that stretched between you and she
strangled me
in our pristine white kitchen.

The dinner bell, the telephone,
we all jumped for separate reasons
each to complete our scheduled intimacy.
Set around a half empty table
trying to make love seem so simple
was simply impossible.

But these were meals
and I learned fast
to stuff versions of scrapped love
behind my smile,
to eat pain like vegetables.

Anything to insure love could be
worth the hurt.

Brooklyn Christmas Tree

2006-12-30T21:09:00.000-08:00

The annual debacle of want
came mid December.
Me craving a bigger tree
and you knowing better
the bounds of our abilities.

We’d place it in our upright shopping cart,
the kind old ladies use that I later
became embarrassed of.
Over many bumps in the sidewalk
we alternately laughed and tripped
making it home only to face the assemblage.
(However many times you pave an ocean,
it leaks.)

One time when you yelled
at your boyfriend across the counter,
louder than you thought, worried faith would die
if we didn’t finish the cards and cookies,
I, wondering what else could go wrong,
quietly took a meat cleaver to the trunk
to make it fit.

Later in the hospital
when the doctor asked
how the wood chip got in my eye
you cried.

I didn’t understand.
I was always there in the morning.

Erased Space

2006-12-30T21:08:00.000-08:00

Coffee’s pronounced
with a Boston accent
and I taste nothing.

It’s early
and you’ve changed the calendar
as only great tyrants can.

Today’s AD,
tomorrow’s BC,
I have no object now
no power to control
my subjective reality.

How many summers
and how many winters
since we’ve all not met?
They pass in me,
I seem to be passing on
to where the winter
does not come
after the harvest
instead the new starts
from nowhere
and we’re here really.

There just is no here.

We’ll reschedule a meal
we say before it’s too late
and someone places food
on a grave, dines with
the heretical dead
continuing.

What shortcuts are there?
To this calendar
this rescheduling
this notion that
the harvest comes.

Elsewhere, elsewhere
where are we now
floating between pages
that subscribe to an
undescribed notion
succumbed to misunderstanding.

One day will the world
be fully erased
by the space
between us?
It takes hold slowly.
It takes hold.

The collapse, the implosion, the erosion
of I, the full uncertainty
is here where we can’t be.

I wasn’t born bruised
but here I am today
an old peach.

Why must we still have
great expectations?
Absalom, Absalom
will we find thee?

She Smelled Like Trees

2006-12-30T21:06:00.000-08:00

Unforgettable voice,

I await your pleasure
on a broken clock
that tells time right
twice a day.

It’s lonely here
where the past metastasizes
(A grassy pasture,
a bouquet of weeds,
a golf course; evolution
shows little prospect
for completion.)
and knows no simple
ending. Ending?
Nothing ends,
nothing heals,
nothing hardens,
nothing’s forgotten.

No one loves
selflessly. We’re selfish
to reveal ourselves
to have selves
and call it nurturing.

What kind of consciousness
is this? With each one
in our ordered place –
alone.

It is the psychic plot,
overcome by the uncanny
prolongation, the next days
and the logic of all things not closed.

Progress is this
symphony of agony,
of moaning uncertain notes
in continuance.

These are the acoustics
of going under.

Expressionless Morning

2006-12-30T21:05:00.000-08:00

I do not want to have to ask
for the things I will not ask for.
I want them to come
like morning.

I want you to be morning
and I know that is more
than I can ask
(because I will not ask for it).

But it would be nice
if you became morning all the same.

And some days you do
and some days I am
tired of wanting more
than morning and so
you in morning are enough —
which is when I remember
I am enough
in morning that is
with me and I am
thankful.

But winter comes
and light holds time less
fast. Speed takes so much
time, and I think,
we are here after all
faster or slower
than morning permits
our tenses to readjust
we’re just here again
and it is enough
that your face is expressionless
when you sleep
and I kiss it still
knowing its rise
and rise and rise.

What Faulkner might teach on “Mammalian Ludicrosities” (“If we could just unravel in time”)

2006-12-30T21:03:00.000-08:00

Once you get inside me
what do you expect?
(I am just another
tenement, awaiting a coffin).

We can’t stand our lives
up that long, sagging
towards death, afraid.

There is no little place
to keep shop, to think
the world in shape.

I want to be let in
where the blood runs free
I am dying. To see what?
More than the mind can doubt:
my very self —
tiny, frail, meager, fallen.

Smell yourself rotting
and try not to die.
Instead stay stuck there
pitchforked between iron skies
and copper fields,
alive in this mud puddle
and then
splash, splash!
in our bodies of wetlands,
tears and animal tracks,
no irrigation, just subsumption.

Can you see and still
want to spill you into the world,
the current of the natural
and drown knowing
there is no reason to think?

Can you want to become mud,
to violate you and I
to love our inadequate selves,
to erase the thoughts that began
the boxes that made us believe
in patches and fixes
and all the justifying
to bury the dead
before noting how limited
how alone?

No, we cannot be cleansed
of metaphor —
in this world of empty words
we still want privacy
to be able to know better
why flesh rots.

But you know,
even the best made glass jar
explodes in winter.

Garlic Press

2006-12-30T21:02:00.000-08:00

My mother harps on apologies
over not giving me her
father’s garlic press.
We feel guilty
for what we cannot give.

It is a small thing, I say.
(That isn’t really so small
seeing as vividly
I remember the light gray
chipping metal
that might have looked sharp
at one point, mechanical,
fresh out of a factory,
or maybe came with him
from Italy, before her,
before he worked
at the factory even.)

I never met him;
She had me late,
he left early —
some combination.

Sometimes she made spaghetti
on his old pasta machine
(which wasn’t suggested
for my new apartment,
which I don’t even know
how to use).

There are these things
about each other
we will never know.

And now, cooking dinner,
my new garlic press
makes me feel too old,
so far, from what once was
home.

Home

2006-06-18T05:39:00.000-07:00

What else could inspire us
Creatures to habitate.
Hopes of walled bliss
of rooms where light shines stronger
on the best parts of ourselves.

Outside, the world offers
no such planted mirrors
but mountains, ridges
and moons seduce.

It is a hopeless romance
between a bedroom and the view.
How lucky we are
to be animate
to have feet.

Apartment at Night

2006-06-06T04:13:00.000-07:00

It’s late
when crane lights still flicker —
and not much seems natural
from one box between two others.

A light bulb slowly fading
will never know why
we sustain it —
fearing dark and death.

It will never know the of course
of your skin and mine.

There’s much to be built
by hands that touch,
but not much more than this
to be had.

Coffee

2006-05-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

When I’m the early morning bird
who’s lost her appetite for the worm,
and I think the world has lost all taste,
I drink coffee. The sun insists
I know no other way.

I find you stirring,
milking my madness.

Like a coffee ground in a filter
you catch me and we brew the day.

5.9.06

2006-05-08T16:50:00.000-07:00

It is nearing the end of lambing season
and from the speed train I must squint
to see who's who in the field.

The youngest have gone for sure
to nourish birthday diners —
racked before grands and parents
of family round a table.

The train slows to a halt
near a field of old, spared mutton,
their wool sustaining them.

It's childish I think
to blow out candles and wish
for such sustenance
to endure my generations.

But the ancient world still blossoms in spring,
and lambs still scamper.

Sleeping

2006-05-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

Dreams hide
with that last turn, before getting lost.
On the passenger side of this life,
there’s an upside down map, the radio
and lullabies chanting the lost sheep song:
“It’s better that way,
It’s better that way,
It’s better that way,”
the sound of our day rewound,
the backwards counting,
our perpetual herding towards tomorrow.

To sleep, we believe we can do
without reality, we think
wars happen, because they don’t
on a screen, the greatest invention of modern man,
a complex of numerical equations,
coordinating our progress.

A hum quiets us
to dream safety amidst the motions.
The only safety of silence
is the coordinates of a bomb.
In the morning,
can we remember
to speak of to move on?
Sleep was always too simple.

Travel Log 4.3.06: At the Very Least

2006-05-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

Would you like to know what you’ve missed?
Much more than many
fire engines rushing to ashes
that trail the myth of indecision.

There are no plans for skyscrapers here.
The people are too short
and concerned with pilgrimage,
their knees and the mountains.

This is Italy, these are ruins, sadly
that is why they are beautiful.

Fly the ocean, become a foreign land,
fight your epic battles, survive an ice age,
try to unlearn why and still remember to return.

I’ll have melted by then.
But, at least it will be a spring.
You will be more beautiful,
have better priorities,
or learned self-help,
at the very least.

Ming

2006-05-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

A storm rolls in
over the pier where you stood
wide-eyed and wondering
if we’d live long enough
to believe in the ocean
traveling distances to green shores.

We play act about the world
posing for pictures, unsure how to smile.

The lapping lulls us to believe
the island is closer,
that it is quiet, not lonely.

We seduce our own jumping
to currents too strong.

Commotion

2006-04-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

We must create mythologies
to survive ourselves.
Like the unexplored craves
propogating street corners,
life instructs oversimplification.
We embellish:
an off emphasis on a sentence,
a gesture,
giving birth to a child.

Another car accident makes the paper—
averting pain is too simple.

Class EL103

2006-03-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

The poems I write now
crave a cradle
like an overtired child
swaddled and whining unawares.

As the minions of your “advanced” class,
we were consoled, with having to write
exegeses to accompany our poems,
as if our thoughts might transcend time
to someday be taught,
taunting us with the prospect
of our survival to medieval status.

Tomorrow, blocked of sleep deprivation
when an angel asks if I’d die to ensure we
as a people become
medieval, and whispers
that to end all avarice and deadly sins
in sequence, I could exchange myself,
for a magic spoon that could forever
feed the hungry,
would you critique me
when I read my poem to the group
responding, “no?” What would you say?

Naïve writers group,
I don’t know we’ll last that long,
us, or the world around.
Like the Virgin Mary,
I know not what we’ll birth.
Will we traverse television and reality?
Will we sculpt starving children before someone’s eyes?
Will we make magic
before again when the blood comes
again when the presented purpose
seduces me back to my cradle?

But here, an offering before my career:

Exegesis –
Until we can know tomorrow
we must continue today.
For this habit, we die a bit living
trying to write a better exegesis.

Tomorrow let’s try again.

San Michelle[1]

2006-03-01T03:38:00.000-08:00

If someday
a palm tree grew
out of you
many years after your death

Would you be mad?
Would you be?

Would you ask to be exhumed?
To plot again
how the ashes fell?
Or would you smile
at tight bouquets,
commemorate what was?

Would you be sad?
Would you be?

Won’t you be?
If only for me
who stoops quiety over your grave
crying and trying
to smell flowers again.

[1] Written on visiting San Michelle, the Venetian island where Ezra Pound is buried.

Cake, Skip, Yes

2006-03-01T03:31:00.000-08:00

“I love you.”
What random words.
Why not,
“Cake, skip, yes,” instead.

Each time I thought it
I would turn to you and say
“Cake, skip, yes”
I like that,
“Cake, skip, yes”

But then
if this ever were to end
every cake, skip and yes
would recall you.
and I like cakes,
skips and yes.

“I love you,” is just
I love you.

Will we say it enough times
To make it mean me to you?
Make it always call and recall you to me?

Bake a cake, skip,
say yes.
Say it again:
“I love you love.”

I love love
I love you
“I love you,”
I say it again,
hoping.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

2006-03-01T03:27:00.000-08:00

It’s a gentle afternoon in Venice.
The bars on the museum window
look like lace
and cross-stitching like noting
was ever penetrated

On a gentle afternoon
I feel like a bra unwashed,
or jeans after the drier,
notice a hole in the point of my shoe
and remember having tripped
(but not well),
into a place where sand forgot erosion
and became sky on the blurred warmth of horizon.

A gentle afternoon is not graceful -
it’s rain without wet, it is what is not,
it is the impossible, seen in negation,
the part a fire doesn’t burn
what remains, the gentleness of ashes –

What quiet deaths
we live on gentle afternoons.

Innocent Fools' Love

2006-03-01T03:22:00.000-08:00

The morning after a sleepless night
it’s hard to calibrate the light -
both a reassurance
and an irritant.

How could the world behave yet again ?

Last night you decided love
meant siege
and attacked me
like only a dictionary can.

Amidst my unfounded belief
over and over you announced your place
in the fissure you’d created,
declaring the insignificance of everything
and the meaning of nothing.

You lost me to words
as I stood before you.

In the morning this earthquake we survived
makes it hard to like daybreak.

I’ll avoid definitions and love poems
as long as I love morning.

My Hermeneutics

2006-01-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

Our relationship now
is recalled by stimulants and realities
to remember, or alternately
to forget.

When you see that person we knew,
place we went, or find your dog
reminding you of the way I fit
in your couch
you remember how we always knew
the world was too small for us,
how we then thought we’d make it
to Mars, or somewhere permanent.

“Thought,” is all wrong though
we thought so little
we could have believed
we were astronauts —
I wouldn’t blink too many times
if you ambled by in a spacesuit.

When you can no longer escape your educated need
to read with an eye for theory
and all I am is an allegory
you long to forget,
remember my innocence
is out there with yours
dancing among the planets
with faith they’ll stay unharmed there,
in the place where progress can’t hurt.

Hazardous Material

2006-01-25T02:22:00.000-08:00

I love you
when you laugh
ahead of yourself
head thrown back
like a cartoon character
catching up.

I worry this observation
of your skewing time
will haunt my memory
someday; still i kiss
that jawline
or permanent molars
as a dentist
brushes his children's teeth
unthinking of his own
inevitable death.

While you're here
I must clear the crumbs
from the table
before lighting the candles.

However many time zones you cross
however many ages of my heart you threaten
there is a trashcan
knowing what is hazardous
and the maintenance of ambience,
of us.

1.20.06

2006-01-22T05:45:00.000-08:00

This tiredness might subside
if I could lie still, as still,
as that stagnant pool of water.

What beauty a moment only
of perfect decomposure could bring.

The Complications of Fertilizer

2006-01-22T05:44:00.000-08:00

Though I’ve stopped being taken with sugar
I still take milk in my coffee -
our mugs differentiated
like leanings in conversation,
the inevitable agenda space
crafted by a table.

Sometimes we forget structure
and find ourselves here
smiling like we aren’t distracted
by the mirrors in our eyes.

Yet when we wore matching dresses
I cupped your tears in my hands like a wishing well.
Me harboring the hope that love would rescue us,
you sparing what left you had of half kisses
filling and refilling this cracked vase,
trying to reassure the unnecessity of my cradling.

I wanted to believe you
to think this wasn’t the holy water
of my baptism.

But I loved you spilling tears over a flower
I loved believing in perennials
I loved you, I love you.

Over coffee tabled space
you look away and say
you didn’t need me
to bring spring.

But you raised me in the Northeast
where spring came graciously
when you dressed me in floral prints.

Morning Mirror

2006-01-18T08:46:00.000-08:00

The myth of female beauty
might appear in my mirror
on any given morning -
a myth for its sense of maybe.

Whether yesterday fractures today’s image,
or the remnants of alcohol and glamour zines
grow like mold over my reflection matters little.
The proliferation of illusion the problem -
a penchant for the inescapable nature
of hope and fantasy.

Watching my lips mime my smile
and mock my sigh
I am elsewhere, she is ugly,
and I become a myth
I cannot debunk -
these eyes are all I have to see.

Like grapes unpicked
and oranges unpeeled
I too mold, untold of constancy.

I am good for the soil I suppose,
re-sowing the myth I woke to.

Dear Teleology

2006-01-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

On Pearse St. a scuttle of girls
skirted to equal lengths
fluster above the chill.

The sidewalk so long
they long to dance
where more than
the cracked pavement
inspires motion.

A wide street in a small city
in a small country on a large continent
of a world spinning away -
geocentric, heliocentric, narcissistic.

Our haphazard development
cannot mend the sidewalk.

We can only read the maps
of succumbed resistance.

How many angels dance on the tip of a pin?

2006-01-18T02:22:00.000-08:00

To seduce belief,
I go back and reread
the fiction we’ve created.

Holding and stroking
a book across your back
I tempt a thought to complete a hold.

Though Icarus and Dedalus circle our embrace
like mocking hawks praying on entrapment,
we remain enraptured with the fable.

2006-01-15T10:58:00.000-08:00

It is morning again,
a toast to sunlight
compelling us to
fill our mugs.

A young man sharpens knives
over the meat display
and a woman’s chest
falls heavy on the counter -
with no one
to straighten up for.

A strollered baby cries,
as bypassers brace a smile.

Watch the steam rise off cups,
the disappearance to the madness of the mundane.

Homeless Head

2006-01-12T16:27:00.001-08:00

In moments before sleep
do you hear backwards counting?
A lullaby you tuned
to undo today?

It’s a homeless head up here
with a mouth trying to enjoy
the half full a taste of tongue
licking the air pocket, the anti-womb -
the perfection of fetal position.

I sleep for the legend of morning
kings, queens and the sunrise.

How many times will story characters die
before tomorrow mornings must become mine?
When we cannot abandon ourselves,
there is no abandon in endings.

2006-01-12T16:27:00.000-08:00

Portentous[1] Enlightenment:

You still lay claim on my dessert stomach
although another man dines me.

It’s unfortunate you’ve filled me,
as the delicacy he ordered
looks delicious

And to think,
I almost bought you a cookbook
with my favorite recipe.

I almost believed you would bake for me.
[1] Ominous of Illness

Mother's Retaliaton

2005-12-01T02:12:00.000-08:00

In our living room
my fifteen year old daughter
broods like only fifteen year old daughters can.

When I tell her to stop picking at her pimples
she roles her eyes melodramatically
tempting me to tell her they’ll stick there
though she’ll find a retort for that too.

Later in the week she barges into the bathroom
finding me at an early morning moment of weakness
as she looks for an obscene colored eye shadow
to further differentiate our reflections.

When she arches her now green eyelids
and coyly says, "stop picking at your face"
I want to scream
about work, bills, practicalities,
men, their shortcomings,
and all the concessions
that made me smoke a cigarette,
that caused me to break out
that left me taking up her mirror space
to pick away and leave scars.

I sigh and don’t bother -
sad knowing she’ll learn this on her own.

Keeping quiet is the hardest part.

Hic et ubique[1]

2005-11-28T02:44:00.000-08:00

I am a little bit lost
to the space between the lines
where meaning gets to hide when afraid.

If you’re looking
this is where I’ll be
minding my blank stare
off into somewhere pretty
where ink forgot to over think.

[1] Here and everywhere.

Early Bird Gets the Worm

2005-11-28T02:37:00.000-08:00

Brimming with caffeine
I am no more than veins -
a mapped being wired by the world,
with the motions of the morning asking
I no longer speak to my dreams.

Hours after awake,
I’m impatient for distraction
from the lost world I want back.
I ask you to wake up with me
or rather clamber about noisily
until aggressive meets passive
and you want to bop me
like an alarm clock.

Collecting yourself off my floor
like spilled change for a jukebox
you sleepily play guitar in my bed -
hope and buttons bright and tangible.

Even the coffee maker shakes
its addicted head at your vibrations
knowing the signs of inroads paving over
my maniacal morning routine.

I refill the French press,
brewing morning,
a blend of new desire.

Medical Check-Up

2005-11-28T02:14:00.000-08:00

I’m sure I left
strands of curls
in your bedroom
to enjoy the static
unsustainable for my head’s budget.

In beginning to know a past,
I’m told of regeneration’s rapidity
and prescribed to redirect my losses -
the acerbic medicinal taste a reminder
to trust trying
to not miss you in my bed.

My indulgence wonders if the medics know
no common sense suggesting simplicity.

I bite my nails and swallow the life of dead follicles,
cautiously conjuring the happy death lying in your arms.

A Better Class in Sex-Ed

2005-11-16T02:42:00.000-08:00

To know how to love is a dangerous thing,
like the beaming face of a child ahead in her reading
perched behind the printing press
encouraging the industrial revolution.

In the textbook post enlightenment
the textiles will make tapestries and suggest future
like a looming woven wonder.
A week later of course it too will tell the downfalls
the demise and the eventual polyesterization of us,
but for a while the simplicity enchants
even those ordering the annual new editions.

I would like to forget such developments
and remember hope, but find us sadly clad,
and only so many hours can be spent derobed
(I’m reminded to tell you, and repeatedly told).

I can barely teach the continuing mundaneness
having spent the night enduring the repetitious beat of my heart
but having been here too briefly to know more,
I only suggest not skipping ahead, avoiding the patterns,
and as the bell marks change, encouraging
another gaggle of girls to become.

Beach Quiet

2005-11-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

The ocean swells like a hungry lover
ready to swallow all memory of pain
and spit back the sea foam of new love -
happily forgetting dissipation and passion
can’t swim in the same sea.

Knowing matter can’t emerge or vanish
when noticing nothing on the horizon,
one counts on the consistency of change
and chooses to remain overwhelmed
here in the helm of a breaking wave

Smiling like I’ve lost interest with sinking ships
I satisfy myself in being able to recede
in being given to take another in
such small victories mount like daily high tides.

I crawl towards you without bucket or shelter
only a little less eager than those toting shovel and pail,
drafting sand castles and hoping my uncle was right
that I’ll find China if I keep digging.

At high tide our motes will fill,
this is what we know of quiet
this is what we trust.

Insisting on Innocence

2005-11-13T12:52:00.000-08:00

On a crowded platform,
a little girl kicks her feet
like oars for a stroller.
She moves along
with no sense of morning.

Sometimes I catch myself
watching the world like a passing train -
eyes shaking behind eyelids
full of nightmares and dreams
glazing ahead as if stability offers control
though I know better than to believe
the schedule posted on the board.

I turn to watch the train go by,
articulating each glance
in a stance for the purpose of paddling.

I smile back at her strollered sense,
refusing to lose an illusion without screaming

To the Stairs

2005-11-06T09:12:00.000-08:00

A lethargic morning sets in
at the stairway landing
my legs feel like yellowing photographs
pressed between memories and souvenirs.

I sit in the kitchen
like a too-long steeped cup of tea
thinking about the stain
I’ll leave
on the porcelain.

This is too clever an explanation
for the logic lacking scrapbook
to which we succumb
but the stairs looked so orderly
as if to up the antiquated ante and ask:
“and what have you to say for yourself?”.

But the day is too young
to grant space to such superiority -
so I permit the morning its meandering,
knowing the archives will
someday sort it out.

Sweater

2005-11-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

Though I will ask for help
finding the other arm of my sweater

I must confess,
in a morning twinkling of stupor
I am somehow warmer.

And by somehow,
I mean you.

Journey

2005-11-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

Running away looks like running towards too
if you forget to focus and remember to get lost
watching your footprints as you
walk towards a chosen point
weaving a crooked path towards nothing
and the greatest something

To keep what little I know of loss small
the destination must remain
disoriented like a wildflower
in bound a park’s naturalizing potential
with the imagined budding of loss looming
unlike a caving valley and more
like a mountain I forget to fear.

To fog it over and feel, my grey matter searches for filling
over breakfasts engaging the background news forecasting
a soldier’s face whose pain looks mildly like my plate of food
forgotten to feed on like forgetting to count sheep to sleep.

We won’t watch people return in coffins
but will watch the morning breakfast blur.

From poems to electroshock, we find ways to filter -
reading and rereading the rules of disregard
asking Shakespeare and all the broken hearted poets
to make a path of tragic romance
as if it could puppeteer us through.

Entranced I watch an enchanted Juliet plead with Romeo
to return to the rhythm of her voice, to not swear on the moon.

Not enacted by an actor an unscripted truth unfurls:
only lunacy and constancy survive
a running trajectory.

Malahide Beach

2005-10-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Like a kid in chem class
my body betrays me between states
and the indescribable steam of our bodies
finds its way to the morning time tea kettle
I’ve tried to lid and begged not to boil.

As the days form a clay of place set routines,
I lean my notebook against the forming table beneath us
wondering whether to lift my hand form yours
to turn the page of my scripting memoirs.
But being complicated complicates such leanings
for even my senseless imagination.
Me and my forgetful sails
begin to believe in the fateful arch
of your shoulder towards my heart.
I might suppose I must like myself indisposed
at least as much as one likes the sun to rise
and all things uncontrollable
like my being here
like you.

As a girl who’s never read the bible knows faith
I find myself fancying your impish incantations
and like only a self-proclaimed enchanted cantor can,
I’m writing you a pocket sized Bible
to ensure we do not remain tourists
on our encroaching expedition.

I patiently await a windblown page
feeling the warmth of wanting
to write you again.

Killiney Beach

2005-10-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Two boys chase each other down the beach.
“How am I even supposed to get there stupid head?”
one asks the other on a sand dune.
Their little bodies bare the ocean
like tide pools drink in sea water.
I sit near the waves’ parameters
fearing drowning and craving control.

I watch what fearlessness felt like -
like the fleas burrowing abandon
and the happenstance man walking down the beach
wearing a vague smile and a suit suited for reminiscing.

My toes dampen and crave this life of the waves
who seem to never tire of their crashing.

As the mountains of silt pounded by the rush
must miss the stable beating even for the gloriest of days,
I too feel a missing.
But by some grace, the world has placed
these hard-pressed grains beneath my bare feet,
like a lesson in continuance.

In learning to love what the future might bring
I try to not forget how one learns to swim to another,
and how to continue longing, unafraid.

Geranium

2005-10-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

The potted plant I purchased
dies a little death
of slowly wrinkling leaves
and browning stalks
like unnoticed moonlight.

Today I felt an appendage short -
spilling coffee, slamming doors
knocking strangers, cursing myself
for first missing your hand,
and then wanting mine back.

I will remember to water the plant tomorrow,
to throw back the curtains and welcome the sun.
on another amputated day for a persistent psyche,
learning her heart is only a regenerative muscle after all.

A Poet’s Reassurance

2005-10-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

Late morning, you worry that I’m drafting the beginnings
of an epic, an opera or some category of tragedy.

As our minds mind us too long post coitus
discern creeps up your cheek bones
like a preemptive terror of aging
and an impish smile opposes you
with a childish wish to land on the moon.

Don’t worry,
it isn’t you
or your unwritten songs I want.
It’s your unraveling dreams on partitioned lips
where my tongue can press vulnerability like a button
taste tonsils on you throat
and sprawl a rough draft of intestines
like the leftover stew your mother made.

I am a poet, in search of my plot
not a question lying in wait of your answer.
I want only the power to let myself go
in your cauldron of delectability .
I am unlikely to play
with this power I possess,
so trust me,
come now,
open wide
say
ah.

Savory Fish Dinner

2005-10-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

I wish I thought it advisable
to tell you about me from the beginning.
Unhesitatingly, like rainwater creeping up pants
or water bubbling furiously to a boil.
Alternately, I wish I had gills to lie
as a stranded fish pining for you like water
feigning necessity and dependence.

Unfortunately, I am not a fish, a kettle or a mess.
I am just smiling up at you from puddles.

Over a kitchen burner,
my mind wanders between missing kissing you
and fighting the pending temptation of love
(or some version of puddle jumping).

These are the beginnings -
the gentle kisses and curious tongues
touring the ruins and ramifications
of a new lover’s lost lifetime.
As you scavenge my being
I move a hair here, a finger there,
withhold words and obfuscate desire
to tend my well protected landscape.

As I chop the dinner onions,
I think I would like to tell you about me from the beginning.
But the world satisfies its irony quotient
with inescapable kitchen tears
reminding me to quell all potential welling.

The fish under my knife knows reckless abandon -
having toured the warm ocean
having felt the shiny lure.
The little girl in me too fears falling to the knife,
falling for life, for your kissing the long forgotten spots
she’s longed for someone to remember.

At a single place setting, I silently imagine you
relishing the onions, tears, allure and savory –
We all have our ways to enjoy daily dinners,
to survive ourselves.

Quote from the IMMA

2005-10-20T11:28:00.001-07:00

Williams Carlos Williams wrote:
“It is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men dies miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found there”

Found this in an art book in an exhibit at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and stopped in my tracks. Seems the type of thing that people should be more aware of -- that a certain format can cause idiocy. Seems obvious sitting here in a concrete room without the massive population staring at me on a television screen. We’re all in such a big rush to get somewhere to go do something.

10.8.05

2005-10-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

This morning patterns crawl up the window curtains.
So far, we know each other like fragmented memories
seeking seamstresses and tailors in matters of the heart.

I lie still trying to preserve the patterns of your dreams.
At this early moment, I know little more than your curtains
and their growing translucence -
lulling me to sleep in the morning light.

A Walk to Phoenix Park

2005-10-20T11:27:00.000-07:00

A tree grows parallel to the ground.
Fearing to grow astray from its grassy shelter
it knots itself again and again,
as if to abet its berries on their inevitable downfall.

Here, I feel the world sooth itself -
mapping madness above scaffolding
on the cyclical paths
of our journeys to somewhere.

Elsewhere trees continue to grow upright,
but I pause here contentedly
amidst its maternal shade
knowing life is full
of such long concrete walks
in open toed shoes.

10.5.2005

2005-10-20T11:26:00.000-07:00

If I could (properly say to you
what I needed
to say)
I would
(say:

To let myself think of you
is to stop.

To stop
the little bones in my ear from listening
and instead hear the high pitch of a strayed computer.
To stop
the pipes from breathing tasteless oxygen
and instead sputter like a miss-weighted wind chime.
To stop
the sheets between my legs from providing a sense of satin.
To stop
and find emptiness everywhere I turn.

To stop
to think of you
is senseless.)

But I can’t stop.

I won’t stop,
stop feeling,
feeling the falseness
of our partial continuance.

And knowing you,
you feel it too.

Farm House

2005-09-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

Anosognosia[1]

On the Train from Utica
I’m beating my heart
like a hopeful jockey
caught unawares
on an electric train.

The train delays
in a depressed station
with my spirit.

I urge my mind to stop its quilting
but it ambles and covets sleep
noting pollen whiz by
and the undrawable space
between a nostril and a cheek, asleep
across the aisle
a young woman fetaly tilted
warms her hands between her knees

I watch the world sooth itself
and the smokers
cued by the conductor
shuffle back, to join the rest of us
journeying from self-destruction
to a destination.

Sunlight sneaks on the high speed train
revealing a tear streaked face
and an unexpected rainbow.
I look in a mirror
in search of my condition.

[1] A useful psychiatric term for the lack of awareness of one’s own condition.

Lunch 9.12

2005-09-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

The shadow of a demolished building remains
sun-stained on the high rise next door.
I search for signs of construction.

The scaffolding has long since been torn down
but the air is rife with the blow of a demolition ball,
and that shadow looms.

As long as the sun and clouds continue to battle,
the shadow of your body on my landscape will remain -
what survives loss will never let go.

I thank the world for continuing
to spin the clouds among the sunbeams,
for making devastation beget creation
in the architecture of loss.

9.13.05

2005-09-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

Another day for the record books it seems. A screen absorbing my time to take away what could be done, what I could do for you, for the world, the same thing, it seems to take over. Once you were my refrain amidst my losses and pain I gained little but gave lots and lost more than I ever knew. I watched me become you in an unending gift. You made me a gift to myself I think all wrapped up in over thoughts over thought I think I should have stopped thinking, walked away from this computer and made rational love to your mind. You would have been too logical but I could have studied neurology instead of writing this. As if I didn’t know I would let my heart break the moment I looked back at you.

A Quote from "The Invitation," by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

2005-09-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with your failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments."

Labor Day Over Headphones

2005-09-03T22:58:00.000-07:00

Ironic that the city lifted taxes for Labor Day weekend. I felt the counter intuition of wandering around NYC like a tourist amidst our world’s lack of appreciation. My own guilt-ridden lack thereof, my mind lost continually somewhere other than now (today that now Labor Day and the celebration of the social and economic achievements of American works). Not there, not absent either. The solution and the problem continually entwined.

Just self-overwhelmed by noise and the pretense of sense and infrastructure. “Don’t mind me, cause I ain’t nothing but a dream,” plays on overpowered headphones, and other lyrics carry me through confusion. Rarely do we know the origin of a moment, the origin of a thought, certainly not the origin of ourselves, or the place we walk over. And today arises like the last one, like the next song comes out of the speakers, distracting us continuously from the past, the roots that hold us together and pull us apart. I grant myself belief in infrastructure that comes un-guaranteed. Katrina reminds us of our flaws. The world suddenly so big and us so small and so wrong, continuously empowering incorrectly, power vacuums and voids on every level.

Voids to be filled on days like today when we can slow to a crawl, trying to appreciate the way smog can fill up a city, the way a you can fill up a void of I. I think not. Sometimes I think so. I think I should stay busy, I should remember to tribute the workers’ contributions, the promise of possibility and the well-being eventually of our existence if we watch the voids fill, if we all grab shovels.

I rush through downtown
as if I’ve prophesized the apocalypse -
as if awaiting an explosion –
regretting my undone choices
letting love loom like destructible buildings.

I’m detained by a child in me
insisting on dancing (badly) in a field
she tells me she waits for fireworks
and the provision of a promised explosion
worth celebration.

I gather seats and provide armor
for my many impatient selves
to witness the predicted
excitement, the predicted terror.

Last I can recall, the girl in me giggles
as she watches her aged heart charge
explode and expend shrapnel.

I notice I’m still on Bond St.,
strutting, giggling, grimacing.

Archives

2005-09-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

Coca-Cola (10.04)

We digress,
whining about the inanity of society
our obsession with selling intellectual property -
Accidentally airing the unpinnings of our illustrious ascent
on the table serving wholesome meals from
here to insecurity, (lacking the grandeur of infinity and
the heartbreak of rags to riches),
another commercial plays -
the little girl with her protruding belly
a nickel a day or else
change the channel, walk by the homeless man,
live on the 15th floor of a doorman guarded building
and gripe over hearty meals.

The custodian moves the trash
I apologize awkwardly
looking down through the past subway grates
the distance I’ve kept from the sewers
“it’s your privilege” he says
and smiles confidently, patting my shoulder,
digesting insecurity like coca cola on teeth
he smiles, clears his throat,“Nice weather today, ain’t it?”
We digress again.

Gray Day (11.04)

When it comes down to it
we’re all here to help each other die, gently.
Although your worry about my crossing the street is touching
the practicality of it all makes me forget
how to reach out for you in the middle of the night.
Considering reveries, I want to compensate,
to impress upon you and the wonderful weight of your body
the poetics of our beings; I want to make you blush.

On top of you I frequently forget
the rage to live and the need of a rain jacket.
If wonder is not a strong enough word
to express the confusion of a nail scratching my anatomy,
consider the paralyzed look of post coital confusion
of ourselves like books, on shelves opened and closed
decaying, consider shifting a bike in gears too high, the collapse,
the clicking, the preemptive arthritis.
The morning’s typicality – the alarm clock, my drool
and now your sleeping arm I try not to wake -
I want to stay, I will try to stay.

Today I don’t want to get out of bed, to face the world
where the sky is too big, and the thoughts are too small.
It is gray and today I am a being that you animate.

GE Washer (12.04)

I would like to know you -
not like a bright green plastic Easter egg
shut up like a broken music box
I keep opening.

I would like to take you -
not like an opening blossom
rushed indoors for a vase
I keep shattering.

I would like to hear to you -
not like a symphony on a cruise ship
excluded from the conversations
I keep listening.

But my grandmother wore out
her GE washer in one year,
shocking the servicemen.

She just liked the humming sound.

The Newspaper Left on the Seat (8.04)

On a primary colored map
smiling sunshines and scowling rain clouds dance feverishly
courting each other down the gulf stream,
a circle forms of upside-down frowns
spinning across the suzerainty of my spine.
I, an upside-down frown, address a sideways boy
lacking the romance of communiqué.
Fine, I buy myself flowers.

Being area minded and conscious of my hazardous hole
materializing, delving and dark between our pressed lips,
I scream all disclaimers -- long skirted down a shoot of rubbish
reeking of landfill, heaping for rescue, for purity for my hallmark beliefs --
the stench suffocates me.

I watch this morning’s sunset, clouded with past and forming hail stones.
Two gulls on a rail won’t fly into this forecasted disaster.
The train sticks on a broken signal.

Hysterectomy (3.04)

For years
I fell asleep to the anti rhythm of your typing with one finger,
overtured by meaningless divorce diction
speed in and out of my dreams
mimicking my nightly heavy breathing, teeth grinding induced overbite.

Room 314 with its walls blankly apathetic and faint smell of dying
flowers encroaching on my normalcy
not acknowledging the gravity forced down my eyes amidst,
the unimportance outpatient simplicity in their eyes
your eyes wielding a loss in this battle of existing unto another
child; as a child
who sits alone on the radiator
waiting for you to awake in me my role
your last hope
last immortal gift:
commonplace affair of unspoken dictation.
I want words. I have always wanted words.

As the child in the room with talking walls
my voice amidst the echoes of dispassion
resounding and bound by your clicking keyboard
and my own maddening exhaustion from
touch typing your frantic finger thinking, again

I would like you to comb my hair.
Anti-rhythmically I dance on the hospital radiator.

You can no longer have children.

Clear Water (7.04)

If fish think
the endless repetition of waves
crazy, I might agree, knowing
what I do of the tide’s addiction
to re-shelving sand tough to crest.
Knowing what I do of your desire –
dragging me against the tide,
trough to crest.

Self-propelled into a lobster trap, I
look at you, darling
poking and prodding through the keyhole.
Disregarding the bars between us
I lie placid, like a damned river.

Trapped, pure water and simplicity go unappreciated.
Is there no way to get excited here except
by salt, wounds and waves?
In response I can’t excite the ocean
to freeze or boil – to control
your tides to disseminate your wild white caps
into a goblet, on a table, in a home with no locks
outside of my mind.

Salt water, spring water.
the sharp corners of the New York City skyline
I lie in its safe deceptions –
knowing that love is crashing
(belied by gentle lapping)
on a shoreline of the world’s tidal sand factory.

If fish think
boundless love is crazy,
I might agree my darling.

My Mother Later On (9.04)

No more coloring books,
no more marching ants,
no more nursery rhymes -
my mother’s skin of excess
makeup caked in wrinkles.
She hunches over the tablecloth
confusing the pattern for pills.
As uncounted candles reflect in her glasses
the birthday cheer wanes
and another year declares victory.

Needle pointed on the wall
“Home Sweet Home” unstitches
(hip bones, desire and the television
complicate the desired affect of wall hangings)
the unraveling of hope as painful as removing a tattoo.

The cat, some houseplants and I survive
in our old brownstone. The wooden floors
creaking with exhaustion. Progression,
regression, progression, regression,
my mother rocks on her carpeted landscape
as the remnants of normalcy sell at a tag sale.
She resents everything that lives -
the whole world should destruct
like a vow.

Preservation (12.04)

I ask to meet a jaguar
to skate, to see the edge of the Great Lakes.
You guide me through Central Park’s
zamboni parking lot to the museum.
NYC provides for us like a heaping plate.

I whine, I gnarl at the stuffed bear
willing the cubs to the window.
You shake your head in disdain, but
keep taking me to the museum
where on the marble steps I can
marvel at lions,
you the architecture.

Oh architect, must you have eyes
in back of your head?
(Guilt and you loom like a third eye
when wandering through crowds looking for
not you, who notes the fire exit’s location
and stroller parking.)

“Mom, what’s taxidermy?”
You pull me by the hood to the next exhibit
explaining natural history
through the solar system poster
you buy from the gift shop for my ceiling.
It’s a controlled view
up through apartment eleven D,
star struck and becoming
your fossil.

Uncle Angelo/Alzheimer’s (8.04)

Family conversation falters
on an heirloom carpet
full of landmines’ echoes and residues.
My uncle eyes us faintly
like footprints on a beach.

Uncle Angelo, you cannot stay
we cannot misinterpret you
dying in drool and snot,
grasping my mother’s hand
recalling the war, the baseball games,
the hairpin on her first communion.

I’ll repent the years without confession,
I’ll do anything for you,
the brook you swam in, now a middle school.
I’ll bring it back to you. You miss it, you missed it,
although it wasn’t the greatest moment in history,
I know you’re missing it.

There’s nothing here to save you,
just people like me in bunkers -
the strong ones dead by unafraid mistakes.

I can die at any time
I can waltz like you -
or I can stumble for a lifetime too,
A lifetime
don’t stop it,
don’t die.

At 75 years old you think you’ve missed it,
you’ve lost your lifetime search.
Come on, shuffle to the front on the line.
Please.

Rooted (5.05)

I recall a fancy meal -
the ambience:
a salad of thirteen greens
before delicate quail,
champagne and seven sorbets
with long spoons
shifting food and toes
in love with sidelong glances.

Except this never happened.
Although once,
you told me
your life story
over cafeteria coffee.

Alarms sound mounting the preparation
to someday, somewhere, with someone
need again.
But today, my watch pot dreams amuse themselves
by allowing the kettle to kill the cat.

At least we no longer need the props
(a coffee cup, a table and a bad story).
The linens can stay unfolded
to shut up the closet’s crutches
preemptively reserved for a broken -
nose? Heart and words that stutter like love
can’t even trip the tip of my tongue,
with your eyes so blue to me.

Dollhouse (11.04)

A petitioner showed up for the first time today
like it just hit ‘er that she exists.
“Numbers and statistics,
yelling and screaming,
hangers and blood,” she shrieks.
“Yes, yes I do have a little girl,” I offer.
Oh, my little girl and the masses.

Her freckles dancing frantic tales
from a tucked in state of mind -
I raised her in the era of broken legs.
I think out loud, talking to the dollhouse
she played in as she took longer to fall asleep.
Around bedtime, her empty room still chants routine -
repeat after daddy:
“Sleep tight,
sweet dreams,
don’t let the bed bugs bite,
I love you a million and a lot
and more than possible
and sooo much.
And I love everyone in the world
except Walter O’Malley[1]”
her arms thrown around me -
I miss the days when the problem was the white noise
of the television after the lost baseball game
and I try to make these problems hers; to keep her home
in the two-by-four means of my protection.
Animalistic means having created her;
an unspoken promise to sustain and nourish love at any cost.
She grows rapidly beyond my bounds and sneaks home
on deserted streets late at night to appease me.

The news broadcast rehashes the world’s age old problems -
traditionalists fighting the modernists
I recall from my college days
desiring yet another argument
to justify human existence.
It’s this unrequited excitement upping the ante:
placing her future and future hanger in question,
so I sign the petition and look around her empty room
wondering where she is tonight.
[1] The man who bought the Brooklyn Dodgers and moved them to LA.

Digital Clock (2.05)

My dreams continue
through the digital alarm clock.
I hit it and imagine stepping on God
for making me wake.
Although blessed,
I ask for more
than dreams.
I should not have had another beer.

Unable to walk I piece together last night:
I am, I was, I will, I had
I have a propensity towards chaos
and no recollection.

The alarm grates like screws and bolts
through my head.
My mind abandons me like a computer
programmed to be invaded.
Pop up. Pop up.

Nightmare (7.05)

I want home
to be a foreign ally
and you its ambassador -
so I teach myself to go home
to alleviate my responsibility
to create my own happiness.

Yet, your self-indulgent heart beats
in me like nightmares of going to war
while I act like a neutral country
letting you declare protectorates.

Secretly, I dream you
in a revolutionary war
costume, musket in hand.
Blindly abiding by the lost concept of a nation
fighting to sign my name to the declaration of us
fucking independence.

I don’t sleep well these days.

Sestina (9.04)

You, your honor, in the hospital full of fears,
lay armored by a lifetime of decisions,
disrobed by chemotherapy. We say prayers
for you against a non-communicable disease.
You asked the nine: ‘Who deserves to die?’ We tried
to defend your stand. Another podium crashes.

You, old men in Boston face curses, crashes,
hopes, Nike commercials. Mounting fears
having watched your team for years, having tried
to justify your history of bad decisions
living through pain and glory like it was a disease.
You too believe in prayers.

You, little one, who at bedtime regurgitates prayers,
hearing of Afghanis. Iraqis? The economy’s crashes.
Through the isles of dogma’s infectious disease
little girls succumb to God’s panhandling for fears
little ears wanting answers, to egocentric decisions,
so you ask for a simple explanation. And God tried.

You, with the big eyes to beg, who tried
to answer your hopeless home broken prayers
on the street corner with no big decisions
nothing to do, repetition haunting you. Crashes
repeat, threatening you with failure and fears
of your mother’s infectious disease.

You, age five, placing mortality on the rise. Diseased
child on the commercial, you can’t even try.
Is it witch-craft or western medicine injecting fears
into your watery diarrhea as you say your prayers?
Too hard to breath, heaving lungs crashing
child now take a deep breath. What comes of a decision?

You, victor, dancing concentric circles of decisions,
I’ve come to despise like a disease.
Pretending to save this world from its crashes,
we concede to you, who has not really tried.
Even for you on this night, some say prayers -
oh it’s a curious world satiated by fear.

Must we have fears? And lack indecision?
We pray for a smug man injecting our world with his disease
trying to infect the steeple of our nation? It crashes.

A Poet in Old Age

Lecturing to us syntactically
he coyly tries to make us comfortable
with coughing, mumbling, aging musically.

Experiences disinterestedly
accumulate to a mess inaccessible.
These days he says etcetera frequently.

Like a young child his faith fades proudly
reminding him to be lamentable.
These days he says etcetera frequently.

Details, moments, feelings blur hastily -
a self portrait of regret is audible:
coughing, mumbling, aging painfully.

Life’s linear phenomenality
pops up like targets in a carnival.
These days he says etcetera frequently.

Has he missed his cue he wonders idly
an old man in a home of words, unable.
Coughing, mumbling, aging gracefully -
these days he says etcetera frequently.

Playpen (6.05)

We suckle as newborns
before we are trained to attach
to a color, a blanket, a voice.

Perhaps you were dropped in training
or worse, left with a music box
wound to lull your composure.

Our sparse memories defend us
like the bars of a crib
we have already learned to scale.

A Gift (7.05)

I imagine I would be beautiful naked in warm sunlight;
like a child imagines her complete disappearance
upon covering her eyes.

I worry for my loosely guarded sanity -
in a peek-a-boo world -
requesting partial disclosure,
hiding and seeking
my exposure.

To whom it may concern:
vulnerability is the greatest gift I have to offer.

Hey World, Here I Am

2005-09-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

And so it begins, or continues, or generally flounders on. Intending to record the trials and tribulations—minimally personal, mostly pseudo-intellectual (despite my aversion), and chiefly interpersonally inspired thought-provocations and general growth instigators—that ensue in Dublin, or more broadly in life, as presently I’m still behind a computer screen in New York City.

People frequently ask to see my writing as I stride (and stumble) into a poetic future. Mostly, I find ways to avoid sharing. Luckily, life’s starting to win over my insecurities and so, here it will be; here I am. To make myself share, to make myself available, to be true to myself, to be open, to be, I’ve created this. My hat tipped to technology, I’ll stay partly under my rock and keep a pen dedicated to privacy, to harboring as much anguish as I allow myself. Here, I hope to keep my mind, defense-free and hopeful as ever.