music for baby.

The father turns the key to the safety of quiet
He has installed for the house, and with a kiss
Consoles the birthing mother without riot
Of hospital or other strange abyss.
The window, not sense, will teach the child trees.
Storybooks will relate the warmth of June.
Her mindless teeth mush the easy peas,
Her mother munches a soft-sinking prune.

For she remembers when the days were crystal
She wooed this man who cried outside the bar.
Her life then fled as though – from a pistol.
Weeping, she strums her thin homemade guitar,
With eyes that never had time; never brooded,
But found the effortless path and concluded.

new prose poem.

Before she was old enough to write, she taught herself to draw stars. Before she could discern, she drew houses on the backs of compact discs in permanent marker. Connecting the squares to the triangles, she taught herself the meaning of home. Before she could marry, she fell in love with her own script and practiced it nightly, stringing together phrases that just looked nice together. She found her mates in dusty books and carved their names into her palms with ink. Through ink, she taught herself honesty and became a mute. Through the window, she memorized the world. Then they took away her hands. And she became the grass.

things of today.

I compete with cacophony
for your attention.
I want to resemble this
sleek thin black pen.
How easily it
makes words and writes.

stumble.

“Put that into your brain when you think.”
--Professor Robertson. 16 October 2009.

the way they were.

What did the river do to you, she asked. He answered that it made him dark, dark with all the colors of his reflection. There were places to go always, but he never could stop wondering why his image had gone black, why all the colors met and liked each other and mixed and stayed that way. It made him so angry he remembered his flimsy notebook with the pages torn out. He opened it in front of her and wrote a lullaby. Write, she told him, do not compose. If not compose, he answered, then why use words? Words break, the way surfaces do, she explained. They break like oceans, like papers, like hands. Do not compose. Compose with your eyes and write your words to match your face with the river. Make them black and bright. I will play in them. Child, child, child, he managed in the February moonlight, you stun me.
Deep purple, you could be, then, she cried. His eyes wrote: Thick purple, do not turn from me. You may harm me, let it be so. Violet confusion of serenity and rage, swallow your flowers and paintings and shirts. Artifice as the moon you are, paint me a picture to identify me.

haven.

Burn the dust off these words
with your dark November voice.
Apply them to the sweet
season of my youth
until the purpose is born
between my ears.

i.

can't escape the two "who i am"s.

444.

It feels a shame to be Alive --
When Men so brave -- are dead --
One envies the Distinguished Dust --
Permitted -- such a Head --

The Stone -- that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we -- possessed
In Pawn for Liberty --

The price is great -- Sublimely paid --
Do we deserve -- a Thing --
That lives -- like Dollars -- must be piled
Before we may obtain?

Are we that wait -- sufficient worth --
That such Enormous Pearl
As life -- dissolved be -- for Us --
In Battle's -- horrid Bowl?

It may be -- a Renown to live --
I think the Man who die --
Those unsustained -- Saviors --
Present Divinity --

erasure.

I am
there
at night
Breaking off pieces of
protection
numbing
The disease
under
your beautiful lines.

I can't stop.

I was, the night of the accident,
Brutus.

calculate this.

straightforward.

what would oscar say?

peter balakian comes to tcnj.

jottings-down.

if i could be human with you, i would.

1472.

"To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie--
True Poems flee--"

Emily Dickinson.

the rock outside cromwell.

all the coffee and this day are done.
what purpose have i reached?
names i won't remember,
faces that burn
cannot lift this stone,
cannot pry it loose.
where is the shelter i've lost?
where is the peace of mind
i've forgone?
if anything, where is the
packet of sugar
to add to this cup?