Sunday, May 30, 2010

it's whatever.


The bookshelves are falling apart
but the house is somehow staying together.
I nestle in the lonely spaces of the breaking wood
as the novels, all the greatest stories
circle around, pile high, look down
and see me with pity eyes.
There's ivy growing between my legs;
a concrete beauty entwining its way around me
and I can't tell if I have planted it there
or if it's my mind's true enemy.

Friday, May 28, 2010

inspiration.

this is the poem that i think inspired my last (morbid) post. it was put to music and our choir sang it last year. i recommend hearing it somewhere because it is absolutely gorgeous.


"There Will Be Rest"

There will be rest, and sure stars shining
     Over the roof-tops crowned with snow,

A reign of rest, serene forgetting,
     The music of stillness holy and low.



I will make this world of my devising
     Out of a dream in my lonely mind.
I shall find the crystal of peace, – above me
     Stars I shall find.


-Sara Teasdale (1884-1933, when she committed suicide)

sigh.

maybe i should sleep more instead of continuing with all this morbid stuff. anyway.


a white harsh dreamland of vast snow
that pours over your head and neck
and mutes the muses in your mind
white like the stuffy bear beside your bed
whose eyes they want you to believe
were sewn on or drawn on but you know
that he was just born with them that way.
bead eyes, beads on a chain like planets
following each other, never knowing each other
a chain you cannot begin to understand.

velvet lovers fall away, white eyes and ears
that have known too much about you.
the thick lips of a man that do not want to
learn your dense language but want to
play a trumpet of breezes through your ears,
to nestle with a bird before speaking your name,
to say a sanctimonious prayer and show you
nothing. because it all means nothing.
but have these been lovers? your mind is
not pristine enough to know.

you dance with the lonely bear beside your bed
and terrorize around your room with
thoughts you thought you would never know,
checking the alarm nineteen times
to make sure that you will wake up in the morning;
wake up and watch the magic dissolve.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

morbid.

we are the victims of a medical professional
from the beginning
when his are the very first hands to hold you,
before your mother knows you
to the day he hands you
the tiny amber bottle
to cure your lazy, fat reality.
you see the awards on his wall,
wonder when one will come for you
but you are stuck in bedrest as he
makes new your generation,
something you thought only your mind
could do.
so you die away, and retreat
right back into his rubbergloved hands.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

exposed.

i'm having trouble focusing in on one image, and everything's coming out in a mess of many images that hopefully go together. at least things are beginning to come together in unity rather than a mess of what sounds good but is too ambiguous. here is a recent amalgamation of thoughts over the past few weeks:


The prospect of that future haunts me
like a cheap hotel -- lonely, begging me to
stay a night, to sleep on it;
A future of black chiffon dresses that fit me
like a distant lover.
But for now I'll linger in an epicurean wasteland,
put things together that will only make sense
in a year or so.
For now,
I will be a universe of silent seas,
deafly still as someone tests the waters,
knowing that love is watching the helicopters
creep down from the sky
over stiff infinities of snowfall;
it is hearing a loved one whisper my name
in the dark.


let's ramble. i don't know how i feel about the line breaks in this. i know, however, that i am seeing my work grow and that i will always be the most critical reader of it and that it's taken a lot of crap just to get here.

Monday, May 24, 2010

bleh.

medication.

Mortality is submitting to the
mediocrity of the bloodline,
the dirty work of the blood itself.
A cliche in plastic wrap, keeping fresh
and sticking to itself.
It's pretty silent, has not much to say;
has dumb guns for arms that cannot shoot
doesn't have a mind to speak
puts together equations to constantly find
the how.
Never the why.
Because answers are immortal.
Suddenly you wake up in a waiting room.
You will not die, you will not live.
You will toil with your friends
in the shadow of abstract eternal unknowing.

Friday, May 21, 2010

the architect's daughter.

they are talking, taking me somewhere
fictionbooks, lost of all their consciousness
third grade, forgotten
real world, forgotten
once i learned how to curve letters into one another,
to tune the brain into a new channel,
white noise like the sound of old, dry roses
but i lose my focus
some day the man who created me
will draw the house in which
i will raise my children,

just like God.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

summer work.

subdued in the raw smell of office supplies
and paper bags with the tops rolled over,
you'll take down in your messagebooks
how they stapled you to a rolling chair,
made you dance for a man you don't know
and for a phone that does not want to ring
and does for anyone but you.

so you answer in a name that isn't your own,
pray at an arbitrary wooden desk
to not be there long enough to see
your name engraved on a rectangle paper card.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

the nihilist.

In the parlour the box of marbles
is stuck to the hands of the great purple turtle.
The reptilian toyteaser fusses the knobs,
directs silver spheres to their rightful paths.
Behind the curtain in the easy light,
He delights in the sound of the rumbling roll
of the raw racing runners to rightful paths.
Through tattered tortoise spectacles he watches
dizzily his ancient hands on the knobs
as they turn, revolve the little wooden world;
old as they are, but not yet one billion.
A simple little box engraved
with lines that rhyme a thousand times.

Below I watch small girl at her pen,
wondering if the people in her drawings are cold
as I, a brunette marble, roll and fall
on my dark mission, falling with
the one who has fallen before me,
into the holes of a square, wooden Earth.
And pushing and pushed against, rolling
rumbling rawly then rising and rising
up and almost touching the glass.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

the house.

family, a home of things. don't let it keep you from having one of your own of your own of your dreams. the apples in the crisper that taste like the ocean, the money jar on the island that jingles like a distant storm. oh, where will you be after the supermarket checks are cashed, after all the bills empty, will you ever make it out of the vortex? I am a box in a light storm and I am coming home dead. for the season. a little girl living in their upstairs room, exhausted from experimenting all day with different emotions. a boy in his twentysomethings lives in the room next door to her, enjoys the view of the outside, enjoys hearing the neighbors, learns how to make small talk from observing them. it's all a matter of environment, where one lives and breathes, after all. and a dirty brown carpet flows and empties into these rooms, connects the lives of these children like their mother's womb once did. a dense girl with too much stuff, too many interesting things to throw away. and he, too many stories to tell, people to be. bass rumble from an apathetic television set, a man clearing his throat six times and ripping open a second fizzingly menacing soda can. girl upstairs remembers the day they climbed through her ceiling into a soft and eerie attic, he showed her the little light that connected to the light of the first floor. she, amazed at what little lights could do. she, living under that other place where even the rats tried to escape. to where? a house with too many things. tables and paintings and textbooks and mismatched pictures of mismatched children and nothing much to offer. no scent even. big enough for one. big enough for something, everything beautiful. little girl makes words while brother makes stories while daddy makes houses while mother prays in silent poems in her office, making a life for us.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

bienvenue, summer.

These people are covered in cement on a sweatsuit tuesday.
far away from the sun they obediently orbit.
it is all so easy.
the car crunches backward and your lover,
too exhausted to love
in her constructed blazer,
sitting smoking in the chilly driver's seat
not daring to drive, to feel
destroying the earth that orbits your sun.
coffee stains litter your chest
and you thank her for making you human
though you have no idea what that means yet.
something about free will
on a cracked table, tension under the stars.
she was fair to you, taught you,
slept next to you in a box of holes -- dead or alive.

But for now, for now,
we'll scope the sky with little eyes
wanting our silly surprise.

Monday, May 10, 2010

aware.



they weren't see-through, there was just sunshine sitting on them. she was aware that there was something quite unexplainable sitting on top of the clouds, dangling golden rays over them like limbs of a goddess sleeping in the sky. there was another world on the other side of the heavy clouds,  another sunny world on the opposite side if they would only flip over and let her see.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

jumbled.

a green sky filters out the red light
for a night we only have to be this way
visions call themselves my memories
take their time to focus
no feeling in our hands --
how did i earn my mother's hands?
feeling, paperthin and tossing
not ready to be skylight
something more than sin.
lists of colored objects
change beneath the sea waves.
he forgot the digits
when asked by a little bird
with a name like yours.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

raw.

A translucent purple man
runs circles in the dreamy air,
limbs as thin as penstrokes.
He cycles on some invisible instrument and
is stuck forever above our heads.
Eunice is his friend,
she talks to the needy,
bends down beside a mute man in plaid,
works out his life story through the stiffened
edges of his statue smile.
Demonic, all.
Because they were looking for food we dropped for them
down a Subway station.
Dreamy hell people lingering above us when we sleep. 
All in its proper place.
A furry quasi-human ascends the stairs
that jut out from cement walls,
copies your movements
as you both try to sweetly escape
the heavy mumbling demon below.



















i want to walk through these streets unburdened --
to cut myself off from the little string of web
to see the green sky underwater
to dangle from a tree,
look around and see only blue.