April Madness 2015

creating a world of fear in seven days

on mondays i wake
to sleep again.
i eat, and the food rushes
to my belly to say 'good morning',
but most days i am not
a welcoming host.

on tuesdays my room
is haunted. i'm sure.
i stay awake 'till it's light out,
and sleep in.

on wednesdays i have targets
on my back. killed with arrow
eyes, and burned alive.

on thursdays i can see the future.
it's frozen in ice.

on fridays i am photographic.
attacked by recollections
with sharp edges that
i cannot keep away.

on saturdays i live upstairs.
with books and games to
keep everything smooth.

on sundays i rest,
hopefully.

2. shedding

I am stretched so thin (like the retreating
of a tide from a shore) that my skin slips
off in the bath, and I am eviscerated
imperceptibly (like an evaporating
puddle lingering in a gutter) until bits
of me float in the water, and I descend
into lawlessness.

day three

last night was rough, man,
how the words (thoughts [landmines]) fell jagged each one
clawed into the chest (madmen with knives, plastic sheets to catch blood) and
still with the murder victim we can say
he lived a long (hollow) life he
broke at the right times and got pity the color
of dried platelets. but you can't deny how the heat of the water
makes the sticky red move faster too fast maybe
for locking arms (sticky hands [dead-bolt fingers and nails]) grabby-greedy
like persephone grasping at blades of grass, feet slipping out of the boat.
this means she wanted out, see, this means she wanted out.

i will always write poetry for you
love darling dear beloved
but it's not worth the blood
if you don't listen.

Today I Laughed Asphyxiatedly as My Peer Read Whitman Aloud, and I Was Not Alone

1

You are crude like fresh horse pies,
rats overpopulating a city
when the Chinese restaurant closes.
You are beautiful with inclusion of me
and her, and them, and him, and us
together, neither me nor you apart.

You are the deity overwhelmed with myth
whom I feared to see, my Ovid, my Hercules
I know so well, and yet, have never touched
[they say never meet your idols]
I did not know your name, but I knew you.

2

Will you explore the body
and the mind as my democratic oath
lingering on the lips of
time, together, never segregated again?

Will you embrace me as you did
her, no poem complete without us together
in pure urges of skin, and universe, and bone
touching as brothers within the brain?
My mind is foggy from your ecstasy of verse
acrostically stealing, my words
never parted.

_______________For Warren Gerard Batchelor

No one is righteous, not even one

If I must die
write my elegy in blood, sanguine
discharge cloying with intentional disgrace,
sweetness and delight never hurt, the upper-lip-curl
of acerbic redolence
from the throats of unlawful-killing-four-years-walking-free.

7 heads with 7 comings
horns on their horns, wings
at their feet and on their wings
“This is the end for you mate, three seconds to live.”
If I must die, it will be slowly,
but not in prayer.

4.1

It is autumn now. It is best to remember that.
There are many things dying here: first we find
a dead bird nestled in the branches of the Pyracantha bush,
where its gray feathers are almost lost in all its red,
and then we find a squirrel, thinned
and spread against a foot in the street, and then the tiniest shell of a spider,
tangled and splayed in the net of its home.
I say that it has simply shed itself -- it hasn't.
The leaves fall. The plants die. Even the tiled roof of my neighbor's house
drops its slats and they crash to the street, shatter, cut my feet.
It is easy to forget what falling feels like -- how bright we bleed.

His obituary was in the newspaper today.
My grandmother bought eight copies of them.
She always seemed to have a copy clenched between her white hands
as if she might tear it to pieces,
and she read the ashen headlines again and again
as if it was all printed because of him.
She cried over them, saying, "They're beautiful!
It's beautiful! He was so beautiful," and doesn't wear black.
The front page is about drought restrictions:
how the world is drying up and disappearing.

My grandmother tired of mourning even before his death, and when it happened,
it seemed as if his hand was just finally slipping from her grasp.
She mourned for two years, growing smaller and thinner as he did too,
breaking herself in her care for him as he developed a beak and shallow breathing
and a ribcage that barely knew how to rise. The knowledge of his death
was so heavy as she sat next to him that sometimes
the "will"s and the "are"s slid together.
We would gently pull her from the room, wonder if we would cry, say
"He is dead, but still listening grandmother. Still here, grandmother."

Now that he is gone, she plants flowers in the backyard. She fills
the world up with the precious water that needs saving,
points to his portrait where it hangs all over the house,
and say, "Look, look at how beautifully he lived."

A sonnet about something
Bitter blood thin as those who choke on it,
biting the figurative gun which holds all power;
and walking every waking hour
with hopes and dreams without wit.

Controlled by those with actual grit;
those who follow often cower
at the site of those who tower,
and follow the formulaic society but don’t quit.

Of course, those do try to fight back
and often get murdered, beaten,
a desolate land filled with a million of dead “cretins”,
or those who just aren’t on track.

Ten strong powers sit in a 400 foot office space,
wondering what they did to kill the human race.

At the gynecologist

she's holding in her sweat
those crags of waiting in her belly
piercing something deep.

it feels wrong and she knows
the storms of oceans churning within
are something she has done,
something she has made

thinking there's an irony
about sitting here dirty
withholding the mess in herself
from a sterile room where pictures of
genitalia cling to the wall.

they're diagrammed with fletchmarks,
covered by grids, they resemble calendars:
mons day, pubesday, today is cervix,
today is fever-red tomato soup
today her demons open their mouths wide.

she's protesting. Her body is no calendar!
but she lies to herself.

day by day pages fall out of her skin,
sheets of hair pile withered as an autumn morning
scheduled appointments scribbled on her palm,
and she is regular, this is what she tells the nurse
who then asks, don't be nervous--

It's the way the light catechizes
and how her pores feel enlarged
and how her freckles are most assuredly cancers
and how her fingernails are preyed upon too raw,
It's the way the nurse pounds again and again
pen to clipboard questions over and over

it's how he did the same--
the pounding against door, against skin
the pen upon the calendar, a daily chore
of disheveled linens.