Moved to another house about 2 months ago now, and it’s knocked the wind out of my creative efforts. At least this one. I promise to get back to full steam by the time the holidays are over. The slowing of the work pace (and the gradual coalescence of the house and the stuff therein) is gradually getting me to think about writing pomes, at least.
Black Friday
Sorting through boxes of old stuff
triggered a moment of self-loathing
or rather, loathing for the old selves
who came out and tried to smother me.
My junior high school poetry.
My 16-year-old self’s car keys
and cork bulletin board
covered with movie tickets.
My 24-year-old self’s attempts
at balancing a checkbook.
All the meanness,
all the family tension.
And a garage I can’t park in yet.
Prophecy
You’ll be coming off three days on the night shift
when you realize there was no sugar
in the bottom of the cup, no bottom
of the cup for that matter. Sometime
after your last 12-step meeting
you’ll know you’ll always walk wounded,
limp home. Those wounds in your hands
won’t heal; they’ll be a sign to all,
especially you. You’ll walk around clean,
feeling the hole in your own side,
wondering if this was the glorious
resurrection promised.
published around 2005 in the now defunct web journal, The New Pantagruel
Second Sunday, Standard Time
The evening falls hard at five o’clock,
Twelve hours after waking up in darkness.
I’ve spent the week too busy to work on time,
or understanding how it falls on me.
Only today have I seen the pink dawn
on the last red rose in her neglected garden.
Sestina: Blues Clues
Sestina: Blue’s Clues
What the past three years have been I don’t remember,
only that the now is taken up with Steve and a dog, Blue,
a sort of surrogate mother for our children, who look for clues
while Mommy, like me, is busy doing something. Think
though we might, we won’t recall that something later.
But Steve is kind, assuring them they can be anything
that they want to be. Continue reading “Sestina: Blues Clues”
Haiku: First Day in New House
First day in new house:
nothing found in cabinets
web is all the same.
Motel Bel Air
Dad pulls up in the Rambler, and
we see the sign first: POOL – COLOR TV.
Darkness fills the edges of the parking lot.
My brother and I plan to live up
to the promise of that sign. No trunks,
but some shorts Mom had packed for the next day.
She wearily agrees. Later, from the zero gravity
of turquoise-lit night water, I see Dad’s
cigarette lit like an orange rocket as he blows
white smoke skyward, sitting slumped in a plastic chair.
The Dream of Being Pulled Over While Thinking About a Poetic Idea
is in turn pedestrian and incoherent until I admit what I was doing.
I’ve rejected making a joke about the Affair of the Fourteen
confrontational, obscure
and the NPR podcast I heard about the rhyming police blotter in New Hampshire
cops seem to hate hearing about how it is up north
“Well, what was the poem?” he says, having swept my car with the flashlight
for guns, pot, notebooks – coming up empty.
“Well, as of now it’s:
blue light like the man
coming to tell me take it
easy in the moment.”
“That’s one too many syllables,”
he sighs, handing me my license.
“Slow it down, and replace
‘in the moment’ with something
that’s not a cliche.”
Levels of Abstraction
Is This Glass Half Empty, Half Full, or Twice as Large as it Needs to Be?
is the question on a Volvo passing me at ninety,
while I’m running at the speed limit,
tailgated by a truck with a cross on the rear-view.
The Volvo also tells me, quickly, that the owner’s son
Is an Honor Student at Something Middle School,
something impressive, I’m sure, but the tailgater
has passed me, showing that he
Stands Up for something
and Yeah, it’s Got a Hemi.
We’re all three doing philosophy
at different levels, I suppose,
my bumper blank of opinion.
The Poetrytech Theorum of Tragedy Tag
Recently, a prominent, or at least internet-famous social media personality committed suicide. Many, including myself on another blog, wrote brief (or not so brief) essays about his passing, and in reading about it I noticed another prominent or at least internet-famous social media personality getting fairly pissy about it all because, dammit, the victim was his friend and people shouldn’t be capitalizing on it. Continue reading “The Poetrytech Theorum of Tragedy Tag”
poetrytech 