Of course it is about you,
asleep, indulged and bat-blind.
No ancient runes, no tome of some
vital commandment, no record of achievement,
my first real poem is metonymic for every subsequent poem,
and silver ore; it is lumpy rock.
My first poem's greatest value
its its liability: of course; it is about you.
I am refining it, currently, hewing chunks of truth
dredged them up from within mind. One day
I will smelt them all together, all of my real poems,
and I will wake you and show you yourself.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
-W.B. Yeats
Loosen the ties where synapse connects.
Like mornings that try to hide jewels among dew,
Know the truths the world secrets and the lies it reflects.
What you see are results of special effects.
Dribble of acid might eat through the glue
and loosen it. The ties where synapse connects
will be broadcast in IMAX at the old multiplex.
Attend if you wish, but beware: if you do,
you’ll learn the truths the world secrets and the lies it reflects.
Dreamers wax poetic, mathematicians perplex;
we’re given but simplest machines: poem and screw.
These loosen the ties where synapse connects.
Watch the spectre ballet; here looms death like a hex.
I twiddle down seconds to our first rendezvous
to discuss the world’s secrets and the lies it reflects.
Come see foetid corpse, catch the flies it collects.
Widening, widening, the pattern that falcon flew
has loosened the ties where synapse connects,
revealed the truths the world secrets and the lies it reflects.
Mama always told me that if I wanted to see change
in this world I'd have to make it, either with Howitzer
or love song, or a “To Whom IT May Concern” mailed
to whomever it might. Sunday nights she would braid
her hair in the kitchen, hot comb on stove, cookie jar
bassist walking blues while I kept time with a tapping heel.
I frolicked barefoot outside so often that my heels
grew to be at least an inch thick; season's change
forced me inside so my protection grew thin. Cookie jars
fall from time to time, but this one, it seemed, a howitzer
had shelled; the shards in my sole were so fine, braided
gauze so tightly bound, prints so red on forgotten mail.
Afternoons, home from school, I would always check the mail
hoping for packages I never ordered. After surgery, as she healed
I would part her hair, learning on the fly to plait and braid,
and apply oil to her scalp, or comb it, generally in exchange
for a long hug or two. She complimented it, noting how it sure
was a nice Mother's Day gift in tandem with the new cookie jar.
It's a ring of black faces, high atop the cabinets, 37 cookie jars.
The first was a gift, the rest marked fragile, arrived by mail.
She takes care to avoid duplicates, but accepts banal gifts anyhow. It's her
passion, or one of them; she paints rooms, shapes landscapes, heals
her babies when their ills wear them down, speeds down interchanges,
and loves, and loves. When I was eleven she taught herself to braid
because my hair required it, and when Jordan followed suit, she braided
his too. She has never had much taste for cookies, despite all the cookie jars,
but never hesitated to stock up on Oreos or whatever our wildly changing
appetites demanded. We had a dog that never learned to pee outside or heel,
but soothed his butt-itches on the carpet and sprinted to gnaw at a piece of mail
we had the misfortune of dropping; Mama looked at him with Howitzer
eyes ready to detonate every time he invaded. She explained how it's her
space he destroys when he shits in the closet or eats the armchair-fringe braid.
I once took her to get a pedicure, hoping Ms Kim would trim stress as she scraped heel:
stress accumulated from years of being the only woman in a house of male
patten blindness so advanced that all we can think to get her is a cookie jar
at holidays; these are usually duplicates. One of these days I'll make a change,
be old enough to heel myself with love and wisdom like a howitzer,
change from idiocy to appreciation, generosity, subtlety somehow braided
together, fragile as a cookie jar, but impenetrable, clad in chain mail.
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
the touch of springs,
and found
concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
for so much melody.
The lightning struck a dozen feet above
my craning neck, my thumping bass, and wide,
now blinded eyes, and rattled brain and frame alike.
Imbalance rectified so violently
by you or I would earn us time in Bellevue;
the universe, though, works in terms (insane)
much grander than our frightened mortal vocab.
It's this, I'll bet, that so entrances me.
I try to trace the golden arc of light
before the black field swallows it like swords,
and fantasize that when I find the source,
electric, of this art that strikes me so,
it will explain this tingle, touch: the urge
to rub this tongue against it, though I know I fail.
I.
I'd promised to wave at St. Louis as I passed overhead,
so I crane as we zoom through the timeless twilight of morning
and waggle a few digits at the bright slick
poised at the confluence of Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
Metallic, it undulates, an amoeba
with twinkling cilia tickling the dark waters.
Odd chunks of jewel intersect it at even intervals,
as if some sloppy god bred pond scum and gems,
and splattered them in a dank nook
to ferment, lovely, floating on nothing,
fed by the breeze blown by my dark hand above.
II.
How meta, I thought, to write the word turbulence
while the sky tossed this machine about its metal self.
Left hand to right, cirrus to nimbus to moonbeam
it juggles our lives and our luggage, with talent, admittedly.
Concurrent with prayer, I imagined I'd blaspheme
when foreseen malfunction came to pass,
when fuselage shattered, scattering roller-boards,
screaming, these fools and I, silent, into altitude.
I imagined regaining consciousness among debris, plummeting
below fiery Plieades, between jagged shrapnel and flaming hands waving.
How deftly I would glide, limbs spread, flannel aflutter,
towards some body of water, discerned from the land that cupped it.
How wisely I would blade my body, knife into the skin of the water–
solid at such speed– and sup of the sanguine splash my form lifts up.
III.
In this moment I notice my asshole,
clenched to preempt catastrophe,
my lungs squeezing stolen oxygen
across cheesecloth and into some mechanism
that transports it to aorta, which disperses
the stuff corporeally, as per usual.
Little green thing lay
squat in brakes,
plotted rotting,
scanned chokes
and oozes brewed
in gutters,
and chuckled;
they gurgled
and splashed in chunks.
Cauldron with fat
boil to match crusts,
seethes, sweats bile
in globs tapping toccata,
ekes out millennia
hexing spiders to drip venom.
Chipped pestle digs
grooves into finger skin
of toddlers who wander
too near scrawny stalks;
mortar creaks; bone-dust
lubricates murderous beak.
Her fountain hair jets and wafts,
and loose, showers, as snug as gloves;
shutter lids block drafts;
within stained glass, wishes flutter, like doves.
Her jawline, a mug, warms my own hand and lips,
while the other sits on saucer sternum, sneaks
to thrum on tummy as if tickling an eclipse.
The whole frame can be held, is as slight as squeaks.
Our fingers, having woven like wicker vines,
or bamboo ankles, tangled over cotton-soil socks.
Knee-backs' puny deserts bear sculpted art of dune lines.
Metronome pores dole out rivulets in unison, like clocks.
Arms wrap like rope stretched from fore to aft
but dont fray, and keep us buoyant on mattresses, watercraft.
