Memory Lane, or haven't titled a poem in literally a year

“Damn, is it the fall?

 Time to revisit the past”

-Aubrey Graham

This is just to say I’ve breezed by the old place a few times now, each more quickly than the last. Each time the crunch underfoot was mushier. But then, so am I. I’ve heard tell the fountains still spurt in the garden. I had no time for their antics then, when we were filling the halls with semantics and dared drape our dusty hopes over the dinette as if to protect it. It was cherry, and in the refracted light thereupon, chubby gnats twirled and died. There was a susurration once. You remember— there under the small, kind moon I compared your beauty to, we gripped one another, each other’s attention and breath. 

Anyway, the light was harsh this last morning when I passed, in a fog. Streetlamps still lingered, and (dare I say) malingered, effervescent as memory.  It smelled like nutmeg and the  blue peal of a toddler in daddy’s safe sweeping hug. I shuddered and quickened my pace. 

This is just to share what I heard the neighborhood kids say, the ingrates:

“Only risk that cul de sac in the growing seasons, when the spindling bulbs shade the gravestones. Listen in the underwater of July for the drowning of all hope among the anemones that bush out and up to the cement gazebo steps.”

No respect.  They google our names, read the etchings in the tree bark we’d forgotten we carved. Read them for fossils. We all stood in the moldering leaves the last time, too far from the filigree to see any detail; a plash stirred the silence and they risked a look to where I strode away, behind them. A call: “Hey mister, what happened here?” 

Safe sex

Lay in bed and pinch your own fucking nipple and rub your rough hand over your taut chest and quiver, inhaling.

The fan and the memories make all parts of you harden and shudder except  the soft heart and wet cheeks.

Writhe  among the sheets,  alone.  A hamstring dares to cramp and you wish for it just so you might feel a thing tonight.

RUST

Rust

We rebuilt the steps to the tool shed

in a warm October when the spiders

were bad, but between hewing

chunks of Ash and felling fresh logs,

we forgot to look into that kind of thing.

Eighty-eight legs scattered from a hidden epicenter: black, spindle jointed.

Pricking and tickling sun-lit skin and hands, each moment stretched as if

the hourglasses on their bellies slowed time while sticky feet ascended me.

The reddening tub’s remaining club foot had long since been buried, maybe weighted

by the rainwater standing tricep-deep in it that day.
The murky stuff that saved me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Spike used to frolic, kicking up dust on the hill behind Grandma’s house and in front of his own,

braying at squirrels and their cousins, playing with me and mine,

tethered to a stake by a chain long enough for him to stretch himself, enjoy a modest freedom.

The fire ants erected monuments in the front yard and side. These Spiked menaced

when walked past them, gnashing teeth and destroying an edifice before a tactical retreat.

In a July we awoke to uncover their plot. Fresh mounds arose far from their origins.

Subterranean corridors mapped pizzicato revenge.

Spike ran in circles from invaders granted access from that rusty chain via grounded stake,

ran that chain into something Gordian that tightened around a tree and his neck—

the stout oak yielded a firmness his flesh could not match.

So we found him
 Strangled, stung, choking. Stuck.

i wrote a poem so who tf cares about at title; or, the second scoop of pre-workout.

i came home to help Neil pwn some fools but he snore/jerked
when i opened the door and wiped the dribble from the armchair,
and i knew instantly that i should have stayed to teach Nina to shoot bp.

she swayed under that jasmine shadow somewhere,
and the eyes beneath it flitted to me so often:
there's your problem right there.

now i'm hiding from sleep.
now i'm watching a mascot dance-off.
now i cant stop texting my ex and i

know somewhere deep i'll never do better than her.
Neil's gonna propose to Molly sometime this spring
and all I'll do is be worse off than i was last spring,

and lonelier.

puny human time

 A full moon hid behind a cloud bank.
Near the horizon its oblate reflection glimmered
like a portal to heaven. The waves threw innumerable
tantrums at the yielding shore.
Grasses stood as tall and straight and sparse as sentinels.      
I asked them what they were guarding, or whom.
The surf bid me hush and
The waves continued their battery.

I await a response, but the grass, and the wind, and the sea, and the moon
speak so slowly, and I haven't got forever, 
like they do.

living to be a quarter- century

We wander down backways often, speeding out of ignorance
towards an a address we only half remember.
Something with a six in it, we agree.
There's an anxiety in our tremulous bellies
like report card day or touching down after turbulence. We
outpace it. We call that Progress. We turn up
the radio and down the windows,
we forget we don't know don't know where we're going.
A quarter is half buried in tobacco shavings and fry crumbs,
warm from the ass pressing it into the charcoal fabric.
It has ridden these old roads before,
Slid and bounced around their curves and potholes,
etched memories into itself, compiling annals;
It has internalized this scarred history, become rugged.
We dig it from the seat cushion and flip it.

A quarter's swan song is singing,
undulating on the granite, is ringing;
I chug a keystone heavy, eyeball it's mathematical decay.
Eerie above the chants and jeering flit the overtones.
The empty harmonics echo and qwaver at the edge of perception--
the terror of knowing my mind's to weak to harvest the fear and
my liver too mortal to filter it.
I slap the coin into my palm and chuck it out the window.

You reel and titter in the hallway, maybe hoping to echolocate,
the way you read once on an eastern healing blog,
maybe hoping, like me, to discern a pattern from the chaos.
An ancient beetle twitches its vestigial wing.
You can't make sense of the image, commit to consider,
 tomorrow, the past's effect on the present. You never get around to it.

irony of mirrors

Foreshadowing: green, I gleaned once,
from a series of graphs,
is the color most absorbed by a mirror.
It is more accurate, then, to call a mirror green than the silver my gullible eye insists.

A drop of blood trembled down through the steam to the porcelain and
ptt
like the snuff of a tiny candle.
You and steam both settle continuously:
It onto the hard surfaces of this bathroom,
you into the razor- nicked mediocrity
of not seeing yourself.

I am misled by myself singing.
In this lonely room, before a sheathed mirror, murmurs swell to screech,
through the steam, seem a barbaric yawp.
I cannot see the smallness of my mouth.
I cannot hear how puny my whispers.

reboot/reflection, or forgetting to be afraid to write

Peek into and out of a drafty window,
Fully knowing its brittle protection:
Navy drapes hang, crooked, cruelly
admitting midnight and streetlight.
Crane and peer for some relic or talisman in the empty cul de sac--                                                                              
Roving eyes glow in the dimness and roll
Like a mad dog's, but there is no lather or fuss, only the hush of the draft, it's whispered imperatives.
And the memory of once translating that rush of air into power, or verse.

first world problems

it has been months since i read any of my own writing, and more months, still, since i put ink to carbon or byte to screen. it's sad, really,and i feel like noone can be responsible for this travesty but me. if you dont make time to practice a skill, you lose it, and my second degree eats at my every waking hour. responsibility that i never knew, work ethic that i never needed, dilligence i could hardly fathom, all are stuffed into my tired mind like some overtaxed finger food. even now, writing with a purpose that is intentionally purposeless feels a sham: i am the burnt out husk of a would be artist with too many needs to have time for wanting to art; words either escape me, or being scavenged, they discard their power and their essential magic to wait for a more practiced hand into which they might unlimber their weight.

the epiphanic is not unknown to me now. at high speeds and/or under mental strain my ear or eye will catch on some tinkling thing, and we will wonder at it together before it flits out of some window or another, lost. perplexed, i concede defeat to melancholy reality and the strength of its manifold succubi.

and all god's people say so the fuck what?

Sonnet

Jose and I alone have never found

the answers sought, have barely glanced beyond

these blinders, equine, broad; we often beg

and query who we even are, and why.

No existentialism: it's just that I've

just noticed this refrigerator hum.

Inaccurate ear paints a teaspoon of sugar,

its simple pallete synaesthetic as metaphor.

Picture cane-shaded fingers forming

halls when locked with mine; human home

where wasp laid to rest. Killer bees flown,

I'd imagine gentle bears could gather

sufficient sweets to honey-spackle memories

that resonate like Quervo crystals, freezing.

My Final Poem

will not be written,

read, or ever spoken.

No anthology

will ever search for

proof of authorship,

or beg my mother

to release the rights,

or find some lost draft.

My final poem,

like all of your own,

will be sickly sweet,

and wet, then dusty

as marrow hardens.

It will be boring

unless uncovered

by some future men,

put up on display:

l'homme ordinare, morts.

In either event,

My final poem

will be shattered down

to its basic parts,

its few elements

when it is eaten

with Earth, by the sun.

My first real poem

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.

Matinee

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.

Sestina for my Mother

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.

Idea of Disorder at any Lightning Strike

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.

Delusion Altitude, 35,000ft

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.

Baba Yaga

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.

somebody suggest a title

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.

Skeleton

Fingers maneuver gently,

tickling lobes, adjusting pony-tail,

or picking nose as appropriate. Each touch

precedes the surface

it encounters: I create

with caresses, construct particles

contrary to physics in milliseconds

of contact with you.

Alas, I touch but so much.

For hours I've mapped the topography,

surveyed terrain, tracked the curve of every space

with kisses, yet

some part remains unfathomed

beneath body I hold, this whole I

grasp so tightly. I want for the structure of

the thing, to know its

core, iron support,limestone

foundation; bone, skull, scaffolding.

I search and shuffle through blueprints and atlas

to find the missing set.

Wunderkammer von Murasaki Shikibu

I. Manners in which we

preserve memory remind

me of our likeness

to crickets, locusts: nascent,

singing sillily;

hoarding not oats and seeds but

fulfilling needs, no?

The tethers that anchor us

to sanity are

but memorabilia:

concrete, stackable,

submerged, preserved in ether.

Keep me enamored

with life, safe below the air’s

mass, comfortable,

nestled firmly within earth.

Merit is ensured

by characters, words uttered,

scrolls, novellas, thoughts

recorded to reassure

us that the human

animal has worth, that he

will retain validity

when his cities burn.

II. All things in this world

link it to me: perception

is existence, yes?

Any argument spoken

is evidence heard,

inference intuited.

Sycamore, magnolia,

lip’s kiss, vibrator,

noon sun revitalizing,

darkness’s terror.

III. Überdi Überyoru.

With every breath, collecting.