Sunday, November 25, 2012

Poem for Sunday, November 25, 2012


Thanksgiving Day

The little cousins play hide-and-seek outside with sweet
potatoes fresh on their breath. Granny approaches by the
porch after she snubs out her cigarette: want me to show you

how an Indian whips his wife? She twists

the skin on my forearm until it wrinkles and burns. Sacagawea
stirs in her Wyoming grave then resumes dreaming of the
plains. The trees bleed in scarlet clumps. The cranberries

stick to the backs of our teeth. An infant

mole lies dead on the asphalt with cat marks and muddled fur.
Croquet on the lawn. Dad snoring in the bedroom. Mom
collecting acorns in a zip-lock bag to present to the girls.

The wind--the silly wind--blows all these anticlimaxes out

of  proportion.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Poem for Thursday, November 15, 2012


Black

The color of the coffee steaming
in the cracked, glued-back-together
mug. The color of the mug. The color
of the morning as the frost crystallizes
against the glass. The color of the glass--
trick question.

The feeling of the anvil dropping.
The act of conceding. The unanswered
questions, the spaces lingering around
the cosmos and the shadow of Charon
himself.

The residuals from the camp fire and
the absence of warmth. The distance
between the two points in the line on the
coordinate plane. The skin of the Maasai
and the Serengeti at midnight. The use
of metaphor.

The texture of stillness and the taste of
salt. The color of colorlessness. The The The.
The last line of the poem and at times
the poem itself:

This is no          exception.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Poem for Thursday, November 8, 2012


Release

if I were to
summarize
my life in a
haiku

it would go
something
like this:

             born in dixieland
             i learned to be verbose &
             eat sleep write love etc.

i would take
all my verbs
string them to
a kite's tail

release them
on a cloudless
windy day in
mid-March:

watch, now
watch as my love
drags the ground

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Poem for Thursday, November 1, 2012


Caveat

At some point, it will hurt.

Not like lemon-juice-in-an-open-cut hurt
or even post-heartbreak hurt. It is meta.
It is the ominous cloud shadow. The divine
cold shoulder. The repercussions of sneezing
too loudly. And it lurks behind you with
dark stealth. And it will seize you during
some innocuous moment--a trip to the bank
or buying flowers on the street. It will reach
inside of you, violate you through untouched
clothes and take part of you with it, upward.
It is not death itself; it is the death of what
you thought you knew. And it hurts the worst
during a soft crescendo of violins or a memory
of a girl with caramel skin.