Scattered

I leave parts of myself wherever I go.

Scattered books, papers, thoughts, scattered ideas

that I held.

Maybe I don’t want you to forget about me,

or maybe

I don’t want to forget those things myself.

There’s so much of me inside those things;

within you.

Those parts of me remind who I am

and I could hardly reassemble it all,

I could never see all of myself.

You keep something of me with you,

showing it back when we meet.

I could never see all of myself,

yet stumbling on something

I left in your house,

I see that’s what I was.

February 24

Backlog

Think of this as a "rarities" collection. To make up for my lack of new posts over the last two months, I posted several poems that I started over the summer or last fall.

Michelangelo

I wanted to start this poem

with a thundering line

and thrust open the gates of awareness.

I wanted to feel the veins of a forgotten friend

beneath my fingers.

I wanted to break someone’s heart.

The line was:

‘I’ve read about the ways that men build towers,’

written in trusty iambic pentameter.

But every time I could not follow through,

my metaphor did not sit comfortably on the page,

it rolled and then refused to rest.

I had been trying to write a poem about how

I could not write poems like the masters could,

then realized that my poem was the perfect example of itself:

It could not do what I wanted it to do.

It could only do what it was born to,

and so I let it grow:

I’ve dreamed about the ways men sculpted statues,

feeling their marble blocks, rocky surfaces

cool against the heat of their cheek

searching faults in their argument

the veins that would ruin their art

working for years to bring a single vision

to life, only to see it fracture, displaced

by the slightest movement. The chisels worked to shape

the concepts and words grew those perfect nudes.

I’ve read about how sculptures were constructed, piece by piece

of marble ready as white paper.

As my mother said, you just have to draw

the face that’s already there. Or my great-grandfather,

whittle away the parts that aren’t supposed to be

and once each piece is finished, just connect them

one to the next until it starts to make sense, if it ever does.

You have to watch out for the veins.

Once I finished my poem I rewrote it again

and again, the ideas circulating, working towards

what beauty there is left to make art from.

She Could

She reveals herself:

She could fall apart,

she could spill out all of her insides.

You’re not quite so easily there:

She could care less,

she could be looking out for your soul.

Her early morning mind is set to ease her somehow:

Eager to make her feel better,

show her what she can think

It doesn’t do anything but frighten her.

It’s never done anything else.

Put on the mask, disappear

into someone else. It’s all she can do

to stop the tapping on the radiator

dripping of the ceiling or all that was left,

the music, thought that passed from her lips

into our world,

She was an imitator, an unlucky thief and creator.

But that’s how she always lived,

take something someone else had done and make it her own.

She doesn’t want your ways she wants her ways

the way she made something with her hands firmly

She was an imitator.

She didn’t consider it anything important

she just thought it was hers.

She gave him what she could:

She was his for one night

she was eager, an unlucky imitator, and she could fall

apart.

February 9

Meeting

You’ll know me in the future, you’ll know my name

because I spoke to you, I shook your hand

I kissed your lover,

insulted your child.

So rock me slowly, love me down

I’ve never been so willing to be dead.

Try it once again,

there's not much difference between that and being alive.

February 9

The Metaphor Machine

We are stuck within the metaphor machine.

I am a tree.

I pump out my work like buds developing:

giving nuts, flowers, fruits away.

And everyone says,

“what fine sap, it sticks

to our fingers.”

But they wash it off and move on,

they forget it.

But you can’t wash good poetry away.

Good poetry never comes free from your soul.

I am sitting in a barbershop, waiting.

This is not a metaphor,

this is not a poem

the gentle buzz of the razor means nothing.

The machine continues.

Krakatoa Fragments

Perhaps I can describe the horror of hearing,

in this heathen world,

the trumpet of the gods blown far and wide.

Perhaps I can attempt.

Human skeletons washed to the shores

completing their odysseys on rafts

rent from the bloated corpse of Krakatau.

One bent its head,

seemed to regard its fellow damned and say,

‘How beautiful are we, adorning our own tombs,

forever drifting towards a quiet resting place.’

A sea-bird taking flight, freeing his prey,

Dislodged another bony mass who seemed

To earnestly reply: ‘Before today,

I may not have known you or what you did

for who you loved, but now your soul is bound

to mine forever.

We join such naked beauty in our deaths

as Egyptian kings wrapped in their succulence.”

And searching across the scarred land,

a single spider, crouched in the crags

and crevices assumed the appearance of prayer:

Up towards the gods no animal should know.

But throwing dust and ash behind shoulders

Would never raise a life on Krakatau.

Why was only this creature left alive?

Everything taken from his life, an arachnoid Job,

except that there is nothing to test within the faith

of a spider, who works and dies without the things

we consider necessary for faith.

Was this world cleansed to make sterility

or was a sterile world destroyed

to make a better one?

Not much makes sense, not much can be explained. 

The Radiator

Huddled around the radiator,

hands pressed together

warming each other up.

They walk in and the yelling starts

the hands move quickly,

the yelling stops.

Under this roof, under this blanket,

the hands move to the heat again

spreading the feeling across the skin.

There is no more yelling that night.

Jupiter

Each day,

to keep his passion alive,

he used a different women.

And he kept asking himself,

“is this abuse?”

if his wife failed to make their marriage thrive.

Feb 9

July Sonnet #9

A thousand restless days have long since passed,

But still here comes another, piling weight

Upon the hours, making sure they last

So long to hear of my ultimate fate;

Not quite like one who’s waiting for his turn

But one who wishes for a fulfilled life,

That time is spent with some part of concern

Directed towards relieving such a strife.

And if you don’t return my passioned pleas,

Those days I spent will not have been in vain,

For days, in scope of all eternity,

Are in our mem’ries seldom entertained

   Compared to what we never gained or got,

   For that is what we always think and thought.

July Sonnet #8

Suppose this is the most we’ll ever meet

And that our conversation soon will cease,

And now your store of patience is deplete,

You want from my affection some release;

I won’t regret what little time we’ve had,

For everything I do is savored well

And all my actions are honestly clad

Though at the time those things are hard to tell,

And if you wish to never see my face

Except for times when you must think it right,

I’ll hide myself away without disgrace

And carry on believing what is right:

A worthy quest, is always in my eye,

The one in which you have given a try.

July Sonnet #7

I do not claim to idolize your soul,

In fact, that which drives all my tenderness,

Is to have met a human, human whole,

Who’s made mistakes, and feels a true distress

That every human being some way holds;

That tempers at the world as I do too,

That may stay low or may be uncontrolled,

Ah yes, I love a human through and through!

Not one who breathes out shimmering perfection,

But one who breathes in air that she requires,

Who learns in life and holds a firm connection

To all the passioned things that she desires.

As I am naught but one other human,

I love a human all the ways I can.

July Sonnet #6

We’ll see the majesty of all this earth,

Though maybe not together at that point,

And live our lives for all that they are worth,

With full knowledge our paths may soon be joint,

As they were always fated to have been.

No matter where we bring our lonesome souls,

No matter what green pastures may be seen,

A beauty gone beyond Heaven’s blue shoals

Lies here within our eyes as once they meet.

No mortal accident could keep me here,

If you are there, vitality concrete,

Urging me to conquer all of my fears,

Which shatter as I touch your warming hand,

And feel the love we share start to expand.

July Sonnet #5

Suppose that I should drift away from you,

Or that the bond we share starts to weaken,

Or that experiences we have been through

No longer serve as some solid beacon,

Directing both our lonely ships to port.

Suppose a storm wrecks all that we have built,

Or that our good intentions quickly distort,

And that a sadness draws though tears aren’t spilt,

Or maybe some freak accident of chance

Shall split the last of our love apart:

These are the threats to any true romance

But I’m assured that all that carry hearts

As strong as ours shall never long be phased.

Good love’s renewed as each new sun is raised.

July Sonnet #4

There still remains the chance that all’s for naught:

I’m wasting life by dreaming of our love,

As if the fortunes that I read are fraught

With horribly perceived predictions of

The ways the stars above our heads align;

And I may write myself the tender fool

Who, though astute, in such a way was blind

To all the chance that fate has to be cruel.

I don’t agree with such a tortured way

Of looking at the world that carries me:

A man who loves, believes, and does not stray,

Is his own master for eternity.

If all this arrogance is my downfall,

So let it be, for you are worth it all.

July/Feb

July Sonnet #2

There’s far too much to say about this world

In far too meager time, though I still ache

Our eager Earth to be more slowly hurled

Around the sun and let us both partake

In long-due conversations intimate

Or of the grandest valor, heart, or scope

With nothing private and words infinite,

Spent in a gentle walk of leisured lope.

No man, of course, can change the stars and sun,

And love could never own reality;

Celestial forces put me on the run

Instead as I work for my own decree:

That time being the thing it always will,

For you I fight it so I stay strong still.

July Sonnet

So long acquainted yet so far apart,

A separation by unnatural means,

Defended at illogical ramparts,

A garden without seed and left unseen.

The question now is who gave those orders,

And which poor gardener wasted all his days

Insisting there’d remain covert borders

Between his crops even as each decays.

One could suppose the reason walls exist

Is to be razed and soon lain down, forgot

By the two parties who I now insist

Should walk abreast and share their passioned thoughts.

The wasted time endured should be turned ‘round

Now that these kindred spirits have been found.

Bookshelf

The supposed violation of his word

in my heartless breast and burning brain

the vague contour had filled out:

It is not dream of mine.

It slept like a dead one.

There was no one and little to be understood,

“She listened in silence,

by the way.” It’s in blank verse, not free verse

I vanish and am seen no more.

I can not live with you

here in the States, they would have been trash.

February 9

Shower

After the curtain is pulled back,

the water falls and I am hesitant to enter

I began this but did not commit:

Clean me.

Clean my body.

Clean everything.

What have I done so far?

Slept with someone else?

Transformed my body with drugs?

For evil thoughts?

Am I in the hands of God now?

Let these mindless acts clean the outside of my body.

Let the warm waters make my exterior

worn down

smooth, clean

unblemished

my insides will follow.