Category Archives: NaPoMo

NaNo(inPo)WriMo #23

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Things Only People with Moon Hearts Can Do

promise our love will always wax
                but then again always wane
barely intrude upon your life
                yet in our absence leave you lost

set the menstrual cycle of every woman we shine upon

pour over you most intimately
                from far outside your reach
inspire poetry, love songs, legends, lore
                turn ordinary men to wild howling wolves

bring even the oceans under our sway
turn orange and take your breath away

contradict the calendars of powerful men
watch you promise love to me then back again

NaNo(inPo)WriMo #22 Hard-crust

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22 Hard-crust

I have loved many people in this rush
of decades I must now consider a life

or so I would have said even as late
as yesterday but strip away the fear93143685dc60e225d26251b674dcf45d

of hurting those I never loved
enough and the truth luster-gleams

across a thousand acres of hard-crust
snow on a clear black night

under a low full moon. How can
light be bright and cool, intimate

and vast, unimaginably vast,
regal, near-divine? No matter lies

I had to tell I snuck out to that
field every hard-crust moon fell back

into the snow until my body shook
open my heart exposed its dark

to a light it could bear
without breaking. To everyone

I loved less than I loved lying
there I am sorry. Each heart

is born to beat only so
many times and I gave mine

to the ice and moon. If it was wrong
to let you believe I could return the warmth

you gave, know the pretense was because
I did love you, in my only way.

(note – I found this image on Pinterest. It was unattributed there, but I’m fairly sure it is by a photographer named Veronika Pinke from Germany. If I can find a site where I can buy this photo I will. I’ve never seen another photo that captures just how bright the moonlight is on snow)

NaPoWriMo 13/30 cloud and rain and flow and salt and wave and cloud and rain

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O! Mother Water O! salty womb of sea O! pure daughter
rivers spawning billions of grandchildren with every
bend and flex. O! rivers how you belong
to yourselves how your waters belong
in your ever-reshaping bodies how you are a container
of water in the same way a human body
is container of blood how blood and water
can both be drained and how
these are acts
of murder.

Little fishies little fishies feed on
even littler fishies and then are feed
for bigger fishies a story that goes on forever
no matter where you open its book O! the cloud
and rain and flow and salt and wave and cloud
and rain of the neverending story

With its chapters ripped out and hidden where children
won’t see O! the horrible consonance of dam
and drain O! the body, caged, O! its water sucked
vampirically as salve for hungers huge as
galaxies.

O! Mother Water, O! salty womb of sea, O! grieve
grieve grieve for the bodies of your daughters
drained and left to desiccate for their trillion generations
never to be born.

NaPoWriMo 11/30 Endlings

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Endlings

Endling, Ender, Terminarch, Relict,
Martha, Benjamin, Incas, Celia,
and George oh George oh Lonesome George.
I saw George before he died not because I was
endling gawking but only because
I was there. Gawking.

Galapagos tortoise young
don’t know how to fuck so those
who grow up in cages without elders
without watching adults get it on
will never do it. We have yet to learn,
the naturalist said, how to teach them to want
to breed.

Endling, Ender, Terminarch, Relict!
Get your endlings here, see ‘em quick afore
they be gone! The last of her species the last
of his kind! Last Passenger Pigeon! Last Tasmanian
tiger! Last Carolina Parakeet! Last Pyrenean ibex!
The last won’t last so get in quick!

Minor footnotes, one and all, before a storm of
endlings blows us clean
away. Last large land mammal, last large ocean
one, too. Last smaller-than-a-thumb Pine Barrens
frog. Last North American river without
fracking fluid, last 17 year cicada, others all
paved permanently under, last fluttering
heartbeat of a black-footed ferret.

But look, the sky shadowing, flocks
for miles coming in to feast, millions
of vultures and buzzards and bald-headed
consumers of carrion, population exploding until
they’ve ripped apart every ripened rotted
carcass until they too are fine feathered final
numbers before zero         familiar story but
with no humans left to give the endling turkey vulture
a sweetly sympathetic name. So you

can nominate your favorite name now!
Harold, I suppose, or Maude, or with that bright red head
how about Valentine? Valentine, the Very
Last Vulture. The end of endlings
out with a bang.

NaPoWriMo 10/30 Martha

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10/30

Martha

From 5 billion down to only you
Martha, passenger
from wild to white.

My grandfather said your flocks
took days to fly over dark
the sky with the thick of you
murdered by tall poles thrust into
flight path, momentum of your mass
sliding death by the thousands
down to the waiting
white men. How fun
to count to compete to complete
destruction and head home
for supper.

Of all the animals I
will never know you
Martha
stick in my gut, you
and the crows I did
not grow up with, extinct
from my thousand acres
youth, murdered by another white
male trick. When I was a child, my father said,
they had me climb a tree and steal a baby crow
put it in a cage and make it scream and when
the adult crows flocked in hundreds
to help a dozen men or maybe more
would blast into the black of them
the burn and pop of shotgun shells
rattling.

To every crow I see I call
Cousin, cousin, greetings to you.
Are you cawing murder still? Have you yet
found descendants of survivors
of the Morgan County Massacre?
Reparations, Cousins, take my corn,
my silver, the shiny bright blue
of my father’s young wide eyes.


Martha was the last known Passenger Pigeon. She died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. At her death she was frozen in ice, shipped by train to the Smithsonian, skinned, dissected, and her skin stretched over a mold and mounted for display. Estimates place the Passenger Pigeon population at 3-5 billion before Whites arrived in North America, and the pigeons were slaughtered, in part, as cheap food for people held in slavery.

NaPoWriMo 9/30 Windfall

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Windfall

Found $5
splurged on a latte
thus is the state of my
IRA

Got $600,
just barely had to work,
spent it on flowers put the vet bill
on the card

Granted fifteen thousand bucks
bought myself some time to write
spent it on taking care
of anything else

Begged a billion dollars
to make a new pain drug
now my baby girl is in
a new kind of pain

Won a trillion dollars
spent it on world peace
won’t keep me from dying
poor and alone

NaPoWriMo 7/30 Now obsess

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(with thanks to Gerald Stern for the first two lines. And also the word “dam.” And the endless stream of song lyrics. And letting the sleeping dog lie. Hell – thanks to Gerald Stern for all it, and all of poetry)

Now obsess on the wet kiss,
now obsess on the red knife,
slicing the cucumber cool-cool-cumber

Now obsess on your sliced bliss
now obsess on your green life
and laugh ha-ha though the day be raw

Now obsess on ancient trysts
now obsess on supposed strife
cry me a river and I’ll dam it to hell

Now obsess on not obsessing
now obsess on letting sleeping dogs
lie and rise and fly to their home, faraway home

NaPoWriMo 6/30 Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking

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Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking
comes the sea the sea
the mystery the deep the wild the universe’s
child O sea O source O return
the sea that has given and the sea that will take away
From waters above and waters below a split
a spit of earth then lungs then legs
Out of the sea, endlessly changing
all water, ever, just a rearranging of rain
and river and broad ocean wide
all water, ever, eternal bride with carbon
groom make single cell then ZOOM
giganotosaurus, virus then ZOOM great whales
Out of the atoms, endlessly combining
Out of the seeds, endlessly trying
to reach more sun than other seeds
make more food to store then die to
rise again, O insistent cycles in the face of which
there is no death no final just round again and round
energy to matter, matter to energy, grow and eat,
secrete and rot, out of rot another bloom
Out of the dying, always more dying
and always living in between O
insistent genes O eternal
crap shoot O malformalities that breed
evolutionary wonders O the trillions of billions
of heart beats heart beats heart beats that have beat
upon this spit of earth, in its skies and in its Mother
Sea O oceans O seas O birthing beds of all that is
O endlessly rock, O endlessly cradle the hearts
that beat the sap that rises the seeds that burst
the stone that stays the air that blows the water
that was our first cradle that is home to everything
that can ever be known

NaPoWriMo Guest Poet Dane Kuttler 3/30

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3/30 April ’14
April 3, 2014 at 9:31am

Young People
(a collaborative poem by me and google)

young people working together
young people reject dairy products
young people interested in electronics
young people today is better than young people before
young people children and the elderly in urban poverty in Ghana
young people’s guide to the orchestra
young people’s heroes
young people having fun on the beach

young people reject urban poverty products
young people guide the heroes on the beach
young people today working in elderly
young people is better together
young people’s elderly heroes
young people’s children having dairy
young people’s orchestra guide to electronics