Tag Archives: my poems

Poem a day #24 Saturday Afternoon Nap

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Saturday Afternoon Nap

beep beep beep
your oven is preheated you can cook now

beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep
your coffee is brewed and hot

beeeeeep
beeeeeep
your clothes are dry

beep beep beep
if you don’t make dinner you’ll be sorry

beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep
just how are you going to function without a second cup?

beeeeeep
beeeeeep
you wouldn’t want your clothes to wrinkle now would you?

beep beep beep
wasting energy will destroy the planet!

beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep
do you think I’m just sitting here waiting for you?

beeeeeep
beeeeeep
your work shirts are puckering! get down here now!
beep beep beep
is there a problem young lady?
beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep
I won’t keep this warm forever you know
beeeeeep
beeeeeep
I’m only going to warn you so many times
beep beep beep
beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep
beeeeeep
beeeeeep
beepbeepbeepbeepitybeepitybeepitybeepitybeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
beepbeepbeepbeepitybeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepbeepitybeepitybeepity
beepbeepitybeepitybeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepbeepitybeepitybeepbeep

Poem a day #23 Missing Minnesota

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Another Emily-inspired poem, again stealing a first line from her.

_________

Missing Minnesota

Blazing in gold and quenching in purple
Minnesota sunsets stretch
Hudson Bay to Oaxaca
Rocky Mountains to tropopause,
light stratified by the lust
of prairie for heaven,
bright sky breaking open—
purplelavenderorangepinkyelloworangered
color volume amping up as sky
darkens around a semi-circle center,
searingred, balanced on a strip of gold,
pushed—finally—out of the day
by the weight of the hush of the night.

I’ve seen the sun set over Cape May,
Key West, Big Sur, Laguna Beach
the Western Alps, the San Rafael Swell
and the Galapagos, several of these
daily accompanied by fanfare and flags
cruise ships and applause, and all
have made me miss Minnesota—
prairie, high desert, Superior,
Boundary Waters, 10,000 lakes’
dreams refracted May to September
through prisms of brown pelicans and red pines,
sky’s dreams captured October to April,
pulled to earth to drift through days,
to remind us that even at 4:30 pm
and 40 below Minnesota sunsets cry Praise me!
pausing time until we too pause
to cry Glory, Glory, Glory.

Poem a day #22 I felt my life with both my hands

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another Emily-inspired poem. Read her text here. Singer/songwriter Carla Bruni performs a setting of the poem on her album No Promises. You can sample that here.

____________________
I felt my life with both my hands

I felt my life with both my hands
though it had been—years
How civilized it was, though warm—
the glacier—booming—as it cracked.
Silent—I’d thought—for listening’d
stopped. My ear—now—to my
own chest—the humming
one thousand acres clover—
a bee on every bud.

Poem a day #21 They shut me up in prose

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Another first line taken from Emily Dickinson. You can find her original, with excellent manuscript notes, here. Her poem keeps haunting me; it could have been written yesterday, and makes Emily real to me in a way she hadn’t been up til now.

__________________________________

They shut me up in prose

They shut me up in prose
With essay—gagged—theory
bogging my mind—my voice
stilled by easy praise

With syllables—I picked locks
with lines—unsyntaxed—
freedom—nothing
left to lose

A single sound—ah or
unh— a window
A single word—treason—
an open portal—to I

Poem a day #20 Before I got my eyes put out

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I’ve been reading a lot of Emily Dickinson, and have been astounded by the power of her first lines. She has a way of kicking open a door and bursting into the room guns blazing. Wow. (And if that doesn’t jive with the myth of Emily The Lonely Scribbler you’ve been fed, go and read right now!) I’m working on using some of those lines as writing prompts. This one is far from finished, just a fragment, really, but I’m out of time and must move on for now.

_____________________________

Before I got my eyes put out

Before I got my eyes put out
wars blazed in raging glory,
hi-def videos of surgical strikes,
dead insurgents and cluster bombs.
And now? I’ve learned to fine-tune
focus just behind the screen.

Before I got my tongue cut off
words spilled out like candy went in,
sweet or bitter—a matter of choice.
I don’t miss speaking, for I can write,
but how I crave the smooth and sweet
of ice cream and my lover’s cunt.

Tomorrow, without hands, what I’ll
miss most is scratching an itch, or so
I’ve read in the testimony of men,
women, and children mutilated.
I think I’ll miss writing most, mute
without hands or tongue or eyes.

I expect my imagination to press on,
gasping like a severed head,
for a startling amount of time. Even
silenced it could change the world—
except it shrivels, unshared, grinding
down to single sounds and then

Poem a day #19 “What do you want, Elliott?” she asks

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“What do you want, Elliott?” she asks

bigger greater longer beyond

alive-with legion lavish vast
teeming myriad unbounded

as-well-as exceeding in-excess-of
furthermore likewise moreover withal

gobs heaps oodles scads
passel peck slew sky-high
lousy-with wads galore umpteen
jam-packed mucho jillion zillion

immoderate inordinate rife
overboard overkill enhanced undue

commodious copious profuse
exorbitant plenteous profligate
astronomically incalculably more

Poem a day #18 With Practice, Drowning Gets Easier

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With Practice, Drowning Gets Easier

With practice, drowning gets easier.
At first you welcome the unconsciousness
that protects you from the moment when
the water expulses the breath from your lungs.

With practice, you can stay awake
to know what happens next, how your
body, heavy now with two hydrogens
for every oxygen, begins to sink.

How your mind is aware, how you could
describe how this felt, as guillotined heads
could talk for up to twenty seconds,
if only you were not alone.

With practice, you ride the wave
of air as it leaves your mouth, rest
on a rock, observe how your arms
keep reaching for the closing surface,

how your legs, straight-jacketed by
your skirt and slips, despise you now
for being born a woman, how the beat
of your heart sends circles of ripples

that hours too late will lead him to
the body now floppy as the doll never made
for the child who will never be born.
Your little one! You reach back to yourself

knowing she could yet breathe, so float
and be found, if you could get her out,
but the only rocks are too dull to cut,
and the faint bruise you leave on your belly

will be dismissed as evidence of nothing.
Knowing she may only now
be gasping her first surprised gasp,
you flee downstream on a trout. The sea

when you arrive is deeper than death,
and pulls you apart, thought by thought,
until each bit of sorrow is
smaller than salt in the finest spray.

You learn to condense and direct the drops,
follow him and fall as warm rain.
All he plants will thrive even as
he goes on shriveling in the drought of your loss.

Poem a day #17 What I Know about Loving at 47

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What I Know About Loving at 47

No pop song or novel or poem
or prose or lecture or prayer,
no advice ever given
has prepared you for falling
in love.

Nothing in the universe
entire has prepared you
for falling
out of love.

“Falling” is a wildly inadequate word
for how love colonizes your mind
and your body, floods your brain
with chemicals, presses your lungs
into service as bellows
for its own fires.

Biologically speaking, love may be
no different from a parasitic
wasp yet how I’ve begged
to be stung, shocked into
that mysterious moment
when every emotion is fed through
a meat grinder and comes out
as love sausage—
that moment, each time, when
the Big Bang echoes in our minds
disguised as an original idea.

Desire and lust may be the swing
on the front porch of love’s
country house, or the brambled path
to its outhouse, the only difference being
whether your ass is covered or bare
when you sit down to do
what needs to be done.

Having loved means being able to hurt
in ways you won’t want to survive
because surviving means you are done
with the loving.

The more vast your love the more you
will hurt your love the more you will
be unable to say you are sorry though
you are, you are—a three-sided vortex
that is the origin of the myth
of the Bermuda Triangle.

Never ever ever ever ever ever ever love
somebody more than you love
yourself. Good luck on that.

Do not let experience or knowledge
or lesbian feminist anti-colonialist
anti-parasite anti-sausage cynicism
stop the sway or get in the way of the need
for love’s gravitational tug.
Carry a tow chain in one hand, a tide chart
in the other, leave the life vest
on the shore, dive in. With practice
drowning gets easier, and I practice now
every day.

Poem a day #16 This Great Upheaval of During

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This Great Upheaval of During*
1.2

during the season of my discontent
during the spring of blue rain
during the summer between corn and husk
during the gale force affair

during the winter spent whetting knives
during the borderline prime
during the fortnight I could do no wrong
during the parable of mine

during the tunnel between dusk and dawn
during the strangling want
during the recoil to a New England mill
during the urge to declaim

during remorse like a slap to the head
during rue like a prayer
during regret, lesion and balm
during resolve like a sieve

during the pain
during the game
during the maim
during the bane
during the feign
during the dame

______________________

*Title is a line from the article “The Estrogen Dilemma”
by Cynthia Gorney

Poem a day #15 Found Poem in Explanation of Events Beginning October 2007

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if there is a lyric poem inside every narrative poem, isn’t there also a lyric poem inside of an essay? At least inside of a well-written essay, the pleasure of which is the combination of the well-researched opinion and the exceptionally good writing? It’s a theory, as is the Timing Hypothesis Cynthia Gorney explores in her wonderful article in the New York Times Magazine

Found Poem In Explanation of Events
Beginning Approx. October 2007
From the article “The Estrogen Dilemma”
by Cynthia Gorney

“Dr. A., do you remember me?”
“I’m so sorry. Should I?”

warring, gesticulating, fluorescent,
reverent, sputtering, fading
Alzheimer’s brains

the timing hypothesis layer of complication
to the current conventional probing,
interrogating, poking—
permitted, distracted,
hallucinatory clashing data
suppositions, mysteries, arbitrarily
coming and going in waves

personal interior chorus of quarreling voices
ferocious hormones
vicious recurring hormonal hiccup

wondrously bland phrasing, explanatory graph,
overlapping lines that peaked and plunged
Climara-surge of industrious scrambling—
some menopausal malady is genuinely making you miserable

daunting influence of a drug industry,
concentrated soup of a pill, conjugated
equine estrogens, vigorous
and sexually satisfactory cardiac events
crank up frantically, crash
and then crank up again
ovaries start atrophying into retirement

this great Upheaval of During

density of dendritic spines,
barbs that stick along the long tails of brain cells
like thorns on a blackberry stem,
chemical solvent sloshed onto rusting metal:
the personal calculus of risk
is an exhausting exercise
phases of life
can unhinge us