Hang on, baby
Sickness has made you understand time has its limits. Carlos Raul DufflarSickness has made you understand
time has its limits
Your sickness has made me
understand time
has its limits, its indignities
its imperialismsunderstand the violent unending insult
in my assurance hang on baby
just hang on with no intention of even
pretending to know the measure
of the expanse of time I expect
you to go on grasping grasping
for time’s limit
Click here to see this poem with the proper lines and spacing Wind
Wind
The long and winding road
winding winds all the way to
unwind all the way to
winds blow, blow winds blow
away
ye merry lassies
get your brooms get ‘em out
we’ll ride the wind tonight
Ride the windup
ride the winding wind
all the way to
unwind rewind dewind upwind of
the Salem downwind of
Three Mile Island the wind here
will be toxic no matter
which way it winds wind, wind, windup
this great global clock, winddown
the revving of a billion engines winding up to
pillage ten billion acres, poison black sludge winding
down to the river to the sea where winding winds blow
it all the way to me
where I’ll close the window against the wind,
wind my way down the stairs to watch the weather
channel and wonder whether today I am downwind
or upwind of the poisons riding their winding winds
Winding wind, blow me blow me blow me away
away ye merry lassies
get your brooms get’em out
we’ll rind the wind tonight
Overheard on NPR today, the phrase “prosecute pedophile priests.” And who could not, in that moment of the alliterating P’s, hear this?
The Vatican protects a pack of pedophile priests
A pack of priestly pedophiles the Vatican protects.
If the Vatican protects a pack of pedophile priests,
How many Popes have preyed among the priestly pedophiles?
12
At 12 years old it took 12 days to find
her body in the dumpster. 12 times
she’d texted him; he said he’d sell her, cheap,
new gears for her BMX bike. The details of what he did
are none of your business. Death is more than the pornography of the coroner’s
report
after the first commercial break of every CSI episode. What I care about is
that bike, that girl on that bike, that girl who loved
the speed and the dust and who couldn’t conceive that a boy offering parts
didn’t care about the bike, not even enough
to hide it well. She loved that bike. Is it possible she knows
he didn’t break
it,
didn’t harm
it,
that her father cleaned it carefully and hung it on the pegs in her room, adorned
with her gloves and knee pads? No helmet hanging there yet;
the electric blue one she always wore on her head,
which they keep trying to force me to
bury her
without.
What I care about is not her death,
but his. It haunts me, how he died. How her bike, tossed into
a woodchipper, became a half million splinters of steel, how I bought
a bamboo tube just long enough at the garden store, how I texted him the
offer of
a blow job—Ha!—and then gave him one, tying his wrists, ripping down his
pants, blowing
those splinters hard into his penis, his balls and how when
the blood flowed
it occurred to me that her blood might have been also once there so how I
cut it off, how I hooked the tube to an air compressor and how the steel
fragments sank
so easily into his belly, his chest, his neck, his face. How I considered,
before he died,
shoving his own porcupine of a penis into his own ass, but didn’t because
I couldn’t figure out the logistics of its limpness.
What I care about is how this doesn’t bring her back and how now her bike
is gone, too. She loved that bike. In those long 12 days I painted this picture of
her racing,
to show the cops, to show the media, to drag her safely back home to me
behind
each brush stroke. I painted this picture, and I shoved it in his face and I let his
blood
rush down onto it and I saw what I had made and I pronounced it good, on the
evening
and the morning
of the 13th day.
Imposition
a steady
falling
ofa leaf brilliant scarlet
long beforea time
for every purpose
buta heaven
08/06
Ring around the rosies
Pockets full of posies
Ashes ashes
We allRing around the pockets
Full of the
Ashes ashes
All fall ashes
All fall down around
The rosies all around
The posies all around the
Ashes ashes
Falling downAshes ashes
All falls down
After feeling less than inspired to start NaPoMo’s Poem a Day Challenge, I saw a great post about creating poems by taking pictures of words in the world around us. (See: National Poetry Month Phone Poets Project)
Not quite up for that, I was struck by the idea of pulling words I see in my city and using them as writing prompts for poems. So here’s my first offering, from a sign at a church near my office.
Reconciliation
The bowling ball has reconciled with the lane
and the pins but is not reconciled to
the sweating unwashed fingers
The pins will never reconcile with
the ball nor the bowler nor the
pinsetter. The lane knows it would be nothing
without the gutters and the gutters and the lane
are not reconciled to the invention of
the bumpers.
The balls and the pins and the lanes are reconciled
to or with the bowlers, depending.
The bowlers are in general reconciled to
the whim of the lanes and pins
but have not been reconciled with
each other since The Incident
when Mr. Last Year’s Champion grabbed
the ass of Mrs. Trying To Be This Year’s Champion, causing
her ball to be reconciled to the gutter.
After six months of silence between the men’s
and women’s league, silence that travels from
Waverly Bowl to home and back again, there is
some talk of making
peace but none yet
of a formal reconciliation.
But even this in its way will come. Like any
relationship that yearns to last longer
than anger, these combatants
will learn to make
peace with
reconciling with and without reconciling
to and next season the men’s
and women’s leagues will bowl on
different nights and in five years this
will be tradition and not evidence of how
life needs neither forgiveness nor
reconciliation and yet
goes on and goes on forgetting how good
either would feel.
Two sections of my long poem “Wanting A Gun” are included in the new anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence
Women Write Resistance
Readings by local authors from the anthology are springing up all across the country—stay tuned for information about upcoming events in Philadelphia!
Meanwhile, you watch a clip of poet Barbara Salvatone reading the two sections of “Wanting a Gun” here:
Draft 2
Another day, another woman’s body found
bound, it’s reported, and strangled and set ablaze.
Bound, it’s reported, sharpening the gruesome details
with every repetition, adding next the rope around the neck
and after the rope around the neck the report that
the body was still smoldering when the dog walker found it.
The body, the it, that the dog walker found while looking for
the woman, the woman who had had a life,
the woman who had had a life and a dog, and a dog walker
whose own life will never be the same
for whose life could be the same after going to meet a woman
and finding a body strangled and bound and burned?
Switch gears—whose life could be the same after going to meet a woman
and leaving behind a body strangled and bound and burned?
He strangled her, he reported, and then bound her body
and set it ablaze but he didn’t mean to he just snapped.
Draft 1
Another day, another woman’s body found
bound, they report, and strangled and set ablaze.
Bound, they report, sharpening the gruesome details
with every repetition, adding the rope around the neck
and with the rope around the neck they add
that the body was still smoldering when the dogwalker found it.
The body, the it, that the dogwalker found while looking for
the woman, the woman who had had a life,
the woman who had had a life and a dog, and a dogwalker
whose own life will never be the same
for whose life could be the same after going to look for a woman
and finding a body strangled and bound and burned?
Strangled, bound, burned—how the pornography of violence
substitutes the description of the body for the depth of the life,
how the details of the body’s death become more glamorous than the life,
how the news staff knows the ratings will spike with certain lead-ins,
how certainly the lead-in body bound ablaze stay tuned will spike
interest in seeing what pictures might follow. Admit it, aren’t you curious?
Curious, how we learned to want to see the pictures, how after the camera
came along we learned to require photographic evidence of our bodies
This Frenzy 
