Tag Archives: NaPoMo

April 14th – Pain poem #3

Posted on by
Reply

After pain has taken you


After pain has taken you, conquered you, kidnapped you,
drug you over the border, forced you to beg
to be converted to that region’s religion

you can never fully escape. After you’ve been there,
even only once, your body will betray you
so stunningly easily: one twitch, one cramp, a single
bright shadow when you blink an eye

and the border police have you, your own language
now alien to you, your body bending in a devotion
revolting to you but so familiar, so known.
If you escape, return home

people around you may say only, you look
so tired, but your dog will sniff you,
hackles raised, sensing you are not the same,
will never be the same again.

Grace – rewrite

Posted on by
Reply

Grace

Not divine, not rare, perhaps unexpected,
not unearned—
our brightest courage shone back at us.

She learned to trust by trusting this horse,
hurtling together over fences and walls

and when Rosie died, she found, when her own knees
refused to push her up from the barn floor,

hands, so many hands, reaching for her. Rosie’s friends,
people who paused at the pasture nearly every day,

people she had never suspected, stopping their cars to say
I’m sorry, she was so beautiful, we loved her.

Grief thrusts a rigid laundry basket of bricks
into our arms. Grace stretches stranger’s hands to pluck

some of them, to make bearable the crippling bulk.
Old wives tell the truest tales—a shared load is lighter.

So light it can come to shine out
nearly as bright as spring sunshine

across a chestnut mare’s back.

April 12 – a poem for Alexine

Posted on by
Reply

Grace

Neither divine nor rare, perhaps unexpected,
rarely unearned, Grace

is our brightest courage shone back at us.

She learned to trust by trusting the horse
hurtling both of them over fences and walls.

And when Rosie died, she found, in her grief, she was
not alone. Rosie’s friends, people who came to the pasture,

people she had never suspected, stopped their cars to say
I’m sorry, she was so beautiful, we loved her.

Grace, too, is how the cumulative weight of these
awkward laundry baskets of bricks grief thrusts
into arms after arms is lighter

than gravity’s unbearable bulk each, separately,
knows could not be borne.

So light it can come to shine out
nearly as brightly as spring sunshine

on a chestnut mare’s back.

April 10th – I’m always trying to explain the world

Posted on by
Reply

I’m always trying to explain the world


such a sham!        when I can’t explain
even the simplest things
like for example gravity, everything
always falling, falling
and I can’t begin to say why

when I was a child I believed I could fly
if only for one instant I could forget to fall

which should have been easy, considering all
I have forgotten       for several years I forgot
to breathe, forgot who was supposed to answer
when my name was called

forgot how my tongue moved to say home

forgot hundreds of the slowest hours of speech
therapy       staring into mirrors, hands gripping my jaw,
holding my lips open       like this   like this

such reversion back
to my youngest self       a world of menacing shadows
I could begin to banish      if I could remember how
to shape my mouth to say their names

April 11 – found poem, NYTimes follow-up story

Posted on by
1

Megan Waterman, 22; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25; and Amber Lynn Costello, 27


vanished drew little or no notice—prospect of a serial killer
four more bodies—that changed

Shannan Gilbert, 24, a prostitute but much more
aspiring actress oldest daughter of Mari Gilbert

Mari Gilbert said police failed to take her seriously until
Long Island’s latest serial-killer case

Look at them: throwaway, margins, anonymous, addiction,
invisible, vulnerable, prey

[average age girls enter prostitution: 13]

estrangement from their families

[57% of prostitutes report sexual abuse as children,
by an average of 3 perpetrators]

few notice

Joel Rifkin, an unemployed landscaper, 17 prostitutes
Robert Shulman, a former postal worker, 5 prostitutes
Kendall L. Francois, 8 prostitutes
Gary Ridgway, 48 prostitutes:

I picked prostitutes because I could kill as many of them as I wanted

Evidence: brush and grassy dunes, bodies of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of murdered prostitutes — women, men and transgender people

Message: “They should be very careful with their contacts”

April 9th – a Beloit prose poem

Posted on by
Reply

a revision, because the first ending was far too simple.

On the 4th day of Bio 101,
Elliott batTzedek

sitting in a hall with more students than my entire high school the professor read to us from a medical journal update about the first person to have died of tetanus in the U.S. in many years. “She was poor, rural,” he said, then read from an article about it, “she’d stepped on a fishing hook in her back yard and when her leg became infected and swollen she had not sought medical attention. Neighbors and friends reported that she felt that her foot was a long way from her heart and that Jesus would save her.”

Laughter from all around the hall.

4th day lesson object attained – the triumph of scientific, logical reason over ignorance and out dated belief systems.

Her name was Hazel Miner. She was 48. She left behind her husband Harold and her son Eugene who loved her. Her backyard had tools and fishing gear and hunting gear scattered everywhere, for they were a busy, self-sufficient family. Her house was small, but the kitchen door was always open for neighbors to sit and have Sanka. On the floor between the small living room and kitchen was a Charlie The Tuna rug which I had loved to play on when my mom brought me three houses down the block to visit.

She belonged to my Grandma Dorothy’s church.

I didn’t go to her funeral last week because I was here, in Chamberlin, in Bio 101, in my semi-elite private liberal arts college.

8th day lesson object attained—I was smart enough to get in, but I could only belong here if I became ashamed of who I’d been. Which was easy—I hated that church with all its bigotry and hatred of others, I hated the racism, the fear of anyone or anything different that defined that little town, I hated that no one there seemed to care about Bigger Things, I was learning that I ought to hate the food, the music, and those short nasal vowels that hang there for second and second in the middle of a word.

I needed to belong here. I did not yet get that my being ashamed of them did not mean these new peers would ever see me as one of us.

April 8th – A Poem in the Stead of Killing My Coworkers

Posted on by
Reply

A Poem in the Stead of Killing My Coworkers
Elliott batTzedek

All I want to say to everyone and everything is
Get the fuck away from me!

Hardly the stuff of poetry.
But why not? It is the most primal

human emotion, older than love,
more visceral than hunger.

It was Get the fuck away from me!, not estrus
not drought, not the invention of iron smelting, that

brought us migration, boats, weapons, and wheels.
And fire too, I suppose, for what denotes Respect

my personal space! more clearly than flames
and hot coals on the end of big stick?

This brain is on fire and this poem
is a big stick so don’t even consider

getting any closer.

Not today. Not until someone
cleans up this damn mess.

April 5th – found poem, New York Times

Posted on by
7

Long Island barrier beach, Monday,
Found poem from New York Times 4/5/2011

remains of three more people
bringing number to eight
[not people but]
missing prostitutes.

Grim December, bodies of four
female prostitutes, a fifth
last Tuesday.

Authorities would not speculate
about the identities;
four, in their 20s, advertised
on Craigslist.

Eyewitnesses, phone records, budget hotels.

Police began last year the search for
Shannan Gilbert, 24, prostitute
who went missing last May.

None of the bodies were hers.

Melanie Englert, 34, driving from work, saw investigators
unloading big cardboard boxes, said “Oh boy, it’s
super shocking.

Brendan Byrne, 36, who lives near, texted
“They’re in our backyard. Literally.”

April 4th – Pain Poem #2

Posted on by
Reply

It is not the body pain destroys
Elliott batTzedek


The pain that waits, crouching
around every corner, the pain
you once tried to fool by living
in a round house, the pain that comes
from no one place, that was waiting for you
inside you, when you were born

this is the pain that destroys you

Not your body

You

When it lunges, ensnarls you,
throws the rancid black hood over your head

you are done for

And you know it

But your body goes on, it drags you to the toilet
to the kitchen, to the door to let out the dog,
to the truck, to your mother’s, its mouth says
“It’s not a good day, but I’ll be okay”, its leg will carry
a bruise from the bench in the garage

which, when the pain retreats, you will discover
and wonder at, another incident, another fact,
another day rendered from you

April 3rd – Pain Poem #1

Posted on by
Reply

Sue has been living through really awful pain and as one way of coping asked me to try to start writing about the pain, all of its varieties and intensities. Writing gives me something to do when I see her suffering and don’t have much else to do, so I’m trying to find words for experiences that are very much outside of spoken language.

Pain Poem #1

cells slamming into cells
honing every edge
to blades that cut each other
open and you must wait
20 minutes for the vicodin
to begin to block the pain but know
every cell in your body will be shredded
oozing cytosol in 2 minutes,
and you will have to feel
your body disintegrating for 1080 seconds,
and you begin to count:

one thousand one, one thousand two , one thousand three