Category Archives: Poetry

On The Way To The Library

On The Way to the Library

Two oily crows play chicken with idling cars
at the traffic light. Inches
from a tire, the birds jackhammer
gray pavement for a smashed tidbit.
This is their only task,
to eat six times
one’s weight every day, even
if that meal sits on a four-lane
boulevard. One crow grabs
a prize hunk and rises
with helicopter wings, landing
on the crosswalk light.
The other pecks and pecks again,
unaware of the thrumming metal
bull looming next to it.
The light changes. I drive past.

Cat Nap

Cat Nap

The cat comes
on little fog feet
sneaking toward me
lying prone. She
heaves her body
onto the ottoman
moves to my thigh
her paws pressing
into my flesh.
She bursts into a
roar of purring
kneads my stomach
and ample breasts
reliving kittenhood
memories of suckling
finally settling
herself across me
pats my cheek
and closes her eyes.

Quenchable

Quenchable

A toothless pinecone sits abandoned
on a tan patch of crispy grass
that serves as a lawn.
Pointed brown pine needles
long enough to knit with tangle
among singed ivy leaves in cemented
dirt. I sit at a sun-bleached
table, scrawling on a dry page
inked with a Rorschach tea stain.
The earth is sullen.
September. Everything not
artificially watered sits parched,
patient, dormant, waiting for
autumn rains that will make roots
gasp with relief. Soon dust and water
will meet, mingle, dance in rivulets.
Gullies of debris will rush to the
sewer to merge with the bay.
Magician rain will vanish smog.
Crumpled tissue mountains will
bloom emerald green, cloaked with
clouds and adorned with shafts of
sunlight. The sky, no longer a
one-dimensional flat blue, will
carry chilly news of the coming
season, a season to replenish.
We are so thirsty. So ready.

Rush Hour

Rush Hour

The gray man in the next lane over
digs into his nose, oblivious
to the fact that there are six lanes
of witnesses to his nasal excavation.

The bumper in front of me touts peace
and the sun winks through a crystal
pendant hanging from the rearview mirror
while a leather-tanned hand dangles
out the window flicking cigarette ash.

Somewhere behind me the air
is punctuated by the seismic bass
thump of some cholo’s rap music.
Words are garbled but I can feel
the beat in my bones as Dr. Dre
and Snoop serenade us.

To my left a sleek black Beamer
shelters a woman who appears
to be talking to no one. Then
she tucks her hair behind her ear
and I see the earpiece. She’s not
insane (yet).

A Little Desire

A Little Desire

His kisses like cotton candy
melting quickly, barely touching my lips.

I devour them.

His fingers stroke the nape of my neck.
A chord of need rang through me,
vibrating up from between my legs,

snaking around my hips,
winding through my lips, impaling me.
I fell
away from myself, turned
inside out,

inhaled,

and floated away.

Still Life

Still Life

Two weary oranges sit in a cracked
wooden bowl. In California there
is always a navel to contemplate,
but I have abandoned these dimpled globes
for sexier fruit.

They have company. Three bananas
lean against the curved belly
of the bowl, their sunny skins thinning
into a melanoma of ripeness.
The air is sweet with ruination.

In the rotting fruit, decadence born
of carelessness and disconnection. Looking
closer, the brown hands that cut, plucked,
sorted and packed, worked
many hours for few dollars. Dusty hands,
scraped and cracked like the bowl.
—
This poem is a result of an exercise suggested by Jack Martin.

A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk

A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk

Each day brims with dots rivaling the stars
and bursts. Millions pursue me as I await
penetration, integration, creation.

A dot is an adventure contained
within infinite boundaries.
The mystery blooms, the line emerges: here,
a rigid, attentive marching row of Marines,
there a meandering rivulet of rain,
sometimes wavering and shaking like a drunk,
other times oozing blood-viscous. The hand

takes no heed of the mind’s instruction. It is a
wayward teenager determined to discover itself.

We walk slowly over the page; it is meditation,
a masterpiece of attention.

We whirl, sometimes a writhing orgy of squiggles,
sometimes a jagged clash of angles. Each journey,
unrepeatable.

Sensate

Sensate

Mid-night I rise to pee, my feet shocked
awake by chill tile, the cold making
my arms like sandpaper.

Then I return to the warm cocoon bed
next to you, and melt again into sleep,
grateful.

—
I’ve written nothing since mid-April, and I could not abide allowing May to pass without my writing something, however lame.

My encounter with a poetry forum inhibited my willingness to play with words, made me overly conscious. While poetry is a difficult craft, something to become skilled at, this awareness made me stop completely, rather than strive to improve. So here is a small poem.

I Gots Nothin’

There will be no poem tonight. My brain is too full, there’s no room to move around. It’s late, I’ve got nothing to say, nothing at the ready. Sorry teacher, the cat ate my homework.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hanging out at an online poetry workshop that is chock full of incredible resources. They have clear rules about which level of forum one should post to and stringently enforce them. They do not suffer fools, and they don’t sugar-coat feedback. If a poem is trite, cliched, and generally weak, the feedback is honest and specific, and many times ruthless. I’ve been lurking in the higher-level forums and see how good some of the work is. And the critiques! They are truly thorough and at a level I’m nowhere near to provide. So I’m feeling a bit intimidated, a little pale, as I look at what I’ve written so far.

This, combined with the fact I have work I took home and am resisting… Nope, nothing tonight.

American Dream

American Dream

Banks pepper us with plastic,
feed our indwelling greed —
we risk our well-being
to barter for glitter,
gorge on obsolescence.
Too many are willing
to forfeit the future,
surrender their power —
it’s just paper, they say —
in exchange for their fix,
allaying the craving
for more, yet more, and more.

—
Poem #11 for NaPoWriMo

This poem is built on the scaffold of Stephen Burt’s After Callimachus. I also found this of interest:

In “After Callimachus (4)” Burt invokes Eudemus, the Greek astronomer and mathematician, who pared back his life in order to avoid debt—which came with mortal penalty. … Burt is taking contemporary America to task (through showing parallels to our esteemed Athenian friends). … In (4) [he] raises his critical hackles by reminding Americans that in another time, debt came with the penalty of death, yet with Americans taking on more and more debt (and the Congress voting to raise the debt ceiling for the government again just this week), Burt is slyly pointing at what Kevin Phillips in his new book American Theocracy calls one of the three most clear and present dangers facing America today, American indebtedness.

—THE GREAT AMERICAN PINUP: STEPHEN BURT—PARALLEL PLAY

Poetry Tidbit

My dream trip will blow me
into a moon lake
and girls pant as
they lie under the summer sky
while hot winds moan lightly.

—
#9 for NaPoWriMo — a puzzle piece for another poem sometime. Have had a very low energy, inarticulate day. Partly angry with a slight chance of depressed. Feh.

Poor Nineteen

Poor Nineteen

I did it because I could not sleep,
had not slept for several nights.

The air was cold as plate glass;
breathing, like death by garrote.
Clouds hissed and spat oblivion.

He lingered a few feet down the aisle
by the hair products. I did it because I was laid off
from my dead-end job.

I promised myself that I would only do it this once.
In a world where I had nothing, felt smothered.
The bleat of the register kept time to the whine of Muzak.
A clerk rang up my purchase: a can of mousse.
In my gut, a tingled warning; he materialized
a few feet from the door, sidled up to me, pressed
his hand on my arm:
“I believe you put something in your purse. Nytol.”

I did it because I was choking.

Rains Unceasing

Rains Unceasing

The rains unceasing fatten
streams into rivers, choke
the planted fields. Satiated
earth burps a sinkhole on
Highway One at Devil’s
Slide. City streets become
quickwater, and black
umbrellas weave over the
sidewalks like vesper bats
veering toward home.
Panhandlers carry their
soggy lives in shopping
carts; even the homeless
cling to commodity. In
broad gray daylight a
man pisses on an
overpass pillar, heedless
of those stoics waiting at
the corner for the next bus.

—
Poem #8 for NaPoWriMo