A Poem with a lot of Symbolism
In my hands rests two resurrected
chickens each with three heads
& a tail of a cow. Each head has
seven eyes. One is a human. One
is laughing.
In my hands rests two resurrected
chickens each with three heads
& a tail of a cow. Each head has
seven eyes. One is a human. One
is laughing.
Hosting alone and hating it
I stay in the peach-walled room half-listening,
Half-shocked at the stories and their theme:
“Ways people ruin their lives.”
Like this: a woman decides she’ll do a ride-along with a cop
Who then gets shot and she gets seen.
She has to go into witness protection
With her three children and new names and a new city.
When yes there you are in your dressy clothes,
Home early surprise and my face lifts and my voice
At the happiness of you of you of you.
The happiness of you.
one hundred six blooms
just beyond the fence
typically thirty-four
petals per field daisy
you can do the math
pluck each white flower
you can take a photograph
no one will dispute the facts
the answer’s always even
but in the end she loves me
I think of you for the first time
in 30 miles
when I feel it, the sting
of a Lone Star tick
clamped steadfastly
in my gut.
How long he had traversed my body
to arrive here–had survived
the Rock Creek rapids, the choking smoke
of three campfires,
had lurked while I bumbled
over way points, blowdowns.
Only now, on my first rest day,
after draining blisters and icing
swollen tendons, do I notice it,
wriggling in me–
flexing like a muscle.
Plucking it, I wonder how long
the swollen welt
will linger,
how many times I will dig them out
before I walk the trail
unafraid.
Poem 9, June 9
There are stories
There are stories about my sister’s house
being haunted by Aunt Rose
& a demonic presence with no name.
There are stories in Oak Grove, Kentucky
about the spirit of a wife, forever walking a bridge
seeking answers as to why her husband,
a soldier, killed her and their child.
There are no stories about an abandoned
Kentucky cemetery in Clinton County,
but there is a picture of a soldier taken in the cemetery
early on a clear day. The soldier wears a uniform
from the War of 1812. He leans on his musket,
unaware, perhaps, that it is 2015.
There is a tradition that the first poetry was a story
& that each of us is an unfinished poem.
The love lines of your hand
as it slipped into mine,
your sensibility, passed to me like a folded fifty,
brought us both luck.
The wheel watched trees die and moons wax
your assurances were ready
should the stars shock space into a question mark.
A load of timber falling off a semi
A bird strike in the engine of an airplane
A syringe of air plunged into a vein
We met your family at Shoney’s afterwards
and decided to honeymoon in Pittsburgh.
Now every day I listen to your chest and wipe your face,
my hands never warm from the Convent lace around us
or the hanging dinner plates and Christmas balls
that I watch, a quarter mile down the road when
I arrive, soon to be with you.
Faster than he chooses his socks for the day
my spouse edits my poems.
More than a quarter century ago
he surprised me with his gumption,
as, unasked, he edited my wedding vows.
Yet he baffles me with questions
about whether he should run today or tomorrow,
paralyzed by the alternatives.
Also amazing is how he turns something out of nothing–
related, perhaps, to the way he embroiders a story
until it bears no resemblance to the truth.
His own poems take weeks, if not months,
to complete. My poems are a different story.
Upon this one, for example, he bestowed new vitality
in a matter of minutes!
They’re both clearly kicking writtens.
Muhammad regards Jesus as an O.G.,
but knows that he can beat him
deep down. He just has to prove it
now that the omnipotent d.j. dropped
the timeless beat. Muhammad starts right
off relentlessly going for Jesus’s family
jewels, with utter disregard for the shrinkage
factor. Muhammad follows that by rhyming about
how he split the moon only after he moonwalked
on water, how he turned water into Everclear,
and how the real holy spirit ate
Jesus’s cake at The Last Supper.
Removing his crown of thorns
out of shame or respect,
Jesus looks finished in the throes
of thrown tomatoes, but quickly cuts
down his clouded mind’s will
to let the crucifix cross
it again. With just a couple swift verbal
jabs in the form of Hail Marys,
Jesus has gotten the crowd back
showing their approval with oohh,
uuhh, and wooo noises while he rhymes
about how Muhammad bit
his style, how real he’ll always
keep it, and about not getting
the socialist principles stitched
to his skull twisted.
Every time Jesus disses him,
Muhammad flashes his sword,
but Jesus just won’t stop spitting
those blue flames
because he was born
to die, and has come back
from such defeats. Jesus says
he only wanted to cipher up,
even though everyone knows he’s more
than aware of the sky’s need
for battlers. He and Muhammad take
turns looking up to the firmament
then down to earth
so no one can see
the blood in their eyes.
Their tongues share the same
crutches: bringing up their Daddy
issues and how much they get lifted
because of it. But when they flow
like Styx, who could doubt
that they’re both killin’ it?
Who won, who
lost, that all depends
on who
you want
to believe.
