Posts for 2020 (page 181)

The castle is distant, and him without a horse,
faithful lord thwarted; my lover

thought to find a princess
and instead: a lonesome dragon, a stony fortress.

perched on a high branch
a hawk devours a squirrel
blue jays sound the alarm

and when that liquor

slides down the back

of your tongue,

i hope it makes

your stomach burn

the way i used to

I’m done writing letters I’ll never send
Not that I’ve run out of things to say
But the list
My collection of lost recipients
has emptied

Desert within,
old as desert without. 

The man on the pillar
wearing the sack  

and the woman chained  
high in the tree 

are characters
in the same story: 

world breaks
because we break it. 

We break it
because we are broken. 

And the tools we make
are tools for breaking. 

Some look to birds.
Others, the stones. 

Everywhere the look goes
it goes alone.   

Say You are. It is.
Say we were, we will.  

What’s said is a saying,
that’s all one can say. 

This too is known:
that voice is a making.

I’ve seen exactly one photo
Of each or my parents
In the full blossom of youth.  

My mother, posed and pristine,
Dark hair as straight as broom straw,
Falling down her shoulders
And cascading down her back
Like an auburn waterfall.  

She’s smiling.  

When I was a child
And first saw Cher
She reminded me of mom.  

My father, caught candid,
Shirtless and shoeless in jeans
And a cowboy hat,
Scampering across a log
Spanning a small ditch
In some woods somewhere.  

Lynyrd Skynyrd reminded me of him.   

Both photos are years before
The exuberant youths would meet,
Each already deep into the bullshit of life,
Even longer before I appear
To patch the cracks
Snaking through the foundation—

Maybe I was the foundation.  

But there had to be more between
The smiling girl with her waterfall hair
And the shoeless boy
Holding his hat as he tries
To keep his balance.  

A Joke, a look, something unspoken
Or unspeakable
Between two people
That springs the trap
And lashes them together
Until, eventually, 
They chew off their own feet to escape.

Eros offers an antidote to ironic distance
                                                Tony Hoagland

Our social isolation
Words gone to waste in a lingual quarantine
You arrest my readting of NYT
Draw back the blind for light
Put your face an inch from mine
To deliver the fury of your salutation:
It’s June
Step on the pedal of language
Valves knocking pistons rattling
Pharses of sibilant
Sex slinging us forward 
To an ecstatic state of over-heaved
Release.  Please PLEASE fling open
The door to the spores of fun
Be the knight who holds up a forbidden
Fungus for me to inspect
Its sensuous fluted stem its bulbous head
That tickles the rooted part of me
The part of me that grows down
Into the dirt of the earth.
Please bring the blade of your tongue
To the roof of  your mouth and blow
Blow me
Away with your twisted syllables

Books
always talk of
hot tears.
But my
tears
are cold.
Streaming down
my face
like a
spring
from a
glacier.
Reminding me that
too much
and
too little
often feel
the same.

Intent to destroy
In whole or part
A people
Deliberately annihilate
In whole or part
A life
Stealing
In whole or part
A future

I made two whole cakes.
I did not write a poem.
I am not sorry.

*I am actually so very sorry that I panic wrote a senryu.