Posts for June 18, 2021 (page 7)

What is…

     texting back “K.”
     dog-earring the pages of a borrowed book
     pretending to press the open button for the elevator when someone is coming
     using your ex’s Netflix account
     turning someone’s name into a verb
     looking at what someone else created and saying, “Hm. Interesting.”
     ghosting after the second date
     offering a hand-warm beer
     skipping a song without asking
     sending a secondhand wedding invite
     calling a woman someone’s wife instead of using her name
     killing a Daddy Long Legs
     not telling someone their fly is down
     leaving a used tissue on a desk
     cursing an accident for slowing down traffic
     mispronouncing someone’s name “because it’s funny”
     serving coffee with grounds in the bottom

seriously
don’t waste your time
go take a walk or 
something

anything, 
but reading 
yet another 
damn poem

you got better
things to do
pretty much
anything is
better than
reading a
stupid poem
about stupid
nothing

you never get
this time back
it is gone
you done wasted it
and what did you
get out of it?

nothing

nothing,
because
you can only 
get out
what you 
put in

*My first try at an Acrostic poem. I hope it is successful and creates a fearsome image.

She screeched until her voice was gone
Crying heavy tears that left clean trails behind them
Ripping at the stone walls until her fingers bled
Escape wavered like a mirage in the future 
As she stared at the opening above her
Mocking her, it leered back from on high
Showing her the only way out of her nightmare
Obdurate in its inanimate state
Fear wracked her soul in a twisted cord illusion
Trembling, she begged to be set free
Eerie silence loomed above her living tomb
Realizing she was not heard willingly 
Removed from the one who forced her there
Only time will tell when they return
Ready to finish the job they started

In your mother’s room, the dresser holds all
kind of treasures: a porcelain jar of baby teeth,
the tarnished brass container laden with coins–
(you pocket a handful whenever you can,
larceneous child)–the computer sat on a corner
before it got its own desk, the Gateway
your gateway to the universe.

For hours, you chat faceless with other folks,
each of you an astronaut of sorts, reaching out 
to each other across the miles, much like how
your great-aunt used her CB radio in the ’70s.
Imagine waiting in the static for so long, waiting
for that voice to come find you, clear as morning,
for that voice to say, “I, too, am here.”

What needled vein,
which greenstick bone,
fractured urge, jealous grasp
drives them to commission
an art theft?  

Polish pirates of Memling
The Takeaway Rembrandt
Van Gogh’s and Gone Girls
Staid Portraits of Ladies
heisted, missing, concealed.  

Made lesser by small hearts
& Swiss bank accounts,
Art possessed is Art destroyed.

We mill about the sloped end
of a sunny field where Chefs throw paper
airplanes back and forth like footballs.  

A herd of bystanders trots down to join us.
The air is charged with anticipation –
an emergency or the county fair is about
to manifest.                        

                       Intellect is trained to reject
experience unless it can impose a context.  
But dreams have context baked in,
even the one we nickname “waking life.”  

Genetic code moves, recedes,
leaves a drumlin field,
scours wool to wear, puts
all of it’s eggs in one
basket of all eggs.

How I end up a wasp?
Sting-weight of words,
carried by a Soule, sold
to win, slow for a plot
left alone, land right here.

Take route through 
heartbreak catch-in-throat
of Wampanoag woman,
a place of many fish,
riot & rot near Captain’s Hill.

In G major, shit out of luck
sister of horse healer,
sing songs for pay & feel,
know not where, but
could live, anywhere?

A press in Lisbon or
maybe in the time it takes
from full wake to sleep,
alive in blood, stable ink,
some statute of limitation.

Twenty marbles in a jar,
fixed to a draft, drink!
To the mealworms,
cheers to the good, true
beasts of placental me.

This glacial pace of myself
without body, my sun pen
prophesy, a fighter, chooser
of long stay, in foal foot
height of warm ice, flow.

Throw candle in fire, come
come again radiant coin, write
of passage, publish atoms
solid, genomic bearing
me, alternating pain & fruit.

When Miss Price sang us
that ‘accomplishments
have no color’

the air accompanied her
as chords on a stage,
her voice, an operatic echo

of streets hummed as aria;
the city, as orchestra;
this park; as chance for change

inspired by #nwp Write Across America (SMWP)
https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c324b4c832bf9e9f1db8174bcf94c402/laurel-virtual-writing-marathon-smwp/index.html

Between the ocean’s
floor & the dying
city, between & the white

tip of a comet & the high
hum of a mandolin. Margaret
used to complain, Help me I’m lost

in flight. Which direction
home? Then one day
quick as a nectar

starved hummingbird
she realized home is a hovering
& mutable space. In streaming

light she imagined herself as a great
blue heron. She stretched her wings
like illuminated maps across

the glass of a quiet lake. Sure, she
still gripes prodigiously. She talks
back. Sometimes she curses

her Creator. Damn it
God! Why should life
be this hard? But her movements

are so lovely. Her grievances
are such sturdy prayers. Between
a gum wrapper & the 79

moons of Jupiter. Between
the whir of a Monarch & the hum
of the Voyager hurdling

past Pluto to the vastness
of interstellar space. Margaret
lives. Margaret thrives.

I feel important driving you,
your sneakers on the dash,

our pants and shoes filled 
with the gulf shores,

feet peeling and burning
from the sand.

Your stomach aches from a screaming 
shrimp gumbo eaten too quickly,  

the chicharrones bought 
in Birmingham, and a hunger for sleep.

We left at one in the morning,
arrived at noon to see 

the placid school of deathly stingrays, 
who swim with us in the rushing green.

Satisfied, we promptly return 
to the highway.

On the Alabama red clay roads, 
windshields and headlamps are canvas—

lightning bugs mug yellow
bioluminescence in streaks

when we slam into them,
rendering the paste we enjoyed as kids.

The air is a wildering pine.
One loses themselves among:

the salty, vociferous wild turkeys,  
the sight of armadillos dodging traffic, 

snaggle toothed opossums running fence,
and absolutely everywhere—

the allergy producing plants 
known to the American South.  

           I wipe my face, blow my nose, pray
           the truck doesn’t look the same as the tissue
           glowing in the dark just as the kitsch, 
           novelty Virgin Mary in the corner 
           of my elementary school room.
           We surrounded her with silk flowers,
           and shelved her above clicking base board 
           heaters; we might have dubbed her
           Our Lady of Chernobyl.

On this springtime day
I promise I will let you down—

there is no other way to begin
but to admit the truth.

Night.  Awake in Nashville,
rosary beads turning in my sleep

as diligently as the garden earth 
you will till for our children to grow

tomatoes, zucchinis, 
and aubergines—

I am awake in Nashville afraid
to fail you, thinking 

maybe 
I am finally a man.