8/26/07-Pogo Stick (song lyrics, let's say)

Pogo Stick

Would you encourage me to bring my toothbrush to your house?
Would I keep it in the bathroom near the sink
where it could fall into the toilet at any given time?

Oh gravity, your laws are giving me the blues
because I’ve been thrown up so far into the air
I can taste the clouds.
I’ll wait for the moment when I come down
I’ll learn some patience one of these days.

Would you pitch your mattress and find another big enough for two?
That way, we can sleep all day
or at least until we get hungry for tomato soup.
I’d make you a grilled cheese, babe, if you wanted me to.

Oh gravity your laws are waking me up
the alarm is ringing until I come out of another dream
where you and I are astronauts
on the moon no one can hear you scream
because you never need to.

Would you rescue me from a day of watching posters fall off walls?
of trying on clothes and eating too much.
Would you pull me out of the well
once I’ve chosen that as my landing.

Oh gravity I wonder what it would be like if I kept falling up
if I changed my legs to pogo sticks
and kept refilling my glass until I was drunk on positive thinking.
I wonder if I rearranged the letters of our names
so it was spelled the same
so it was spelled the same
both up and down.

communist in red lipstick-started 8/15, edited 8/22

Communist in Red Lipstick

Bolshevik tart
You smudged your revolution across the face of that boy.
You sent him stumbling out of the bar
Like a child scattering his sweat out of the ruined village.
Years after, he’d feel phantom pain in the center of his chest
when it rained or snowed
or broke out a few splinters of sunshine.
He’d feel your words like shrapnel.

You rushed across the barrier
Red and red and red, a fucking spectacle
Trashy as a dirty word in a foreign language,
you ran around Berlin your freedom songs
clamoring behind you, clinking like tin cans on a marriage car.

The flies buzzed around your tearducts in that unbearable Russian summer.
A single afternoon when you dreamed up that sugarplum acid dream
A big diamond and a home with a white picket fence
Painted an extra coat to hide the membrane of sweat from the worker’s backs.
Wearing paint thick as fur to conceal your naked phrase:
“I’ll make you see
Someday.
I’ll hold open your eyelids, made heavy by the imitation designer handbag
Slung over the weary shoulders of your waitress daughter, pregnant
with numbers, full of the blue cotton candy fibers
left over from the carnival of American dreams
which will someday fatten her for the kill.”

They shut you off in September, sedated with the balm of college amnesia.
life gave you more lemonade than you could possibly want
and there you sat, fat with their acceptance
mouth bare as a clean newborn
sterile in the arms of it’s new mother.

electric shoes-8/22/07

Here's something I wrote while bumming around in the library before my 2:10 Women's Lit class. This is the first real poem I've written for awhile.
And no, I'm currently not on acid.

Electric Shoes

I’ve got pair electric shoes
I walk up in the sky most every night, sometimes it breaks the heat
in a powdery shatter.
I give it to the swaying monks of 3 am
walking the streets unarmed, the peace girls
giving out their alms.

I’ve got a room with a few stray cats
that smoke cigarettes and stay up
to wag their tongues out the window
so they can sing their song to the wolves that pass outside
it sounds like laughter, and I become their sound.

I’ve got a dress that’s a certain shade of red
I wear it because an old man told me
I looked like a commie flag
only a bit more glamorous
a little less frightening
but no less willing to burst through containment
like a Chinese river.
I wear it most every night, holding hands with Bolsheviks
and drinking cheap beer with Japanese fashionistas.

I’ve got a swarm of bees in my brain
That make honey that drips out of my tongue, slow as melting wax
whenever I open my mouth.
They are quiet, though, or at least their rhythm
matches up with the way silence punctuates an accent.

I’ve got a pair of electric shoes
And when I make that clockwork stroll up in the sky
August sings me liberty
And I try to remember the word but it rushes to the back of my brain
And graffiti’s itself as if I’ll remember.