random poetry from the last couple of weeks....

Listening to the Oldies Station at Work, July 2009

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it, let’s make it last.
I peered out through the weeds
(as Eve must have done with Adam)
and our eyes danced and shimmied like peacocks.
I walked past, and you got a bad case of vertigo
looking up my skirt.

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it, let’s make it last.
I’m glad I didn’t listen to my well-meaning Catholic mother
when she said “Nothing good happens after midnight.”
I’ll compulsively eat tic tacs and hope to god’s empty throne
that you don’t notice my tobacco-stained fingers.
Oh, for fuck’s sake
just kiss me
I’m ready!

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it
let’s make it last.
Let’s sleep in our clothes.
Let’s smoke two bowls.
Let’s make frozen pizza.
Let’s talk about Nietszche.
Let’s break in
end before we begin.

Baby, let’s dance
because it won’t last.
Ashing into an Empty Heineken Bottle, April 2009

Oh my god! You’re so punk rock!
Just try to squeeze that beer belly
into Joey Ramone’s skinny jeans.
It would be justice (she’s a sweetheart
but not too bright. Just your type.)

Oh my god!
The train is crashing through the toll booth
but it only made the sound of paper plates against linoleum
and a few shattered 40s.
So no one looked up from their magazines.

Oh my god!
You’ve got a pile of my discarded clothes in a plastic sack,
but you can keep them as personal relics of your failures.
Write a song about it, you son of a bitch,
make some of that food bank mac and cheese
and remember, the world is my ash tray
and my most convenient spot, your sock drawer.
El Dorado

I thought the cup was overflowing
but the wine had run dry.
We walked home from the party
as if we were tearing down Parisian alleyways.
I whirled like a kaleidoscope
and you popped like a cork.

In this orgy of mirrors,
everyone is beautiful.
and we emerge with red ears
and bitten bottom lips.
It is the carnival of eternal youth
but I have a secret…

I watched our fuse burn
and it was short
disintegrating into ash.
Virus

Once a satyr put a curse on me,
one autumn night in his sticky grove.
There were no magical apples to cure me,
no handsome prince could lift it,
no fairy godmother to baptize me
and make me pure again.

Morning in the leper colony:
a dog waits at the gate
dreaming of mangling a man like a chicken.
I crawl from my cave
begging for scraps of food from your table.
I clutch the brim of your hat:
“Please, sir! Make me pure again!”
but you ran shrieking down the hot black streets,
“Unclean,
unclean,
unclean!”

Last winter, they stretched me out
setting matches to the roots of the tree inside me,
and burned it to white ash.
Like hydras, the branches resurfaced,
and they could not make me pure again.
Tattoo Parlor

Your pen is not like mine.
the ink can’t be washed away
in a basement flood or a madwoman’s campfire.
It is eternal as math
and you paint π on someone’s neck
in Einstein’s black spit.

In this savage planet,
all the men are sailors and soldiers
and the women, trapeze freaks and burlesque dancers.
There are no puritans,
no fluttering aristocracy.
Anchors are buried deep in flesh
and our lovers occupy only two dimensions.

The wound oozes and flakes off,
the amniotic fluid wiped from the baby’s skin.
It reveals this:
I am fragile, tiny as the three bones
hiding in the inner-ear.
My children are false gods
not muddy lotuses or butterflies caught in thorn,
simply bruises and woodcuts.

I wake to the sound of bees.
Something is being born.

Letter to My Mother

Dear Mother,
I wish I could have been you in 1975.
Nineteen years old, your round wire glasses
taking in the cold rush of Minneapolis
sneaking around the Walker’s sharp white angles
to glimpse Warhol’s soup cans behind a closed door.

Standing before it, did you have a moment
where you saw the future?
Did you see that you’d forsake art for god
(anything to get that man back on your side)
and that you’d tell your little blonde girl the horrors of Greek proportion,
the piss-christ sacrilege of photography
the eye-rape of a life drawing model
so that she’d never fall into their oily hands.

And when you knew I chose the pen instead
did you weep when I did not write prayers?
O bleeding saint,
save your bats in your Japanese silks.
I no longer fear them.
House Party

Picture yourself here:
a small town house party in the mid ‘70s.
My father, who never claimed to be a rock star or cowboy
who had always dreamed of that blonde California girl,
that freckled, Protestant Cheryl Tiegs
smiling as she emerged from his can of Busch Light.

Imagine my father
the alphabet not yet hanging from his nose,
the Buddha not yet sitting on his weak right knee
pulled from the orange velour couch
by a friend, some shotgun buddy or other:
“I want you to meet this girl.”

Imagine my mother
two years younger than he, her shy brown eyes swimming and diving
through that little pond of acquaintances
to see my father turned inside out.
Through the curtain of ironed hair, maybe she smiled
and turned away to light her cigarette
and thought of that night years ago
when her own mother met her father
in that post-war dance hall
eight babies swinging over their heads.

Picture yourself here:
my father, craving sobriety.
Three Dog Night record skipping, people passing joints
my mother, shutting the screen door behind her.

The President’s Au Pair

Thank you, Mr. President
that was a great sandwich.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if you adopted me
a white, working class Catholic poet (nothing like
a Kennedy, but just as cursed.)
who could live in the White House basement
and make your daughters s’mores
and sew buttons on your jackets.

Would you be my benefactor?
Would your wife give me interview fashion tips
(smart suits and black patent pumps)
and I’d rise like a red balloon
out of a den of tobacco and ashy knees.

seven deadly sins: class exercises

Sunshine (Yellow Persona poem)
When the princess spun in her buttery skirts,
I was there.
When you were three and painted that maniacal grinning sun,
I was there.
When you sat on the park bench after getting high and fed fleecy ducklings,
I was there.
When you sang incantations into daffodils and durges for maple leaves,
I was there.
When your summer tan faded in that first month of college,
I was there.
When you puked up Easy Mac after one too many shots,
I was there.
When you painted the nursery a gender-neutral color,
I was there.
When the baby god jaundice,
I was there.
When you poured honey into your chamomile tea,
I was there.
When you gummed bananas,
I was there.
When you bought your sullen granddaughter a butterscotch sundae and realized you'd grown old,
I was there.

***

Special Sauce (prose poem)

I am a compliment and nothing else, a culinary color wheel that spins like a Happy Meal kaleidiscope
and ends up smashed onto a red plastic tray. I am a secret known only to toothless meth-heads
and soft-spoken immigrants. They are my gatekeepers, they are like magicians who will never reveal
their tricks. They are like prisoners who are always innocent of their crimes, be it of murder of selling
marijuana to nurses or fucking seventeen year olds. The answer is obvious: it is right between your lips,
but like my counterparts we will be lounging on your hips like the yellow foothills on the coasts of America.

***

George Washington Carver's Dream

There are some things that are eternal,
interchangeable, blatant as god.

I wanted to create something that could shift-shape
that could feed millions, that could sit as I sat
in dusty shelves, waiting like a fat, sweet-toothed guardian angel.

I wanted to create something that could bring peace to nations,
that was the united colors of us.
A compliment to the darkest fruit or the whitest bread.

I wanted something to mend the tears in these feeble fabrics
blot out the negative space. "How did we ever live without it?" they'd ask,
and I'd shrug humbly.

I wanted something that couldn't be ignored,
but ketchup was already taken, and sugar was a cop-out
nothing more than salt's ditzy cousin.
So I crushed 'em,
crushed 'em
crushed 'em.

And so I will be remembered, praised, repackaged and sold
cast in bronze, but only a tiny figure in some pastoral corner
of a Midwestern state university.
Peanut butter.
Big. Deal.

rouge--7/10

Rouge

I will never be pure again.
I was a melancholy princess
but I had yet to bleed.

I have a confession to make:
I am a monster, Prince Charming.
Watch as my delicate hand trembles
in it's red satin glove.

I am transforming...

and you will gasp and faint as disgust
floods in and drowns the lust.
Lover, excuse me,
I am giving birth to my teenage journal.
The pages seemed endless
and some words clotted together.

I am Mademoiselle Werewolf,
and the moon drives me insane.
I am not a modern woman made of sterile linoleum.
I am a witch, an effigy made of apple skins,
an oracle prostrating herself to the virgin goddess:
Mother, my third eye is bleeding.
In the maple grove, I hear her answer...
repent, repent
she says through the red curtain.
you have weeping to do.

the attic--7/9/09

This is a prose poem I wrote last night. As they say in the Wall Street biz, I'm "diversifying my portfolio". Let's power lunch.
-d
***

The Attic

Step inside. We are two mushrooms exhaling our green smoke. Here, things come in pairs
Two arms that will twist into you like vines over bicycle handlebars. Two empty bowls that
once held the meager cuisine of bohemians. Two sets of eyes that stare out of the hollows
of shadows. The macabre mother whose feet we kiss in the psychedelic armpit of mid-summer.
Step inside, but mind the broken glass and rusty nails jutting from the floorboards. Mind the
fleecy darkness and cold light. Mind our cat (she is a madwoman) Mind the dust on our stolen
board games. Mind the ghosts that hover in the soft jutting of our hips and the gaps in our teeth.
One day, maybe two, a swarm of bees had a wild family reunion in our skylight. They lost
themselves in the outlandish sunlight and fell to their death. The Icarus family Thanksgiving,
a ritual to the jealous sun god. I swept those foolish boys into the dustpan and went to work.

seven deadly sins

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest/
I'm taking a "Seven Deadly Sins" poetry class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this week, and I'm pretty much a gigantic poetry burrito at this point. I'm amazed at the things I'm learning, one of which is that I really don't fit in at wine and cheese receptions. I ate my brie and finger sandwiches and bailed.
This is my instructor's work. She is rad.


You know you're a huge nerd when...
You attempt to write a cento and sort of feel like you're being buried alive.
Verb tense pisses you off.
You're excited by phrases like "and the stars in the sky are still boss" (that's Corso. I want it tattooed on my body).
You brainstorm about poetry series while drinking Dr. HyVee in the wee hours of morning.
You get maniacally excited about all these contemporary poets you didn't previously know about, then you attempt to get all your non-writer friends to become as obsessed as you.
A prose poem about disembodied ears is the class favorite.

boys--7/6

Boys

My ribcage fails to hold in my absurd heart
for it and the nerves in my skin
fail to reach symbiosis.
Once again, it must throw itself overboard.

I.
I laid with you in a red room
with a red curtain and red cheeks
red hands and red sheets
red hairs patchy as red stains
and we were young again.

II.
His sweat made my bed smell like a tomb
and I tried to tell him that the man on the couch
would rape up both if he could.
Hungry as a panther for our empty stomachs
and dirty hair.
So I clamped my jaw shut
and waited.

III.
Somewhere, your face is painted, my bedouin.
I write you letters, piecing together
remnants of my life that seem as innocent as we were.
I sneak in dried lilies, butterfly wings,
and let them sleep with ink and drunken night kisses.
Taste the gin on the sealed paper
and someday I will leave my gold sandals at your door.