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.