Loss as lunch

Old slick slice of turkey
No bread
No mustard
You will nourish me
When you are gone
And I'll remember eating
Without you
You
When next I have bread
Even a dead dog
Can be missed fondly
Never: if only
Only: never again
It's  ruff
But we lose
Things
Each other included
And if we find ourselves
In the kitchen
We eat

ITEM: considering upping game on practice

On sparse occasion I acknowledge the intent of this blog, as enshrined in its subtitle

"writing practiced"

and lately after some lapse I've again practiced at writing with regularity

but I'm maybe up to pushing myself to practice structure. Which gives me fits and I loathe.

So maybe very very short essays at a 2nd grade level will appear here soon amidst the offal poems.

One more restless before bed

Trees not trees dark mountain cloud
Lumbering under grey
Sky not sky
Always demanding specificity
Surrounded by blur and glare
The sharpest thing
Is my mosquito bite
And it's always been the same mosquito
Foot my foot
Purple cracked
The story goes
Was one mosquito
Not my story
Nor my foot
Not my body
Then or now
But we repeat the same
I repeat until my history is biblical
The mosquito my snake
The first bite
Gave all knowledge
All these years
And every mosquito
Was one mosquito
Trying to tell me
The world is blood
And pain

I have stared and studied love

Squinted and marveled and made all my focus the little elements and large motions 

Of 

But in my memory

All eyes

All feet

All kisses

Burn one flame
Melt to one

Grotesque amorphous body barely seen

A waxing monster in the shadows 

Thighs

Where lips are looked for 

Or a laugh

When the back of the neck is sought 

No hair

Until hair is conjured

No hand to hold

But a hundred hands together

When hand is spoken

Despite my memory

I long for you

Ever surprising comfort

Refuge from the haunting

Of your shade

In some cell of my body
Death
Can I find it
Like a cool breeze in the desert
Faint harbinger of cold
But welcome in the heart
Of stifling day

Waiting for hope
Is not hoping
For love
Not loving
For life
Not living
To stand straight
Straighten
Always

Unobserved verginity take 2

The stars beyond our sight

Free of our binding

From a center point 

have spilled their light

Into galaxies 

We are hunting them

With names

Their light is green

As leaves in darkness

Or love in sleep

If they sing our names

Our memoriam

Before we are made

Or harmonize our names together

Lights to bind us

Though we, hunting,

Hide

memory is the kneading of an instant gone

I am eating an excellent plum
in the case between our kitchen and dining room
I was eating an excellent plum
I had washed
I was eating
the black purple skin
and dense fruit
and the pit is still in my mouth
I am worrying it
I was
eating a plum
after a nap
which made me feel ill
I had gone up
inspired by
vivid imaginings
of your
hot afternoon
dense flesh
and fallen asleep
in the hot
afternoon
I was
wet juice
excellent
plum
I ate so quickly
what seemed an experience
all meals
kissed
all moments
held
from is to was
are dense fruit
let go
full of joy
allowed to pass
and gone

I sat in the shade of an Oak
Wide and tall
from there observing a sea
Of differentiated greens
And browns
And bright where the sun reflected

I had studied before arriving
how to discern the shapes of leaves
And textures of bark
I had learned to know one tree from any other
by the differences

I thought I would know every tree from myself
No thought or want or muscular feeling
Would give me
Roots

What tree
would be
for me

The wind
blew

whispering all and nothing

What are these ups and downs of
Seesaw being
This is no
Good world
I am not good
Or good in
Or good at
But i go on
Wanting
And i in sight of
Love
Panic
That it can be
Deserved
Or earned
The giving gets mixed up
In the gain
The rainstorm
Delivers both water
And Drought
Alone I discover no difference
Between recollection
And hope
Of a warm
Embrace
Having been
Let go
I fall
And the place I travel
Tomorrow will be
Out from these old
Same
Doors
Like a ghost
Without expectation
Of arrival
I have been
Sent
? will
Deliver me

Fishtanks over apples
Are her eyes and cheeks
And a little knife flashes
In her voice
That I might like to hold

Bird hole dust flap
Older than Christ
Antediluvian fossils
Of a dirt bath

These tiny pains

Or the sound like the crocodile clock

Of blood in my ears

Lend nagging doubt to the certainty

Of my immortality

Kiss

When I was a child

I couldn't sleep

For the roar

Of my own pulse

And now can't sleep

For the silence 

Rejected cockerel

Sneeze sand?
Baked wildebeest.
Lizard bone?
Tithe.
Witchcraft.
Honey.

can tomorrow be assured
 yesterday I ran
sat upon by giants long ago
still wary of feet
it is a wonder
the lips and eyes
of strangers
 and they wondering at
                                      what

to meet is unlikely
 always
              accept

what is it to know

or to be in one time: 

neither waiting

nor remembering

to ask and to do

Raining July 4 8:30pm

like mites we are traversing the cast off snakeskin of I-95 
appear ascending from dust grey streets                                
to burst above low square row roofs                                    
like the after-image of paper mulberries                          
and the ash indistinguishable from steel grey sky       
who launches these in a rainy evening
to marry firecracker pops with thunder moans
acts of love at the end of days

playing with form

I regret nothing
                         but     net
                              the     which has caught all my history

unobserved verginity

how lucky are the green stars
 beyond our sight
singing their own songs
still
unbound by
 names we give them
  blindly

I said goodnight but remained

fear is like a stone
what a stone is
not a thing
but observable
a part of gravity
 in that around it we fall
  part of time
   meteorites and melted stars
  things we're told of and say "we know"
 as the gods
we know their names which we have learned
but before we learned their names
 they were larger
  they held the space beyond the edge
   we filter out
    to see

fear is
 our friend
  in the lion's thicket
   and we hold it too long
    the wrong talisman
     when the new gasses have begun to burn
 
we call our fear love
 I've seen you do so
  and I've learned to follow

   that stone
 which is
 beyond our presence
  is

  snow will fall
   whether we love or no
  whither you go
 or i

   the snow has held the memory
  or foxes feet
 and rabbits                                                       jump
 creatures I don't see pass in the old hours
  but pass the same
   as white as a plaster cast
    as though
     the memory of rabbits
      fell by flakes                                                         fall
       from the moon


     that stone
    which has been so many known things                           change
   and was
  before knowing                                                                              death

                                                                                                                      become
      Maya
    Munnin
  Moon
                                                              memory
the space between                                  without      
the source                                                the brilliant web
and the reflection                                    of wordmaking
where light is invisible                           the charted stars
as though it were dark                           before birth

Dry Clay - edit and questions - mar 26 2012 -

Should you look for me
try the house we built
of photographs
and sex
the bricks of our days
who now resides
within
may know

---




if you should look for me
Try visiting the little house
  we built
of sex and photographs
Before we learned to build with stone


--

?why the capital T and B?
 ?does "visiting" belong? or "little".
  ?what about the ambiguity of "should you"
?what is the significance of building with stone? of preceding it?
?what are sex and photographs? things that are other things? moments which can't be captured and captures which are not moments? snapshots of larger experience. landmarks.


Should you look for me
Try the house
we built
of sex and photographs
the stones of our days
who lives there now
may know my new country

--
?country?
 "where I've gone" my first impulse but it's an ugly cadence.
?"may know", full stop?

Should you look for me
 try the house we built
of photographs and sex -
 the stones? of our days
  (or bricks, old clays)
who lives there now
may know



Should you look for me
 try the house we built
of photographs
and sex: the bricks
(dry clays)
of our days
who now resides
within
may know


--

there's something snide
in "now resides"

and the clay and day are bitter in their nursery sound but do bricks need explanation (but then he slipped it in the title)

--

Should you look for me
try the house we built
of photographs
and sex
the bricks of our days
who now resides
within
may know

--

on seeing a plane in a starless sky

one red star
 a roving mars

the only light
 in an ink black
  dismal night

   though told we live
  with wonders -



 I have
 doubts

  squatting low
  on the rocks
  fearful as ever of
fire

flying machines
 with red tails
  like fishing lures

as unfathomable now
 to our understanding
as in the days of icarus

but now
 even the stars
  have abandoned us

-is rising our only aspiration?

how can we fall
 with no light
  to melt our wings

This morning
With its cars and broken streets and
I don't know
Birds
Fences
People who feel urgent
Disconnected like cut fingers
Instead of waking together
Sleeping together
Singing
Holding together the wailing new day
They let go
And chains of Others
               like mold in soil
      Let us suspect a collective continuance
and alone in our places
 Synchronize sighs

Villanelle

I said “I'll try to write a villanelle.

The work's been slow. I wish I'd not begun.

Having written's joy, but writing's hell.

I barely can remember how to spell

these words. I thought I was John Donne;

I said “I'll try to write a villanelle”

I'm terrible at this, I feel unwell.

My tercets are unraveling one by one.

Having written's joy, but writing's hell

Perhaps I could quit now, and never tell.

I never did announce to anyone,

I said “I'll try to write a villanelle,

I hear, I think, a distant tolling bell:

is it for me? I wish I had a gun...

Having written's joy but writing's hell

I may let out a strangled desperate yell

If ever I can get this damn thing done.

I said “I'll try to write a villanelle.”

Having written's joy, but writing's hell.