blue hookah

Baguettes

2011-01-21T02:49:00.000-08:00

What can match the flesh
of fresh baguettes when morning

bursts through the bakery door
and shadows roam the loaves?

At 6 am, every Paris roof’s rising.

Pores do for the dough what
bubbles did for champagne.

You say you’re done with hunger
and gain; you’re finished wielding the knife.

How will you spread the butter?

.

list poem

2010-12-31T00:23:00.001-08:00

Unlovables

There are certain seats on airplanes
that can’t arouse affection, several metropoles
of the Midwest impossible to warm up to.

Some people can’t be loved, whole groups of them,
such as mall-trawlers, teenaged and petulant.
You draw an arc around them.

Date-riddled fruitcake. Tin cans
and tap water earn no one’s ardor.

There’s that table near the restrooms
at Mauro’s Trattoria
that you don’t want to sit at, ever.

Some creatures are better left unloved,
like the black rat snake of Canada.

In some cases, you long to love:
a feted painting, for example,

or the nice man who adores
your every pore, whom
your mother loves
but you like less
and less.

.

Papergown

2010-09-04T04:40:00.000-07:00

White sleeps by the bucketful.
White lies down in pieces.
White snaps like the pearl bones of birds.

White staggers in its enormity, its pachydermal sadness.
It shores up the dyke denying night.

White burns its blank onto my retina,
slips a cake of soap into my robe.
It claims me as erasure.

From time to time white reminds me
of all the water shapes that quake, beads
tugged by suction through a tube.

By the tic of my eyelid, I am moving
towards white with all alacrity,
with all my parts,
which are sore and terrible.

**************

My starting word was "papergown," which I read somewhere I don't remember, and which triggered "pachydermal," because of the P and also because a papergown is like skin to the pachy's dermal. I also collected "enormous," one of my favorite words, though it morphed here to "enormity." The other words just came.

Read Write Poem prompt 17

2010-04-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

Drawing Exercise: Dissolve

To be truly sad, you have to know the right people.
But since the whole world was marching,
I kept on marching.

The leper was kneeling by the pond, turning
to crumbs for ducks and pigeons.

Instead of roadwise, I took
to rounding water.

If I could have sealed out that erosion,
I’d have sealed it with a footprint.

If I could have filtered salt from avalanche,
god knows I’d have filtered.

Without rippling, I was going lightly round.
By the second day, I could not spot him.

His clothes were lying on the ground.
The pond turned blue.
The road was brown.

.
(the prompt asked to choose an element as a springboard for a poem. Make mine water.)

Moody Snow Poem

2010-04-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

Snow brings the necessity of sleds
which means a 20-mile drive northwards.

By wailing, the brakes take note of damnation.
Toddlers in snowsuits like comrade reindeer
stagger incapacitated in the aloofness of cloudveil.

In haste, I’ll grasp at any antler
but there is no place to park.

Sky, you doer of fireworks, we’d settle
for a short walk in peaceable packdirt.

But snow brings out the beast in everyone.
Theatrical colonist of mountaintops,
whistle some sleet into man’s moodiness,

let these wheels spray milestones
into the avalanche we’d well abandon.

.

RWP prompt, barely

2010-04-09T10:12:00.001-07:00

*poof*

Vigil

2010-04-02T00:06:00.000-07:00

Sleeves sewn with bells shall end the day without ringing

(...)

Waitress

2010-04-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

My motive is more:
more sparkle, more potion,
anything that counts among
the more delectable....

*

Napomo Lemony Pledge

2010-03-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

I plan to write a poem a day in april, just to write.
I don't know if I'll post it all, also because I'll be away part of April.
But whatever. I plan to write, even a couple lines.

RWP prompt #116

2010-03-04T23:27:00.000-08:00

a photo prompt from Read Write Poem. You can see the photo here.

Winding Down

After running, I lay myself down
on the throw rug, belly floorwards,
and listen to the blood's beat slacken.
The throb untangles and draws out
to stillness. Recumbent, a heat
flushes outward and there’s a trance
of the mind in abeyance, the body unwinding,
the snag of inertia that follows exertion -
a feeling not to tease into thought
until the run is over.

Like a tunnel emptying at both ends,
I feel myself lengthen with each exhalation.
It is strange to observe the body
close down, like letting a clock do its work,
deciding nothing. I press the heels
of my palms against my eyelids.
I turn my eyes back into my body
and see there’s nothing in there,
nothing and no one.

.

Wordle prompt / RWP

2010-02-18T00:41:00.000-08:00

Packmule

In the age of eggshells, it pays
to be acquainted with decay,
which moves slow among
yet slower travellers.
Along Hairsbreadth Trail,
the sky drops frogs today,
the prophecies of ice and fire
disgraced by the red of rain.
The preface to avalanche is patter,
its amphibian quickening,
and he who says the soul
seeks calm speaks fiction.
The soul belongs to panic
when the lightning begins
lightninging; its holds tight
as a twin when the rain nails
its lubricious body to the tail
of the packmule carrying you.

********

Prompt words used: eggshells, nails, lubricious, panic, red, patter, fiction, decay, frogs

rwp prompt: s*x in strange contexxxts

2009-12-10T10:36:00.000-08:00

Digits

I never do the math
when we sleep together.
I let desire run into the triple digits.
I let lust, that dumb slut, multiply like toes,
little piggies eating roast beef, getting fat
and round at home, till I am born
to your ten fingers, which fuss
like snouts beneath my clothes.

.

rwp prompt

2009-11-26T03:50:00.001-08:00

removed!

wordle prompt

2009-09-18T01:37:00.000-07:00

Verities

The scofflaw will plunder any orchard, come autumn.
To conform, I must girdle my hips and my bottom.

Love is to clover what matte is to smatter.
Should your head itch, not thinking, but dandruff’s the matter.

For a lack of affection there’s no known remedy.
At the sushi bar she ordered plum wine, same as me.

On paper, love triangles are always obtuse.
The light of the lime isn’t lime, but chartreuse.

.
(hat tip to ron hardy!)

eavesdropping poem #1

2009-09-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

these poems will be less than terrific, so i'll be taking them down after a day or so...

Café Mokka

Among the manicured, straight-pin
executives, I nurse a coffee near the window.

Inside it’s jazz
and plush red sofas; you’d think

the whole town was built with wool and lipstick.
At each table, noon dissolves
like sugar in the dark.

POOF
.

Buffett Sees Poetic Justice

2009-08-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

woes are justice designed

and sold, gone sour,

billionaire irony crashed

bearing much of the fallout.

It's sort of a little justice

the people that brewed

this toxic Kool-Aid found

themselves drinking a lot.

In the end the turmoil

rocked months, imbued dumb

money, of which

there was plenty.

*********************
this was my news headline poem, an erasure. Here's the article from which is was sifted -

Warren Buffet Says Bank Woes Are “Poetic Justice”

The woes in the U.S. financial sector are “poetic justice” for bankers who designed and sold complex investments that have since gone sour, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said. Speaking in Toronto, Buffett, one of the world's wealthiest people, appeared to see irony in the fact that many of the banks who marketed complex investments which have now crashed are bearing much of the fallout.

“It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end,” said the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet added played down worries about a credit crunch by saying that recent interest rate cuts mean low-cost funds are readily available. But he warned that the U.S. dollar will continue to slide unless the country can rein in its trade deficit -- the “biggest factor” behind the decline. Still, he said, the U.S. economy will “do very well over time.”

The billionaire investor also said the turmoil that has rocked the U.S. economy in recent months has imbued the markets with a healthy degree of caution but despite this, recent interest rate cuts mean low-cost funds are readily available. “I wouldn’t quite call it a credit crunch. Funds are available. What has happened is a re-pricing of risk and an unavailability of what I might call ‘dumb money,’ of which there was plenty around a year ago.”

Rubber Spatula

2009-08-19T05:42:00.001-07:00

The blunt pornographer

POOF

Fragment from Rushka

2008-11-24T09:25:00.001-08:00

On the sill, rain rubs the spoons.
It’s rained for years
all afternoon.

@

Fragment from Disappointment

2008-11-23T08:06:00.000-08:00

The ghetto in your core, emptied
and stitched in with train tracks,
the airplane
you thought was a star

@

Fragment from Neighbors

2008-11-22T04:05:00.000-08:00

Through the bushes
and ivy vines that twist
the pickets of our common lot
I see her stagger out
cursing winter,
cursing larkspur --
Maria of the blue tears,
sad accident of thorns.

@

i'm flushing my brain, please stand by

2008-04-21T09:26:00.001-07:00

un-post

2008-04-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

I'm fulfilling this April duty on a poetry board for now, but am writing out the month.

Clearing the Table

2008-04-11T09:32:00.001-07:00

The guests have gone

As Smoke Enters My Mustache

2008-04-09T01:21:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of noise out in the universe.
We miss most of it in our little spaces.

Me and My Bourgeois Concerns

2008-04-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

And thus the Olympic torch

The Marlboro Man

2008-04-07T03:53:00.001-07:00

His wounds were sewn with smoke.

Quaker Meeting

2008-04-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

It was the summer my father read Aldous Huxley
and began to do exercises to improve his eyesight.

The Qualities

2008-04-05T07:57:00.000-07:00

Shoulders back, short.

On Smelling Mark Jacob’s Ivy Cologne at the Department Store After Work

2008-04-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

Do you remember Ecuador?
How our luggage burst like bulbs
from the mouth of the baggage claim?

(post removed)

april 1

2008-04-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

i'll be right in ...