number six

your silence wastes my silence
like a wicked cocktail
until my silence won't get
out of bed the next day and calls
for cold water, lots of it,
and tylenol.
your silence thinks it's sweet
to dial up my silence and
sit together
maybe have a conversation
and my silence will stay
on the phone
not to leave your
silence out in the rain
or hung out to dry
or holding the line
even though my silence has
to be up for school tomorrow.

i am saved
by the open door to your
temporal lobe
and my ability to think
a scrambled egg is beautiful
or watch a movie in
french and divine things that are true
and listen
but my silence
runs out of breath
splashes jasmine on its neck
would prefer banter sometimes
or more platonic lists
or just to take a bubble bath and
listen to lisa loeb. but my silence,
before saying that, would rather
listen.

After Reading Rilke

i have known
not many dead, yet always felt
they should be
content in their own vault,
comewhat resigned. but you--

you seep back in, you brush my
sleeve, you want to throw open
the curtains and squint
into sunlight and tell me you're
here. don't interrupt--

or consolidate what
i take no pleasure in learning
for you were safe to me
this way the way
Masonic lodges are safe, or a
Mass in Latin, or gingerbread,
the way i could seal you up
or spear you out.

but no. of course not.
you've come back, demanding
cherries, which aren't in season,
and words
i've forgotten how to say

it startles me, today, that
you came back, you
with your foot pressed constantly
to the accelerator
fingers feeling for my pulse, telling
me i moved with twice
waht hesitation might be
healthy--
all this keeps me up at night.
the point, dear friend,
is that you didn't call, but grasped
each tiny thing,
gin for your bathtub, and when
finally the mute ache of
a package unsent
drags you back into recorded time,
you announce your
faulknerian tendencies.

so tell me, do you want
chocolate, apricots, a newly-
christened galaxy
an alphabet made up solely of the
letters of your name, or simply
for me to adopt a new
breathing cycle
or read only dostoevsky
i probably would.

i'd travel anywhere you
wish, build pyramids despite
my abysmal talent
for engineering, i'd swim
upstream
during salmon spawning,
watch peasants eating cake
pour oil over their loveliest idol
and lock myself inside
a temple until all the answers
creep out and scuttle across
the floor between rains.

Little Rags III

in history class we
learned about epidemics
spanish flu, black death
(conducive environment)
god, if he indeed sends sickness
must compulsively hate the world
and if he so despises us, what
compels him to create
or is he just lonely and jealous
and therefore skulks through slums
that surround the airport

i'm going to arabia
to eat paan
i can't stay here (even to
grapple with a single long
sentence) because i'm afraid
of hand-to-hand fighting
of copper earrings, ornamental
banana trees--i can never leave

well enough
alone--i still think of clever
ways to answer something
you said in 2003, steam
my mind in irrelevance

revive memories in terms to
what we are afraid of happening
theatrical souls meetin gbody
the antimonopoly of sanctioned
feeling because we are open
to advice
until it's delivered and sluff
off decisions

in favor of sanskrit lessons,
pursuing things
we'll never need
listening to scandalous revelations
of torture before facing
the sugary demons that tango
all through the night.

this is a time
to put our shoulders back and
say who we are
because we don't know, and because
allegations belong outside
the courtroom in the vibrato
of a flamboyant opera singer
my niche is quasigovernment
wishing to combust, condoning victims,
eating brownies, reading Ginsberg,
stenciling a line up the back
of my leg. there is no sentence

long enough for me to list
everything i want to do and be
and love about you
---now what? meet me

in the cart corral
to discuss a volcano-monitoring system
so i will never
stop surprising you
and you can shanghai my
book collection, which has all
the potential to jolt me out of
theatrical complacence (reliance
on loftists) and force
me to meditate on the spot,
or ask what color
my tongue is.

continuing

a good beginning, while important, is not the only thing.
a joint poem with my writing mentor:

Mistral
though i commit to living
here and now, sounds cannot move
me in the direction
i would wish to go,
to go without hesitation, without
looking and if stumbling then
stumble and laugh, here and
now, that's how i put a finger
to the wind and further my
own eyes (the grass
a clumsy liquid gold) to play
a dizzy blindman's bluff
well is to play without
sheetmusic, to improvise the
crescendo and decrescendo,
manipulate the refrain to fit
whimsy
to fit the graffiti on my eyelids, to wax
slightly hysterical
and from there who knows--
take
a moment and unhinge,
swing
open and opening
allow for the wayward
wind to lift hair
to blow starboard
ready or not.

beginning

interesting weekend full of words, words, words. the fruits of my labor:

driving down the interstate, i've often wished
i could speak only spanish.
comprende?
how blissful ignorance would be if
there weren't so many ways to plug
in all the time
if at age 18 secret tree house clubs
weren't something
you're supposed to have grown out of.
i want to be inside a venus
fly trap the color of a barely-ripe
papaya. I want to be inside
the world's bacterial mouth
get my hands dirty. I've been experimenting
with green knights and cat's cradle,
the disappointing
contours of a rosary
spread across the pillow next to me.





I hand out tiny lies
like spare change

a nickel buys a compliment
the price of truth

so deflated as to be indistinguishable.
Maybe you watch

from an idle train car, thinking
of me, your powdery eyelids snapping

between us.
but if you would dare to creep

in, i'd kick you in my sleep, not knowing
better.

If i gathered all those wooden nickels,
lit a single match,

How my life would blaze.





I tried to live in Utah once.
too much wind.
economy is the way to solve everything--that is,
economy of spirit
because caring is the licorice root
of all the world's problems.
if i talk too much--
don't tell me.
the tree out front drops false
crabapples only when i want
to bade pies, the same
way my skin turns blue
when there are no
mirrors for miles and the sound
of an idling tractor is my
forgiving alarm clock.
if my mandible was chitinous,
if i could strike up a conversation with
any lepidorpera crawling up my knee,
i might not adore vaudeville,
or chew my bitter cud
while my words echo--
ping! ping! ping!
down the valley of my double standard.

technology's arms finally opened . .

it's only taken me a couple of years to catch up with the rest of my generation where blogging concerned, but hopefully that changes soon. mostly i want to post writing, and i like the feeling of being out there in cyberspace . . it's amazing what you can find online if you put your mind to it.

i have every intention of posting something wonderful at a later date. sooner rather than later, that is.