“Saw a poem float by just beneath the surface”
– Jim Harrison (Day Seventeen – 28 Days of Unreason)

Poems like water wings
Flotation devices
Strapped around our arms
Our chests our necks
Their gallows promise of not drowning
Holding on at/above/just under
The surface coughing out love
Hoping to breathe like the air itself
Our hearts sharked and slippery
Then slipping over onto our backs
Floating forever
Gulls floating forever
Overhead like forever
Sunburned onto our faces
Drunken and dunked in our
Breathtakingly cool skin and
Hoping we will
Live forever.

“Art often isn’t [nice] though it scrubs the soul fresh”
– Jim Harrison (Day Fifteen – 28 Days of Unreason)

The scour of carbolic
Is the most China smell I know –
The granite stripping scrub
Of every lobby, bathroom, terminal,
Mall, subway, and hall without end.
As if under Communism
There is only one factory
For Janitor in a Drum.
It is the smell of Forward!
And Upward!
A poem of the Revolution
Written with mops
For brushes.

 

*With apologies to Colin Lee

“Only the water is safe”
– Jim Harrison (Day Thirteen – 28 Days of Unreason)

A piece of jade so beautiful
It took prisoner of your eyes –
Prized their tempest for itself

To become the color of the sea,
A stone that secrets rain
In its deepest stony heart.

“I’m unsure if all of me returned”
– Jim Harrison (Day Eleven – 28 Days of Unreason)

Like a broken clock
Even a poet can be right
Twice a day.

Once at the hour of felony,
When our eyes are hunted
And our sins sharp.

Once at the instant when vertigo
Pitches over the horizon
And we are too dizzy to pray.

Don’t look down or you will see
All the words lost along the way,
Strewn like shavings on the floor.

We jiggle truth
To shake some loose,
So take what you can carry.

“That morning the sun forgot to rise”
– Jim Harrison

Well sure
It had been wild –
Out late with the boys,
Sirius crazed after his breakup
With Andromeda.

Heavy drinking
At Izzy’s Black Hole,
Then laying tracks
Across the Milky Way.
The cops are still looking

For the son-of-a-bitch
Out shooting stars.
Any witnesses
To the takedown
At the Apollo?

And cosmic conversations
At Observatory Park
Overlooking the Strip,
The city lights and sea
A and B sides of the moon.

Then home to Burbank
To sleep it off.
Call in some cloud cover,
Take a rain day,
And call it a night.

Day Two – “Plums and Red Wine” (a Lament)