Like the last drops
of whiskey
I shake my words
into this poem;
I’m a man taken to drink
at the cost of his family and job –
One round for the house
and one for the Pope and
very last call
to the Devil.
For Quadrille Monday
Tag: Poem
William Wordsworth: Parking Attendant, Weehawken, NJ
Lincoln might be in the Bardo – where spirits wait bewildered in their Rubber Room souls – But William Wordsworth is outside in my parking lot waltzing with language and cars – Foxtrots of Kias, nouns, and verbs, Fords and Acuras tango with adjectives – insensate and doleful dip and turn, While the drivers, like inmates of ballroom dance class, trip on overgrown iambic feet, hoofing to Glen Miller. In Spring he will gently blow adverbs and romance into pistils of foxglove, until magnolias faint in jealousy. For him, Death is no purgatory, no dotage, he is as lucid as yellow, as sharp as a blackbird quill plucked in flight, Far less bewildered than I between this world and the next – if he writes of eternity, it must be so – Poems to guide us with the half-life of Uranium 235 – fissile at room temperature – Nuclear reactions of sunrise breaking like egg yolk over the hillside – Ten thousand daisies runny with light.
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
Me/Her/Wind
| I’m a tornado of bees, a cyclone of buzz and hum | |
| You have more sharp turns than a toboggan of hornets | |
| I’ll rattle your mullions, believe you me, love storm of the century. | |
| The sky is seasick with hurricanes | |
| We’re the full catastrophe, no atrophy | |
| No apostrophe, no trophy | |
| You ring in my ears like dynamite, like a fight between samba and flamenco | |
| Oh Nagasaki, oh hot ginger, oh Ali‘s rhumba in the jungle | |
| More fun than a barrel of mimes tipping over Niagara | |
| You are handcuffed to wind, laughing about mortality | |
| Eskimo my nose, my toes, cuddle is the new tundra | |
| The windows leak ghosts, whistling for their supper | |
| But this is a love poem, gorgeous with leaves turning cartwheels | |
| Rain weeps through the cracks in my hands, wanders the damp maze of my bones |
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
86 That
Go ahead, tell your sob story to the spoon and the coffee cup, how your addiction to night sky started with poetry, the gateway drug, and now you are mainlining – shooting stars – your veins twinkling with broken bottles and shards of Christmas lights. Go on, lament to this plate of eggs and Tabasco the fate of words like tigers performing tricks with what's left of the magician's sleeve, or the sound of violins playing blackjack on their shoestrings, hit me. I listen to your sling, your hash, your blather spread on whole wheat or white, your second, or third, or fourth marriage to sonnets, to Surrealism, to Whitman, feeding the doggerel scraps under the table, stumbling down 12-steps into the void.
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
On Reading Four Small Bees
On Reading: Four Small Bees Found Living in a Woman’s Eye
He could see in her eyes she'd been sweeping graves. Memory and duty – incense and a yarrow-stalk broom worrying away leaves and dirt. Unearthed, bees flew to her sweat, her sorrow. They knew no pollen could yield such honey – love, so smoked with grief that it was holy. Ancestral manna to feed her, and keep watch.
First published Sept 2020 in the I-70 Review
Backwash
You said I was to imagine a great thirst, and then to slake it. But I think “back at ya!” – instead why don’t YOU imagine you are the sea itself with salt in your throat, waves rolling off your tongue tasting the brine of last night’s sleep – the great deep trenches deep as the pathways of your lungs, as if we could name your breaths Mariana, Tonga, Aleutian – And you cannot imagine thirst because you are nothing but thirst, the way a fish cannot imagine water. And you cannot imagine drinking, because you are nothing but drink, the way a glass cannot imagine empty or full – In this way you, the reader, and I break the fourth wall of the sea – the stone jetties and dikes, the levees and breakwaters, give way. Our tsunami comes then, beyond imagination.
Wheezer
This morning I am a shuffleboard disc – shoes scraping across cheap playground asphalt, lines weathered and flaked I try shoving over a copy of The Waste Land, see if I can make points with ”hyacinth,” or bump off “lilacs” with ”lilies” But I'm too sleepy. I still have goblins in my fingers from last night's dreams, my maw dry and filled with peacock feathers Better, my game of folding grief like origami – I tear pages from the book, crease poems into surprise! A crown of thorns Forget about forgetting, memory steeps in tea bags of the past, dried peels and scabs of 1970 in tiny paper sachets "Are we having fun yet?" Outside again, the sun slowly slides Into scoring position, aloft Above the mirrored river, wings choppy as waves, geese wheeze south for winter
For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse
Beekeeping
Sleepy, when my arm went over you, the trapdoor slipped open as always And we fell in stuttered flight, like bees drowning in sugar water set out in the lids of jars Tongues and stingers slurred with nectar, our waggle-dance instead a stumble Drunken semaphores to the Sandman – Instead of: "follow this way to forage, to hive, to hoard" He reads: “Turn left at Chicago, ride the ferry in your dwarf costume, and meet us in the Shatterproof Café” Which becomes someone else's dream tonight while we linger on the veranda, our bower draped in honeycomb
For Shay’s Word Garden and The Sunday Muse
East of the Garden State Parkway
The same way rain betrays a newspaper left on the bench – Water kissing the cheek of headlines under a grey paste sky drained of news – I finger my coffee mug like a rosary, rubbing the face of Christ from the stains In my best Judas voice I ask to you please pass a napkin and a pen What will I erase between the lines, between you and me, What will I leave hanging
Waiting for Rain
Anne Sexton wrote: "God has a brown voice, full and soft as beer." But I think no, more a shot of cask-strength bourbon – "Wow, shit. Woo! Hoo boy." Or "Hoo-ah!" like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Holy – fiery midnight tossed back without sentiment, the stars sway and shake as they did at creation. No sotto-voce stage-right, no sorry Romeo in crestfallen overcoat, no sentimental trombones stepping on valentine shoes doing the boxing-step waltz. Or if God has a soft voice, maybe like asphalt gone formless on a burning hot day, the sky a void – no place for bare feet on the road. Waiting for weather. Waiting for thunder and rain.
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