Monday, August 12, 2019

poem

Sidewalks


A neighborhood without sidewalks
Is a world unlimned.
Staggering along soft shoulders
One leg slanting lower than the other,
It’s dumb and dangerous.
Cars honking, swerving
You can't trust your fellow man
On the arbitrary grids he’s laid out
Especially in the dark
You leap into the boggy ditch.


Beyond the ditch is a rising plain,
But it’s just a yard
Goose-bumped grass iced in frost
Like it’s afraid of the dark,
A lawn bounded by another.
Homes and fences.
It all belongs to someone else.
Stick to the road.
But this old road is no good.
This road just goes into town
Which is just a place 
To pour out the asphalt
And lay some red bricks down


I want to make a home
Beyond the borders
Of the known 
dutifully mapped world.
Let us trace a path,
My hand guiding your fingers
Across conjured maps 
Etched on blank sheets.
Look, we can’t help it,
it's happening without trying;
Straight, cross-hatched lines 
All across the page,
Hopscotching from thought to thought,
Leaping across cracks
In our imaginary sidewalk.  

8/12/19

Saturday, August 10, 2019

poem

Poem #6

This one doesn’t have to be about sickness.
I don't need another ode to chromosomes
or anaerobic metabolism,
a sad dirge about suspicious adrenalomas.
I don't want to write anymore
about the provenance of dark stains
on my blue scrubs,
the strange odors that linger on my palms.  
The post call anguish of alone.


Doctor so and so has written another poem.
Look, he’s alluded to lungs,
the last gasps of life.
The fearful wide eyed last days gaze.
The true heart that lives in a cage.
Must he go on like this?

Look he’s switching gears, 
he’s describing a beautiful woman;
perhaps he had once operated on her.
it's always about that.
Maybe he’s wistful and older and tired
of scalpels and salves and bandages:
Almost done here.
Let me wrap this up.
Shower twice a day.
Apply this ointment.
Take this for the pain
that comes later.
Kiss me when you find me like this.
Hold my hand, later
when you see me like this. 
Ask me about all the mysteries
I've already dreamed the answers to.
Be right here at time o’clock.

I've stopped writing about chromosomes
and sicknesses and unbalanced hormones.
This is a lump
I find in your breast.
No, no, no this is my hand against your heart
that rises and falls in your chest.
It swells like a mass
without edges but
I swear I can feel something.
I want to describe it precisely
using the proper terminology;
supple, caudal, infero-lateral.
I want to classify what this is.
I am reaching  for your heart.
I have been flailing for your heart
and so this poem for your heart.
My love, I cannot speak
for the lump in my throat,
and for all that's beneath
the heaviness of this white coat
obscures the sounds that escape,
an exhalation of garbled words
for the time we have lost.
for the time we have left.

The doctor will see you now.
(I’m sorry I am so late)
The doctor is ready now;
he is sorry he is so late.

8/10/19


Saturday, August 3, 2019

poem

Lookout


We passed the carrion, the mangled deer, 
On the side of a bend in the road
That wended its way up the hill
To a lookout I wanted the kids to see.
Ooooooooooooooooo, they scream,
daddy gross it smells roll up the window!
The rank gamy invasiveness of odor.
I wanted them to see the valley stretching out below
The mist enshrouded trees
The generational timelessness of 
All that falls below,
All the unnavigable naturalness
They'll never probably go.
But don’t stand too close to the edges.
Goddammit what did I say!
kids
You don’t know enough of 
the buzzed moss or
blotched whitened lichens,
the blood against rock
in the noonday sun,
the slippery humors
that ooze from the 
dead along the way

8/2/19