1. |
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…for the human body.
For limbs that spindle, octopus spaghetti, around my
tubed torso of salami muscles.
For hips, for lips meant to love
food, but sometimes turn attention to painting skin with spit.
For hands, wrinkled, at the ends of arms, young.
For lungs that wax and wane the balloon of a body,
but not for minds. Not for hearts.
Even if I keep falling asleep to its tune
of an irregular, murmuring beat
buried under limbs, torsos, hips, lips, hands, lungs.
They can find another home, but,
for them, this poem
is not.
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2. |
Coffee Stains
02:09
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This machine in past-life white is creeping into
smudged Latin American brown:
Temple white enamelling
gears and cogs which milk bean into coffee,
grain into liquid,
water into wine.
I’ve noticed my teeth are decaying.
Remember how the Industrial Revolution
decayed into a cloud of its own smoke? Over,
and yet remembered in the stray smokestack brick,
or in the rasp of a planet’s cough,
like the one that spiced coffee’s cigarette this morning.
Your violence reminds me of revolution.
You sputter discombobulated obscenities,
as water kneads itself into steam
above plastic perspiration,
and mud explodes downstream
into my wanting mug
stamped by Michigan in cursive.
It’s snowing outside.
Peaceful in blizzard conditions.
Do you prefer snow, in its first-fall whiteness,
or peeking out from beneath snow-plow cinder black,
my dearest coffee?
He (snow) only wishes to craft a love triangle
between car’s affair with asphalt,
a Shakespearean interloper crafted each morning in work’s
post-coffee pull.
This third wheel is awkward.
My teeth are turning black, Coffee:
Dip-dyed in the industrial,
Please. I rely on your borrowed violence
to wrestle these orange-juiced mornings
into the lattice work of my brick-work schedule.
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3. |
Watercolors
01:39
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A letter to me:
briefly, leave word for image
in watercolors.
Discover color
outside of typed black and white.
Like rocks, bleed in red.
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4. |
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5. |
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So this is what it means
to be an art thief. A piece of soup
bowl’d in valley masterpiece
yanking down rocks, not to throw,
but confine.
I will box in what I call beautiful
to paper’s edge and dimension two
to bring home to the life painted mundane:
a window facing east
on experience.
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6. |
Braces
01:48
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Childhood teeth roam free
as knives slice gums to bits,
and eyes to infant tears:
teaching the first lesson
in what it means to grow into human form.
Skin melts into dust,
while stretching across meated bone canvas,
and toothy battle badges fall
into glasses of water,
plates of food,
playground woodchips.
Faces left gapped:
a peek into old-age
carved into smooth babyface cheeks.
Giant tombstones take their place
An old west graveyard
With crooked, scattered slabs
And unfamiliar to order
Calcium roots grow sturdy into soft gums
barreling down past topsoil
past the 6 foot mark where ancestors rest with worms
and into the gnarled twisting of family trees,
jagged in every sense of British Heritage.
My smile first found its fences
in middle school
Sharp, metal edges of barbed wire invaded their roost
dragging roots to attention.
Metal laced over white calcium
until square rows
gridded the hole in my face,
Ninety degree angles boxing in
The possibility for ugly.
But battles, wars end.
Barbed wire meets a veteran’s return
to white picket fences.
Perfect stalactites and stalagmites
gnawing through lawns of green grass
Sharp and White and Suburban.
White picket fences at attention,
to form words,
smiles,
inhalations,
exhalations,
tenuous contacts with particles that are not
my own,
after sneaking through the slats
picketing my gums.
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7. |
Controlled Burn
03:26
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“Controlled burn: do not report” glows in safety orange
emblazoned among a sopping sky’s fall to earth
(the asphalt is soaked in the smell you call “wet” instead of “rain”)
as I tumble downhill into desert sand,
where I might hang these feelings to dry on clotheslines
strewn above the oneness of suburban riviera
along the disconnect of an empty swimming pool.
“Break up” carries the violence of ripping apart
these parts of a whole, my dear, or smashing to pieces
collections of the familiar,
a child new to limbs lost in the space of things:
what sort of holes do spaces within the atom
leave wounded in this universe?
How does the heart of the atom yearn for the distant linger of the electron?
And what power high does that electron get from pulling light
into the gray scheme of cloud’s fall from heaven,
bucking up the sadness of scene with the violence of
attraction
(parting lips was an exercise of muscle and magnetism, love.
I don’t know how I let go of your hand at all.)
This sign, blinking in its orange bulbs, though, tells the story
of a controlled burn;
the accident of lightning does not always beg for
man’s smother.
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8. |
Tequila Sunrise
01:53
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9. |
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Despite my greatest effort
I cannot grow a moustache,
and my upper lip defies modesty,
flaunting its naked ass to the public.
Sometimes children are watching.
Neither razors nor waxers have
waned between lower nose and upper lip,
and yet
blonde, fuzzy sprouts never garden,
and instead whimper away into the night.
Perhaps I ought to water it.
Purchase a tiny gardening set
and set up shop,
nourishing that thin strip of skin above my mouth.
Wear overalls as I pray to Gods
and Harvest Moons
to bless me with my crop,
that I may then feed to the men at market.
Perhaps science has the answer:
Take pills,
rub creams,
write letters to Steven Hawking,
sprout the beauty that sells cars
and emits musk,
before side effects reduce me to the ground,
where my moustache would keep growing.
Alas I could philosophize my way to a moustache.
Sit for hours on end
Preferably on rocks, naked, in sculptural contemplation,
finding the solutions to life and locks.
In wisdom, a beard would spring
To oblige my credibility,
professor preceding its name.
Perhaps I shall pet my upper lip,
call him a good boy,
take him to the vet,
and buy him a collar asserting that we share a last name,
that we are one in the same,
that I control what is mine.
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10. |
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Teach me what Shakespeare meant by a summer’s day:
I grew up in Phoenix and could never understand why
he would cast love in such a harsh, beating, sweltering light—
at least before Post-Modernism’s affair with Irony.
I grew up in Phoenix,
but am settling into adulthood north, on a mountain,
where we’re leaving winter to melt into the
footprints which built this path to the present,
where I can see your upper-arm slipping out
into sleevelessness and down to
forearm, hand, finger grasping Hemmingway print,
as a renaissance lover might have once held onto
a summer’s breath:
a cool breeze mingled in stagnant air.
Your body warmth isn’t a battle any more,
held close in grasping need against winter’s freeze.
You and Air have reached osmosis, a temperate oneness.
I want in:
to make trinity with you between
body
body
and blossoming spring.
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Grandpa Rosevelts Sandy, Oregon
Inspired by intelligent alien friends who like to study the American south-west (because tradition dictates some things), but also north-west, we like words and strings and ambient things, but not fluctuating vocal tones, because then our aliens would go have other, more monotone friends. ... more
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