two months of poetry prompts with D & K
Day 1 (Movie)
We made love behind the thin curtain in your childhood home
Silent and watchful as two Japanese soldiers skirting a bunker of American marines
Themselves jacking off into folded wads of Rita Hayworth
The Enola Gay was named after the pilot's mother;
One wonders what their issues were.
The same crew, fresh off Hiroshima,
served as weather reconnaissance for the Nagasaki mission
Diverted from its primary target due to cloud cover
The pilot radioed that fog was too thick.
"We cannot see, sir, we cannot deploy, pull back, pull back - !"
A teenage Japanese pilot climbs into his kamikaze aircraft
No bullets on board and one-way fuel in the tank
Flying straight away from the rising sun
All is lost and nothing gained
The boy at the aviator controls
Diverts away from his target at the very last second
Fuel tank at zero point zero points nose into Pacific
The empire's flag a shroud wound round his body
Dragging him down and down, into the deep
Day 2 (secret and when you learned something)
I'm all fucked up this morning, brokenhearted and my chest like a herd of gerbils is running loose inside me and eating out my internal organs; shame and dread and sadness and fear all settling in for a long winter's nap; not enough sleep, so much shitty parenting over the weekend, and a terrible phone call with Matt in which I tried to express how I get so weirdly hurt by some of the things he does and ended up so humiliated and overexposed and my bowels are like medieval sewers, shit just running through the streets; apparently I do have a raging case of borderline personality, a child Violet's age lives inside me and she is sitting frozen in the corner behind bed and desk by the heater vent; this will be the age when I learn the architecture of suffering, of humiliation, of keeping secrets and of holding them inside and perhaps this kind of pain at some point turns into some kind of clarity or some kind of selective resignation. I could hear in his voice that he felt tired and wished to be done with the exhausting task of doing this woman's work. I cannot see because I cannot see; the blinding presence of my own insecurities steal the stage and ruin the play every time. I'm about to set out on a run and in the dark and Christ be with me, in all things.
Day 3 (Take a stand)
There are a number of things I swear I cannot not do
At night the kids go to bed and I'll fight you with every silent signal, avoiding eyes and invitations, tooth and claw, to create a solitary nest
made out of two fudgesicles and a book and extra,
a small mountain of goldfish crackers
and take my frayed and freaked out self on a little bender;
I remember my client; the one who studied zebrafish as a research postdoc
sharing that at a molecular level, hearing has to do with tiny circles of crystalline dots of embryonic yolk that he would remove his own eyelashes to create a tool fine enough to be able to manipulate under the electron microscope,
inside zebrafish ears those crystals fall down, one by one,
like little dominoes over a time sequence, resulting in fish sound.
Which anyhow is the exact same as the fudgesicles; soothing some internal crystalline domino clock allowing the pale larval version of myself resonate with a feeling of finally being okay enough that perhaps it's all right to go to sleep.
Day 4 (Mysterious envelope)
I imagine X opening this advent window
And hold the journey it will inevitably send her on
Mourning and morning circling like osprey
Because the envelope already arrived
Weighing less than a feather
Matter compressed to the size of a pin before the Big Bang
The envelope that might have been
A threat; a promise; a bullet; a heart; a child -
A single ticket to the country fair - it was faith, hope, and love
And now these three remain, and the greatest of these is love.
Day 6 (tonight I believe…)
Tonight I believe there is nothing to believe
But instead a holy communion
God utters me like a word
containing a partial thought of himself
Invoked or not invoked, God is still present**
I seek the Christ in you, sleeper
And invite you to seek it in me
Uncle Steven used to write an annual Christmas letter
In which, in addition to his desert visions and reports of mountain conditions,
he reflected on the wondrous nature of his lovelife
With Aunt Meredith. How she still moved in passion under his old body
And how they found an ecstatic communion, a wilderness anew
Together each night in their dusty bed in the shadow of Mount Whitney.
Those letters would land on the desks, variously
Of my mother (his sister), his horrified conservative Baptist parents,
The dean of English literature at Berkeley, the chief of the Paiute tribe
In my house the letter was folded neatly into the basket with all the other Christmas cards
Dominated by eighties photos of families in matching sweaters holding cocker spaniels
I remember how embarrassed and electrified I was to read them
Proclaiming year after year that love lasts and lust deepens
The Christ becoming clearer and more enfleshed
Tonight I believe in blood and body, bread and wine, holy sacrament.
** stolen from Merton and Jung
Day 7 (fear)
Wake up in the morning to discover both tea and coffee were
embargoed as part of Trump’s trade war and are
simply no longer available in North America
Running shoes were eaten into unrecognizable shreds overnight
by a herd of omnivorous, hummingbird-sized, thick-legged spiders,
who digested them and then disappeared to various corners of the house;
except you can sort of see their legs sticking out here and there,
and they especially like the underwear drawer.
Overhear my roommate starting to vomit from Norovirus
we must have both contracted given the lukewarm stroganoff we shared
from the same spoon the night before; my most violent symptoms are still three hours away.
The cat dropped several secret hairballs including one on the white couch that I don’t notice until after the fancy ladies from my book club pop by for a surprise visit;
RBG is poisoned in an airport with ricin administered
by an angelic four-year old boy trained since birth as a Russian agent,
It’s November 5, 2020,
And on CNN a panel of pundits are trying to understand the confusion of early polling
As we all settle in for a second term following an election that went in a landslide.
Day 8 (trying in third person)
In which she attempts to compose a firm but civil email to her attorney
Refusing to pay for additional services he claims to have rendered
And the fact he’ll charge a fat Ben Franklin just to dismiss her complaints with the thought:
“And this, sweetheart, is exactly why someone found you impossible to live with”
And despite promises at the outset that it should cost
Somewhat less than the shitty mattress they used to sleep on to dissolve the marriage.
Like it hadn’t already soaked overnight in caustic liquid a thousand times already.
In the email she is demure and fact-filled like Christine Blasey-Ford
A bleary-eyed owl behind those smeary glasses, needing caffeine
Every neck wrinkle on display for all of America to ponder
if they would have drunk-raped her in high school.
Dear Attorney, you are not my type, she types. I would not fuck you
Even if you were blackout drunk behind a dumpster.
Instead she thinks she will find the nest of the owl
That divebombs her on dark dawn mornings
Silently climb the tree that holds the nest, branch after branch
Reach into the hollow in the snag
And pull out owlets one by one,
Lick them mewling eat them blood and feather and beak and bone
Crawl into the nest and take their place
Mother owl makes her into a new chick
Feeds her regurgitated voles and teaches the art
Of misdirected violence.
Day 10 (homophones)
Teaching Violet to read
Bend the will and break the reed
Ascend from halting babble
Break down walls of Babel
The room is airless
Anger; and I’m heirless
She a ballerina baroness
Me a scathing barrenness
Weaponize shame’s bruise
Tiny pain inside her brews
Bribe and cajole and force and box
To join this sullen group of Bocks
Day 11 La Cañada
In the eighties, smog settled in the narrow valley
An enormous fat graybrown Persian cat reclining across our oxygen supply
Refracting the sun into an orange ball
The valley walls hypothetical a mile distant
Not rain trapping us inside from recess to play head’s up seven up
But air pollution days, air conditioning filtering hot soup into cold bouillon
Twice we had big forest fires up the Angeles Crest
From the big living room windows at night my mom, brother and I
watched the red line of fire eating its way
Toward the houses we were inside;
Firetrucks rolling down the streets slow,
loudspeakers in the night blaring “Evacuate! Evacuate!”
Dad despite the divorce on the shake roof of Mom’s house with a puny hose of water
Earthquakes started with a sharp femur snapping “crack!”
And then the big picture windows rippled like waves
Leaving a strange alert exhilaration afterwards
Mom silently panicked for a year afterwards
playing game after game after game of solitaire
Day 13 6/6/6
Me and also the small
One inside that is scared
And never said fuck no
I am frozen to please
We are not doing well
Dark lost and very cold
Lie in bed with baby
Girl asleep next to me
Silent son hurt across
The hall also sleeping
His rage forming into
That which will define us
Forsaken beloved
Kintsugi broken light
We are more real now that
We are defined by loss
We had to break more than
Necessary to breathe
I asked the small one what
She learned so well about
Not making a sound dry-
wall over the heart dead-
en anger into seek-
ing answers outside self
I should probably be
Alone for a year or
A decade might give light
To dark impossible
Want to work with myself
In free clear light of day
Day 14 – dead and the living
Nestled between the cheese plate and paté
Grandpa’s brain was held at 37°
In a brown cardboard box labeled “Human
Remains” in the assisted living fridge.
Excavated after death to donate
A dissecting neurologist’s wet dream
My dad delivered his father’s brain to
The same facility that would receive
His 18 years later; no box needed
Fresh out of the skull to formeldahyde
In 1987 my dad sat
His dad down to talk about their feelings
Conversation captured on cassette tape
Two men in their prime, hearts locked in battle.
Day 15 candy
Monday morning after insomnia and the alarm shrieks and my chest is still a radioactive lake from top of throat down through the chest and making my hands shake.
Sweetheart, sweetheart
i say to myself, i am with you.
Years ago I felt this way and took zoloft, sweet blessed seretonin candy, after two weeks suddenly the lake in my chest got cleaned up like a superfund site and I could breathe again, albeit in a shallow way. I gained fifteen pounds and couldn't come to save my life; poor boyfriend slogging away at oral sex like a steam engine for hours at a time; needed chiropracty after; and I couldn't discontinue without eight months of restless leg and grinding my teeth into broken shards of concrete. But holy shit the miracle of my chest being clean and sweet and still, fear and rage anesthetized, deep underwater, sleeping Ness. Doctors at the institute opine that Dad, Grandpa, and Uncle Don all got Parkinson's from swimming in just such a radioactive lake; Green Pond, which was right next to the Picatinny arsenal. I too, swam in it once, after a cross-country redeye with my dad he took me to his most beloved summer childhood place; I remember the water cool after the humid New Jersey air and the sticky exhaustion of flight. But that's the central confusion: Do I trust the lake, or will it destroy me?
Day 16 Color
Picatinny picatinny
Nick a penny; Pick a ninny
Tin and picky pica nitty
Cyclonite white and bright
Hellfire fight atom’s flight
RDX, flex a hex to HMX
Pickaninny in picatinny
Swimming swimmy
Myelin sheathing
Bequeathing decreasing
Sinemet; sign we met
Pale pastille to brain’s bastille
Lick a penny in the Picatinny
Day 17
Woman Killed by Falling Debris in Times Square
Squarely in the head, she got clobbered
Bird-like it was not, that piece of falling terra-cotta;
Talking on her cellphone at the final moment,
Mental capacities Ferrari’ed sixty to zero
“Oh! Son of a motherless goat!” She exclaimed,
Lamed and brained, an architect and socialite
Lightning strikes only once, they say
Saviors unpresent at the moment of truth
Ruthless gods kidnap their quarry
Original sin our Eve had committed;
It did not block the angels from arriving.
Day 18
Opposites
To be what one is not –
Faculties gone to pot;
Neuroses lost their plot;
How long before it is noticed -
I sit a perfect lotus,
A smooth and silky poetess;
Allergic to cats; uninterested in priests;
Hawking essential oils; cruel to beasts.
Mascara forgotten, caffeine ceased.
Perhaps for one day
I could play it that way;
Dance and sing; for once, say:
“A cigar is just a cigar!”
Ban gray from repertoire
Watch TV, hardy har har
Day 19 Mad Libs
Poseidon stepped in a fresh green cow patty
While polishing the dregs of a bottle of maraschino cherries
His mind murmuring with memories of the mermaids
Now exiled, he wandered, centipedes wrapped into the long dreds of his hair,
Bandying a slow bolero around the dead body of his ancient companion
William, scheduled to catch bus 321 to the underworld
His eyes burned with tears, a quiet knowledge he was repeating
Endlessly, the patterns that would imprison him
No Vaseline to soften or loosen his escape.
Day 20 Tiny Delight
My love
makes
tiny “hunh”
sounds when
listening with
his heart
A small
chirp
of
presence
The tiniest
invitation:
Yes – and -
linger – and –
stay – and -
more.
Day 21
(De-stress)
Before leaving; a mild dread of it but also a hunger for it,
Circumnavigation between procrastination and rush
Left to settle, a sludge liquefies lung cavity into undifferentiated bucket of Ebola goo
Muscle tissue falls off bones like Dali clocks
Skull fills with cotton balls soaked in iodine and exploded in a popcorn popper
Tiny copper wire running from brainstem into foregut runs green electricity
Eyeballs burn dipped in a mild Drano bath
Scope-defying halitosis and mild trembling shakes
Cognition left to traverse a single lane highway with construction flaggers
And so: Leave.
The heart the center pushing and cleaning; a dialysis of miles
Sweeping and scrubbing; microscopic Downton Abbey scullery maids
Open each room and pull back every curtain and swipe the sheets off the sofas
Rats and roaches are trapped and discarded, chamber pots dumped in the street.
My soulful self goes along for the ride; Bran carried by Hodor
And sometimes clarity comes as the sludge retreats, left on the wrack line
A knowing thing is washed up and left for examination;
Carried home now by a new being; capable of facing what remains.
Day 22 Punctuation
Transcribing Simon for five minutes
I got the dragon in there
I have everything I need
I went into the dark place
I take the path to get there directly
Instead of getting myself lost
A hard form holds a liquid more firmly
Mom what would you do if I had two million dollars
What would you have as your superpower
What would you do if I turned into a kitten
What would you do if we had a t-rex in the backyard
I want to get to the very hardest level and see if I can defeat it
My sister is gone on a playdate now I can relax
One kid with one parent is the best
Two parents is too much control but with two kids it’s out of control
Day 25 Prose love
(Love, prose poem)
Last night I took Simon and Violet over to Joyce’s and met Matt there for a Christmas get-together. Only the mildest apprehension prior to arrival; Matt being there is likely a safety buffer plus the kids plus maybe she and I are pretty much ok although I was tired and that can be trouble. Walking into her home as a kid and frankly up until about age 35 it felt like being pushed out the door of an airplane like an Argentinian desaparacido; not really the falling into the ocean from two miles up part, more just the flight out and waiting for the bay door to open. And now I walk in willingly; always the quick sizing up at the door and the hug more bird like and ambivalent than I know how to metabolize in the moment. She is saying without saying, “you have hurt me but here you are to maybe hurt me more and you believe I have hurt you and I know that but I can’t look at it because it would make my life cave into a volcanic crater and also maybe you can help take the hurt away, let the games begin”, and me saying basically the same. We do all this while the kids pounce around like spring lambs and while commenting on the pros and cons of using an air-fryer to cook a turkey breast which parenthetically is a highly effective way to create astronaut food which then is served as the Christmas meal. And then Matt, God bless him, turns out to be an adult fully capable of animatedly chatting for three hours with a charming 74-year old southern lady who despite previous advertising from his grim and hyperbolic girlfriend, does not slam doors in anyone’s face nor make cutting comments that lacerate anyone’s self-esteem leading to decades of psychotherapy. He claims to really like her, which possibly will result in my needing to throw him out of the hold of an airplane over the open ocean at some point in the future, but I also rest assured that she will at some point act out horribly in his presence and I will be vindicated in my bitchiness and man oh man is this turkey breast ever dry; communion host mixed with wasa crackers. The night’s conversation somehow leads to my reading off google the characteristics of everyone’s astrological sign, which miraculously are a perfect simulacrum of each person present; Joyce, an Aires, is described as hot-headed, competitive, impulsive, and difficult to please. She proclaims in all dead-seriousness that she is nothing like that, while the ten-year old in the room says it is a perfect match and then recalls for the crowd the time she threw my birthday cake onto the floor and a wine glass across the room as evidence and then obliviously goes off to play with his new lego set. His sign, a Cancer, described him as preternaturally empathetic. Mine described me as wishy-washy and diplomatic to the point of self-oblivion, and Matt, independent, self-sufficient, and internally preoccupied. Violet, a Leo, warm-hearted and generous, the age I was when some essential part of me was run through a tree chipper and then air-fried into this Christmas' turkey dinner by the woman in question, asks me if she can spend the night with her Granny, a home where she feels happy and safe and free; imagine – redemption.
Day 29 Rispetto
Defensive fat shit-eating grins
Watching white and black lady walk;
It only begins with the skins,
Lion and lamb, hail to Barack.
White liberal niceness likes this
Peaceable kingdom: goodbye kiss
Not in my backyard to be sure
Some black, but not much: reassure.
Day 23 Procrastination
My marriage was ended after 17 years
By a small ball lodged in my chest
The size of a nectarine
But gray in color and filled with fog
Cold and still and empty
Things attempted to fill the ball with a different substance included:
Mindfulness meditation in which my anxious intuition to leave was seen as a thought on a passing train and/or cloud; pausing with compassion for self prior to critical judgment;
seeing my husband as the unattainable father who finally loved me unconditionally; deciding ours was a successful arranged marriage which billions in India would be grateful for;
reading his journals to concoct a feeling of love and gratitude for his poignant and charming perspective; committing to a once-per-week schedule of lovemaking;
accepting that Jesus would be my companion and the only solace for the existential dread in my heart was that of the universal Christ; engaging in hundreds or thousands of conversations to attempt to describe the contours of loneliness;
reading articles forwarded by friends about how modern marriage is expected to be too ideal and a woman in a previous generation would have been content with my situation; imagining adopting from foster care after our kids left home in order not to be alone in the house with him,
avoiding years of date nights so as not to have the sick lonely feeling grow to cantaloupe proportions; diagnosing myself with an attachment disorder incapable of secure connection;
numbing and avoiding my emotional world with an epic number of lowfat icecream popsicles; numbing and avoiding my emotional world with an obsession with the 2016 election; numbing and avoiding my emotional world with _______________
Day 30: Seven
Seven years old I entered third grade
Youngest and ugliest and book-smartest and
Precociously self-conscious, able to glory in
Seeing myself as I imagined being seen
Summers I’d ride the Queen of Tsawwassen
Between the mainland and Galiano Island where
My grandmother brought me to safety under
Her gray feathered wing. On the ferry
I would stand casually posing on the
deck in front of the big picture
windows and imagine the people inside imagining
me to be romantic and wistful and
unattainably beautiful. Ostentatiously self-conscious of being
watched and oddly longed for, the cause
of envy and wonder; a heroic solitary
character. “Who is that lonely, brave girl?”
I thought them to be thinking, as
I gazed dramatically into the distance pretending
To think deep and concerned thoughts about
Perhaps, my dead mother and the baby
deer that I would nurse back to
life, how deeply my soul was held
by Jesus and other sentimentalities that kept
me apart and special and untouchable until
the ship’s horn would blast and I’d
have to come inside to my grandparents
to go back to the car where
my grandma gave me saltines and Tums
as a snack; we played Go Fish.
Day 31 Prologue
I’m owl-attacked
Exhausted
And sidestepping
No goal just a Great White's
Sensitivity to blood in the water
And feral cat’s disbelief
In the kindness of strangers
Or perhaps not strangers;
They walk past without offering
Tuna from their sandwich
But sometimes out of desperation
I have wound tail around the leg
Of the man in fedora with hand out
Saying “pssst psst kitty!”
But charity is easy
I love it
When you say something
Finally true from the center
And your eyes are still
I know you’ll say
Tell me three good things
And put in earplugs
After I bring up Hitler’s biography
And incest at 3 am
I am the canary
You are the coalmine
I am Tiresias; blind clairvoyant
I have come this far pulled
by a space in my chest
the size of seven nesting hummingbirds
It is embarrassing
To keep crying on the phone
But how in the hell else
Will I ever end up
Anywhere but here?
I want to walk headscarved
Through Istanbul and Tehran;
Aleppo before cluster munitions
And disappear into some tiny door
where love will welcome me with silence and knowing eyes
Welcome me to a secret sisterhood
Of those who know but cannot say
The terms of surrender
I used to be a Rothko
Rust, Blacks on Plum
Now a Cezanne
Rocks near Chateau Noir
He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire
A dozen times and died.
My solitariness the same.
I like to wake ahead of the kids
And find in 4 am the safest place
Now disturbed by love or its lack
I have become a glutton
Khodumodumo
Swallowing whole villages of sleeping innocents
I love to hear from women
Who have words for all the pain
Who can see the interlocking
Embroidered half-hitch sailor knot
Interspliced with macramé
That makes up the impossibility
Of safety without presence
I fear if faced with watermelon
On a hot August day
I might still be preoccupied with
The place in my chest cavity where a leak has sprung
Making it impossible to breathe
Except in short gasps.
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
Being all the proof allowed
Not the proof I need.
April: Day 1
Mama shot the dogs with a 12-gauge.
He and Frank heard muffled poppoppop
Walking now running the mile home from the bus
What now, oh god oh mama nonono
Their sleek furry bodies warm in the dust.
In darkened bedroom she blamed him
for not having fed the dogs that morning.
Later; but not that day, she killed the pony, too.
Soaked it in kerosene; lit it on fire,
He had to bury it in New Mexico clay;
Dad sawed off its hooves to make it lie flat
And a thunderstorm unearthed it.
These were not the only things that happened.
A skinny sweet-hearted boy
On a dusty failing horse ranch;
Loved to cook, loved to tinker.
At sixteen he sat alone on the school bleachers
And another boy’s mama sidled close:
“Hey, are you okay?”
He exploded into tears and ran
Never said a word
Joined the Marines and gotthefuckout
Now he’s fifty and he’s building my mom a house
I saw he hung a crucifix over the bandsaw in his workspace
And a framed postcard of the Pieta.
I spent a year trying to make him love me
In the way I needed
Dream I hold the 12-gauge.
Wave it dramatically; turn it on him,
but use it on myself;
Leave him to clean the mess,
And a note that blames him
for not having fed me.
I hold him lightly
Give his dog treats
Together we cook and tinker
I have a photo of him, age four, framed on my desk.
My bowlcut beauty, beloved, friend.
Grandma and her son
Tunafish sandwiches in wax paper
Folded in perfect origami
Towhees in the feeder outside
And also finches and the dratted jays
Licorice in the drawer
For no reason other than a happy “why not?”
Grandpa slowly chewing with eight incisors
Silent and resigned to our hilarity.
Little Drummer Boy on the piano
Grubby kid hands on old arthritic knuckles
Grandma says, “Well, he seems like a good man.
Although perhaps a lot like your father -
Whom I never could forgive
For leaving your mother like he did.”
Uncle Steven sidles in: “Love is a wild dog,
And you are a wolf. Danger is near. Howl my beloved.”
Grandma nods;
Passes out the tunafish.
Childhood
No
Oh please no
Quiet! GodDAMmit
Nonono ohgodno
hold !still
hold -- stay -- stop – don’t!
Ohgod
Step step step stepstepstop
Oh:
No
Avalanche
Violet wants to be touched but not touched not held or grasped but running past me sweeping under legs and rolling over me in the grass and gimme five and picked up onto the tall height and brought back down she edges up sideways and leaves her avalanche of beauty pulling down a mountain of desire to capture her on stork legs she escapes at a million miles per hour burying my heart in the space between us in which she grows like a golden weed.
How I Became Single Again
We met on this precise date one year ago. I thought him intelligent, self-inquiring, steady; the edge of sharp pain that had caused him to take a strange path glinting behind him like the reflection off a car’s mirror, in our periphery. Mannerful, cordial, capable of conversing; for me -after an adulthood with a husband who could not do the smoothing basics of social interaction – the ease he created was a relief; he was happy to assume his side of running the engine of connection. He expressed curiosity about me, not an enmeshing desire to be liked or wanted, but an actual desire to know what my experience was. He wanted to try it on to see if it fit him, and that wanting to know and to feel it so he could feel it for himself was very intimate. It all made me want him. I wanted that strong manly solidity and warmth to glow all over my life. I wanted him to see all the intricate parts of me and expose them to that light and have him smile and say, “oh yes”. He was a soul like my father but a lover. I started to show off, to show up. How much could he glow on me? How much would he? And I would in turn hold him in my light; I could see more depth and intricacy in him and it elicited sympathy but he did not need of feed off the sympathy because he was also holding himself in that light he has. So my sympathy just became an honoring of him, and he felt that as safe and it was. Over time I wanted him to bring his light to more and more of my life. And soon there started to feel like there wasn’t enough. He was a sun in constant eclipse. His light was titrated; it was a resource somewhat scarce; the more I wanted the more he held back; felt accused and criticized; the light flickered; I danced faster and pushed and prodded wanting more; anxious now; like one of those days at the beach when the clouds cover the sun and it’s biting cold and then clouds part and the warmth flirts in for a moment but the clouds threaten. And he became angry and he started to fear me; resent me, and I could feel it but he did not say it; it only played out in the sense of cool and heat, unpredictable; fragile. And I questioned if he was light at all; if perhaps that warmth was a façade, something else; he had seen me in all my showing up and showing off and the light was not warm; instead it was naming me with fearful names, and the shame and anger came flowing in like a dam that broke and we saw it all happen and now we stand together looking at the great mess we made; alone.
Hand
The handsome Archbishop homilized the confirmants
“I am in the palm of the church due to the Eucharist”
And pointed with one bony finger at inert bowls of wafers
As a couple hundred sweaty-palmed immigrant adolescents
In sexpot dresses and cat-eye makeup long to finger one another;
They look on handily; anthropologists in the world,
Of handsy empowered white men.
Oh dumb cat
Lost in a storm
Door flew open
Left a warm bed
For a black blow
Moon and star
******
odd symptoms
Tapped into google
Suggest glioblastoma;
Psychosis; dementia;
As well as hayfever
The still waiting of a house
Perfectly clean
Even laundry folded
Dishes away
Before company arrives
Walking home
At the end of the last workday
Before a two week break
The end, like death; out of sight
Yet close; makes each drop sweet
About to deliver news
That will break a heart
Comes with fear
And causes rage
A hundred future selves lost
A cat; lost for days
Appears at the door
Suddenly inhabiting
The yawning empty space
Of her former disappearance
Your son says a thing
Wise and deep
He only learned
By facing pain
Alone
***
Think of the waterlilies hanging in the D’Orsay, alone now
Day after day. The room is charging and charging and charging
An endless defibrillator, beauty gushing out and not being seen;
Just gushing and gushing into the room not being lapped up by cameras or eyes
To enter the room now like being licked and nursed by a thousand pound snow leopard, like being swallowed into the sun after an endless space journey; like being drowned in a giant pool of honey in a hidden valley at the peak of Mount Fuji; like being loved by a god, a siren, a phoenix, ravished and ravaged and torn open and burned - ?
****
Occasionally we stretch off the land of ourselves
Onto a dock that extends into the water
Of that which rushes past us but is not of us
We stand upon the dock; separated from self
Over that which is made of fantasy, hope, and dream;
The dreams of others, their projections, their plans for us.
It is possible to live upon the dock
Connected to self but separate; grounded not in land
But floating upon the story of an other
For long years.
The journey back to self
Is made of a commitment to truths so hard
They appear to threaten each creosote plank
That holds us above drowning.
****
The leader of the free world hunkers impatiently in the head
Drafting tweets and awaiting deliverance of his pound of prunes.
Advisors loom in the Oval; flailing at governance as disaster
frogmarches the citizenry en masse off a plank.
“LIBERATE Virginia!” Tweets the pres; Fauci pounds a fist on the Resolute;
Cuomo gets on the phone to the local 504, drafting 50 drivers of refrigerated semis
Redeployed to stack patients in yellow bags rolling out the back of Montefiore.
The democratic candidate runs on a plank of obsolescence; looming his November loss
Out of yet another set of circumstances too terrible to count on his pruned fingers.
***
die unzufriedene Frau
“die unzufriedene Frau - the discontented woman – it’s what my mother always called me; and herself.” - Daisy
I want not too close
Closer farther closer now
Not exactly there but here is good
And soft and hard also
Strip dressed and run here being still
And leave now don’t move stay
Darker deeper more and stop but don’t
Leave and be here always and also never
Be with me go away just right
Be outside and come inside
No and yes but not.
****
catgut
oh Catgut you hold me
inside tender webbing
fiddling incessantly with
my heart’s rubiks cube
silent shotgun rider
you knew me then and
know me now magnet
compassed south
to turn the mobius
strip of intimacy
into a desert salted
with frog eggs
lying dormant a hundred
years until the rain
comes but always quicksand
and lava threaten
to swallow and burn
so leap sofa to
coffeetable don’t
fall in.
****
granny panties
there may or may not be a god
loving me even as I insist
on sticking my head inside a pair of XL
granny panties; tying off my vision
and taking three dizzying spins
as sole preparation for the navigation
of an unspent minefield
surrounded by a barracuda-filled moat
patrolled from above by Predator drones
and from below by tunneling Sinaloas
inhabited by goliath birdeating spiders
and backed into San Quentin’s basketball court;
But my god there are some friends -
you know who you are
wise owl, grasshopper, Beloved -
you take my hand
“Nice panties”, you say
And show the way.
****
The teacher tells the story
Of the ex-con who writes his estranged and elderly parents:
“I’ll come on the 23rd but only go to the door if you hang a blanket on the line”
And so walks the long road to home;
Twenty years or more since he raged down the road in hatred and shame;
And with fear he approaches; about to turn back
But then on the road; sees a blanket in the tree
And twenty more in the road, paving the final curve;
And finally his childhood home, covered roof to stoop
In blanket upon blanket upon blanket.
****
The fundamental law of magic is that the message; what something means is not separate from the way something instantiates in the world. And you can’t separate the two.
I was thinking about the medium is the message also in terms of McLuhan’s religious beliefs. Because McLuhan was of course a daily communicant; he was as Catholic as you could possibly get. He would go to St Michael’s Parish every fuckin’ day and he was very religious; and yet – he’s seen as this very cool, Playboy interview kind of guy, very secular in what he writes, but when you think about the medium is the message as a Christological concept, well then it’s obvious – like, the whole thing about Christ’s incarnation is that the medium is the message – Logos – the word becomes flesh – it’s that the life of Christ is the message, is God, you can’t separate those two things anymore…incarnation is divinization; to exist in the material world is to be spiritual. As fresh as his theories felt…there’s something ancient about it, something ageless about it, something that goes way back…that’s cool to think about them in terms of magical theory.
“The content of any medium is always another medium…hidden within McLuhan is a theory of Logos incarnating itself; of something nonverbal, something completely outside coming in and shaping the world. For me, as a Catholic myself, and someone interested in magic and the esoteric, when I read McLuhan, I can’t help but realize, he says that, he’s giving us a very clear indication of the mysticism at the center of his philosophy. What he’s talking about is that everything we see as history is actually the incarnation of the spiritual. And that’s a Catholic vision. And let’s be calm here. When I say a Catholic vision I’m not talking about a Roman Catholic vision specifically…I’m talking about Catholicism as a particular instantiation of ancient religious thought. It’s not something that you need to kiss the Pope’s feet to believe this stuff. This is magical through and through. Catholicism is a magical system. That’s what it is. That’s why it works. And so what I’m saying is that there is a magical theory of incarnation in McLuhan and everything he’s talking about is how the divine transforms itself into the world, and how the imminence of the divine in the world and how it manifests, and how we as human beings have a responsibility to become aware of the divine so that we can see where things are going. Because when we live blindly and we practice an idolatry of each instantiation of the divine thinking it is the thing…or thinking we that now we finally understand what reason means because we have confused reason with language…this blindness we are in is the kind of golden calf idolatry that leads us astray. Whereas what we need is a kind of artistic or magical vision that calls us back to the background. The ultimate background which is nonverbal and divine…”
Let’s be calm here
the divine transforms itself into the world don’t
kiss the Pope’s feet the word becomes flesh
a magical system that’s what it is
that’s why it works
history is the incarnation of the spiritual
ancient religious thought
the imminence of the divine
in the world manifests
we have confused reason
with language leads us astray
St Michael’s parish every fuckin’ day
someone interested in magic and the esoteric
let’s be calm here
that’s a Catholic vision
the life of Christ is God
ancient magical theory fresh
the divine transforms itself into the world this
very cool Playboy interview kind of guy
the magical theory of incarnation
each instantiation of the divine
I’m not a Roman Catholic vision
this is magical through and through
incarnation an artistic vision calls us to the background
Logos incarnating itself the medium is the message
the word becomes flesh
lead us astray divine mysticism golden blindness
a daily communicant manifests the nonverbal divine
***
A dating website is that final scene in Raiders when the ark is wheeled into a giant warehouse of identical crates;Each one full of nazi-melting gods; sweeping destruction to all whose eyes are open
In middle age, the only sense left unencumbered is that of touch. Smell has departed due to covid,
and with it taste, allowing consumption of velveeta cheese slices;
the tiny hairs sensitizing the auditory canal so many burnt and broken stumps;
sight since grade school bleary and myopic.
The sound of my ex-lover’s voice on the phone tastes of Gacy’s final KFC order before electrocution
Maxim Loskutoff tapped out his response to my fan mail one-thumbed while seated on a white Kohler
Or else those crates: they are just full of dust.
My best friend once said my spirit animal was a dust bunny. Funny at the time. Mustn’t think about it too hard, though.
Dumbfuckery and douchebaggery along with roaringdumpsterfire all seem like excellent additions to the Oxford English
Because if you have words for something you can overcome it, said a dumbfuck douchebag somewhere, perched on the lip of a roaringdumpsterfire.
I simply can no longer with the man who calls it “sexy time” and asks to go for “walkies”.
The humiliating cat of reality will scratch your eyes out given a chance
And the wise teacher tells us all hope is lost; we are seaworthy Titanics
I overcome and stand firm; clear in self-knowledge; a beacon:
Susannah Banana; Suzie Jacuzzi; Sue Poo; SueBeeHoney was destined for greatness, this according to the 1993 yearbook, in which the merits of sugarfree donuts are also expounded -
And this great reckoning of arks and dustbunnies and roaringdumpsterfires shall be rendered as we are lashed to the pole;
A potbellied Harrison Ford forgets to tell us to close our eyes as the ark is opened;
Take delight in the lord and he shall grant you the desires of your heart
Hijo de la gran puta no sabe ni mierda
Gacy's chicken looked me straight in the eye; said, "To thine own self be true" and hopped in the fryer
A god is escaping through the tiniest crack in the ark’s crate; this one sneaky, leaking out like a line of ants.
***
1980 in Pasadena, California
I am four years old and
Feeding the tiny succulent
Jewels of the leaves off a sedum
Through the ear hole in my
Bouncy riding horse
Which is located on the back patio
It feels like morning
The air light and warm
Of 9 or 10 am on a
Southern California day
Must it be a weekend
For me to be home?
My mother must have
Helped me get out of bed
That morning, out of twisted pajamas
And fed my little girl body into
A handstitched sundress
I imagine she was kind through
Those pleasures of my apricot skin
And downfluff hair
The clothes I am certain
Were neatly folded in the cedar drawer
Little feet secured into white sandals
I am sure she helped me potty
Saying things like “a hop skip and a jump”
and made me breakfast
God she took pleasure in me
Grapenuts or grapefruit perfectly dissected
And real silver spoon with serrated tip
Sugar I piled on myself from the
blue and white sugarbowl
And then I am left alone and
It occurs to me to go outside
Through the goldroom
Which has orange carpet and flowered
Wallpaper on the ceiling
And windows all around
The air is like a bite of ripe cantaloupe
And the horse is my baby
I get in trouble for peeling off those sedum petals
But I always do because they are the food
And my horse is hungry and
I murmur to him how good he is
And the petals, a perfect aloe-y pop
Plunk plunk plunk into his plastic insides
Through the hole in his head
And riding him he lists
slightly to one side and squeaks
like an old bed on someone’s wedding night
My mother taps on the window that
Overlooks the patio
Waving at me to stop ruining the plant
I comply briefly and then do it in hiding.
A tiny snap in my chest
As I resist and refuse
I am galloping away but still held firm
I hold my secret No
She holds her endless Yes.