Friday, June 30, 2006

Microphon-a-phobic

The dispersal of my voice all at once
to all your ears
Smother strangle your
Tube Eardrum Tympanum
Wrangling our beauty language
with acrimonious vibration.
“I apologize ahead of time -
I shouldn’t’ve put you through this”
Process slurry pronunciation of my words
Catatonic dissonance; I hear myself
being taped.
I taped myself at a young age
Played it back
Hated it.

Cross-genre Capsa

She has the confidence of a blonde
The smirk of a brunette
The twinkle of a child
The wit of an old Volvo

She has the likes of a child
The transience of a blonde
The trajectory of a Volvo
The quiet eyes of a brunette

She has the scribble of a Volvo
The trinket of a child
The scape of a brunette
The footnote of a blonde

The brunette of a canteen
The Volvo of a Stephanie
The blonde of a cat-hair
The child of a planet encounter

Blonde fronds in brunette sail-canvas
Shrink like a child curled Volvo

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

What's more important than peeing and sleeping?

The breaks we are granted are short little niches
where regular life tries to keep on.
Getting cleansed dressed prepped for the day
Shaving bathing our clothes for proper aroma
Most of these deal with tolerable fragrance-
acceptable redolence for our new friends.
(we are in close quarters -
it is just considerate
not to carry an odor)

After lecture today- Tuesday- I stopped at the stairwell
in my apartment complex,
thought: “Haven’t checked the mail in some time.”
But my internal timer did the math
I had to pee
Had to nap

I couldn’t think of any letter package bill
more important than these acts.

What’s more important than peeing and sleeping?
Apparently, writing a poem.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Zoning

“When you were a little kid
Did you ever lock yourself in the closet?”
Syntax disturbs intentional message
He locked himself up in the bathroom
Naked
With a few papers
A pencil, I assume
And his glasses on

I hadn’t knocked for hours
And didn’t ask him how his time was
When he emerged

Thursday, June 22, 2006

“The Universe” as a Black Hole or America collapsing under its own massive ego

Ameritocracy (&-'mer-&-'tä-kr&-sE): n.
1) a hegemony of American ethnocentricity; a selfishness specific to US.

If a helicopter were to be flown above and around the world, America
would be the overhead rotor blades; not propelling itself to go higher, but instead dragging those beneath it to trail along

And we’re vacuuming
We’re sucking the culture out of the world
Maybe we’re jealous that others aren’t melted, so we attempt to meld them to
McDonald’s
Nike
Gap
If not with the hamburgers, shocks and sweaters,
with the hamburglers, shock and sweat shops.
We tie their shoestrings together and pretend to expect them
to stand on their own two feet
Fully aware that the knot is too tight
and they’ll trip and fall right into our support “system”

Hovering over the pooooooooor countries
that need our help
Our help in extracting the oil from their land
Our help in commercial labor
Our help in nuclear advice
Our help in raising their children
Raising their armies
And raising their flags

Tag:
“Hello, my name is America”

But the underlying message is
“Hello, you will be saved by becoming a mirror-America.
If we’re going to hell, you’re all coming with us.”
Enjoy the freedoms of fast food
Enjoy the freedoms of democracy
Hypo-crazy because
Nothing is the only thing
free
We are bound just as any other
Bound to stereotypes
Bound to government funding
Bound to our TV’s media
Constantly re-bounding from our shots missed
One day a country, not as tall,
but with a higher jump will catch the ball.


What are we here?
A ten tier broken sphere with half working
transient ears
Trolley hop between bridge gaps
Gaping like a baffled man
Grown- an adept, competent person
in disbelief of patterns
the shapes types and masks
projecting out toward
The East
The Other

The disbelief is maddening
like an unconscious comma
placed in the wrong space
in a sentence

His face gapes
Stuck like someone slapped
his back and it became
fixed like that.

Even when he smiles,
his lips are just a crease.
He hates the ease in
which he carries on in a conversation
in a country so broken
Scattered, battered, beaten, persisting in
good/ and bad ways

Is he bad to be so privileged and so lost
like the comma?
No matter which angle he sides with
He is somewhere
to someone, where that somewhere is wrong
to somebody.
What’s right?

United? Divided States of America
into sides
of right wrong
Long short
Retort prompt

Which came first- was it the chicken or the egg?
Was the egg a reaction to the chicken?
Was the chicken a hatching of the egg?
Who started it? “ You started it!”
Who cares!
It persists and we’re all apertures
spewing our intentions
Propositions
But what is resolved?

Ameritocracy is hypocrisy.
A country- each side, every angle
faction wing bloc sector pressure group
camp branch area variable- each one is
conniving & contorting pretension
This belief that his or her values should and will
Be universal
His belief is controversial to the opponent
The opponent’s belief is contentious, as well
Disbelief in the world as a circle
with us as the center.

Where am I going with this?
Where are we going? – when we
have a word specific to our own
Ethnocentricity.
A pathologic propensity to be revolved around,
as opposed to evolving within/amidst, the world.

(This is where the conclusion goes)
Yet there doesn’t seem to be any resolution.
We just let the years pass, decade by decade with
tens of hundreds of New Year’s Resolutions unresolved.

So where’s my solution?
Today I realized that as hypocritical as Ameritocrity is
Amerisocrity is our privilege as poets:
We indulge.
We explore rhetoric and resistance and rebuttals
in our fortunate forum.
Who else can save us?
What else?
Questions that bend at whichever light
that it lends.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Aurora

I wake up late on a Saturday
and an odor permeates
jostles my nostrils to turn toward him
and nestle my face in a crevice

Although my nose is small, it tickles
his longest hair
and he stirs
and slurs something incomprehensible

Although the allure of his scent
has sent me here,
I shift 90 degrees and place
my ear on his abdomen

I find there is no better place to
take a morning nap than the belly button

The Great Pumpkin

Slept out on the porch
the bedroom, his radiating body heat, too hot
so I snatched up pillow, pants, long brown blanket
and Linus van Pelt-ed out to the porch

* * *
the stars crowded with clouds
and Canyon Blvd teeming with whizzing cars
the mountains squirreled away
but the air, unblemished

a breeze so slight, the trees barely sway,
I lay across the two ottomans accompanying
our odd sofa seats and fling
my left leg up over the armrest

* * *

Woven into chestnut cotton
snarled up like an entangled scorpion
I slept pleasantly under the semi-starless sky

A Slight Disparity in Clarity

Argument
An exchange of diverging or opposing views
Discussion
A detailed treatment of a particular topic in speech or writing
I’d rather the latter

I trip on the first
I burst forth with emotion and twist myself
up in a nonsensical abrasion of the issue
scraping the edges; a blunt stump

Instead of sharpening a point
I write and write with my granite tip
Saw off thoughts that pop in my head
Sparks of speech leap from my mouth

I leak tears like a tempestuous preteen
I’m weak and beat from the poke

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Doorkey

I hold the golden ingredient up
with the divots facing down
Against the brown wood paneling
of the elevator door

The incisions resemble mountains:
the foothills, the flatirons
just west of us

The vista from our terrace

proves the notion true
The juts and abrupt slants
fit the topography of my key
Perfectly

A miniature landscape in my hand:
What an attractive apparatus.

Tranquil lakes run deeper

How many thoughts go unsaid
the important ones
the thoughts that mean something to the world
but are held back because of their weight

A weight so heavy
it burdens the mind
it hampers action
Like an anchor on your fishing boat

Sitting in the early AM
waiting for fish to come to the same spot they haven’t come to for hours
They will not come
unless you stir the stillness

What is it about silence
that leaves us so afraid to speak?