Untitled (for now)

A tree, shaven from wind & season,
sheds its bark onto
those below

The trunk, thick with
curves & ridges in its
sharp skin bark,

scrapes my delicate
ankle skin as I pass
a bit too close

But it heals, the cut,
placed so close to the
Achilles heel

The places more prone
to scarring are
the knuckles, the knees

the heart.

Blog to check out

Dear Bloggees

I will be taking a month hiatus from posting my hasty poetry.

Why?- you ask?

I decided I need to quit effing around and get serious with what I write about.

Also- when I post these things, I kinda just move on and never edit and never attempt to better em.

I will be working on research poems. If you would like to know what these are, please comment.




Joint blogs will continue through this lengthened poetry-writing lacuna.
Woop!

Blogger Propaganda

Stephanie and I are proud to announce the introduction of our two new children (born a few days apart; fraternal) into the cyber world.

These are collaborative efforts.

get with it people

comment!

Why are yawns contagious?

Contagion
Con tangere
Together with
the touch
Against
The opposite and adjacent
Contagious
Communicable
Spread of things
Good or bad
such as laughter or merriment
or yawning
Contagiousness
To spread and affect
With or without contact
Infectious
Transmission
Through the environment
Influence
Extend

I watched a yawn wave crash over the audience of poets and prose writers today.

Yawn
To open one’s mouth
Gaping
To open one’s mouth
Wide open
Deep Huge
Great!
Reflexive act
of opening one’s mouth
Action
Reaction
To open one’s mouth
and inhale
To open one’s mouth
Involuntary
Inherently empathetic
and aware

Said to be an action that circulates
Through nearby bystanders
Who want to understand the human condition
And therefore, subconsciously, try out the act.

Picaresque: A ship's soul survivors

When two colors collide
Instinct draws September

You were amongst brown eyes
& orange saris, bracelets, curry
for months
You arrived back in New York
In the night
When I saw you first, I shifted
on the concrete steps
I approached you, touched
Soft cotton, orange om shirt
For a few rupees, I imagined

We met up later at the
Soup & Burger on W 8th street
Each ordered a pound of meat
and spoke in soft tones about
harsh things
discordant themes of reverie

You said it felt different
You said: “You feel it too, don’t you?”
I nodded either up of left
I can’t exactly recall
But I do distinctly remember
the fall of the tear onto the pickle
caste aside.
It has occupied my mind
for some time now.

We paid the bill then made our way
South toward Washington Square Park
Where we found a dark corner on the north
that had a momentarily abandoned bench

It was quiet there.
We kept our talk about the
Summer, the year.
You, back in South Louisiana
Me, back to Brooklyn soon
“It’s distance and unassuredness
It seems absurd
It snaps the branch of us,
In a sense”
A bough already bent

-haunting sailor-esque musical interlude lead by mandolin accordian and tuba-

I buried my face into your
Orange shirt, shifted one hand
inside your left pocket,
holding.
You joked about how she was
wearing brown and orange to
The Conan show; just like you
Completely missing my new brown skirt
My shirt, a saffron hue.

I cried into your shoulder
Sobbing slobbering shaking
We sat, you then rested your head
against my lap and took a nap.
I listened to the song
“The Mariner’s Revenge”
and stared.


:In this belly of a whale
I:t’s ribs are ceiling beams
Y:ou may not remember me
He:r sheets still warm with him
To :keep their vestry nice and neat
The: prior exchanging words
The :following day
Ther:e is one thing I must say to you
To lea:n in close and I will whisper:

Naropa is...

This was a pass-around assignment where everyone in the class would write Naropa is... (fill in blank)... then pass it to the next student. In the end, we had 17 lists of Naropa is's. A selection:

Naropa is a lunch box
Naropa is open to nudity, unlike CU
Naropa is a temporarily ridiculous zone
Naropa is the audience for my ridiculous zone
Naropa is magnolia blossom, red & pink
Naropa is wilting
Naropa is the beginning of the end
Naropa is the paper cut on Charlotte's arm from the paper I'm shoving at her
Naropa cut me!
A naropian wasp stung me!
Naropa is not afraid of the pain.

Naropa is totally throwing off my gaydar
Naropa is full of hot women that might be gay
Naropa is my aphrodisiac
Naropa is transgendered bathrooms at the library
Naropa is into tantric things
Narops is a small aquatic fox of southern New Guinea
Naropa is skid-marks on the stranger sitting next to you's underwear
Naropa is kinda gross, at times
Naropa is stronger than dirt
Naropa is going to Cuba
Naropa is going to kiss Fidel
Naropa is Fidel

Naropa Naropa
Naropa is a good place to fuck post-emo, post-modern, post hippie Buddhist-questioning men
Naropa is about fucking the minds of the mono-culture fascists, with compassion
Naropa is extremely simple when you stop thinking
Naropa is the square root of infinity haw haw
Naropa is star tattoooooooooooo
Naropa is shooooooooooooting star
Naropa is one of the strangest places to be drunk and rambling in half-poetry, half non-sense
Naropa is the perfect place to be drunk and rambling in half-poetry, half non-sense
Naropa is drunk rambling poetry non-sense
Naropa is sober, concise and imperfect
Naropa is an AA meeting for drunks on poetry
Naropa doesn't take into account Tequila happy hour
Naropa is Tequila happy hour
Naropa is drunk today, definitely staggering
Naropa spends hours in the personal ads searching for a sensative love who likes eating meat
Naropa is without speedlimit
Naropa isn't

Naropa is calling to me in my sleep
Naropa is wonderful onderful nderful derful erful rful ful ul l
Naropa is a deep hand-print on your left breast reast east ast st t
Naropa is shaken, not stirred
Naropa is full of sea-shll sculptures
Naropa is the water bottle in the mesh pocket of my life's bag
Naropa is a place where bottles of water are also a form of currency
Naropa is a place where I currently
Naropa really has to pee
Naropa is beckoning
Naropa is a curled up yoga mat next to an esoteric gong
Naropa is contemplating her navel
Naropa is probably an exit maneuver
Naropa is a mechanical pencil in the hands of a three year old
Naropa is where "first thought, best thought" often means "shut up and drink that"
Naropa is my second thought and definitely not my best thought
Naropa is the process of wanting a drink of water, knowing you'll get it, but not yet

Naropa is breath in a gas-mask world
Naropa is a fart in a windstorm
Naropa is splat, ho hum
Naropa is a single eyelash floating down the length of a singularly sexy body- and we all are watching it
Naropa is the fart in car with all the windows up and no exit strategy
Naropa is not the present perfect of the verb "to run"
Naropa is orange, silver and saffron
Naropa doesn't rhyme
Naropa dances aerovoka
Naropa is a vote without chads
Naropa is currently engaged in a testicle comparing contest with Chuck Norris
Naropa's balls of metaphor and anti-matter

Naropa is the capital of chai
Naropa is a small oddball college in Colorado with a Buddhist orientation
Naropa is sequoia tree shavings playing swords with themselves
Naropa is OW! a splinter
Naropa is a pain in the grass
Naropa is better left unspoken
Naropa is too good not to be false
Naropa is full of gov't spies!
Naropa is a cornflake in a cow's second stomach
Naropa is in need of a window washing
Naropa? Naropa, c'est moi.
Naropa is a chocolate cornflake shake in a dream with French subtitles
Naropa is the subtitles
Naropa speaks esperanto
Naropa is my favorite party favor
Naropa is drunk on petuli
Naropa is the last one out of the oxygen bar
Naropa is a disembodied institution of Higher learning
Naropa is a disembowled institution of higher scaffolding
Is Naropian a word?
Naropa is open 24/7
Naropa is an alternate reality, resonating with Yoda
Naropa is free of marmots

Naropa ist nicht ein Schnitzelbank, und auch nicht meine Tante Maria
Naropa is a mustache kiss inside my brain
Naropa is NOT two wings on the same vampire bat!
Naropa is experiencing sexual tension
Naropa is aporan, backwards
Naropa is aporan forwards
Naropa can spell the female version of a porno: a porna
Naropa is much much more than 30 acres and a mule
Naropa means "no clothes" in spanish
Naropa is climbing up a totem pole, naked
Naropa is clilmbing on the scaffolding, naked
Naropa is nuked by naked Maoist
Naropa is Ricky Lake... naked
Naropa is a place with more "thank you for not smoking" signs than smokers
Naropa is the thank you on the smoking sign
Naropa is lacking rubber chickens
Naropa has a crack

Naropa is free bicycles
Naropa is forming an itch on the back of my brain
Naropa is like a rock; just do it
Naropa is perhaps, but then again, maybe not
Naropa is egg whites, soy
Naropa is levitating
Naropa is not cheese, definitely NOT cheese
Naropa is Christ's hot vacation spot
Naropa is allah's bakery
Naropa is a bar of oatmeal hemp soap
Naropa is the land where the cheese has slid off the cracker
Naropa is baby, baby, kiss me softly in the moonlight, baby, oh I croon for you, sweet oh honey, love ya sweet hon, kiss me, yeah.
Naropa is hilthy, deppie, quild and weir
Naropa is aerating your next door neighbor
Naropa is my favorite color.

A horizontal underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes.

Flood of recourse
Staging presence
Mexican tequila
Evanescent week
Dark grey bracelet
Steel flavored sheets
Studio makeshift
Rent too deep
Enter the poem
Basement window ajar
Four pronged socket
Plugged up clock
Missing light switch
Happy hour Sangria
Heating up belly
Curdling squirrel poop
Shaving of sycamore
Sword fights poke
Shine desperate moon
Mountain overlap
Rhizomatic word.

Chelsea sparked the Suub

She touched the car hood
And created an alarming sound
Instead of shock
She backed right up
And started to dance around.

Dulcinea

The auto-pilot knows her best
A paroxysm of quixotic electro-shock blues
entangles you into
the mysterious production of eggs.

She’s stereopathetic soulmanure:
A pale coil of stamps
a rift in the perforated edges
She’s an audit in Our World’s Divorce
We have the facts and we’re voting “yes;”
Escape these paegan terrorist attacks through
chutes too narrow.

Which one’s you?
Have you fed the (acoustic) fish.
Have you fixed a comforting thought.
Show your bones, you Loup Garou!
“There’s No Body to Battle When Your Mind Is Your Might”
howls the Woman King.

It’s okay if you’re lost
It’s early A.M. when the clouds all taste metallic
when the motorcade of generosity
filters in like The Delivery Man
like a version of yourself
after the soma project has sunk in
after tears brim out of the vein

These are the strategic grill locations
These are the sketches for my sweetheart,
the drunken moonflower plastic twig
whose little spaces dilate
whose happiness is not a fish
you can catch.

Ruby Vroom,
She’ll capture you
She’ll drown you in an ass-pocket of whiskey
Deja-voo doo you
She courted a vintage burden
and love said “no”.

Leftovers

Candied Yams Macaroni Casserole
Combination of:
crushed croutons
a can of yams
mac n cheese
sprinkles of sugar
sprinkled mexican cheese
sliced ham
glass pan

Cook mac mix with
sliced ham then
slop in glass pan
Can of yams
cooked in juice
butter brown sugar
sprinkle mex-cheese &
crushed croutons on top
Bake for some minutes
(at whatever temperature
the oven was set to
however long you can wait)
to eat the candied yam mac-casserole

Has a casserole aroma
and a steady aftertaste.

Life's a diversion. From what? You decide.

for Jen


The boy morphed into a clandestine gremlin with just a few swift movements:
He hopped behind a bush a few inches taller than he
and he bent his knees
and squinted his eyes
and scrunched his face,
as if the smaller he made his face, the smaller his body would appear,
(or disappear) behind the bush.

He peeked through the bending boughs on my left
but forgot to hide his white plastic butterfly catcher
so I whispered as I peered at him in my peripheral vision
“You can’t catch me-”
and at the break of my last vowel, I broke into a sprint
toward the main door.
The spontaneity of my scurry triggered a giggle from the bush.

I turned to see him standing, just barely to the side of the bush
An uneasy countenance surfaced about his abilities:
worried he hadn’t hidden well
I smiled and said “Maybe next time.”

What's the acronym-ical sentence for TALK?

After a few five minute intervals
we sat on a bus bench
Him detached
Me in haste
We switched-
Me stare off
Him speculative.

Our volumes rose and fell
Quelled by an emerging ambulance
Siren erupts! from the air to ear
Closer, a reflection off the Mexican restaurant
Then quick shift in passing

Skirt flips, hands hold it down
Silents
We up and (I think) resolve
the moods.
He walks away for food.
Again, we hit the up/down switch
Again, ambivalent about.

Naropa Update!

For all (three) of my blog readers:

We are heading into week 3 of the 4 week process that is Naropa's Summer Writing Program. Each week we meet on Monday with our MFA class and talk about readings we've done for all the professors and guest speakers that will be at Naropa in the upcoming week (usually about 15 extremely interesting and talented men and women).

Week 2 favorites included Lisa Jarnot, Rebecca Brown, Donald Preziosi, Laird Hunt, Akilah Oliver, Anne Waldman and Elizabeth Robinson. For a "get-you-thinking" assignment, we had to take one of these writer's texts and make a piece of art out of it. Now, the perimeters were loose, so we could do basically whatever we wanted with this assignment.

I took Donald Preziosi's text "Haunted by Things" from -Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity- and "magnified", if you will, certain words on the page to create a poem out of the words already presented on the page. Here is what it turned out to be: (looking much cooler ON the actual text)

a blend collision
intermix tion
delicate two opposing
passion

for the most part
is ART
which is
unfading
yet ephemeral by
the bouncing back of images
and usually in a time
not always
coincidental.

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

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.

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

“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.

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