redux

There is a hole in the sky
where i come thru
the clouds just spread and there i am.
It was so easy to excavate the self
from bleary light and mindless color.
Now I lie in bed wondering
whose facts are these that surround me like logs
and why can't i remember
anything that happens under this net of skin.
i guess, tho, who would
remember the trundling postures
that flounder beneath daylight, ruptured by a toothy decay.
i prefer to know the grim kiss of barriers
as i jump blindly from them.

aubade at the shore with mom

There is a hole in the sky
where i come thru
the clouds just spread and there i am.
it was easy to excavate the self
among the bleary color and wind
it was easy. but here i am
sitting, writing in bed
at 7:57 in the morning
and facts surround me,
facts, simple facts like logs
and i have a body, i know that
i stare at it, finding and seeing
nothing at all. and time passes
and music collects into my ears
but the sound goes nowhere
and i find myself, no, i don't
find myself at all
in a body, in this net of skin
but there i am
leaping boundlessly
over the grim barriers
the toothy decay of time.

night is bleary

i sleep all day
a fan whirring over my head
and when i don't sleep
my heart asks a simple question
without an answer.
I don't want to be called this name
I don't want to bang my bones
against this hard wet rock
anymore. But my body, oh,
lingers in the cool notes
of the fan, letting the blanket
collect me into unfathomable night.

women and men

women and men: they are a fickle duo. here is what i think: why does one sex always have to have the power? in so many relationships i see either the man or the woman is the one who has the backbone; the other just listens and does. of course there is a balance of power in other ways but still it bugs me to see one person sort of be colonized by the other. is there a way to unify and become one with a person without completely losing yourself, or without losing yourself at all? is this why so many poets (marianne moore, for ex.) didn't like marriage? because it took something away from the self? and must be always take something away in order to add?

how can you fuse yourself to another person--i am thinking physics, i am thinking chemistry or what have you, but really it's a matter of tending your garden--if you don't water one part of it it's not going to grow. but metaphors are not life--they are not like life and that is a point. they carry you away from the point. the point is that people need one another to grow but sometimes people hinder their growth as well. it is a difficult road to travel.

there are people in my life who both hinder and encourage my growth. i dont know why this is. when you think of a plant there are clear things that take away growth and give it--sun and weeds, for example. but in my life there are things and people who are clearly not just the sun and not just weeds but have some of both. i guess that shows are depths and complexity but it just confuses me. not that i want everything to be equal and easily explainable--life would not be fun--but i have trouble untangling the weeds of a person when they also give me light and sun. maybe it is not about the other person but me--i am my own weed, strangling myself alive, and why do i do this? because i am also the sun. i shine and let myself grow. we are all perhaps both things. can there be a duo, a moon and a dark side, a sun and a shadow, a coin with a face and an amount? two things that are one are also two. i always knew there was no point to math and yet it is everything we are--i look at trees and see numbers climbing straight into the sky--i see everything as metallic and unpretty--and i hear voices plaintive in the dark, calling out numbers, calling out uncertain breathing techniques.

once you open up your boundaries a little bit you feel as if something has died. and why is this? im not really sure. because you are open--when you are open i guess you are open to the elements, to letting harm in. but of course this is the only way to grow, to have harm threatened. i guess this makes sense. how can you grow if you have no reason to grow, nothing for which growth is productive? of course there are different directions of growth. a person can grow towards death, towards life, towards love. but plants only grow in one direction. is this our choice, part of our choice, that we dont always have or get or know how to grow towards the light? we grow in other directions and perhaps they are not wrong or right or anything at all really...

growth is human but so is not growing--if you look at how many humans are not growing you would see that it is a pretty human thing to stave off growth. i wonder if this is evolutionary in some way--to not grow as a technique to protect. probably. but there are consequences. in other words walls must be broken down and techniques will fade--nothing is true, truth is a bleeding valve, and tomorrow again tomorrow we must go home, to go home to go...

mas

Nothing satisfies me
Therefore, nothing, I let you satisfy me.
Pain is indistict, without borders
Beginning and ending outside of me.
I know I am not responsible for my pain;
I feel it grasping from deep inside the earth, an angry mother.
And yet in its mouth I am broken
Through cracks of myself I view small changes taking place
But they are too far away to make out.
Whatever person lives in this pain
It is not me. Whatever time has freed
Cannot expect to make a home in time.


*

It is 3:30; by 10:00, I will be a new woman
But I will not recognize what changes have taken place
And also I will not remember the woman I am now
So I think I should document
What I feel, how I have acted
Sitting here, typing, trying to name things
As they decay.
Allowing something so simple as rain
To penetrate me, I realize how small I am
And how far off from the world I can be
Despite these endless channels I swim
Away, away, toward, toward.

*


Sorrow comes disguised as yellow leaves
A green lighter and a phone: this is my allowance of pain.
Cigarette butt speaks the only truth I know
And that is that all craving ends in the destruction of self.


*


First, I will tell myself all that is not true
And then I can begin again to meddle with Tuesday
Having faith in the outstretched and ungrateful sorrow
That rounds out my flesh; though as I am ended
By leaf, rain drops, traffic noise,
I remember my only duty is in delivering the unsaid
Into what has no knowledge of sorrow
Cannot fathom bliss, shakes pain from underfoot
And extends its root into the sky.

somebody somebody sent this to me

Poetry
You reverse me
Endless gravity sinking into sun
Of mindless thoughts
Thoughts of their own little minds
To shelter me from diseases
Which I lift and drink in.

Oh death, I crave you—
But I do not allow myself time to sink in
What dearth does not remember
The lifting of its brew
Cannot, should not are the features
Tremulous stones thrown down to the bottom of me
What mishap shapes this face
Crayon bicycle nervous system
A toothy miracle spitting systems
And staple yourself to yourself.

Fruit of wisdom
Cries full of nutrient
Element of deathly decay
Shelter in roaming lethal concrete
And I suppose you want more out of me
That is fine; what does not cling to earth
Vanishes into your words and your breath.

So write about him:
There is nothing to say.
Don’t think about him;
He will come out anyway.
His name flits around in silence
And his face hemorrhages in the dusk
You cannot know what his map
Has blistered into your skin
There is no system for understanding
A rope that he has strangling
Tooth by tooth, your words
Your mirror of yourself, and your fantasy
Which don’t meet up anymore
Elastic and undrinkable.


What doesn’t touch is
Still capable of hurting.
This is an easy concept:
Pain which mirrors I guess
Some soap of destiny
And made up words which offer
A route to fantasy
And cups of soda to level
Your thoughts into green gray day.

First I will wake up
And then I will fall back asleep.
And then I will begin my day:
Falling into endless pattern
Repeating smoldering movements
And stapling myself to the day’s edge.

That body you left alone with him.
That body belongs in his bed.
That body does not belong to you,
Or to him, but it lays in his bed
Motionless, and crying for energy
Listening to horns and music in the night
And saving itself for death and ruin
Where it knows how to begin again.

What gets saved up
In the little remainders of what was once
What was once, and is now unsayable.
What and where it gets placed
And how it may rise
And how and how
The unsayable and the outside of understanding
Comes up to speak its bleary hello
And sink its fathoms into a blue face
Which is either your face or the sky
And which you no longer tell the difference from
And which now owns you and your thoughts.

There is a line
We draw
We walk over it
We sometimes dance over it
We like to breath and watch our breath
Wiggle towards the other side
Where a pair of eyes wait
Are they our eyes?
They are always our eyes.
They are his eyes. But still they are our eyes.
Because what can breathe without you?

This is outside of emotion.
This poem does not have an emotional happening.
It will run its course only in words.
It can speak only in dictated sounds.
And you will understand it by rote memory.
And as it forces its way into your mind
Remember, that you were once forced
Into being as well. So you have that in common
With a poem.