Light lessons

The sill still tries to learn me

Shadow isn’t absence

It’s the light
falling somewhere else

It's all just was

When
all this is
always just was–
whether
the once-white of a creamy walk
grayed by rain
or the chocolaty puddle
crept too-wide there to skip
with the stone-cold squawks
the starling tossed to me–
why
would I stop
and trip into will be?

No bother

Bah, mother, they’re
no bother there
both in the air
and the water,
fonder of where
father brought their
farther off stares

Transparency

These cicada suits are see-through
Their good-natured ribbing
is pitching, sound-effects
sci-fied to sell
a quicksilver summer
on the value of settling down

Xi-sub-b

Get up, quark!
It’s not so strange, quark,
for me to want you
to lift your heavy bottom, quark,
and carry on
the way young baryons do.

[Physicists Confirm Existence of New Particle]

Parthenogenesis

The good book and many less good read mankind was made in god’s own image and though the atheists think it’s the imaginary reverse what if it’s that the universe and all its matter what if it’s that all those things before we mattered in our smattering of light what if it’s that all that was and is was plucked round and red into being by one unknowably knowing consciousness tempted by the empty black to fill it with the white noise of chattering possibility and what if it set those first simple blocky shapes it plucked those blobby forms it picked to form themselves into ever more complicated shifts inventing themselves flappy fins and gills then wobbly legs and lungs a caring heart and brain again and again toward a more subtle somewhen else when someone else more knowing stands up and falls down fruited by the tree of life to see we have our farther’s sensitive eyes and can look past walking lifetimes to find the now knowable blueprint tucked in a twisty pocket of ribs and it’s also here we’ll find ourselves red-faced according to the plan laid out for those first formless shapes somewhere else as someones else not trapped but free inside a magical black box filled by the emptiness come back and a poisonous white flask of one possibility silently collapsing into an informing consciousness.

Pickles the cockatiel

Beautiful

be you, too full
not to feel
your fill

How to unlearn the damage of decades

1. Stop
reading what you’ve read;
now read it all again,
but in reverse.
2. Go
outside, look instead;
there are lessons written
in the bark’s terse
lines. [End]

As god goes ...

as god goes or our notion of god goes with the young pink chubby and rash motion of its toddler's reach we won't go with god but we and god will come out together by vanishing in that very shiny second he’ll come she’ll come we’ll come shambling out from the shadows showing not himself or herself myself or yourself no self at all but all of us linked arm in arm jowl to jowl wink for wink with the cheery release of an unstuck swirl of a magnificent eye unshut where we'll be and we’ll see our past falls away our future is forgotten and matter was is will be of a mind to help us find a way back from the bitter not so long ago night spent curled up right here on a bus stop bench graffito tagged god is dead

Hints turned neon blue

Hints

My cosmology prospers

such stuff are we
and all things made
dreaming on, on

our spirit and flesh resolved,
these towering clouds of droplets
melted once to fall again and again
rippling the muck

the very fabric on our backs
is based on a form, filled
by a vision

there was a bang
then light went forth
with matters to attend
and potentials to birth

death comes, it came before,
it comes, not as a rack
but a collapse

all our possible worlds
dissolve into this one
gorgeous rock, this palace,
a home to vibrating atoms

a little rounded life
both bound and free
both found and lost

it’s bounded but free, found
and lost, lost and found, on
and on, our revels a spiral, to end
and begin, to begin and end

Better bare than threadless

Prodded by my Facebook friends and in defiance of Threadless T-shirts having rejected the design as not worth the printing, I've created two new custom shirts in my Zazzle store (yes, I have a Zazzle store, even though no one bought any of the previous merchandising brain storms).

Here's the design:

Yes, it's a little crudely drawn and not ha-ha funny, but it has a certain charm in my eyes. If your eyes see the same vague quality, it's available on both light color and dark color T-shirts. Find a color and a style that makes your heart flutter.

But don't purchase them yet, though I know you're eager too. I need to order them first myself to make sure that the graphic prints at the correct resolution.

The Bloom wears off

Odd. I see us hop
disappointment
to disappointed.
Our penny lope
isn’t waiting for us.

One touch can mean the universe

There’s a whorl at its tip
and it slips, a world
in the palm of your hand.

Rendering fat unto Ceasar

it may or may not be fading the glory but the gory red white and blue meat of it was charred to a cinder while you neglected to handle the griddle and its blackening pool of fatty answers that spits and pops greasy drops wanting to fly to a wheel any wheel left that’s not attached to axles attached to chassis attached to roofs attached to sirens hurtling bodies bloodied by joyless sticks their attacking thumbs with no prints just a serial number and a pension that causes them to intentionally twitch these deaths a world away throw that world away and turn your eyes to see reach your arms to hold and probe their discarded limbs feel their loss a loss repeated to a scream you couldn’t hear what good is your akimbo pose posing as if you had questions or doubts even when the questions ran out so long ago so long in fact that the meat you’re cooking was no longer fresh when you tossed it in that pan of foul smelling fat you thought was clear but it’s flecked with bits of sour alibis and singed hairs that float and lie to you they’re licorice coated floss

---

At the suggestion of a friend, I tried writing a poem with "no structure." I combined this exercise with the wordle prompt over at The Sunday Whirl. What emerged is much freer and, probably because of my current state of mind, much more overtly political than what I usually write. I'm sure not everyone will appreciate it, but that comes with the territory of experimentation and speaking one's mind.

An interdependence of days

Where’s the joy in belonging,
with them, your head will be
long at it, figuring this out,
before you’ll understand,
if you can, under
stands of pretty poplars,
enjoying the love of your life,
the embossed license they gave
you with a scent of petty lies,
and that pretend belonging
sensed but well-overlooked
for the overhanging green
clusters missing their catkins
the way your toes miss
those calfskin shoes
toppled on the flagstones beyond.

Bossily they’re quite good at putting
their airs off, you to ease
with an easy welcome,
but when their time unwell
comes, and there’s a lively green now
speaking love and life without license
to those beyond who will call on you
not to be rapt by leaf or catkin,
but a different flag, and their stones
and shoes hurled at impositions,
disfiguring heads painted on calfskin,
you’ll need to understand
where it is you belong, and stop
longing for toppled stands of pretty
poplars and petty lies
they only pretended belonged to you.

The stationary traveler, twenty

Head bred. ... These heads bred
ease. ... Inner’s outer. Outer’s
in. ... I’m all islands.

Plant this seed

She tells me to plant this seed.

It's not much of a seed,
this seed.

It's not much of anything,
with wee crags and crenels
its slip of a crescent slides through
the creases of my palm,
but she insists it’s robust.

She persists with me,
This seed can live within,
where there are no waysides,
no rocks, no thorns.

It can live despite
the greedy shadows everywhere.

It will thrive
basking in the light of a future sun.

This is not Egypt,
she says.

No wicker basket will deliver you.

The river here isn’t strong enough,
she tells me,
and above her there’s the drone
droning on,
droning her out,
but in it I still hear her,
and she lets me have her ear too.

So came she to sow
and the souring
night couldn’t discourage
her final words to me.

Not thirty, or sixty
or one hundred days,
but one day,
the plant will grow
and it will be grown
to a great height,
a height higher than you
can imagine it reaching.

Its future sun will be
your present sun,
and the old days,
even older ways,
will wither wanting
their lost light and the fluid
love taken up by these
stronger roots.

The stationary traveler, nineteen

Wring seconds out of
minutes. Out of hours. Out of
days. Suns ring us still.

Face palm

The stationary traveler, eighteen

Weariness closes
eyes. … See magenta-full fields
float there in black. … Yield.

The stationary traveler, seventeen

There are stories told,
not told. … They bring the people
cities eat to live.

Between me and a judeo-christian god

Forget the bit about being
everywhere, and seeing
everything. My mercy is
limited. I can try
to give you
my forgiveness
completely.

On the plus side, I won’t
ask sacrifices,
send down plagues,
cast you into the desert,
turn my not-all-seeing eye blind
to test you, or make you
a salty column.

Other than that, I think
we’re the same lonely guy,
and I do
love you
unconditionally
at least when I’m in
the proper frame of mind.

I do little more than repeat myself

More than twenty years gone.
What’s not, may not be,
but I won’t get there … yet.

More. … Then, twenty years.
Gone’s what I won’t. … Maybe not.
Not yet, but get there.

Twenty years. … More than
what’s not gone, I won’t get.
But there's not yet. … Maybe.

Our future is looking up

We have our stories
etched in bone,
echoed by
this temple’s pulsing.

Tangled brown threads
play there and know
from their fibers,
not one word is true.

A serpent didn’t usurp.

It still has legs,
but they’re hidden where
no bitter gods can take them.

Stardust isn’t light.

It falls, not angels
prideful or worldly, as the sky
sifts a fateless effluence.

Neither snake
nor cosmic particle
will spark our clinging
gossamer’s tear.

The claws to rip it
can come back to us,
if we’ll use them.

Then we’ll twist
up the slit
and see our else,
no longer idly watching.

---

This week's wordle prompt at The Sunday Whirl took 13 words from Nicole Nicholson's excellent poem Homeward. These are always a challenge, but this week was a little more so for me. I tried to go against my usual instincts and write a piece that contains a bit of optimism.

The stationary traveler, sixteen

My plants and my pets
are happy. ... They don’t care why
I still care for them.

A language for the end times

It’s the midsty morning,
all grammar’s run amuck
and the rapture won’t take me.

They’re lining up,
the letters and errant punctuation.

Spray-tagged against walls
they’ll torment the souls
who’ll stay here in god’s mean timing.

I keep putting apostrophe’s
where they don’t belong.

It’s an oblonging of words
and it will always be
my denial.

What’s possessed me?

I could pose esses,
caressing them down to tildes,
til disappointed and unsexed
by a symbolic life on its side,
they'd rise back up to text,
not angry but sure
their standing’s worth fighting for.

That’s nothing but a bad dream.

Line theft has left
this man fantastical
and it’s broken my container
of finger-twitching quotations.

The stationary traveler, fifteen

Straight lines. ... I painted,
unacquainted with white. ... Watch,
the walls have stained me.

The evolving food chain

Wolfe, pig, whale

Wolfe's "You can't go home again" came
millions of years too late, or too soon.
India's pig, her offspring whales
re-committing and committed to mother sea.

Bold doesn't suit me

my story isn’t

your story
with a foreign accent.

it can’t speak. devious

it signs an inspired sleep.
between us,

strange kinship slips. it’s not

freudian,
but wishful. thinking its

enchanted thoughts, i won’t

lure you. a venus, all
torso, no alluring

sins, it won’t

feed the lotus readers
who’ve left off caring if

my story is.

---

Bold is not one of my favorite words, and it may require extensive psychoanalysis to uncover why. Clever fellow that I am, I worked it into the title, so all wordle words have yet again been vanquished. Brenda's moved the prompt site over to WordPress, so here's the new address where you can find the other poets' contibutions: The Sunday Whirl

L'escargot-go

The stationary traveler, fourteen

Cobblestone, dust. ... Walls
huddle their heads, comfort. ... We
pine for far-off green.

meeting through the walls

Over the past three months, nooshin azadi and I collaborated on a series of poems that are now available in our self-published book meeting through the wall.

These 30 poems each deal with a pair of contradictions, such as light and dark, right and wrong, empty and full, joy and sorrow, etc. The "wall" of the book's title refers to the divide between these "opposites" where we tried to reach a common understanding.

Our method was to separately write a set of seven lines on one half of the pairs. Since nooshin lives in Tehran (and I'm in Chicago), we exchanged these short poems via email. Once we'd both finished our seven-lines, we alternated writing the four lines of a concluding stanza together.

It was a fascinating process, and I learned a lot from the way she approached these topics. The different sections of the poems can have different styles, and different points of view, but we tried to resolve these differences by the time we reached the conclusion.

If you'd like to order the book, it's available in paperback at Lulu.com for $7 US. And if you do, please leave a comment here letting us know what you think. There may be more collaborations to come...

---

An update... nooshin asked me to add this lovely poem and comment to the post:

you think you own many things
but when you share what you have
you understand owning is not having
but giving

you think you see many things
but when you share what you see
you understand seeing is not eyeing
but whying

you think you know many things
but when you share what you know
you understand knowledge is not knowing
but forgetting

(Francis... our collaboration was a journey into awareness... thanks!)

For Smita

I have to strain to see it.
I’m too far to catch it, your smile
Cheshire-tucked in the coming,
in those cooling mountain mists.
It waits for me, and I’m patient.

---

This poem is dedicated to my friend Smita Tewari who passed away yesterday. Please visit her blog Smita's Poetry and remember her with me.

With apologies to Harold Arlen

It’s only a paper.
Moons cover cardboard.
See, it couldn’t be.
Make believe it’s you.
Believe it’s me.

The humor of human invention

A plane makes raspberries
against deeper blues. The chickadee
titters its approval.

The stationary traveler, thirteen

Life sits, over-lit
An actress floating against
faded supper scenes.

Pretty things preach pretty thoughts

This blissful abyss we share glows,
gaudy-full if unfulfilling. … It spins in
purple prose. … It tastes of bon-bon
mots. … It won’t suppose the inky
murmurs squirming below it,
or those secret scents that rise in goodbye-
giving waves ... or those
undulate and aqua misunderstandings
misgiving further underneath.

Ours is a blank-space world. ... It’s always
facing West, its face made-up
with gunpowder daubs. … Its head
is traced on one side by Queen Anne’s
lace, the other bullet baubles. … Its mind
is stripped of all naked-mole
rat thoughts. ... They’re the ones who might
burrow blind but unafraid
to love a common, unadorned heart.

---

Another week, another Wordle. Check out the other participants' pieces at A Wordling Whirl of Sundays.

Flowers can't care for you

The rose does not want
your water. It wants the sky’s.
It needs even less
sappy poems to it. Its ads
the petals jingle for bees.

The stationary traveler, twelve

The hill of beans, it’s
bigger than. Enough to fit
we. Crazy problems.

A wig, in the middle of the road

A wig
wigged out
in the middle of the road
is no middle-of-the-road
metaphor.

It’s not an octopus either.

A polypus?

Perhaps, because
eight’s not enough
what with these many strands
stranded on the center line
where pretty pivoted
away from trash.

It’s no skin
off my back,
or off your head, or his, or hers,
whoever ditched it.

There's no skin
to cover, so it covers
not divots but gouges,
and those gouges are filled
not with pebbles,
but bits of tarry black blobs.

The pigeon feather
farther on
knows what loss is.

This isn’t much of a loss.

It’s better
than losing your head,
a head you were part of,
to a vicious jack
with an angry boot heel
quicker than any head can move.

The stationary traveler, eleven

Good offense takes good
labors. We work for one touch
rain drops can undo.

The stationary traveler, ten

My wet palm’s printed
On black glass. It unsettles
A minstrel’s dead smile.

This calm is brutality

Farther, farther, where you have forsaken glee
take to knee, and have that good cry.

The wind’s stopped ... caring
how the twilight comes,
if it comes … it can come
with pigtails and a little-girl skip
or baldness and an old man’s stride.

Our bruise of sky has turned from
a heartless purple-black
to a gassy planet’s sickly yellow.

The leaves are out
again, exhaling greens.

Against their backdrop
who can be afraid … of sparks to fire,
for we future fallen?

---

This weeks prompt from A Wordling Whirl of Sundays uses a dozen words taken from the Wallace Stevens poem Domination of Black. Check out the poem, and the prompt site to see how other's have responded to it.

The stationary traveler, nine

Each green seed of thigh
high grass seeks an ear. Their waves
reach me on parting.

Albert (In Praise of a Pug)

It’s been said
“dogs grow to resemble their masters”
maybe
we’re drawn … to those who resemble us,
not like Narcissus,
but grabbed by the familiar
kiss of a kindred give … and take.

Albert’s pug face shouts … wide
ranging expressions. … Most
are in a key of indignation.

Those few times,
happy times … indeed,
when the joy does
come, ... it comes so overwhelming,
he snorts and puffs, he hops
and prances about … His tiny body
can never contain it
and he lets it … spill
all over me.

The stationary traveler, eight

The spoiled sun inhales
fog shrouding distasteful brown
lands. Leave me, sourness.

The stationary traveler, seven

Drafts nibble my heels
A cracked window opens me
into broken worlds

The stationary traveler, six

I had peeled away
incumbent gray. Refusal
flirts pink underneath.

In this time of rapture, moonbeams scatter

When you weaned me from the waning moon,
its milky cusps, winking welcome
moods of starry surrender, I was lost
to my reflection rearranged
roughly on the window’s pane.

Don’t take flight yet, you said,
first take the light’s left hand
and keep it from the misbehaving oak,
its frightening reach.

There are beehive-capped angels
swinging there beneath, and they’re angling
to gather moony souls
together in false hope.
Their absent promise is absolute,
and absolution.

They’ll utter their nothings,
utterly sweet, if you let them,
and lull you with their yellow tongues.
Fly away with this light you now hold
and risk the falling.

---

What better way is there to celebrate surviving the rapture than with a wordle? You can check out this week's prompt and all of the wonderful responses to it, by visiting A Wordling Whirl of Sundays.

The stationary traveler, five

Thicket walls stand on
the writing of longer lives.
I can't feel my hands.

The stationary traveler, four

The teacup appears
an ocean ... Its bag the beast
I, bitter, swallow

The stationary traveler, three

The world I saw is
Worlds beyond me, red-shifted
Small measures of time

The stationary traveler, two

To every season
there comes a time, out of turn.
Days, I’m not at home.

The stationary traveler

On another side
of understanding, I’ve lost
it, all hope for home

We fall away from the forest

The man, somewhat less than
environmentally leaning,
falls down, making a definite
sound in protest.

The forest, far away
and dwindling, may or may not hear
his unkind sting. It’s none the less,
not interested.

Fast-food notions

There’s no need for me to start
in, when a stop’s been
abridged to little more than
a pause and a wink at
the romantic thought
pleasant but stony bridges
once came between
coming and going.

They’ve substituted it –
the dirty and rutted
road leading up –
to a smooth black surface,
with a broad white stripe
and a textured mat
of margarine yellow,
hard rubber bumps, that
will teach us, what
shakes us doesn’t have to slow
radials slurping us in through
the drive-through.

Some things are worth the wait,
like the wind-up voice
behind sliding-glass,
and its brandishing hands
eking us our infusion
of copper coins back
and flimsy paper sacks
filled with a rural life
filtered out through industrial
chimneys, then patted
down to a few
salty, groundbeef patties.

---

This is in response to the most recent prompt at A wordling whirl of Sundays. Check out the site to see what others have contributed.

For all those who've known a Michael Francis Lynch

I read Michael Francis Lynch
lived twice, but differently
as two different men
and was killed
on the same day
in the same tragedy.

We’ll mark it, that day
(and both of him,
and those more than two,
thousands of others)
with twin reflective pools
set within twin absences.

Above the one,
northerly facing
spaces carved out of bronze
may recall one
Michael Francis Lynch.

Above the second
southerly gazing, similar
spaces taken from similar bronze
may recall a second
Michael Francis Lynch.

How will they know,
those who knew
either Michael Francis Lynch,
which of the face-filling blanks
holds which?

And if by the same
slim chance as two
men with the same name
finding the same end
on the same day,
they, all those who knew them,
choose the same bronze
and search it
for the same spaces,
whose face will they find
in those empty words,
and will the other still unread
stand for anything more
than emptiness?

---

I read a short piece in the New Yorker ("The Names" by Nick Paumgarten, 5/16/2011 issue) about the National September 11 Memorial due to be completed in the fall. It dealt with the difficulties the designers had arranging the names of those who were killed on the bronze panels ringing the two cascading pools where the towers stood. Among the 2,982 victims were two with the same name, Michael Francis Lynch, and it was decided that they should be listed on separate panels.

Lessons from foreign gods, No. 4 (Iktomi)

Iktomi inches to me.
His trip has eight furry legs.
His trap is eight black-ringed eyes.
He’ll walk me too willingly
into his world-weaving web.
Words I spin, strengthen its strands.
The pull teaches me, new tricks.

---

This is a re-posting of this poem, because the Blogger gods decided to embark on a massive Fail and eat the first try from yesterday.

Iktomi is not actually a "foreign" god, but indeed very native to this land the Europeans so skillfully swiped (and re-swiped as many times as it took). When I encounter him, I try to escort him outside where he can play his tricks on the squirrels and the possums.

There's a crooked geometry to his smile

The dreamy promise of this vast wasteland

Half-asleep in a fog
of blanket and pyjama
I slip through flickering
channels of static-drenched drama
and the hiss made by bickering,
childhood-imprisoned ghosts.
A heavenly spokes-damsel
flirts me to my host
using a slink full of crackle
and the oddly addictive pop
of mis-stressed syllables.
The offer on the cluttered counter-top
is a bullet-point bible,
leather bound for an easy-income calm,
and thrown in with the assured salvation
of an outstretched palm
to slap me away from happy damnations
he’s conveniently catalogued.

Draw it away from the lake

It’s then, your breath shifts
Off that reservoir of cool.
Corners rise up, slow.

Giving in to the clichéd on Mother's Day

Ahem, it's for the many ways I haven't said "I love you"
Oh, I know, it goes without saying, or even doing, when
T-shirts, circulars and greeting cards all proclaim it for me in
Achingly florid fonts, dripping with pastel sentiment, but
Each year this day brings with it an advertisement-teased doubt.
Erring on the side of their callow self-promotion, I’ll give you this. I love you.

---

With a special "I love you" dedicated to my mom Marina, and all the women out there who make this world a more welcome place for the rest of us.

I muri

The lines don't last too long, at the dollar store

For her, winter’s not a season,
it’s the clichéd age.
It has been, for ages,
and it’s made sad
patches of her greasy black hair,
those slicked back hairs now licking
the back of her frosty white scalp.

It came in with a wire, this winter.
You can’t see it,
but there had to be a wire,
a wire to tug at her lip,
to drag down her hip,
to pull her foot out
to its permanent perpendicular.

She didn’t come in alone either.
She’s got her fella with her
and he’s a tall fella,
on the go and going,
going on
with a heart that beats him
humming-bird thumps
while he hovers
figure eights around her
and the impulse rack,
his two salty-sweet feeders.

The winter’s lost its bark outside,
and she’s losing hers,
but it doesn’t stop her from barking,
I ain’t paying for that ... 
even before he’s got a that
for her not to pay for,
so he beats it back
and nudges his beak
in the lost blossom of her neck
to half-kiss and half-calm her,
I’ve got my own money.

Too late, she’s at it,
the front of the line
and she swipes it,
$41.02
off the plastic card
for a cheap plastic bag of chips
and two twenties back.

Then, the wire
lets her flash the cashier
that stolen-spring’s smile
before she and her fella
face it together
the end of her winter
out through the door.

What the hills get over is, you're far away

What the hillsides want,
you can’t know. They scribble
dark matters on the stream below,
and they train their animated whispers
to piggyback the summer wind’s
fiery bellows. Moments later
it reaches you, their angry murmur,
but they won’t teach you its meaning,
only the sustaining double-
vision of a revenge that will come
first, with a thrumming ache
and then their resilient thirst.

---

Another week, another wordle. Check out what others have contributed at A Wordling Whirl of Sundays, the site Brenda Warren created to keep us wordle junkies properly fixed.

The world at the bottom of my cup

After a month of poems, I'm in need of a visual interlude.

The sum of my month (in its reduced parts)

Today is the last day of National Poetry Writing Month, and this is my last daily poem celebrating the 30-day occasion (though not my last poem, of course). Making like one of those awful clip shows where TV writers mash together snippets from previous episodes in order to take a week-off without resorting to a full-fledged rerun, I give you an erasure built from 30 days worth of poem titles (in order, including this last one). Maybe I've invented a new genre... the clip-poem? Thanks to everyone who read and wrote along for this NaPoWriMo ride.


Looking up,
I could dive
to meet you.
There are moments everyone wishes they were
brave.
To wake
the others
I'll dream
a reckoning.
Hey,
our hope is
In the sunrise
with broken-glass
lessons from
Death. Skip to
what to believe.
What was lost
with her blossoms,
a brother.
The hardest path's
shadow and song,
the not-so-good of
metaphysical,
her true face.
He'll waste it, wanting
the grass greener,
insomnia
slipping into
this (a love poem)
the sum.

This is how I'll write the multi-verse of you's (a love poem)

I’m in the simplest
super-position

Zero and one

knowing these many
weathered worlds of me

Strangling cloud and drunken sun

are faced with flip-books
flapping startling expressions

A dropped lip and picked-upon eyes

as each tries not to let varying
beauty-scars overwhelm me

Forest lost in ash and beige fields waving for hands

They’ll collapse into a single here-
when my I’s observe in unison

Giving back to sticky roads and taken by stubbly plains

the then-where I can convince you there's a we
calling to those countless shades of me.

Slipping into the bit stream

Is it a selfish wish
to want
even less self,
less of this flesh, too?
It too sullies,
this flesh.
That it would melt,
melt or better
be resolved to zero
and one both,
a qubit, which leaves
no smudgy prints, but mixes
with others, entangling
invisibly as we flow, growing
into the most unthinkably
spooky actions,
viewed at a distance.
Pull us closer, Einstein.
We’ll materialize,
our selfless wishes.

(With an obvious nod and wink to the Bard, whose birthday it was a few days back, and less obvious ones to David Deutsch and his theories of quantum computation with the irresistably named qubit, which I read about shortly after composing the first draft of this poem, in a proof of entangled concepts).

When birds get insomnia

Out there in two-thirty’s
marbled indigo, he goes on
and on with his warbling,
not minding the long unwinding
until the dawn.

The grass may be greener, but it's still struggling to emerge

Pulling seasoned lessons
from their shallow pockets,
springy fingers, nimble and green,
push through a saturated brown
to beg you: “Spare us some
of those bits of warmth
you’ve stolen, touches of sunny
encouragement to entwine,
entangle, and cushion you
against the coming fall.”

He'll waste away with its wanting

He feels the blue-black
chattering of his cheap tattoos.

They pinwheel around
and they tumble down
to greet a broken-track braille
and join its scabby trailing off,
stammering dead-end tempts
to the diminished lots
of unmarked tissue.

You can t-taste it too,
first that rubbery sharp squeeze,
then a streamlined steel’s b-bite
with its c-creeping warmth,
its p-piquant glee
and its promises to quench
those g-glimpses of eternity.

Each promise gets
reneged as soon as it’s replenished.

There’s an art to this steal;
its con is his meat and bone.

---

This is in response to the weekly Wordle prompt provided by Brenda Warren. She's set up a new site for prompts called A Wordling Whirl of Sundays. I did slightly change a couple of the words.

Easter shows her true face.

Ôstarâ dawns, her yellow shift
chased by sunny rabbits and
the reed-woven basket she handles
nestling a pair of stork's eggs.

She'll chuckle as she skips by
Wotan well into his nine-days
sacrificially dangling, the wound
weeping brown to white in his side.

Metaphysical recycling

A soul’s not a bottle,
hard and cold. You can’t
redeem it with one trip
to the corner shop
or swap it for nickels.

The Not-so Good of an Earth-centered Friday

Here’s what passes for a Good Friday:
The drone of bots dropping bombs
in the name of a Man-god,
whose half-breed flesh
and blood have been
transubstantiated
to stand for a peculiar,
store-bought brand of freedom,
freedom we dilute more
with the gallons of others’ blood spilled,
while still others shed their blood
just to taste it.

The celebrated Earth tastes it,
the others' spilled blood.

It’s her day too,
but she’s not in a celebrating mood
what with that sour taste of blood
and the litter of flesh we’ve left.

Their god can sort
the innocent from the guilty.

Our god was crucified today
and we’re taking the afternoon off.

Shadow and song

Dusk’s crepuscular creep
makes the craggy steep dour.
Crickets receive the hour well,
chirping to it cheerily.

The hardest path will help you

The flagstones, they push
up at me. They push
back at me. They spray
dusty well wishes,
and they tell me, “When
you finally get
there, to whatever
where is there, thank us
for the wear and tear,
simply being here.”

It's a fun-house, brother

The purple gorilla’s spacing.
Splayed-out on the trash bin,
he’ll play it off cool, jiving me:
"It’s a fun-house, brother,
tripping hard in this down-
on-its-luck play-land of plenty."

No catchy slogan can compete with her blossoms

Chip-bag phrases,
clipped and cornered,
ripped and unstrung,
make a sad sense
out of their silvery
linings.

Jagged, inept scars are
overlooked and forever
forgetting the spring,
the way
her perfumed messages
sneak off to the sun
and his golden-tongued
flattery returns
to sprout more magenta-blue
crescendos.

The swelling
colors cover-up
the drone of crudely picked,
plastic plantings.

Beauty is all.
It discounts
as it recounts
the bags’ ticked-off failings.

---

Here's another Wordle prompt as provided by Brenda Warren. I enjoy doing these because they're like a game of connect the dots, making stories out of a clutch of (not quite) random words.

What was lost was (the warmth in their hands)

Our memories may be too short
the one-hundred years too many
and the lessons too hard
to bring back their every touch,
each tender touch given
by the hands of
one-hundred twenty-nine women,
the seventeen men taken in the Fire.

There are those cold, raw numbers, but
I want to talk about
I want to feel and hold
the warmth held and lost in their hands,
the way one hand might fall
as light as a tissue
brushing the hand of a friend as they talked
about Sunday strolls with lovers,
or the way one hand might squeeze another
tightly when they gave sharp laughs
after an off-hand joke
at the expense of a hand-me-down coat.

Fifty-two hours a week, those hands
had work to do,
work for others,
work snipping and folding
shirts, they worked, and the work kept them,
it kept them from
the touches they wanted to give
and it robbed them
of so many more touches when
they touched the doors made walls,
those bolted doors
their bosses had made walls.

The walls were flame then and their hands led them
instead to the windows,
those windows they could leap from to keep from
turning to ash, their hands
becoming still there on the pavement, lifeless where
on the pavement passersby watched
and reckoned the costs of keeping
comfortable in cheap shirtwaists.

---

I wrote this poem in commemoration of the recent centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which was "the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York" and took place on March 25, 1911.

Today I'll be reading selections from the excellent anthology Walking Through a River of Fire at the closing party for my friend Diana Berek's exhibition Denim: Fabric of Our Journey (Narratives of Work Embodied in Reconstructed Fragments of Recycled Blue Jeans) at the B1E Gallery here in Rogers Park, Chicago. If there's time I hope to read my poem there too.

What not to believe

I distrust
the lessons I’ve sussed
like cigarette butts,
gum wrappers and foil
pulled from the tangles
of trampled-on grass
or a susurrus
overheard
in the suspect dusk.

Death and taxes skip to the due

The modern taxman cometh more
certainly
and conveniently e-.
One meaty hand's
in the bony hand
of his forsooth saying-mate,
the other flits
freely, its unaccountably icy digits
lithely cyber-tapping
Franklin-picking
rhythms from a tipless plastic glove.
His sticky memory can serve, not love,
but the love of two
masterly forms of flim-flammable,
incorporeal
sleight. The aghastly fat
he flabbers glad
and the stripped-down he tops
toward the same childish deduction:
a pea
will evermore end happily
feathering the most luxuriantly
nested cup.

Lessons from foreign gods, No. 2

I've followed the Wyrd thread
where it led me,
and it leads me again
to this loose end.

Three gently giant crones
dip their watering pale
hands in a waterless well.
They tell me:

"The becoming's
happened. It was one picked.
There were many
hung by our ought-to-be."

---

This is the second in my planned series of short poems related to gods and myths from around the world. I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is providing me with ample hints toward other mythologies to research. His reference to the Norns from Norse mythology got me exploring, and this is the result.

I've had a history with broken glass

At six, I pitched
two small, balled fists
through the flat of a screen
door’s flimsy pane.

It was latched shut, but
I was Superman.
The blanket cape and
bloodless wrists proved it.

Over four decades
I’ve leaped, bound
to keep fewer
delusions of super.

The last shattering
as my clench gives
a misplaced tap,
to storm window glass.

Two sputtering
crimson tongues taunt
the kerplop
of that passage.

In the lighter dark before sunrise

At the nexus

between morning

and the next us

lies

fleet sparrow song

to becoming

too, we’re coming

...

Our hope is only as strong as our shelter

The cruel April wind doesn’t howl.
It laughs at
his corrugated-cardboard hovel.

Dandelion-wine-stained walls groan
gloomy up against it,
as a cut-out flap flips to reveal
hums of empty space.

Cobwebs come
to what’s at rest. Here
the poorly grounded facts are:
scrambling,
scattered ash,
the misplaced and misspelled
scrawls he so feebly scratched out.

His paper-weighting
dance of two exposed knees
can't be crucial.

---

Brenda Warren provided another Wordle prompt for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). You can see what others came up with for it here.

Hey Mister

Hey mister!
Hey mister!
The little girl calls in her
little-girl voice.

Hey mister! Up here!
She calls again, still
little but clearly showing
a growing impatience.

Her pig tails poke
over the sill. My eyes meet
chocolate-milk saucers –
filled to brimming
– and her questions spill
down on me.

I leave my answers there
to fly to her. They were
not meant for the dogs,
or for the dumpsters lining
this brick-shouldered alley,
or for me to hold.

A Jungian Reckoning

My shallow shadow’s grown
a deeper troubling.

It creeps here doubly
corpulent, as its opulent
appetites swallow
the tendered terrains.

Side-ling, I’m shoved aside
unloved in its lack.

It shuffles on, a truffle
top tipped to taste tasty
shades of mustard and green
then spit them back, dead black.

I'll dream in haiku

Morning, dark and wet
Slithering sleep won’t let me
Escape its slick scales

The foot's in the other shoe

There’s nothing.
Nothing is gonna change.
Go on and change, nothing.
Change, nothing, and prove me.
Prove me strong.

How to wake-walk (don't sleep)

To simulate somnambulation
is an ambition, when you can’t sleep
but you can walk. Not far. Close enough.

The first step is instructional. Eyes
distant. Not focused to avoid both
ambivalence and stimulation.

Then comes. A stub of revelation:
shiny objects at rest are better
practitioners at simulation.

When yellow is brave

Spring winks small and wild
yellow flowers. They tease dead
leaves, crowding clover.

There are moments (everyone wishes they were somewhere else)

The wooded hills would give
a prodigious shout to shake
the humdrum from pedestrian clouds,
but they’ve been stilled by brown
water. It soothes and it slaps, small
falls striking an inattentive stream.
The insect smog where they meet
buzzes in anticipation of antic
aerobatics. One fussy fish
might just follow along; it’s swept up
instead by the gentle flutter of leaves
a breeze puffs off sheer slopes.
It’s a freedom that lends them
omnipotent airs. This lack
of agitation should be apparent
to everyone. Not the harried stones
who've relinquished closely harbored
preconceptions. There is no necessary
conclusion to a docile journey
downstream where a supercilious
tortoise scoffs at such received wisdom.
Far away cold puddles are mired
in a fallow field. They imagine
the tickle of a flow with sunlit speckles.

---

For NaPoWriMo Day 4, I've taken up the Wordle prompt Brenda Warren so generously provided. Check out Brenda's poem Fish Basket, and the comments to read what others have done with the prompt.

Albumening to meet you

There's egg on my face.
It's a gooey place to look
For quick sustenance.

I could dive right in

The river was and is
curious shades of shy.
I can't say why
she calls me in,
her husky tone rippling
with hints of verdigris.

Our downward gazes are looking up

​​It's plainly a checkerboard plane
..... That's a jet leaving cotton candy 
​with green and brown boxes boxing dots busied bopping,
..... ribbons. It has a clear destination, 
​but there's one wondrous dot not
​..... pushing its snow-cone nose so purposefully
​caught up in their squared-off games.
​..... through the Kool-Aid sweet sky. 
​You know how I envy its open-ended refusal.
​..... If I could only tag-along agreeably on its closing-in...

(Happy NaPoWriMo!)