Strange Cinquain

Strangeness 
comes in odd waves,
turns a blind hand in air,
stills the eyes of the shallow night
and sleeps.

A Thank You and a Congratulations!

A big thank you to the lovely folks over at The Blue Hour for publishing two of my poems,

and a Big Congratulations to my friend Jeremy Nathan Marks, of The Sand County for being nominated for the Blue Hour’s 2013 Best of the Net.  He is a remarkable poet and thinker and the nomination could not be more well deserved.  You should definitely check out his work if you have not already.

 

 

 

Bone’s Memory

(another one for the "Bone Cycle")


Bone's Memory

I can tell that it's raining 
without looking or listening.

After a gallon
of chopped celery,
a negative space 
in the shape
of the handle
of a knife
persists
in the hand. 

The point where 
bone meets bone 

wants to become 
bone,

wants to become 
a monument 

to the form
of its function.

This function wants 
to become fossil.

This body remembers 
what it does 

long after 
the mind has forgotten.

Unheard Music

We were in the room next door,
the one that, 
                     when you enter, 
                                                you suddenly 
find yourself below ground, 
looking at the feet 
of passers-by on the street
but you don't worry about that,
about how you have found yourself here.
You don't think about how it doesn't 
make sense because it does 
at the time.

In that moment its dark energy rings truer 
than the dark.  It's dark and dingy like you 
imagine a bar in a building’s basement should be.
It has been abandoned,
raided and forgotten
with still uneasily spoken 
spirits that might be raised.

Eighty years ago
a thick layer of light brown 
dust settled, coating everything,
taking the room and everything in it 
and turning them in tones of sepia
with the sounds of the street coming 
filtered through dirty glass
disturbing nothing.

There is music that comes and goes,
music that no one is listening to anymore,
faded laughter like lost loves and stale cigarettes,
like slowly yellowing paper (we can see it turn
before us, we watch it happen there on the window sill,
the paper curls and crumbles).
Shadows pass and the passers feet 
become the passing of the light.

From the room, a quick, lonely movement 
catches in the corner of the eye like a cobweb
that you can not squeeze out.

The room can not decide which floor it wants to be
so it becomes the floor, and you are

flattened along with it.  You have 
become a shadow of who you are,
your own shadow that you step on.

This is a time when I was alone.
This is a place I have been before.
This is a time when I was not afraid
of any thing or any one
but of time's not passing,
of dead flies that have stopped 
accumulating in the windows.

Intersection

I stand at the intersection of
compassion and self interest,
thinking how life can make

such an ugliness of us all
or is it how we make such
an ugliness of life?

Cheeks change from
cherubic to sallow,
hour by hour.

From jaundiced to
jaundiced we go, from
sweet to salt to sour.

Songs of Fictive Moments: Rocking

(The second in a series.  The first can be found here.)



Rocking

On the south side of town,
a young couple 
pushing a stroller
rounds the corner
of a closed cafe 
among two-family 
and four-family
homes.

They walk half-way 
in the heat
across a small, empty plaza,
stand and wait, 
turning
as they talk,
looking down at the sidewalk,
up 
and down the street.

A bright white 
suv pulls up
at the curb, 
rims shimmering 
chrome in the sun.

The girl--
thin with lank 
blonde hair and 
willowy skirt
--walks up 
and stands 
on tip-toes
at the driver’s 
side window.

The boy stands back, 
rocking the stroller. 

The girl 
leans in.

Hands move.

She speaks,
tucks a few 
loose strands of
hair behind her ear,
looks up at the sun,
looks down the street,
looks up the block
and steps back.

The suv drives off
and the boy 
and the girl
go back 
the way they came,
pushing the stroller 
and examining 
a small package.