NaPoWriMo / NaPoREADMo — Day 24 — The Scarecrow

(with apologies to Wallace Stevens and his Snowman)




The Scarecrow

Mutely standing in a field of 
fallow stubble, bending on the loam,
one’s mind is a business of 

musing the morning sun to rise.
Bold mice scurry through holes in boots,
tickling would-be toes of would-be feet

and climbing through knees of overalls
that, overall have seen brighter days.
Sparrows puff from red flannel seams--    

brown-feathered breath calling to 		
starling hands that wish to rub pale straw
moths from hollow sockets that stare

the stars from the sky.  One has hopes of scaring
someone--anyone--and listens without ears to hear
all that is not there and the one thing that is.

NaPoWriMo / NaPoREADMo — Days 20, 21,22, & 23 — The “Missing” poems

(Four-for-one today, because I have been Presently Absent or Absently Present or....
well...Missing...and I may come up Missing again.  Anyone who actually listens to all
four gets a cookie...and my undying....umm...curiosity?  Awe?  Stupefaction?)



Missing, part 1

How many times did you wake up
in the night, find an empty cup
and wonder where your mind used to
be, your self alone and just you
in the bed, and just the one bed
with unfamiliar sheets, your head
on a strangely scented pillow?

I would have brought her there, you know,
for you to hold, and not for me.
You needed her more.  I can see
that now.  I would have stood close by,
just a ways, and averted my
gaze; let you have your time alone
as I tried not to turn to stone.





Missing, part 2

I wonder--did those strange scents jar
your memories and dreams toward
unseen collisions with silence,
that wrong kind of quiet made dense
with soft specific sounds that spell 
a place far deeper than our well-
used alphabet of ancient objects?  

Our limbic world just disconnects
over time.  Our temporal selves
get disheveled.  Cerebral shelves
do not suffice any more.  We
strive to hold things in place, but see
only place-holders and when age
eats worlds, the words fall off the page.





Missing, part 3

Do you feel the rain where you are?
Is there water there in the far
reaches of memory? Does time
fall through the air, like brittle rime
crusting the sea? Is this weather?
Tenuous shifts of the tethers
that tie us, each to our own place?

I stand in the rain, raise my face
to the falling sky as my sight
becomes a part of the pale light
that is left to us, and wonder
how we can all be so sundered
and still hold together all this
madness, beauty and darkness.





Missing, part 4

Are your words still with you?  Did you
carry your stories deep into 
the night and leave them like luggage
on a railway platform, an age
and more down silver tracks, with just
the wind, the stars, and leaves like dust
blowing and hissing in the dark?

This silence leaves a fading mark.
The thing that took you left your face
in bodies unknown to you, lace
filaments tracing what the eyes
of others cannot see: the ties
that generation takes away;
the look in eyes that cannot stay.

NaPoWriMo / NaPoREADMo — Day 19 — The presence of absence

The presence of absence

this emptiness is not a substance
or a non-substance but a thing 

or a non-thing.  this emptiness 
has a name, a place and a form.

when we speak of it, we speak 
not of emptiness but of an emptiness, 

a singular vacancy that 
inhabits a place, a space 

in an inner landscape
like a deep canyon where 

nothing ever happens any 
more, not even weather.

~~~~~~~~

and this is how it happens.  an empty 
rumble echoes in an emptiness. 	

a space finds room to breathe
and the room finds space 

to live again in the empty 
rooms of another, and these 

emptinesses are much the same.  
they are filled with the same nots,

the same uneasy intervals
bound by different chords,

threads that thrum in the void,
the same void, the same un-

this-ness — the same— and these 
emptinesses speak to each other 

across the fullness of the world, 
through the things we cling 

to and avoid and we 
color these things and

we build them up around 
us and we call them memory

and they are never enough.

NaPoWriMo / NaPoREADMo — Day 18 — fluid

fluid

"god" is a word.
"god is dead" is three words.

Meaning is fluid, pumping 
from three words
to what you believe 
I believe.

“guts” is a word.
“I hate your guts” is four words.

I don’t know your guts.
My words are
meaning moving in
your guts.

“Can you taste the venom in my soul?”
I have no soul.
You have no guts
to call your own.
Venom has no taste and
no vessel. 

“Guts” is just a word.
“Soul” is just a word.

“god” is 
just a word.
God is just.
God is justice.

Justice is a worm.

I have worms in my guts,
God’s guts.

NaPoWriMo / NaPoREADMo — Day 17 — Winter Madness, a cinquain sonnet

(A bit late...more on the cinquain sonnet here)




Winter Madness

Under 
the streetlights, the 
blocks go on forever 
beneath the leaden sky.  In this
city,

streets seem 
somehow longer,
straighter in the winter 
night, lonelier than the steam from 
sewers.

Madness 
belongs to the 
night, to the filling of 
empty lanes with the walls of words.

NaPoWriMo / NaPoREADMo — Days 15 & 16 — Hum(m)us & Oysters

(two for one today, again, because yesterday was a cock-up and today we get weird...)




Hum(m)us

Hearth of soil and soul of 
stone, gather us 
to your bosom.  Hum us
like warmth into
winter’s close conjuring.
Hum us into 
the bellies of our love.

Heirlooms live in 
ancient ovens leavened 
with our tailings, 
leavings telling of our 
ordinary 
meals, the most sacred shared
by us, alone.

Pulses from one 
to the one that sprang from 
her very soil
(earth murmurs), the maker
passes on the
notes of a melody
for the making. 

Six simple gifts, the land's 
material,
ascend in scales, soft sound 
offerings of 
humble place; ordinals 
older than words;
sounds fat and round and full 

of life.  "Fully
formed and transformed by the 
mouth’s own making,
the soil's song sings itself
in tongues' silence,"
mumbles humus, a tune
down in its roots.





Oysters

We went into the streets 
and squared our shoulders 
against the coming night.  

The clouds hung low in 
our minds, eating us--
eating our thoughts.

The rats were everywhere, 
walking over our feet and
chewing our fingernails for us.

We twisted our hearts into 
animal shapes and 
gave them to the rats.

They did not want them.
They wanted the bones of 
our world to gnaw on.

They wanted to be 
the humming birds that ate 
the fairies of our hearts.

They wanted to filet the blue 
fish of our minds.  
They wanted to burrow 

through our marrow 
and delve into our guts, 
coming up with fresh oysters.