The city moves too fast. The City never changes.

Lost in the floodplain – 3

NaPoWriMo, 2016, Day 9 (on day….ummm, whatever…give me a break, I’m still writing. I’m still giving myself, poetically…), Something to do

Something to do


it has something to do with these three little pieces
and an old coffee can full of more

something to do with 
many pieces that are lost

that are lost but almost remembered and
then forgotten again

many things full of many pieces 
that are almost found 

and then lost again
and then forgotten yet again

how many things have been lost and then forgotten 
and never remembered

or barely remembered
or only just remembered in a fevered state

in the night
in a sheet-soaking sweat

things that seemed
terribly important at the time

but then were hidden from the mind under the corner of a rug
in the corner of a rug shop

a dusty place to lose your self








...keepin' the Po in NaPoWriMo...

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.

Spiders

(Remember The Rats and the Oysters?  This is what happened next...)




And then the spiders came for us.

We gave them our eye lashes 
and they wove them into their webs,
into the words of their world.

We wondered what they would look like
and they stole our eyes for it.

We gave then the cilia of our 
guts, but they wanted more.

They wanted the fat flagellum 
of all our faked identities.

We gave them the threads
of our thoughts and they 
traced the fine treacheries
of our limitations with them.

They felt the quivering
of every one of our nerves.

Our neurons became their prey
exactly where they came to rest,
sticking in the silk of their silences.

They spread their legs 
to embrace the all of us, 
especially those parts we did not 
want embraced,  They defiled
our own embarrassments and 
defied the lodgings of our throats.

They sucked the sins from our insides
and spun them into empty gags and 
blindfolds so that we might not witness 
the uselessness of our own suffering.

They machined our sadness, honed 
it to a poetically correct awareness 
of the watery silks of our existence.

Our will withers on the spine 
and the spine’s tinctures 
strangle our limbs in their time.

Down at the squirt shop

Porcupine hill met fish-pond face down at the old squirt shop.  They thought they’d head out to green feel piece and wilt the day trippers with fuzz.  Twelve-piece times felt too much like tank girls on acid and then there was the fun-farm.  Too much piss and vinegar, sponges and spill-proof pistol grips spinning into the night.  Twelve days to go ‘till the fortnight of the revolution and then?  Then what?  Then the dandelions take over and there’s no telling what could swallow the night.  Fortunate speculums hit these fuckers on the head so many times they thought their ears were spit-shined.  You know, tweezed to within an inch of their artificial dangling spinsters, like all those frozen pin-cushions positioned on the precipice of window displays, dancing in the eyes of corn-hole robbers and rocking chairs….

…puttin’ the Po’ in NaPoWriMo…