Assorted Poems
March 26, 2009
Guilt
I am your mother and I made you
squealing pink potato, with hands and feet
for roots, parents for roots
with a strong, branching heart that grew,
webbed red and blue with veins like vines
and wide, wet eyes.
I watched your body
unfold like a lawn chair.
I watched as water
turned the color of your hair
dark and back. You had a laugh
like a little old man
and you blinked your eager hands.
We fought, your daddy and I.
We let the neighbors line
our windowsills with ears.
there are no erasers or cosmetic lasers
with which to vaporize the fights,
the time I yelled eat shit and die
and the words came through your bedroom
wall, and woke you like a grizzled nurse.
And so the next time you return
home to here, the next time
I watch you descend
down the death white steps,
I’ll be waiting in the airport lobby,
balloon-faced, hugging flowers,
forgetful as time allows.
love poem in winter
i have never been very good
when it comes to defining love or
falling in it, as if love were
the everglades, a duck pond, a ditch-
which is why it came
as a surprise, this weekend,
after you spent all of saturday
with my cousin and me, and after
you sunk in my bed and my body
like a warm submarine,
to realize that i loved you,
when love had always been a word
(i’d thought) too much abused
by sonnets and pop songs.
and so i wear your body like a coat.
it is winter and my teeth chatter,
my heart feels like a cold, bruised raisin,
and i try not to move, keeping my warmth
collected. i can’t tell you enough how much i love
when you just have to touch me—
i mean my hair or frozen claw of hand, that is.
you go immediately to my head
(lover as whiskey, warm rum lover)
which is unfair; in the binary of us
i am always cold and you are always tea.
Missing It
I left the wack jobs and living gods
back in Dublin, where I found ‘em.
The place feels like a dream, now.
Like a dream my brain invented
one long, hot, tortuous night,
without my self howling like a referee
carving the turkey of real or unreal.
I made the mistake of reading Baudrillard,
(Baudrillard on nostalgia and constructs).
Now when I talk or think about Dublin longingly
I feel Baudrillard’s clammy French hand
kneading my shoulder like cold clay.
Oh Baudy, Baudy my dear! Dear, darling
philosophizing shaman, isn’t there some well
I can drown you in? Some pissed-off mule
I’ll tie you to? The rest of this poem will
stretch on like the muscles of a pioneer,
mine silvery verses so
horrifyingly long, like horse cock—
and it won’t be remotely poignant,
or retain a smidgen of poetic technique.
it’s just going to be lists of place names,
names of streets… that kind of thing.
Tags: Poetry
