world news

Inspiration comes from so many places. The other day, the Google sidebar called out to me. It was an article about a squid ship from Japan resurfacing near Canada. The picture, to me, was kind of haunting. And the impacts of the tsunami are still being felt in places. I wanted to access that emotion, that haunting, in a way I understood. It may not be a real reflection of the news, but as a writer, I take internal truths, ghosts of the news, and reconstruct them in a new way. So, here:

Backwash
“An aircraft patrolling the seas off British Columbia saw the vessel… from the Haida Gwaii islands on Friday. It is believed to be the first large item from the millions of tons of tsunami debris to cross the Pacific.”–BBC News

The oceans pushed me back to land with an azure hand
after the clap of saline and spray that washed me away
from the coastal teeth of the Hokkaido. Take me back
to rock-strewn sea-cliffs, to the scream
of water against Earth, the rushing collision
of waves straddling themselves as they teem
towards the shore. I was vast once, holding inside
myself the heavy tools of nautical labor, dark and solid
and greasy with saltwater. The Pacific lapped along
beneath my keels and nets, and I was strong
in my stroke against the currents. Then the tremendous
upheaval, the rapid flood of tidal bores into the harbor
like the whipping of one great sheet in the wind,the smashing
force of shoaling crests, the draining drawback
that yanked me from the jetty and swept me adrift.
In that blue emptiness, that suspended stillness
of so many depths, the rust blossomed along my hull,
and my sea-tossed body refused to sink.
Approaching that black brow of horizon again,
I know I am all hollowed out, a ghost of myself.

what do we call poetry? an experiment.

I was writing this paper on a book of poems by Hafez of Shiraz, this mad Sufi bloke (he is so good, you should read some of his stuff). As I looked down the table of contents, I felt like each title was chosen as a line in a poem all its own. Does anyone ever notice that? Anyways, I decided to play with the titles a little, and created this. But that leads me to the following question: Is this poetry, the simple act of rearranging lines already forged by another hand? In one way, this is slightly plagiaristic. In another, its a re-conceptualization. Do I have artistic license here? Or am I just being lazy in pointing out something poignant that existed outside of me?
Anyways, it looks and reads kinda cool. Maybe I just want someone else to notice that.

The Subject Tonight is Love:

Forgiveness is the Cash
At This Party
Why All This Talk
In a Handful of God
Because of Our Wisdom
We Keep Each Other Happy
This Place Is Where You Are Right Now
In a Tree House
We Are a Couple of Barroom Sailors
No Other Kind of Light
You Say, I Say
Where Do You Think We Will Be?
The Day Sky
Out of the Mouths of a Thousand Birds
I Knew We Would Be Friends
That Sounds Wonderful
Your Shape of Laughter
Something I Have Learned
Narrow the Difference
The Small Table of Time and Space
The Happy Virus
The Wonderful Lawlessness
They Call You to Sing
Your Medicine
It Happens All the Time in Heaven
I Saw You Dancing
Absolutely Clear
Carrying God
Deepening the Wonder
Join Me in the Pure Atmosphere
Playing the Brilliance
And Acting So Cool
Just Sit There
A Suspended Blue Ocean

a half-complete piece and a little reflection

I like using poetry as a means to enter another culture. When I say that, I mean most of my poetic prompting comes from learning something new. I fire up wikipedia and troll through various articles until things start clicking for me. A teacher once told me a poet could never be bored with life, and thanks to wikipedia, I agree. Life is poetry.
So I wanted to learn more about Russian folk tales. And they are wicked cool. You can read what I wrote to kinda catch some references, but the point here is to be more curious, to find a point of entry into something new. That’s kind of what poetry does for me, I think.

The Firebird

I am at the end of the tunnel: burning light,
boiling sun. Each shining feather-shaft sharpens
to a point, a premonition of your path. Covet,
then curse me, my gilded frame and pearlescent
beak pouring songs over the blooming steppes
and drawing you onto your quest. Ensnare me
in a crystalline cage and carry me on the silvered
backs of wolves back to Siberian gardens
and pale, perfect brides. I will rob you
of your dreams as I robbed the king of his
golden apples and his tsarinas, maidens sent
forth on platinum horses to Ottoman kings.
With my ember-red crest flared and flame-tail
trailing, I will rise, and all mouths will chant
krasny, krasny. My wings and breast unfurl
in amber kokhloma patterns for which you reach,
plumes falling around you like fading tongues
of fire that settle, spark and gutter out.

another quick one

Still Life

On the desk you left a dry orange: a crumbled rind
and sour insides acidic to the touch, sugar drying
in curled traces on the wood-grain. I think you wanted
to paint it—capture some juicy drops in oil and turpentine.
But the sunlight glowing in those citrus cells called
much louder than the transfer of sleek, pebbled skin
and stringy carpels onto dead, dry canvas. You abandoned
the project for the sear of summer heat on shimmering
waxy leaves, the cool darkness of shaded
tree bark grafted and re-grafted to shape the perfect
green-black stock, the pleasing bite bursting
pulpy and seeded over your lips—
sometimes a life is not meant to be still and set
aside for examining, pictured from afar. Sometimes
it must be consumed.

Spring Break breaks the Writer’s Block

I have not written in a long time. Months, probably. But now that spring break has arrived and I’ve had more time to think, I thought I’d try my hand at some ideas that have been bouncing around in my head the past few months:

The Russian Firebird
Oranges
Kerouac
Mexican alabrijes

I’m kinda happy with the piece I cranked out tonight: a poetic rendition of Kerouac’s On the Road. If I can’t travel this break, why not go vicariously through the word?

Mexico City

Your feet came slapping up the weather-shined
wooden stairs in those dusty huaraches, the beat
bending with the sound of locust calls and rattling
train cars speeding away from us to San Antonio.

I don’t know how you got me here.
The memory folded up and tucked itself inside
dysentery delirium, where I shuddered and sweated
on a cotton bed roll while the cannabis and whores
streamed through our loft in an endless haze.

Oh, I needed this rabble and its coal-black depths,
needed it to fill the space where my grape-picking wife
fell out, needed it to wash over me in waves stained
with tobacco and mosquito corpses and falling stars.

But before that, there was a ’37 Sedan
with broken headlights screaming through Colorado,
a dreamless place full of card games and baseball—
that place was not for us, sleepless as we were

with our itch for the road, the bracken culverts
of the Midwest in which we laid our bum-hearts
down, the raging parties and the Zen lunatics
and the mad poetry and the jazz, jazz, jazz.

But things are stiller now. Here in the stale wake
of illness I watch you at the window, a caricature
of Roosevelt or Gotama or God. You scuff your sandals
on the red dusk of Mehico, light you cigarette and tell me

you’re shoving on. I thought this hot, flat sprawl
of swampland was the end of all roads for us, the glorious
frenzy of not-being-but-doing. But you’re headed to Frisco,
and as the sun drops behind Sierra Madre, I pray
I make it back to Jersey before the car falls apart.

we can all be buffalo.

I love how my work over this past semester reflects the change in seasons. So here’s one for the shift into winter. No class prompts, no (real) research save for the “Buffalo Jones” theme song and Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans album and a clove cigarette to help me think.

A Buffalo’s Prayer

My Great Mother, I open my self to you, to every
rustling soul stirring in the tall grass that is you.
I am preparing every part for you, every stiff-
legged step into the cold, every silent white
star that prickles in the burnt sky, every turning
chord hidden beneath the sleeping prairie sod.
Will I be invited into the sound?

I am still. I know my sign. The winter is
an angry animal blowing these bracken stalks
into shapes shuddering and strange, and I am
grateful, so grateful to turn my face into its winds.
I will not lie awake in this dark and weep
for my sins. I will embrace every broken
enchanted thing, every circling wing of grief,
every umber-stroked thread of clay beneath me.
How much longer before I join the dirt?

You are heavy on my hulking back, but
not impossible to bear. You are every throb
in my solid heart, wet and visceral and real.
You are every huffing steam of breath
wavering in my nostrils, sharp and scented
with firewood and frost. You are the changing
tears of rain and brush wandering my plains,
painful, pulling, and I am everything in you,
ever-roaming, ever-rising, like the secrets
in these carpets of snow that frost, then wither
with the gasp of another golden dawn.

sickness and villanelles

So as the seasons change, I am prone to these horrible colds that make life terrible. In the middle of this year’s ailment, I wrote out one of my hallucinations in a really disjointed manner. Last week when we were prompted to write villanelles in workshop, I was thrown for a loop. But then I came up with the brilliant idea of performing poetic surgery: whacking a poem up line by line and rearranging it within the villanelle form. In doing so, the creation of the villanelle became less about production and more about formulation, which was nice and easy to handle in my ailing state. It also really changed the expression of the original poem in a new and interesting way. So, there ya go. Never be afraid of laziness when it comes to trying to write in form. It can be just as creative.

Fever Dream

I clutch a new nightmare, a new paralyzing fear
where a mutant man-bear zombie rips iron-wrought
bars of his cruciform cage into twisted snakes, thorned hands
strangling, soldering the throat shut more solidly than sleep.

Bloodied eyes scream platitudes of servitude, nobility,
captivity, crushing dark—I dive beneath the black
waves and cringe against another nightmare, a paralyzing fear

where dead hands slither between stone sheets and snap
bones like branches laid bare in the predatory stalk of a storm,
splintering the scream in the throat with solid sleep.

The claws come back, shredding the spinal chord like a worn out
garden hose, crumbling the bunkers antibodies clamber up, failing, falling
into the clutch of another nightmare where fear paralyzes—

struggling, failing, no breath in the gasp, no heat—
I WILL DIE, I WILL DIE—
the throat closing shut under hot torrents of solid sleep— and then

nothing. And then the silence of waking in a night that whispers its empty
code against my wrist, pacing out the steps of my thrashing heart
caught in the clutches of a nightmare, a deeper fear already
attempting to still my moaning throat more solidly than sleep.