SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English
cuando we go into Sears okay Por qué
Porque didn’t you hear lo que pasó It say
on the eleven o’clock news anoche que two robbers
Draw a line through our scattered bodies. The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror
the constellation above. Look up. We whip our tails to a silent song:
The night America took off her mask
we slept together poorly. I'd woken up early
that Tuesday, dragged myself to a gymnasium
in Jersey City to cast my vote into the void.
we were never caught
we partied the southwest, smoked it from L.A. to El Dorado
worked odd jobs between delusions of escape
drunk on the admonitions of parents, parsons & professors
On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain
which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,
in the dry, steep ravines, the live
mist of the heat is seething like dust
left over from an earlier world.
My poem without me in it—would it be like
my room when I had returned to it
after my mother was done with me.
Under my bed, only the outer
space balls, of dust, only
the asteroids of hair, no bent-legs
There is a mouse under the sink
Little mouse turds around in the kitchen drawers
It is raining, storming
The refrigerator
has gone to the dump
Donald's back
has brought him to bed for several months
The bodies are on the beach
And the bodies keep breaking
And the fight is over
But the bodies aren't dead
And the mayor keeps saying I will bring back the bodies
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature
poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts
big ghosts contra
band my diction war
korea's north sees red as
america flags china's chopped limb
british crowns hong kong
cut for duplicity more capitalist than capitalist
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
the spirit of
your flowers is
my favourite shelter
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
I come from the land of
Where You From?
My people dispossessed of their stories
and who have died again and again
in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,
the dead who walk, waiting and
it’s rank it cranks you up
crash you’re fracked you suck
shucks you’re wack you be
all you cracked up to be
dead on arrival
overdosed on whatever
excess of hate and love
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said. O God.
To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last
inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice
for my mother. To be a more comfortable
bear with me it wasn’t long ago I was brainless
lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth chewing them
into pure light so much of me then was nothing
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s
nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.
I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs
to those of us who might as well be on the moon
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which…
We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America
opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Blousy guitar I don’t want to count the beats Hey Hey
My pen I have bed hair in the best way Daughter
of sunlight and air and I’m glad you were born
In my dream my mother comes with me.
We are in the meadows we call
The Flats, walking the dogs.
Walk straight past the water trough,
she says, do not engage the moss.
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and
everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your
glasses to single out what you know is there because
Where is the word I want?
Groping
in the thicket,
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There…
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
…
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
