I use this page to post a variety of pieces, both those just out of the sluice, and older pieces that feel fresh to me at the moment. I generally keep them up for a month, or a few at the most.
Look for new poems (and more) at the start of each month.
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Breaking Crown #9 (new in August)
Breaking Crown #10 (new in August)
The Dreams of Fungus (new in August)
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Having focused so much this year on other media and not having written much poetry, in June I decided to sign up for an online poetry writing marathon which asks you to write a poem an hour, unpremeditated, for either 12 or 24 hours. I signed up for the first 12. It felt a little out of character for me, which of course was the best reason to do it. Besides, I was following my instinct and my instinct said Go there. It started at 6 on a Saturday morning, so I got up at 5:55, grabbed a pen and notebook, opened the site (they ask you to sign in and upload any poems you write that feel worthwhile), and lay down on the daybed to either write or fall back asleep. My brain (or body) chose to write, and within about 45 minutes I’d scrawled a sonnet. A sonnet! WTHeck. Hadn’t leaked one of those in years — and a pretty good one at that — a little dreamy and kind of about being born, which is pretty much what we do every morning, written in semi-rhymed tetrametric tercets with a couplet ending in a trimeter. (I’ll throw down with any formalist who has issue with that.) So I typed it in and sat back down to write…something else? I decided to cheat and use the last line as the first of the next, as in a crown of sonnets, and whaddaya know, I wrote another sonnet that kind of continued where the first left off, about trying to see the world clearly. During the third hour I decided, what the heck redux, I’d sit there and try to write a crown of sonnets, which I’ve never done before. So I wrote fifteen interlinked sonnets in fifteen hours titled “Breaking Crown” that addresses how we might approach change in our currently broken culture. And they turned out pretty darn good. The best part — cause there has to be one — is the Collapse Press has agreed to publish the crown as a quickie chapbook, with a release reading on September 12. How nifty is that? Deets on the Events page.
Here are two of them as a bit of a tease. Stay tuned in September if you want to see more!
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BREAKING CROWN
#9
Let the pain settle in and remember your skin
how it tingles and crawls at the lightest caress
just as you are oppressed by the threat of abrasion
the body so fragile so easily harmed
you better be careful I don’t want to hurt you
but I will if I have to so do as I say
and look at you go you servant you sherpa
you proxy you proctor you denture you pal
and you’ll be just fine as long as you curtsy
and go fetch the ball from the neighbor’s backyard
and go fetch the radioactive component
and go fetch your head to be hung on the wall
and that’s how they train you, that’s how they sell you
the option to live in a thrall
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BREAKING CROWN
#10
The option to live in a thrall isn’t new.
Chickens do it all the time.
Domestication – an early skill.
Remember the crown? The cowboy hat?
The cat o’ nine? The judge’s bench?
The IRS? The numbered tat?
Remember your crown just after birth,
so soft the bones could separate
and you could trade auras directly with space.
Remember your skull hardening with age:
ossification. Remember your will
softening with strain: domestication.
Remember realizing you were alive.
Remember you breathe regardless.
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This was penned for Richard Modiano, on the occasion of his 75th birthday
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A MAN WHO
A man who tells.
A man who tells true.
A man who tells truth to the world.
A man who tells and truth takes root.
A man who asks, what happened?
A man who asks, what happened, baby?
A man who cares what’s happening.
A man who happens.
A man who happens to care.
A man who burns with care.
A man who burns.
A man who churns.
A man who churns community.
A man who churns human beauty.
A man who turns the soil.
A man who turns.
A man who turns keys.
A man who keys the limousines of corruption.
A man who has no truck with malevolence.
A man who brooks no bullshit.
A man who carries a well-read brick.
A man who rends fabric when fabric restricts.
A man who knows what fabric is.
A man who knows his Marx, and marks monarchs on a lark.
A man who knows a phony when he sees one.
A man who knows his euphony, his cacophony, and his antiphony.
A man who fosters Poetry Derangement Syndrome.
A man who speaks of melapoeia mellifluously, fans the flames of phanopoeia, and pogos gleefully with logopoeia, then hosts a banquet for them all.
A man who tastes this crumb of life, so delicious, and orders more.
A man who chases the perfect pastrami.
A man who faces life and grins.
A man who grins in the face of oppression.
A man who glares at the face of cruelty.
A man who falters not in dearth.
A man who works.
A man who knows work.
A man who knows union.
A man who knows variorum.
A man who knows phantasmagoria.
A man who knows.
A man who knows a thing or two.
A man who also knows when he doesn’t know.
A man who knows not, and knots.
A man who looks at a knot and sees it.
A man who knows a knot from a weave.
A man who unknots knots like the last gnarled banshee, and knots ‘em right back.
A man who has your back.
A man who has a back.
A man who backs up upon occasion.
A man who rebounds.
A man who unbounds.
A man who leaps with every step.
A man who bounds.
A man who cycles.
A man who bicycles across Los Angeles with a Buddha’s bliss.
A man who bikes Los Angeles a warrior ghost.
A man who cycles Los Angeles as an angel of truth.
A man who cycles true.
A man who trues his cycle.
A man who trues his bike.
A man who trues his wheels.
A man who trues his mind.
A man who trues his heart.
A man who trues his life.
A man who trues.
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Something writ within the year espousing a wish to have mycelia, I believe. Or maybe not.
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THE DREAMS OF FUNGUS
The dreams of fungus connect us all.
We are the fire that eats fire, the soil
that drinks steam. How do we know anything?
The fungus dreams us as we think and move.
Does the fungus move us? No.
The movement is cursory, however intended,
visioned by the fungus as our minds contemplate
and at the same time reveal, set fire.
Nerves carry the fire and tissue leaps.
We leap into knowledge as we do and strive,
creating that which we already are.
The fungus knows this because they have been,
as in the stream they manifest the circuit.
What dreams we have of clay and sky
tell us what the fungus sings – the why
of savoring breath, the chance of life,
the practical vein that feeds the new-furled leaf.
How can we keep the dreams in mind?
How can we find the nutrients that catalyze
our next-born, new-flung flesh?
Such fire there, such dreaming in the
limitless cataract of light. Let us stride
into valleys and lie face down in the scent
of the underground eating our cells and
claiming the constant origin.
We are the dreams of fungus, just as
fungus dreams us into life.
What fire is rife.
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