POEM A DAY 2019

Until next time

Time to march towards next year.
I was waiting to begin, as I always do.
And now the wait is over, and such
is my great privilege.
I heard on the radio that some
do not march toward the next year,
live only in the present, and that
is the wedge against happiness.
Isn't it funny, the appeal
of deprivation.
Well, I'll tell you what
it makes me mad!
To think a life could be so hard
that one might not have the room
to say "this year blank verse but
next year, finally, a villanelle!"
I heard this on the radio,
such horror, and here I am
becoming middle-aged. Or not? Well,
I experience changes at last,
and see the gift in it,
and wish it for all my kin
and all their kin, and all
they've ever known or seen
forever, and ever, Amen.

data model

o little metadata person

2019: Get out when the time is right

20 years of resignation and then suddenly
it's over. The oven works again and
the whole time you said you couldn't
you could. At least that's what
they want you to think, THEM,
those that would shame your past
selves without congratulating the present.
The thing is, you really couldn't.
Even if you could. You
COULD stop screaming
for no reason, you COULD have never started
but what matters is
after some amount of time,
you did. Stop screaming.
No, YOU stop screaming. Right.
Now. Calm down. Ok, then
calm down when you can and
pretend it wasn't my idea, it
was yours. I know it was yours
20 years ago the oven stopped
regulating heat which is different
from breaking, in a way. It always
had the heat it just went too far,
it was a campfire. So for 20
years you have a non-working
working thing and you adjust,
and isn't that what it's all about?
I'm constantly screaming but I've
muffled my mouth so am I not
an adaptive, uniquely human
creature? Won't I survive the apocalypse
because I was raised to not worry too much
when things break (although otherwise yes,
to worry too much). Won't I survive
because unlike THEM I
just give up until it's time to change?
And then it's like there was no time
at all?

Recalibrating Sentence Test

Friends, I'm home.
Reclined with blanket.
Cold and old and quiet.
Friends, I rode the train.
An act of decadence.
I eat whatever I please.
Strong and smart and tall.
I see a friend on the landing.
She is breathing.
Friends, forgive my absence.
There will be more.
I have lost all my resources.
I got lost in the woods.
I became simple.
I'm switching demographics.
It's busy work.
With no reward.
But blanket.

On which we celebrate the birth of Robert Burns, the Peoples Poet

Isn't it totally wild
knowing one's self to have been
a bug!
On the day of one's birth what is
there to think but "ew, mom,
isn't it weird to
talk to me? When you
look at me do you see
a bumbling thumb-sized
bundle of bones
covered in urine? I
should be canceled!
The things I said
to you when first I
found the means
to speak!" And in
that am I sort of
judging her? And
let's throw dad in there too,
like, why do these people
still talk to me knowing
how weird I was when
I knew not what
an adverb was. They
should have more
self-respect. They
should always say
"yes but if you
hand a man
your boogers then
you cannot be forgiven."
It's embarrassing to talk
to them they've
SEEN MY BUTT!
God, and people
wonder why birthdays
are so stressful.

Food waste

Conveyed on a belt past the window dark

Bedtime carousel

It's bigger than the both of us
It's bigger than the both of us
I don't experience changes
It's bigger than the both of us
I'm totally hair!
It's bigger than the both of us
It's bigger than the both of us
Mr. Ed and the rural purge
I'm totally hair!
I don't experience changes
It's bigger than the both of us
It's bigger than the both of us
Green Acres is a spin-off
Family Matters is a spin-off
Mr. Ed was not a spin-off
was not spun-off
It's bigger than the both of us
I don't experience changes
It's bigger than the both of us
It's bigger than the both of us
the rural purge of the 1970's
I'm totally hair!
Bamboo died in 1970
1979 was an important year
I was born in 1985 and also
I'm totally hair! And
I don't experience changes but
It's bigger than the both of us.

In-home-help

bless you tv
kind voice of the hearth,
electric domestic,
shooing the darkness,
lighting the lamps
against the winter -
being the lamp in fact -
against the early
night, the late
morning, the branches
strained by shrieking
wind and shrouded in
the gloom, prepared to crush
the home, but not without
the gentle protestations
of the blue-lit beauty,
cathode caretaker cheerful
at the rattling window pane.
In this love I am my mother
in this storm, swaddled
by her long-beloved
in-house help, her guardian
and friend, whose many
voices fill the ever-
widening house, and
cluck away the threats
of angry trees. She and I
and empty rooms and
endless gratitude for
you.

atomic age

starburst winter is it over
the future's just as bad
as ever but at least the past
was nothing clever.

An historian has said it thus

and so it is.

atomic burst such music
such design, the star shape
of the best of some of time
oh why bother, why remember.

crisis of (lack of) faith

When is the next big burst of faith?

My grayscale palette of belief

Has rendered me a heathen creep.

Eastern Seaboard Equilibrium

Are most folks fine or not fine?
What's the metric, and which is
a more radical idea, and where do
I fall? I'm fine. Also fine when not fine.
On the train most folks seemed fine.
Today, that is. Once I saw a whole train
pass with more folks not fine than fine.
It was an E train, at 11. I was fine.
What are the leftist thoughts on being fine?
When I think most folks are fine I think
I'm thinking "such deeps joys and sorrows"
but maybe I'm just thinking "look away."
But it's polite to look away in New York,
where I'm from. It's my culture, and it's fine.
Deep joys and sorrows, combined to be fine.
I'm with most folks, fine.

Nudie

lived in a nudist colony in Florida,
pink and blue all the time and truly
full of joy. Middle aged with as
strange a body as anybody, baby.
Lived in the glow of daily thunder,
daily neon without much need of money,
and good health, and why not? Why not
think to just live that way and not this.
Lived like a real bad girl with weird friends
and hated art, my own apartment and
a job at the sex shop. Why strive. When
did I decide.

noteworthy location I saw today

In this, the first year

Executive dysfunction

I will not wash my face
I will not use the mail
I will not change the bulbs
I will not trim my nails
I will not set my goals
I will not having said I would I
cleaned the toilet and felt that
modest goals became me well I
tried to write anything, anything at all
other than in my own voice and
found that having no voice gave me
no way not to have my voice my face
is not washed I dream
only of garlic I flew in through the window
in a swarm of bees as soft as a wide silk scarf
I settled in my bed, my queen, I do
her bidding as a bee I have no face to wash
a bee is all body and so am I a bee
has no nails a bee cleans the toilet because
I said so a bee has only goals and simply
knows them and also flies and when you fly you
do not mail. And are we dying are we bees
or canaries? Will I finally lose the "I" no I
forgot to think about the bulbs but that is
where the garlic comes from and does garlic
like all things come from bees? Or what?

propaganda

everyday art object in a bad location.

when will I find some space to see the

walls in harmony again with objects offering

themselves to me with no expectation.

the flood

My name is Allison.
I lived a hundred years
before the flood. I knew it was coming
nearly the whole time, but I never saw it.
some saw it while I yet lived but I
had always been lucky, a good star,
birth chart charted by a family friend
lost to the plague, another biblical blip
to start my era.
I worried about children.
Would they survive the flood? If not them,
then, who? But when it came they too
were old, so old. Had been too afraid to have
children of their own, who may have lived, who knows.
But things survived
some things,
some language.
What was lost for having known so long
the flood would come,
I do not know.
What do you want to know from me?
I'm glad you've called, here on the hill, and yet
why me?

as fast as you can!

Matt hands me the computer at 17%
we're sharing and the race is on.
My own machine drops faster
careens towards empty, powerless
voids at will, I love it, the little
nihilist bastard but, it makes me
fear all else, such as this, staid
standard laptop, ageing gracefully
at 16%, now and you, the reader
knowing how much fear flits through
my 1% of words; you know, don't you?

Avebury

so honestly 1,000 years ago
I don't even know and they
1,000 years, and again
1,000 years before that even
less so but somehow even
knowing that I'm like "sure
but, they knew better than me
right" but...did they? I say
no! So when the record is
less complete and the lives are
shorter but the building (hi
baby building!) takes longer than
do our ancestors (who, let's say, are
here because I, a hippie, decided to
say today I don't believe in
linear time which...I've said before
but, that's the point of
saying something like
that) take to live (than do our
ancestors, who are always living,
take to live) then, do we ever
understand, we who are our ancestors
ever, understand what we're doing when
we finish
what we started.
We remember only that
we're doing it but then, for whom?

Plan for retirement

A brisk morning walk,
dog at my heels, the
frost upon the heath a
pot of coffee hot at home
and I so old, my garden grown.

Fuck.

I'd break my leg the dog
awash in sores and I too
afraid to know why to call
to end the pain the coffee
pot is thick with mold I need
a corner store to stay alive.

Where am I from? When will I leave or have I?
What is the country? Is it bad? "mine?" and "the?" and "ours?"

Ah, this morning felt like heaven and the afternoon,
and evening too. Remember it, they always say
but how.

What will come tomorrow

no weather solidarity what is left
at night the map cannot show a nation;
Lonnie never looks at California
or even Ohio, or even Syracuse.
All our forecasts all so small, all
our sense of self is hardly there at all.