POEM A DAY 2019

#2

oh, uh, i didn't do it?
a core thing to learn about myself is
i think i will but then i won't but you know
still right now i'm like
well ok in the next 2 days i can do
one each for each person all poems are ever for
myself! and the high school buddies
you know
like it's going to be one
and now i can't be cagey that it's just about what
i've been thinking about myself lately and how much i <3 you

Twisted Haiku

Poem #2

I wore my glitter
over black and white stripes
everyone noticed

I got dizzy
woke up on the kitchen floor
everyone standing over me

When you saw me you said I
looked like the Nightmare Before Christmas
but you thought that was a good thing

When I left everyone said goodbye
but no one checked if I was okay
no one called or texted the next day

I got too high and dehydrated and hungry
everyone got too embarrassed
but forgot the following day

an apology poem

because you were a myth to me

Facebook

Who Are Ya

It's a challenge to your stated intention,
to force your justification into mine.
We should exist without the other,
but next week it's some other mugs
who live all over you and I both,
so we exist to each other as they and all
but yes, who are ya indeed,
coming from the next or the next to next
town over,
who are ya,
fifteen minutes ago
you could have nursed a Thermos on the coach, staring at the Hellmann's smear,
the lubricant between Hovis and cling flim, before jumping right in.

As mud clogs up my Stans from the walk across the park from the hospital border,
and its great outline reimagined, were the bricks that charcoal, its windows slit in defence, or perhaps wider, 4x3 panes of the grimed April light that first drip fed my retinas four years before my eyes gave out and the blackboard receded as did expressions, as did impressions on my periphery,
and the world crunched in to a smaller field of view-

and as the Thermos, half empty rolls off the felt seat, settles two rows back, you tuck a flare in your hat, to be let off at 0-1 (premature like, it finished 3-3) I'm well through the park now
and who are ya anyway I think looking back at the nursing homes that went up five years after mother and baby were reunited, safely sent on their way, such a shame she used to say,
such a shame I thought, folding shitty sheets in the displaced hospital laundry,
where the new roof in blue kept the seagulls honest,
(you don't shit where you eat)
that summer where I sort of kept at it,
two years after my hopes kicked back in.

The Groom's Father

Things the groom's father
ought to keep to himself -
his view on politics and race
his hits and mistresses

the world is blurry now
such sharp edges no longer exist
all the features washed out
identities borne by voices

he stands to clink a glass to this
as if boy and man were simply
sets of sweats you could exchange, a crown
of fabric pulled up over ears and hair

a set of coordinates on a map or plane
a corner you turn, and then you're there --
a son's voice cracking
the father's jokes, ice cubes popping

in bourbon's hot bath. Daniel, you've taken
all these vows layer upon layer
with the same mouth, yet you've never
promised to improve what you replace.

Gloaming

When I finished the Muriel Spark book just before half past 11,
 I felt full of trembling promise, excitement. Heady with balmy.
Lying in bed beside the piercing cries of unfamiliar night birds,
one like the creak of a swing, back and forth.
Confused with images from the book, still, those characters marooned
on an island like this one, growing desperation, fierceness, bloodiness,
everything blooming in a tropical sky...

The windows here have no glass, but shutters full of wooden slats
that you can close against mosquitoes in the dusk.
Mostly decorative though, I supposed,
as we saw them flying inside, and woke in the mornings covered in red welts.

It's so strange and jarring and childlike, opening shutters right into air.
Like we're just playing at this living. I suppose we are-
holidays are make-believe.

Indiana closes all of the pretend doors before we sleep.
Even though the woman told us everyone here lives with their houses wide open.

Indiana slants their slats till flat and carefully slides the hanging hook in
to keep them there.
He nudges a door with his foot just so, but it bulges over the threshold.

"This is no good, really," he says.
"The woman said to just leave them open. I think that's really what they do here."
"Yes," he says. "It's no good for my fear of strangers breaking in to kill us."
(I didn't know we shared this fear.
I wondered if I'd accidentally passed it on to him, ptsd-by-proxy
after years of me jabbering anxiously about it at night.)

But of course, he went straight to sleep anyway, right on top
of his book, even, and when I moved us
into the bedroom, he went right back into it, barely stirring at me observing
that the bedroom door could not be locked from the inside.

Alexandrins

Meet me tonight in a place that doesn't matter
Beneath the fog forgotten by curious winds
Shielded by knee-high weeds where no one needs to mow
Under the four-leaf clover of the overpass
Or along the chain link infinity at the
Water treatment plant where we can see forever
How can you forget that view of endless nothing
Maybe by the drought-stricken spring of Pilger Ruh
A half mile hike off of PA 501
Let me take you there so we can rest like pilgrims
Meet me in a place they won’t think to look at all
Speak to me in words they can’t bother to translate
Dans la friche urbaine nous devenons des fauves
Et je t’aurais et tu m’aurais et je t’aurais
Words that don’t matter to anyone in this sea
Let us float away on the knowledge that nothing

the boy on the bike
says i will eat you
spooky spook you
it's a weird night
foggy.
squeaks and murmurs
in empty places
somebody calls my name
and another person
they sound happy to see me
but
my forward momentum is too precarious
for that my forward momentum is so precarious
that i bike five blocks past my house to make it.

I'M REAL

In a classroom at Rondout Valley
I heard myself say my real name
with my real voice,
thanks to a voice coach
volunteering for "diversity week".

For me
high school was all about defiant tenderness --
love notes passed out to anyone whose name I knew
where I scrawled questions
to try and hear their real voice
through the thickness of survival tactics.
I hoped there was something real
under their old navy shirts.
I hoped I was a sacred fabric
that could polish gravel into crystals.
I hoped I could stay in a haven
where I felt so sure of my softness,
my specialness
in a hard, boring world.