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Category: Poems

Poems written by me.

Legend Says

April 5, 2011 • • 6 Comments

Legend says
this land was sculpted by golf pros who only knew how to make a buck.

Legend says
there is a secret zodiac of yet-to-be trademarked corporate logos.

Legend says
the northwest passage was built by Bigfoot but is now owned by crows.

Legend says
there was a cat who joined the circus to run the big humans act.

Legend says
trees are the heretical thoughts of stone, but no one understands.

Legend says
the woman on the lake bottom sold her sword business for a taco stand.

Legend says
there was a man who named three oceans and drowned in a river.

Legend says
all night, the cities beneath the plains hum that tune stuck in your head.

Legend says
the Loch Ness grebe got lost on migration and settled in Oklahoma.

Legend says
everyone has three teeth and a tongue that aren’t attached to them.

Legend says
a man rode out of town and returned with an elixir made from cheap tequila.

Legend says
words are keys, but the doors were all busted down by thugs years ago.

Legend says
I don’t want to go to bed; tell me another one.

—

This was based on one of the prompts at Big Tent Poetry: start a poem with the phrase “legend says…”

—

My sci-fi haibun “Dear Old Stockholm” is up over at qarrtsiluni as part of the translation issue. Be sure to check it out and while you’re there have a look around. There’s a lot of great work in the issue.

Gull Impostor

April 4, 2011 • • 6 Comments

Stretch your arms, rock to and fro
on the abandoned tracks, imagine

you’re a great ocean bird. Swoop,
dive, fly up to dizzying heights, peer

down to a rippled carpet, the ocean,
far below. Lean into your dive, feel

gravity’s pull, the insistence of textbook laws,
the water miles away. Accelerating,

you race until at the last moment,
wings straining with the effort, you pull

up. Soar away from collision, use
momentum to regain the sky. Eager

you test yourself against another drop.
Open your eyes. Disoriented, you’re standing

on the broken tracks, arms outstretched.
A flock of gulls about their business stays

a safe distance away. They have no idea
you flew with them. They watch

you with aviator’s eyes, making sure
you never attempt to get too close.

Walking home, you wonder if the sky is
farther away than ever, if you’ll ever belong.

Here Comes a Twister

April 1, 2011 • • 12 Comments

She grew up in the land of twisters,
seeking shelter in middle bathrooms.

She baptized herself in the rivers of glass
sparkling through the broken house.

Wall clouds turned and blackened,
the sky decayed, fell down from itself.

Monsters ate trees in the night
but by morning, birds always returned,

the feeders full of color and song,
while all around hailstones melted.

Only small questions remained, then;
the big ones were all torn up

with the trees and trails, apologies
she used to believe she owed.

A familiar man in coveralls claims
he can repair the roof faster, cheaper,

better than the other guys who don’t
understand these things (sign here please).

Her fists clench, knuckles ache like love;
she relaxes only when he leaves.

She whispers secrets to her daughter:
about the days of electricity and engines,

about the thrill of kneeling wild-eyed
before the weather radio’s robot voice,

about prayers for thunder and wind,
about how she learned to control storms

and how everything that happens
flashes in a dark and roaring instant.

—

Call this my first NaPoWriMo poem for this April. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing last year, but here I am again, back for more. I won’t be posting here on weekends, of course, but I’ll still be writing my daily stones at a gnarled oak (but I often don’t post weekend stones until Monday). One where or another, though, there will be daily poems.

A Texas Highway in Springtime

March 22, 2011 • • 4 Comments

The soaring hawks who patrolled this highway
through the winter watched as wildflowers grew.
As if the sky were napping on the earth,
the fields in spring explode in deepest blue.

Fields mirror sky and fill with the shadows
of hawks and vultures flying through flowers.
Bipedal hairless apes swarm through the fields,
teeth bared, pointing rectangles at each other.

In just a few more weeks, the bluebonnets
will wither and be swallowed by the grass.
Then the soaring hawks will get their fields back
as, ignoring green, the apes just drive on past.

—

This was first published at Bolts of Silk (thanks, Juliet!) back in May 2009. I figured I’d share it here now since it’s springtime and our awesome Texas wildflowers are starting to show up along the highways. Also, I’m busy and getting over a cold so it’s a good time for posting reruns of a sort.

—

Caroline at Caroline at Coastcard [Land & Lit] wrote some very nice things about last year’s gnarled oak chapbook. They’re all gone now, but you can still read them online (though apparently not if you’re using an iphone).

—

Dave Bonta is running a cool little contest over at Moving Poems wherein contestants will produce a videopoem using Howie Good’s poem “Fable.” I’m almost done with my entry. Deadline is April 15. Check it out.

Flags of Convenience

March 10, 2011 • • 5 Comments

Flecks of sea rust
trailed phantom ships,

their crews (it’s said)
marooned in paradise.

In this crash economy
we had no choice—

fight the fishing fleets,
reflag at sea.

An old fax machine
wired to a car battery

sent our request to join
some landlocked navy.

We lined up behind
flags of convenience

leading us forever
from our green homes.

While sharks & frigates circled,
I reckoned the distance

between two hearts
and almost made the leap.

—

This came from reading a series of articles on piracy in the Naval War College Review (Summer 2009, Vol. 62 No. 3).

The Matter of Dancing the Tangle

March 4, 2011 • • 20 Comments

there is the matter of slipping below streets
where other worlds lie deeper still

parades of skulls answer boyish dreams
where flashlights’ flames throw question marks

illuminating smiles and bare thighs
(don’t say more before we wake)

the space spins round a radio star
sweat, short skirts and cowboy boots

typical typical a laugh a sigh
he starts by saying more

when less is better
she finishes by saying nothing

there is also the matter of energy
when D.J.’s lock in with the subway rumble

there is also the energy of matter
and dancing the tangle of time and bass

there is also the matter of knowing
when to burn and when to gasp

there is also the matter of morning
when the last one up turns out the lights

—

This is written in response to the latest Big Tent Poetry prompt, which was a list of words and phrases. It also owes much to the recent National Geographic article “Under Paris” (Feb 2011).

Check out what others did with the prompt here.

Here We Go Again

March 2, 2011 • • 1 Comment

She holds her smoke. She’s swallowed the sun. Tendrils drift blue from her nose, a curtain obscuring the year. Cars weave through the lot. She stands among leaves, refusing to flinch at the sound of tires rolling over gravel like fragile bones. Her resistance radiates through the trees’ bare branches and out to space with the smoke from her lungs as the light between her fingers fades. She flicks the butt to the sidewalk, a comet to inspire the prophesies and curses of the ants. She runs her hands through her long and tired hair, pushes open the door surprising herself by humming snatches of a tune she thought she’d forgotten. The ants gather to celebrate this thing, this fire, they believe is theirs.

—

Prose poem or flash fiction? Who knows. This is based on this old post from 2009.

2010 Gnarled Oak Chapbook

March 1, 2011 • • 2 Comments

What you see above is the electronic version of last year’s a gnarled oak chapbook. I made one as a holiday gift in 2009 for family, friends and lucky blog readers. It went over so well, I did it again last year. I was surprised to see how many people actually liked getting a handmade book of poetry and when I offered it to blog readers, I was again surprised by the response. Who’d have thunk something this simple could would go over so well.

The experience of making and then giving these things away has been so rewarding, I wish I had more to give, but 50 is the number and when they’re gone, they’re gone. I have just 3 left. If you want one, let me know. They’re free and I’ll send them anywhere.

Two blogging poets whose work I greatly admire were kind enough to write nice things about it on their blogs. First, Fiona Robyn wrote about it on her Writing Our Way Home blog (and gave the post a title that would make any longtime Austinite smile). Be sure to check out Fiona’s new (and free) e-book How to Write Your Way Home. Also, Sherry Chandler wrote a very nice post about it as well. Make sure you check out Sherry’s wonderful e-chapbook at Dead Mule School of Southern Literature: Firing on Six Cylinders.

Update: …and they’re gone.

The Rope Swing

February 17, 2011 • • 7 Comments

We were the shadows
that filled the sky while
ten thousand flying foxes
hung sleeping in the trees.
We raced up the street,
tropical sky and a flash
of the South China Sea’s
brightness squinting our eyes.
Barefoot down the hill,
not thinking once about
bamboo vipers the color
of grass to the rope swing
made (we all imagined) from
the same rope they used
to hang Tojo. Running,
we took our lives in hand,
swung out over the houses
in the loop, imagined
we could soar and in airborne
moments learned to love
the risk, the danger,
the sunny disregard for
the bone-shattering distance
to the rooftops down below,
the all-too brief air in your face
seconds when we could have
just let go,
birds learning to fly—
unschooled and unbound
by our parents’ gravity.

Chasing Westward

February 9, 2011 • • 19 Comments

—

Chasing Westward

The vultures are heading west, their slow flying
shadow grace just an illusion of the blank sky.

Clock them. They’re racing away fast as thought.
Faster than often-repeated certainties and fears.

They escape with gizzards full, hurtling toward the sun,
shuttling some soul’s nourishing remains westward.

Out there, I hope, they’ll catch the day that never ends,
the place, I believe, night will never fall.

After sunset, I hear the rumbling highway, cars
chasing westward, chasing dreams, the fading light.

—

I wrote the poem the other day in response to some footage I shot a few months back. I was going to try letting the poem grow out of the video to see how that worked (there’s a great discussion on this over at the Moving Poems Forum), but as it turns out the footage I based the poem on is nowhere in this video.

Here’s how this video came about. Yesterday, I was sitting in traffic when my phone rang. After the call, I set the phone on the dash. While I was sitting there looking at it, I thought maybe I could turn the videocamera on and let it just film sky while I was driving. I did and whenever I came to a light, I’d just stop the recording and reset it in a different place, either on the dash or against the window. It never occurred to me until yesterday just how useful it is to have a perfectly flat camera.

By the time, I got home I had the footage and I thought this poem would work well with it.

The birds at the beginning are not vultures. They are grackles, and that was just a lucky shot. I’d love to have more than a few seconds of that, but they just happened to fly over at that moment. I didn’t even realize I had gotten them since I was watching the road. I left them in because I think it’s a cool shot and decided not to change the poem.

The grackles there work on another level for me too since this one feels like both a Highway Sky and a Birds Nobody Loves poem.

This videopoem is posted both at YouTube and Vimeo. Feel free to share it if you like it.