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Category: Poems

Poems written by me.

U.S. Highways

July 9, 2010 • • 4 Comments

 

We read lines and studied rest stop signs to
learn the languages that govern highways.

Electric rivers flowed outward from cities
in red trails along the eastern highways.

We lived on the salty French fry grease and
fast food feasts of American highways.

We waited through summer road construction,
rebuilding and slowing northern highways.

In the mountains, we squinted through the dark
studying switchbacks to discern highways.

Green shadows crept across the road through
endless rolling tree-lined southern highways.

We avoided the rest stop stares of owls
and meth addicts on nocturnal highways.

In the desert night, lightning played with stars,
and we saw God on the western highways.

The engine downshifted, slow to grip the
road; tires clung like goats to mountain highways.

At night in desert motel rooms we laughed
and followed love down unspoken highways.

God Bless Johnny Cash

June 29, 2010 • • 20 Comments

This is my first attempt at a video poem. I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and  Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.

Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic ap, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.

The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.

Here’s the text of the poem. The title is from a bumper sticker I saw twice last weekend while driving through the hill country outside Austin:

God Bless Johnny Cash

I drove to the river;
it followed me home.

Sweated the night surrounded
by lesser freshwater demons.

Sang pelagic chantys
heard second hand

from deep-gulleted
birds plucking a thunder bass.

The earth ate the moon,
broke the fall of morning.

Twisted roads passed tallgrass hills
that can’t remember trees.

In the morning, I prayed
the dusty pick-up truck petition,

God bless Johnny Cash.

A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea

June 11, 2010 • • 25 Comments

After years in the desert, when he reached the empty sea,
he knelt in the sand and prayed to the rusted ships
bobbing lifeless on the shimmering black waves.
Syringes and glass glistened in the sand like ruined stars.

He knelt in the sand and prayed to the rusted ships.
In the grimy brownlight of evening, he collected treasures:
syringes and glass glistened in the sand like ruined stars.
From these bones of the past, he made her a necklace.

In the grimy brownlight of evening, he collected treasures;
he found bits of plastic and driftwood poisoned with tar.
From these bones of the past, he made her a necklace.
Imagining her beautiful again, he sang like the birds of legend.

He found bits of plastic and driftwood poisoned with tar
bobbing lifeless on the shimmering black waves.
Imagining her beautiful again, he sang like the birds of legend
after years in the desert, when he reached the empty sea.

—

This is for Big Tent Poetry’s weekly prompt. The form is called pantoum, and this is my first crack at one. I liked the repetitive spiraling nature of the form, which seemed an interesting fit for another of my post-apocalypse myths and legends poems (for want of a better term), though, I suspect pantoums are best kept short. The idea was to write in form about something that makes us angry so there’s some BP oil spill in this as well as a little bit of influence spilling over from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Using form to tame emotion is a good idea, I think. I’ve tried to write about the BP spill, but its hard to maintain control. Form helps. So does 3rd person narrative and walking so far down the chain of effects that I’m in a different world by the time I begin to write.

—

Just for grins, I de-pantoumified (de-pantsed?) it . It’s easier for me to follow this way since I can get lost in all that repetition, but it loses that legend-y vibe, I think.:

After years in the desert
when he reached the empty sea,
he knelt in the sand
and prayed to the rusted ships
bobbing lifeless on the shimmering
black waves. Syringes and glass
glistened in the sand
like ruined stars. In the grimy
brownlight of evening, he collected
treasures. He found bits of plastic
and driftwood poisoned with tar.
From these bones of the past,
he made her a necklace.
Imagining her beautiful again,
he sang like the birds of legend.

Beyond the Mesquite Trees

May 21, 2010 • • 6 Comments

Venus chases the moon into the mesquite trees
where a cushion of haze rises to dim their light,
break their fall so as not to disturb the golfers
coming up the back nine during twilight play.

A Carolina anole turns green, inflates his dewlap
as his clock ticks toward mating; he searches
along railings and in bushes, peering through
the dusky light for the female he knows is there.

Out over the Pacific Ocean, it’s still daylight,
could be tomorrow or yesterday or maybe even
next week, but in the brilliant sky, Venus and Moon
sail unseen, a slow pursuit like lizards stalking mates,

questions circling all night only to come up again
in the morning, looking different, but only slightly.

—

This started as a micro-poem posted at a gnarled oak and Identi.ca, where Deb hinted it could be a first line.

Nature Poem

May 17, 2010 • • 2 Comments

My students freeze—
how out of place

that slope-intercept
equation on the whiteboard

in this literature class.
Scrawled in blue, graphed

and correctly worked.
It’s poetry, I tell them.

Untamed

May 6, 2010 • • 15 Comments

Elegant and graceful, forever young
under the lights, but up close her legs

were scarred like cottage cheese, her eyes
had bathtub rings. She twirled the years

inside the cage, spinning them away
like someone else’s dreams. Backstage

she showed us off: tiger, leopard & me,
toothless cougar rescued from a meth dealer.

We rumbled like idling engines while
she ruffled our fur, loving all of us

as she did her own children, loving us
even as we tore her and her son apart.

—

This one took a decidedly dark turn, and it’s based on a true story. My father-in-law used to coordinate a Shrine circus. We went and got to go backstage to meet the woman who worked with the big cats. She was much older in person than she looked onstage. The cats were beautiful, and she clearly loved them and took good care of them. We weren’t allowed to touch them, but seeing them up close even inside their kennels was enough to set some primal adrenaline sparking. A few years later we learned that the cats killed the woman and her son.

This is a response to the very first prompt over at the brand new Big Tent Poetry where I’m honored to be a barker and to have had one of my posts included in the 3rd ring of that exciting poetry circus. The prompt, in honor of the site’s circus theme, was to write a persona poem ideally about someone associated with the circus. I chose the cats who I can’t blame. It’s what they do. We often wonder if our sweet cat would eat us if he were big enough. I suspect he would.

Darkening

April 30, 2010 • • 6 Comments

It’s warm this afternoon,
and sunny—a spring day
of bluebonnets and tall grass
and songbirds in the trees.

It’s a beautiful day, but
heavy beyond my horizon.

The pictures are coming,
we all know they’re on the way,
we’ve seen them before:
birds dying in oil-choked seas,
blackened beaches, ruined
estuaries and suffocation.

They say it’s going to hail
tonight, here.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo #29: Front Page News supplied by D.S. Apfelbaum. The poem is based on the dread I feel about the images we’re about to see when the oil slick hits the Louisiana coast. The pictures that will be on front pages in the coming days.

This is my last poem for National Poetry Writing Month. It’s also, sadly, my last response to a Read Write Poem prompt, since RWP is closing down tomorrow. It is Read Write Poem that inspired me to fulfill one of last year’s new years resolutions, which was to start sharing my poetry. It also led me to a vibrant community of online poets and writers of which I’m happy to be a part.

There are new sites gearing up, growing out of the community created by RWP, and that’s a great thing. Big Tent Poetry developed by Deb Scott, Carolee Sherwood, and Jill Crammond-Wickham will be doing weekly prompts starting next Monday, and I’ll be helping out as a “barker.” Starting on Thursday, We Write Poems, conceived and organized by Neil Reid will launch their weekly prompts. I’ll contributing a prompt or two there from time to time. Rounding out the online poetry prompt madness will be the Friday prompts at Rob Kirstner’s Writer’s Island.

Thanks to all of you mentioned above who are so dedicated to keeping these online poetry communities alive, and thanks especially to Dana Guthrie-Martin for Read Write Poem.

Standardized High Stakes Panic

April 29, 2010 • • 10 Comments

Sorry, kid. You’re on
your own today. Just
you vs. the State of Texas.
Give ‘em Hell, remember
the Alamo & your #2 pencil.
Should you not pass
(we won’t say fail) you may
retake this test, repeat
this grade or possibly
redo your whole life.
Don’t work too fast either:
these tests may cause nausea,
dizziness, double-vision,
vomiting, hallucinations,
panic attacks, bitterness,
resentment, depression,
and a profound distaste
for school, education and
even learning in general.
And Remember, don’t panic.

Redirection

April 28, 2010 • • 6 Comments

Words drip
from dictionary
lips—

challenges
& curses

stain the classroom
carpet.

OK, then.

Let’s mop these
words up off
the ground

turn them into
something

you can use.