ALL RESPONSES |
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It is fitting that you pay homage in my court.
As a royal subject, you have performed well,
providing all that is required by your sovereign.
A portion of your income, a slice of your time,
and above all, your love. Complete dedication
is rewarded by audience, and the opportunity
for my ear, perhaps to sway events within the realm.
Of course, failure may result in exile or worse.
Tread lightly on these threads, held together
by the stitches of your life. So, bring me tuna.
Bring me skin of baked chicken, turkey giblets,
and those pricey grocery store treats. Do it.
I may or may not eat them, it depends. Just do it.
I will continue to ignore you, even as you love me.
I will shed on your furniture, leave tokens
of gratitude in the litter, rub against your leg
in the morning. The sunny spot on the chair is for me.
Do I love you? No. I don't know what love is, or care.
I understand food, warmth, sleep. Love? Meow. Nothing.
But don't leave me. Don't give me away. You would never,
never do that. I'm the prince of the pink carpet. |
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Number 1. Original and actual sin may be difficult to distinguish.
Number 2. I like snakes.
Number 3. I like apples.
Number 4: I like plucking fruit from trees I’ve been told not to.
Number 5. I like gardens in the afternoon, the shade of trees, dosing birds, the name Adam.
Number 6. “Succumbing to a serpent’s temptation” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Number 7. Words alone can be sinful.
Number 8. Take a moment now and think of all the sinful words you know
Number 9. and love. If I think a sin, am I therefore sinning?
Number 10. I’ve always wanted to commit an original sin.
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And Monumental begat Meatloaf, who begat
Roadblock, who in turn begat Doorstop, Anchor,
and Enormous; who begat the tribe of Blimp,
Truck and Chuck-wagon, who thence begat
Super-size, Humungous, and Bloon-man.
They, myoweth the Great Sherman Tank, begat
Grandiose, then Torpedo--who loved Hefty,
and those two mis-begat Stonewall Jackson Cat.
That's that. |
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based on There is Always a Way Out
I’ve grown tired
of carrying these diamonds,
these precious relics of exploitation; my young heart
against your laboring past
I’ve always loved you,
the smell of sweat in your welcoming skin,
the way your kiss deepens the day into warm night
and changes a widespread year of utterly poverty
into the anesthetic nature of Rio’s carnival
Even so, somewhere along the parade’s path,
I melted the silver necklace you gave me;
buried it, like the image of civil liberties we once had,
the sense of coherence leaching off it, gone
underground, towards the infinitely trusting
permeability of our original roots
I’ve grown tired
of sipping the tired aged wine,
barely capable of carrying the weight
of the empty souls, of political leaders
of lost desires and unforgiving lovers;
the thorns of past Easters pushing through
I roll now; cool grass underneath,
the metaphorical equivalent of calming tears
in the burning sadness of eyes;
hoping that the small cutting blades of green
rupture the hard shell I’ve grown around me
I’ve grown tired of knowing
that our sensuous dance would end,
some day
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inspired by A Walk into the Sea
Perspective arrows down the dock’s platform
to the lighthouse, directing the eye
to the object it deems worth consideration,
herding all others into categories:
left, right; lake, sky; wind and
the intrusion of silence, not as important
as the invitation to examine. What?
Light? Oddity? The little house
of our desire, where everything
inside is made clear? Concentrate,
the perpsective implores. Even now,
something is happening in your head.
Something decisive. See?
Something that needed to quit is abandonned.
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in response to A Balance of Color
I remember you dearly--
when I was nineteen, and we
were holding onto each other
like we could blanket one another
and hide in passive resistance
from the darkness of the world
where the water was inviting
but we somehow knew nature's frozen disaster
would stop the waves six months later
to leave only the recollection of them
creeping toward the shore--
I remember the night before
finally letting my clothes fall
onto the beach of obscurity,
with you, suddenly standing naked, next to me,
and how you then slowly walked away,
eventually chest deep in moonlit anonymity,
with only a Cheshire smile above the black
questions of the waters’ sleep:
the moon’s slivers of white slid
from left to right, and right to left,
creating laughter while my mother slept;
I remember holding to the hope of “us,”
the warmth of the waves licking at my shoulders,
and how we joined hands, finally, where
loneliness leapt away
and swam to shore
while we were left floating in forever,
or at least that is how it seemed
that August night
when I found a youthful dream waiting for me
to bite its lips and neck,
to let it close on me like there was nothing left--
I remember, with clarity,
the distances between our twining legs,
and how uncomfortable it was, at first, and then
I let my guard down and you crept in, and
I closed my eyes and cried because I knew
that there was no turning back,
and you told me that you understood
and said, “It is hard, isn’t it.” and I nodded
like a child, and let you lead me down, drowning
in the water where I was baptized and shed
my fear, at least for an instant
I remember how distant we were even then, and
that you disappeared after
we last held hands and walked on land,
two shades in the night
(not my first admittance, but my first commitment—
your breath and heart and love);
and how even years later I still thank Gaia, who
you believed in, for letting us have
a tender moment
before we parted ways, with a kiss, and
never heard each others’ voices again.
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Just because i can’t
feel it, doesn’t mean
the earth isn’t spinning
everything into itself:
now lightness, now darkness,
now bang, now silence.
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Cat’s Eyes
Diana was a cat once
And dared the sky
Look down on her
At rest.
And when it did
With camera,
Flash, she became
A poetess.
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to Mini Effel
Ah, Vegas, only you could sport
This Eiffel among the eyefuls
Down the street from a pyramid
And across from dancing fountains.
This creation is no more French
Than I am, but I love it, like I love
Venice, volcanoes, and pirates.
I have never sailed to Europe.
Afterword:
And, by the way,
If I may,
Effel was
Lucy’s fwiend,
Married to Fwed.
Please excufe,
My mouf is full of chocolate.
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One mile down Fernberg Road
across the from a resort
was Jerry's 3.2 bar
A rustic tumbledown
one room shack
A lacquered bar
and wobbly stools
Every footstep across
the dull wood floor echoed
The tables and chairs were
designed somewhere around
the beginning
of the nineteenth century
Jerry was a big red faced guy
who sounded kind of grumpy
when he asked with a sigh
"What can I do for you"
We spent summer weekends
barefoot and feral
drinking orange soda
from glass bottles
while our parents drank beer
with the locals
Dad's friends
gave us fifty cents
because of our dimples
we spent it on chips
and salted peanuts
I vowed not to
raise my children
in 3.2 bars
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a response to a walk into the sea
guest house
palace of wanting
end and beginning
neither too full nor too empty
just flesh and sea snarl
where I lay down my longing
the sea churns up
fears ragged, old
sorrows, yes, yes
you know us
we’re yours
then swallows them again
gulls cry mine, mine, mine
lighthouse flings its separate
all night a running a
love without object a
love in sea change
where anemones flow scarlet
a box full of flood
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This morning
I found a fallen leaf,
a burgundy & gold leaf
I held this leaf that likened
and accepted its falling
as though remembering
a beginning or seeing an end
This afternoon
I picture you walking
beneath colors of grandeur,
among the thousands
of trees, beneath the millions
of such leaves
This evening
I wonder where
my civilization starts
and when it will end
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in response to Mary of the Rosaries
Once I knew where to find god.
Just sit in the wooden pew,
feel the paths in the wood
beneath my hands and watch
the little house on the altar,
the red light signaling he was in.
A god small enough to fit in there,
large enough to save the world
and me in it.
At eighteen I wrote:
In the early morning light
I will dress myself in white
To give myself to you
Who gave yourself for me…
A cold love we had then,
locked in, safe, the hidden
parts of us fresh as pieces of fruit
in a zip-locked bag.
We worshipped a god man
loving that red wine smell,
his eyebrow hairs sticking out
like the legs of spiders.
But here in La Iglesia de San Francisco
is the Mayan Mary – a shepherdess
wearing light lavender
to set off her dark skin.
A lavender veil drapes over the arm
that holds a shepherd’s crook.
The other reaches for her sheep.
This church cannot hold her
as it couldn’t hold us young nuns.
She is the lady of light,
inside, outside this church
her color, the color of jacaranda
sweeping the indigo sky.
I have seen her kneel
on the ground to flatten tortillas,
or roast tomates on the fire.
I have seen her kneel
on stones and kiss the earth
the way we nuns kissed the floor
in punishment, but this is no trial
this honoring of spirits.
She, breaks from the dark
churches of my childhood
where I knelt hoping to see
her smile,
heart-breaking light.
How come we are told there are no
goddesses and how come they sometimes
surface when we need them?
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I awoke, not knowing light from dark, or
even if I had dreamed the difference,
or what a dream might be. The mice, for that's
what later I learned they were, came near,
whiskers twitching, and though I found something
enchanting in their form, and extended
a cautious paw in greeting, they would run,
trembling, though my intention was not
malevolence. O hurtful form I had been born
to, that my tasty friends should run in fear!
Then something larger, hairless, reeking
of vegetation and sweet false flowers
picked me up. Tickled my chin. Thrust its pinkish
maw to my muzzle and cooed while what long
hanks of unseemly fur it had fell about
my shoulders. Despite my horror, a noise
of pleasure uncoiled from my chest.
It gradually emerged this would be my world.
Lucky thing for claws. |
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This cat used to be a stray
This cat was named Grover Cleveland
then Captain Graybeard
then Hey You Get Out of Here, You Don't Live Here.
Now it is winter and he has disappeared.
Perhaps he found a family and a permanent name
And a place he can grow fat off the land.
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No more songs, my love.
No more.
I’ve neither the patience, nor the voice
and I’ve forgotten how to weep.
By the clock
we can fake
what we want to see.
There is no reason against me
for there is no thought in me
but for thoughts of you.
No craving
but for your flesh.
You can satiate my guilt with poison.
For you are alive,
opulent, reticent.
Even my arrogance
cannot strip you of air.
It is I who has become lost to the solemnity of fantasy,
while your love knows no thievery.
A love never lent to myth, haunt,
or lord.
A love which blesses
in the manner of wines.
A love you paint
from my yearnings,
my emotion,
my history,
my ink.
The struggle with life
is a thin song.
It pushes faith
toward folly.
I’ve dismissed everything I’ve heard after our names,
forgetting suffocation will never find breath.
It is difficult to find life while living.
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Plastic pens pawned from hotels
I have never seen remind me
of businessmen with breifcases,
creased papers and spreadsheets,
short glasses sweating with
moisture suspended in delicate beads,
that run at the first hint of
human touch
they sound like america,
like wives left behind
in apartments whose radiatiors
hiss and moan and sometimes
wail all night, clanking as cold
hollows fill up with hot pipe water
and missed first steps
first words, first teeth
and those hallmark days
get recorded
and shared
with elbows on the bar,
head hung low
wallet weepingly set open
to be fingered by strangers in
the dark, forgotten by morning
--just a few more years
he tells his tie,
searching his pockets
for the almighty dollar
which occurs to him is paper,
and like everything else,
burns just as easily. |
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Walk out onto the lake in the late afternoon.
The further you go, lower sets the sun, red,
maroon, scarlet, purple, colors without names.
Walk out naked, on ice, in January, in Minnesota.
Please do this. Walk out onto the lake, naked,
walking towards the line where ice meets sky.
Skin complains, cold sucks heat from an alien
walking in a world where myths turn to steam
and every transgression curdles into phlegm,
every pain writes itself into memory, every pleasure
swims inches beneath your feet, walking
towards twilight, cold, naked, dissolving
into particles of love, hate, envy, guilt,
and sin, on ice. This is how I want to die. |
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Frenchy was there
from the moment the doors opened
until they closed.
Her children knew to go there
after school.
She was the Liquor store queen,
her maple stool throne
in the middle of a thirty foot
cherry wood bar.
The more she drank
the louder she got,
never held her tongue,
spewing insults at everyone.
Hanging on every woman's man.
First fight I ever heard
my parents have
was when my dad stopped
mom from pulling Frenchy's hair out.
That was the first time I heard
her name,
"French Whore"
and that she had black roots.
Rumor was, her husband
brought her back after the war.
They never called her a drunk
but everyone called her a whore. |
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In Response to Merc[e]y
Glory Mercey attached suction cups to the heels
of her shoes for preventive measures
while maneuvering up the slick walkway when
visiting the man with bells for eyes, bars for lids and lockjaw.
The apparitions on either side of him quickly dissipated
and upon entering his head she found he had nothing more to say.
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Messages
It was a time of confidences, letters, stories, poems and verses
from scripture memorized for the gold star. Words had
power: omen, prophesy, blessing or curse. Hand-writing was a school
subject, no one tried harder than me, I loved to watch the letters flowing
out of my thick yellow pencil. Later it was the discovery of
gracefully controlled calligraphy, that Christmas there was only one
thing I wanted: an Osmiroid pen with its refillable bulb. I copied the entire translation of the Gospel of Truth, a writing 2000 years old
excavated in Nag Hamadi, Egypt, an entire library buried by the monks because the books were not in the canon and could be burned,
could rock the church, could wake people up to their own divinity,
brought to light just in time for The Transformation
we had been expecting for the world.
Emails are too easy, easy to write, easy to delete,
add a smiley face when there is not
enough time to be eloquent, heartache
disguised under the perfect formation
of letters in any font and color you choose,
no tear drops to smudge the ink,
no perfume leaving behind a fragrance to entice
Read about Gnostic scriptures
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Wings and Flight
It takes only a moment
for lovers to collide
tracing the spiral of notebook
with finger
watching a lemon being cut,
juices sliding
down the outside of an open glass
Nowhere does it say words
are necessary
Nowhere does it say I’ll miss you
someday
It takes only a moment for lovers
To bend light into dark
send God away until Sunday
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Sometimes what’s left is a singing
after the wave recedes, before it
gathers and returns
Sometimes the sound of what’s left
is color ⎯ two monarchs hanging
from a pepper, finch in the lemon tree
Or what’s left echoes in the clatter
and scream of the train as it passes
through town
What’s missing can make what’s left
silent, palm trees have ragged red eyes
at sunrise, then they are empty, blank
eyes that Modigliani paints
Sometimes what’s left is woven
through the day, the way pelican wings
sew earth to sky
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There is no seat you want to sit in, no place
that you belong, so you choose one near
the middle, closer to the back than the front,
one with a kid in a faded jean jacket and striped
watch cap. A skinny kid who stares at his hands
lying in his lap. His fingers are slender,
stunning-- and you are ashamed that you notice.
You never sit in an empty seat, nor do you sit
next to the boy in the blaze orange down coat,
his head shaved, his skin the color of onions.
Nor by the girl with the unzipped coat and black
v-neck sweater, her eyes lined in coal. You slide
in next to the boy with the graceful hands, say,
is it alright if I sit here? He glances
over his shoulder, sees your powder blue ski jacket
says, it’s alright. But I get off before you do.
The school bus fills. You do not look up as the eighth and
ninth graders saunter down the aisle. You do not notice
how their jeans ride low on their hips, how those hips move
with a certain ease. Nor do you notice the cigarettes tucked
in their coat pockets, the lighters they flick close
to the pink pom poms on the girl’s hat three seats up.
You look only at their boots-- mud-stained, steal-toed,
a size too big.
You and the thin boy look out the window, watch
the houses get larger, the trees get taller, denser,
until rolling hills and frozen ponds take over.
The houses squat, thin out near the highway.
You watch a v of geese head south, spot snow
that falls but never lands.
He gets off at the trailer park, three stops
before yours. Each morning he waits there by the
chain link fence, his breath billowing clouds in the
thin dawn air. You watch now as he walks along the road,
hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. As the bus pulls away
he is swallowed by row after row of white tin trailers.
The sky is empty now, all the birds and color bled
out of it. Even the highway is nothing
but salt and potholes, windswept asphalt.
You close your eyes, vow to bring an extra pair
of mittens tomorrow, mittens
you will never have the nerve
to give to him.
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For The Color After a Tidal Wave,
Sometimes the tide of grief comes in high--
sneaky at first, so no one notices
how it masses forces on the shore of an eyelid
and for a time stays there, armor glistening,
shiny with lost love.
It doesn’t really want to fight, just to be heard,
and then to curl child-like in the crooked arm of sand,
wounded and healing; but at the same time,
it wants to crash brutally into the moment,
howling its war-cries, then to skulk
up the beach—a soldier under fire from above--
a victorious conquistador subjugating all in its path.
If it can’t become a scream, it thinks,
I may as well be a thief.
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it’s a cold November evening and the wind
sends dry swirling around us
there is a winter storm warning about
we are talking about music, sucking
on the peppermints you share while walking
away from the little hamburger joint:
grilled onions, ice lettuce, dark beer
it has been a good night to be with you
on a different night, many nights ago
you came to me with wet eyes, your confidence
in a heap like the day’s clothes and told me
in a low voice, “love me”
you opened your cage for a night
and let me touch the things that snarl,
that bite
later you kissed my bleeding fingers
tonight we walk hand in hand
and part of me insists on knowing
who is holding who?
is your palm sweaty?
or do you secretly wish to pull it away
and wave to someone else in the dark |
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THE LION & THE CAT
There is a connection
we are trying to ignore
but runs deep below our skin.
Me, a cat looking at a meal.
You, a pray wanting to be eaten.
There is energy flowing between us,
strong, contained.
You, a desire under control,
me, a desire waiting expression.
The lion in you
has yet to leave his den.
The dance has started
but in this play,
we are both the hunter and the pray.
It does not matter who will pounce first;
we both know we'll get our meal.
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see the photo Mercy
GRACE OR MERCY?
I
You wait.
A chapel, a stone hard face
ready to inhale me through your barred nostril;
the stench I already am
and only death anticipates.
You wait for my steps to reach you,
to enter your toothless mouth,
sideways lips of dark wood.
Your eyes of bells will sound my death,
an hymn called justice
over my strangled voice.
Your exercising mercy to my soul,
is the illusion that justifies
the murderous intent of men,
crawling within your visceral walls
like vermin in their best at Sunday' service.
My innocence, my rights, to them has no value.
I am a craved show,
the justification to their murderous instinct,
sanctified under a name, a symbol, a heaven,
excused by chants or whispered prayers.
Mercy shouldn't be for the likes of me,
but for their righteous soul.
II
Rain quenches your thirst,
runs down your walls,
as if sliding down stoned cheeks;
the tears you have been craving
to wash your pavements
from years of dust and sins.
Quiet is all around you
while the mist rises
from the heated ground,
lingers, and softens the edges
of broken walls remain.
I look at your grace of solitary chapel,
your wooden door, the stone arch above it.
The symmetry of your facade
holds the sad expression
of the forgotten ones.
Your silent bells are blind pupils
to the empty road leading to your threshold.
Within your ruins you wait,
hoping to one day,
be recognized once more.
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