Chanelling Sylvia Plath

or something. Written sophomore year of college. I want this one to be edited and polished but I'm so weirded out by my own adolescent writing I don't even know where to begin.

Aleph

I feel sterile,
in this sober skin without rain
how it stops two inches before striking my bones.

How the prayer never reached my lips this morning,
laying dormant on my tongue and
waiting for breath to strike the chords
or the scratch of a pen for repentance.

Now the children in my stomach are sleeping,
rolling over in their watery graves
like bodies trapped in the hull of a riveted ship,
the sunken bed frames and cradles,
the coffins inside the lagoon,
their filmy eyes sewn shut by empty veins,
the vertigo of falling forever forward
in the knowledge they will never be born.

The planets hang like cells in a womb,
they roll over each other forever,
waiting for God to give birth and
they throw their open palms upon the sky
and scream out with gaping mouths,
swallowing gravity and the center of cells,
their grief spilling over their skins like a cloak,
waiting for breath and for rain and ignition.

In the silence of morning life hides
itself like a virgin from death.
Beneath a thick fog between buildings,
the city pulls the cold up like a blanket
barometers break from the weight of a prayer
whispered over coffee in cups on a saucer,
the glass of car windows steam and the world
is so quiet with reason.

Beneath the steel legs of a street lamp
I confuse the pulsing of veins for small kicks.
Saturn in it’s screaming spin is a planet aborted by God,
frozen and useless like cells pulled from my stomach
by clean, metal tools, dangled on the end of a wire.

I squint in the dim lights with their starry stretch,
the walls of my womb collapsing from the sound before all sound –
the murmur in the back of a throat,
the earthquakes and mountains quaking,
God spoke from a bush and it wasn’t the words
but intentions,

how I meant to hurt you when I did,
laying smoldering coals beneath both your feet and standing
with smiles on the opposite side
smoking on cigarettes in my sterile purity
of white skin and bones,
swearing to you that like God
or a city I am impenetrable,
my teeth with their serpent tongue
beckoning from beneath it’s red roofed house.
I had no intentions when starting,
the themes lost in translation from chemical
to nerve into action, the technical terms
and my marble encased legs,
standing spread on top of tall towers
while my children yawn in their catacomb cells
except one.

Two Poems

I've finally started printing all of my poems to do lots of red pen editing and make my very own chapbook.  Granted, I'll be the only person in the world who owns a copy, but at least then I can shelve it and move on to more structured projects instead of all this willy-nilly stream of thought BS about love and broken hearts and I think I'm going to tattoo a pin cushion on my chest.  I actually do have some coherent ideas for poetry sets I'd like to pursue, but shelving all the old material must be done first.

Following, I let Lennon read a spoken word piece I wrote about not being able to perform spoken word pieces.  He pulled out his Seamus Heaney book afterwards and made me read the first poem.  I felt cosmically connected, or something.  So here is my draft and his perfect-as-is poem for the full side by side affect:

Burning  by me

Mark Twain said:

The world’s greatest poet was an Irish potato farmer

Who never wrote a single letter

And died,

Tangling his decayed body with roots the way his fingers,

Knarled and knotted as tree trunks

Dug deep on dark winter days in dirt

To search for something satiating

Since the only thing he was ever given

Was hunger.

His hunger mixed fire with acid and burned

The lining of lips and stomachs so

He did not speak.

The only lines he ever wrote were composed with plows and

Furrowed deep as his grey brows when the dark secrets

He unfurled with spade and seed came sprouting

Every spring.  

 

With hands that couldn’t close any tighter

Than the width of a shovel

He dreamt of verses written in the lines of constellations,

Reading a celestial hymnal that swung on its axis

Stacking stanza on stanza of poems that

Couldn’t compete with potatoes;

With words that would never find a pen because

Paper is only good for burning

When you’re hungry.

His verses were cold as a voice withered on the back of a throat,

His tired tongue dry as grey embers.

When he died no one would remember

Any more about him than the knot in his empty belly

And the dirt beneath his nails as he dug

roots from fields and dreamt of fires he could never feel.

This was the world’s greatest poet,

Illiterate, starving for a thing he could not define.

 

Like him, my written legacy will never amount

To more than a sack of potatoes.

But unlike him it is fear that freezes my tongue

And while I applaud a verbal arson,

A poet who lights a crowd on fire,

I wonder, if we all breathe like dragons,

Will the smoke leave the Earth scorched,

Scarred, and begging for water?

I haven’t felt heat in so long that the ice

Is drowning me.

I can’t breathe fire when doused in water,

Swimming in insecurities I carry around like stones,

Polished smooth by my thumbs,

A weight stitched in my pockets

To insure that I never take a risk and float.

And it’s hard to maintain a fire when

I’m on a sinking boat bailing out with buckets

As waves cap the edges of a bow too short

To withstand the tempest of voices that tell me

I couldn’t shine bright enough to make a dent

In the night sky so

Why bother burning.

I’m hitting an iceberg.

It’s going to be sink or swim when this blockade

Breaks the barrier I’ve built around my voice box,

Walling off thoughts I’ve hidden in cellars,

Buried deep like gold or potatoes and even though

I’ve been told to burn down the house

I have barred myself into

It is not that easy to light matches

Without walls for striking,

To ignite candles without wicks.

But like undertakers and farmers I have a penchant for digging

So I strike shovel to ground,

Pen to paper and foot to stage.

Like paper that is only good for burning

I am learning my flint sharp tongue is actually good

For sparking. 

 _________________________________________________________________

Digging by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Memories fade too.

Love another tribute

After my mom died I would consistently sit down and write poems that began with, "in the event that you have been for two weeks, one month, three months, one year, three years..."

I can't do that anymore. All I can do is write another letter to love telling it what a fickle friend it is, but in the end I'd never dream to live without it.


Six years love and is this how you teach a heart that
there is no such thing as forever?
You pull pages from library books and
Pocket marbles you didn’t win
Somewhere a telephone book is missing the entire ‘Smith’ section
And you don’t believe in regrets.
Love I have watered my palms in the swirling stream of your
Eternal youth and watched my reflection age
As you slither away down shore
I float face up in a tangled beach
As your brown body mixes my desire
With sand and feeds it
To children who’d rather
Kick beach balls and finagle crabs on to fingers
That have never been pinched.
Love you slip out quiet as smoke rolling out of car windows
From lit cigarettes and vanish
Almost as quick.
Now I hide the lines of my face behind sun glasses and try not to remember
The feel of an ocean swell.
The salt that sticks to skin.
One open palm that still harbored the hope
Of expectation.

Breakups:

I seemed to know more about them at 16 than I do at 26.

stolen clip from a longer piece:

in the end, in your boredom you move

right through me like ghosts

through the woodwork of houses,

like termites chewing away at my beams,

jaws full of sawdust and this is how I speak to you,

empty palms and toothless,

my meanness spilling out on your shoe

and you wipe it away like a stain.

The stars at night.

I can't help but think...

That I shouldn't edit poems from my freshman year of college. Those documents feel like a mausoleum that should not be disturbed out of respect for something that is past.

the long night

I.

my god, my god.

the empty space when I speak;

the hood of a car folded crisply in half like a sheet

with glass on the concrete like snow.

shattered china, superglue and stitches;

an irreparable structure that fractured itself at the seams।

there’s a weight in my heart that is never enough

and I shouldn’t have to be doing this;

the stillness of bed posts building shadows in rooms

as I rinse my eyes out with salt; sinking in wounds and it stings,

a lashing of words when nothing is there

but the bare skin of backs to the whip।

II.

today I may as well be the floor

or the clothes in the corner.

you grasp my wrist and we speak of the slow death

and the blood running dry in our veins.

we are no longer people

and these are the nights that will never end।

what is there to bring him back --his toothbrush,

a shirt. I may as well be something he forgot,

a light he will turn off in the morning; the stove,

still burning in an empty house.

Sometimes it seems I never say (said) the right thing to you.

I betrayed my own language
the vernacular of pictures sold for profit
and petticoats
I have never smoked
although I have low standards.
my bars are vertical and easily slipped
through when I feel the need for
escape.
I have stopped trusting my fingers.
They do not move in directions familiar
to my face and my mouth
I have spent more time waiting
to hear you speak than I have
taken my own tongue out
to play it is locked
in a suitcase it is
wearing a training bra and braces
hoping to make you smile by how
pink it is.
I do not trust it
to speak right.

Another Not Original: I miss ideas.

"When we take things apart, we get to the center."

spit and soda crackers.

Not An Original

Dallas Clayton:

LOS ANGELES PROPER

Your apartment
reads just like your blog:
found objects and beautiful images
of people you admire
and so much time spent
arranging them neatly
into a tiny space
that you don’t even own.