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.

windmills

Scribbles

I'm downstairs by myself.
You're one floor above me and
occupying a separate altitude.
The lamplight throws shadows harder
than the blows that fell off your hard lips
throwing punches with your tongue and
the shadows like my company even
when you do not.
The hours of night walk laps inside
my bones and I pass miles just
by sitting still;
If only it weren't in
the wrong direction.

Story Telling

Today he tells the nurse he is in a Sigma Chi dorm room in Fayetteville.

The white columned fraternity house bears little resemblance to the

Flat, brick exterior of the building where he lays on a twin bed that folds in the middle.

Yesterday, he was in an army barrack at the end of WWII.

He never answers the nurse’s question, “Mr. Robertson, where are you?”

By reading the letters stenciled on the sign over the clock –

The Presbyterian nursing home.

There is always an association made in his mind

With something familiar from the distant past.

The present doesn’t exist for him anymore.

To him, I have stopped ageing, on the days he remembers my name,

And other times I am a visitor he squints at in veiled concentration

As he asks me about the weather in Excelsior Springs, Missouri

He wears a plastic wrist band like a concert goer waiting on

mixed drinks at the seedy bar of a smoke filled venue.

But this band sets off alarms at the end of either hall way.

There is no risk of him escaping to walk naked down the side of the highway.

If nothing else has killed my grandmother yet, that would.

He does not know why he is here.

The stroke that left him with a bloody chin that dripped

Down his worn, white t-shirt beneath

the bathroom sink is not an event

That registers in his available memory.

There is only the day before, when he spent the night in the pleather chair

Beside his daughter’s hospital bed in a cold cancer wing,

And today – finding himself in a room with an echoing air conditioner

And a shower outfitted with metal handles and emergency call button,

Wondering, perhaps, why a fraternity house has so many walkers and wheel chairs

Parked in the hallway.

If I visit him, he does not know I was here an hour later.

Often I use this as an excuse not to go and watch him

Diminish with the age he had kept an arm’s length away for years.

His black hair turned ashen over night,

and his cheeks have since sunk into the bones of his face,

A collapse that coincides with the confusion of loss of memory.

He does remember when my grandmother’s waist

Would have spanned the length of my forearm

If laid out flat, and the dog named Charlie Beagle

That bit people and frequently peed on the avocado green living room rug.

And he remembers my mother as still alive and occasionally

Looks to me and asks how Susan is doing.

Once, my grandmother took his hand and told him, calmly,

“Bob, Susan is gone,” and he stared at her, expressionless, and answered “Oh,”

As though that explained why she never left the hospital

And why he could not spend the night beside her anymore.

The next day, he asked her how Susan was, and my grandmother answered, “fine.”

My memories of my grandfather as he was mix with the man

Who stares at the TV and rubs his hands together, agitated.

I want to remember him as the man

That drove a white Buick as big as a house boat

With automatic, adjustable seats I could slide forward and backward

Even when in drive and he never scolded me for distracting him,

Just hummed songs I had never heard

And complained that my grandmother drove too slow.

He would take me to McDonalds to get the Disney toy and then

Let me spend an hour in blockbuster choosing three new releases
I would take and watch all in a row,

And he would watch My Girl with me and take his glasses off

To wipe tears out of his eyes when McCauly Culkin died of bee stings.

These are the things I find worth remembering.

Now, at 25, he asks me the same questions every time I visit:

What year am I in school and who am I dating.

He is able to calculate his conversation to convince visitors

That he understands who they are and what day it is.

And we want to believe him – that the seizures he has three times a year

And deliver him to the hospital in an ambulance

Are diminishing. That his brain is healing.

When weeks go by without seeing him I chastise myself

Wondering how I would feel were he already dead.

My grandmother visits him everyday but still harbors the resentment that he

Never had to deal with the death of their daughter by

Mentally checking out of the reality we deal with and that frustrates like

The line at the DMV or a jar of pickles with an untwistable lid.

My grandfather left two weeks before the morning she passed away

In the hospital room.

And it makes me question the amount of stress a human body can handle,

And if I’ve inherited the blood clots sitting like bombs in my brain,

If my memory is slowly waiting to abandon me the way

His abandoned the present and the way my grandmother feels

Abandoned by him.

I hope that when my memory goes, I can live like he does,

Preserved in the belief that everyone I love is still alive

And waiting down the street for a phone call.

The possibility looms before me with the promise of a life that can be started over,

A blank slate every morning where I will never again have the wherewithal to question

Why a nurse comes in to my dorm room to tell me it’s dinner time at 5 o’clock every day.