bring around the poesy

[hipslipsmilk-blog]

A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up  like a raisin in the sun?  Or fester like a sore—  And then run?  Does it stink like rotten meat?  Or crust and sugar over—  like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags  like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

[thepictureofsound-blog]

Thoughts of a Deaf Child My family knew that I was deaf When I was only three, and since then fifteen years ago Have never signed to me. I know when I’m around the house, I try and use my voice, It makes them feel more comfortable; For me, I have no choice. I try, communicate their way- Uncomfortable for me. My parents wouldn’t learn sign Ashamed or apathy? I never cared about the sound of radios and bands; What hurts me most is, I never heard My parents’ signing hands.

Stephen J. Bellitz, Reprinted from Senior News, July 1991 (via thepictureofsound)

[bringaroundthepoesy]

Cat's-Eye

My father waved good-bye. I didn't wave back, scared I might drop  my new cold smoky marble. At the core a spiral  glinted and coiled like a small windy flame turning in on itself. That night my mother  shook me from a dream, whispering he was dead, he was dead, he was dead, as if to teach a language and I answered: he is dead. Even in sleep my hands had not opened.

--D. Nurske

[bringaroundthepoesy]

Evening Practice

I asked my father,

“would you rather die

of cancer or a heart attack?

Would you rather be executed   

or put in jail for life?

Which would you rather be—

a spy or a sentinel?”

And he tried to answer

honestly, combing his thinning hair

with his fingers, thinking of something else.   

At last he fell silent. I ran out

to savor the dregs of dusk

playing with my friends

in the road that led to the highway.   

The ball flew up toward day

and landed in night.

We chanted. Every other minute

a truck, summoned by our warnings,   

brushed past in a gust of light,   

the driver’s curses muffled

by distance: the oncoming wheels   

were the point of the game,

like the scores in chalk

or the blood from scuffed knees   

that we smeared across our faces:   

so when my mother called,

her voice was quaint and stymied   

and I took all the time in the world   

trotting home past tarped barbecue pits,   

past names of lovers filling with sap,   

past tentative wind from sprinklers:

then I was stunned to see my golden window   

where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots   

were framed by night and dwarfed   

by a ravenous inward-turning light.

--D. Nurkse 

D. Nurkse, “Evening Practice” from The Rules of Paradise (New York: Four Way Books, 2001). Used by permission of Four Way Books.

[bringaroundthepoesy]

Crash Test Dummies of an Imperfect God

Because we are so stupid,

the prizes in Cracker Jacks are now paper

so they can be swallowed, ladders

spackled with warnings. No getting

within a hundred feet of Stonehenge because

everyone wants to hack off a souvenir

and the way home is clogged to one lane

so whoever wants to can stare into a pothole

until coming up with a grievance. I’d vote

the greatest accomplishment of mankind

is the pickle spear. God created paradise

to tell us Get out! which is why we probably

created God who doesn’t much like being created

by ilk like us. No wonder it’s pediatrics

every morning and toxicology by happy hour.

Is it all in the mind, the dirty, dirty mind?

Maybe God tried to turn you into a garbage can

so you could be lifted by the truck’s hydraulic

arms and banged empty. Maybe a snow cone

so you could be sticky-sweet and dropped.

Maybe a genital-faced bivalve to be dashed

with Tabasco and eaten whole or, to his glory,

produce a pearl.

--Dean Young

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Jet

Sometimes I wish I were still out  on the back porch, drinking jet fuel  with the boys, getting louder and louder  as the empty cans drop out of our paws  like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars.  Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,  bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish  and old space suits with skeletons inside.  On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life  out of the box, uncapping the bottle  to let the effervescence gush  through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances  in unison, and then the fireflies flash  dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation  for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex  someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night  as if remembering the bright unbroken planet  we once came from,  to which we will never  be permitted to return.  We are amazed how hurt we are.  We would give anything for what we have.  --Tony Hoagland 

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[bringaroundthepoesy]

Novelette

With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird

watched my grandfather during the Great Depression

use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields

knowing this world is just one pig after another

in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose,

shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope

terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup

of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer-

blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking

and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly

until he died more naturally of cancer

too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters,

masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers

the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls

is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction

so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy

his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus,

the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird

is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart,

I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.

--Adrian Blevins

[bringaroundthepoesy]

Winged Purposes

Fly from me does all I would have stay, the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped, every contract void, and flying in the crows lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep into afternoon and still wake soaring. So out come the bats, down spiral swifts into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream- figments then are gone like breath-prints on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever I hold however flies apart, the children skip into the park come out middle-aged with children of their own. Your laugh over the phone, will it ever answer me again? Too much flying, photons perforating us, voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter. Remember running barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s hovering, remember my hand as we darted against the holiday Broadway throng, catching your train just as it was leaving? Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet, horses coming from the field for morning oats, insects hitting a screen, the message nearly impossible to read, obscured by light because carried by Mercury: I love you, I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone, maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under- feather only then that too, yes, rained away. And when the flying is flown and the heart’s a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust- stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us, still some fledgling pledge?

--Dean Young

[bringaroundthepoesy]

  From “Ceiling Unlimited Series”

(ceiling unlimited)

God of seedpods, we are wallowing in it.  The hay has been gathered into gold rolls  in the field. Why the calves in concentric circles?  Why every other picket in the fence pulled out  to be sold at the store? Yes the papery poppies  are a bit like the dry side of a foot & hence  the unnecessary massacre, but that’s no reason  to condemn the pelicans or throw out the wedding cakes  when they turn grey. You said when a semi spills  its cargo of oranges the driver has a choice:  flamingo on the salt flats or canary in the mines.  I want the former. I’ve waited years for the xerox flash & still no inkling. Lately I’ve been thinking you  love the groves & don’t know how to tell us.  I think you made the steps slick for a reason.

(almost anything)

Dear dust-ghost, the instructions don’t make  sense unless I sing them. If the bottom-most hem  is six feet from the ground, how do I get into this dress?  Bird ode: Dark triangle feet in a wind-field. Fifth museum poem: O swim on through.  Handsome & Then Some: Hello. Please help.  Or if pretending isn’t the way, tell me that  the pony’s bones are still too soft to hold me up & take away my paper lantern. Like most  cadenzas I need something to come back to.  I push the rubble out of the second-storey window.  I put the money in an envelope & it’s sucked up  a transparent tube. Only the rusted bits of roof  stand out against the sky. Yellow water  in the gutters—always the fault falls somewhere.

(silver print)

The lock sticks again. I can make a self- portrait out of anything. My silhouette  in the window is all elbows. Blossom to stem —  the rust roses on the pipes are blooming  backwards. The head pushes its way out,  learns how to waver later. Upside-down in the spoon, I think I am getting closer — second-hand skimming time, blue windows everywhere, sharp smell of keys in the air.  Where are you inevitable slap? I have propped  the storm windows against the side of the house for you: twenty paintings of the sky & five grills heaped with charcoal so the air above them  shimmers, shatters. Tell me I’m not just forging  a copy, tell me you’re more than the moon.

Poem by Matthea Harvey. Originally published in “Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.”

[bringaroundthepoesy]

  BAKED ALASKA, A THEORY OF

The moat simmers at 210°. From his tower the king watches, pleased, as a swallow tries to land on the water, squawks & flies off. He believes in setting a good example. O the flesh is hot but the heart is cold, you’ll be alone when you are old, his favorite country song—on repeat—is being piped through the palace. Downstairs in the dining room, the princesses gaze out the window at a flock of pigeons turning pink then black as they fly in & out of the sunset. The princesses put down their spoons & sigh. Baked Alaska for dessert again. The flambée lights up their downcast faces. In the fireplace, dry ice sizzles didactically. When dinner is over, they return to their wing of the palace, The Right Ventricle. On a good day, they can play Hearts for a few hours before they hear the king’s dactyllic footsteps (dámn the queen, dámn the queen) coming down the aorta & have to hide the cards. They aren’t allowed to adore him, so they don’t, just allow his inspections—checking their eyes for stars, their journals for heated confessions. Because he is a literal man, he never finds anything. But that night, when he’s gone, the princesses tiptoe down to the palace freezer. Sticking their fingers in sockets is no longer enough. Amongst the frozen slabs of beef, they sit in a circle on blocks of ice & watch the red fade from their lips and fingers, the frost on the floor creep up the heels of their shoes. Finally when the skin is numb, the heat starts retreating into their hearts & they can feel it—love, love, love. 

Matthea Harvey

[bringaroundthepoesy]

THE CROWDS CHEERED AS GLOOM GALLOPED AWAY

Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later. The girl who thought of the ponies made a lot of money. Now a month’s supply of pills came in a hard blue case with a handle. You opened it & found the usual vial plus six tiny ponies of assorted shapes & sizes, softly breathing in the styrofoam. Often they had to be pried out & would wobble a little when first put on the ground. In the beginning the children tried to play with them, but the sharp hooves nicked their fingers & the ponies refused to jump over pencil hurdles. The children stopped feeding them sugarwater & the ponies were left to break their legs on the gardens’ gravel paths or drown in the gutters. On the first day of the month, rats gathered on doorsteps & spat out only the bitter manes. Many a pony’s last sight was a bounding squirrel with its tail hovering over its head like a halo. Behind the movie theatre the hardier ponies gathered in packs amongst the cigarette butts, getting their hooves stuck in wads of gum. They lined the hills at funerals, huddled under folding chairs at weddings. It became a matter of pride if one of your ponies proved unusually sturdy. People would smile & say, “this would have been an awful month for me,” pointing to the glossy palimino trotting energetically around their ankles. Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away. & when they wanted something more tangible, they could always go to the racetrack & study the larger horses’ faces. Gloom, #341, with those big black eyes, was almost sure to win.

Matthea Harvey

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Hospital

 While the machine sucks the black suds from my mother’s blood and then sends it back stinking clean into the pistol-tube nailed down into her chest, I climb out of my shoes and slip a cotton swab of water between her teeth, her dentures sliding off the back porch of her mouth. Nobody knows, never knows, how she has to pee, wrapped in a diaper. But can’t. The yellow eggs she ate one hour ago already the shit in her bowels. And lonely, head-hanging-from-the-balcony-of-her-body lonely, darkest-passage-from-the-hairless-vagina lonely. But brave. But lonely. Because I did not stay all night. Because I won’t. Because I’m going to pull out the one bone that hurts her the most and break the back of every word I ever said to her. The world is evil, Mother, and I am, too.

Jason Shinder

[bringaroundthepoesy]

Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

--Pablo Neruda

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How to Meditate

                      -lights out- fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine, the gland inside of my brain discharging the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as i hap-down and hold all my body parts down to a deadstop trance-Healing all my sicknesses-erasing all-not even the shred of a "I-hope-you" or a Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought comes a-springing from afar with its held- forth figure of image, you spoof it out, you spuff it off, you fake it, and it fades, and thought never comes-and with joy you realize for the first time "thinking's just like not thinking- So I don't have to think     any       more"

Jack Kerouac

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Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning Moon

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon, dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light, what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars? What primal night does Man touch with his senses? Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars, through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain: Love is a war of lightning, and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness. Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity, your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages, and a genital fire, transformed by delight, slips through the narrow channels of blood to precipitate a nocturnal carnation, to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

Pablo Neruda

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This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had   And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn   By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern   And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin