Into The Headland @intotheheadland - Tumblr Blog

Thirty

Pitching the final inning with any arm at all

Land like a clayform and the creationists selling children the story of dinosaurs on a boat in a flood right next to the imprints of their feet in 140 million year old mud

The measurement of the obelisk that cratered here might match

One step toward home and the lantern cracked and seeping gas as the birds go quiet underground

They pulled the head out first the hands out after the tie, the body whole after the pressed rock could be burned

Whoever counted the pitches from up there - one loud squeak against the sun and I am not living without you the rest of the galaxy seemed to whisper

The gods in their planet homes, the writer’s we’ve admired turning their bones into whatever might press

And there were more jokes to not understand, more cigarettes to stare at glowing in the dark, more red stone quarried

The quartet began to singe, being fair skinned, in the bright day

The drunks began to wind their tongues round the notes of their bottles

The bodies of the largest dinosaurs floated away from the flowing water’s edge and deposited in the deeper silt there

Apparently the boat apparently the story the creationist kids read apparently the god folded into the man’s round head was one that left most everything to die and we take after that

One last armless swing and the air goes quiet as the ball hits the mit and the game is called some sequence of events that will be forgotten and the memory of humankind will raise its dollar bill to useless paper lanterns glowing against another planets hands and lamp skating

The robot on television told an anecdote about pachyderms that grew up in the circus

One memory gets planted and the stake keeps the being edged by chain to the place the stake meets the ground

We can believe such wonderful things about the work this world has done without us

#napowrimo

twentynine

encountering a series of phrases in succession

the potato plants are continually plants

i touched the feather like it was a country or a cousin who i hadn’t known before

this is sembling real, bringing a realness that only celebrities on twitter can afford

one too many hoopla is not enough to fill the spaces that remain empty in the buildings being constructed in the center city area

how to remain complacent in this hurried century is hard, the geezers seem to be saying with their extended government support

in order to harvest the baby potatoes the flowers have to quit as a sign

we stick our heads out the window, the weather returns our heads to us, this is a privilege we say we’re not aware of

i touched the faceless name of my fear like it was a rung on a ladder

the hazards of being were so dizzy turning

what do we do with our sand, our sadness, the sacks of it showering us

how to be safe in conversation

the storage of potatoes does not depend on how deep you dig your root cellar, or so the bugs suggest

you have to hug the water right out, here

this might be the second to last thing this house has to say.

#napowrimo

Twenty Eight

something lost is bested, beset

fold the world in fabric and take the joke hat off hardy har har

things are owed to others like the one about the gun in the barroom, entering and then asking what its job is

I am certain the trigger is a warning itself, but the sound after is not

a hole filled with the motion after words

glass to put the protracted nature in, shatter the notion and we were able to see the galaxy from the blown circle, like our scale is one where we can order a new planet from, stock line and sink

if I was billing the pastoral, high fire for how to place its dirt in the dumpster, a house made from shipping containers the corrugation mentioned and made forest

i stand next to my shadow for a while and then let it alone

the swell of the story becomes an arc and then the belly of it blows out - no one notice can convince the ants in the photo where they’re covered in corn syrup

we walk through the pixelated animals and touch the real live plants

I forgot to hit send last night so this is here now.

#napowrimo

Twenty seven

Game the system and ask for it’s keys to change

No one I’ve encountered can sing anyway or they’re birds out all night partying with the neon glow of the afterlife they’ve shuttled from to get here

Purgatory is a placemat and the diner patrons wagering their paychecks toward a worsening situation with elected officials

I’m not confused by the light pattern, it’s green and then green and then there’s no more power

This electrical system and it’s noises the geese keep on about - they’ll hiss if. You ask them nicely

No point in trying or not trying or lampooning the ones who try or don’t try - it’s only shifts in what matter

Dark and repeating

One seat at the counter will squeak whenever it spins but you shift your weight and wake up like your life depends on a series of consequences that others have decided decades before you were a thin mint swimming in the trash heap of a movie goers memories

I can’t communicate this enough - bales of hay and the corn fields blathering on

A thousand light jackets barely keeping the bodies tepid. The planes lined up and pacing

One vista can change the car names of history

I know you know I know but so what the population counter rests - dumb numbers meaning what they add up to - waves through time and settling bets

#napowrimo catchuping

twenty five and a half

the enemies of my enemies are me

set the days, say them - you’ve been bought before. Just think of all the work.

No one is going to make that hole any bigger just by staring at it. There are people who crawled into the earth before the light began and crawled out after it ran away over the hills and they’re still doing it.

Set the movie to replay our lives before us after we’re alive again. Before we’ve begun to cry for milk and the magnesium we never had enough of in this life. Who knows what minerals do to their friends.

I watch the television show that my parents told me they used to love and find it somewhat endearing because they used to love it. I don’t know its name. I made this up.

You can conjure any set of believable actions from a character who you will never meet in a story, but in a poem this will always be a stand in for some version of a self that you can’t likely know. That’s why fiction sells. It takes the people and gives them more.

We all want more, unless we don’t and then we all want less because it seems neat to not be cluttered. You should see my desk, it’s an immaculate disaster.

The enemies I’ve turned from, their backs like kite strings and scissors jutting out, their faces things I’d easily jam full of pencils, their pubic hair trimmed and shaped into a hammer or topiary

If you take an image to it’s home it will let you ask it more questions. The sound of this does not disturb the context or contest it’s been entered in, it makes our hands shape the dirt, makes them shake.

One country is bigger than the others on the television show my parents began to love but didn’t continue watching because the kids wouldn’t not get it, but they might get it too good.

It’s easy to remain in the dark when people tell you things that aren’t.

#napowrimo

twenty five

the tag on the skin, the bailing wire sketch of a person

holding hands with a train whistle, the notion of some type of mid day rust - smell of a storm from far off

if this were a warning bell it would be tongue dumb and calling

the big boss sets the list of forgotten to-dids, the little boss takes a cue from inside the lake house. Drip water over the beams, burn out the wall heaters, kneel down with the pink insulation and the angelform of your body will coat in itch after you stand. Pine in the lungs, lips salted.

directives suggest that there is some cross borne of a past, the waiting to speak for so long it turns towers of sleep back into their babble. I wave at the strangers who’ve come to tell me new technology will grant them better wishes than the ones listed on the brochure.

I get the later model edition. Forms to populate like cities with signage. If unoccupied for too long, the shop will become one filled with half spilled bottles. Who knows what of.

detectives corner the flosslike tilt of my head. A bear that I’ve known since I was born with its stuffing reinserted and its eyes bald glass reflects back from the windowpane. There is something cool to be touched, to meet the heat of a hand. What’s outside is always just a shout away.

#napowrimo

twenty four on twenty five

it was 1918 and now it’s now

a world busy eating itself - not the world, so much as

there’s a longer researched comparison to make

through time and angles of light

from saturn’s rings, the cassini probe shows how bright this mirror for the sun is

not a trace of us on it from there - just a dot in the distance

time is a ___________ (insert comparison in voice over)

the days in this month keep approaching

#napowrimo

twenty three

you put on your favorite hangup mask and then pick up the phone

it’s still connected to a wire and to the wall

you put on your least numbered shirt and play the game where the wall is your face and you draw in its eyes, they mirror you and dig back bad

it’s an hour where the clock looks funny but nobody’s laughing

you tell the dead lamp to glow, you shake it and your hand gets bright

there’s snow outside then there’s the quiet that makes the cars go numb

you put your favorite handkerchief over the top of the tea cup and let the jewelry flop in there

fish make kissing sounds on the glass and you can feel them breathing

you take the knife out of the drawer and put it in your purse and then forget your purse at the doorstop

no one counts to ten better, no one

tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags - two more or whatever

you stare at the glass and stare at the glass and know its bending into you further but there’s nothing to show for it

the ghost is afraid its going to come back

you don’t bother to whisper up the stairs, your hair crawls down your shoulders like a fountain and the mystery of whatever wishes were tossed into its dark grasp

coins for eyes, for the sum of the ships found again, foes in their little windows, rowing

you open the door to fin, to the end

#napowrimo

twenty two on twenty three

typing these numbers makes me think of baseball

two lies and a truth

the weather patterning its way across our dumb nation, cursing as it goes

when the light comes back from the streetlamps on the moving water beneath, it builds a bridge out of the dark there

Prince and Bowie are still dead and their sounds mark us

I don’t know anything and yet pretend

Hands like two spenders, the insects barely hiding beneath their skin

tomorrow will be for listening, and the day beyond that which is also just another window into now

time doesn’t make itself, you know

today i got an email from richard buckner about a book i’d sent him a while ago

the plants are covered in plastic and we hope for them to grow so we can eat them

so much for benevolence

the water is wearing a diamond shaped light hat that stretches toward us

we’ll be running the bases in no time

#napowrimo

twenty one on twenty one

the correct form i have found for pretending to be

if we listen to an adult who claims to be christopher robin

the neverlanding a boat does when it’s sunk

fish eye, scooter trailing the drinks, a peel out in the parking lot, feeling like nothing could be harm

and this is privilege - the space to lay still, a saturday without a pocket full of hours named “do this now” no, “do this yesterday”

the donkey with its fall-off tail, purple as the gloaming and some semblance of the friends you knew who grew out of their stuffing and into better cars and home ownership

tomorrow is supposed to be a day of bright cheer - the boy inside of christopher robin’s cold eyes wants to simply hold the animals he knew again

instead there’s all this traffic and a newsperson spouting rhetoric from a national leader who’s more faberge egg than human and the geese suspicious, eyeing him from above their lot

#napowrimo

twenty on twenty one

count the cards - you see everything i’m seeing is on the table

or it’s come from a series of numbers scrolling out in front of us without us realizing we’re just the same

i’ll take another sip, another hit, this corrugated lake, the lips of a cat, peeling back in a yawn, the dirt in the drive train, the snooze button always a tempt

what doesn’t go bust if you cap it full of iron? the blood baby, the bear in the cup dancing like it was trained in Russia to lie and take photos of foreigners, to sell them back their experiences

the ones and zeros don’t add up to this - when we’re asked to “Show em” no one bothers to turn over their papers. they just stand up, turn around, walk away, sit down, start again.

ready players, beg for your acrimony, buy your way back in

#napowrimo

nineteenth - one day behind

mime the movement of a calendar, one day previous is today now and gone

I sweat right through the rings in the tree, the voices form inside

they are cyclic and hardly change, five years in, one hundred, the starting measure, a block to curl against and call yourself asleep

if a bed always, if a fern the spray of firs above it, and this from inside the house where the call is coming out - is berating the walls

i sweat right into the cup, my voice a catch, the lost frequency bailing

a friend releases an album, a friend posts the picture of a child, a friend does not say anything and this might be the best gift since quiet is what you’re clutching

one line measures the break between water and air, not crying but maybe

#napowrimo

Eighteenth

To pose a question you just have to set it up with the right kind of jauntiness and nonchalance that a model would have

Something that says I’ll take all the saltines you got with this soup and try to save room for some three day old pie

Is probably a grandparent but it could also be the roundabout you know from Jersey trying to pass itself off as a diner customer

People don’t really say the life is like a box of needles unless they’re familiar with that movie or obsessed with pine trees or the opioid epidemic

I don’t want to hand over anything that is over my hands already, pickleback - the nickleback coverband who only play in brine wearing pickle suits - I wouldn’t pay for that either

Someone gave me the tickets. It’s hard to say no sometimes.

#napowrimo

seventeeth

to the tooth - you press past the water heat, the while eater

cord in showerpull, string the words like a necklace, a toothbearer

all things in threes - burdenplate, asterflower, wheeldissent - the bail bond polished

when you come free the mouth, from it until the silence after

Place the string around the childbone, the x-ray showing beds on beds

One end around the doorknob, tight and shut the thing - one quick snap

chip in place, underbite, string of blood after the pull

what you gum can become a solid again drafting though a body

holes in the back, the drug-like sleep after the sutures are resealed

one pull on the straw - the copper flavor floats tongueback and then taking the socket

when opening in front of strangers you can tell the work that’s been done, they open before you - it’s hard to see into the holes

what doesn’t stick, the film, the morning crust, you can be identified

eye teeth, dart soothing, the past now edged by a parent visiting to place cash beneath a pillow

what the coins softness suggests, when you break off the bottle top, crooked right into the edge of the cap

pile of bone left after, pile of cream colored smile

#napowrimo #toothlikegodshoes #thatsnotathing

sixteen

cut like a lock, you wake up shaking there are so many things to compare

one suit of the wrong color in the cards could signal a neurological disaster

and the nearness or distortion of the root word for star does not compute in the flickered dark

it’s the day we want to skip flagrant foul of the light

and what to wink past - to shake off or resituate on any calendar - a piece of meat in your pocket

at the dog park may make you popular among the unwon friends who gather there

count my face in the hound i can’t help but observe what’s before me

point with my whole body and shout it out like a child who just gained a word

and is trying not to lose it

#napowrimo #tryingto

fifteen and a halfway

the sharks gathered together for tax day, basking as they say, in it.

my foreign accent is getting more american

and the drainage basin of every river warped through time and rerouting can be present in the notated electrical output of a tesla coil

you can learn this the hard way or seated with the ones you love on backless bleachers

I take things from my life like its a kind of theft here

when watching a friend introduce the lightning or change their course in order to photograph the left buildings between wherever they are and where they are going

There are dozens of the same story being written right now by people in hollywood who look better than us.

it’s the light there, maybe, or the proximity

i bask in the gathering waters like my life isn’t a thing to steal from

Fourteen

I’m supposed

To know

How to

Say things

By now

But barely

Can get

Anything out

This mystery

Good game

Another counter

Slip entry

When time

To pay

It’s time

I know

My hands

The glass

They burn

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