Poemunity — your poem community

Que será,el café of this holy, incorporated place, the wild steam of scorched espresso cakes rising like mirages from the aromatic waste, waving over the coffee-glossed lips of these faces assembled for a standing breakfast of nostalgia, of tastes that swirl with the delicacy of memories in these forty-cent cups of brown sugar histories, in the swirling froth of café-con-leche,que será, what have they seen that they cannot forget— the broad-leaf waves of tabaco and plantains the clay dust of red and nameless mountains, que será, that this morning I too am a speck; I am the brilliant guitar of a tropical morning speaking Spanish and ribboning through potions of waist-high steam and green cane oceans, que será, drums vanishing and returning, the African gods that rule a rhythmic land playing their music:bongó,bembé,conga; que será, that cast the spells of this rumba, this wild birthright, this tropical dance with the palms of this exotic confusion; que será, that I too should be a question, que será, what have I seen, what do I know— culture of café and loss, this place I call home.

after Laura Riding Jackson There's a structure for idiocy—lamplight— all over the nation; it's an illumination with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius. I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways—their lightbulbs— as righteous forms of complexity; not calculated obfuscations. Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing the most important seer of light. Am I providing this luxury as well? Or is this my radical assertion in order to call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like? (That's my problem with the poem these days.) (The light in my office flickers on and off—the lamp is broken.) I see no enlightenment here, much like I see my acquaintances: bright lights and night lights. The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's: It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.

my puppet-strings are the sweet decaying lamps I flutter round. I am as immense as a black kid with a spinning top. drowned tripper fat crawls into hollow cuffs to be sewn up like hot cats cracked soft caryatids in tails. I'll force you all to your knees your dirty muzzles will squawk out of your faces. and I will continue to climb I'll spread my thin arms along the queer walls till they bleed. I'll reach into threadbare velvet so that you bash yourselves like poor moths on corners of night. the reason I'm here is to scratch all the white bellies squatting down there. your stupid silence I will  just toss up in the air. I am as sky high as all your staring regards laid end to end on the ground somewhere lies my broken smile.

“Man wants but little here below” Little I ask; my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone, (A very plain brown stone will do,) That I may call my own;— And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that fronts the sun. Plain food is quite enough for me; Three courses are as good as ten;— If Nature can subsist on three, Thank Heaven for three. Amen! I always thought cold victual nice;— My choice would be vanilla-ice. I care not much for gold or land;— Give me a mortgage here and there,— Some good bank-stock, some note of hand, Or trifling railroad share,— I only ask that Fortune send A little more than I shall spend. Honors are silly toys, I know, And titles are but empty names; I would,perhaps, be Plenipo,— But only near St. James; I’m very sure I should not care To fill our Gubernator’s chair. Jewels are baubles; ’t is a sin To care for such unfruitful things;— One good-sized diamond in a pin,— Some,not so large, in rings,— A ruby, and a pearl, or so, Will do for me;—I laugh at show. My dame should dress in cheap attire; (Good, heavy silks are never dear;)— I own perhaps I might desire Some shawls of true Cashmere,— Some marrowy crapes of China silk, Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk. I would not have the horse I drive So fast that folks must stop and stare; An easy gait—two forty-five— Suits me; I do not care;— Perhaps, for just a single spurt, Some seconds less would do no hurt. Of pictures, I should like to own Titians and Raphaels three or four,— I love so much their style and tone, One Turner, and no more, (A landscape,—foreground golden dirt,— The sunshine painted with a squirt.) Of books but few,—some fifty score For daily use, and bound for wear; The rest upon an upper floor;— Some little luxury there Of red morocco’s gilded gleam And vellum rich as country cream. Busts, cameos, gems,—such things as these, Which others often show for pride, I value for their power to please, And selfish churls deride;— One Stradivarius, I confess, Two Meerschaums, I would fain possess. Wealth’s wasteful tricks I will not learn, Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;— Shall not carved tables serve my turn, But all must be of buhl? Give grasping pomp its double share,— I ask but one recumbent chair. Thus humble let me live and die, Nor long for Midas’ golden touch; If Heaven more generous gifts deny, I shall not miss them much,— Too grateful for the blessing lent Of simple tastes and mind content!

The jungle, from the floor to the canopy, Clogs and entwines Its every rung and level with rank growth. The python dines Among an epiphytic gaudery And hungry vines. On the mizzled hair of the two-toed sloth Moss has designs. Yet all that climbing tonnage is content-free. The top limbs sway as though to write in air, But can’t remember what they scribble there. Through the savanna’s heat-glaze the herds pause, Ripple and shiver, Or graze hypnotically, or drop their young, Which may deliver Their wet thin steps into the lion’s jaws. By pool or river They stoop at evening side by side among The surface quiver Of their reflexions as the light withdraws: A fable set down in invisible ink; They print their shadows on the pool they drink. Even the perfect pictures in the shale’s Slow-motion traps, The filamentous feathers, which one or two Sharp hammer taps Release, the fish in their meticulous scales, The precise maps Of leaves, did not direct this rendezvous. They’re simply gaps In time, and have no part in these details. The weird wiwaxias, worms and arthropods Were empty of intention as stone gods. Once, though, a figure had the thought to crawl Out of the day Into a cave’s dark reach, its first invoker, And there to splay His hand against the tallow-glimmered wall, And pause to spray His mouth’s cargo of spittle and red ochre On the array Of his five fingers, clear, indelible: Author and content of the space displayed, The maker’s hand becoming what it made.

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss? —this melt, the sign assures us,natural cycle and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would —poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions: the smell of a bare neck in summer a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks —that was all and yes, someone took me in his car.   and another against the low fence in the park at the end of our block.   under the willow branches where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing: a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us. you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song —for Haines Eason

When you come, bring your brown- ness so we can be sure to please the funders. Will you check this box; we’re applying for a grant. Do you have any poems that speak to troubled teens? Bilingual is best. Would you like to come to dinner with the patrons and sip Patrón? Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit? Don’t read the one where you are just like us. Born to a green house, garden, don’t tell us how you picked tomatoes and ate them in the dirt watching vultures pick apart another bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one about your father stealing hubcaps after a colleague said that’s what his kind did. Tell us how he came to the meeting wearing a poncho and tried to sell the man his hubcaps back. Don’t mention your father was a teacher, spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball, tell us again about the poncho, the hubcaps, how he stole them, how he did the thing he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies, mutates into false memories Which find language a receptive host, Boosted by boastful embellishments. Self-esteem is raised on wobbly beams, seeming seen as stuff enough To fund the hedge of personality, Though personally, I cannot forget Whom I have met and somehow wronged, wrung for a jot of fugitive juice, Trading some ruse for a blot or two, Labored to braid from transparent diction Fiction, quick fix, quixotic fixation. As the pulse of impulses Drained through my veins, I tried to live Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty.

On the volatile nights of a winter nature corroborates with magnanimity a Cuban is in training for amusement or amnesia, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he brings candy to God, he cultivates the vernacular, he fights off cirrhosis with fruit poached in syrup, he conducts business; thus research has shown that The Cuban is resourceful. In the weighty choreographies of a summer nature authorizes already with suspicion a Cuban meets the ocean with offerings and harpoons, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he finger-counts the casualties, he commits an infraction he slides his hands into his pockets, he avows and commits; thus analysis has shown that The Cuban is inspired. Let’s attend the improbable territory where with pasty mouths a Cuban and The Cuban engage in virile conversation we will learn there by what voyage, by what strange condition by what exchange we fall prey to so much ingenuity.

We are learning to control our thoughts, to set obtrusive thoughts aside. It takes an American to do really big things. Often I have no thoughts to push against. It's lonely in a song about outer space. When I don't have any thoughts, I want one! A close-up reveals that she has chosen a plastic soap dish in the shape of a giant sea turtle. Can a thought truly be mine if I am not currently thinking it? There are two sides to any argument; one arm in each sleeve. • Maybe I am always meditating, if by that you mean searching for a perfect stranger.