Poemunity — your poem community

First sew yourself into a pom pom mushroom Strut across the thirstland past faerie lights Shout complaints inside volcanic mancaves Scout for the last unlocated spring of ylem Then plait a cottage out of kestrel fluff Stir potato eyes into a vat of dislocated feelings Write a luculent novel five winters long Till dismay ferments enough nuclear energy to power Your moon buggy beyond the nacaret fields Stopping only to gather the pollen of the Umbiferous True Then plunge over cliffs sporting moth wings Dropping to the bottommost of the besprinkled sea And make your way up through the rain shadow On two cat feet in hostile territory All the while you compose a callithumpian song To nail a ritual within the astrobleme So bend dragons and constellate your enemies Fox on your shoulder spend a month sun-grazing A hundred hawks exploding before your stride Which will bring you luck on this godawful day You must make a new life by yourself like all Lurching tellurians stuck in eviternity

It's hard to be humble when you're 235 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal with a body women love and men fear. —Sputnik Monroe When my father died, he left me a trove of video tapes, a warped memorial for those men he watched with my mother before she left for parts unknown, for those fights he relived once he was laid off from the plane yards. We watched men like Sputnik Monroe bleed the hard way, shook our fists as he broke rules against guys who were easier to cheer. He was a bad Elvis, greased-back hair with a shock of white, Sputnik Monroe mixed it up everywhere, a rodeo fistfight, a henhouse tornado. My mother picked a fight in an Idaho truck stop once, stabbed a man’s chest with her middle finger, then stepped to one side so my father could fight him in the parking lot. Afterwards, my mother was silent all the way back to Seattle, her disgust with him—the way he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, guided her to the car, and sped back to the freeway—hanging between them from that point forward. Sputnik Monroe clobbered men wherever he went, sneered at those fists raised against him in Memphis. Some nights, as my wife sleeps upstairs, I watch my father’s video tapes and imagine what I would have done that day if I knew that my marriage depended on what I did with my hands.

I took back the night. Wrested it from the Chinese, many of  whom were shorter than me. Two billion outstretched Chinese hands, give or take a few thousand amputees. A cheap knockoff, the night proved to be —Nokla not Nokia on the touchscreen. Well, even Old Peng gotta eat, Confucius say. Or maybe that was Cassius Clay. In me, folks, a movable object meets a resistible force. I haven’t worked a day since the accident of   birth. Born of  woman, my father the same. Make love then war. I’ll bring round the car. These children that I spit on are immune to my consultations. I’ll have none myself. It isn’t (Write it!) a fiasco. I am small, I contain platitudes.

For Christ’s sake, learn to type and have something to fall back on. Be someone, make something of yourself, look at Gertrudo Ganley. Always draw the curtains when the lights are on. Have nothing to do with the Shantalla gang, get yourself a right man with a Humber Sceptre. For Christ’s sake wash your neck before going into God’s house. Learn to speak properly, always pronounce your ings. Never smoke on the street, don’t be caught dead in them shameful tight slacks, spare the butter, economise, and for Christ’s sake at all times, watch your language.

Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream That over Persian roses flew to kiss The curlèd lashes of Semiramis. Troy never was, nor green Skamander stream. Provence and Troubadour are merest lies The glorious hair of Venice was a beam Made within Titian’s eye. The sunsets seem, The world is very old and nothing is. Be still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake, Nor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart, But patter in the darkness of thy heart. Thy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl Blind with the light of life thou ’ldst not forsake, And Error loves and nourishes thy soul.

for Colleen The cliff above where we stand is crumbling and up on the Palisades the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt. Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts in perfect unison against a backdrop of gorgeous blue, and for you I would try it, though I have always forbidden myself to write poems about the beach at sunset. All the clichés for it sputter like the first generation of neon, and what attracts me anyway are these four species of gulls we’ve identified, their bodies turned into the wind, and not one of them aware of their silly beauty. I’m the one awash in pastels and hoping to salvage the day, finally turning away from the last light on the western shore and the steady whoosh of waves driving in, drumming insistently like the undeniable data of the cancer in your breast. We walk back to the car and take the top down for the ride home through the early mist. No matter what else is happening, this is California. You’ll have your cancer at freeway speeds. I’ll drive and park and drive at park. The hospital when I arrive to visit will be catching the last rays of the sun, glinting like an architectural miracle realized. I realize a miracle is what you need— a grain of sand, a perfect world where you live beyond the facts of what your body has given you as the first taste of death.

The day the fat woman In the bright blue bathing suit Walked into the water and died, I thought about the human Condition. Pieces of old fruit Came in and were left by the tide. What I thought about the human Condition was this: old fruit Comes in and is left, and dries In the sun. Another fat woman In a dull green bathing suit Dives into the water and dies. The pulmotors glisten. It is noon. We dry and die in the sun While the seascape arranges old fruit, Coming in and the tide, glistening At noon. A woman, moderately stout, In a nondescript bathing suit, Swims to a pier. A tall woman Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.

On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o’er the channel reared, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails, I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretched forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. Imperial lord of the high southern coast! From thy projecting head-land I would mark Far in the east the shades of night disperse, Melting and thinned, as from the dark blue wave Emerging, brilliant rays of arrowy light Dart from the horizon; when the glorious sun Just lifts above it his resplendent orb. Advances now, with feathery silver touched, The rippling tide of flood; glisten the sands, While, inmates of the chalky clefts that scar Thy sides precipitous, with shrill harsh cry, Their white wings glancing in the level beam, The terns, and gulls, and tarrocks, seek their food, And thy rough hollows echo to the voice Of the gray choughs, and ever restless daws, With clamor, not unlike the chiding hounds, While the lone shepherd, and his baying dog, Drive to thy turfy crest his bleating flock. The high meridian of the day is past, And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven, Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low The tide of ebb, upon the level sands. The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still, Catches the light and variable airs That but a little crisp the summer sea, Dimpling its tranquil surface.

If   love is like a doll’s shoe — the color of nascent snow that laces over the ankle or the polychromatic beaded baby moccasins we saw lying in the museum drawer that belonged to an infant from a sea tribe of seal hunters. Or the rutilant pink blossoms of the locust tree that bloomed in the dark while I slept dreaming of my arrival on a red-eye wearing a long to the floor skirt — not of a postulant, but of a flower vendor or a woman covering disfigurement. Freud believed that religious faith is a wish-fulfilling illusion. I can’t locate faith in a carved or uncarved pew. I’m more focused on the altar boy’s shoes. Under his white robe he’s wearing a man’s black loafers vastly oversized for his small feet with sufficient spare space for a coyote den in each toe. I want to buy him a kite. If   love is a mezzanine floor we will not fall from, a hand holding back my hair from my face as I’m sick on the side of the bus. The mouth so at home in the vicinity of pavement. Pew also means to enclose, as in men who were as willingly pewed in the parish church

She looks for wiggly fishes, At least so it appears, To stuff inside the suitcase That's swinging from her ears. And though she's very graceful When flying round and round, How does she get that faceful Of luggage off the ground?