Poemunity — your poem community

A new obsession. How to get out of cold, metallic waters alive. Every night for a week I dream of my car ending up in a body of water. If I’m not driving, someone else is. Bob, the neighbor. My new paranoia. I Google how to escape a car filling with water. I watch videos on YouTube. I memorize the steps of what to do if this happens. First, you take your seat belt off. Late at night, I read pages and pages on the internet. What if the car lands in the water flipped over? Remember to stay calm. If you panic, you will die. News story about a woman who drives her minivan into the ocean on purpose. Horrified beachgoers run toward the water. The two kids are strapped in the back seat. One of the kids is screaming “No, mommy” — What about the sunroof? What if you land in the water and your car has a sunroof? My new car has a sunroof. You have to let the car fill with water so that pressure is equalized on both sides. This is elementary physics. If you don’t do this, it’s impossible to open the doors. This is the scary part. You have to hold your breath. None of the YouTube videos say anything about what to do if you have kids strapped in car seats in the car. I look up what the dreams mean. Water in dreams signifies turbulent emotions. If you are in your car and there is a flash flood, you should get out immediately. Even six inches of water can sweep your car away. Sweep it to where? Maybe the forest? I get nervous driving by the Gulf of Mexico. My friend Dyan got into an accident there and she said that if the car had flipped on the other side of the road, her whole family would have ended up in the water. I don’t like water. I don’t want to touch it. It scares me. I know all life was born of water. Today the government proposed to sell off all public lands. That before anything existed there were rocks and then water. I know that water is beautiful and mysterious. But why does it sweep people away? I want to push down the rising seas. I look at a map of cities that will be underwater by 2100, 2200 — Jacksonville, New Orleans, Amsterdam. I want to push them down with my bare hands.

The recital of the new optimism was oft interrupted, rudeness in the ramparts, an injured raven that needed attendance, pre-op nudity. The young who knew everything was new made babies who unforeseeably would one day present their complaint. Enough blame to go around but the new optimism didn’t stop, helped one pick up a brush, another a spatula even as the last polar bear sat on his shrinking berg thinking, I have been vicious but my soul is pure. And the new optimism loves the bear’s soul and makes images of it to sell at fair-trade craft fairs with laboriously knotted hunks of rope, photos of cheese, soaps with odd ingredients, whiskey, sand, hamburger drippings, lint, any and everything partaking of the glowing exfoliating cleanup. And the seal is sponged of oil spill. And the broken man is wheeled in a meal. War finally seems stupid enough. You look an animal in the eye before eating it and the gloomy weather makes the lilacs grow. Hello, oceans of air. Your dead cat loves you forever and will welcome you forever home.

to Michael Lally You had your own reasons for getting In your own way. You didn’t want to be Clear to yourself. You knew a hell Of a lot more than you were willing to let yourself know. I felt Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right. Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity) A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode Island New Englander is able to manage. You Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not Naïve, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too. Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we. He was himself & I was me. And when we came together Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me In what I say? Because as well I see you know In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do You, “in the right way”. That’s just talk, not Logos, a getting down to cases: I take it as simple particulars that we wear our feelings on our faces.

Last night I invented a new pleasure, and as I was giving it the first trial an angel and a devil came rushing toward my house.  They met at my door and fought with each other over my newly created pleasure; the one crying, “It is a sin!”—the other, “It is a virtue!”

The body is a nation I have not known. The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that. Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin- covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark. Like that. “The body is a savage,” I said. For years I said that: the body is a savage. As if this safety of the mind were virtue not cowardice. For years I have snubbed the dark rub of it, said, “I am better, Lord, I am better,” but sometimes, in an unguarded moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat and the screaming grass. But this distance I keep is not divine, for what was Christ if not God’s desire to smell his own armpit? And when I see him, I know he will smile, fingers glued to his nose, and say, “Next time I will send you a down as a dog to taste this pure hunger.”

The mind must set itself up wherever it goes and it would be most convenient to impose its old rooms—just tack them up like an interior tent. Oh but the new holes aren’t where the windows went.

congas          congas             congas congas          congas             congas desperate hands need a fix from the healthy skin of the congas congas the biggest threat to heroin congas make junkies hands healthier las venas se curan ligero con las congas conguito congas congueros salsa de guarapo melao azucarero congas on summer months take the place of the winter fire that the wino congregation seeks, the fire . . . que calienta los tecatos muertos de frío en el seno de un verano congas gather around con un rumboncito caliente . . . y ahí vienen los morenos a gozar con sus flautas y su soul jazz congas           congas tecata's milk gets warmed broken veins leave misery hypodermic needles melt from the voodoo curse of the conga madness the congas clean the gasses in the air, the congas burn out everything not natural to our people congas strong cuchifrito juice giving air condition to faces unmolested by the winds and the hot jungles of loisaida streets chévere, rumbones, me afectó me afectó, me afectó, me afectó chévere     rumbones     me afectó

Are you of or not of brain, matter’s boss or its crevasse, are you the body itself, or more than that, immortal you, crouched in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat? Are you housed in me or not? The tenant or the landlord of my skin? Am I your avatar? Are you my East Berlin? Are we an I or each other’s synonym? Last night, the train I was on dimmed then re-electrified, and I thought again that we are conscious a lot less often than we suppose, that half the time in us you’re half reposed. I was in South Orange again, city of my former self’s last stand. Do you remember him, your swallowed twin, the child king whom you deposed? Oh, I know: you think you’re the buried light, the jeweled glow, the sunlight falling through the falling snow. But I’ve seen the uranium laced through your walls: you’re an equation only destruction solves. Who else but you starts each day with masturbation and ends each night with gin? And so how should I begin? Four years ago, you rose in me like a fin. It started as an overflow, a drop of go, some royal beast in me, all gasoline and yeast, unhinging its own jaw to accelerate the feast, the rails of thought so greased that the outer world began to skew, as in that moment on a train when the view becomes a wash of hues. There were clues. Phantom music in the air. At times, I’d look down at my body and think, “How’d you get there?” One day, I de-napped to find myself entrapped within the tangled logic of a subway map. All day, I’d refrain, I’d double-track. I’d talk to myself and myself talked back. Was it you? That tick I felt within the trick of thought? That wick that curled itself around me, not exploding, just making a constant tick-tick-tick that finally convinced me that I was sick, that there was a cascade of toxins in the air, that there was something queer about the neighbor’s stare, that charade of signals everywhere, an air raid in the brain, something in me left unpaid, a cosmic debt in arrears. Some nights, I’d hear the voices of my parents coming near, like waves that overlapped— she’d slap him, he’d slap her back—their rage a single note that climbed its staff for years, my siblings and I in the closet with our fingers in our ears, though still I heard one night the knife drawer heaved back, as if they really might slice each other or the house in half, and then my thoughts unweaved and I began to laugh.And it is funny, isn’t it, the way that which starts as confession ends

After William IX, Duke of Aquitaine As sweetness flows through these new days, the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase in neumes of roosted melody incipits to a new song. Then love should find lubricity and quicken, having slept so long. The bloodroot blossoms, well and good, but I receive no word that would set my troubled heart at ease, nor could we turn our faces toward the sun, and open by degrees, unless we reach a clear accord. And so our love goes, night and day: it’s like the thorny hawthorn spray that whips about in a bitter wind from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet, until the sun’s first rays ascend through leaves and branches, spreading heat. I have in mind one April morning when she relented without warning, relenting from her cold rebuff in laughter, peals of happiness. Sweet Christ, let me live long enough to get my hands beneath her dress! I hate the elevated talk that disregards both root and stalk and sets insipid pride above vicissitudes of lust and strife. Let others claim a higher love: we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife.

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place Where I was lost alone Folk looked right through me into space And passed with eyes of stone O homeless hand on many a street Accept this change from me A friendly smile or word is sweet As fearless charity Woe workingman who hears the cry And cannot spare a dime Nor look into a homeless eye Afraid to give the time So rich or poor no gold to talk A smile on your face The homeless ones where you may walk Receive amazing grace I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place Where I was lost alone Folk looked right through me into space And passed with eyes of stone