872 Life poems

For js You were laughing no you weren't she was she was she wasn't These aren't the right words The people are waiting on the platform and the decisions are being themselves as usual You could take this silver cord and wrap it around all of your ideas You could you could What is the way to make meaning You're less busy than the machine has time for I poured the world in for you All the sun on that block Or at least I wanted to: Everyone is leaving but this would be an arrival your torso is a drum people come through and then they die you see the obituary in passing as the man next to you folds the paper and all these people at all these parties that cannot be the answer but what Back above ground and it's the same sun different block same world different world Your friend is lying down with the thing he is carrying Everybody is somebody's family you think you forget the sun keeps going still you keep going the world rearranges itself just so False alarm you say and then you don't know what to say you wrap yourself in the future you wrap yourself in the past the woman gets in the taxi just in time Everybody is it's not an easy thing to understand False alarm you say and then you don't know what to say the sun keeps  going.

for years the scenes bustled through him as he dreamed he was alive. then he felt real, and slammed awake in the wet sheets screaming too fast, everything moves too fast, and the edges of things are gone.

The stroll from my cell along the path above the donkeys past a door open, a door shut and a strong smell of wood and cigarettes ends where music helps white marguerites cut through the masonry. * Dark for words with a clicking wren a yellow tit and over the clover a shovel and a rustle of grain. He’s training calves with shouts and food to follow him to another field before the second bell. * Broom loops over the buttercups. These names give birth to cones and needles, ferns with mini-sacs of pollen attached. It only takes one shot of spittle on green for my brother to explain the sexual life of the forest and honeybees. * Simon says he would like to live alone in a cottage with a garden, no humans, no obligations.  Solitary I prefer a pod while he likes hives. We confess we both wear armor outside our habitats. * Water was our first armor before our skin. Then came the bristle of sunshine. And a thickening of blood into oil or syrup in the lower veins. * I hate the thistledown covering my prototype now interior layer cowering at power or shout, but can laugh with the one who has sap under his skin pouring the bucket the hand is carrying. * Brother, help me find an animal who will rescue me from sharp delirium of fear beyond armor and my friends the birds by an open window:  to be clear would be wonderful. A sigh without the ghostly gasps that accompany a certain voice. Still I still do desire more of the kind no one can see or hear. Not that second, rasping breath of triumph. Find me instead more like the breathy Saint Bernard. But a little dog A cask of brandy hanging at his neck

I am not a poet because I live in the actual world where fear divides light I have no protection against the real evils and money which is the world where most lives are spent I am not a poet because I cannot sing about lost kingdoms of righteousness instead I see a woman in a blue parka crying on the street today without hope from despair I am not a poet for there is nothing I can say in smart turns to deflect oncoming blows of every day's inexistence that creeps into the contemporary horizon I am not a poet but a witness to bear the empty space that becomes hearts if left to loiter or linger without a life to share I've seen sorrow on joy street and heard the blur of the hurdy-gurdy and I too know what evening means but this is not real—poetry is and from this have I partaken as my eyes grow into the evolved dark

Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline lana turner has collapsed! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The eager note on my door said “Call me, call when you get in!” so I quickly threw a few tangerines into my overnight bag, straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and headed straight for the door. It was autumn by the time I got around the corner, oh all unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk! Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie! for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest only casually invited, and that several months ago.

This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter. The poem will go on without you. It has the spurious glamor of certain voids. It is not sad, really, only empty. Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why. It prefers to remember nothing. Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago. Your type of beauty has no place here. Night is the sky over this poem. It is too black for stars. And do not look for any illumination. You neither can nor should understand what it means. Listen, it comes without guitar, Neither in rags nor any purple fashion. And there is nothing in it to comfort you. Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon. You will forget the poem, but not before It has forgotten you. And it does not matter. It has been most beautiful in its erasures. O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned! Nor is one silence equal to another. And it does not matter what you think. This poem is not addressed to you.

The whole country in a courtly dance its tiny mouth open I pour another cup of wine and falling, rising the children remove their toys around the small apartment to their bunk beds not quite dark yet early spring with snow on the wind the woman across the street bent like a sickle collecting bottles and cans knocks, goes on I wonder where she lives and the stars shining on her greasy clothes

It’s a star that looks like a poker game above the mountains of eastern Oregon. There are three men playing. They are all sheepherders. One of them has two pair, the others have nothing.

One condition of work-release is daily to confess my obsessions, which I then write in disco glitter, one gluey blossom across my permanent record. When I eat too much of the local fruit, it gives me clairvoyance. But I forget to write down the predictions, instead crush cherry pits into a fine powder, chop the powder into lines with an expired credit card. The homeless give me quarters. Union rules require at least one mention of the weather here. My flight leaves on an inexact date in the nebulous future, arrives late afternoon, two days before our first kiss. I pay the airline $25 extra to lose my dignity between here and Chicago. At the airport you buy it back. When I walk to the market to buy more cherries, a parade of kittens follows, marching in formation, singing precise and bawdy cadence about prostitutes and crack houses. They change the names to protect the innocent. Signs say this mile of interstate is paved with the bones of the great mastodons, and kept clean by the well-meaning gentlemen of the Kiwanis Club. Vacationers from further south sit in the lobby watching guests from the north put on one-act plays. On even-numbered days, only, of course. Registered letters from the clerk of the court inform me that it won't violate my probation to drag you across state lines as long as I promise to return you by 8 p.m., mostly whole. The desk clerk is also the milkman is the town orthodontist. Instead of leaving Bibles at bedside, Gideons leave individual soaps printed with couplets from the Song of Songs, or corkscrews. I did not catch last night's plays, but promised to attend this evening's performance. I play a slightly amplified version of myself, with one line:Wish you were here. It's a song and dance number. Everyone applauds.