Telephone Cigarettes Restroom

Older poems

Some haiku-like objects

Cat shaped like a loaf of bread
purrs as I throw him outside.
He likes himself.

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E=MC^2:
it is only ashes
that prevented us from noticing.

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No way!
I'm covered in tiny hairs
like a fly!

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Orange maple leaf
lacquered to the glass with rain:
stormy October.

Can you believe I wrote this stuff? Sadly, I can. I found these two in a journal I kept in 9th grade. The first one indicates that I probably read too much Moorcock or something. The second is my attempt to be funny. I think I'm glad this is all I could find from my childhood.

Lament to the Son of the God of the Moon

Come down to the earth, o spawn of the gods,
O son of the bright moon shining!
Tis many a night I’ve stood ‘neath it’s light,
My pitiful mortal fate pining.
O child of the sky and the stars and the night,
Do you see how you burn in my eyes?
O no, for I see that you never could love --
Lovely god-child, in faith, you’re too wise.

Math

Six you can factor to two time three,
Or even six times one --
But seven is seven whatever you do.
Aren’t prime numbers fun?

This one is from my junior year, I think. Somewhere in my house should be lurking a yellow 3-ring binder containing my entire poetry output from senior year, but I can't find it. Which is too bad, as I recall there were a few things in there that showed promise, which I might someday rework. If I can find this binder it might also tell me what happened to 'Sister City' one and two, which presumably must have existed at some point.

Sister City 3:
boxcars

who is a railroad? who is the rusty nail music? in
with a hayseed and blue steel guitar. i only want
the boxcar life on the august night on the step
with my japanese twelve-string it makes me feel
like a poser.

who is a railroad? my father. I can see him seventeen
and burly in nerd glasses. his plywood guitar cost
thirty dollars. the red gibson came later.

who is a railroad? my mother. in the days of steam
she was very fast. that’s a metaphor: she with her
bare feet the beauty of the acid age but ringo
is still her favorite. she never learned to play.

i never meant to trace my ancestry through guitars.
i never learned to play harmonica and never jumpad
a boxcar but the time of day the long grass was
yellow like nobody’s hair i know my blues my blues
my own from the salvation army used but mine.

these: who is a railroad?

Warning: frequent suckage from this point on. These are all out of chronological order, and I have only the vaguest memories of where in my life most of them came from. However, a few of them might be keepers.

Wedged

after a long night’s stagger into dawn
these remain:
ice-loud puddles black and bottomless
melt-swollen creek mirror full of trees
dog footprints
swingset
stoplight signaling to itself in the empty street
(pointless semaphore like my moebius dreaming)
and the headache that comes
of an inability to cry.

after the intrusive gray behind the clouds
steals the comfort from the yellow streetlights
these still hang on my back:
tiny betrayals
welcome ache
headphones wedged in my frozen ears
a song that unreels my guts on the asphalt
eight thousand ways to tell you
and one way for you to reply
all i want is this dreaming to stop
all i want is a dark place to hide in
all i want is not to be
the way i am
anymore.

What I know about Tom

Tom says he knows me --
and wouldn't it be nice if that were true?
His hands are so big
mine barely cover his palms.

He has never read Rimbaud,
he has never bought geranium-red chopsticks
in the Japanese quarter of San Francisco,
he has never been fat.

Tom's eyes are like a child's painting of eyes,
as blue as china plates,
with lashes a black crayon line above.
He doesn't like to shave but he does anyway.

He says he can read me easily.
He says that some people are like, what the fuck?
-- but he can read me.
He makes things sound simpler than they are.

Tom's arms are so long he can hold the world,
hold it down so it can't run away,
long enough to get a good look.
But not long enough to hold me.

Tom likes to talk about
how he could kill fictional people
but has never really hurt anybody
that I know about

and as far as I know
he doesn't cry to himself
when he's alone
but nobody tells anybody that stuff.

His would be a bony shoulder to cry on
if I trusted him enough for that
but you don't want to be too comfortable
when you're using somebody that way.

Tom understands debts of honor.
He understands friendship in terms of favors owed.
And then he says he understands me --
wouldn't it be nice if that were true?

I analyze a guttering torch

It isn’t fair for me to speak of beauty;
I watch and watch, and sometimes almost understand
But never quite and never when it counts.
Did I describe to you your knuckles
Pink against the whiteness of your hand?
Appropriate: every freckle right where it belongs.
A sort of resonance, strings of the same weight
And length will hum together
As my spine hums along with certain songs.
But is that beauty? Or is there something there
Before I look, and would you still be lovely
If I forbore to love you? Sweet if I forbear
To look and sigh?
Do your hands’ grace need a beholder’s eye?
Those who fail to stumble when you smile --
Have they forgotten how to see? Or did I watch too long?
There certainly exists some thing
Which makes my breath tear in my throat
And freezes me almost like fear,
Which turns my clever words to bitterness and bile;
I can believe myself inferior and foul
Beneath the petal rain of your ordinary words.
Which is not love, or beauty, or anything outside of me.
Just that you’re more alone that I’ll allow myself to be.
The gentle solitude that schooled your eyes
To find the floor or watch your hands or close
Whenever I come close to knowing you, which shuts your mouth
And turns your conversation on itself
Is mystery to me, in Latin and illuminated,
Succulent heresy, lance and wilderness, cross and rose.
Would you fade to dun
If you were opened?
Burst in the air like creatures drawn
Up from the ocean’s deepest trench, would you
Lose cohesion in the light? If I am given leave
To touch your beauty, will I find it gone?
The world is full of those to whom
The darkness of your lashes, fairness of your brows,
Your sudden show of teeth and mocking laugh,
Your marionette gestures of dismissal at your knee,
Your endless tapping dialogue with no one, do not sing
The way they sing to me.
If you were nearer, less strange, kind, less cold,
Maybe your charm would fade, your arrogence grow old
And I would feel the loosing of a bond, some freedom,
Drifting, maybe just a little lost.
The damping of the resonating wire
Might bring something superficially like peace
And maybe I’d get something useful done,
Not wasting all my good words on desire.

Glad you were tired of Seattle

There is something of August in you
something lazy and humid
something hammock and tall weeds
some sunburn
some condensation soaked beer bottle label
some concrete step and cloud of gnats
some slanting sunlight
in warm flat cola eyes.

There is something of August in me
and though the streets were icy when I met you
and though you keep your windows closed
from your first hello
I lay on my stomach in the grass
blowing dandelions

and all my summers ran into me.

All other months
are synopses of what they lack:
the smell of henna and potsmoke
the smile of not needing
the whine of cicadas
in dark beer eyes.

Chatterton

I’m told you were beautiful,
but all the portraits are fakes.
It’s appropriate;
you were a fake,
you were a liar, but everyone
says you were beautiful
and beauty excuses a lot of shit.
You called yourself friendless,
but who would you have called
good enough? And who
could have been friend enough
to lance your twisted, flaring soul
and suck the poison out?
Rimbaud? Plath? Kerouac?
Bloomed too early,
broken too young,
burst like a firework
going off on the ground.
And those who lit your fuse
stood back and watched,
inspired to rapturous sugary crooning
by the light of your detonation.
How self-destruction moves us!
What did you want, Chatterton?
What were you looking for, Tom?
Some proof you were as wonderful
as you thought you had to be?
Where did you get the idea
that seventeen years should be enough
to be judged perfect
or irrecoverably false?

Best Waiter

He smiled like he knew nobody
could say a word
like he was bringing my coke
just cuz he liked me
just a cookie I said chocolate chip
felt bad for not ordering more
chocolate chip he said back
like it was a clever thing to ask for
I felt cute for saying cookie

in the next booth matrons preened
and ordered tiny salads
and skim milk
and sucked in their stomachs
and the gay waiter with the purple nails
wouldn’t look at him

he had hedgehog hair
and an eight-year-old’s mouth
he was up on stilts
his tray was Ginger Rogers
he wore a thrift shop tie
and telephone lineman’s boots
his hands were goldfish
my tip was twice my bill

he didn’t have a name tag