Poem in my pocket is printed manuscript copy of Whitman’s “Live Oak, with Moss”:

Wherein the image of towing the safe is meant to be homage. And what the hell: “V”, just because.

Love-Letter Number One

While you watch TV and cross-stitch, quite alone,
I sit to write my first love-letter.
All sharpeners gone, I use my teeth until the pencil's center bleeds.
The paper ends up mottled from my wet strokes,
the pencil soaked and flaccid from my sucking.
I find no stamps in my drawer, just
the Walther pistol you left loaded, safety off,
find an extra cartridge on the floor, just in case.
I place the letter in the iron safe from which our cat escapes
and tow it with tied bed sheets down the hall.

You've gone to bed; you're fast asleep.
So instead I fill your work shoes with the petals of spring blossoms.
Not knowing these are beds for apple worms;
you squish them in the morning as you walk to work.
The old janitor grins his three teeth as he washes your feet
his course hands dipping your toes in his battered mop bucket
water seeps out from under the custodial closet's closed door.

From the cubicles down the hall, typing resounds a dance club hit
causing the windows to vibrate, threatening our poodle-shaved cat
who dangers the ledges, nine floors up.
Realizing his escape from the apartment
I've followed you to work, careful not to be seen,
embarrassed when I realize that you've realized the worms;
I take the elevator while you take the stairs
hoping to beat you up.

Inside I'm held in a velvet bear trap.
Strangers in suits tip-toe to spit on my scalp.
As each leaves on each floor I calculate how long,
in this humidity,
until my hair is dry.

"Going down," the bellman says.
Half-way down I "Open Doors",
I chalk a line upon the wooden wall.
Half-way again, half-way again,
until the chalk disintegrates, and then
until my fingernails are ground away.
We reach the basement where the bellman sets me free.
The warm wet stink of peeled bananas, molding plums, spoilt meat,
and residue of oily cheese, ocean sea, hair spray, and hand cream
make treacherous my walk across the concrete laminate floor;
I tip-toe in my socks, sticking to avoid a fall,
leaving a trail of cotton threading as I go.

The basement stairs lead to a hotel lobby, walls lined
with kinetoscopes, the antique kinds we'd romanticized.
I find you there, too,
checking-in with a taller man
whose felt fedora hides his face.
He sets his forearms on the desk,
and I watch you stroke his under elbows from behind.
Thus you lead him from the desk clerk to the elevator hall,
while he threads the room key through his fingers
fast and faster.
I hope he'll rub the metallic strip away,
but instead it flashes light in each flipping pass,
blinding me like waves on the noon-time sea.
The smell of brine, the roll, the pitch of the ship
is all too much: I flee,
balancing a fragile line upon the baseboards
back to my bed, my abandoned room.

All night I roll in my sheets,
I wake to find myself bound in knots,
that you had returned during the night.
For I had written the one thing I must do,
the one thing I can't know, but know must do,
on Post-It® notes, leaving one in each room.
But each has been erased, or
in the case of ink, embroidered over.
Each of these is signed
with your crimson fingerprint--a testament to your will
and the prophesied apostasy of thimbles. 

I'll write that one thing down once more,
eventually, when it falls by,
as a letter to myself, stamped, sealed, and sent
safe until tomorrow's mail arrives.
The first day it comes I see I've addressed it to you,
so I write, "RTS - NOT AT THIS ADDRESS" on the envelope,
and, again, again, at an angle, erect
the carmine mailbox flag.

My poor attempt to follow Chris’s very interesting Venus poem with images centers on Artemis. Immediate reflection tells me I want this briefer, more elegant.

In the moon, in the night
you bathe, palming pool water
into streams upon your skin.
It glistens like stars,
traces constellations on your back--
a map of the impotent,
failed suitors caught
between shadows of your shoulders.


Diana Palace of Caserta

The sheen of your silver hair
wanes as you turn toward me.
Cut close it shows more skin, more neck,
the angles of your frame,
the bulb of your pale breast
draws me to the open
where, naked, I quake in the midnight air,
shaking like a hound before its master
falsely, feebly held together
like the water in your cupped hands
I break upon the pounded shore.


Modesty, Metropolitan Museum of Art


The pink I thought I saw
blossom on your milky cheeks--
was it coyness or rage?
Your eyes, black as a bear's,
tear a path to the mouth of the creek bed
show their black unto your silver bow,
your endless quiver
from which you slide a single shaft.
Fingering it's notch
you draw it back.


Diana of the Tower, Augustus Saint-Gaudens


You who give
but won't receive, release
the string, send
the straight and stinging arrow
into me.
Its piercing cancels any chance to catch my breath;
I moan, I twitch, I shudder,
emptying for death.


The Archer, Johann Philipp Ferdinand  c1930

Prone on my back in the understory,
trees and night sky above,
now all is still:
obsessive lust,
doomed desire,
absurd attachment,
burdened brotherhood
all are falling free.
I wait for my heart to beat,
for my lungs to heave,
for you but once to find,
to stand over me.


Diana, Jean-Antoine Houdon c1790


Forced to it, I must admit
I am your enemy
a predator of liberty, of celibacy;
at last, at least your prey.
Standing over me
your short hair lets slip
a drop of its potency,
spattering warm on my dying lips,
a liqueur of your triumph--
no bacchanalian fete with wine-soaked tresses,
but quiet, wild, and solitary.



Do you watch? Or do you merely pass?
I strain to gasp, to say, to wish,
Unmastered idol, virgin of self-mastery,
beware, for others soon will come,
beware, the banshee's ardent call,
beware, the hermit's friend-lorn letter,
beware, the promised rest, the earned calm,
beware, and never let your hair grow long!

Part II of this poem “Guide” is ottava rima:

II

My muscles locked, my lungs devoid of air,
I struggle to my knees, do all I can
to grapple with my guide's chimeric stare.
Though fierce, its eyes suggest an honest man's;
despite its tarnished scales, its clotted hair,
the fecal stench its winged panting fans,
I realize that here is native brawn
so, answering its crouching, I climb on.

Note: I felt a bad taste in my mouth as I finished this, so sour was its working. Well, it’s effort, it’s practice.

Part I is in “rime royal”.

I

As I survey the memories of my world
I'm lifted by a certainty of love,
for who deserves to have these veils unfurled?
Who has earned this coming guide? this dove
whose thundering wings blow tumult from above?
All fear now fails! And all my thoughts are drowned;
disarmed, dismayed I stumble to the ground.

Here’s another skate poem–one of the first skater sketches that I’ve tried–that I really want to come back to and “fix”: make elegant, make meaningful, whatever. As it is it barely describes the skater that I hoped to illustrate, but I can’t hang on to it right now.

Total Commitment

This black guy with earphones in,
waits,
watches over the local kids
whites, hispanics,
riding, some catching trucks up on the lips
and stumbling down
some scooping up and over spines,
one little hoard flips their boards,
lets them skid out of control
or, landing chicken-footed,
proves that each knows how to curse

Then he moves,
drags his board by the nose,
steps on, speeds along the platform,
ollies big
off the lip of the quarter-pipe
doesn't flip the board,
doesn't turn, or twist, or spin
just seven feet of air
bombing down onto the flat

and his board spins out from under
and his body splays and slides

He rises up, climbs the trans
rides again, ollies big
falling hard, without a word
just the pound of his torso on the ground

the kids turn as they see kids turn
some have stopped to watch him mount the wall
he goes again,
same start, same drag,
same solitary ollie off the lip
and as he hangs, brutal in the air,
I see it in his face:
he's here alone;
he'll rise again;
it doesn't matter how he lands.

I’m set on the idea of poems about skating; though I personally don’t have the skill yet to make it work, I like to try. Here’s one of three I wrote this weekend after some back-to-back trips to the Orem and Logan parks.

Raising My Generation

This guy with surfer hair,
my age, maybe just a little less,
old enough to fear
the pain, young enough to let that pass,

kicks off fierce, rolls right in,
almost soaring
over the fat, rusted coping
floating down to the transition,
which entices to the flat

there he pushes twice or thrice,
lifts his knee for extra speed,
drops down to the lower bowl:
a rushing waterfall
that slings around the wall
and launches up and over the hip,

I gawk at how he tucks a little grab
to show he meant it
now he pops above the lip,
lands, board in hand,
nods at me
to go.

Another poem worked out faster than I’m comfortable doing, motivated by the fact that last time I did Napowrimo I didn’t think so much, fuss so much, revise so much, but simply made the daily deadlines. At least in posting early drafts I’m more motivated to return to them quickly to edit.

Collect

I hunt along the sidewalk
for buttons worn off with use
collecting for a child's necklace
or to sew on a friend's jacket
but no one wears their clothes that long

I check for coins in every pay phone slot
saving for a dollar
but every booth is now an empty husk
their phones have flown away to hide in pockets

I search for scraps of literature
a hundred years old or more
but all the copyrights have been revived

I leave the city, looking for a mountain trail
but all the trails I used to know
are orphaned, overgrown
despite my striving quickly am I lost

I sit in a cafe, order tea to stay
but they have only paper cups.
   At this, at last, I protest
going home I promise
to never wash my coffee mug
so it, at least, will, over years,
layer on sediment and finally be full
a record of this living

Day 8 of napowrimo hit me with regret that I hadn’t wrapped up drafts of 4 poems in the queue. Then I reassured myself that I don’t have to write great poetry to write poems, and kicked out this:

Senility

The doors weren't unlocked and opened
but blown off with a sneeze.
Yet what we didn't see
was the coughing mothers,
who were told, or else, remembered
to drop their brooms of bounded golden hair
and come indoors to oil all the hinges with their phlegm .

We didn't see; we sat
in the pews, our backs to what went on outside.
And, waiting for sitting to be affirmed,
we grew bored, our eyes servicing the stations,
hoping to be paid off like a whore.
Then the Father of the Babysitters,
enraged at how we traded torn out pages from the hymnal
(we had heard that they might make a map),
and further enraged to find himself disarmed,
his sword and shield buried with his brother in a tomb,
swung our Savior from the wall,
leaped down from his sanctuary,
caught us in the angles of the cross
and pushed us out the gaping doors.

In the streets we were emasculated by its nakedness--
the old mothers having swept the clues away.
We wandered until we found ourselves alone
each standing at the center of a million-pointed star.
And round our face a headstall and a halter
for which we gripped the shanked reigns.

But in the shade of blinders we will hold
until, restless, we fidget down an arm,
calling to the dead, who answer, "Nothing"
or else are too content to take our call
and the star arm grows more narrow as it goes
or else is it only just a trick of sight?

Are we walking? or does the ground rotate beneath us?
And do these blinders that we wear grow larger?
Or does this landscape simply grow more dense?
The trees, cathedrals, garage shops,
the garbage mounds, the craters pull together
toward a black hole at our true horizon
it inflates, or, rather, we diminish.

Ah! Ah! Too late!
To change our minds,
to take some other arm.

Which is in worst taste? A light-hearted poem about suicide? Or a light-hearted poem about patricide? Take your pick in today’s (not-quite-finished) Nanopowrimo entry:

Inevoedipal

MOTHER.
Son, where were you after school?
I ask because your dad's a fool:
He's shot himself, and wouldn't you know it
he didn't leave a note to show it.

SON.
I can't believe you'd even ask
if I did this bloody task.
Even though it takes a while
poisoning is more my style.

MOTHER.
Darling that's not what I meant!
I figured you were innocent.
Just let's agree it's not a lie
to be each other's alibi.

SON.
Of course, dear mother, I'll attest
that you were no where near our nest,
that we were on my paper route
when father blew his old brains out.

MOTHER.
As if I hadn't enough stress
your father's made an awful mess
by shooting himself without warning.
I haven't time this week for mourning!

SON.
I must admit it makes me sad
to hear about the death of dad.
By taking his life in his hands
he's spoil'd my own avenging plans.

MOTHER.
The only thing that is a bother
about the death of your poor father
is that he shot off half his face
and left me to clean up the place.

SON.
Many people often said
that they'd be glad to see dad dead.
They'll all be sorry when it's disclosed
that we must keep the casket closed.

MOTHER.
In retrospect I should have guessed
that your poor father was depressed.
If I had known he'd no endurance
I would have paid for more insurance.
/or/
If he had brought his woes to me
I would have raised his policy.

SON.
Here's another cause to fret
compounding on our family debt:
You know that mobster that I hired
to ensure that dad "retired"?
We're lucky that he didn't cause it
but will he refund my deposit?
/or/
Now that there's no one to whack
do you think I'll get my money back?

MOTHER.
If there's one thing I can't abide
about your father's suicide
it's that he took the easy route
before he took the garbage out.

SON.
Seeing father on the floor,
fingers round his forty-four...
at risk of being reprimanded
I have to ask: was dad left-handed?

Inspired, of course, by Harry Graham’s “Little Willies” (which are often too horrific even for me) this was baked in my fevered skull while I lay in bed most of the weekend.

T