Tangled Rope

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.

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.

This is a repost from last year’s NaPoWriMoNov Google Wave, for archival purposes.

A sonnet that didn’t quite wind up as neatly as I’d have liked (I hope to work it over on the weekend; I wanted to imply some hope in momentary pleasures, but that was hijacked in that end):

Men in Space

Around us each whole universes loom,
their touchless, cold embrace we fear to feel,
their sparkling teeth hang open round the gloom,
their emptiness ignores our frantic peal:
"Hear me, O God," and, "Carve my name in stone,"
"Forgive our trespasses," and, "Grant me more!
Let me outlast--transcend this brittle bone,
this muscle fast detaching from its core."

But skin distends, and in the end, the brain
collapses under its own weight;
your contributions to the human train
still hurtle off the galactic edge of fate.

And solar winds blow past our cells, and sigh,
Tomorrow we must die, tomorrow we must die.

For as much as I disdain “confessional” poetry, I sure seem to have a penchant for writing it. O, Hypocrisy!

I dreamed
I put an arm around a friend,
clasped his shoulder with fraternal grip,
watched light curve along his gazing eyes,
and it was enough.

I woke, and the dream,
carried across the water in my mouth,
echoed in the hollows of my lungs,
confined solitary,
immortal only as loosening waves,
invisible against the dark matter.