American sentence for the Day

Blew a bubble and it stuck to my face-try to have a little fun...

an American Sentence

In my dreams, I can fly, but my teeth are rotting out.

paranoia

It stretches over my eyes
rubber-band like
over my mouth, my ears

and then I only have
reverberation.

All I need is a ukulele to serenade you out of my heart

The shadow of my hand
across this page
clashes with you.
I write these words:

You are crouched,
emergency blanketed,
having lost your belief in
spring long ago.

Nothing is so complicated
you can't let it
leak from your pores,
or risk living face up,
face out
in the middle of all the
wrath and reconstruction.

You dump out your milk with
your pills
down the same anonymous
chute.

I want to clean your face,
watch it change,
but then there would be no chance
for me.

You stopped production,
ran out of wishes.
You can only remember the number
Zero.

You forgot about your cells.
They all sit dormant,
reciting the same lines.

The cemetery tells you:
“Go away.
There’s a holy city
just down the street;
shrines and comrades
for you to soak in.

There is no myth except death.
Including and communing are
necessities.”

You are not cut, but
slowly severing,
and the thinnest string
can tie you back.

Please don’t behead your own
flowers.

You have plain-looking
lovers on the other side.

We are not experts in belief,
or advisors on how to build shrines,
but we do have wishes for you.

They are in the melodies
of a broken ukulele.


This is an old poem. Just thought I'd put it up because I'm too busy to write at the moment. I was doing a little editing instead. Will be back around after papers are graded (hopefully by the end of the week!)

American Sentence for the Day

I chunked responsibility out of the sunroof several times today.

Rumors

do a body
no good. We can

live inside the may be,
the cold windshield
fogged with half

truths. Lines
of mouths whisper
half words in quarter
ears.

The pink of what should be
red. The gray of what
should be white.

We find ourselves alone
in a tiny box
at the end of the
story.

(for an Easystreet prompt)

I Hear America Spinning

This is a poem I wrote years ago that went into my manuscript for my Master's Thesis. It was the last poem in the thesis. It sort of sums up how I feel about where we were, and where I hope we are going.

I Hear America Spinning

the lush land is divided
by the line of the body
in the loneliness of tall grasses

Barn with ten yellow birds
Perched on the peak of its roof

Grotesque cadaver behind the anthill,
melting into the earth
redness, brown and yellow
death juices seeping into black dirt

Worms and eaters like buzzards
take long thin pieces of meat
sail slowly with them
hanging

Hair growing
Nails growing
The land listening to the body,
body never hearing land
Soak up rain, rigor-
mortis sets in

Mother, Mother, Mother
Courage to take her Beloved
by her own hand in lieu
of rotten black slavery

Strange cutting machines under
purple-lipped observers
hands ready for bouncing and circling
on stage in the moonlight

White America running from
the Brahmas in a field of low grain,
green still, not yellow or brown
sky dark christened with
hundred-thousand pound clouds

Whirling dervish, spinning
mystic in the morning to
try to make the world right

I am thankful

for this amazing day. Lovely speech, prayers, and poem. WOW.

don't make me do it (or, Ode to Someone)

I want to take your face
and smoosh it up
like putty, soft clay

watch your features change
listen to the splotch of
gums against teeth

lips touching nose
breath becomes a whistle.

I want to twist your earlobes
pinch your cheeks till they're
purple.

Bite your lips till they
bleed.

If you have any sense at all
you'll know you need to listen
and not say a word.

brother

Your broken bones
are not the problem.
All the mushy parts are
rotting, angry, neglected

in your young flesh. Your
vigorous outside doesn't match
the sludge produced

from spinning tires
melting into the gray air
circulating inside you.

Angry headlights
a sleek body with a
sad engine drowning.

We can see what's under
your hood, the soot
and oil of years.

You are your fiercest foe.
You have a night stick
inside you, a gun in
the glove compartment.

Black battering your heart,
your brain leaving you
restless, broken.

When you were born,
in jealousy I said,
"I'm gonna hit him"
But I never needed to.