Boss of all bosses of the universe. Mr. know-it-all, wheeler-dealer, wire-puller, And whatever else you're good at. Go ahead, shuffle your zeros tonight. Dip in ink the comets' tails. Staple the night with starlight. You'd be better off reading coffee dregs, Thumbing the pages of the Farmer's Almanac. But no! You love to put on airs, And cultivate your famous serenity While you sit behind your big desk With zilch in your in-tray, zilch In your out-tray, And all of eternity spread around you. Doesn't it give you the creeps To hear them begging you on their knees, Sputtering endearments, As if you were an inflatable, life-size doll? Tell them to button up and go to bed. Stop pretending you're too busy to take notice. Your hands are empty and so are your eyes. There's nothing to put your signature to, Even if you knew your own name, Or believed the ones I keep inventing, As I scribble this note to you in the dark. |
Monday, December 29, 2008
To the One Upstairs By Charles Simic
By Charles Simic
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.
The World Doesn't End
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.
The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
In Passing
by Ted Kooser
walking briskly along, carrying parcels,
furtively glancing up into the faces
of people approaching, looking for someone
you know, holding your smile in your mouth
like a pebble, keeping it moist and ready,
being careful not to swallow.
I know that hope so open on your face,
know how your heart would lift to see just one
among us who remembered. If only someone
would call out your name, would smile,
so happy to see you again. You shift
your heavy parcels, hunch up your shoulders,
and press ahead into the moment.
From a few feet away, you recognize me,
or think you do. I see you preparing your face,
getting your greeting ready. Do I know you?
Both of us wonder. Swiftly we meet and pass,
averting our eyes, close enough to touch,
but not touching. I could not let you know
that I've forgotten, and yet you know.
Friday, December 26, 2008
The world in the year 2000
by Marge Piercy
inches by the little white plastic
chips at once soft and repellent
to the touch and with the ability
to bounce like baby beach balls
under the table and under the radiator.
They come in boxes with toasters,
with vitamin pills, with whatever
you order, as packing material : they
will conquer the world. They are
doing it already beginning
with my kitchen.
Monday, December 22, 2008
the mother
By Gwendolyn BrooksAbortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
sitting at a party, chatted with an older woman about nothing in particular. except i noticed she acted like a much younger, shallower woman than she really was. i moved on to smoke and my place was taken by another. later, i was chatting with that other and the older woman came up as the other went away. you're my favorite she said to him. she turned to me and said:
"you were my first favorite, but you're so inaccessible."
sitting at a table at a bar with my friend and her two friends. one of her friends was telling me all about herself. they were an odd pair of partners, these two friends. the acted like they had their own private universe. she does conceptual art. she takes notes on conversations while they happen. i asked her about her art and she said:
"you wouldn't understand."
Saturday, December 20, 2008
By Roddy Lumsden
Friday, December 19, 2008
What Became
“A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about...”
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Jeffrey Miller
my bottle opener is M I A & I’m searching
the beer is lined up on the table & it’s not american
beer which can be opened with a soft american twist
no this is Mexican Beer in thick brown bottles
if a whore smashed a GI in the face with one of these
blood would splash out maybe his eye would hang
he could show his grandkids the scar & say get me a beer
if it was american beer the kid could open the bottle
but this is Mexican Beer & i’m in my kitchen, a jungle,
searching, because you need an opener for these babies
they’re like hand grenades without a pin to pull
& I’m no pacifist i’m just on my own side
HANDCUFFED TO THE ONE I LOVE
Jeffrey Miller
Which came first, the chicken
or The Shake & Bake? It’s a rough job
being a poet during these modern times, folderol
it’s a snap, Exhibit A: me. Each day, stepping
into nothing like it was my pants, I’m tickled
pink, a dog about to piss the length
of The Great Wall of China. We’re buddies,
me and the huge terrier. We boat calm as tourists along
the captured and monotonous ocean.
Like heroin down a motel toilet
DEPRESSED & HORNY
Jeffrey Miller
Behind every car wreck there’s a beautiful dish
& buying her drinks is smashing your head on the windshield
such a long throat, what a curve
swallowing me up foot first. I didn’t wanna go
out of the house but it was so quiet & violent (like a tree)
& I need a liquid light on my teeth, cool white
cue ball, parlor games. If you feel mixed up
you should try and drive a 52 Ford Station Wagon 50 miles
an hour down the road to my house. That will set
you straight to pursue the things in life that interest me
—Jeffrey Miller, The First One’s Free
Monday, December 15, 2008
Elizabeth’s War with the Christmas Bear
I feel sorry
Sunday, December 14, 2008
What is this about losing respect?
Clouds Gathering
"I am the last . . ."
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Lost in Translation
Holy Shit
Anagrammer
By Peter PereiraIf you believe in the magic of language,
then Elvis really Lives
and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin.
If you believe the letters themselves
contain a power within them,
then you understand
what makes outside tedious,
how desperation becomes a rope ends it.
The circular logic that allows senator to become treason,
and treason to become atoners.
That eleven plus two is twelve plus one,
and an admirer is also married.
That if you could just rearrange things the right way
you’d find your true life,
the right path, the answer to your questions:
you’d understand how the Titanic
turns into that ice tin,
and debit card becomes bad credit.
How listen is the same as silent,
and not one letter separates stained from sainted.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Pieces That Fall To Earth
By Kay RyanOne could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
A Poem Without a Single Bird in It
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
I Would Like to Describe
Sunday, November 23, 2008
More Blues and the Abstract Truth
By C. D. WrightI back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.
In the mornings we’re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.
Then there’s the frequent bleeding,
the tender nipples, and the rot
under the floormat. If I’m not seeing
a cold-eyed doctor it is
another gouging mechanic.
Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs
and Eileen Briscoe’s elms
the house keeps cool.
Well. Then. You say Grandmother
let me just ask you this:
How does a body rise up again and rinse
her mouth from the tap. And how
does a body put in a plum tree
or lie again on top of another body
or string a trellis. Or go on drying
the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile.
Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes,
how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.
With the wine. And the loaf.
And the excellent glass
of the body. And she says,
Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling.
My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.
Friday, November 21, 2008
"I am the last . . ."
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
They eat out
over which of us will pay for your funeral
though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.
At the moment only I
can do it and so
I raise the magic fork
over the plate of beef fried rice
and plunge it into your heart.
There is a faint pop, a sizzle
and through your own split head
you rise up glowing;
the ceiling opens
a voice sings Love Is A Many
Splendoured Thing
you hang suspended above the city
in blue tights and a red cape,
your eyes flashing in unison.
The other diners regard you
some with awe, some only with boredom:
they cannot decide if you are a new weapon
or only a new advertisement.
As for me, I continue eating;
I liked you better they way you were,
but you were always ambitious.
Monday, November 17, 2008
neatly, like cord wood. soon a home for moss and mice.
perhaps a blue tarp covers it all
dusted and peeled, fit, tightly, in a crisp paper box
labeled and filed, stored in the attic among the chairs and sewing machines
neat handwriting on neat labels
tossed and flung, with eyes shut, into the fireplace
lit, turning to ash, smoke and fire, into the earth and into the air
maybe we'll have a bar-b-que and the coals will mix
left and forgotten, casually, lost and unremembered somewhere
unnoticed, the combination to 20 year old lock, neither here nor there
they join the lost socks and things as important as toe nail clippings
we stack our bones, we burn them, we bury them amongst our detritus
cuddle them, make uncomfortable beds from them
sleep on those beds and clutch the discomfort they give us
it is that discomfort, like a scratchy pillow, like a sneaker that fits,
but doesn't
that brings the bones to their place
cast them away with lint
with fliers advertising window tinting
and the bones, though molding, stored, burnt, unremembered
they make and increase our foundation
that supports the ever growing house called our lives
- Robertson Davies
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Shame
offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at
first she'd found me—
I can't remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable,
out-of-things—
she'd decided that I was after all all right…twelve years later she comes back to me
from nowhere
and I realize that it wasn't my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want
she meant,
which, when we'd been introduced, I'd naturally aimed at her and which she'd
easily deflected,
but that she'd thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,
what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible
humiliation.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Lucky
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.
Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.
Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.
Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,
amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.
And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
and she begged me like a child
to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.
If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy
because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The Patience of Ordinary Things
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
Lessons
that life goes on,
or doesn't.
That days are measured out
in tiny increments
as a woman in a kitchen
measures teaspoons
of cinnamon, vanilla,
or half a cup of sugar
into a bowl.
I have learned
that moments are as precious as nutmeg,
and it has occurred to me
that busy interruptions
are like tiny grain moths,
or mice.
They nibble, pee, and poop,
or make their little worms and webs
until you have to throw out the good stuff
with the bad.
It took two deaths
and coming close myself
for me to learn
that there is not an infinite supply
of good things in the pantry.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
by Tom C. Hunley
She said "open up,"
so I showed her my teeth,
a chipped-white fence
that keeps my tongue penned in.
She rinsed my mouth.
She suctioned my cheek.
She said "How do you like this town?"
so I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "More every day,"
and she said "Gorgeous weather!"
so I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "In my mouth?"
and she didn't say anything,
so I said "Mmpllff" and "Mmpllff"
though I'm not sure what I meant,
and she took me to mean
"Would you like to go out tonight?"
and "to an expensive restaurant?"
When I arrived with a bouquet of roses,
she stuffed them in my mouth.
She told me all about her feelings:
how she feels about fillings,
how she feels about failures.
She said "open up."
She said "It's like pulling teeth
trying to get men to talk about their feelings."
So I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "You smell prettier than the flowers in my mouth,"
and I said "Mmpllff"
she thought I meant "I'm afraid of dying alone."
She said I was a good conversationalist
and showed me her perfect teeth.
I felt an ache in my jaw.
I felt drool crawling down my chin.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Welcome Home, Children
in my past lives. We sit around the table at my grandfather's
farmhouse—mashed potatoes, creamed peas, cornbread. There's
the Confederate colonel with his mustache and battlefield odor.
The medieval peasant from Portugal with insects in her hair. The
Irish boy who died from the fever at nine. There's the patient wife
of the fishmonger. The petty thief from Cathay who's already
stuffed his pockets with my grandmother's paperweights. My
favorite is the Hindu monk. His orange robes. The sacred paint
across his forehead. He's never reconciled his lust for women and
steals glances at the dancer from Babylon—my first life. Her long
dark hair. The thin veils draped over her shoulders. She loves
to lean across the table for the marmalade, exposing her breasts
for him to see. After dinner she excuses herself and walks into
the garden. He follows. I'm not sure if it's just a natural kind of
thing… One incarnation of mine seducing another…Or an act
so vile even Narcissus would have gagged.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Dog Music
Saturday, October 18, 2008
I want a dog named Nig
Benjamin Pantier
Monday, October 13, 2008
Dog Experiences Best Day Of His Life For 400th Consecutive Day
October 13, 2004 | Issue 40•41
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Warnings
irritate the eyes, while a bathroom heater says it's
not to be used in bathrooms. I collect warnings
the way I used to collect philosophy quotes.
Wittgenstein's There's no such thing
as clear milk rubs shoulders with a box
of rat poison which has been found
to cause cancer in laboratory mice.
Levinas' Language is a battering ram—
a sign that says the very fact of saying,
is as inscrutable as the laser pointer's advice:
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Last week I boxed up the solemn row
of philosophy tomes and carted them down
to the used bookstore. The dolly read:
Not to be used to transport humans.
Did lawyers insist that the 13-inch wheel
on the wheelbarrow proclaim it's
not intended for highway use? Or that the
Curling iron is for external use only?
Abram says that realists render material
to give the reader the illusion of the ordinary.
What would he make of Shin pads cannot protect
any part of the body they do not cover?
I load boxes of books onto the counter. Flip
to a yellow-highlighted passage in Aristotle:
Whiteness which lasts for a long time is no whiter
than whiteness which lasts only a day.
A.A.'ers talk about the blinding glare
of the obvious: Objects in the mirror
are actually behind you, Electric cattle prod
only to be used on animals, Warning: Knives are sharp.
What would I have done without: Remove infant
before folding for storage, Do not use hair dryer
while sleeping, Eating pet rocks may lead to broken
teeth, Do not use deodorant intimately?
Goodbye to all those sentences that sought
to puncture the illusory world-like the warning
on the polyester Halloween outfit for my son:
Batman costume will not enable you to fly.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Sleeping
He slept on his hands.
On a rock.
On his feet.
On someone else's feet.
He slept on buses, trains, in airplanes.
Slept on duty.
Slept beside the road.
Slept on a sack of apples.
He slept in a pay toilet.
In a hayloft.
In the Super Dome.
Slept in a Jaguar, and in the back of a pickup.
Slept in theaters.
In jail.
On boats.
He slept in line shacks and, once, in a castle.
Slept in the rain.
In blistering sun he slept.
On horseback.
He slept in chairs, churches, in fancy hotels.
He slept under strange roofs all his life.
Now he sleeps under the earth.
Sleeps on and on.
Like an old king.
Monday, October 6, 2008
The Scientist
Other fathers might cuss out a lawnmower
that wouldn't catch. Or kick the car.
Mine would simply stop. A physicist, he'd stop
and think awhile, his breath wheezing
through his nose-hiss and hiss, mechanical
until, abruptly, a solution clicked.
Then, step by step, arranging parts
in the sequence they'd come loose,
he'd direct at our lawnmower a logic
even that sullen machine could not refute.
Then, just as systematically, refit
each wrench upon its pegboard silhouette,
re-index every drill bit, every nail—
this small, half-German intellectual
who, although he'd own no gun himself,
let me wear twin Lone Ranger cap pistols
on each hip. You couldn't tell
just what he thought of you. Had he hated
us, he wouldn't have shown it. When,
in that reasoning, mildly troubled tone
of his that meant he might
be disappointed in his son, he once explained,
In war, people hurt with tools,
I shuddered. You couldn't imagine what
he might invent. He was a patient man.
I like this, but I'd like to know what it means.
The Virgin King
by John Ashbery
They know so much more, and so much less,
“innocent details” and other. It was time to
put up or shut up. Claymation is so over,
the king thought. The watercolor virus
sidetracked tens.
Something tells me you’ll be reading this on a train
stumbling through rural Georgia, wiping sleep
from your eyes as the conductor passes through
carrying a bun. We’re moving today,
today on the couch.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
my preferred translation, thanks Mr Lowell
To the Reader
Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice
possess our souls and drain the body's force;
we spoonfeed our adorable remorse,
like whores or beggars nourishing their lice.
Our sins are mulish, our confessions lies;
we play to the grandstand with our promises,
we pray for tears to wash our filthiness;
importantly pissing hogwash through our styes.
The devil, watching by our sickbeds, hissed
old smut and folk-songs to our soul, until
the soft and precious metal of our will
boiled off in vapor for this scientist.
Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad,
and each step forward is a step to hell,
unmoved, through previous corpses and their smell
asphyxiate our progress on this road.
Like the poor lush who cannot satisfy,
we try to force our sex with counterfeits,
die drooling on the deliquescent tits,
mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry.
Gangs of demons are boozing in our brain—
ranked, swarming, like a million warrior-ants,
they drown and choke the cistern of our wants;
each time we breathe, we tear our lungs with pain.
If poison, arson, sex, narcotics, knives
have not yet ruined us and stitched their quick,
loud patterns on the canvas of our lives,
it is because our souls are still too sick.
Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice,
gorillas and tarantulas that suck
and snatch and scratch and defecate and fuck
in the disorderly circus of our vice,
there's one more ugly and abortive birth.
It makes no gestures, never beats its breast,
yet it would murder for a moment's rest,
and willingly annihilate the earth.
It's BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.
You know it well, my Reader. This obscene
beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine—
you—hypocrite Reader—my double—my brother!
– Robert Lowell, tr.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Blowfly Grass
Monday, September 29, 2008
Purring
The internet says science is not sure
how cats purr, probably
a vibration of the whole larynx,
unlike what we do when we talk.
Less likely, a blood vessel
moving across the chest wall.
As a child I tried to make every cat I met
purr. That was one of the early miracles,
the stroking to perfection.
Here is something I have never heard:
a feline purrs in two conditions,
when deeply content and when
mortally wounded, to calm themselves,
readying for the death-opening.
The low frequency evidently helps
to strengthen bones and heal
damaged organs.
Say poetry is a human purr,
vessel mooring in the chest,
a closed-mouthed refuge, the feel
of a glide through dying.
One winter morning on a sunny chair,
inside this only body,
a far-off inboard motorboat
sings the empty room, urrrrrrrhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhh
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
When I Call
As I talk to her,
I like to think of
our paperback copy
of Thomas More's
Utopia sitting
on the phone table.
No one reads Utopia
No one has ever
read Utopia
No one has ever
wanted to read
Utopia, not
even Thomas More.
The only action
it will ever see
is when she absently
flips its pages while
she talks to me . When
I call, I like to
think of her doing that.