poems

i cannot drink or play chess
like my uncle, who wandered drunk
around Paris in the 80s 
in search of those unlucky enough to fall	
into his checkered spider trap.

he made his living drinking
& gambling his wits, his skill,
his charm.  he won oysters & caviar,
duck confit, an apartment 
in montmartre.

i cannot drink or play chess like my uncle.
i make my living on luck, on happenstance,
on fate-- which has a lot to do with my face
which has a lot to do 
with my mothers face.

for in me is generations 
of lithe beauty, lithe youth
as a new flower on the old
vine, a fruit of roots, expatriates
from america, from belgrade,
entwined & hybridized
with the native french.

i wish i were a fly trap 
of chess & wine like my uncle.
to be male & persistent, to take love
& life instead of merely receiving it...

perhaps i will start playing chess,
perhaps i will become a perfect 
flower, both sexes
on the vine.

I cannot drink or play chess


[A found-poem from Dylan Thomas' A Hunchback in the Park]

A woman figure without fault
stands in the night straight
as a young elm all day
until Bell time.

In the unmade park, the wild boys
followed the hunchback in the dark. 
"Mister, hey mister," the truant boys called,
running out of sound-

"let water enter; like park birds,
come early; roar on the stones 
among the willow."

He came early.  
He sat down.
Nobody chained him up. 
He ate bread from a newspaper, and drank.

Sunday somber bell (Dylan Thomas found poem)

[Haiku Erasure poem from Dylan Thomas'
   I Haved Longed to Move Away]


  I have longed to move
but am afraid of echoes
  burning on the ground,

  for there are old lies
of terrors and ghostly cries
  to some life unspent--
  
  The parting leaves me
half-blind; to fall after lips
  pursed and crackling.

Dylan Thomas haiku erasure

i am trapped
in a child's body- 
clothed, but ripe
for picking. i prune 
my cheeks
plump.

fresh-flesh,
plum-oiled
& weighted 
off the branch,
eat. with you, i shall be
bitten clean.

ripe

The flood's screeching melts the earth, and the typhoon bastions break from the south blue cloud. Torrid water up to the neck and still, we went to see the deluge.  We went to see the monsoon that could have ended Noah and his flock and fleet, and we saw him, we saw him and his blood soaking bone wet and bewildered in devotion.

Ha, devotion! Ha, love! Unending anguish. Death is calling upon the mighty hand and we are drowned in the storms.  The sea sings, crying in its grief and chained in its shackles, beating  against the unyielding stone its fists, its foam, its spittle, and the bodies of the drowned ones.  My thirst is not quenched by unbending Time, my thirst is not quenched by the unending torment of the sea.  My thirst is not quenched by my own love strangled.  

Who is the devoted? Who are the living ones?  When Divinity is dying into its smallest atom and the mind's lotus flounders black and blue in the pond of autumn, we find ourselves lost in the darkness of our caves, and leave our shelters to seek the colors outside, unfounded and false.  The leaves of the trees shudder in the wind as God's breath sighs at our ignorance.  The Raven shrieks, calling:

O small ones!  O runts of the world! Find your caves.  Burrow in the corners of the earth or in the hallway of the sea.  And see that the floods escape you, and the torrents abate at your cries. And the drowned men shall throw you pearls, salted pearls as wedding gifts within the whale, for the little ones, the afraid ones, the ones who do not fight but drudge wearily to carry  the planks of the ark.

For it is these that are the weights of God- fear, obedience, patience, and prayer.  This the tempest whispers within the eye of the storm.   And when it is finished, the little ones, the newfound strong ones, the delirious ones, move forward foot by foot to stagger from the edge of the tide and gaze in wonder before them;  for above the stars gleam the hint of dawn, and  behind, in the watery footprints, glimmers the evidence of the Sun.

My grandmother has told me this
many times before: you weren't there
when I was born. You were
somewhere shooting pool,
while my mother screamed,
mostly alone. And I was born
into a sea of women, incubated 
like an egg, while you scratched. 
I've never understood your absence
then. You hoard children now,
like gemstones, even strange ones
you see at restaurants. And after
I was born, you wanted a son so 
desperately that you made one 
with another, kept a stranger, 
because my mother said no.
Half-brothers seem more
than half, connected, I think,
by that strange umbilical cord:
your deficient and obsessional
devotion. And though you broke us
all, still, you made a plan then; two, 
actually. For that, for planning, I am 
grateful. I wish today you could be found 
playing pool at a bar, winning or losing, thinking
you'd much rather be gone
than there, with something
you love too much 
to understand. Though what
is ignorant love worth? 
It was worth nothing. 
But now, you stare at me
blankly, like a child, helplessly 
unable to choose which to drink
first: the milk I've set down, 
or the water.

elegy for my father

By then it took three weeks to retrieve our wasted thoughts

And push them out like smoke from cigarettes.

Like smoke, our words vanished silently, leaving us wondering

At their invisibility.  If words so easily disappear, then what

of their mother?  Our hearts are like father and mother

both.  They give birth like a mother, they wed each other delirious,

humming quietly to smile, but most importantly our hearts leave

like a father:  your heart was forced, barred from mine and barring

itself,  because of a thing more certain than smoke:  choice.

poems

hailstormpixie