Archive for the ‘Creative Writing’ category

When you’re a snow sculpture you end up

January 8th, 2010

Taj Mahal Ice Sculpture 2having some serious trepidation
about the weatherman’s calls for rain

you end up standing alone beside
burning buildings and feeling
merely out of place

you find yourself making myths
about the gooey innards you’d keep rhythm by
when the night goes silent
and your boots become pieces
of the stiff and sleeping ground

you start to wonder whether you may have been
a river or an ocean
full of squishy squeaky struggling life

or whether your forebears had
the good sense to send you
any hidden message about your ultimate bright wet meaning

or some signal that you could
someday make yourself
the stolid limbs of some hardy bush
secure in knowing that they remain connected
to something, somewhere,
when the sun comes out and shows you anything.

The disturbing truth

January 8th, 2010

Self-Portraitis that we are disturbed,
that this is normal,
all these lonely nights
and private sufferings;
the whole order
of buildings and bureaucracies
are boundaries
around minds perpetually on the brink
of madness, loathing,
stark tears and uncontrollable anger,
all ordinary,
matters of course,
terrifying in their relentless
presence in our lives,
terrifyingly thin protections
against everyday psychosis,
against life that can never be lost
because it’s never had,
against sentences undeserving of punctuation
that we give our commas and question marks
out of nothing more than hope
that the love we imagine
might be more than hunger,
that something is ultimately sensical
in a universe that writhes and pulses with us,
rocks crashing against one another
and order in chaos
and chaos and chaos
and dead emptiness.

» Read more: The disturbing truth

There are demons at the window

August 6th, 2005

great aimless ones
who can become
disillusioned on sidewalks,
who can read footsteps aloud
in spurts of music,
who bring dreams like bread and wine.

At night I stay in
and beat against my windows with brooms,
crouching alone inside,
waiting for angels of pestilence.
» Read more: There are demons at the window

And the reality Between the motion

July 14th, 2005

I can’t sleep tonight
because the bad moon ever.

Because the far dream.

I can’t make a hat
that can hold the lot of us;
it’s hot in here and loud
and cold crystal out in space—
I can’t drift out here,
can’t sleep tonight.
» Read more: And the reality Between the motion

I Seem To Be A Verb

August 5th, 2004

I started in the swelter downtown, finding a perch on the stairs by the college and smoking cheap Columbian cigarettes in big hot gulps. Miami in the dog days is humid like the sky is leaning in on you, and everyone is foreign to everyone else. You watch them: a group of Cuban girls wearing brightly-colored nothing, swinging their hips as they go by; a red, sun-burnt beggar, claims he’s from Alaska, waiting for his sister to wire him some funds and any little bit would help in the meantime, really; an old man in soot-dusted purple robe, his whole hair a single defiant dreadlock, shuffling around corners waving his hands to the sides in rhythm with his curses and invocations. Somehow foreign isn’t ever foreign enough: you know these people, every one. Their weirdness is mere weirdness, is familiar. Mystery is what we crave, what we go out looking for, what we spend our lives waiting for. Even when we’ve given up, the habit of it is what causes us to rise each morning.
» Read more: I Seem To Be A Verb

and leading in every direction

July 6th, 2004

der Schöpfer,
sans l’adresse
e senza un numero di telefono

only a paper-trail
in omnis lingua
και καθοδηγώ μέσα κάθε κατεύθυνση.

The Structure of a Revolution

June 6th, 2004

“Reality is an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one.”

-Albert Einstein

I flip the pieces ’round themselves
in temper-fits that last for days—
and while it’s true I tell the truth,
it’s only in the thoughtful ways:

the green the pastures tell the cars
as they go by in smoky fog
and revel in the passersby
in burnt out ends of salted hog

is just the sort of self-defeating
admiration of itself
that paints a blue sky out from under
silky black and endless bog!

You see? the pieces fit each other
across the bread in marmalade;
the truth is only true so often
that when it is, I am afraid.

I don’t really care

June 2nd, 2004

that much about
the pressing issues,
the wars and revolutions,
all universe falling apart
and coming together,

and all of us,
the flesh of us,
going crazy and
coming off the bone—

I’m really a lot
more interested in music,
in the gentleness of thought,
the way in dreams
we find we
stroke the hair of angels,
assign them names that,
while beautiful, can never be true again,
names we’ll never even
remember.

I don’t really care
about the government—
it’ll never work
and they’ll never stop trying;
I wish that all the voters
and the soldiers
and the lovely meter maids
would come and lay with me
with open mouths.

2-part epoxy

October 31st, 2003

You need that second part
when the first part
isn’t sticky enough—

for those really tough jobs,
you know? Like trying
to build a nest
or film a movie—

things you might have
conceptual difficulties with
when you’re on your own