Category: Poetry

NaPoWriMo 2015 — I: The Swallow

Near and dear to our trough and crest wavelength
sits a swallow of indeterminate proportion
(likely due to a lack of perspective).

It coos the way only a swallow can,
taking all of its learning into account—
that’s right, all twenty-seven hours and sixteen minutes
of learning administered by its very own mother
before unexpectedly losing nest privileges.

Every note tinged with sorrow
for losing its childhood home,
the swallow innately understands
that tragedy begets beauty. So it belts.

It takes all the air it can possibly pull
into its feathery balloon body
and churns it into the equivalent of church,
every chance it gets.

It sings along with everything it hears,
understanding the whirr and the hum
of all life around it.

It nestles between the blankets of noise
it’s always encountering, placing harmony in chaos.

Few swallows have been given
the gift of self-awareness,
and this one dreams of being a performer.

Every day it sits on a wire by itself
in a crowded urban-industrial area
for the sole purpose of chasing away its demons
with interactive improvisation. And damn, is it good.

Overconsumption and Overcompensation

The sugar packet parlor gleamed with artificial charm
in the dull summer haze we call liberty.
Somewhere, somehow, someone knows a better way
to portion sugar.

Today, however,
nobody made an effort to explain the intricacies
of our package-centric society,
the landfill-clogging generation
content to leverage children
for bleach bottles.

Doesn’t nature have its own ingenious packaging
already set in motion?

We obtained our paper and plastic
from butchering the landscape and its inhabitants
and dumping their carcasses into vast piles

of
overconsumption
and overcompensation
for our lacking wits.

Sorry, Crowface

Stitch witch Fernandez, folly smell polly otter britches for the love of how many lost sailors in the sea of temerity and sometimes regretful lust? Who doesn’t associate sailors with regretful lust these days anyway? Those poor ladies and gents take a pill and forget their troubled soda fountain fantasies, being king and queen at the prom, being king and queen at the prison camp, being king and queen at nothing at all. But they must tell themselves they are king and queen at everything in particular, or the PTSD will sink in, groaning bottlecaps of philosophy until there’s nothing left to them and to all their dedicated brethren, shackled to jingle bell fury (not unlike bongo fury, just around the Winter months with tinsel). Oh, those poor intrepid wanderers of the human invertebrate psyche, those who develop thoughts according to their predestiny, their density assured for at least three tours of duty. And nobody cares anyway. They’re all wondering how they can somehow stand out amongst the other clowns, the sick practitioners of boredom for aesthetics’ sake, those poor intrepid sailors who think they’re taking life by the horns; they don’t understand.

What? Oh, nothing. I was just sharpening a shoehorn and calling it my mother. Move along, nothing to see here, crowface. I’m sorry, crowface is insensitive. Raven countenance suits you better? Okay, I’ll remember that from now on.

Thinking Such Lovely Sights

Powdered telltale foghorns love our indecisions, oh don’t they though? They laugh at us through cheeky grins of early incandescence, pretty little snitches bitching anyway they may for the sake of everything larger than the scale of a matchbox car. Ha, if only they knew the folly of thinking such lovely sights and telling such lovely frights to the neighbors.

The Remainder: All That’s Left — Excerpt 7

Narrow your scope for just a second of your life, would ya? It certainly wouldn’t kill you, and you might just learn something from focusing on single subjects for longer than sixteen minutes. Wouldn’t that be just awful if you learned more than the basic tutorial level of any activity you’d ever think of practicing? Imagine: you’re sitting on the shore of the Pacific (California, probably), eyeing the waves and hoping that about six short shifts of that pesky tide will yield some whoppers.

Burgers aside, we need to figure out what to do with this chimney sweeper’s moustache. It fell right off his face, straight into the soot. I wouldn’t have noticed it, though out of the corner of my eye I saw the wax glimmer with a sheen never seen in coal nor creosote. No ordinary object is this, I said to myself as I crouched and recovered the hallowed hair, somehow bound together at the roots, meant to transplant and land on any face it so chooses.

But why did you pick a chimneysweep? Is there something about his person that draws you to warm his lip? Is he more sensitive? Does he tell good stories? Will you ever let me know, or are you just going to smirk at me like that while I rip my hair out?

The Remainder: All That’s Left — Excerpt 4

Wherein the nights have a stretch memory,
we scan the horizon for a peek of sanity;
none to be found, we hitch a saddle to the moon.

It’s all empty, we just have air up there.
It’s like an attic, just covered with hair.
Kind of bulbous (as Beefheart would say),
fast and bulbous. Got me?

More than an homage, this is necessary for the advancement of strangekind everywhere, the liberties inherent in my birth and subsequent rearing as a beaten beat poet taking candy from strangers because they seem to have the best packaging and marketing strategies. Whoop dee doo for all my grotesque neighbors, seemingly unaware that what they inhabit is more a grid of profane propaganda pushers on every facet of what used to be proclaimed by a proud and noble people as life at large.