Monday, July 23, 2012

Danger in color

Yellow postit notes and unfurled legal pads sit before me, maize numbers on my football jersey, in a pattern that is not a pattern. A pattern only because there is no other yellow in this section of the library. Because we look for patterns and when you look for something you will find it right where you expect it to be.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Pointing skyward

Minarets like masts on the ship of countrymen headed to a coast jutting tall buildings upward, so that in their past, their present and their future, they obsess with tearing through the sky's filament.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Our maiden voyage lands

The red light from the radio while we are wrapped in 4a.m. black a beacon for us to come home from the storm, a 90s ensemble playing us in.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Why I find it hard to write today

The dog licks the puppy bites the dog fights with the puppy draws blood from the dog limps away with head bowed from the puppy whines like a teakettle at the cat claws at the patio blinds to get the attention of the puppy pounces the glass doors to get the attention of the cat licks his genitals, ignores the dog watches the puppy terrorize the dog watches the cat lick his genitals.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Classrooms as a social activity

Reb1rth is not some scribbled dead sea scroll markered on a particle board school desk in first period. It is the student from second period who considers what has been written so that it saturates her understanding of geometrical theorems, of Chaucer, of the Trail of Tears and women burning in shirtwaist factories. A word that means practically nothing but connects her to some sleepy and irritated boy with blaring headphones in  a way he will never consider. A boy who sniffs fumes from the permanent marker, black, which he used to lazily scribe the capital letters and number 1 in place of i.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Things you can't take back

To protect the pathetic little naked tree from the winter squalls who blanket the city in bitterness, you have to keep all the pathetic little naked branches from snapping off.  You'll need those for later, after the unending storm.

Old loves, new adventures!

We'll take a trip to P5
Nice little venture
New Horizons
Navigating our way
Through thick ebon
Pinprick Earth
Suns
Settle in
Where moons are
Dwarfed by Methane Gleam
Pluto at the
Center
of our
Gravity-tugged
Hearts

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Hair stylist who uses Manic Panic/an evening in

Electric Banana in afternoon
Wildfire at dusk
Decorative hedge
Hitchhiked sand spur
Drawn muslin
An upside down salad bowl
Salad
Straight flush
Sheets ruffled
Raven black after midnight

Monday, July 9, 2012

Thy festering gums as catalyst

The kind of thing you want to say with a dental drill leaned into your darkest cavities. You are now paying for your excesses, the dentist reminds you as he wipes his brow on his sky blue scrubs sleeve, checks the gold watch set in his bush of arm hair. The kind of thing you want to open wider to shriek, a tribal howl as you gag on your own tongue and he scrapes bits of meat from your molars. "Spit," he says. But you find yourself speechless without pain to compel confession.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Timelines

Fingers set in motion down her back, down his back, parallel lines. Skin fissures, primordial pulling of time's edges together, volcanic pressure builds new life from the puddle of its prehistoric predecessors, and finally he fits into the curving lines of her back in the hidden dark edges of the universe.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Mark 16:17-18

Rain batters a church's tin roof and the bayou creeps up, moccasins like a hundred ripples in the mud. In times of flood, the congregants hold on to faith that kills.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Warm pillow, cool pillow

A fear of death, but that is really a fear of other things. A fear of not remembering a saltwater smell on a Gulf coast. A fear of disembodiment, a loss of warm breath settling on my neck. A fear of blindness, deafness, muteness. Impossible to wake up and find you still pressed into the pillow beside me.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Day for patriots

So we cannot forget the bitter taste of gunpowder on our tongues.
So we may sweat alcohol, through our shirts, shoulder to shoulder, beneath fiery rain.
So we may illuminate the faces of our sons with sparks, as if God, shooting from their very hands.
So hot, the other children's faces are invisible beyond the tips of their lit instruments.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

A seafarer's idea of faith

Tidal inertia pulls flotsam away from the wreck, a matter of prayer.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Kinetic teakettle

The teakettle's spout has been left open as it sits on the cool stove top burner. One of the many things it is not currently doing is boiling water for tea, though this is only one of many things it is not doing.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Wonderful ride

The world literally shakes beneath and we clutch as it hurtles around, weeeeeee!