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Adverse Verse
May. 14th, 2008
08:53 pm - a little tale that popped in my head after eavesdropping on people at Starbucks today (unfinished)
"On a different note," Kylie said, scanning the other coffee lovers quickly, swirling her caramel macchiato with a smooth hand motion, "I'm glad you helped Deb with the cats."
"You, me and likely most of the neighborhood." I sipped my green tea. Still too hot. It was late, a Friday night, rainy, and cooler than May ever should be. "The stench had reached that point of alarm."
"Did she at least have them in a bag?" Kylie liked to direct our conversations, as I'd always controlled our levels of interaction. I often wondered if she made notes in advance, if she rehearsed a draft script of the witty things she might work into our chit chat.
"In separate bags all in a storage bin. I think she intended to bury the bin like a coffin. I opted to empty the...contents into the grave."
"Interesting. How deep did you have to dig?"
"You're changing the subject." I reached across the table and flipped one of her blonde curls, which despite being a touch wild, worked with the navy suit coat and above the knee skirt she'd worn to work and still wore even though I knew she'd been home from work. "What's with this?"
"I saw my namesake's latest video on the internet and felt inspired." She snapped her head sideways, tossing the curls back behind her ears and shoulders without a tucking move. Impressive. "What did you dig it with?
"A shovel. Four shovels actually. I'm not sure why she has that many."
"Or if that's even the sum total of her shovel arsenal."
I gave her an eyebrow arch with, "Who are you, Chris Claremont?"
"You wretched boy." She laughed a little, then, "I can't help being curious. A backyard pet funeral isn't something I've ever experienced."
"If you weren't so existentially sterile...."
"Oh lord. First, I prefer austere." Spoken by a woman whose home interior was all white, only mirrors on the walls, with dark cherry, brushed gray metal, and chocolate leather everything broken only by the chrome in the kitchen. Our mutual friends referred to her townhouse as The Lab. "Second, who the hell uses the word existential in casual conversation?"
"We're talking about death." Which was weird to say, as until Kylie's questions I hadn't really thought of Deb's cats in terms of death. I saw and related to her grief, but that seemed more about the loss of a companion. Not 3 aged cats with a bad habit of jaywalking.
I'd had no pets since my teen years, when my dog Barley disappeared the day after his 10th birthday. I always wondered if the cake I gave him made him sick. If sensing his fate he'd fled the house some distant spot in the city in which to die. Or perhaps he'd been struck by a car. I hoped then and now that he didn't suffer.
"We were," Kylie said, pausing to sip her drink through the green straw, "until you tried to hijack it."
I tried the tea again. Ah, just right. "The grave was about 30 inches deep."
"Oh wow."
"Only took a few minute to dig. It was wide too. I didn't want to dig too deep because it was muddy and I knew we were going to plant the forsythia on top, thus leaving us with extra dirt to pile on top and let settle."
"Those are pretty bushes. It'll make a nice memorial."
"And a shady spot for the other animals."
Apr. 14th, 2008
07:39 pm - a rare poem as opposed to all my friends only entries of late
There is this...that song called it grandeur...but
it’s bigger than that word intends,
bigger than me, than us. Bigger than we can understand or intend
in our gelatinous heads of chemical stains and elusive electric currents.
Even as I guess it’s like
the weight of the sea pressed against a sky already punctured by the mountains.
How does it resist? All that invisible spinning. That grandeur.
I have sensed it...though indirectly...
much like a mother knows her son’s secrets.
Smelled it in the unfolding of a rose’s petals, in that aroma unique.
Then blurred by a hummingbird’s hover. Or exploding
in a climactic minute, my own little big bang, creating...maybe
someone’s new universe.
But I do not and cannot know what it is.
I am incapable, with insufficient scale.
Its nature will always elude me until I rejoin it.
No matter how I name it.
No matter how I write it. Grandeur
Yet pertinent is how I discuss it and its infinities,
so nuanced...much like a Monet, more impenetrable with increase inspection
and given to fits of biography. Small stories
rising from the sea, hoping for the sky.
Jan. 11th, 2008
09:39 pm - a point, but it won't be clear to y'all for a while
Loot couldn't remember
where he left the puppy
when he left the house.
Chasing his dad down the driveway
but he should know better
about that puppy with his short legs.
Jan. 1st, 2008
08:22 pm - random stanzas that I'm working out in words tonight, while watching The Biggest Loser
Mother crawls through the dirt up the hill into the blue sky.
Daughter drags her back down the slope because her legs have the rigidity of rope.
(That rhyme was indeed meant to make it sound less sad.)
Mother's ass smooths the loose earth with its skidding roundness.
Sliding with less speed she could turn coal crumbs into sparkling diamond sprinkles.
* * * * *
Ring of some new words
(Should I conjugate 9 syllable verbs?)
and I read with no apprehension
against the building tension.
(Doesn't make sense? Try
remembering the rush of the New.)
If I can find a friend in the kilobytes
I may realize life can be full of filled mights.
* * * * *
All this mass must too pass.
Weigh less way down, down, down to the ground
as you vomit
water and bodily acids.
From behind tears she tells of a hurt
she wrapped around her fat
when she left him
obese and obstinate, though he knew better her love,
clearly.
* * * * *
Mama worries that she will be the heavy
sending Son to the bottom and thus
to the home that is an empty barn.
They graze over the greens, going
for the grains instead, hopped full of what God
did not create, even if he made it possible.
Dec. 27th, 2007
10:11 pm - beginning of something I've had in mind for a while, the order is not sensible yet
She was the space between his words.
She gave his elaborate sentences pace and pauses appropriate.
She allowed him to be read and thus well received.
Else his frothy ideas might foam and run on like dyslexic Pynchon.
Else she might have to be noticed another way.
Else they might not be together.
Her existential blankness was never before as useful.
Her usefulness was a new long coat she wore weather regardless and safely cinched.
Her hair she rolled nightly and kept shoulder length against her head's unsure shape.
He was too engaged in his word work to appreciate her.
He often wrote successively larger words.
He remained unconscious to their precipitously innocuous nature in disseminating a germane point.
She smiled frequently, so as to widen her placement for periods.
She laughed rarely, as too much space resembles a typo.
She loved him, because what else could she do with her additional heartbeats.
Sometimes he hugged her at a party, causing her sweaty armpits.
Sometimes she lost their page, proving two drinks could trample a checkpoint barricade.
Sometimes they disagreed, but like squirrels always took it back to the branches.
She asked questions via eyebrow punctuation.
She liked that he was (at least in this manner) intuitive, regardless of his lumbering otherwise.
She once tried blinking Morse code.
His breath often smelled of chocolate
His contradictions were quite Catholic despite his being Presbyterian.
His eloquence was a child in need of her rearing.
Without her, he was a farmer with perfect weather, always working.
Without that tap on the shoulder or tug at the sleeve, he blathered like the worst of C-Span.
Without
They should not have worked.
They were the oil and salt in a box of pasta's bath.
They were gestalt at its finest.
She watched his words go by, but did she listen?
She thought
____________________
©2007
Dec. 25th, 2007
09:27 pm - Do yourself a favor and go see
The Great Debaters.
I chuckled.
I experienced tense moments.
I cried a couple of times.
Never mind its ultimate predictability.
Just enjoy it. It's wonderful.
As much as it pains me to support anything Oprah, I must recommend this movie.
Dec. 11th, 2007
09:34 pm - Keeping on a comic book note
Earlier today, I talked 2 different people into reading Watchmen.
Now if I could just finish Chicken With Plums.
08:58 am
In a fit of boredom this morning between reading resumes for a search committee I'm on - I took one of those personality quizzes - which X-man are you most like - I've taken these before and come back as Cannonball and Gambit on separate occasions - This quiz was quite extensive and as always I answered as honestly as possible in the given moment's frame of mind - It told me I was most like Emma Frost - I would so not settle for Scott Summers.
Nov. 22nd, 2007
11:09 pm - an idea that...well, damned if I know...it's like a looped beat or 2..this is UNFINISHED
Give me thanks for witty words
and I'll spread my kudos for typewriters, galleries, blogs and antibiotics.
Send me love in the form of a fit man
and I'll spread his ass cheeks for certain delight.
Promise me an end of uncertainty
and I'll speak of the tales I have a tendency to keep
secret.
Yes, I broke the way I was doing it. No,
it will not ruin it.
A poet says not me-
narrative character, voice of the word god, siren from the sea's murk
from which lurks the minor characters,
anemones on the backs of scallops
the poet chews like tardy hors d'oeurvres.
Give me the main course
and I'll spread the scraps round the room,
in the faces of all the silly women with their mouths slobbering silly tales.
I will not speak of tales I keep
sealed like medicines
fit only for the near dead. Imagine
the zombie readers stumbling from their homes
drooling the blood of brains burst.
That would ruin it.
____________________
©2007
Nov. 8th, 2007
08:01 pm
I am the tired of a runner's fatigue
pinching ankles as the right knee creaks at quarter bend.
The rabid imbalance of a bone spur in the left foot.
Leg hair in articulate swirls from the drying sweat.
Not nearly as salty as me.
I trick thirst into hunger and dull the memory active.
____________
©2007
Oct. 29th, 2007
10:58 pm - some progress....still no title in mind, which is odd...
I gathered my lovers into a rectangular room. Lovers even though I care for a very few.
I layered them from back to front based on the bounce of each ass as my hips struck.
Such a measurement I would remember well beyond recalling a name. Calibration
of what mattered most even in a post 9/11 world of sanity, sanctity and safety.
Safety in cooked numbers, such as the total of said lovers. More than I should admit
but fewer than I do. It is the trickiest slight of hand. Four hat rabbits instead of two.
My ratio far saner, of course, but the room remained full even as the false faded.
This gathering not a moment of reckoning, merely retrospection. To consider who was,
who could be again, who should not have initially been. Those poor wallflowers.
Wilting toward death, though post-actualized rejection was clearly less traumatic.
I should have also gathered who was not. A certain lien against my seeming success
dividing down my efforts expended, leaving me emotionally illiterate. With a zero note.
A blank page on which I could write the worth of urges and actions, but no gains.
No ticking of names, souls or smiles, no personalities that buoy interactive substance.
Chemistry may demand careful amounts, but from lovers you can only extract magic
or something like the flat taste of day old soda from a open can. I trafficked in six packs.
I stacked their cans and struck the piles. Like fires I lit them from the bottom, burning up.
_________________
©2007
Oct. 26th, 2007
09:33 pm - hmm, more later perhaps
I gathered my lovers into a rectangular room. Lovers even though I care for a very few.
I layered them from back wall to front based on the bounce of each ass as my hips struck.
Such a measurement I would remember well beyond recalling a name. Calibration
of what mattered most even in a post 9/11 world of sanity, sanctity and safety.
Safety in cooked numbers, such as the total of said lovers. More than I should admit
but fewer than I do. It is the trickiest slight of hand. Four hat rabbits instead of two.
My ratio far saner, of course, but the room remains full even as the false fade.
The gathering not a moment of reckoning, merely retrospection. To consider what was,
what could be again, what should not have been in the first place. Those poor wallflowers.
Wilting slopes toward death, thought post-actualized rejection is clearly less traumatic.
________________________
©2007
Oct. 13th, 2007
10:05 am - Transcripts of the poems featured at the FList show, in case people are coming here from there.
The Dominatrix of Abu Ghraib
© 2007
She thinks in volatile lines tonight.
Lines about young soldiers and the pornography of death,
of desire dismembered and digitally preserved.
For a mind warps in war.
Forgets home for the idea of it.
Forgets love for the lust of it.
Lust as swollen, hot, and bloody as that man splattered across the sidewalk -
his wide-eyed head on a pink pillow of spleen and duodena.
His fingers scattered, pointing in ten directions and
glowing alert red. Pointing perhaps at former friends
able to dodge the ultimate orgasm of his dynamite vest.
It’s all on glorious self destruct as if...as if
hoping against good and God.
As if the Devil dances in Babylon.
Oh but to employ this unilateral distraction requires that thumbs up attraction
magnified like a fire fed gas,
throwing smoke as dense and heavy as two millennia of guilt.
Guilt like photographs of naked prisoners, bound and stacked.
Images meant to sicken turned into sex.
Jesus Loves Me
© 2007
Oh but I forgot to believe in Jesus.
A simple, pertinent, intentional and understated lapse.
Judgement being more His gig than mine.
Picture then my shock and awe
when last night I rolled over to cuddle my pillow
and crotch grabbed the Christ instead.
I fully expected Him to disintegrate my head.
Delineate though His pertinent intention:
Why have you forsaken me?
Because Judas told me you're a top too.
Of course he took offense to that one
and shrank my dick by an inch.
Oh Jesus, why do you care?
Because I do, He said, sliding under the sheet.
Convenient for a god to justify it so.
To cozy in against my sin.
And then he lay there, keeping my eyes
like the true lover He could never be to me.
You’re wrong there, He said.
Capitulating I kissed Him, full on the lips,
my tongue eager against His teeth.
When He kissed me back...damn, no nectar so sweet.
Who’d have thought, I mused,
finally putting my pillow in its place,
and instigating His expert embrace
as we spooned the night away.
Oct. 11th, 2007
09:18 pm - Post Punch
You've a contusion inside out.
Red instead of blue, bump instead of slump.
But still remains that sinking feeling, a nausea
calculated by autonomous chemicals ionized
by synaptic response to excessive directed impact.
How did this happen? No I don't want to feel it.
Like a snake's slither, imagination is sensation enough.
Was there purpose behind this? Was it an invention
of intention as sinister as that snake's glassy, deceptive eyes?
Yes I know their eyes are fake. That's rather the point.
I could forgive you clumsy or drunk. And violence
is an idiot's answer. I've no measure of your mind's volume capacity.
But on initial inspection you should be spilling profusely,
steaming in this evening's specific October chill. Smell that?
Dry leaves remind me of nursing homes, though less antiseptic.
A salve...perhaps baptism in hydrogen peroxide, or better
than that silly jelly, a dog's tongue. You've heard that?
My grandfather swore by it and he knew hurt outside in
the sun, under a testy heifer's hoof, by a nest of yellowjackets
disliking the taste of diesel. He walked through the yard
with his shoes untied, confusing the honeybees.
What pills will aid? Is there a tourniquet for your condition?
Better I drop a rock on the spot and hope the polarity reverses.
For while I'm back to those honeybee, pondering Grandpa's magic,
I have enough ice to pack against your obtuse swell.
________________________
©2007
Oct. 10th, 2007
10:41 pm
There's something lacking in your comprehension.
You're on the precipice of a bad decision
with the hot air of talking currently supporting your place.
Someone pauses for a breath and you may fall to your death.
Loose gravel is only a friend to hot rods and dirt bikes.
You're quite far from anything concrete.
___________________
©2007
Oct. 9th, 2007
04:01 pm - pop up lines - recording for later use - maybe
Should I lead the way through a room of lead
rather than heed the warnings in my head
from a pressure you've not known, though you surely own the knot
my stomach insists on twisting into, making me thin too,
as I cannot eat as fully as I might want.
___________
©2007
Sep. 24th, 2007
07:27 pm - initial snippet
This is my pussy mix.
Vagabond mashup like a scissor stance crisscrossing the dance floor in vogue with a greater beat.
Simple moving romance.
Even a hike dyke could do it in her jeans and flannel,
though naked and sweaty she'd be.
The scratching you learn from experience.
Sep. 22nd, 2007
10:35 am - very rough, initial ideas
James Meets the Gentleman Motorcyclist
I knew him as Reinhart, wishing
he wore a helmet, not a silk-stitched fedora.
James named him Ray, skipping
weather and neighborhood (so unCincinnati)
for the bike. "Tell me about this rocket."
Ray's lashes wagged and he unbuttoned
his suit jacket like Jimmy Stewart
about to make a point, fist to hip, retro athletic,
his midsection flatter than I'd thought.
But then, my father is fat, and James
enjoys concocting better characters
from the mostly boring populace.
I call it his O'Conner complex. (The Cliftonite Tales.)
He calls Ray dapper later, after laughing madly
for the four rides around the block near dusk.
"It's a Sportster 1200L. Couple years old."
James liked that his bone white suit matched the fuel tank.
Sep. 20th, 2007
09:30 pm - Allergies
He let slip a week.
Apparently a few words
abandoned his hive.
Buzz stuck in the snot
and draining backscratch of his
shiny uvula.
Holler and you will
see it, dangling, mucus
in wait behind it.
He let slip a cough,
spewing small balls, oh so blue
to keep it quiet.
09:10 pm - beginning of something....
My lover claimed his name was Prince. Despite being white, blond, fat and not a fake-child of Michael Jackson. Yes, he possessed paunch enough to make a turbo V6 struggle on a straightaway.
I met him at a wedding reception. At which he was thinner, less tan. A mere month previous. Just another hot June Friday night at the country club I'd never afford. Like B characters in a chick flick we reached simultaneously for the same champagne flute.
He laughed. I reached for another. We toasted the bride, though he was her brother's random date. Alone equals lonely at a wedding. Hence I was at the open bar chatting up another man's lean, aryan seating arrangement filler.
Having never met said bride, he asked me if I knew her favorite song. I informed him I was the type of gay who knew her orgasm axis. Songs are the forte of sorority sisters and drunken pub crawls.
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