The Whisperers

Are you attracted to those with quiet voices,

soft speakers that make you lean

closer to hear their words? Their breath

beside your ear, they will not amp it up

because they know you want to listen: those,

do they bring the iron in your blood

up to the surface, creating bumps,

creating tingles, blushing thumbnails?

Do the stentorians push you away

with the gusts their lungs create?

Do you crawl on bleeding palms to reach

these whisperers, unconsciously self-confident,

shyness turned to charisma, like

a closed rose you know will open in the sun,

or even, naively, under a reading lamp?

Venus of Willendorf

She dangles

from your pine branch,

porous thighs generously slabbed,

her eyes germinated, her braids, her hands

small and forgotten and grasping.

You never touch her in anger,

but anyway her fat

would act

as a cocoon.

Soon

her shrine will crumble from decadence,

weighted down by gold, by lard:

spitted, rapidly charred,

her hoard

will melt and resolidify into wax,

her skin cracked.

Easily, reverently, she will be

ignited.

Black Irish

Your limbs are choppy: elbows that stutter,

and nervous, Morse-tap knees. They spell

our names in Ogham, incomprehensible.

And your eyes have been rinsed out again.

I should have guessed. You have mislaid

your ragged-winged umbrella, your mascara,

again, and I think again you lost your rings.

Crow, rasp your resined bow so that my down

jumps on edge, my teeth raze my words and then

we intersect again. This macadam, it begs

our cataracted soles, the starless scrape

of our cab's brake, our fingerprints, partings.

Sometimes, when I want to say something that I care a lot about, it's hard to physically shape the words and push them out of my larynx and oral cavity. It's like my body wants to shelter them, kind of like they are an egg that I want to lay but its shell isn't on yet. My body will only let the words out if the shell is on the egg, that is, if the words are protected by misdirection and not saying exactly what I mean. Because that protects the emotions inside, which are the yolk. I don't know, but it's hard for me to say things when I really mean them.

first snow

held in, not fully

formed until born,

spat out in shapes specifically and

caught

on hair coats gloves concrete so quickly melting:

this sleet, fleet

impermanence

The Squall

Unclarifying, merely muddling,

puddling,

I'm weather that never

ends, only pauses

like the whine of a newborn.

Sickly, almost sticky,

and pairing with wind to ram skins,

I am slick

and slippery, can be

insidious, residual. I

change all into fuzz and rust.

Eye-catching shine,

and those black wings I've snapped

broken. I'll wait

'til you think I've left. You forget

and go out without your boots on,

foregone, and

I'm not gone at all!

I make raincoats gain a hazy glaze

like snails;

I leave sidewalks undrained,

beating down

(downbeat).

And the buildings drip like sides of meat.

Tauromachy

Drag me up the roofs, bull,

push me through the floors;

I will break the boards,

stain the wood,

and when I try to shape my mouth

I blow a bubble with right angles:

I cannot speak but with my hands,

those roving birds that court south.

Oh, you are yoked, you are rooted,

but I have seen you chase vermilion,

your twin horns balancing oblivion,

your nimble hooves confused

and accidentally crushing.

I may spill the pail,

empty the grail

and still you will never end up with nothing.

Why would you need the filling of a lover?

I will be the one tipped over and cracked,

perhaps,

as your toes stay wreathed in clover.

10 Washington Place

Here are yellow curves,

orange cubes, a floor of suede

and dimmed reflections on the floor,

marbled. The stairs drop

like a Jacob's ladder. One wall

is shapely, the other bricked;

trios of lights harmonious,

seven suns, black-and-white and glorious.

Columns hold up the ceiling

like verbs, attached to phrases

at both ends. Speckles and

moving squares like adjectives,

decorative, and I can sit on these

nouns as if they were couches

and chairs. The walls glassed.

(Language, here, is glassed.)

A hushing building, the air filled

with invisible words, unyelled.

washington square after a rain

somehow the benches are dry,

somehow the world is pastels

and the clouds are soft, the

air is soft; somehow the

quiet pervades, pervades;

dogs are walked, smiles

are swapped (some brighter

than others, some bright

as the hiding, peeping sun);

and when somebody has a

diabetic seizure while he's

playing the guitar, cover

songs, the paramedics

come in the sleepy calm

of after-rain and move

unhurriedly, professionals

don't hurry... and meanwhile

the two men on the bench

next to mine, one white

and old, one black and young,

talk, too, unhurriedly; they talk

of children and of bedtimes

and of how no one wants to

have a seizure in the park when

it's such a nice day.

Yoga

New Age music is on in Coles and

the flabby women soon to be draping naked in the

locker room splay obscenely with heavy

rotten breaths beside you, cobra,

cat, pyramid, hold it --

breathe in, breathe out like a

moron -- nothing further from

exotic Gandhic philosophies thought up

in a language you don't read.

Perhaps if it were done

in a world pretending to be India --

asanas on East Fourteenth Street or on Canal Street,

put in the street vendors but

pay them to yell and to hawk,

arch the bridge in the middle of the intersection of

Houston East First and Avenue A with

taxicabs honking and bikes swerving surprised at the veering shapes of the street --

breathe in, breathe out.

Know that love can only be reached after you leap the channels of risk.

Man in a White Hat

Our lives

seeds in maracas, tapping...

 

Aged eyes, crinkled skin, black

man in a white hat, I

saw you helping the shrunken white zinnia, I saw you in

the library, I saw you again walking by;

 

when you said "hi" I felt nervous though I'd already smiled

that mouthless smile of glass girls five feet tall,

wallets uncasually guarded, black

man in a white hat coming from somewhere, feet leading, eyes watchful,

 

looking classy in that white hat.

While you are dreaming

While you are dreaming,

While you are awakening,

While you are standing on glistening tile,

While you are brewing,

While you are switching on the vent,

While you are reading headlines,

While you are filling in the two answers in the crossword that you know off the top of your head,

While you are stopping at a stop sign,

While you are running a stop sign,

While you are turning right at a red light,

While you are tapping your fingers on the steering wheel,

While you are reading the personalized license places,

While you are finding a song on the radio that you know,

While you are humming along because you don't quite know the words,

While you are parallel parking,

While you are working,

While you are worrying,

While you are making a call,

While you are laughing,

While you are looking at the menu,

While you are ordering,

While you are calculating tip,

While you are paying with your debit card,

While you are checking your watch,

While you are checking your email,

While you are feeling the breeze or lack of breeze against your cheek,

While you are thinking about the one you never called back,

While you are smoking a cigarette,

While you are whistling,

While you are driving home,

While you are narrowly avoiding an accident because somebody else ran a stop sign,

While you are cleaning your windshield with the wipers and the fluid so convenient,

While you are fumbling with your keys,

While you are microwaving,

While you are doing the dishes,

While you are flipping channels,

While you are examining hairs,

While you are undressing,

While you are unmaking the bed,

While you are making love,

While you are praying,

While you are sleeping and dreaming again...

 

All the while Niagara runs,

All the while Niagara falls,

The water changing color when it vaults into the air,

The roars of nature's forces colliding and combining,

Sometimes making rainbows, always making mist,

Greater than time, the celebration, the power unending.

 

 

 

Sagittarius

The way he grazes, unattainable,
Fingers clean and callused.

Running unbridled, walking on tiptoe,
Sleeping standing up.

He is a singer, he plays the guitar.
Neck so wide,

Calves so hairy, teeth so frank.
He rolls the joint, chews the roach:

Lazy glow,
Breast braced in the wind.

interlude : 3 poems by noah cicero

Noah Cicero's blog is one I've been following for a while now. It's worth checking out for his political views and extrapolations as well as for his unique, Youngstown voice in the world of writing.

The following are three short poems that Noah wrote; enjoy!

Obituary

Noah Cicero got a check
for 130 dollars
instead of buying food
he purchased cigarettes
and starved to death

Fortune

I once had dreams
of being a great man
now I dream
of fixing the fuel pump
on my car

The present

I'm overwhelmed by the present
some poets are overwhelmed
by boats
and juniper trees
but right now

I don't wanna talk about it

Auto-da-fé

A year has passed. This summer's a lot hotter
than the last. Do you remember when
you turned eighteen? Now I am eighteen, too.
I did it without you.

You ran out of butane not long ago, stopped
lighting me afire. I require
something greater now, something monstrous. I am leaping
into the pits and opposites of pits:

The city will sift me to ash.
The lasting flashes will reduce me
to a girl of marrow.

Cross-scheme experimentation from a few weeks ago

Sing out, whistle a tune for the world's end:
it rings in echoes, ripples and then fades,
like small things dropped into a well and watched
until they're gone. Zing! Beats like bent lightning bolts,
jagged, unsure, strings sent across a line
in different ways; sent strings, crossed messengers,
the lyric bent and limed, zinged in weird ways.
In a well-mannered way, the things behave
and then watch it all fall. The bells ring tolls,
end everything. Ragnarok. Muses, sing.

Dreams

This morning I wrote through to the last page of a notebook, a rare event in my life.
This notebook contains a couple of poems, raps, stories, and journal entries, but what it is primarily comprised of is dreams, transcribed in that half-awake, incoherent, coherent state of morning.
Paging through it, I found this entry from February 20th:

I lived next door to James Joyce. He had just recently died.
I woke up and water was lapping all the way up their house, halfway up my own window.
Huge waves.
It was just the Joyce house. I watched for a little bit.
I was going to call 911 but it didn't happen, but someone else eventually did.
I think the pets drowned.

old school, cold war

Peach pits sat in your lungs, your kidneys lingered.

And you were unlettered,
you could never read or write back to my letters.

Thumbing from your friends,
you skinny-legged child of bums and guns,
you never knew when you were wanted.

Sleeves too wide,
you eyed the hammer and sickle,
cocked the pistol,
let your fingers win it.



(a rewrite of this)

I tossed a rock onto the sand.
The moment it left my hand

I gave it up. It made no splashes,
settled before the crashes,

but when the sparkling water rose
my pebble changed Neptune's flows.

We trip gods with our crumbs.
The sea is moved by a slip of the thumb.