Thursday, December 24, 2009
sidenote
The formatting on the poems is different then how I intended, always. Which is definitely a bummer. So if you could read them as a run on sentence in your head, that'd be awesome.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
I guess this is what oh shit feels like (21)
tocsin/toxin
(the afternoon leaves my nails chewed and golden, but i swear
all this breakdown started with such potential)
tonight i am trying to fly on my cardboard and spraypaint wings and i just might
figure out the secret of uplift and rising, and i can, i totally can
if those guys over there will just put away their goddamn cameras
the reason i hung my ballet flats over the railing of the dormitory balcony in the first place
is because there's always a voice in the canyons of my head that tells me
if you bust all your crooked teeth, you'll be rendered perfect, weightless
this night is the first warning bell, softer than all the others.
tonight, i might be all magic but i don't know these people and i'm homesick
enough to go sit outside on the smokers bench and call my mother and cry
this is the first swallow of shame and it burns as it goes down and it's doled out in red plastic cups
(i'm trying to tell you the truth and the shape of things
but i'm afraid there aren't words for a truth like this,
a faith that makes you huddle in your closet and bawl and anyway,
most of the memories are a tangle of legs and pumpkin seeds
and it all smells like loreal hairspray and cigarettes.
the photos from last night reveal a distinct sensation of fluidity and grace
just restrained by the weight of misery-to-be)
i guess i'm in this here mess because i like striking matches and watching them almost,
but not quite burn my fingers, in the same way i like kissing girls whose last names
i don't need to know.
some people say that's a waste of matches and youth, but i'm eighteen
and there's arsenic in the water these days.
finally
stumbling down telegraph avenue, he tells me
angels are only good because they aren't buffeted by free will
and we'd all be so good, if we couldn't choose.
(the afternoon leaves my nails chewed and golden, but i swear
all this breakdown started with such potential)
tonight i am trying to fly on my cardboard and spraypaint wings and i just might
figure out the secret of uplift and rising, and i can, i totally can
if those guys over there will just put away their goddamn cameras
the reason i hung my ballet flats over the railing of the dormitory balcony in the first place
is because there's always a voice in the canyons of my head that tells me
if you bust all your crooked teeth, you'll be rendered perfect, weightless
this night is the first warning bell, softer than all the others.
tonight, i might be all magic but i don't know these people and i'm homesick
enough to go sit outside on the smokers bench and call my mother and cry
this is the first swallow of shame and it burns as it goes down and it's doled out in red plastic cups
(i'm trying to tell you the truth and the shape of things
but i'm afraid there aren't words for a truth like this,
a faith that makes you huddle in your closet and bawl and anyway,
most of the memories are a tangle of legs and pumpkin seeds
and it all smells like loreal hairspray and cigarettes.
the photos from last night reveal a distinct sensation of fluidity and grace
just restrained by the weight of misery-to-be)
i guess i'm in this here mess because i like striking matches and watching them almost,
but not quite burn my fingers, in the same way i like kissing girls whose last names
i don't need to know.
some people say that's a waste of matches and youth, but i'm eighteen
and there's arsenic in the water these days.
finally
stumbling down telegraph avenue, he tells me
angels are only good because they aren't buffeted by free will
and we'd all be so good, if we couldn't choose.
starting to scare myself.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
The Plague Years
So. I believe in a lot of things. I believe in a really old school God, with sin and grace and all that. I believe in my family. I believe in my legs' ability to do anything I tell them to do, thirteen miles or two thousand meters. And I believe in poetry.
Look. I know there's hella feelings out there, and that people go through bad shit, but I believe that if you really want to say anything, you and your poetry have got to juggle two balls at a minimum (and I'm not even sure that's called juggling, I think it's called throwing two balls in the air). You've got to do beautiful, and you've got to do angry. Personal and wondering. Erotic and political.
Poetry exists to do something. Poetry shouldn't exist to befuddle or show off. If you haven't made your reader more alive by the end of the poem, fail on you. And poetry exists in community. No one I've met writes so well that there's nothing you can critique. No poem is sancrosanct.
These poems don't exist as a chapbook. If you really want one, let me know and I will make you some sweet sweet chapbook magic. But you've gotta let me know. I'm not detached enough to hand off my poetry to people who may or may not care and I don't think I'm hot enough shit that everyone should care about what I write. And, if I handed you a chapbook, there's no real way for you to tell me "hey, that verse makes as much sense as whale jewelry" or " that line makes me wish my mother was here." I write best for and with others.
So. This is a collection of poems around the idea of epidemics. Most of them are centered around real diseases, real biological things that happened. But when you are talking about epidemics, you have to look at the social aspect of them, and how all things connect, and interact.
So.
"At the beginning of a plague, and at the end, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not been yet lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth- in other words, to silence."
Albert Camus, The Plague, Part 2, pg.116
Look. I know there's hella feelings out there, and that people go through bad shit, but I believe that if you really want to say anything, you and your poetry have got to juggle two balls at a minimum (and I'm not even sure that's called juggling, I think it's called throwing two balls in the air). You've got to do beautiful, and you've got to do angry. Personal and wondering. Erotic and political.
Poetry exists to do something. Poetry shouldn't exist to befuddle or show off. If you haven't made your reader more alive by the end of the poem, fail on you. And poetry exists in community. No one I've met writes so well that there's nothing you can critique. No poem is sancrosanct.
These poems don't exist as a chapbook. If you really want one, let me know and I will make you some sweet sweet chapbook magic. But you've gotta let me know. I'm not detached enough to hand off my poetry to people who may or may not care and I don't think I'm hot enough shit that everyone should care about what I write. And, if I handed you a chapbook, there's no real way for you to tell me "hey, that verse makes as much sense as whale jewelry" or " that line makes me wish my mother was here." I write best for and with others.
So. This is a collection of poems around the idea of epidemics. Most of them are centered around real diseases, real biological things that happened. But when you are talking about epidemics, you have to look at the social aspect of them, and how all things connect, and interact.
So.
"At the beginning of a plague, and at the end, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not been yet lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth- in other words, to silence."
Albert Camus, The Plague, Part 2, pg.116
Twenty
How It Starts
Unwashed new jeans
Wild rabbit sausage
Tomatoes from graft
A pig from New Jersey
Swimming in the Nile
Sodium nitrite
A dog or a cat or a fox or a bat
Shipments of coal
A classroom parakeet
Shipments of coal
Super absorbent tampons
Carrots
Sex, with or without condoms
Pesticides sprayed by a playground
Felt, goat hair or otherwise
A dripping faucet in a nursery
Mexican style soft cheese
Apple danishes
Copper IUDs
The forest, Zaire or Connecticut
Unwashed new jeans
Wild rabbit sausage
Tomatoes from graft
A pig from New Jersey
Swimming in the Nile
Sodium nitrite
A dog or a cat or a fox or a bat
Shipments of coal
A classroom parakeet
Shipments of coal
Super absorbent tampons
Carrots
Sex, with or without condoms
Pesticides sprayed by a playground
Felt, goat hair or otherwise
A dripping faucet in a nursery
Mexican style soft cheese
Apple danishes
Copper IUDs
The forest, Zaire or Connecticut
Nineteen
1972- They Tell Us It Is Gone
and that we shouldn't be afraid.
The danger is sealed away in bunkers in Soviet Russia,
and that's who we should really be afraid of. The Soviets.
They are angered by our ambivalence.
A little miffed that we are not hailing them as conquering heroes in spectacles.
Rejoice! proclaim the press releases. Our children will live.
The price of plastic goods will fall. And tourism will become viable in Somalia.
We have made the world smaller!
We are not so sure.
The fear of the pox has been bred into us, same as wolves.
(children don't wake up crying over car crashes)
We got this far on our ancestor's antibodies.
Tardition moves through our veins like T-cells.
Extinction is nothing to be ashamed of, they announce from the podium.
However
from our perspective in the audience, things blur.
In the glare, their white jackets glint like Mantilla armor.
Fifteen million is a big number.
Somewhere in the tangled strings of our systems,
we remember.
Mostly inspired by this photo here
and that we shouldn't be afraid.
The danger is sealed away in bunkers in Soviet Russia,
and that's who we should really be afraid of. The Soviets.
They are angered by our ambivalence.
A little miffed that we are not hailing them as conquering heroes in spectacles.
Rejoice! proclaim the press releases. Our children will live.
The price of plastic goods will fall. And tourism will become viable in Somalia.
We have made the world smaller!
We are not so sure.
The fear of the pox has been bred into us, same as wolves.
(children don't wake up crying over car crashes)
We got this far on our ancestor's antibodies.
Tardition moves through our veins like T-cells.
Extinction is nothing to be ashamed of, they announce from the podium.
However
from our perspective in the audience, things blur.
In the glare, their white jackets glint like Mantilla armor.
Fifteen million is a big number.
Somewhere in the tangled strings of our systems,
we remember.
Mostly inspired by this photo here
Eighteen
1979- Untitled (Testimonies)
"Of all the mysteries posed by AIDS, perhaps the deepest and most damaging is this:
why have we failed so utterly to prevent it's transmission?"
-New York Times November 17, 2009
Because the needle the dealer gave me wasn't clean.
Because I only ever had sex with two partners and the second one was infected.
Because my second husband told me his wife had died of it, but I didn't understand what that meant.
Because I was born this way.
Because I couldn't ask my husband if he'd been faithful. He paid for everything.
Because the prostitute didn't have a condom.
Because they pay more for sex without a condom and I need the money.
Because the condom broke.
Because sex doesn't feel the same with condoms.
Because I forgot, once.
Because back in the day, they didn't test the blood supply.
Because I was afraid to get tested, because if it came back positive that meant it was it, it's over.
Because she never told me.
Because I thought you could tell who was sick by looking at them, and he had a six-pack.
Because I thought you couldn't get it from oral.
Because I thought lesbians didn't get it.
Because I thought people my age didn't get it.
Because I thought married people didn't get it.
Because I thought I wouldn't get it.
"Of all the mysteries posed by AIDS, perhaps the deepest and most damaging is this:
why have we failed so utterly to prevent it's transmission?"
-New York Times November 17, 2009
Because the needle the dealer gave me wasn't clean.
Because I only ever had sex with two partners and the second one was infected.
Because my second husband told me his wife had died of it, but I didn't understand what that meant.
Because I was born this way.
Because I couldn't ask my husband if he'd been faithful. He paid for everything.
Because the prostitute didn't have a condom.
Because they pay more for sex without a condom and I need the money.
Because the condom broke.
Because sex doesn't feel the same with condoms.
Because I forgot, once.
Because back in the day, they didn't test the blood supply.
Because I was afraid to get tested, because if it came back positive that meant it was it, it's over.
Because she never told me.
Because I thought you could tell who was sick by looking at them, and he had a six-pack.
Because I thought you couldn't get it from oral.
Because I thought lesbians didn't get it.
Because I thought people my age didn't get it.
Because I thought married people didn't get it.
Because I thought I wouldn't get it.
Seventeen
1997: New Mexico- Sentimental Appeal
They were very young.
They were very young.
She was beautiful and Navajo and angry about all the right things.
She had a scholarship, she was going to be a doctor, she loved children.
He was his mother's only son, and they were poor, but stubborn about it.
He ran barefoot at first, but after the scouts spotted him, he ran in off-brand New Balances.
He first developed symptoms on the way to her funeral.
Sixteen
1492- Fucking Europeans
what seems to have been the case
was that yaws
spread among Taino boys and girls
while they were playing.
years later,
some of those little girls grew into women
who still carried the pathogen.
then they were raped.
while the rape was in progress
the unwashed skin of the Spaniards,
chest, belly, penises,
was broached by the yaws causal agent.
this is what we think happened.
what seems to have been the case
was that yaws
spread among Taino boys and girls
while they were playing.
years later,
some of those little girls grew into women
who still carried the pathogen.
then they were raped.
while the rape was in progress
the unwashed skin of the Spaniards,
chest, belly, penises,
was broached by the yaws causal agent.
this is what we think happened.
Fifteen
1975: Lyme Connecticut- Something Is Wrong Here
Arthritic oaks in the suburbs of Connecticut
-like walking on marbles, that fall in the forest-
and the deer have come.
We watch them from behind the windows of the family hatchback.
On the neighbor's lawn, they sway like statues on the verge of something.
Glassed over brown eyes, and father buries the body behind the woodpile.
The newspapers tell us that we are both in the glorious endtimes
and that we are divorced from all animate things.
That we know. Mother's on her second marriage. We don't talk about it.
We are caught in surges of Saudi oil,
gobalization sings cheerful company anthems,
our president seems nice, and we're out of Vietnam.
But, still.
Last night, a deer stood on the double yellow lines of Park Street.
Florescent streetlights watched impartially as her legs buckled
and finally collasped;
lay in the road, gasping.
Arthritic oaks in the suburbs of Connecticut
-like walking on marbles, that fall in the forest-
and the deer have come.
We watch them from behind the windows of the family hatchback.
On the neighbor's lawn, they sway like statues on the verge of something.
Glassed over brown eyes, and father buries the body behind the woodpile.
The newspapers tell us that we are both in the glorious endtimes
and that we are divorced from all animate things.
That we know. Mother's on her second marriage. We don't talk about it.
We are caught in surges of Saudi oil,
gobalization sings cheerful company anthems,
our president seems nice, and we're out of Vietnam.
But, still.
Last night, a deer stood on the double yellow lines of Park Street.
Florescent streetlights watched impartially as her legs buckled
and finally collasped;
lay in the road, gasping.
Fourteen, for truth
Cascades of Acorns and The Woods in Zaire
What I need you to know is that all things are connected.
It's all umbilical cords and atoms that sing ambiguous pronoun love songs
across transatlantic cable lines.
(sometimes, when I think about meeting the Designer of all this breakdown
I think about asking Him if He underestimated Disease, and Desire)
Because I believe in the glorious Maker&Breaker because the watch cogs are strewn
across field hospitals in Tanzania and Palestine.
I believe in revenge as a way of life
because The Shape Of All Things and The Ambiguity Around The Edges,
He saw that.
He saw us as we ate the roast thigh of the endangered golden tamarin
saw us shit in the water
saw the virgin baobab fall
(and it is always us, isn't it? anything you do, i do my dear/
and whatever is done only by me is your doing my darling)
And we are all feeling the whiplash snapback from the slow motion car crash
- filmed in California, index case in Kuala Lampur, and the death toll mounts in Berlin,
tonight at ten-
It used to be rickets,
bones bowed, and baby was too blissed out on opium to cry,
and we're all gonna die young, I promise, so who cares?
If some of us do it with insulin and some of us do it with girls&boys our mothers wouldn't like
And I need you to listen, alright?
The only thing left that really scares me is Ebola and that scares me.
Compassion fatigue doesn't have a CDC approved treatment, not yet, not ever.
We need to get out of here before the viruses have us by the throats,
but there's no place left to go.
Twist your hand in mine, take the vaccine.
We're gonna make it out alive, promise.
What I need you to know is that all things are connected.
It's all umbilical cords and atoms that sing ambiguous pronoun love songs
across transatlantic cable lines.
(sometimes, when I think about meeting the Designer of all this breakdown
I think about asking Him if He underestimated Disease, and Desire)
Because I believe in the glorious Maker&Breaker because the watch cogs are strewn
across field hospitals in Tanzania and Palestine.
I believe in revenge as a way of life
because The Shape Of All Things and The Ambiguity Around The Edges,
He saw that.
He saw us as we ate the roast thigh of the endangered golden tamarin
saw us shit in the water
saw the virgin baobab fall
(and it is always us, isn't it? anything you do, i do my dear/
and whatever is done only by me is your doing my darling)
And we are all feeling the whiplash snapback from the slow motion car crash
- filmed in California, index case in Kuala Lampur, and the death toll mounts in Berlin,
tonight at ten-
It used to be rickets,
bones bowed, and baby was too blissed out on opium to cry,
and we're all gonna die young, I promise, so who cares?
If some of us do it with insulin and some of us do it with girls&boys our mothers wouldn't like
And I need you to listen, alright?
The only thing left that really scares me is Ebola and that scares me.
Compassion fatigue doesn't have a CDC approved treatment, not yet, not ever.
We need to get out of here before the viruses have us by the throats,
but there's no place left to go.
Twist your hand in mine, take the vaccine.
We're gonna make it out alive, promise.
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