rumination house 

wheeze

Wheeze
----------
can we drag this out some more?
like the sun that fades so slow you never see that if you had been paying attention you'd notice you're sitting in dark
like the death rattle where the breaths get slower and slower and slower and the spaces in between longer and longer and longer and after a while it's just the space inbetween
like the middle age guy at the garage sale, in the letter jacket with the duck's ass hair, riffling through the 45's, and he tells you hey i got a fully functioning soda fountain in my basement, wanna see?
like the cat showing up at the door night after night after locked door night because once we gave it the skin off the salmon, but we are allergic to cats, and plus there's a no-pet clause
like the white dot on the tv getting smaller and smaller but you fall asleep before it's all the way gone, so you never are sure
like the dream you can't shake when you wake
like the dream you don't let yourself have

time for a country song

lonesome parade
--------------------------

saturday night and you ain't got no body
leaning in close to tell you sweet lies
you sit at your notebook and write up a story
only trouble is the end won't be a surprise
come on down sailor don't be afraid
shine up your shoes for the lonesome parade

in the lonesome parade you're the only attraction
no one is watching so there'll be no distraction
come on down pal to the lonesome parade

another winter passing as cold as the last
for warmth there's always that blanket from sears
you stumble your futures as you live in the past
like grain through a goose, well there goes the years
so get off your lowdown and cut the charade
and run yourself downtown to the lonesome parade

sunday morning wake up why put the coffee on
life's bitter enough in its own drippy grind
you figured it out and you got it all wrong
it's venus's rapture and you're the left behind
well since you've given up all those plans that you made
why not come on down for the lonesome parade

in the lonesome parade you're the only attraction
no one is watching so there'll be no distraction
come on down pal to the lonesome parade

merging styles

(in which we combine the literary style of a famous 20th c. author with a letter to an advice columnist. can you guess the author we were imitating?)


Dear Abby:
I hope your readers won't mind just one more "how we met" story.
Many,many years ago, I was a nurse in an emergency room in a small village in France. We often treated soldiers stumbling in after long drinking bouts on the Rue de St. Germaine, and it was sort of a in-joke that we despised them, despised them in our weary way, our rural way, the way we weary rural nurses have of despising these men who drink on the boisterous streets, and are loud, and crude and then bleeding. So when a handsome man was brought in that dark night, a night as black and empty as the soul of a pensioner, left alone to die in a small, sodden apartment, unloved and unremembered, and he was stinking of gin, and bleeding, the nurses hurried to spill their iodine, and cruelly scrub him, and I, the nurse selected to administer our weary, rural despising, cast my furious, scornful gaze upon him, becoming all the more scornful as he whimpered at the harsh touch of my needle, and my derision. I chastised him cruelly, yes, not for only his sins but the sins of all the boisterous, stinking, drunken and bleeding soldiers who passed through our small village, and his protests that he was not drunken, not a soldier, that the gin had been spilled there, and that it was not a knife wound from some sotten fight did not register on my harsh heart and wearied ears. As he passed in and out of consciousness, his whispering a woman's name-- Anastasia?-- did nothing to soften my heart.
Imagine my surprise when the next day a dozen roses were delivered to my home address, with a note "To my Nightingale", and signed "Dr. James Lance". My face was red when the story unfolded: the handsome man I had so abruptly attended was a doctor, flying in from Prague, who had received his injuries on the flight when he was rushing out the plane and side-swiped a stewardess wearing a dangerous brassiere. Her attempts to clean his wounds with the only disinfectant available had resulted in his gin-soaked state.
To make a long story short, Ann, we were married the next day and recently celebrated our golden anniversary.
Signed,

Mrs. Dr. Lance

a set of 10en20s

the game: everyone calls out titles, then you have 20 minutes to write a poem for each. this was a 7 in 15.


walking the creek
-----------------------
the rocks don't hurt
by august; her feet are
summertough, and
she's brown as the
minnows that scatter
as she passes

zebra underfoot
----------------------
first it was the white elephant,
in the dining room,
quiet, sure, but god the
smell, and then the birds
came in, all colors flashing
but feathers everywhere,
and the noise to boot,
and now
this zebra
underfoot.

go pull your own chicken
-------------------------------
sadie says that
she likes
do it yrself
men

Mesopotamian Rhapsody
------------------------------------
everything was fine
till the water ran dry
corn grew high
babylonian pie
everything was cool
till the mongol fool
wrecked the machine
fucked up the dream
everything grew
til the invaders drew
the suicide sword
oh no oh lord
the water ran dry
mesopotamian bye-bye


spinning around to see what's back there
----------------------------
the tree came
faster than her head
returned
the angels here
wear starched white
and hover above
whispering
don't look twice
it's all right

white trash in a waiting room
-----------------------------------------------------
hey
I bleed just the
just the same
hey

3:14 a.m.
-----------
all too familiar
with the ceiling stare
and the glaring
red
and the hard
hard bed

Song of Cyndi

(playing with the Song of Songs)

The Woman
---
Like a Red Bull among Fresca,
so is my guy compared
to the rest
of these wankers.
His fruit is X-treme.
He took me to the King Buffet,
and gave me his ring.
Pass over that Coors, baby! and
hand me a Salem.
I am done worn out with
your good lovin'.

---
I hear my baby
He's bounding over the cars
vaulting over the rods to me.
My baby's a real fox,
a wolf,
leaning against the speaker pole
at the drive in
he leans in my window
yakking at me.

The Man
---
C'mon, girl, cupcake, peaches;
c'mon already.
It's summer. It ain't raining.
Look, here are some flowers
I got at Fred Meyer's.
This is the time for hooking up,
you can hear the others in
their cars, moaning.
My balls are blue like Eddie's bowling one,
and the air smells like candy.
C'mon, honeysuckle, lovebunny,
hotcakes, c',mon.
You are like my kid's sister's hamster,
hiding in a toilet paper tube.
Lemme see your kisser, and hear you
say okey-doke.

Woman
---------
My guy's mine, and I'm his girl.
He eats mornings at my house, nibbling
like a rabbit in my ferny place, but then
disappears.
Night after night I dreamed about that,
and I paged and I messaged him.
Where is that fucker?
I went to the bowling alley, the diner,
I asked the girls at the game,
have you seen that fucker?
When I found him at the drive-in;
I gave that asshole the what-for.

gardening started all this trouble

it was good at first. we ate what we found-- roots, berries. but we got tired of moving, and thought, why not. a little patch of dirt to call our own. then flowers, i said, to brighten up the place. but the asters crowded out the strawberry patch, so you planted that apple tree. that's when everything went to hell.

to shapeshifters at the edge of the sky

(a riff off a poem by my favorite living wordsmith, s. elsemore)
-------------
this is not a poem about things that can be held, or not held
this is a poem for the girl at the party in a story,
who stared at the couples talking and thought
"i am neither a liquid or a solid"--

this is not a poem about things we can find along the road
everything's scattered now
there are poems about the proper places of things
held steady;
this is not one of those either

this is a poem for the mercury in us, trembling silver
things that both slide and break
things that regroup
but maybe leave
little little pieces behind

pieces that lie heavy at the edge of the sky

how i kill time

to start with, you have to be heartless.
time will look right at you, with big sad puppy eyes, will try to hold your gaze so you will lose your nerve.
don't.
stare it down. and while you're at it, tell it what a miserable shit it is, even if you have to make up parts. if you are sadistic, clean your gun while you're talking. don't lose eye contact. time will try to get you in a story-telling mood. have none of that. you're in charge here. stare it down and starve it out. it will try to fritter away. seize it. i like to let it start out the door then
step on its hem. i don't usually ask for last requests. sometimes i give it a cigarette if i am feeling generous.

after it's over, i get sort of a naseous feeling. but i am learning to ignore that.

rock climbing

it helps to have the right equipment
but here you are anyway, on the wall,
water below, or death;
sky above, or hereafter.
it helps to have the equipment
but you're already in-between.
where is there to go but on?

you've read about climbers--
wiry men, mostly, too young
to know, to believe in death;
too here to worry about the after.
one climber had a feature in
some magazine you saw, one
day in a doctor's office,
the blood sliding out of you,

the baby already dead but
waiting, as if some ghosts think
they still belong to you.
"fear-- it's a stupid word;
no point to it", he'd said,
"i am only thinking: where
next does my hand fit?
where next my foot?"

on the mountain, sky above,
water below, looking steadily
ahead there is only the
firmness of rock. it doesn't
worry about the sky, the endless
blue and whoosh of it, or the water,
the wet rolling change of it.

it doesn't even worry about you,
and where you fit, or whether
you have the right equipment.
your carabeners and ropes and chalk:
a temporary insult.

there is nowhere to go but on.

this one i can't explain

Susan stalked to the vcr and slapped the eject button.
"It's NOT art, Pavese. It's a washing machine instructional
manual. Putting it on a videotape does not make it art. I don't want to pretend it holds higher metaphors. I don't want to spend my evening making one up for it. I'm sick of this whole gen X seinfield-something-out-of-nothing post-ironic CRAP. Can't we go to a fucking play?"
The wall of words falls between them, brick by brick. He can't meet her now. Hhe doesn't know how. He's stinging nettle, even when he's still-- she brushes up to any part of him and gets hurt, whether he intends it or not. He stares at the ceiling, thinks Breathe, Pavese, just Breathe.
"Can't you fucking MOVE your mouth, even pretend we are having a Goddamn conversation?" She glares at him, 5 foot 2 inches of ball breaking fury, and he's suddenly every bad boy, every disappointing son, every bumbling incompetant man. He sighs.
This infuriates her further.
Pavese stands up as if underwater. She's yelling, he doesn't know what about. It's another language, long distance. He walks to the door, thinking I am. I breathe, therefore I am.