Poems

Poetry

From a rusty cookie sheet

Poetry magnets. Cookie sheet. It's all too crappucino. Everyone else's magnetic poems are about love and their dead dog. Though mine, like most, are completely overwrought and underedited.

1.
Dark secrets blossom
We are full bouquets,
what grow like lace.

2.
Pager sounds slice through me;
I am on the avenue with him.
Wild people consume crack
as Ed pronounces,
"You are my only user,"
his speech bruises blue
a slender morning tendril
his arm wraps around me.
This love song
will have to do.

3.
A bomb of liquid glass:
good evening, sister dirty.
She has worked skin.
Used up. Burned red.
Seeing her meal man pull
up after a minute
the wait is over.

From the brown Keroppi notebook

The present notebook is mostly prose. Only two poems live there, both featuring the color pink

Cathedral of alveoli

My inert cherry popsicle heart
suits a meat locker
rather than this tropical
pink cathedral of alveoli.

Ode to the Pink Lady

Her hair
some heavenly meringue halo
of cotton candy sweetness
radiating from within.
Clicking knitting needles
her heels with each step
describe the arc of Cupid's arrow
descending to Earth,
for this lady in pink

Commentary: Ever since I saw Lois Hobbes, the infamous Lady in Pink (better known as Reed's History and Social Sciences secretary) she's been my hero. Everybody loves Lois, and that's just the way it should be.

From the Machine Love project:

Machine Love was a Quark project featuring these two poems, another older poem from a different class, a selection from Select None (about video poker), and two short prose pieces (one about a refrigerator and the other about a warehouse). Unfortunately you don't get to see the cool paper cuts I did for the project, but it's probably just as well that you don't get to see my horrendous typesetting.

Antenna prayer

I lean back
in imitation and reverence of
the swayback antenna
which rises like a prop cross
from Ben Hur
above the white clapboard garage
picking up the generation
of electromagnetic energy
that we call signal.
I press my forehead
against the garage door
hoping to hell
that I can pick up
and withdraw vestigial
flakes of pure titanium white
with my sweaty reverent skin.

Found Poetry

Found poetry is a wholly appropriated form in which you take phrases from other pieces. These are from the January 4, 1998 Oregonian, and written while I was, to say the least, in a bit of a state.

Original article title "Hong Kong admits chicken slaughter came off as haphazard and incomplete"
Commentary: I think about chicken a lot . Probably too much.

Hong Kong bird-flu virus

Television footage showed
fatal gassing by carbon dioxide
inside plastic bags;
dogs sighted strutting around
scampering off with carcasses
chewing on bedraggled birds.

Original article title: "Multiple births more often come accompanied by sorrow," by Pam Belluck, NYT News Service
Commentary: The article was a response to all of the fertility drug hoopla that was going on at the time.

Birth Notice (medical miracle multiple births)

Birth Notice:
Amber Raquel; vital statistic: deceased June 24, 1997.
In the yellow light of a neonatal incubator
the word caution on its side
eyes still shut, so tiny
her parents buy doll clothes for her burial.

Birth Notice:
Cheyenne Barbara, vital statistic: deceased July 6, 1997
with tubes sprouting from chest, legs, arms, hands
Maybe he does miracles for other people but not for me.

Their daughters' ashes in a wooden urn,
they left space on the engraving
for Mario, Jr., still alive,
palm sized infant with a ventilator tube taped to his mouth.
'I would hold him
and then I would hold the girls' urn
'cause I wanted to hold them all together.
Maybe he does miracles for other people,
but not for me. Not for me.'

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