Category Archives: Poetry

Three Dreams

some strange squash
I don’t know how to cook
they hand me

like a prize
though they won’t let
me text
someone I need to

urgently
watching
the clock

…

My punishment was just.

Though I had no
memory of the site they
said I visited. The one

that made the commuter
jet come crashing down. But
for some reason I could not
deny the charge. I tell

them I would like to be
hanged, but they say they
don’t do that anymore.

…

We talk to the chef/owner of this
sushi/chocolate shop
and tell her

because we’re friends

about another meal
we enjoyed recently then
she’s not

paying much
attention maybe because
she’s busy prepping

she says we should be
careful

of the knives in the
other place I want to
ask what she means and

Excerpts from My Autobiography

xxxxx

once the image has life an emptiness says
it will always be so I stare into the distance
blind to trees and flowers
begging to be born but the refrigerator hey
are we doing stream of consciousness
cool and the snow gets sharp in these
huge piles in the back of the lot
days later my handwriting
starts to rot never to recover

xxxx

suicide off the table you start working again
with a miniature saucepan and the clock trying
to rid the mind of all the rules you’ve
made &
feel your hand tight around the thick
rope now only good for that
silly exercise you love

xxxx

away from the neighbor’s dog
across stinging fields we grow
smaller so slowly we don’t
notice until grasshopper parts become
our yard sticks and blades
of grass jostle and topple us in this
dream-familiar landscape we
learn secrets of slow growth, the rootlike
lineages of wormkind and a love
of the sweetness that writhes up from
dark earth and we long to pass
it on to our children who have
grown monstrous in the orange light

The New Sound

those faithful plants I neglected still shelter my [redacted] even after the party is long gone the conversation buried in coarse sand

you mentioned that the fashion this year will be nothing but zippers and mismatched shoes so leave me out of it and let me sleep in the sweet green morning calls dropping dew

but at my back I sometimes hear Noel Fielding reciting bad poetry in my ear and

perhaps the goal is to write something that no forget it yes I see you noticed it too but went back to your puzzle so thanks for that

Remember to

Forget what you know sit softly
lulled by the sound of hundreds of
pens simultaneously writing down
your mistakes think of clouds
over that chasm you love

Forget the ad that is following you
keep sharpening your teeth into points
we’ll see if we can find a knife and a few

layers of breathable fabric as you
start off stinging wind your boot brittle
grass bright crunch beneath

Forget it and start again don’t think of pathogens
the tickle in your throat give the pills a chance

outside flashes of red flowers one ant
carries his scrap of stone down into the dark

the difference between scrap and fragment wind
in the rain in the trees but once I’ve walked up to
this cliff then what maybe later in the day an aching
back full of whisky isn’t the best time to start but
well this is getting too prosaic so get the clipper &
the magnifying glass there’s only one place you or I
can start and that’s with these badly drawn feet
bleeding into the stones of the sharp here & now

And Again And

Cold words in winter.
.
Fleeing, familiar.
.
No
leaves falling.
.
in an unlined notebook thoughts
downhill
.
gods of our youth now chicken salad
.
What, do I have to start again?
.
Happy there. Though the
smoke. Through?
.
Still
strings. A glimmer in the
sky. Awful.
.
What she
said. What she meant.
.
No, leaves falling. Earth spins.
.
blossoms
.
in the prison
of the rib cage
.
nock
.
on bars
that
aren’t there