These are all super rough first cuts, most of the lines will be discarded, a few good ones will go on to become parts of different poems.
we have sent foraging parties
to each others bodies
fingers finding their eyries in sunburned shoulder blades
staking claim to favorite stretches
the patch of chest
warmest under your morning breath
we have scattered flags
and unknown to us,
land mines
triggered by the cold or absence
an explosive loneliness that
leaves the chest caving for breath
until we ravage our skins
raking for an eventual peace
turning up now and then
an unexploded round
we choose to keep
waiting for more delicate hands
to dig it out
I've got those new city blues
and I'm breathing cigarette smoke through my nose again
maybe I just want to smell a bit a like home
more later, as always
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
Waiting for a letter
I've decided to start an online repository (here) for my daily snippets of poetry, so as to give myself a sense of progress and a little more permanent home for all of them. Feel free to comment if you have made it here. Some may be whole poems, most snippets, which will float around until hopefully finding a home in a complete poem. Enjoy
Velocity
I did not want to look back
I had tasted distance before
so I carved the staples out of my body
pulled the map down
and drew a line straight to new york city
ran, upon arrival, feet slapping the gum-shot pavement
eyes wild spinning piercing
the glare of an endless orange night
the humans, howling werewolves
a pheromone haze infecting
all thought with images of inertia
of twisting bodies and collision
the smell of sweat and youth
the flammable buzz of alcoholized oxygen
8 million gasping psyches
crashing and coagulating
a hastily assembled cast of strangers
armed with piss-bitter prescription bottles of malt liquor
and a clock that stops at midnight
returning, like a boomerang at 5 am
to knock you from
adventure to psychosis
waking up on stone lipped rooftops
stale cigarette salutes to a creaky sunrise
until sobriety blows the dandy-flower cluster of
bit players back
into the sharp atlantic wind,
some never to be seen again
some to crash back into your autobiography
for moments, sometimes years, sometimes knowing glances
and slight waves on 29th and Lex
sometimes cowardly shuffling past
a body who sweated away a brooklyn night in your eyes
your biographies circling around you, your stories for a moment inextricable
possibilities, an escape from the impermanence
the morning uncaring in it's punctuality
they will continue to haunt the same theater
sometimes passing underneath your feet, unknowing
your pac men ghost velocities
carrying you to the end of a new act,
your newest bit players shouting
their lines into the wind ahead of you
Snippets
Never known purity until I saw your arms clean and craterless
there are trees that grow in normandy with roots that taste like blood and gunpowder
but leaves that breath and branches that finally reach
there are children who skip over the cracks
in the sidewalks in nagasaki
packed with ash and shadows
on the longest days in summer
when I was young
I would sit in the shower, turning the water from freezing cold to burning hot
relishing in the polar pleasures of rising and falling
my skin shifting from shiver blue to a sunburn red
and then back again
never knowing it was a sign of things to come
later, I would smoke a thousand cigarettes
just to feel the beauty of breath
over the smoldering coal
lodged in the back of my throat
where it still burns today
on the streets of new york
a city of asymptotic curves as sharp
as the razors I used to learn
how beautiful unbroken skin was
a city of skyscrapers
as stunning from their bases
as they are breath taking from their roofs
and I feel like a child, in my shower
sweating out burning summers
bundling through frigid winters
each one an ode to the other's beauty
spoken in opposite tongues
Cinnamon toast still smells like your clothes when you were sick
you only asked me to come back quick
even though I offered to bring anything you ever wanted
I'm haunted by a memory of a memory
More later!
Velocity
I did not want to look back
I had tasted distance before
so I carved the staples out of my body
pulled the map down
and drew a line straight to new york city
ran, upon arrival, feet slapping the gum-shot pavement
eyes wild spinning piercing
the glare of an endless orange night
the humans, howling werewolves
a pheromone haze infecting
all thought with images of inertia
of twisting bodies and collision
the smell of sweat and youth
the flammable buzz of alcoholized oxygen
8 million gasping psyches
crashing and coagulating
a hastily assembled cast of strangers
armed with piss-bitter prescription bottles of malt liquor
and a clock that stops at midnight
returning, like a boomerang at 5 am
to knock you from
adventure to psychosis
waking up on stone lipped rooftops
stale cigarette salutes to a creaky sunrise
until sobriety blows the dandy-flower cluster of
bit players back
into the sharp atlantic wind,
some never to be seen again
some to crash back into your autobiography
for moments, sometimes years, sometimes knowing glances
and slight waves on 29th and Lex
sometimes cowardly shuffling past
a body who sweated away a brooklyn night in your eyes
your biographies circling around you, your stories for a moment inextricable
possibilities, an escape from the impermanence
the morning uncaring in it's punctuality
they will continue to haunt the same theater
sometimes passing underneath your feet, unknowing
your pac men ghost velocities
carrying you to the end of a new act,
your newest bit players shouting
their lines into the wind ahead of you
Snippets
Never known purity until I saw your arms clean and craterless
there are trees that grow in normandy with roots that taste like blood and gunpowder
but leaves that breath and branches that finally reach
there are children who skip over the cracks
in the sidewalks in nagasaki
packed with ash and shadows
on the longest days in summer
when I was young
I would sit in the shower, turning the water from freezing cold to burning hot
relishing in the polar pleasures of rising and falling
my skin shifting from shiver blue to a sunburn red
and then back again
never knowing it was a sign of things to come
later, I would smoke a thousand cigarettes
just to feel the beauty of breath
over the smoldering coal
lodged in the back of my throat
where it still burns today
on the streets of new york
a city of asymptotic curves as sharp
as the razors I used to learn
how beautiful unbroken skin was
a city of skyscrapers
as stunning from their bases
as they are breath taking from their roofs
and I feel like a child, in my shower
sweating out burning summers
bundling through frigid winters
each one an ode to the other's beauty
spoken in opposite tongues
Cinnamon toast still smells like your clothes when you were sick
you only asked me to come back quick
even though I offered to bring anything you ever wanted
I'm haunted by a memory of a memory
More later!
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