poems, etc. from readers of dennis cooper's blog
Nikolas said...
Here's (I think) my most recent poem:
Reconnaissance
Blonde hair stacked like the hay and just as flammable in which I used to roll and sneeze when my body was smooth and unblighted by corporeal want, before my navel dropped between my legs not many years later. For the sake of thematic consistency, let’s say the eyes were blue like the sky whose cloud voyages I used to mutate whilst reclining on the hay and just as malleable on which I used to roll. Emotionally I mean.
Four cold fingers on the back of my neck, manipulate my field of vision forever in the direction of:
‘Please wrestle my physical autonomy from me so I can be the plateaux on which things grow instead of the axis around which my anxieties and aspirations orbit.’
The opposable thumb allows my captor to squeeze, my hairless neck a malleable dough.
How old were you when you first got hard in public?
One finger smothers the past.
Another strangles the future.
The next is the blue touch paper of fusion.
The fourth burns the blueprint into my e rotic heart.
I was seven and the teacher warned that he might paralyse my neck.
The thumb dug like the pitchfork my mother’s father used to ventilate the hay in which I used to roll leaving a white spectral hand of shadows inside which I dwell like I would a creamy blissful oubliette if at times I could find one.
She spoke of paralysis in negative terms. I think he was called Wayne, like the moon the arrival of which used to signal that I’d mutated clouds long enough and it was probably cold and time to eat sometimes does only spelt differently.
Nick.
2:03 AM
aaron said...
Funny that you decided to do a poetry day the day after I write my first poem in like six years.
3 Films Featuring Lawrence Olivier
Heathcliff slaps Cathy
Then runs his wrist over the broken window
Pane.
And you thought romance was dead, she said.
That’s not how it happened in the book, I tell her.
Saturday afternoon and I’m stoned,
Watching Clash of the Titans on…
Some channel.
My best friend in the third grade—Adam
He loved this movie.
I thought the claymation Medusa was cheesy even back then.
The spaghetti pot is boiling, telephone ringing
And I’m sitting on the couch picking at
A loose thread on the hem of my jeans and
Before she gets up to answer the phone,
She turns to me and says, I don’t like this movie.
After she’s out of the room Olivier screams,
A horse, A horse, my kingdom for a horse!
2:54 AM
laura beth noble said...
i tend to write short stories, rather than poems, because i end up wanting to write more than a poem can hold.
the first poem i ever read, and legitimatley liked, was e.e. cummings's "a leaf falls" poem.
1(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
3:44 AM
Chilly Jay Chill said...
Two short prose poems adapted/stolen from Kathy Acker. Used as monologues in a play:
PIRATE INVOCATION
Out of the parrots and macaws they step into the seas which sound like earthquakes into waters that reach up to and punch holes in the air.They’re on the march, as much as they ever do anything together.
They’re after booty. Ownership. Usually they commence battle by surrounding their quarry like cats surrounding mice. Teasing them, then destroying. Leave without having actually murdered anyone. They’re back in their hideout in the black sands. All of them naked.
PIRATE DREAM OF PIRATES
While we had been dreaming, as if we had been dreaming pirate girls, the boat had made a great deal of way. It was lying half a mile southeast of the earth.
But we were caught in whatever dreams boat dream. Dreams of being pursued by bloodthirsty pirates but unable to move. The waters around the boat growing thicker and thicker. Our boat, stuck in a mixture of mud and water.
We were unable to the approach the shore we had dreamed about. We were caught in another world.
6:12 AM
Comment Deleted
This post has been removed by the author.
6:19 AM
Comment Deleted
This post has been removed by the author.
6:21 AM
Dickon Edwards said...
Apopos of nothing, I notice that your website bibliography omits one short book:
Title: 'Violence, News Item, Literature'
Author: Dennis Cooper
Published: P.O.L. Books, Paris, 2004.
ISBN: 2846820139
Edition contains the text in both French and English.
Just got my copy of this now. It's a rather cute little book with a proper spine, containing a concise but startling memoir by yourself. I don't know if you have any plans to include it in an anthology, but surely DC fans would be interested?
Amazon (France) link.
6:23 AM
Callum said...
My Brother's Penis
Began as a nut
in a silver-birch junction
with a map of walnut
wrinkles tight beneath;
beached into driftwood
that smelled of the
same salt
I was pulled from;
darkened to a plum
of guilty sweetness
and the tart taste of stars
on the tongue;
became a tunnel under the sea
and a route to something primitive
and finally, gorged on imagination,
was a myth never sung.
6:35 AM
Eddie Beverage said...
since my days of writing poetry are comprised of two eras with an epic gap in between, i've posted one old and one new.
SOMEWHERE
If sexuality be expressed through longings of the heart
I am gay
If through the loins
bi
If through my facade
straight
And if through the truth
Somewhere on the long road in between
SAN JUAN RAIN
San Juan rain calls
to pigeons on calle joyful
calle serene, calle present
where does the sea end?
waves crash
children cry "aqui!"
mist on their brows is sea,
love in their hearts is sunshine.
San Juan rain delights in
anointing strange heads
while singing,
"Blessed are the lonely,
they truly know themselves,
they only feel at home
when they are away."
oh yeah, i know the contest is over but i just thought of a new name for a band, Clammy Jizz.
rock 'n' roll!!!!
7:32 AM
matt said...
A million guys
line up everynight at
the foot of the moon.
Training their erections on
his smile, they bury
their desires beneath
a constellation of ideas
scattered and shot awhile back
in more adult bedrooms.
What is it you want them to do?
Twinkle, water, plant
themselves firmly in place?
I know--you want to be 15
want them to be
Ryan, Chris, Derrick.
Well, they can't
they're porno.
It's not so much nostalgia
that makes you crack the dust
on these old Honchos, Inches
as the desire to feel your brain
or
at least wipe up and
get the phone.
7:37 AM
nicholas said...
where rivers turn a magic casualty
a vast persuasion of sad lines
I can't stay here
absence shadows an empty shell
the savage deceit of ghost hours
I don't care if he does
rain begins a twofold loss
in lucid delusion of shadow selves
you turn to go
7:47 AM
Josh Feola said...
Boy King
the Sandman has placed a little grain of dust
in each of your eyes every night
since you were a child and
when you stopped waking up he
still placed a little grain of dust in
each of your eyes every night and
now the little grains spill over you
like time and you’re under a massive
dune, buried like a pharaoh and still
he places a little grain of quartz in
each of your eyes for every night you
stay asleep, renewing you.
p.s. callum your poem is great
7:49 AM
Dickon Edwards said...
I write lyrics rather than poems, and hope that's applicable:
RUDE ESPERANTO
You're just too good at this game, love.
Prey to every tourist desire.
When versed in rude esperanto
no phrasebook ever required.
The night's young,
and neither are you, love.
Here's to immaturing with age.
Star of the youth club posters:
"The Most Life On The Minimum Wage."
Is there ANYONE'S car you won't get into?
Cat-like hair's a dead giveaway.
And O, the way saucy repartee
can conceal alluring tragedy.
You want to dance blameless into urban legend.
And leave your name to a new syndrome.
Till then you'll play
Venus In Pedal Pushers.
Hating and loving that you cannot ever go home.
This time (you say) is the last time.
Okay - one more, then for sure you'll retire.
Still, when gifted in rude esperanto,
no phrasebook ever required.
8:26 AM
antonio said...
i dont read too much poetry. mostly obscure french stuff. alot of symbolism i guess. and some newer kids in nyc. i do write sometimes. but mostly for myself. maybe to be published posthumously. but i went to this art high school, it was sort of like a "fame"-esque art school, like think of the quintessential one and that's it. and we were all divided into our own departments, there was a visual arts department, a dance department, theater, music, and a creative writing department. and when i moved here and got accepted into the school in the va department i found out by complete coincidence that i had a cousin in the cw department and she was basically the coolest girl ever. the cw kids worked really hard i suppose. i know the va department worked really hard, so obviously the cw kids did too. and they had prosody classes starting at i think 8th grade and ending around 10th where they started focusing solely on their own output instead of studying other people's stuff and doing exercises.. and every year the seniors had a reading and their work was published in the cadence of that school year.. and every year the music seniors had a recital and got an album and every year the theater seniors directed their own productions and the va seniors had to open a show and all that etc. it was hard. but anyways. here are some selected poems from the creative writing department kids starting firstly with my cousin paige poe, these are all sort of oldish. like the newest one is two years old. but whatever i ain't even care. also for some reason the formatting of this is being fucked with by i guess the blogger gods.. so that sestina is sort of fucked up.. but uhh.. imagine... imagine!!
Paige Poe
The Rolling Stones Catch the Indian Pacific at Perth
Switch the track breakers,
porcelain figurine, and derail sighing.
Remember those who glittered
trains through you rhythmed
with the pulsing of science.
Floating down from the Starship,
Mick touched your forehead
like a fairy king and you felt it for days.
You caught trains
fleetingly with footsteps of song
along miniature ivory organs.
Your head was held by Dreamtime:
Australia was a sunken desert
in impossible mist, until
those lost princes returned, wings frayed,
crowned in crumbling baby's breath.
Opening windows, blowing dust from their hands,
they leaned out to call you in.
The train slowed at their command. When it stopped
for you all eyes watched: the conductor's hands
slipped from his duties, vaguely promising
smashed metal and screeching brakes
for the future. And sparks
flew from metal against metal,
louder than factories
or the scorched, empty town.
Your future in the desert was a dream,
a snake hiding in every hole
and nothing but brush for years away,
mating frogs like aboriginal music
reflecting your body caked in dust-
years earlier
when the fairies found you
in their bed, face full of sleep,
you were brushed with honey dust.
Their eyes pricked with desire.
They cast away their cigarettes
and wiped the gold from your eyes.
their bodies sleek with wonder.
And if you breathed in the dust
and coughed out the gold,
it was only temporary asphyxia-
the whiskey they bottle-fed you was worse.
But when your lips were numb
and held by a stranger, you tried to smile:
you felt it with your face.
Before the train slipped from the station,
you tiptoed to reach a window of their car,
but they were gilded with dust and all you saw
were gray shadows of movements.
You still touched the glass in goodbye,
and left your hand impressed in dust.
You fell and landed in the desert
like a shattered meteor, silent
as the night when the trains stopped.
There's no sound to signal
what the years have worn away,
what the trains carried across
this abandoned desert in the summers.
But even now if the night is warm,
you can wipe the sweat from the back of your neck
and watch it glitter in your palm.
Katie McGriff (this girl wrote in form and scared everyone, she is a crazy lesbian and she took bible study classes in order to properly use obscure religious imagery in her poems)
Retrogression (a sestina)
"God, that's disgusting." My aunt reaches to cover my eyes
as we pull into Jeremiah's driveway. Jeremiah has hung another
dead deer in the oak tree in his front year and blood slides
from the branches like sorghum. "How could his father
let him do that?" Her hands fall from my face; she knows
she hasn't prevented me from seeing anything. All four
of the deer's legs are tied together, a rope barely strong enough for
Cat's Cradle holding a deer so heavy the branch sags. "I
think it's like a parade of homes," I say. "You know,
some people grow carnations or roses or something. Others
hang deer in trees." We are here to visit Jeremiah's father,
perched at the kitchen table. He's waiting to slide
even farther into death, like a child at the top of a slide.
The x-rays barely show his lungs at all-he's already waited four
years. My aunt doesn't mention that Jeremiah's father
might not even know of the deer in the yard, and I
don't say anything about his dirty windows-another
week of dust against the glass, so thick no
sunlight can reach through. My aunt wipes her nose
on her shirt sleeve, opens the car door, and slides
out of the front seat. "I don't know if I can take another
year of this," she says. "Imagine being sick for
this long." I don't say anything, but I shield my eyes
from the sun and climb out of the car. "Imagine if your father
were sick for this long." Jeremiah's father
sits at the table most afternoons we visit. He knows
about waiting-he bites his fingernails, wipes his eyes,
tells visitors of hunting trips with Jeremiah, how they slid
rifles against their shoulder blades and tried to fire before
the deer noticed. Then they dragged home another
body, left it bleeding in the backyard until sunset. Other
afternoons when we visit, Jeremiah has left his father
in bed, asleep in the heavy darkness of the dusty widows. The four
o' clock sun sinks below the deer in the tree. Though she knows
Jeremiah must be waiting inside for us, my aunt slides
her arms around my shoulder and we stop to stare at the deer. "I
don't know," she says, eyes squinted into the sun, "but any other
deer would've slid down by now." Inside, Jeremiah and his father
know this kind of waiting already-this is a death they've seen
before.
Natalie Elliot, i think natalie used to write alot of fiction, she wrote a short story called the Boys of San Blas that's basically my favourite piece of writing ever. but it's pages and pages, so i'm not going to attempt copying that. But shes kept a blog for almost 5 years exclusively of writings i'm not sure if she would like me to give the address out, but here's two things not poems. but fuck it.
There once was a monster
I simply cannot stop conditioning !!!! Guess this is just the side-effect when your hairstyle is now an NYC Eastern European immigrant mullet. They caught us at the stateline. I don't know what to say. I want you to look for me everywhere. In all apple orchards, in the folds of your eyes, in the magazine of your dreams. See I was brought up to love Bruce Springsteen at a very early age. So what do you want me to do?
It's good she's got a husband. Had a bad dream where we were looking at a National Geographic special issue on fisherman and you were in every picture. Then there was a giant spider trickling down the wall. Jesus save me all the boys left this week and I think that just might mean the end of summer. If autumn and apples begin today, I at least want it to be dark for the mourning. Then it will be golden and steamy soon enough, and if nothing else I'll be too busy to notice. When I come back into town I am going to be a legal vagabond. Even if it means giving away my possessions one by one. Land over sea. Patience over profit. I saw that all the girls are growing up, and I feared that maybe I was not. Then I realized he doesn't even know my age, and then I know that I am already grown. You may not know me by my true name.
Oh, our poor broke parents. Eating out of cans and foil packets. Still not more than once a day, still mostly late at night fighting the cats for bites. Old lover of mine, it's very clear that although you love some things, all you have now is a very different kind of fun. You seem mostly assanine in your apathy, and I may interject by saying I once made the same mistake. It's all right, though. It's good for the body. It creeps through you to speak.
I think she takes pictures of us while we're sleeping. There was an accidental poetry night where I commanded the stage, which was actually her bed, and they were all curled together like two young hot people who do not know each other. If I weren't me, and I were in the room, I admit I probably would have puked. Or gotten so vile and sick to my stomach I'd have to flee the room from fever. And all the same I know I'm grown, because I was faced quite in the face with that all to familiar moment of reckoning, and it was serious, and thank god this time I was fortunately sober, and I could do nothing to hurt him; I was helpless to his face and hands. And after all these drunken lectures. And after crazy one-thousand times. And all the same: it was still not a fight. There hasn't once been a fight. And all of you idiots thought there was something wrong with me ! I've never stayed so drunk and been so peacefully uncontentious--I am the girl you've never seen before. Not that I deserve a medal. I deserve prize money. I have found a bloodbrother. I have found that which I so foolishly handicapped myself with envy for. If I thought of the wrong way to say knowing you makes every song beautiful, then let me think of the right way to say knowing we two is like knowing one-in-three-persons. And knowing is like learning how two bodies fit together back to back according to the Greeks. The retelling of the untold story. And all of this, the year I was born.
Paper Sheets on a Wooden Bed
We are all your children. I've got your money, baby, and I'm tired, and I'm still broke, and I'm aching from sleeping on the floor. My lungs are shot due to a carton of Lucky Strike filters that my babyhole graciously bestowed to me for Christmas. I am sorry I want to see you so badly. But I haven't any gifts. I have no gifts for anyone, and they are especially not wrapped, and I'm not going into work until three in the afternoon tomorrow but it don't fucking matter because I'm fatigued right now beyond cohesion, vehicle operation, film watching, etc.
I don't give a shit. I ain't said anything I meant in a long time. But sometimes when I come home from work I want my bitch to have a hot, homecooked meal on the stove. Is that so much to ask ? Fucking working women. Fucking bitches that won't cook a man a nice hot dinner. At least save me a plate. And then I come home night after night, my patience is deteriorating. They're going out to dinner tomorrow and what the fuck do I have to show for it ? I muddy mop and Marlboro Light cigarette butts stuffed into the fissures in the concrete patio. Tonight I microwaved some eggs. I am listening to her old Valentine's Day Massacre tape but it's not doing it for me just quite like I thought it would. There is no lukewarm reminiscing. Instead ? Well, I suppose I am that disgusted. I just love you Poly Styrene. I mean really I love you. And I know you're a Hare Krishna now but I saw the lame parade down London and it makes sense that someone would be. But I love you and I want to listen to no one but you. I want to hold you in my arms. I want to collect the food from your braces. Alas, you are middleaged now. But maybe I can steal one of your children.
She says yesterday something like "Every time I see you I just want to paint a picture of a girl in a cafe because you're so beautiful and lonely. You're the kind of girl a boy falls in love with but will never--" enter mild comedian. Clean, but lazy, and perpetual halitosis as well as other aspects of faulty hygiene. Nevertheless, I don't want her to finish. I think she is one of the kindest I have ever met, but I don't want to hear about what I am or what I am not. I don't need these things to hold on to until I drink too much bah and fall off of my high heels again. I haven't drunk in a while but I got this feeling that the next time I do I'll cut my whole ankle off, and I'll put my foot through the window, or the rest of my neck, etc. etc. etc. etc. He said oh he said he said.
and finally
Lil Plott (my lover for life)
The Miles to Go
From here to Roanoke there are seventeen
white crosses on the side of the highway.
It is an average of two and a half deaths
every twenty miles. Those drivers
whose counting is tedious
remember only the half- death.
For them, there is the half-death
and then the half-life left over.
There must be something of neither side
that remains, something lost
in the shadows of every cross.
What remains are clipped images
of those slow moments:
the deep breaths taken in winter
just before cranking the car to drive home,
the gradual winding of highways
across miles that exist inside nobody's city limits,
the evolution of the landscape
in the aftermath of the crash.
8:31 AM
stickitminister said...
A couple of my own:
1.
Last chance
Written in fake blood
After Halloween was over
I’m sick of making statements
That try to mean something
When really all I want to say
Is that you’re the fucking monster
I’ve been expecting my entire life
And you’re gonna die soon
Costume or none
2.
Eugene, Oregon:
WMJ (White Male Juvenile), 15 is propositioned in a shopping mall bathroom by a group of older youths who call themselves, The Last Cumming. They want him to join them on a road trip to Colorado. They’re going to visit the site of the Columbine school shootings. “Those guys were true fucking outlaws.” The group has a white van with a mattress in the back and black curtains in the windows. Allegedly, they had been involved in animal mutilations, and they bragged about human sacrifices. “We pump them full of ketamine, you know, K, and they don’t know the difference. When they finally see their own intestines spilling from a slash in themselves, they just laugh like it’s some cheesy horror movie. Like they’re Johnny Depp at his cutest or something.”
Sean P.
8:33 AM
Motor Inn said...
i hope this counts as short
The Atlantic Monthly
from the Free Clinic Series
i
Yassar Arrafat
with his
come hither gaze
the September issue
of The Atlantic Monthly
still on the waiting room table
with its missing cover
which I stole for you
because your were sick
becuase I brought you to the clinic
but mostly because you wanted it
ii
Yassar's
bedroom eyes
become diabolical, inhuman
as I vilify you
it's in the camera lense
the fluid image
--mind/eye--
in a ruined country
8:38 AM
charlie q said...
Things to Film
Tarmac at airports:
mirages in the exhuast
a desert scene
looking for water and
other things
Telephone poles as class signifier:
older neighborhoods
still with above ground
wires, those branchless
trees evenly planted
one after the next
rusted staples up til
the end of arms reach
decades worth of
yard sale signs
lost cats
dogs
8:40 AM
michael_karo said...
i only wrote about 3 or 4 poems last year, this is the best...i think.
"split the difference"
i.
everyone KNOWS it's my favorite place.
my lips against the back of the neck.
and later, talking into your hair.
the inverse curve, up from the shoulders
at times seems monumental.
a breathtaking view i never knew i was missing.
and in the front, nipple and clavicle-hollow.
through shirts new and old.
ii.
his neck was different.
though i can't say how.
familiar yet strange.
a spray of freckles span his back like pebbles on the sand.
i spoke to his head too.
different words.
iii.
in the dark he held me.
in my mind i was talking to you.
"you see how easy it is?"
that familiar picture on the wall.
how you would laugh.
i woke up in the dark and thought i was home.
in the morning, coffee and oranges.
a few hours later, an hour with you.
iv.
you with your head down.
me above.
hands flow down from neck to back.
close your eyes.
let's pretend.
you see how easy?
8:40 AM
Motor Inn said...
charlie q, love your poem.
Dennis, that poem is amazing. I'm glad I read it now because I'll have something to think about all day.
8:43 AM
Motor Inn said...
I'll be selfish
refractions of white on water
ii
it cannot last
the chamber maid will enter
our stay will be
erased
erased
erased
erased
we will be washed down the drain
with so much dirty grey water
toxic cleaner that tears skin
from the bone
8:50 AM
Mikel Motorcycle said...
A couple of mine:
Heijden
Something’s wrong with my chest. My heart beats 4000 miles away in a third floor apartment off the red streets of Amsterdam. The room is as white as my light-body standing alone in the center, flooded with the relief of a lonely man returning home. Drawn toward his psychic impressions created thru years of movement, I diffuse with a sigh, wrapping around his lingering scent, twisting together as our naked bodies on the bed. Intertwining friction charges the air, gives birth to a steam rushing toward the center out of which I materialize, a child of chemical marriage, a room humming with electricity. I walk out and lock the heavy door, down two flights of stairs into the warm afternoon.
I’m waiting for sinuous grace. There he is touching down. I’m in on the firm, mile-per-hour windy kiss. The outskirts of the rubble that used to be me, rotating faster man faster down deep canals to the crescendo of the city. We stop and I step off walking into gilded filth, descending into rabid crossroads. Walk down a cool cement hall to the left and then a right turn to the end and there he is: my heart explodes in phosphorescence. I’m a covert spy observing but he senses, and those eyes of blue blue blue smile.
Smile
Your disdain fits you like Prada,
my reverence whites out my vision.
Stumbling through a tunnel
you tore off my antennas.
Now my head is full of holes,
and I can’t find the sun.
Wriggling worms wrapped around
your barbed spike. I take the bait,
you yank me home by the cheek.
I lay passive to your ulterior motive.
We have nothing to talk about anyway.
Your whole scene is content winding
the key of this dust jukebox.
Alcoholic puppet strings,
dancing into Death’s wings,
it’s under everyone’s skin -
what you can’t put your finger on;
The pulse of this parody re-circulating,
suffocating.
But it’s our way to keep this
mask in place. As we laugh, the
dead magnetism keeps tight control
of the situation with our band-aid smiles.
***
stickitminister: love #1.
8:53 AM
angela said...
I do not understand one word she says to me until she gives up and speaks in English. It is simple and broken. I understand, "Let's go" or "Come here," but when she tries to explain a recipe or maybe the life she left in Frankfurt, I smile until she stops at what I think is mid-sentence. She snakes then a finger into my closed fist, rubbing my palm like it's a strange and soft fur. She leans into my body, her hair smelling of eucalyptus. When she tilts her head back to bite at my chin, the words appear before me in big block letters.
9:01 AM
Tosh said...
My eyes
So sad
So I said to my Dad
That I am leaving
Going to places that are gone
But nevertheless,
My eyes
Twist the image
That is in front of you,
And I remember
When I should say I tried to remember
Because what I remember was not really there
And in essence
This is all I have
9:15 AM
Maximum Etc said...
I Forgot to Say How Sunny it Was
The flower arrangement at the corner store is so perfect
A polity you’d even be credulous if asked to believe
They grew just that way, just right there—sprung up
Through the concrete and the bottoms of all the proper
Plastic pots and you wouldn’t even pose the obvious
Philosophical downer (perfection is a kind of stasis
Which equals death) you’d just contemplate the ratio of
Kissing to everything in the world which is not kissing
And you’d lose yourself in a smile like some cute kid or
Else be consumed by the hard choice between shattering
The bright accord and her to whom you’d gift a bouquet.
9:36 AM
porcelain skull said...
hey dennis,
squinting brown eyes
behind a teenage fringe
as he chews his
headphones, slowly
rocking his hips, swaying
a studded belt halfway
across low slung goth
denim, his slender ass
beneath black under
wear, smiling and
head swaying as he
stares me out with a grin
sideways, swaying
my head back to him as
he closes his eyes and
smiles to let me in,
chewing headphones,
his hips gently rocking
within his music.
hope you have a good weekend, (i just saw the last guy i went out with, i feel like puking.)
alex,x.
9:40 AM
death-hustler said...
THE VERY LONG HOLIDAY
The names of the hours
on a very long holiday
would be the strangest collection
of discordant light
the boys had ever seen.
The names of the hours
if there could be such names
would open in the day-light
on the hinges and seals
of summer
a door
of the present that is named
THE SLEEP OF THE SENSES
or
THE IRON BOUNDARY OF THE SOUL
The boys who unravel this door
from the grids of lavendar
and the drowsy wasps
circling for sugar
unravel the completion
above the day,
the aleph in which
the walnut orchard
is bathed in its sap,
the rows of ants
are the living terrirtories
moving in the shade,
the sleeping cat
and his sleeping breath
disturbs their column.
These are names and numbers
the aleph combines and remembers.
The whole glittering shield
is immune to fracture
it must be summoned to light
this lense of heaviness
above the air
named by the boys
PULSE
or EIDOLON
or FANTASY
and it dissolves the lock
recalling perfection.
The names of the hours
of this dark
within the day
tender only to the boys
who draw from it
their purpose,
the serpent's jaw
the present that is named
HEARTLESS AND ABSOLUTE
or
THE VERY LONG HOLIDAY
9:47 AM
Land of the Bat said...
iPod
White cord connecting us,
Just friends on the subway car, close on orange seats
Listening together, feeling the epic,
Skinny rock boy’s miserable life, perfect dirty hair
Raising the volume:
Drown out the tracks, beggars, the runaways,
Driving forward, listening together, truly touched, until
We’re at your apartment (your roommate’s out of town)
A slice of orange sunset on the back of your pale neck,
I dream of on the
Bedford-bound L
But on the subway train, we’re
Together still:
Connected by your headphones.
10:21 AM
Nick said...
here's one from the cockles;
RAGDOLL CONCUBINE:
tell me more about the way the sores connect
into some constelation
no skyline could have ever concocted.
tell me more about its gases,
to weak to properly fuel the metallic glitter
their crust gives off.
my mouth will mimic the climax
out of habit.
i'll pretend i can't see
the insect legs that lend mobilty to the blackheads
and in turn you'll stifle your vomit long enough
to let these fingers graze the only part of you
that is still cotton.
11:46 AM
measdisease said...
MOVE THE SOUND SILENTLY WITH ALL YOUR BROKEN STRINGS
a violin tragedy
ushers patience into place
with a slow distant
tremble
that shivers air into sound
cello drones rumble
like cautious midnight masses
dark hums that make men
weary
and shake the frail with might
bow-draws wail with broken hair
the ghostly horses screaming
resound through the shrill
of strings
shaking high-pitched pull
winter songs descend like leaves
falling silent after deaths
soundless shimmers close
eyelids
not for dreams but nothingness
12:19 PM
RichJohns said...
Not all that recent, and a bit old-fashioned perhaps, but fairly short at a little over 100 words…
Night Life
This is the place
where the Japanese boy
with the black-haired bangs
hangs out, showing his face.
This is where he danced once,
close, then far away,
his incredible thinness
thrilling at a distance.
Here is where another one plays pool.
Strikes straight.
Lurks late.
Real cool.
In this spot these lovers,
face to face,
dance until they leave the bar
oblivious of all others.
There, with his naked chest,
that gleaming Indian boy
embodies the music’s
exuberant lust.
And this one is hopelessly moved,
borne by the traffic of bodies
past the beautiful now
and the loved
toward where, at a certain hour,
brief near this darkened window
your scented presence blooms,
malevolent as a flower.
1:11 PM
hello said...
here is a new poem:
my bed is a coffin i built
for his small corpse
that i found beneath a pile
of clothes i call myself
he grew up and ran away again
and by coincidence
met your reincarnation
beneath a pile of magazines
we went fishing in your blood
and caught this star eyed doll staring in them we saw the past
how the future became so small
now you hover at the ceiling
defying time and gravity
your life is dead giving birth
to a baby named insanity
2:10 PM
christopher is lost said...
eavan boland's anorexic was the first poem to really capture me. it still moves me, rereading it after all this time...
Anorexic
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
2:11 PM
jack said...
(Selected) Definitions of poem on the Web:
o Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poem
o A descriptive orchestral piece in which the music conveys a scene or relates a story; c1850 to present.
www.wku.edu/~smithch/music/glossnew.htm
o Originally a metrical composition. However, many modern poets no longer use meter so a more accurate definition might be: a concentrated or charged piece of writing; often featuring stanzas and line breaks. www.poetsgraves.co.uk/glossary_poetic_terms_p.htm
o A poem must be intellect's debacle. [BRETON & ELUARD] providence, All approved accidents. [LEIRIS]
pages.citenet.net/users/ctmx1108/humour/humor-dict.html
o The concept of POEM, an acronym for "patient-oriented evidence that matters", is defined as studies that evaluate outcomes that matter to most of our patients. The Journal Club for Journal of Family Practice use POEMS in its reviews of primary care literature. informatics.medicine.dal.ca/w4/glossary.html
2:54 PM
nick said...
i
a day long in waiting
left alone with thoughts
easily compartmentalized
as the wool winds round the needle
small diamonds form
as the muted colors meld
time passes
the mind quietly focuses
the small skein on
the damaged mattress
the only movement as it
becomes something new
bruises rest
as hands deftly create
in the corner shadows
the door remains unopened
the bulb hangs still
ii
freakin' out nights
gut wrenching nausea
eyes fixed to the screen
reading your footprints
as jealousy strangles my common sense
how can you be so different with them
than with me
i want to invade that space
posessively claim you as mine
what other voices cram mine out
so you no longer hear
the silent sobs
you love so much
where do you go
when i'm in here
alone
in the darkness
with my scratches
waiting
for that familiar footfall
for the low voice i crave
i slam the hanging lightbulb
the light jags across the scrawl
jaxzboi
3:35 PM
paradigm said...
here's my most recent poem.
WISH
I wish I was God then I know my life would be a llie
5:49 PM
robert-nyc said...
Dennis, I'm loving everyone's poems on this post--fantastic idea. I want to read all of them when time allows. I made my list of 50 favorite poems. Now I just need to post it. Here's a short poem instead.
Unemployment, Slush, and Ruby Red Heels
Being unemployed can be fun. Running out of money
is a bother. Job-hunting is a tug on the sword in the stone,
well knowing you are not the future king of England.
Take the first thing that comes, don't be picky, earn your way,
make a living, love life, be part of life, make something
of yourself like clumping a snowman out of slush, sacrificing
your well-being to a newly formed religion, perhaps practice
Satanism, kill animals in state parks, walk French poodles
as an occupation, gallop, gallop, trot, trot, do the bus-stop, don't
walk funny, make others laugh because you can do anything if you
believe. It's Dorothy clicking her ruby red heels three times,
repeat after me, “There's no place like home, there's no place like
the past, there's no interest in the corporate world but isn't the art
of administrative assisting so worthwhile in the long run.” Being
a poet is a blast, being unemployed can be fun, I will remove the sword
from the stone, I will be crowned, and running out of money
will not be fatal like a gun, lodged throat deep, spinal cord tickling the wall.
9:53 PM
young/guns said...
"why we chew our organs (our arms touch tomorrow)"
flailing within some fleshy membrane...
the light diffuses softly, pink and veiny
we stumble over our stick legs trying to stay above
always fucking forget what love
is
it's the tentacle that sucks us and drags us below
a watery orange glow laughs as we choke
the progression is like a pot of coffee left out
cold and tastes like frozen earth
stop lying to me. i drink it anyway(we think the world marches on/over our frailblackened bodies/towards a white horizon/bright with fire and smoke/asteroids pock the brightness like colorinverted stars/but we are trapped under a rock/in a 1930's film studio/in a production designed Rolls Royce/with a scrolling screen projecting heaven/the apocalypse behind us)
while we write in terms of lyrics
10:07 PM
timethrift said...
Born in a dank smell
And smudgy twist of sheets,
I'll cough up rusted figurines
Of Los Angeles boring its lovers
Into Heaven after everyone left
And you had to walk home
By yourself
Forty minutes into something
No one has the right to call cold.
1:50 AM
Nigel Symon said...
In Secret..
In secret I play, it can be a lonely place sometimes
Behind closed doors where the curtains are drawn
In the darkness, broken now and again by flickering images
In the silence, in my quiet little corner
I enter my own delirium,
I can hear you downstairs as you watch TV
Moving about, the kettle boiling, and a lighter flicking.
In secret I search for the one thing
The one thing we all keep looking for
The ultimate high, the kick, the buzz
That will be nirvana, manna from heaven,
In secret I traverse the web like a trapeze artist
From A to Z and round the globe
With the click of a button
I move from page to page.
In secret with the sound turned down
I make up my own story to get me high
Coming so close, but always missing the mark
Where I hunger for your touch
That gentle caress, like ice upon fire
The shudder down the spine
That can never be replaced
That sets my mind spinning
To far out galaxies.
In this solitude, hidden away from the world outside
This lust unsatisfied keeps on burning
Keeps on churning through my blood
As I keep on searching, keep on looking
Like a knight in search of his holy grail
For that ultimate high
That will lead me to paradise.
7:49 AM
darling daintyfoot said...
THE ARCADES PROJECT
Why spy?
It is like interrogating tetanus:
don’t ask it not to follow men uphill
like a tracer through veins
to a folding chair
close to their hearts.
Ask what it sees
between the lines.
He, we, teleport in jogpants,
turn a shoulder.
Alone in pockets that hold our hands, keys, lube.
He does violence to softness
and fucks cartoons,
spool slots.
Moans in celluloid’s grip
to the lube of soft video tape.
You, in the duct:
calm as a fume,
filming something between these lines not all.
Such is the uncertainty principal of poetry.
Door locked, it’s either, ah, the face
that breaks me
or the hand that fuels
my life spent in the penny arcades,
gloving my piston.
We are all machines in the age of late capitalism,
foundries along a pacific rim smelting
tiny galaxies that die in the hand.
12:02 PM
jose said...
Zombie
cunnilingus
blood
trickle
down his
chin
her skeleton
jitters,
in the music
video.
Makes me
laugh,
makes me
sick.
12:53 PM
photi said...
A forest scene
In a forest
two woodsmen
loosening vices drop
planks
their grain
evince the cutting
Read them His
swells and loops His
face vanishing into the dusty
Fleshy pools and lines fleshy
Indoors
the furniture lumbers also
in woods neon &
in negative filigree
redden the pinks
to bleach out the white
Hollows made bland
travels in the half sight
their likenesses
a Plasticity
2:08 PM
Devon said...
First poem I did in years recently, needs a little erosion, but that's for tomorrow:
Bad Sex (Verse Remix)
this day. in addition to the door-glazing, I took to endure, he pulled out, trashed the condom, said with nervous smile, curtsied, then chevrons of them, and balanced them on the wink anymore, and it pissed me off. As he was in line for some straddling, I, ever vigilant in scrubbing down the recent receiving, was the more inept. Even if the body threw out old defenses. and put on my clothes, I would have come inside me, him hyper-sensitive a shower later, I went back to the porn, his head, curious.
tables by thrusting them into me, desperate-pealing older fellows went into the—
Used my last half-hour at a bar with—Not about to waste the last hour on me for later scribbling—lusted after during the night, I found it once, my pants, and went back private-roomed with an older man’s come as I press Thumbing through my pages a listing of Five strokes and already I was having a better drink, which I will decline so I could type, where the hair is and isn’t, dribbler or sensitivities: the slow circles of stage one—
the Dissatisfied by how I remember these things. Squeezings of stage three coupled with a balls-plucky guy who resembles Steve-O initially when a face is fragile
while standing at my door to my privates roomed the lead rapper from The Streets as he—
No, my travel-mate’s face is fragile, one stalactiting my cock—
anemone, grazing arms to see if the potential fuck, but that’s after three years of looking at—
Spreading the cum on the door with—
Travelmate and I set our meeting time to our meeting spot, I contract my sphincter part of me behind. It’s a superstitious sluttylinks at the bars down the street, me to buy in my ass, not painful, just a souvenir.
could catalyze into more successful fuckings in a locker, and get lost in saunas, grow and empty twice during the trip—was I—
I wasn’t keen on these sex and no-sex—
I usually manage to document six cocks, my eye, visible constantly. Everyone must all pitch black. I tried the stream room, which is when I have someone only half-circumcised and the two straps of backpacne from wearin’. Pulled my cock out when I heard the slurpineel pube-follicles halfway up one’s shaft. But flared and red from the cold I had been getting such a tease, not having a thing to fondle-cock. No signal made sense.
In the dim porn room, I stopped worrying inside someone’s mouth.
At the sauna I jerked ever closer to a young black guy with a hard-on under—
So not used to this bathhouse format, nuzzles the backs of my fingers against his direction. I jerk in plain view, and realize, just not hep to the protocols. Do I have to sweat less, but he gathers his towel and unveils so soon? At all?
like they did decades ago? Touch toes undernought, I was pursued by a compact Latino—
Nope, there’s an okay fellow with his. Should have just not gone due to my winding search for the privy couple next to him straddling each other, rub—
I blamed my body during the fourth saying to lose him.
¬can see. He’s looking my way again. I doled out under the reddish light that smoothes—
Too much space, I thought, taking my raised eyebrows, my request for permission. Took a break in a whiter darkness, especially with glasses hidden behind my glasses, but pulsed near the escort sections of gay weeklies. ‘During. But I wasn’t able to see the hazy sucking, the breakout on my chest passing the time sipping beer, smoking cigs to watch the blowing circles spill their fellatio, waiting for him to grab my leg so I can ball, and then take him to a room where he walked off—for me to follow? Then, I even turned around to see if he still rooms. Might have been interpreted as areas. The sex areas were darker, even—
2:34 PM
vomitingghosts said...
I know I'm a day late with the whole poem thing and yeah, I'm posting this in the wrong place but I sure could use some head. Yeah, I also know Marco is the '60 minutes' boy, but maybe he'd reconsider...?
Anyway, Dennis, you've convinced me it's good to take a chance and show strangers your work, so here's the last poem I wrote. It's a ghazal, that weird and sad Persian form of poetry usually about unattainable love. Interestingly, in the Arabic 'ghazal' literally means 'talking with women' but in Persian means 'the last melancholic cry of a deer cornered by hunters.' I don't know if that's what the Arabs meant by 'talking with women' but...
Apparently blogger doesn't shine on lines any longer than like ten words, so / means the line break. Not that it matters really...
...
Inside
"The worst things: to be in bed and sleep not, to want for one who comes not, to try to please and please not." - Egyptian proverb
How well I know these snowy streets and houses through my window inside! /
The dark keeps my sorrow alive while the cold keeps me inside.
Black coffee in the morning and green tea at night. O bitter mistresses /
of the lonely wintertime, you are the axes that break the frozen sea inside.
All night the wind turns, burying everything in great sweeps of snow. /
When I cannot sleep, I imagine the coffins of the dead, and the satin inside.
My house is haunted by ghosts I cannot see. Dishes rattle and my bedroom /
doorknob turns in the night. Though, perhaps they don’t know I’m inside.
Looking at my reflection in the morning light, I see only the sadness /
in my eyes. Some days it seems my mirror reflects only what is inside.
No one was born in the world today, the news reports. Nine months ago /
every man denied his love. Their hearts: what was happening inside?
Though, lately it seems “strangers are an endangered species.” What I’d give /
to eye new faces all day, then come home and not find myself inside.
Staring at the ceiling I am convinced God leaves me alive so I will be lonely. /
I bless Him for His generosity, for showing me the room I will die inside.
“Oh haven’t you known nights of love?” Yes, but by day it is very different: /
all day we are alone, and our love is the “great death each of us carries inside.”
But there are days I can’t lift my eyes and long to be burned alive with all /
my books and candles, letters and photographs. Fire, release the ashes inside.
What rationale explains sleeping until the sun goes down? Hopelessness? /
Depression? Whatever the mess, I wake without a skeleton inside.
The afternoon sky takes on the color of turtledoves while snowflakes swirl /
to earth. Yes, even God above has a bottomless pit He drops things inside.
What’s frightening is reality with its thorns and prickles like the cactus. /
And until you shake me and splash cold water on my face, I will stay inside.
“Perhaps a sleepy teenager is being pulled from his crashed car or my father /
has died and this is how God tells me:” by turning off the electricity inside.
How could I have imagined then how alone I’d become? My brains, veins— /
even my heart has left me. Tell me, how do you live with no heart inside?
I’ve gotten used to them slamming the cupboards shut and flickering /
the lights. Yes, they are here to stay. There is no vomiting the ghosts inside.
Yesterday I dreamt there was no carriage to leave my palace, only giant eggs. /
But suddenly the eggs burst, and with each one I discovered a rabbit inside.
Yet sleep doesn’t solve anything, Matthew. Can’t you understand? /
Its repose refreshes only the body, and settles nothing except your guts inside.
...
Yeah, so I'm way behind, but I'm also working on a 50 favorite song list. Things are really crazy lately but every morning I read your blog and am lightened. I'll post the list eventually. And I'm liking all the poems everyone's posting, too. Land of the bat's ipod poem particularly, and paradigm's little wish poem jump out at me for some reason. And your ghost poem has always been a favorite.
A 50 favorite poems list seems impossible but if anyone can do it, you all and Dennis can. Anyway, this is a huge post already. So my vote is for Marco if and only if he's giving out head. If not, Sammy with the same deal...
Matt
7:37 AM
tony said...
You don't deserve anything good
Because you're a bad person.
Everyone hates you, and you know
They are just in doing so.
Love is so often lost to you
Because love has inspiration.
There are places for people like you:
They are cold, dark, and boring.
You don't know what you want
Because you want everything.
There are times that are nice, pleasant things;
Knowing you, these will turn to shit.
Focus on the first thing that comes to mind;
Knowing you, that thing will be yourself.
The second thing that will come to mind
Is the long walk home, spurned.
A cold walk, shivery and heady,you notice
Everything looks just a bit wet.
Denuded trees surround you, dead leaves,
And everyone who passes, passes in silence.
(I write fiction, and very few poems; you see why)
4:57 PM
hilarie said...
to hear you in the bath
resonating coordinated gestures
Then I wash my waterfall of moons
low beyond your garden
your fingers imagine meeting me
at the end of our bed
you have birds for teeth
turned as sideways rain
the field sounds coming inside through glass
waving bright ribbons
echos that come in through a window.
-Hilarie Hildebrand
8:42 PM
corpodibacco said...
Only now I acknowledged the existence of 'the poetry page' and, guess what, I thought I wanted to be into it. :)
I read we can post here to be moved there... so here's my poem. Hope it won't sound too trite or something.
I wake up because no bird is calling in the morning
before the downpour,
this enhances the impression of the builtland all around sleeping,
every animate creature in it sleeping
under the furniture giveaway acid yellow poster bill,
the phenomenal FIAT blue car they want me to buy is there,
in front of italian bars where sugar bags advertise
ROMAN horse gambling are there and later,
the first buongiorno of the day as I walk past,
is feeling observed,
and walking I let my fingertips bounce
over the poles of the garden gates
there everything lays motionless and lights are
only sloughing colors behind the boughs ajar,
I feel friendly but I have no one to talk to
is this the moment where I am supposed to grasp something of the world,
I wonder, is that a fair landscape in the concrete valley
this necessity to die the sooner the better, it says
you won't believe it but
as she does with millions of lives all around, life
can stand you
it says.
10:04 AM
Here's (I think) my most recent poem:
Reconnaissance
Blonde hair stacked like the hay and just as flammable in which I used to roll and sneeze when my body was smooth and unblighted by corporeal want, before my navel dropped between my legs not many years later. For the sake of thematic consistency, let’s say the eyes were blue like the sky whose cloud voyages I used to mutate whilst reclining on the hay and just as malleable on which I used to roll. Emotionally I mean.
Four cold fingers on the back of my neck, manipulate my field of vision forever in the direction of:
‘Please wrestle my physical autonomy from me so I can be the plateaux on which things grow instead of the axis around which my anxieties and aspirations orbit.’
The opposable thumb allows my captor to squeeze, my hairless neck a malleable dough.
How old were you when you first got hard in public?
One finger smothers the past.
Another strangles the future.
The next is the blue touch paper of fusion.
The fourth burns the blueprint into my e rotic heart.
I was seven and the teacher warned that he might paralyse my neck.
The thumb dug like the pitchfork my mother’s father used to ventilate the hay in which I used to roll leaving a white spectral hand of shadows inside which I dwell like I would a creamy blissful oubliette if at times I could find one.
She spoke of paralysis in negative terms. I think he was called Wayne, like the moon the arrival of which used to signal that I’d mutated clouds long enough and it was probably cold and time to eat sometimes does only spelt differently.
Nick.
2:03 AM
aaron said...
Funny that you decided to do a poetry day the day after I write my first poem in like six years.
3 Films Featuring Lawrence Olivier
Heathcliff slaps Cathy
Then runs his wrist over the broken window
Pane.
And you thought romance was dead, she said.
That’s not how it happened in the book, I tell her.
Saturday afternoon and I’m stoned,
Watching Clash of the Titans on…
Some channel.
My best friend in the third grade—Adam
He loved this movie.
I thought the claymation Medusa was cheesy even back then.
The spaghetti pot is boiling, telephone ringing
And I’m sitting on the couch picking at
A loose thread on the hem of my jeans and
Before she gets up to answer the phone,
She turns to me and says, I don’t like this movie.
After she’s out of the room Olivier screams,
A horse, A horse, my kingdom for a horse!
2:54 AM
laura beth noble said...
i tend to write short stories, rather than poems, because i end up wanting to write more than a poem can hold.
the first poem i ever read, and legitimatley liked, was e.e. cummings's "a leaf falls" poem.
1(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
3:44 AM
Chilly Jay Chill said...
Two short prose poems adapted/stolen from Kathy Acker. Used as monologues in a play:
PIRATE INVOCATION
Out of the parrots and macaws they step into the seas which sound like earthquakes into waters that reach up to and punch holes in the air.They’re on the march, as much as they ever do anything together.
They’re after booty. Ownership. Usually they commence battle by surrounding their quarry like cats surrounding mice. Teasing them, then destroying. Leave without having actually murdered anyone. They’re back in their hideout in the black sands. All of them naked.
PIRATE DREAM OF PIRATES
While we had been dreaming, as if we had been dreaming pirate girls, the boat had made a great deal of way. It was lying half a mile southeast of the earth.
But we were caught in whatever dreams boat dream. Dreams of being pursued by bloodthirsty pirates but unable to move. The waters around the boat growing thicker and thicker. Our boat, stuck in a mixture of mud and water.
We were unable to the approach the shore we had dreamed about. We were caught in another world.
6:12 AM
Comment Deleted
This post has been removed by the author.
6:19 AM
Comment Deleted
This post has been removed by the author.
6:21 AM
Dickon Edwards said...
Apopos of nothing, I notice that your website bibliography omits one short book:
Title: 'Violence, News Item, Literature'
Author: Dennis Cooper
Published: P.O.L. Books, Paris, 2004.
ISBN: 2846820139
Edition contains the text in both French and English.
Just got my copy of this now. It's a rather cute little book with a proper spine, containing a concise but startling memoir by yourself. I don't know if you have any plans to include it in an anthology, but surely DC fans would be interested?
Amazon (France) link.
6:23 AM
Callum said...
My Brother's Penis
Began as a nut
in a silver-birch junction
with a map of walnut
wrinkles tight beneath;
beached into driftwood
that smelled of the
same salt
I was pulled from;
darkened to a plum
of guilty sweetness
and the tart taste of stars
on the tongue;
became a tunnel under the sea
and a route to something primitive
and finally, gorged on imagination,
was a myth never sung.
6:35 AM
Eddie Beverage said...
since my days of writing poetry are comprised of two eras with an epic gap in between, i've posted one old and one new.
SOMEWHERE
If sexuality be expressed through longings of the heart
I am gay
If through the loins
bi
If through my facade
straight
And if through the truth
Somewhere on the long road in between
SAN JUAN RAIN
San Juan rain calls
to pigeons on calle joyful
calle serene, calle present
where does the sea end?
waves crash
children cry "aqui!"
mist on their brows is sea,
love in their hearts is sunshine.
San Juan rain delights in
anointing strange heads
while singing,
"Blessed are the lonely,
they truly know themselves,
they only feel at home
when they are away."
oh yeah, i know the contest is over but i just thought of a new name for a band, Clammy Jizz.
rock 'n' roll!!!!
7:32 AM
matt said...
A million guys
line up everynight at
the foot of the moon.
Training their erections on
his smile, they bury
their desires beneath
a constellation of ideas
scattered and shot awhile back
in more adult bedrooms.
What is it you want them to do?
Twinkle, water, plant
themselves firmly in place?
I know--you want to be 15
want them to be
Ryan, Chris, Derrick.
Well, they can't
they're porno.
It's not so much nostalgia
that makes you crack the dust
on these old Honchos, Inches
as the desire to feel your brain
or
at least wipe up and
get the phone.
7:37 AM
nicholas said...
where rivers turn a magic casualty
a vast persuasion of sad lines
I can't stay here
absence shadows an empty shell
the savage deceit of ghost hours
I don't care if he does
rain begins a twofold loss
in lucid delusion of shadow selves
you turn to go
7:47 AM
Josh Feola said...
Boy King
the Sandman has placed a little grain of dust
in each of your eyes every night
since you were a child and
when you stopped waking up he
still placed a little grain of dust in
each of your eyes every night and
now the little grains spill over you
like time and you’re under a massive
dune, buried like a pharaoh and still
he places a little grain of quartz in
each of your eyes for every night you
stay asleep, renewing you.
p.s. callum your poem is great
7:49 AM
Dickon Edwards said...
I write lyrics rather than poems, and hope that's applicable:
RUDE ESPERANTO
You're just too good at this game, love.
Prey to every tourist desire.
When versed in rude esperanto
no phrasebook ever required.
The night's young,
and neither are you, love.
Here's to immaturing with age.
Star of the youth club posters:
"The Most Life On The Minimum Wage."
Is there ANYONE'S car you won't get into?
Cat-like hair's a dead giveaway.
And O, the way saucy repartee
can conceal alluring tragedy.
You want to dance blameless into urban legend.
And leave your name to a new syndrome.
Till then you'll play
Venus In Pedal Pushers.
Hating and loving that you cannot ever go home.
This time (you say) is the last time.
Okay - one more, then for sure you'll retire.
Still, when gifted in rude esperanto,
no phrasebook ever required.
8:26 AM
antonio said...
i dont read too much poetry. mostly obscure french stuff. alot of symbolism i guess. and some newer kids in nyc. i do write sometimes. but mostly for myself. maybe to be published posthumously. but i went to this art high school, it was sort of like a "fame"-esque art school, like think of the quintessential one and that's it. and we were all divided into our own departments, there was a visual arts department, a dance department, theater, music, and a creative writing department. and when i moved here and got accepted into the school in the va department i found out by complete coincidence that i had a cousin in the cw department and she was basically the coolest girl ever. the cw kids worked really hard i suppose. i know the va department worked really hard, so obviously the cw kids did too. and they had prosody classes starting at i think 8th grade and ending around 10th where they started focusing solely on their own output instead of studying other people's stuff and doing exercises.. and every year the seniors had a reading and their work was published in the cadence of that school year.. and every year the music seniors had a recital and got an album and every year the theater seniors directed their own productions and the va seniors had to open a show and all that etc. it was hard. but anyways. here are some selected poems from the creative writing department kids starting firstly with my cousin paige poe, these are all sort of oldish. like the newest one is two years old. but whatever i ain't even care. also for some reason the formatting of this is being fucked with by i guess the blogger gods.. so that sestina is sort of fucked up.. but uhh.. imagine... imagine!!
Paige Poe
The Rolling Stones Catch the Indian Pacific at Perth
Switch the track breakers,
porcelain figurine, and derail sighing.
Remember those who glittered
trains through you rhythmed
with the pulsing of science.
Floating down from the Starship,
Mick touched your forehead
like a fairy king and you felt it for days.
You caught trains
fleetingly with footsteps of song
along miniature ivory organs.
Your head was held by Dreamtime:
Australia was a sunken desert
in impossible mist, until
those lost princes returned, wings frayed,
crowned in crumbling baby's breath.
Opening windows, blowing dust from their hands,
they leaned out to call you in.
The train slowed at their command. When it stopped
for you all eyes watched: the conductor's hands
slipped from his duties, vaguely promising
smashed metal and screeching brakes
for the future. And sparks
flew from metal against metal,
louder than factories
or the scorched, empty town.
Your future in the desert was a dream,
a snake hiding in every hole
and nothing but brush for years away,
mating frogs like aboriginal music
reflecting your body caked in dust-
years earlier
when the fairies found you
in their bed, face full of sleep,
you were brushed with honey dust.
Their eyes pricked with desire.
They cast away their cigarettes
and wiped the gold from your eyes.
their bodies sleek with wonder.
And if you breathed in the dust
and coughed out the gold,
it was only temporary asphyxia-
the whiskey they bottle-fed you was worse.
But when your lips were numb
and held by a stranger, you tried to smile:
you felt it with your face.
Before the train slipped from the station,
you tiptoed to reach a window of their car,
but they were gilded with dust and all you saw
were gray shadows of movements.
You still touched the glass in goodbye,
and left your hand impressed in dust.
You fell and landed in the desert
like a shattered meteor, silent
as the night when the trains stopped.
There's no sound to signal
what the years have worn away,
what the trains carried across
this abandoned desert in the summers.
But even now if the night is warm,
you can wipe the sweat from the back of your neck
and watch it glitter in your palm.
Katie McGriff (this girl wrote in form and scared everyone, she is a crazy lesbian and she took bible study classes in order to properly use obscure religious imagery in her poems)
Retrogression (a sestina)
"God, that's disgusting." My aunt reaches to cover my eyes
as we pull into Jeremiah's driveway. Jeremiah has hung another
dead deer in the oak tree in his front year and blood slides
from the branches like sorghum. "How could his father
let him do that?" Her hands fall from my face; she knows
she hasn't prevented me from seeing anything. All four
of the deer's legs are tied together, a rope barely strong enough for
Cat's Cradle holding a deer so heavy the branch sags. "I
think it's like a parade of homes," I say. "You know,
some people grow carnations or roses or something. Others
hang deer in trees." We are here to visit Jeremiah's father,
perched at the kitchen table. He's waiting to slide
even farther into death, like a child at the top of a slide.
The x-rays barely show his lungs at all-he's already waited four
years. My aunt doesn't mention that Jeremiah's father
might not even know of the deer in the yard, and I
don't say anything about his dirty windows-another
week of dust against the glass, so thick no
sunlight can reach through. My aunt wipes her nose
on her shirt sleeve, opens the car door, and slides
out of the front seat. "I don't know if I can take another
year of this," she says. "Imagine being sick for
this long." I don't say anything, but I shield my eyes
from the sun and climb out of the car. "Imagine if your father
were sick for this long." Jeremiah's father
sits at the table most afternoons we visit. He knows
about waiting-he bites his fingernails, wipes his eyes,
tells visitors of hunting trips with Jeremiah, how they slid
rifles against their shoulder blades and tried to fire before
the deer noticed. Then they dragged home another
body, left it bleeding in the backyard until sunset. Other
afternoons when we visit, Jeremiah has left his father
in bed, asleep in the heavy darkness of the dusty widows. The four
o' clock sun sinks below the deer in the tree. Though she knows
Jeremiah must be waiting inside for us, my aunt slides
her arms around my shoulder and we stop to stare at the deer. "I
don't know," she says, eyes squinted into the sun, "but any other
deer would've slid down by now." Inside, Jeremiah and his father
know this kind of waiting already-this is a death they've seen
before.
Natalie Elliot, i think natalie used to write alot of fiction, she wrote a short story called the Boys of San Blas that's basically my favourite piece of writing ever. but it's pages and pages, so i'm not going to attempt copying that. But shes kept a blog for almost 5 years exclusively of writings i'm not sure if she would like me to give the address out, but here's two things not poems. but fuck it.
There once was a monster
I simply cannot stop conditioning !!!! Guess this is just the side-effect when your hairstyle is now an NYC Eastern European immigrant mullet. They caught us at the stateline. I don't know what to say. I want you to look for me everywhere. In all apple orchards, in the folds of your eyes, in the magazine of your dreams. See I was brought up to love Bruce Springsteen at a very early age. So what do you want me to do?
It's good she's got a husband. Had a bad dream where we were looking at a National Geographic special issue on fisherman and you were in every picture. Then there was a giant spider trickling down the wall. Jesus save me all the boys left this week and I think that just might mean the end of summer. If autumn and apples begin today, I at least want it to be dark for the mourning. Then it will be golden and steamy soon enough, and if nothing else I'll be too busy to notice. When I come back into town I am going to be a legal vagabond. Even if it means giving away my possessions one by one. Land over sea. Patience over profit. I saw that all the girls are growing up, and I feared that maybe I was not. Then I realized he doesn't even know my age, and then I know that I am already grown. You may not know me by my true name.
Oh, our poor broke parents. Eating out of cans and foil packets. Still not more than once a day, still mostly late at night fighting the cats for bites. Old lover of mine, it's very clear that although you love some things, all you have now is a very different kind of fun. You seem mostly assanine in your apathy, and I may interject by saying I once made the same mistake. It's all right, though. It's good for the body. It creeps through you to speak.
I think she takes pictures of us while we're sleeping. There was an accidental poetry night where I commanded the stage, which was actually her bed, and they were all curled together like two young hot people who do not know each other. If I weren't me, and I were in the room, I admit I probably would have puked. Or gotten so vile and sick to my stomach I'd have to flee the room from fever. And all the same I know I'm grown, because I was faced quite in the face with that all to familiar moment of reckoning, and it was serious, and thank god this time I was fortunately sober, and I could do nothing to hurt him; I was helpless to his face and hands. And after all these drunken lectures. And after crazy one-thousand times. And all the same: it was still not a fight. There hasn't once been a fight. And all of you idiots thought there was something wrong with me ! I've never stayed so drunk and been so peacefully uncontentious--I am the girl you've never seen before. Not that I deserve a medal. I deserve prize money. I have found a bloodbrother. I have found that which I so foolishly handicapped myself with envy for. If I thought of the wrong way to say knowing you makes every song beautiful, then let me think of the right way to say knowing we two is like knowing one-in-three-persons. And knowing is like learning how two bodies fit together back to back according to the Greeks. The retelling of the untold story. And all of this, the year I was born.
Paper Sheets on a Wooden Bed
We are all your children. I've got your money, baby, and I'm tired, and I'm still broke, and I'm aching from sleeping on the floor. My lungs are shot due to a carton of Lucky Strike filters that my babyhole graciously bestowed to me for Christmas. I am sorry I want to see you so badly. But I haven't any gifts. I have no gifts for anyone, and they are especially not wrapped, and I'm not going into work until three in the afternoon tomorrow but it don't fucking matter because I'm fatigued right now beyond cohesion, vehicle operation, film watching, etc.
I don't give a shit. I ain't said anything I meant in a long time. But sometimes when I come home from work I want my bitch to have a hot, homecooked meal on the stove. Is that so much to ask ? Fucking working women. Fucking bitches that won't cook a man a nice hot dinner. At least save me a plate. And then I come home night after night, my patience is deteriorating. They're going out to dinner tomorrow and what the fuck do I have to show for it ? I muddy mop and Marlboro Light cigarette butts stuffed into the fissures in the concrete patio. Tonight I microwaved some eggs. I am listening to her old Valentine's Day Massacre tape but it's not doing it for me just quite like I thought it would. There is no lukewarm reminiscing. Instead ? Well, I suppose I am that disgusted. I just love you Poly Styrene. I mean really I love you. And I know you're a Hare Krishna now but I saw the lame parade down London and it makes sense that someone would be. But I love you and I want to listen to no one but you. I want to hold you in my arms. I want to collect the food from your braces. Alas, you are middleaged now. But maybe I can steal one of your children.
She says yesterday something like "Every time I see you I just want to paint a picture of a girl in a cafe because you're so beautiful and lonely. You're the kind of girl a boy falls in love with but will never--" enter mild comedian. Clean, but lazy, and perpetual halitosis as well as other aspects of faulty hygiene. Nevertheless, I don't want her to finish. I think she is one of the kindest I have ever met, but I don't want to hear about what I am or what I am not. I don't need these things to hold on to until I drink too much bah and fall off of my high heels again. I haven't drunk in a while but I got this feeling that the next time I do I'll cut my whole ankle off, and I'll put my foot through the window, or the rest of my neck, etc. etc. etc. etc. He said oh he said he said.
and finally
Lil Plott (my lover for life)
The Miles to Go
From here to Roanoke there are seventeen
white crosses on the side of the highway.
It is an average of two and a half deaths
every twenty miles. Those drivers
whose counting is tedious
remember only the half- death.
For them, there is the half-death
and then the half-life left over.
There must be something of neither side
that remains, something lost
in the shadows of every cross.
What remains are clipped images
of those slow moments:
the deep breaths taken in winter
just before cranking the car to drive home,
the gradual winding of highways
across miles that exist inside nobody's city limits,
the evolution of the landscape
in the aftermath of the crash.
8:31 AM
stickitminister said...
A couple of my own:
1.
Last chance
Written in fake blood
After Halloween was over
I’m sick of making statements
That try to mean something
When really all I want to say
Is that you’re the fucking monster
I’ve been expecting my entire life
And you’re gonna die soon
Costume or none
2.
Eugene, Oregon:
WMJ (White Male Juvenile), 15 is propositioned in a shopping mall bathroom by a group of older youths who call themselves, The Last Cumming. They want him to join them on a road trip to Colorado. They’re going to visit the site of the Columbine school shootings. “Those guys were true fucking outlaws.” The group has a white van with a mattress in the back and black curtains in the windows. Allegedly, they had been involved in animal mutilations, and they bragged about human sacrifices. “We pump them full of ketamine, you know, K, and they don’t know the difference. When they finally see their own intestines spilling from a slash in themselves, they just laugh like it’s some cheesy horror movie. Like they’re Johnny Depp at his cutest or something.”
Sean P.
8:33 AM
Motor Inn said...
i hope this counts as short
The Atlantic Monthly
from the Free Clinic Series
i
Yassar Arrafat
with his
come hither gaze
the September issue
of The Atlantic Monthly
still on the waiting room table
with its missing cover
which I stole for you
because your were sick
becuase I brought you to the clinic
but mostly because you wanted it
ii
Yassar's
bedroom eyes
become diabolical, inhuman
as I vilify you
it's in the camera lense
the fluid image
--mind/eye--
in a ruined country
8:38 AM
charlie q said...
Things to Film
Tarmac at airports:
mirages in the exhuast
a desert scene
looking for water and
other things
Telephone poles as class signifier:
older neighborhoods
still with above ground
wires, those branchless
trees evenly planted
one after the next
rusted staples up til
the end of arms reach
decades worth of
yard sale signs
lost cats
dogs
8:40 AM
michael_karo said...
i only wrote about 3 or 4 poems last year, this is the best...i think.
"split the difference"
i.
everyone KNOWS it's my favorite place.
my lips against the back of the neck.
and later, talking into your hair.
the inverse curve, up from the shoulders
at times seems monumental.
a breathtaking view i never knew i was missing.
and in the front, nipple and clavicle-hollow.
through shirts new and old.
ii.
his neck was different.
though i can't say how.
familiar yet strange.
a spray of freckles span his back like pebbles on the sand.
i spoke to his head too.
different words.
iii.
in the dark he held me.
in my mind i was talking to you.
"you see how easy it is?"
that familiar picture on the wall.
how you would laugh.
i woke up in the dark and thought i was home.
in the morning, coffee and oranges.
a few hours later, an hour with you.
iv.
you with your head down.
me above.
hands flow down from neck to back.
close your eyes.
let's pretend.
you see how easy?
8:40 AM
Motor Inn said...
charlie q, love your poem.
Dennis, that poem is amazing. I'm glad I read it now because I'll have something to think about all day.
8:43 AM
Motor Inn said...
I'll be selfish
refractions of white on water
ii
it cannot last
the chamber maid will enter
our stay will be
erased
erased
erased
erased
we will be washed down the drain
with so much dirty grey water
toxic cleaner that tears skin
from the bone
8:50 AM
Mikel Motorcycle said...
A couple of mine:
Heijden
Something’s wrong with my chest. My heart beats 4000 miles away in a third floor apartment off the red streets of Amsterdam. The room is as white as my light-body standing alone in the center, flooded with the relief of a lonely man returning home. Drawn toward his psychic impressions created thru years of movement, I diffuse with a sigh, wrapping around his lingering scent, twisting together as our naked bodies on the bed. Intertwining friction charges the air, gives birth to a steam rushing toward the center out of which I materialize, a child of chemical marriage, a room humming with electricity. I walk out and lock the heavy door, down two flights of stairs into the warm afternoon.
I’m waiting for sinuous grace. There he is touching down. I’m in on the firm, mile-per-hour windy kiss. The outskirts of the rubble that used to be me, rotating faster man faster down deep canals to the crescendo of the city. We stop and I step off walking into gilded filth, descending into rabid crossroads. Walk down a cool cement hall to the left and then a right turn to the end and there he is: my heart explodes in phosphorescence. I’m a covert spy observing but he senses, and those eyes of blue blue blue smile.
Smile
Your disdain fits you like Prada,
my reverence whites out my vision.
Stumbling through a tunnel
you tore off my antennas.
Now my head is full of holes,
and I can’t find the sun.
Wriggling worms wrapped around
your barbed spike. I take the bait,
you yank me home by the cheek.
I lay passive to your ulterior motive.
We have nothing to talk about anyway.
Your whole scene is content winding
the key of this dust jukebox.
Alcoholic puppet strings,
dancing into Death’s wings,
it’s under everyone’s skin -
what you can’t put your finger on;
The pulse of this parody re-circulating,
suffocating.
But it’s our way to keep this
mask in place. As we laugh, the
dead magnetism keeps tight control
of the situation with our band-aid smiles.
***
stickitminister: love #1.
8:53 AM
angela said...
I do not understand one word she says to me until she gives up and speaks in English. It is simple and broken. I understand, "Let's go" or "Come here," but when she tries to explain a recipe or maybe the life she left in Frankfurt, I smile until she stops at what I think is mid-sentence. She snakes then a finger into my closed fist, rubbing my palm like it's a strange and soft fur. She leans into my body, her hair smelling of eucalyptus. When she tilts her head back to bite at my chin, the words appear before me in big block letters.
9:01 AM
Tosh said...
My eyes
So sad
So I said to my Dad
That I am leaving
Going to places that are gone
But nevertheless,
My eyes
Twist the image
That is in front of you,
And I remember
When I should say I tried to remember
Because what I remember was not really there
And in essence
This is all I have
9:15 AM
Maximum Etc said...
I Forgot to Say How Sunny it Was
The flower arrangement at the corner store is so perfect
A polity you’d even be credulous if asked to believe
They grew just that way, just right there—sprung up
Through the concrete and the bottoms of all the proper
Plastic pots and you wouldn’t even pose the obvious
Philosophical downer (perfection is a kind of stasis
Which equals death) you’d just contemplate the ratio of
Kissing to everything in the world which is not kissing
And you’d lose yourself in a smile like some cute kid or
Else be consumed by the hard choice between shattering
The bright accord and her to whom you’d gift a bouquet.
9:36 AM
porcelain skull said...
hey dennis,
squinting brown eyes
behind a teenage fringe
as he chews his
headphones, slowly
rocking his hips, swaying
a studded belt halfway
across low slung goth
denim, his slender ass
beneath black under
wear, smiling and
head swaying as he
stares me out with a grin
sideways, swaying
my head back to him as
he closes his eyes and
smiles to let me in,
chewing headphones,
his hips gently rocking
within his music.
hope you have a good weekend, (i just saw the last guy i went out with, i feel like puking.)
alex,x.
9:40 AM
death-hustler said...
THE VERY LONG HOLIDAY
The names of the hours
on a very long holiday
would be the strangest collection
of discordant light
the boys had ever seen.
The names of the hours
if there could be such names
would open in the day-light
on the hinges and seals
of summer
a door
of the present that is named
THE SLEEP OF THE SENSES
or
THE IRON BOUNDARY OF THE SOUL
The boys who unravel this door
from the grids of lavendar
and the drowsy wasps
circling for sugar
unravel the completion
above the day,
the aleph in which
the walnut orchard
is bathed in its sap,
the rows of ants
are the living terrirtories
moving in the shade,
the sleeping cat
and his sleeping breath
disturbs their column.
These are names and numbers
the aleph combines and remembers.
The whole glittering shield
is immune to fracture
it must be summoned to light
this lense of heaviness
above the air
named by the boys
PULSE
or EIDOLON
or FANTASY
and it dissolves the lock
recalling perfection.
The names of the hours
of this dark
within the day
tender only to the boys
who draw from it
their purpose,
the serpent's jaw
the present that is named
HEARTLESS AND ABSOLUTE
or
THE VERY LONG HOLIDAY
9:47 AM
Land of the Bat said...
iPod
White cord connecting us,
Just friends on the subway car, close on orange seats
Listening together, feeling the epic,
Skinny rock boy’s miserable life, perfect dirty hair
Raising the volume:
Drown out the tracks, beggars, the runaways,
Driving forward, listening together, truly touched, until
We’re at your apartment (your roommate’s out of town)
A slice of orange sunset on the back of your pale neck,
I dream of on the
Bedford-bound L
But on the subway train, we’re
Together still:
Connected by your headphones.
10:21 AM
Nick said...
here's one from the cockles;
RAGDOLL CONCUBINE:
tell me more about the way the sores connect
into some constelation
no skyline could have ever concocted.
tell me more about its gases,
to weak to properly fuel the metallic glitter
their crust gives off.
my mouth will mimic the climax
out of habit.
i'll pretend i can't see
the insect legs that lend mobilty to the blackheads
and in turn you'll stifle your vomit long enough
to let these fingers graze the only part of you
that is still cotton.
11:46 AM
measdisease said...
MOVE THE SOUND SILENTLY WITH ALL YOUR BROKEN STRINGS
a violin tragedy
ushers patience into place
with a slow distant
tremble
that shivers air into sound
cello drones rumble
like cautious midnight masses
dark hums that make men
weary
and shake the frail with might
bow-draws wail with broken hair
the ghostly horses screaming
resound through the shrill
of strings
shaking high-pitched pull
winter songs descend like leaves
falling silent after deaths
soundless shimmers close
eyelids
not for dreams but nothingness
12:19 PM
RichJohns said...
Not all that recent, and a bit old-fashioned perhaps, but fairly short at a little over 100 words…
Night Life
This is the place
where the Japanese boy
with the black-haired bangs
hangs out, showing his face.
This is where he danced once,
close, then far away,
his incredible thinness
thrilling at a distance.
Here is where another one plays pool.
Strikes straight.
Lurks late.
Real cool.
In this spot these lovers,
face to face,
dance until they leave the bar
oblivious of all others.
There, with his naked chest,
that gleaming Indian boy
embodies the music’s
exuberant lust.
And this one is hopelessly moved,
borne by the traffic of bodies
past the beautiful now
and the loved
toward where, at a certain hour,
brief near this darkened window
your scented presence blooms,
malevolent as a flower.
1:11 PM
hello said...
here is a new poem:
my bed is a coffin i built
for his small corpse
that i found beneath a pile
of clothes i call myself
he grew up and ran away again
and by coincidence
met your reincarnation
beneath a pile of magazines
we went fishing in your blood
and caught this star eyed doll staring in them we saw the past
how the future became so small
now you hover at the ceiling
defying time and gravity
your life is dead giving birth
to a baby named insanity
2:10 PM
christopher is lost said...
eavan boland's anorexic was the first poem to really capture me. it still moves me, rereading it after all this time...
Anorexic
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
2:11 PM
jack said...
(Selected) Definitions of poem on the Web:
o Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poem
o A descriptive orchestral piece in which the music conveys a scene or relates a story; c1850 to present.
www.wku.edu/~smithch/music/glossnew.htm
o Originally a metrical composition. However, many modern poets no longer use meter so a more accurate definition might be: a concentrated or charged piece of writing; often featuring stanzas and line breaks. www.poetsgraves.co.uk/glossary_poetic_terms_p.htm
o A poem must be intellect's debacle. [BRETON & ELUARD] providence, All approved accidents. [LEIRIS]
pages.citenet.net/users/ctmx1108/humour/humor-dict.html
o The concept of POEM, an acronym for "patient-oriented evidence that matters", is defined as studies that evaluate outcomes that matter to most of our patients. The Journal Club for Journal of Family Practice use POEMS in its reviews of primary care literature. informatics.medicine.dal.ca/w4/glossary.html
2:54 PM
nick said...
i
a day long in waiting
left alone with thoughts
easily compartmentalized
as the wool winds round the needle
small diamonds form
as the muted colors meld
time passes
the mind quietly focuses
the small skein on
the damaged mattress
the only movement as it
becomes something new
bruises rest
as hands deftly create
in the corner shadows
the door remains unopened
the bulb hangs still
ii
freakin' out nights
gut wrenching nausea
eyes fixed to the screen
reading your footprints
as jealousy strangles my common sense
how can you be so different with them
than with me
i want to invade that space
posessively claim you as mine
what other voices cram mine out
so you no longer hear
the silent sobs
you love so much
where do you go
when i'm in here
alone
in the darkness
with my scratches
waiting
for that familiar footfall
for the low voice i crave
i slam the hanging lightbulb
the light jags across the scrawl
jaxzboi
3:35 PM
paradigm said...
here's my most recent poem.
WISH
I wish I was God then I know my life would be a llie
5:49 PM
robert-nyc said...
Dennis, I'm loving everyone's poems on this post--fantastic idea. I want to read all of them when time allows. I made my list of 50 favorite poems. Now I just need to post it. Here's a short poem instead.
Unemployment, Slush, and Ruby Red Heels
Being unemployed can be fun. Running out of money
is a bother. Job-hunting is a tug on the sword in the stone,
well knowing you are not the future king of England.
Take the first thing that comes, don't be picky, earn your way,
make a living, love life, be part of life, make something
of yourself like clumping a snowman out of slush, sacrificing
your well-being to a newly formed religion, perhaps practice
Satanism, kill animals in state parks, walk French poodles
as an occupation, gallop, gallop, trot, trot, do the bus-stop, don't
walk funny, make others laugh because you can do anything if you
believe. It's Dorothy clicking her ruby red heels three times,
repeat after me, “There's no place like home, there's no place like
the past, there's no interest in the corporate world but isn't the art
of administrative assisting so worthwhile in the long run.” Being
a poet is a blast, being unemployed can be fun, I will remove the sword
from the stone, I will be crowned, and running out of money
will not be fatal like a gun, lodged throat deep, spinal cord tickling the wall.
9:53 PM
young/guns said...
"why we chew our organs (our arms touch tomorrow)"
flailing within some fleshy membrane...
the light diffuses softly, pink and veiny
we stumble over our stick legs trying to stay above
always fucking forget what love
is
it's the tentacle that sucks us and drags us below
a watery orange glow laughs as we choke
the progression is like a pot of coffee left out
cold and tastes like frozen earth
stop lying to me. i drink it anyway(we think the world marches on/over our frailblackened bodies/towards a white horizon/bright with fire and smoke/asteroids pock the brightness like colorinverted stars/but we are trapped under a rock/in a 1930's film studio/in a production designed Rolls Royce/with a scrolling screen projecting heaven/the apocalypse behind us)
while we write in terms of lyrics
10:07 PM
timethrift said...
Born in a dank smell
And smudgy twist of sheets,
I'll cough up rusted figurines
Of Los Angeles boring its lovers
Into Heaven after everyone left
And you had to walk home
By yourself
Forty minutes into something
No one has the right to call cold.
1:50 AM
Nigel Symon said...
In Secret..
In secret I play, it can be a lonely place sometimes
Behind closed doors where the curtains are drawn
In the darkness, broken now and again by flickering images
In the silence, in my quiet little corner
I enter my own delirium,
I can hear you downstairs as you watch TV
Moving about, the kettle boiling, and a lighter flicking.
In secret I search for the one thing
The one thing we all keep looking for
The ultimate high, the kick, the buzz
That will be nirvana, manna from heaven,
In secret I traverse the web like a trapeze artist
From A to Z and round the globe
With the click of a button
I move from page to page.
In secret with the sound turned down
I make up my own story to get me high
Coming so close, but always missing the mark
Where I hunger for your touch
That gentle caress, like ice upon fire
The shudder down the spine
That can never be replaced
That sets my mind spinning
To far out galaxies.
In this solitude, hidden away from the world outside
This lust unsatisfied keeps on burning
Keeps on churning through my blood
As I keep on searching, keep on looking
Like a knight in search of his holy grail
For that ultimate high
That will lead me to paradise.
7:49 AM
darling daintyfoot said...
THE ARCADES PROJECT
Why spy?
It is like interrogating tetanus:
don’t ask it not to follow men uphill
like a tracer through veins
to a folding chair
close to their hearts.
Ask what it sees
between the lines.
He, we, teleport in jogpants,
turn a shoulder.
Alone in pockets that hold our hands, keys, lube.
He does violence to softness
and fucks cartoons,
spool slots.
Moans in celluloid’s grip
to the lube of soft video tape.
You, in the duct:
calm as a fume,
filming something between these lines not all.
Such is the uncertainty principal of poetry.
Door locked, it’s either, ah, the face
that breaks me
or the hand that fuels
my life spent in the penny arcades,
gloving my piston.
We are all machines in the age of late capitalism,
foundries along a pacific rim smelting
tiny galaxies that die in the hand.
12:02 PM
jose said...
Zombie
cunnilingus
blood
trickle
down his
chin
her skeleton
jitters,
in the music
video.
Makes me
laugh,
makes me
sick.
12:53 PM
photi said...
A forest scene
In a forest
two woodsmen
loosening vices drop
planks
their grain
evince the cutting
Read them His
swells and loops His
face vanishing into the dusty
Fleshy pools and lines fleshy
Indoors
the furniture lumbers also
in woods neon &
in negative filigree
redden the pinks
to bleach out the white
Hollows made bland
travels in the half sight
their likenesses
a Plasticity
2:08 PM
Devon said...
First poem I did in years recently, needs a little erosion, but that's for tomorrow:
Bad Sex (Verse Remix)
this day. in addition to the door-glazing, I took to endure, he pulled out, trashed the condom, said with nervous smile, curtsied, then chevrons of them, and balanced them on the wink anymore, and it pissed me off. As he was in line for some straddling, I, ever vigilant in scrubbing down the recent receiving, was the more inept. Even if the body threw out old defenses. and put on my clothes, I would have come inside me, him hyper-sensitive a shower later, I went back to the porn, his head, curious.
tables by thrusting them into me, desperate-pealing older fellows went into the—
Used my last half-hour at a bar with—Not about to waste the last hour on me for later scribbling—lusted after during the night, I found it once, my pants, and went back private-roomed with an older man’s come as I press Thumbing through my pages a listing of Five strokes and already I was having a better drink, which I will decline so I could type, where the hair is and isn’t, dribbler or sensitivities: the slow circles of stage one—
the Dissatisfied by how I remember these things. Squeezings of stage three coupled with a balls-plucky guy who resembles Steve-O initially when a face is fragile
while standing at my door to my privates roomed the lead rapper from The Streets as he—
No, my travel-mate’s face is fragile, one stalactiting my cock—
anemone, grazing arms to see if the potential fuck, but that’s after three years of looking at—
Spreading the cum on the door with—
Travelmate and I set our meeting time to our meeting spot, I contract my sphincter part of me behind. It’s a superstitious sluttylinks at the bars down the street, me to buy in my ass, not painful, just a souvenir.
could catalyze into more successful fuckings in a locker, and get lost in saunas, grow and empty twice during the trip—was I—
I wasn’t keen on these sex and no-sex—
I usually manage to document six cocks, my eye, visible constantly. Everyone must all pitch black. I tried the stream room, which is when I have someone only half-circumcised and the two straps of backpacne from wearin’. Pulled my cock out when I heard the slurpineel pube-follicles halfway up one’s shaft. But flared and red from the cold I had been getting such a tease, not having a thing to fondle-cock. No signal made sense.
In the dim porn room, I stopped worrying inside someone’s mouth.
At the sauna I jerked ever closer to a young black guy with a hard-on under—
So not used to this bathhouse format, nuzzles the backs of my fingers against his direction. I jerk in plain view, and realize, just not hep to the protocols. Do I have to sweat less, but he gathers his towel and unveils so soon? At all?
like they did decades ago? Touch toes undernought, I was pursued by a compact Latino—
Nope, there’s an okay fellow with his. Should have just not gone due to my winding search for the privy couple next to him straddling each other, rub—
I blamed my body during the fourth saying to lose him.
¬can see. He’s looking my way again. I doled out under the reddish light that smoothes—
Too much space, I thought, taking my raised eyebrows, my request for permission. Took a break in a whiter darkness, especially with glasses hidden behind my glasses, but pulsed near the escort sections of gay weeklies. ‘During. But I wasn’t able to see the hazy sucking, the breakout on my chest passing the time sipping beer, smoking cigs to watch the blowing circles spill their fellatio, waiting for him to grab my leg so I can ball, and then take him to a room where he walked off—for me to follow? Then, I even turned around to see if he still rooms. Might have been interpreted as areas. The sex areas were darker, even—
2:34 PM
vomitingghosts said...
I know I'm a day late with the whole poem thing and yeah, I'm posting this in the wrong place but I sure could use some head. Yeah, I also know Marco is the '60 minutes' boy, but maybe he'd reconsider...?
Anyway, Dennis, you've convinced me it's good to take a chance and show strangers your work, so here's the last poem I wrote. It's a ghazal, that weird and sad Persian form of poetry usually about unattainable love. Interestingly, in the Arabic 'ghazal' literally means 'talking with women' but in Persian means 'the last melancholic cry of a deer cornered by hunters.' I don't know if that's what the Arabs meant by 'talking with women' but...
Apparently blogger doesn't shine on lines any longer than like ten words, so / means the line break. Not that it matters really...
...
Inside
"The worst things: to be in bed and sleep not, to want for one who comes not, to try to please and please not." - Egyptian proverb
How well I know these snowy streets and houses through my window inside! /
The dark keeps my sorrow alive while the cold keeps me inside.
Black coffee in the morning and green tea at night. O bitter mistresses /
of the lonely wintertime, you are the axes that break the frozen sea inside.
All night the wind turns, burying everything in great sweeps of snow. /
When I cannot sleep, I imagine the coffins of the dead, and the satin inside.
My house is haunted by ghosts I cannot see. Dishes rattle and my bedroom /
doorknob turns in the night. Though, perhaps they don’t know I’m inside.
Looking at my reflection in the morning light, I see only the sadness /
in my eyes. Some days it seems my mirror reflects only what is inside.
No one was born in the world today, the news reports. Nine months ago /
every man denied his love. Their hearts: what was happening inside?
Though, lately it seems “strangers are an endangered species.” What I’d give /
to eye new faces all day, then come home and not find myself inside.
Staring at the ceiling I am convinced God leaves me alive so I will be lonely. /
I bless Him for His generosity, for showing me the room I will die inside.
“Oh haven’t you known nights of love?” Yes, but by day it is very different: /
all day we are alone, and our love is the “great death each of us carries inside.”
But there are days I can’t lift my eyes and long to be burned alive with all /
my books and candles, letters and photographs. Fire, release the ashes inside.
What rationale explains sleeping until the sun goes down? Hopelessness? /
Depression? Whatever the mess, I wake without a skeleton inside.
The afternoon sky takes on the color of turtledoves while snowflakes swirl /
to earth. Yes, even God above has a bottomless pit He drops things inside.
What’s frightening is reality with its thorns and prickles like the cactus. /
And until you shake me and splash cold water on my face, I will stay inside.
“Perhaps a sleepy teenager is being pulled from his crashed car or my father /
has died and this is how God tells me:” by turning off the electricity inside.
How could I have imagined then how alone I’d become? My brains, veins— /
even my heart has left me. Tell me, how do you live with no heart inside?
I’ve gotten used to them slamming the cupboards shut and flickering /
the lights. Yes, they are here to stay. There is no vomiting the ghosts inside.
Yesterday I dreamt there was no carriage to leave my palace, only giant eggs. /
But suddenly the eggs burst, and with each one I discovered a rabbit inside.
Yet sleep doesn’t solve anything, Matthew. Can’t you understand? /
Its repose refreshes only the body, and settles nothing except your guts inside.
...
Yeah, so I'm way behind, but I'm also working on a 50 favorite song list. Things are really crazy lately but every morning I read your blog and am lightened. I'll post the list eventually. And I'm liking all the poems everyone's posting, too. Land of the bat's ipod poem particularly, and paradigm's little wish poem jump out at me for some reason. And your ghost poem has always been a favorite.
A 50 favorite poems list seems impossible but if anyone can do it, you all and Dennis can. Anyway, this is a huge post already. So my vote is for Marco if and only if he's giving out head. If not, Sammy with the same deal...
Matt
7:37 AM
tony said...
You don't deserve anything good
Because you're a bad person.
Everyone hates you, and you know
They are just in doing so.
Love is so often lost to you
Because love has inspiration.
There are places for people like you:
They are cold, dark, and boring.
You don't know what you want
Because you want everything.
There are times that are nice, pleasant things;
Knowing you, these will turn to shit.
Focus on the first thing that comes to mind;
Knowing you, that thing will be yourself.
The second thing that will come to mind
Is the long walk home, spurned.
A cold walk, shivery and heady,you notice
Everything looks just a bit wet.
Denuded trees surround you, dead leaves,
And everyone who passes, passes in silence.
(I write fiction, and very few poems; you see why)
4:57 PM
hilarie said...
to hear you in the bath
resonating coordinated gestures
Then I wash my waterfall of moons
low beyond your garden
your fingers imagine meeting me
at the end of our bed
you have birds for teeth
turned as sideways rain
the field sounds coming inside through glass
waving bright ribbons
echos that come in through a window.
-Hilarie Hildebrand
8:42 PM
corpodibacco said...
Only now I acknowledged the existence of 'the poetry page' and, guess what, I thought I wanted to be into it. :)
I read we can post here to be moved there... so here's my poem. Hope it won't sound too trite or something.
I wake up because no bird is calling in the morning
before the downpour,
this enhances the impression of the builtland all around sleeping,
every animate creature in it sleeping
under the furniture giveaway acid yellow poster bill,
the phenomenal FIAT blue car they want me to buy is there,
in front of italian bars where sugar bags advertise
ROMAN horse gambling are there and later,
the first buongiorno of the day as I walk past,
is feeling observed,
and walking I let my fingertips bounce
over the poles of the garden gates
there everything lays motionless and lights are
only sloughing colors behind the boughs ajar,
I feel friendly but I have no one to talk to
is this the moment where I am supposed to grasp something of the world,
I wonder, is that a fair landscape in the concrete valley
this necessity to die the sooner the better, it says
you won't believe it but
as she does with millions of lives all around, life
can stand you
it says.
10:04 AM
posted by poetry_shelf | 12:56 AM
|
7 comments
