Two Poems I'm Digging

PLEASE (Chad)

Pack a bag, then forget to leave the house. Stay in,
imitate any language but love. One shouldn’t fake

an orgasm or English. Instead, just wing-it. Have ugly sex
with the lights off. Finger-tap sweaty palms beneath

the balminess of bedsheets.

Tell each other about the body you’re in.

“Sometimes not-touching is almost touching.”

Like how I have never seen the stomach erode
or even get upset, yet I understand these phenomenons.

Go ahead, get to know me. You might find anything
in my medicine cabinet: Salt, tequila, lime, or the moon.

These days, my spirit is an abandoned building.
(I read an article recently about Disney's abandoned parks.)

What turns you on? Prayer, penetration, being bound or impersonated?
Let’s make love to I’m Telling You For The Last Time. 

How about BDSM after fifty-cent wing night at the Holy Wing Bucket?

Never-mind, fuck-it.

I thought this poem was absolutely hilarious. Finding the moon in one's medicine cabinet is an awesome image. I almost used the same line from Samyn's book too.

“Dreaming is Safe for Some” (Carly)

I left your intense and promising eyes

last night as you waved goodbye

from your lit door.

When the door slammed shut

the shadows consumed you

and me as well.

My head hit its safe landing

and my dreams obsessed over you.

I was lost in them for the night

and now you would be lost

for eternity.

Without me.

A familiar knock and a familiar face

is how I started day one.

Followed by this never ending

stream down my cheeks.

Then a hospital bed and IV’s

and lastly, a straight line.

Closed eyes.

Infinite dreams.

Everything in this poem can be vividly seen and felt. I thought it was a really engaging, well-executed narrative.

Chapbook Description

            In compiling my chapbook, I’ve noticed that I tend to gravitate towards violent imagery, religious blaspheme, sarcastic humor, desire, and heartbreak when writing poetry. I do want to tone the violence down a tad and focus more on humor and personal accounts for the final product however. For some reason or another I excel at grotesque and violent imagery, and I often find myself incorporating elements of fantasy (from phoenixes, to Breaking Bad, to Cthulhu). In the end, I want my poems not to simply shock and stir emotions within the reader, but to ultimately reflect a melding of reality and fantasy where meaning is constructed – or often stumbled upon (which seems to happen in a majority of my poems). I want to be careful and not have the meaning be lost however, so I want to be sure and streamline my work more…in order to make it more clear, concise, and easily relatable.

Sand (Samyn Imitation)

Sand

Beyond your shoulder, the hillside went

dark as the sun

and the rest of the stars toppled from their homes in the sky

to hide

as Cthulhu swallowed dirt in

the same manner that frost webs over a windshield.

I’ll never forget the night the earth died;

clouds raindropped embers and

the moon melted to paraffin wax that dripped down to

mummify us

alive like clay dolls.  Think of Pompeii

except the ash was swapped with strings of wax and

the smell was more like

toasted marshmallow than the caramelized keratin of

hands reaching up to gods who won’t help.

I tried hard to hold onto your hand

but death washed us away and any memory of initials we ever etched into the sand.

(Line taken from "I Want Your Kisses" on page 65)*

Cancer for Cure (Erasure poem)

Disheveled

politics precondition and protest emotional responses.

Young women prefer economic confidence to facing insecurity

unglued.

Change takes more time.

A strategy of discredit and prison violence and

a set of demands tortured live on national television.

Dominated faces are

eager to caricature rebellion.

Older women seem drawn to God  – 

one approached him and wrapped her arms around his kiss.

Taken from Nick Miroff's "Student who lives with parents rises as a leader in Venezuela's protests" in the Washington Post (March 11th).

Tentative Chapbook Title and Table of Contents

"Watching Sound From a Quiet Place"



Table of Contents:

1.      A Healthy Distrust

2.      New mid-short length poem*

3.      God Loves Ugly

4.      Leprosy

5.      Polterzeitgeist

6.      A Girl Named Hope or Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder and Balls Swell Bluer*

7.      Escape Artist

8.      Anti-Serum

9.      I Against I

10.  Shorter poem*

11.  He

12.  A Visceral Rip

13.  Beware

14.  Maximino Arciniega

15.  New mid-short length poem*

16.  The Winds of War

17.  Another New poem*

Will likely have acknowledgments prior to poems and biography at end*

A Christmas Hallucination

The

stockings are stuffed with lambskin condoms and pocket knives

instead of greenbacks and peppermint canes.

The

pine is replaced by a weeping willow and

the mistletoe above the door is really a marijuana leaf.

The

angel that sits atop the tree is

dead; some would say death has been kind to her, but the

orangutan titties and hollowed eye sockets

beg to differ.

My brother’s gift is a Japanese sex

doll with all three insertion slots and

my sister got a caroling

Furby without an off switch.

I got a Transformer! A mini-cooper that

metamorphosed into Mephistopheles, with a

fire-breathing mandible and

horns protruding through a Santa hat, capped with

tiny plastic reindeer antlers.

After presents Jack Skellington, Grinch, the Gingerbread Man, and I

ate milk and cookies;  but

the milk was really curdled Eggnog

topped not with nutmeg, but with residuals of picked scabs –  and

the cookies were really Snickerdoodles baked with microdots.

Tis the Season.

-I feel like this poem is a little too improvisational, which I don't believe makes it as effective of some of my other poems. Although I really like the humor in it, I feel as if it might just seem more like a collage of bizarre imagery rather than a complete poem.

Anti-Serum

Promenades below pomegranate sunsets are kin to

supernovas;  their  flustered tendrils  both

caterpillar  into blackness,  but

you can’t  chisel through  an oil spill with

only strokes of liquid white-out,  yet you and I can

clammy up the air with the syrup of sex and

let our linens parachute from the

granite bassinet – who will soon scoot and bounce as if

pushed around by poltergeists.

Please stay love,

for like a black hole re-assembled from an

innie to an outie –  the

shift from sucking to stuffing – I want to

unfurl into you and never leave.

I want to rot and shrivel up inside of you till I mature into a

Monarch and chew through your cocoon – and

I lust to pluck off your head so I can

plant my eggs inside and then

flutter away.

-I feel as if Anti-Serum is one of my most successful poems because I find it to be a good balance of my violent, macabre imagery and twisted humor. It's clean and concise, which is something I struggle with achieving in some of my poems. It's a poem driven by the emotions of desire and longing.

Polterzeitgeist (Ruefle Imitation Poem)

Jesus was really an ancient astronaut

he crashed and traded his spacesuit for dinged rags

convinced a virgin that she gave birth to him

and started a cult with his dad, God

or Yahweh depending on who you talk to,

yet he can’t really walk on water, you know.

He floated above meadows

on the billows dripping from the exhausts of his hoverpack

and gave the sick Tylenol and Pepto Bismol

he also gave a gift to the blind man –

the gift of sight

by shaving off the whites of his cataracts

He made his disciples

drink his blood and eat his flesh

and some pissy Romans and misguided Jews found out

so he fled and left a clone to atone for his crimes

and went by the names

Horus and Mithras and Bob

and he grew a magnificent beard

and also knocked up his disciple Mary.

Jesus told me all about heaven

you can have sex with whoever

smoke whatever and

eat without getting fat

the air stinks of fabric softener and churros

money grows on trees and so does pizza!

Can you imagine that?

A whole sausage pizza, growing on a fucking tree

what more could you want?

-it was fun to imitate Ruefle's style and adopt her absurdity and oddness. I was pretty happy with the final product, so I'll likely try to incorporate more zany, off the wall thought processes into my poems now, like Ruefle does. 

Unanswered Question - Noelle Kocot

Unanswered Question

"I'm standing on so much wreckage
I think my legs will break," thought
Mary. Mary didn't want anyone
To know she was sad, so she acted
Pleasantly all the time. She had
The thousand-yard stare of a crack
Addict. People thought mean things
About her, like when she was a child
That she'd be barefoot and pregnant by
The age of thirteen, but Mary was
Not discouraged. Mary's whole
World was a giant string of deja vu.
When she met Roy Willbathe, Mary
Was as happy as a slice of snowy
Cheese. Roy looked like a vulnerable
Sheepdog in drag. Roy told her
Everything she wanted to hear, like,
"I eat my dirty business whole,"
And, "I will bathe...eventually."
Roy wouldn't marry Mary because
He said she was too loose. "But
I'm not loose at all, in fact I'm the
Opposite of loose." Roy smiled,
"See ya, kid." And Mary went back
To groping fruit in the market,
Pretending it was the body of a lover,
And eating disgusting things out
Of cans, while the birds chirped quietly
In the dawn outside her kitchen window
After she'd rubbed her wrists with
Scissors oh-so-quietly in the dark.

-Noelle Kocot (The Bigger World)

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Like the other poems in "The Bigger World," Noelle Kocot kicks off the poem with an inciting action involving a character, this one involving Mary who has become overwhelmed by the grief of losing her lover. Despite the underlying narrative being melancholy, the poem is hilarious and at times, absolutely absurd. Her lover's name is "Roy Willbathe," who promises that he one day "will bathe." Finding Roy apparently made her as happy as a molded piece of cheese, and her elders thought she would be "barefoot and pregnant" by age thirteen. Aside from these and other comical moments however, the poem's underlying, more serious theme returns during the conclusion and leaves the reader with a powerful ending, in which Mary gropes fruit like the body of a lover and "rubs" her wrists with scissors. Chilling, and quite haunting - the juxtaposition between humor and melancholy is awesome.

Middle School - Mary Ruefle

Middle School 

I went to Cesar Pavese Middle School.
The gymnasium was a chapel dedicated to loneliness
and no one played games.
There was a stained-glass window over the principal's desk
and innumerable birds flew against it
reciting Shelley with all their might,
but it was bulletproof, and besides,
our leaders were never immortal.
The classrooms were modeled after motel rooms,
replete with stains, and in remedial cases
saucers of milk on the floor for innumerable cats,
or kittens, depending on the time of year.
In them we were expected to examine ourselves and pass.
The principal himself once jumped off the roof
at noon, to show us school spirit.
Our mascot was Twist-Tie man.
Our team the Bitter Herbs.
Our club the Reconsiderers.
It was an honor to have gone,
though a tad strict in retrospect.
You have probably heard that we all became janitors,
sitting in basements next to boilers
reading cheap paperback books of Italian poetry,
and never sweep a thing.
Yet the world runs fine.

-Mary Ruefle (Trances of the Blast)

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In this poem, Ruefle describes her experiences at middle school...a very twisted middle school in which the principal jumps off the roof in a display of "school spirit" and where no one plays games in the gymnasium. Although this poem certainly has some dark portions in it (such as the somber ending or the principal leaping from the roof), it's crammed full of humorous lines and notions. After all, at Cesare Pavese, the club which Ruefle was proud to be part of were the "Reconsiderers," the school mascot is "Twist-Tie Man," and the classrooms resemble dilapidated motel rooms overrun with cats. While I'm sure Ruefle is in her own way addressing her middle school experience, the absurdity and cynicism transform the poem into a hilarious, surreal, and somehow downtrodden recollection of the past.