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.