Mondays at the Office

A quick one before I go in to dinner, inspired by Miz Quickly’s photo gallery offering:

It’s kind of a wry one that I think we can all relate to, in one way or another. There’s this physical reaction to Mondays that I would love to deconstruct further, but I think the absurdist dream that came out of this photo is the best I can muster for the moment. (And Frank O’Hara is still resonating in me a little bit. I can imagine him going out on his lunch break like this guy.)

Mondays at the Office

You feel like unclipping the phone’s receiver
and taking the helical cord into your mouth, swallowing,
swallowing, ripping the guts out of technology
to take them into your own. Like Cronus’s children:
death will come to you in the shape of a hiccuping bell,
another e-mail, or the goddamn fax machine jamming
again. You are not the only one: Marianne sets fire
to the ficus plant by the door, and James
shreds the photos on his desk one by one, while Yvette
staples, staples, staples, staples. This madness
lives in a cubical comb which you seal off with wax,
individual, but all in this together. What is work,
you think; it’s impossible to hear the answer over this
ringing now passing from your esophagus,
through stomach acid, into an intestinal confusion.
There is paid time off; there are holidays. But really,
what you all need is to be paid to go once per day
outside onto a flat green place, stripping off shirt, tie,
patent leather shoes, spread out and laid upon
underneath a timeless sun. What is mercy, you think,
but the freedom to show off ribcage and collarbone
turned up to that mythological blindness
free from income tax, memoranda, the purgatorial 401K.
Once per day each of you will queue up to go.
James will return glorious in his own sweat, embrace you
half tears, breathe in your ear that it’s your turn.
You will stagger past security, run type-numb fingers
through fountain water, smell the fresh-mowed grass
as you expose yourself in relief. Cough wires, shit wires,
empty yourself of copper. Strike the pose bees must
when the queen says, enough honey, when Cronus says,
split me open, let the passionate gods break free.

Lunch Sonnet

I’ve been on kind of a Frank O’Hara kick lately, as I am wont to do. I feel like when spring comes, it’s much easier to keep an eye out for the strange and somewhat uneasy side of New York; the truism is that the crazies come out when it gets warm. (Even though everyone gets a little bit crazy when it’s warm.) And since I’ve been reading Lunch Poems again, and since Poets & Writers asked for sonnets yesterday, and since I did indeed eat lunch today, here is an O’Hara send-up. No, it’s not a strict sonnet, but it rhymes very nicely and Petrarchanishly, I think. You could call it semi-persona, maybe. Anyway, it was fun to write.

Lunch Sonnet

I came for peace and quiet: lunch standing up, at small round
silver tables grit with crumbs, garlic, red pepper flakes,
two slices and a Coke two seventy-five. The thick-chin boy takes
two paper plates and lifts my lunch like I am about to be crowned
street-food royalty, I am starved with thanks.
Patient standing the art student and Titus who marked his place
with bundled trash, the paranoid Honduran girl and that half-face
dogfighter with scarred dewlaps. Dissension in the goddamn ranks
when a guy cuts in front, wheelchair tires squealing
he hoists his plastic leg like a truncheon. Some fucking respect
for a Eye-rack vet he bleats and I think, just let it happen, best
avoid trouble. Peace. and. quiet. In here we’re used to feeling
lullabied by salsa radio and grill smoke, when the mood is wrecked,
when he snarls up to my table, I keep my change. I leave the rest.

Fire Ecology, remixed

Too much chocolate, I think, has left me with an unhappy stomach this evening. At least, that’s what I’m blaming it on, because the very idea of being sick simply won’t do in my life right now. For dinner, I have eaten an avocado sprinkled with salt, and I think that will be all I need. Meanwhile, catching up some poetry business… tomorrow is the Rainbow Book Fair, which will eat up a lot of time, but since I already feel slumped from work today, I will redouble my efforts to get some things written in the scraps of time available. On Sunday I’ll do a count of poems, because it will be nigh the halfway point, and I’d like to check. The goal this month was 2 poems + 1 prompt per day + an extra prompt/poem whenever I could toss one in. (Not all of them have been online.) I should be up to 24 and a few. What the hell am I thinking?

Miz Quickly was asking for remixes of stuff we’ve already written this month. I took “Fire Ecology” from last week and tried a cut-up remix, as well as an erasure. I miss the actual Erasures site; I hope they come back soon. Meanwhile, this is what I’ve got; I’ll count it as some progress for the day, I suppose!

Fire Ecology, remixed

endless upward tongue give tongue and
risen his god indifferent, want fortunate sun,
wide-as-the-world throw the kerosene,
cage cage seas said;

I paper crackling finger, thinking kerosene,
stand on your white moth seas as India
your kerosene of want crossing me
the prayers, and

oil god sawtoothed inside give sierras
and ink, dissolve the well, thinking your love that is
the prayers, and to sacrifice breaking well,
to climb with your fact;

all kerosene, atmosphere to fortunate sun,
wide-as-the-world comet wet grazing inside prayers,
and India be atmosphere to stand on
endless, itself risen as I, thinking

…

Fire Ecology (rmxd)

give me
love that blinds,

the flame grazing wet white
free of atmosphere

throw it into
black ink,

dissolve your tongue and
endless wick

prayers, your tongue
your cage, quiet god

out of his indifferent burn

Sacred Spring

…and another one, back to back. (It’s been a nice little evening at the café, and I am about to trundle home.) This is for another Miz Quickly prompt, an ekphrastic one from today. The title comes from the Gauguin painting provided. See below:

I’ve had Kay Ryan’s “Crown” just going nonstop in my head for days now, and this poem was a direct attempt to get it out by copying it relentlessly, more or less. (There was a dash of Robert Frost as well, but I think it’s mostly been effaced.) Anyway, it has very little to do with the painting. But it inspired Tessa’s poem, too, so I guess that is how art grows beyond itself. Hurrah!

Sacred Spring

At times, evening clouds
tumble like ripe fruit.
What daring enterprise–
to shake heaven by its root.
The sky, then, must be
the organ-pool that bred it.
What fool plucks a tear–
before some god sheds it?

Ashes, Ashes

Hanging out with Tessa on GChat before heading out to a karaoke birthday, I finally managed to squeeze this poem out like toothpaste from a tube. (So thanks to her for being my reflective surface off which to bounce ideas!) Adele Kenny had a prompt based on a Dorianne Laux poem, and since I adore Dorianne Laux, I really wanted to give it a try today; meanwhile, Miz Quickly was exhorting people yesterday to have fun with sound and internal rhyme, which made me get all Kay Ryan. (I read and re-read “Crown” and “Sharks’ Teeth” about twenty times while writing this one.) I think sound play is a direction I’ll take on a few poems this month, but specifically I wanted to do it in this one. Not that this does any justice to either wonder that is Laux or Ryan, but this is what happens when I go rampaging through my subconscious looking for the profound and sublime.

Aside from the… er, nine? I’ve posted so far this month, I have two more in reserve, and hoped to write another today to catch up with my goal of two poems per day. (Plus one prompt per day.) (Because I am an overachiever like that.) Definitely need an infusion of steam or strong drink, though. Six days down, twenty-four to go.

Ashes, Ashes

They say we’re made of
particles forged in stars,
whose suicides we lie in
the shade of. It’s like
building castles in sand:
it takes a certain art,
shaping a burst bulb
into two hands, or a heart,
that can be believed.
But the sky with all that
cat’s cradle has only room
for night’s perfection.
How could we rain down
from the Great Bear’s ladle?
Unless we are meant
to be the tomb: the lights
wearing their own ashes
bent, crooked, as crowns.

Requiem for the Infected

This was a toughie to write. I think I’ll let the poem do its own thing, but it was for the NaPoWriMo prompt of writing a “valediction”, which got me thinking about some obvious paths to walk along for the theme. I had four inspirations bouncing around as well for this: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come”, and Peter Campion’s “Dandelions”. I’ve just found Peter Campion, and I’m thoroughly charmed by his work, so I shall have to investigate his stuff further. In workshop, the advice we’ve been given is to find poets who we admire greatly, and trace their writing genealogy, so to speak: find who inspired them, read those poets, find who inspired them in turn, etc. A “family tree” of poetic voice.

Requiem for the Infected

O murdered youths: may they leave the light on
when you come home,
                                 all you snow-white boys,
up the back of a rainbow-scaled serpent
                        at dawn:
the key’s beneath the mat.
                                 Hide your childish toys!
The sky has been opened, and an angel comes
cruel with the sun in his mouth,
                        cold, pale, hot,
all stinking brimstone and singing,
                                        how much have you got?
                        And he shakes a wet fist,
shows a drop on one thumb.
                                        O murdered youths!
who burned with an Aztec fire,
                     who dove into lakes and pierced
                                   each other through:
how did you fall apart, waste away so young?
The salt that I shed makes a flat
                        white wire
                                        down my cheek to
my mouth, lures out a bloodstained tongue
which is incanting, forgive me!
                                        I was too afraid for you.

Villanelle

Before you even ask: no, I don’t really know what this poem is about. I had kind of an idea, which then went off into some bizarre land (as often happens when I try to write even half-assed villanelles) and refused to come back, but ultimately it was an attempt to write to today’s Poets + Writers prompt, keying off a line by Frank O’Hara (the first one in the poem). I tried to get some of that rambling O’Hara voice in there too, without much success. And ultimately, I wasn’t even going to post this one, but part of the thing about NaPoWriMo is that I think you have to put your crap out there next to the stuff you’re proud of. I kept trying to get into the headspace to write today, but things at work kept happening, and I just kept getting distracted by this and that. I hope that I’m not stalling out already, only four days in… second wind is needed!

Enough ado about this, I’m just going to post it and forget about it before I get even more miserable about it.

Villanelle

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent,
and when he lies naked on a black sheet pulled taut,
he becomes a mirror, shaped like a man.

Most people prefer an other who is shaped by hand,
but I prefer the ones who are blown while still white-hot
for quietness with a man in it who is transparent.

Sometimes a secret is so heavy I have to bare it
red on my skin, I hate admitting then I hate that I’ve got
an unbecoming mirror shaped like a man.

Because the worst you can say is that he understands,
being a body that only wants to be worn as a body, not
the quietness, just the man in it, just transparent.

We see through, the two of us, and though it’s apparent
I should outgrow him I won’t, so long lonesome I sought
to become a mirror shaped like a man.

Now with that wish reversed I’m exploded into sand,
numb glass dust with time to think while he’s caught
by quietness, he’s the man in it, he is transparent,
he becomes a mirror shaped as a man–

A Warm Day on Titan

This wasn’t at all the poem I set out to write, but there you go. It started with this idea of science and religion, and turned into some thoughts on a Wiki article I stumbled across about the theory of ancient astronauts, and some notes were taken for it on a train ride, and… well, it just went bonkers from there. In workshop, our moderator often writes these rambling musings, so some of that style got in there too, but I wasn’t sure what to do with this one. So I’m just going to pitch it up here unaltered and see what happens.

A Warm Day on Titan

I was reading about the theory of ancient astronauts:
how our human ingenuity was not enough for fire-making,
or Great Pyramids, or the invention of gods– and so some
figures must have descended like Prometheus, all light,
to prick us in the consciousness. And maybe an old priest
came up from Thebes, climbed to meet the travelers

who told him (like I-AM to Moses) how Venus, the traveler
star of the evening, was sulfuric, molten, any astronauts
foolish enough to land killed instantly. Then from the priest
spread an idea of Hell along the red Nile and beyond, making
its miserable rounds. I don’t know if I believe it. If the light
switches off, and I’m only left with terror, maybe. Some

familiar bell is rung. But here’s what I wonder: would some
other extraterrestrials have first granted them that traveler’s
spirit? When faced with the impossible, do they make light
of it, say, “it’ll be a cold day on Venus,” forgetting astronauts
crushed to death before them? Here’s the point I’m making:
there is a place for the scientist, and a place for the priest,

and I don’t think you can do without either. In Babylon, “priest”
meant “king”; it follows that the analytical mind rules in some
inverted place. And we’re abandoned in between, making
do with half-stories, half-logic. We’re the worst sort of travelers:
Orphean, necks twisted. We could be the ancient astronauts
to someone else, explaining the truths and mechanics of light

with mythology. (The Eagle Nebula’s Virgin and her light-
year Child; Orion buckling a blue-white belt.) We’re high priests
of the full circle. But I’m telling you this, not some astronaut,
because I’m on a train feeling earthbound, seeking some
capacity for kinship. This is the curse of everyday travelers:
to always be dissatisfied, the drab surroundings making

you wish for some magic. Leaving Secaucus, we’re making
slow time past graffiti levees, brown marshes decaying light.
Can you blame me for dreaming? And my fellow travelers
stare unsatisfied out the windows, too, each one a priest
given the chance. Me, I’d preach the moon called Titan (some
ancient giant), orbiting Saturn, where (according to astronauts)

oceans of ethane boil cold. I’d get there uncertain, priest
making science out of legend-names, traveler carving religion
from light. Some astronaut! But being what we are– I could do
no less.

Whitman’s Kiss

I don’t read enough Whitman. I know there’s a copy of Leaves of Grass at the old homestead somewhere, I just have never gotten around to sitting down and reading the whole thing. Maybe that will be an April goal. But I have read my fair share of Whitman, and I do have that note of South Jersey/Manhattan Whitman pride. DVerse wanted to hear about people we’d like to meet, and I would absolutely love to have met Whitman. Relatively little of that has to do with his status of Great American Poet (for I can think of few contenders for the title), but rather because his verse is just so ecstatic and liberated and self-aware without being self-conscious. This poem keyed a little bit off “I Sing the Body Electric”, but mostly it’s just a little dash of exuberance about the man and his work; I could keep going on this all night, though I think it’s best to quit the poem before too long.

Whitman’s Kiss

We would be breathing the dust of an unpaved street
deep in the ventricles of the Village, those New York parts
pumping city traffic north-south, heady, honeyed, dazed;
for this would be Walt Whitman of Manhattan and
not the shy Long Island boy smoldering with pale light
or the Prince of Camden ragged-breathed by a slow river.
This is that nameless Whitman from the engraving
where at one angle he looks ready to rip off his shirt
and pop off trouser buttons one by one, perfectly lithe,
tanned, bit of grey, and yet from another angle
considering something just over your shoulder, head tilted,
eyebrow raised, deciding on the right thing to say.
He is half pornographer and half philosopher, thatched
but polished, and we would hang from the iron railings
still steaming from summer rain as he describes
muscles releasing under crinoline or gingham
easy as syllables, pointing out every twitch and holler,
movement language multiplied ten thousandfold.
This is that certain Whitman bursting from his upbringing
as the first crocus does from its snow-covered bud,
all hymn and wonder, the wildfire crying for peace! peace!
and the masculine soil praising love, the blood delta
swimming with bardic ancestry, anatomist practiced
in descending the marvelous body as a drop of water.
Here, he would say, feel my smoothness and my
careful percolation, how I can work my way into each
hairsbreadth, each capillary, and see, how underneath
the earthy flesh grows so narrow that it turns to fire;
and I say, yes, it’s like touching a battery to your tongue,
it’s like singing an unknotted firework, at last, at last.

Some Blood

Turns out I may not end up at AWP after all; there is a large snowstorm moving in tomorrow night, and the forecast for Thursday (when I have to go up the Interstate in a rickety bus) is not yet set. I’ll see how it looks tomorrow, but I don’t fancy the idea of riding through a blizzard. It would certainly be a wonderful treat to get there, though. We’ll see.

With snow on the mind, here’s a quick piece for We Write Poems, who wanted natural images without “the”, in the hopes of (presumably) making the elements more personified. Thundersnow has always confounded me, a little bit. I don’t go for that sort of thing. A little bit of Kay Ryan channeled into this one, maybe. A very little bit.

Some Blood

Snow and thunder
should not mix.
At least with summer storms
you know some blood’s beneath
tall clouds gnashing
their rainswept teeth.
But this contraption of dusk,
catching streetlights with its
rapid whirl, striking
every heart dumb
with distant, muffled dynamite–
well, it just won’t do. To come
so coldly beautiful, to
slow time to a crawl
and the world to one’s liking,
you know, it won’t do at all.