Archive for April 18th, 2013
My PAD Was Super Bad
An apology doesn’t seem necessary, but sometimes I like to work at explaining my failures. I thought the Writer’s Digest Poem a Day effort for National Poetry Month would be a good thing for me to join in on, but I should have considered it more carefully. (I wanted to understand why some things get a day, some a week, and then poetry gets a month. Puppies only get one day, and if I were in charge, I’d give puppies a whole month and strip poetry down to one day with the side benefit of only needing to write one poem each year in celebration; however, I think it’s not that way because puppies don’t need much help in being lovable, but poetry sure does.)
I didn’t start PAD until the fourth day, clearly demonstrating my propensity for procrastination, but I thought no problem, Read the rest of this entry »
Who Left Me Dead Alive?
If the music gets loud enough, I feel
the escape of despair, and I scream
with dizziness, though I never say it
as well as the musicians, and I’m left
wondering why I’m pale and so muted.
Freedom, let’s catch the bus as it leaves
the station, jumping up and down on the tin
roof, grabbing the crumbling cement,
passing under structures meant to bury
us, swallow us, throw us away.
Superman and I rage against the wind
as we jump from rooftop to polluted roof-
top, scrambling to locate our missing
hearts, rumbling through city forests,
making pancakes out of cement trucks.
Screaming in my twisting intestines,
coughing, blowing out clogs, who is it
who shut me out from my art, who has
splayed me, sucked out my screams,
removed my hums, left me breathing?
.
When it Hits Hard
When the empty comes back, I ask
what’s wrong, try to breathe big air
in, and the air won’t go. The medication
makes me feverish but it won’t fill
my hole, and nothing is allowed into
my empty, so I think about how
smooth death might be. This ugly,
bald survivor with whom I cannot talk
squashes energy death requires,
so I am a broken man, empty,
and I wonder why empty causes
such excruciating pain. I wonder
why some power will not end this,
long for courage to find violence.
Pass, pass, pass, pass, please.
.
