kora
1.
eurydice did nothing.
dark-eyed woman with her flesh glide,
eyes like dials beneath lengthy lashes:
form of girl, so possibly sweet and gentle.
everything
abstract: this neck of white,
this chin of snow,
these two lips like kissing cherries,
beautifulest and most lovely.
suffer, orpheus, and
suffer, lyre, twined about her memory.
make rocks and streams sough out tears;
tame lions in grief.
lock her perfections in her name:
the best embrace
you can create.
sing her name
melodiate.
2.
persephone
bit.
dream of winter,
come to me
hard:
a song,
its flow
a break,
a fuck
fluid.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
juiced
the hard bloom part 2
angles like those of sharded glass--
angles fourty-five degrees or below,
stiletto-like v's. hard lines. the hard break.
lines that radiate outward so slender from
endpoint--
between them, that space, occupied
by extrapolate:
the tautest vibration, from line to line,
from line to line. to the edge, the middle
and back, narrowed, winnowing--
push down, push down, hold
hold:
the pressed trickle.
the winter sap.
like water to water,
love to love runs back.
angles like those of sharded glass--
angles fourty-five degrees or below,
stiletto-like v's. hard lines. the hard break.
lines that radiate outward so slender from
endpoint--
between them, that space, occupied
by extrapolate:
the tautest vibration, from line to line,
from line to line. to the edge, the middle
and back, narrowed, winnowing--
push down, push down, hold
hold:
the pressed trickle.
the winter sap.
like water to water,
love to love runs back.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
the brain alone and sulking in the skull
repetition is the way you go about making something again, something entirely different than the first thing. gertrude stein has this.
sometimes my words get caught in a trap, like elvis, and they abstract the same thing over and over. for a long time (three years?) the thing was quasi-real (emphasis on the quasi)--it's gone into a mode of entire abstraction, however, which means that the poetry can focus absolutely on one thing without carrying any burden of narrative. this sounds fancy, especially considering all i'm really saying is that these poems aren't in real time, or particularly meaningful.
i stink at poetry. i'm not a poet. but i don't stop doing it, in part because i have no shame, and in part because of this possibility of non-narrativic insight (to whatever false degree)--a few years ago i was writing about a poem a day, and though none of them were good, they all helped me realize that forcing yourself to think in poetry is productive. just not necessarily productive of good poetry.
i guess i'm attempting to excuse myself for writing the same poem over and over. if you can never arrive at the truth of a thing, you can never fully express the thing. yet by expressing and re-expressing a thing, you end up expressing something--a truth, borges style, not the truth--like that varicolored lantern in roger corman's the terror (a weird point of reference, but it's what rings the bell). none of this is interesting, i'm pretty sure. but i think the boring observations are necessary...occasionally necessary. because otherwise you end up with "the kingfishers," which is brilliant, but doesn't touch gwendolyn brooks.
sometimes my words get caught in a trap, like elvis, and they abstract the same thing over and over. for a long time (three years?) the thing was quasi-real (emphasis on the quasi)--it's gone into a mode of entire abstraction, however, which means that the poetry can focus absolutely on one thing without carrying any burden of narrative. this sounds fancy, especially considering all i'm really saying is that these poems aren't in real time, or particularly meaningful.
i stink at poetry. i'm not a poet. but i don't stop doing it, in part because i have no shame, and in part because of this possibility of non-narrativic insight (to whatever false degree)--a few years ago i was writing about a poem a day, and though none of them were good, they all helped me realize that forcing yourself to think in poetry is productive. just not necessarily productive of good poetry.
i guess i'm attempting to excuse myself for writing the same poem over and over. if you can never arrive at the truth of a thing, you can never fully express the thing. yet by expressing and re-expressing a thing, you end up expressing something--a truth, borges style, not the truth--like that varicolored lantern in roger corman's the terror (a weird point of reference, but it's what rings the bell). none of this is interesting, i'm pretty sure. but i think the boring observations are necessary...occasionally necessary. because otherwise you end up with "the kingfishers," which is brilliant, but doesn't touch gwendolyn brooks.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
another poem
letting the days go by
night, lit
by moon's light.
red lip, bit
redder.
moon white like
bedknob and
its whitened knuckle:
taut skin.
smoothed down.
redder.
a poem
mnemonic
thoughts of
red--
slit through
to the sap.
red from red,
sap into sap,
like water to water,
love to love runs back.
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