June 2012
22 posts
6 tags
Letters to Sweden
installment two.
Dear Sweden,
I hope these letters are reaching you safely. I hope they find you happy and well. They are built sturdily and full of heart to travel across the waters to your door. I miss you, Sweden.
I am light today. I feel lifted like the salt being drawn from the sea into the air and carried over piers and beaches. That is me today, the salt in the wind. Subtle revenge...
6 tags
Ask me if I miss you. Ask it out loud if you trust your voice not to falter, or write it down and slide it under the back door and creep away unseen. Either way, my answer will be the same. I’ll tell you that yes, I miss you terribly. I miss the beer and the scotch, the whiskey, bourbon, slices of lime, the tequila. The constant buzz, constant stickiness of your fingers, my lips, the...
4 tags
Letters to Sweden
installment one.
Dear Sweden,
The weekend was wonderful. I was caught out on the cobblestone streets in a sudden and terrific downpour. The sky split in half and out fell millions of silver drops, some of them iced over and nearly blue with cold. Others were warmed by the leftover sun and they’d slam onto your skin and then be gone just as quickly, sucked back up into the clouds. My...
1 tag
i apologize for the impromptu hiatus but i needed to shut my brain down for a little bit. i should be back soon, in working order.
————-
with static in her music and white noise over long-distance phone calls with honey stirred into her tea and crushed asprin whirling in her water-glass she is every morning born into the chaos of a boston sunrise and sleeps quietly in...
4 tags
grey.
you are grey. you are waiting rooms and waistcoats. a shoreline you can see from your hospital bed and the conversations you hold with overnight nurses. you are an opal. you are shining and new. you are beaten by the sea, the rocks, against the tower, against the floor. you are gilded. you are underexposed and you heat yourself against yourself under the sun, the x-ray beams, the headlamps....
5 tags
i cannot handle being naked in your arms, knowing this will end.
5 tags
I’ll love you slowly at first. Like Winter melting into Spring. Like a child’s first steps. Like honey poured from that little bear’s head. Like the moon rises. Like our skin tans and wrinkles. Like the ink drains from our pens. Like lips crack. Like smoke curls.
And then, my love will quicken. Like slam poetry. Like blood rushing towards our heads. Like the fire spreads...
3 tags
An old man sitting slouched as an old sack in his old kick backs says, Hey barkeep, gimme a cuppa Joe. Hell, throw in a cuppa Henry and Frank a little side’a Shirley. Says, Man, I gotta be up early, see the kids and wash the car, can’t keep sittin’ in this bar.
And I watch him, this old man in his old man suit just a wrinkled tie, wrinkled face, a wrinkle in time and he’s...
2 tags
Expectations.
When I can’t write, blank mind I know with complete certainty that I will never write again.
When you kiss me, heavy breath I know with my entire body that this will end before it begins.
6 tags
pull my hair and show me how to believe in god again.
3 tags
Monday.
Some days, I would love to tell the whole world to fuck off. But not just the people, in fact, you can stay if you like. You and your smile and stubbled beard, calloused hands, infinite book-mind. It’s mostly just the trees and the spider-webbing crack in the windshield that I’d like to send away. The cartilage in my chicken, the pit in my stomach (big as a peach pit, but...
1 tag
Flowers sprout along ivy vines clinging to the concrete that surrounds us. And Patti sings low hymns up through the wires that connect me to humanity. Gold rings and the scent of sterilization. Your fingers up inside me. Me, retracting my teeth for you. Not quite trapped, but never ever free. Here and there, birdcages. Here and there, roadkill. I wait to hear from you and Ani screams out through...
6 tags
What My Pen Wrote (While Waiting For You).
Should we miss only the dead because it is more painful to miss the living and lost?
Should we honor only the great because it is harder to honor the misfit, the demon, the daily smoker powered by his hangover and his TV?
Have all of the new ideas been written and if so, should we give up? Have Hemingway and Bukowski seen the only alternate world there...
7 tags
WatchIt’s an uneventful Friday evening, so I’m going to read you a poem about poems.
The way I read Poems is in tiny little spurts. Poems on toast with half a sugared grapefruit. A glass of orange juice, no pulp.
I read Poems in little bundles like nerve endings, A Poem after I’ve brushed my teeth and Pretended to floss. These are spearmint Poems.
I’ll read a Poem between sending two...
5 tags
my darling, i can’t do it alone. please help me to continue this poem.
Surrounded by old Coke bottles filled with cinnamon sticks and cushioned by battered pillows with dryer sheets tucked inside their floral cotton cases, I light a cone of incense, a cigarette and go to outer space in my mind. And that is where I find you.
7 tags
hour one. sit and wait. smoke cigarettes and lean your head against the car window. convince yourself he won’t show.
hour two. try to slow your heart while he sits across from you inside the chinese diner. keep your fingers wrapped tight around your beer bottle to keep from shaking.
hour three. keep mental notes of the movies he mentions. the books and the music, too. you won’t...
5 tags
my heart never knows how hard to pound at the sound of a car door opening, then closing because the creak and the slam are the same whether you’re coming or you’re going
6 tags
dismemberment.
sipping coffee clouds in the corner i watched as your body slowly dismembered itself under the bar lights and how the stench brought on the barflies your head was the first to go, rolling awkward little semi-circles across the beer puddles and chipped nail polish flakes on the floor and then your fingers, spider-legging away into cobweb crevices your arms, tearing themselves from...
3 tags
so my plan is this,
i will be as much awake for you as you are asleep for me.
i hear you snore, head against the wetness of the window, the coolness of what exists beyond the pane. you trust that i’ll keep the wheel pointed straight ahead, looking like we’ll crash right into the mountainside but always veering directly into the twilight instead. and it will be wonderful, in morning...
5 tags
Exhaustion from defensive arguments settles in around now, around midnight. In the morning I’ll be sticky with a fake tan and my eyelids will fight against the weight of my tar-thick lashes. I’ll buy a pack of smokes, take the matches they offer me and never use them. I’ve got 42 books piled up in the center console. Useless and unlit little paper pieces of miniature...
4 tags
Let’s wake in the morning, older than we were last night.
I. let’s sit for a minute under this canopy of old and moth-eaten scarves, so thread-bare we can see the stars in a haze and the smog too, if we don’t look past it
II. let’s lay here a minute under this tent of your grandmother’s floral sheets, that smell so much of lilac soap the insects swarm around us...
4 tags
i read the bad news smeared across the front page. i thought about how if the birds decided to stop singing at dawn, we’d be okay. i asked the trees if they would feel less alive without the music. but the trees weren’t in any mood today for hypothetical chatter.
