gone

i have lost whatever skill i ever had.


it's just the rain on my face,
woodsmoke in the air
it's just the last warmth
of autumn, a season without you

lightning backflashes retinas
turning my eyes red
and the rest of the world blue
even the mound above you

were we born a hundred years ago
you wouldn't be moldering in my mind
coming to pieces, going to dust,
succumbing to entropy;
you'd be luminous, together with all
in the clouds-- i wish it were so

but i chose my lies, the comfort of
the big ones, or the small images
of movie death, of zombies and decay.
it doesn't matter.
you are gone either way.

-jm9.8

6:40 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Rest Well, S.G

You know death don't have no mercy in this land
Death don't have no mercy in this land
In this land
He come to your house, you know he don't take long
You look in the bed this morning children
You find that your, your mother's gone
I said death don't have no mercy in this land

Death will leave you standing and crying in this land
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land
In this land
He come to your house, you know he don't stay long
You look in the bed this morning children
Find that your brothers and sisters have gone
I said death don't have no mercy in this land

Death will go in any family in this land
Death will go in any family in this land
In this land
Come to your house, you know he don't take long
You look in the bed this morning children
Find that your family's gone
I said death don't have no mercy, no mercy in this land

Death will leave you standing and crying in this land
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land
In this land
He come to your house, you know he don't take long
You look in the bed this morning children
Find that your brothers and sisters have gone
I said death don't, death don't have no mercy in this, in this land

9:11 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

it's early, but it's late

I don't know if the morning's grey or if I am;
if the air's too thick-eyed and yawning
for normal saturation, or if in my slumber
I'd lost the edge of sense,
a threshold crossed in the daily dulling,
like the jagged cliff succumbing
to the relentless curve of the sea--

I went to sleep thinking I knew
something about the color blue.
I woke today, and all I remember is
that blue is the color of your eyes,
and blue is angry and blue is sad
and blue is tired of me.

I don't know if the air's forgotten
everything but grey, or if I have.

-jm9.8
 

5:11 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

little help. . .

i have been on a writing dry-spell for the past few months. it is no big deal, as i blame it on too much studying for the GRE and too much playing of the guitar. but i want to get back in the flow of it, so i am asking you for ideas. ever wanted to see a poem or story by me about something specific? now's your chance! gimme a character or a situation or a bunch of words you like, and i will try to make something interesting out of it.

thanks for the help!

-j.

8:29 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Three Elementary Particles (unfinished draft)

1.
By virtue of what
it is not, the first is void.
Living, as we do,
on a damp condensed speck,
the primacy of absence
escapes us. We are in love
with presence, from the
ink-spilling philosophers
to the sweaty press of lovers,
we never look past our transience
to the immutable void behind.

Absence ennables.
Void allows for action,
not as impartial framework,
but the most vital and active
participant. The void in our future
pulls us to it. This pen scratching
forward across the page
is not slave to some mental will
or determinate action-- it moves
because the void in front pulls it along--

I drag the pen across the page
like the man hanging
above the abyss, fingernails
scraping for purchase

When she left you, or when he leaves
that hollow in your chest
like a socket missing its bone
or the prisoner quartered
by four compass-riding horses--
that hollow isn't new. It isn't the absence
of your beloved; it is your awareness
of yourself. The inward turning motion
of the broken hearted reveals
himself to himself, naked and unprotected
by the merry distractions of love
That's why we love again, or die.
We cannot live in the awareness
of our own hollowness--
the echoing black infinity
braced on both sides
by the twin mirrors of reason
and animal emotion
Listening to yourself echo--

12:41 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

converation with wallace

WALLACE::

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock 

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

And what difference, Wallace,
if we take our rest
in the vestments of clowns--

Purple with green rings
or green with yellow rings
or strange nightgowns
with all the sequins and beads
your Puritan heart cares to fancy--

Do you think dreams
of periwinkles and baboons
can save us now?

In this red weather?

-jm7.8

2:10 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

useless, useless

it starts with the unutterable,
always the unutterable;
the words
    ~scent of sweetgrass
    rising under a crescent moon~
they only gesture.

the scent itself, the quality of light
this year's crop of fireflies alighting
the soft breeze, these things
are beyond words, as they must be.

are there words without ideas
are there ideas wrung dry
of the sea of language
in which they float?

these questions are for
the dessicated, for we know
that words and ideas both
are children, unruly
perhaps ultimately unruleable
but progeny nonetheless
of the simple, unutterable
always primordial
scent of sweetgrass rising
under a crescent moon

-jm6.8

8:25 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Atlantic City. for CT on his birthday

How did this herringbone strip happen,
to what end the tan scent of caramelizing
onions, oily on the Pine Barren breeze--
the cruel red beaks of gulls drifting
in wide gyres through mist and neon
all-night Casino glow.

There are no unmediated angles
in Atlantic City.  The gaming floor
murmurs like a womb, incubating
some new monster, a behemouth
with thirty thousand eyes,
orchid-beautiful, glowing
like some predatory
deep sea fish with teeth
delicate translucent daggers,
swallowing bus-loads of seniors
shaking out their nickels and
vomiting the rest back up the Parkway.

What wind blows such driftwood
to this nondescript beach, from points
north and west, to tumble under pallid
sunshine, white clouds pulled
to long brushstrokes
by the descending jet-stream,
beginning its long commute
to Cape Clear, Galway, Cork,
Wales, Morocco, Lisbon.

It was the same breeze that blew us both,
me to the formica countertop of Bill's,
the boardwalk's only liquor store and
Greek deli, to the finest gyro of my life,
perfect tzaziki and souvlaki and warm pita,
simple things, greasy things,
on the bright windy morning walk--
that same wind carried us like grit,
like blowing trash, and I kept my eyes
away, crossed behind my friend and his girl,
to avoid passing too close to him,
de-legged torso, perched on the edge
of the sandy boards, his wheelchair
behind him, a coffee can in front, jingling
with the guilty change of tourists--
impassive as a Buddha, listening
to headphones, a grizzled cheek
reddening in the maddening wind.

You create the absences around you,
which are not nothing, not nothing at all--
nothing doesn't ache and
sting like fought back tears.
What fate left you balanced atop
a nothing below your ribcage, and
do you bury your own lower half,
do you drink at your two legs' wake,
do you leave space in the casket
for the rest?

Statue-like, with his head less
than two feet from the
splintery thoroughfare, he offered
no answers; my only teacher
is cowardice or revulsion, whichever
masters me and turns my gaze.

In the book I'd given my friend
for his birthday, last night, in the hotel,
a man said that all we are is only
what we are doing. We are in the midst
of defining what it means to be human.
Not wind or sand, not God or chance
accumulations of supercooled starlight.

Just us.

-jm5.8

11:31 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Desperate and Conventional

I am desperate.
I want, more than anything,
to write a conventional poem.

To build the rooms of
each stanza meticulously,
precisely layering color and texture,
rearranging the furniture
to just the right effect.

And then deftly execute
the turn, in the second
to last stanza, revealing
to all that the ticking
grandfather clock
is stuffed with dynamite.

Leaving the words searching
the walls for a seam, the
reader looking for
a way out before what
has already happened, happens.

-jm5.8

9:43 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

with apologies to wallace stevens

Ten Ways of Seeing the City

I
Purchased for a string of beads
Nothing of them remains but
The name:
Man
Ha
Tan

II
For this I wanted to hate it
Cruellest swindling in history
But I cannot

III
Little Dominican child
Stands on a subway grate
Watching his amarillo balloon
Drift into the skyline
Points and laughs

IV
I am the city
You are too

V
There is an echoing void
Negative space of towers
I can look through the spot
And see blue clouds, white sky

VI
Even when I slip on icy stairs
And skin my knees into the subway
A passing gangsta helps me up
And I cannot hate the city

VII
Alexandria, Rome, London in 1765
Tokyo (once Eto), Shanghai
Even Athens pales in comparison

VIII
One voice, one language, one meaning
All voices, all languages, no meaning
A howling love song of greed and regret

IX
Edges cannot contain
Like a wild thing it grows

X
I hate the city


-jm3.5

5:02 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment