Frame

Original image by mzacha

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Skycat

A cat doodle for Manic Monday.

Original images: cat sign by mzacha, white clouds by gorex

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Elecelephony

Once there was an elephant
Who tried to use the telephant
--"Eletelephony" by Laura E. Richards

but now we know they talk by infrasound—
and pachy gossip travels underground,
vibrations picked up through their giant toes.

Reception’s best on ground that’s dense and rocky.
Herds of elephants will sometimes jockey
to be over subterranean flows

of hardened stone. They hang out there and listen
to the oldest land-line in transmission—
or they used to. Guess what’s coming next:

they’ve super-sized the buttons on the cell-phones,
no wires to tangle trunks. So now it’s well-known,
elephants send messages in text.


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Rough Drafts

The door’s off its hinges and a mean breeze
toys with the crumpled notes on the floor.
A plastic bottle reading Sierra Spring
rolls across the table, but it’s empty—

she used the last water to wash her
dirty handkerchiefs and socks. It leaves marks
in the dust like the tracks of a hockey puck
caroming off the walls of the rink

like her thoughts off the inside of her skull.
The room is so full of unreadable heiroglyphs
she can’t find anything to write. Unhinged,

empty, dressed in ironic labels, she strikes
a sad note. And the wind keeps on with its
unending paper chase. It’s a rough draft.

--for Poefusion

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Exit Door

Original images: doorway by ilco, statue of Trajan by dgisarad, plaque by scol22

"pointed in a direction I hadn't noticed": quote from Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

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Plane View

Original by zuen

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Angling

3 Word Wednesday: Cautious. Human. Maybe.

cautious fish approach
human shadow on water
maybe there's a hook


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Stonework

They ask if God could make a stone He couldn't lift.
Well, I don't know 'bout that. The world's chock-full of stones
and most of them too heavy for my hands to shift--
the earth's foundations, mountain's teeth and giant's bones.
I'll mark the graves of righteous folk with cairns of pebbles,
build a wall from chunks of columnar basalt,
line the city streets with water-rounded cobbles,
cut a slab of granite for the family vault,
all things to their measure. Hypothetic boulders
beyond the strength of Deity to move or break
get nothing done, give no-one shelter. Lay my hand
to some constructive task. I'll do my best to make
a house that's sound, though it be humble or though grand
from rocks: the biggest I can carry on my shoulders.


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Numbers

are so difficult to grasp:

22,000 dead
41,000 missing
hundreds of thousands starving

Cyclone Nargis blew in like a storm of numbers

twelve-foot storm surge
ninety-five percent of houses destroyed
one million homeless

drowning in a sea of numbers
and they just make you numb
clinging to life-raft numbers while the tide goes out
and whispers help

help

help

Donate to International Burmese Monks Organization
Other aid agencies accepting cyclone relief donations

Petrified Wood

Harder than saw-blade steel, this gem
was surely never wood. What tender green
could grow from stone-cold orange cambium?
Yet growth-rings, seven fat and seven lean
recall both plenty-years and years of drought.
Intruded quartz, a jagged mass of white
recalls the thunder-strike and wooden shouts
of breaking. Sunk in montmorillonite,
a strange clay-change turns trees to stone. Medusa's
eyes were not as potent-- only meat
was hers to alter so. But clay reduces
everything to mineral at last,
a color-coded skeleton, complete
recording of a lost organic past.


Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Balanced Breakfast

Original images: fried egg by woodsy, glass with juice by bigevil600


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Ω

Ohms are not a measurement of distance,
kilometers and miles do not apply
to calibrations of the heart’s resistance.

PSI may serve to grade how pistons
are powered by compressing air-supply
but ohms are not a measurement of distance.

Call them stubborn counters of persistence,
call them units striving to defy
the dissolution of the heart’s resistance,

letters from illusion to existence,
searching for reflection or reply
in space defined by measurement of distance.

Ohm denotes a certain self-insistence,
a veiling of omega. My ohm I,
a cry against the death of heart’s resistance.

Beloved alif, grant me this assistance:
swift surrender to the will Most High,
disappearing measurement of distance,
dissolution of the heart’s resistance.


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Do North

The Do North show at the IFCC opens tonight and runs through May 24. It includes two of my poems: "Dummies" and "Water Music".

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Bypassed

3 Word Wednesday: Empty. Highway. Ignored.

empty exit ramps
ignored by highway drivers
frame desolate towns

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Programming

The white chalk lining of the egg,
the folds of the translucent membrane,
the red scribble on the surface of the yolk—
say: Cowbird.

The hatchling accepts this first lesson
and overwrites all later programs.
Its courtship language comes embedded
in the firmware

between the hard layer of shell
and soft albumin, threaded through
the cellular architecture clear down
to the core.


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SQL Triolet

I'd like to do an INNER JOIN with you
WHERE Heart's NOT NULL. Let that be my SELECT
and let the GROUP BY Lovers follow through
and carry out my INNER JOIN with you.
It seems that that would not be hard to do--
I hope I got the SQL correct
for me to do an INNER JOIN with you
WHERE Heart's NOT NULL. That stands as my SELECT.

--for readwritepoem

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Rip-Tide

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Julius Cæsar. Act iv. Sc. 3.

There is a tide in the affairs of men--
it's rip-tide now, and all along the coast
the boats are stirring, pulling at their lines
and pointing prows upstream, like gun-dogs on
the scent. An oar goes floating past, a stray
seat-cushion fallen from some dinghy moored
by the marina; swirls of bubbles mark
the current's hidden passage undersea.

You've watched and known the daily rise and fall
but this is different, new, orthogonal
a stealth bomb third-time-downer. Nothing shows
except the painted eyes, the pointing nose
of sleeping boats awakened by the smell
of change that's riding underneath the swell.


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Organ Recital

Original images:
organ pipes by CH_01, chest X-ray by Portable X-Ray

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Begrudgment: Beer and the Roomba

To think you're still maintaining that old score
as if you were bartending, and my tab
was full of unpaid drinks. I swear you're like
a Roomba swooping round a polished floor
in search of any strand of lint to grab,
or vultures waiting for a car to strike

some sorry squirrel. Justice is on strike,
you mutter, while your heavy hand is scoring
gouges in the tabletop. I grab
another can of beer and pull the tab
and foam pours out and soaks the vinyl flooring
like the Red Sea drowning Pharoah. Like--

oh, who cares what the hell this beer is like?
Its sole importance is as one more strike
against me. Get the mop out, scrub the floor
and put it all down on my growing score.
You know I'll never live to pay this tab,
you'll have to settle for what you can grab:

unsatisfactory, I'm sure. It grabs
me, though I doubt it's to your liking,
that I should dodge the arrows, slings and stabs
of vast, outrageous fortune's random striking
and exit, leaving this unsettled score,
a steaming pile of grudge upon the floor

of your neat parlor. Truly, I was floored
to find you hadn't let it go. You grab
on tight, I'll say-- but brittle as unscored
Saltines. Rigidity is fragile, like
a glass that shatters at the slightest strike
where metal bends, a curling beer-can tab

for instance. Press the Roomba's power-tab,
the mindless thing will circle round the floor
and never think that it should go on strike
for higher wages. Robots never grab
from other robots just because they like
to. Humans are the ones who must keep score.

You had to grab the mike, so take the floor
and call the strikes and runs just as you like.
There's no-one keeping tabs or taking score.


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Pressed Rose

Original images: dried rose by Pix_Elle, old notebook by Scyza








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Dead End

You followed your path to a dead-ending street
and came face to face with a solid brick wall.
You say that your journey right now is complete

'cause there’s nowhere to go. The choice of retreat
is not one you’ll take. You’d much rather crawl
on your knees on this path in a dead-ending street

with no-one to see you accepting defeat
and no-one to give you a hand when you fall
at the end of a journey that’s still incomplete.

Until they have pulled up the cold winding-sheet
to cover your face, you’ll stand here and stall
at the end of the path in a dead-ending street

at the point of the angle where two brick walls meet
the place where the street dies, past any recall
the end of a journey that you call complete

though the rest of your road is laid out at your feet.
Back to the beginning, or over the wall—
any way out of this dead-ending street
and on with the journey that’s never complete.

--for Writer's Island and easystreet


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I'm Sorry I Complained about the Weather

It's not really that I hate rain,
but I envy the clouds.
Not because I think they're closer to You--
(as if You lived up in the sky someplace)
--but because, at the first glimpse of sun
they disappear.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Eccentric Spheres

The future of our planet bends
around the sky, unfixed in space
a dancer in the close embrace
of Sol and planetary friends.
It’s gravity that sometimes sends
a comet falling, shining trace
across the night sky’s velvet face
and keeps the dancers turning, mends
the rifts in pinwheel galaxies.
We’re all afloat in cosmic seas
of milk or ink or sorrow’s tears,
but always on the move, like spheres
eccentric, crystalline, and full
of music playing in God’s skull.


Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Soul Repair

Yes, I know the old place is moldering
and I really should get it fixed up.
But my day is punctuated by distractions.
I have no time for repair.

Evening falls; I light a votive candle
and wander the threadbare halls
of my soul, wiping dust from banisters.
I have nothing but time for repair.

Cobwebs choke the windows and I
stumble on the uneven stairs. Dry rot
under my hand. A splinter in my palm.
I repair to my dark bedroom

with nothing but time in my hands,
no tools, no money. Where did I leave
the candle?

The phoenix is reborn in smoke
and she knows nothing of repair.

--for Poefusion: splinter, distractions, molder, votive, punctuate


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Voting is open...

for 2008 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, now through April 29th.

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