| 559: Those Winter Sundays |
[15 Jul 2009|11:40pm] |
“Those Winter Sundays”
Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
K: I am slowly realizing just how much my father loves me.
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[15 Jul 2009|08:33pm] |
Why when ever something goes wrong or is bad.
I turn to you, or just the memory of you?
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| Life Sucks... |
[15 Jul 2009|02:44pm] |
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The Fucking High Way! |
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Hates being the only one that has to stay home and do nothing! Wouldn't this baby be better off in a box with docs that know what there doing rather then just sitting in me trying not to come out? Atleast then they will know whats going on and what to do rather then making everything miserable for everyone. Kt and Ryan who knows where the hell there at. Marcos mom and Mckenzie are in town with the baby. Marco and Tucker are golfing. (Of course!) Me I'm stuck sitting on the couch taking pills all day! We have to move right when the babies due date is. So that sucks but the place they were looking at everyone seems to think its amazing so that tottaly doesn't suck. But it sucked last time moving with a new born so I cant imagine moving with a new born and a 10month old just starting to walk. Don't really care about getting a dog any more because these dogs are driven me nuts! Mikey huge ass is always in the way knocking Marco over and eating everything. Stevey is a fat ass pig that wont shut up inless he gets what he wants. Nelly is an annoying little kick dog scraggly mop. Not to mention the one time a cat did come down stairs, some one let them out of the basement and the fuckers almost killed it. And Marcos sister gets mad over that because Marco hates the dog. But yet those damn things get to go out side they get all of this floor pluse the fucking basement. And what do our cats get one little hall way and no people contact because I can't walk up the stairs and hang out in a hall way when ever I want to. It's all bullshit! Everythings bothering me lately. No one ever stops fighting or yelling or throwing shit. How am I supposed to just lay here stress free when all this shit is going down? I feel like this baby doesn't have much of a chance any more and its killing me. 
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| 558: Facts About the Moon |
[14 Jul 2009|11:54pm] |
“Facts About the Moon”
Dorianne Laux
The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you're like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What's a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped, a mother
can't help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can't not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she's only
romanticizing, that she's conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can't help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.
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| jordin |
[13 Jul 2009|11:33pm] |
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a few diffrent thought,,
I found out my baby cousin knocked up his girlfriend, only cause the myspace told me so. many children are being created in holly mi as of now, i enjoy there company but cant imagine being a parent.
also i have found myself in an unlikeable postion or two latley. I should prolly be more bothered by that.
when i raised my hands over my head i feel like i am going to hit the ground.
the world is a very dizzy place and i am not always sure if i am being sucked in or spat out.
i am not so sure why i gave you up.
the past weeks have been to busy to enjoy and my mind is just waiting to faint,
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| 557: My Father's Back |
[13 Jul 2009|10:21pm] |
"My Father's Back"
Edward Hirsch
There's an early memory that I carry around
In my mind
like an old photography in my wallet,
little graying and faded, a picture
That I don't much like
but nonetheless keep,
Fingering it now and then like a sore tooth,
Knowing it there,
not needing to see it anymore....
The sun slants down on the shingled roof.
The wind breathes in the needled pines.
And I am lying in the grass on my third birthday,
Red-faced and watchful
but not squalling yet,
Not yet rashed or hived up
from eating the wrong food
Or touching the wrong plant,
my father's leaving.
A moment before he was holding me up
Like a new trophy, and I was a toddler
With my face in the clouds,
spinning around
With a head full of stars,
getting so dizzy.
A moment before I was squealing with joy
In the tilt-a-whirl of his arms,
Drifting asleep in the cavern of his chest....
I remember waking up to the twin peaks
Of his shoulders moving away, a shirt clinging
To his massive body,
a mountain receding.
I remember the giant distance between us:
A drop or two rain, a sheen on the lawn,
And then I was sitting up
in the grainy half-light
Of a man walking away from his family.
I don't know why we go over the old hurts
Again and again in our minds, the false starts
And true beginnings
of a world we call the past,
As if it could tell us who we are now,
Or were, or might have been....
It's drizzling.
A car door slams, just once, and he's gone.
Tiny pools of water glisten on the street.
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| 556: Phone Call |
[12 Jul 2009|09:05pm] |
"Phone Call"
Tony Hoagland
Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight overexaggeration,
an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.
What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them
living deep inside of me
like a bad king, or an incurable disease-
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells – the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming,
with bad knees and white hair sprouting from his ears.
I don’t want to scream forever,
I don’t want to live without proportion
like some kind of infection from the past,
so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window
where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.
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[11 Jul 2009|02:15pm] |
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Well out of the hosp.
On bed rest and drugs to help stop my contractions and get red of the infection.
Took steroids for the babies lungs to develop faster since I was have contractions, 2 cent dilated, and have a short cervix.
Worst two shots I have ever get but not that bad.
The IV shit was the worst with the burning and hurting off and on all day and night.
But it's a boy.
" Yeah! That's definitely a penis." the woman said
I'm 32 weeks so far and hes already over 4 pounds.
Now laying at home trying not to think about how this week is going to go not being able to get baby Marco every time he cries and simply stuff like that and cleaning. But I guess we will see Friday when I go to my next appointment if I make it that long. The doctors make it seem like I'm going to take a shit and o theres a baby like any day now.
I don't know I'll feel a lot better about every thing once Marcos mom gets back Monday to take care of everything and everyone. Because right now its kind of chaos and its only day 2.
Well I'm glade Marco just admitted he can't do all this.
( Play take care of Marco...)
Knew he couldn't but hes going to have to learn fast like I had to. hahah
Because I'm not going to sit in a hosp with a baby in a glass box because he came to soon for his lungs to be done, having to watch a 10 month old and having to take care of house shit and my self also.
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| 553: How To Eat a Poem |
[09 Jul 2009|10:56pm] |
“How To Eat a Poem”
Eve Merriam
Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
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| 552: I go back to May 1937 |
[08 Jul 2009|01:58pm] |
"I go back to May 1937"
Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar make of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips back in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it - she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to die. I want to go
up to them there in the at May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
K brought up a movie I created based on Jeffrey McDaniel's The Quiet World. I had not planned on putting it up, but now that people know it is there, I guess it would be unfair to not show it now. If you are interested, here is my humble interpretation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOTujRDlu3U. --M
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| 551: The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy |
[07 Jul 2009|11:06pm] |
“The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy”
Jeffrey McDaniel
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end
of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women—those you write poems about
and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction
lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast
as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power
never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely
a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,
as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long
regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light
of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that's just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing
into each other's ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn't make the silence
any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you'd press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I'm sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade's precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we'd put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other's eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn't be said.
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| 550: Trying to Have Something Left Over |
[06 Jul 2009|11:06pm] |
“Trying to Have Something Left Over”
Jack Gilbert
There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.
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| 549: The Ides of Amer-I-Can |
[05 Jul 2009|05:44pm] |
“The Ides of Amer-I-Can”
Kevin McFadden
O tempora! O mores! —Cicero
I write in times of plus and minus, in
decades of division. I write in times
when what's said aloud is sometimes
not allowed said. The brain's in halves,
the heart's in half-knots. In times when
pronouns take the place of nouns and
proverbs take the place of thought. Times
of humanity's peak-ruts: assaults on clear
new summits (and summits on nuclear assault).
When the Air Force aims high and diplomacy
dips low. I write in times when ink seems
obsolete, pens dead. I write on a computer
whose newspaper-named fonts beg
outrageous multiplication. I write in Times.
Her T-shirt exclaims NF! and this is America
all right, that said it, NF is enough, and
yeah, it's clever, but lacks a clear referent:
of what? She's dressed kinda feminist
so maybe that's her beef: NF
of this crap, NF of the way you
bastards look at me—basta bastardi!
for those of you who ogle in Italian—
NF sentences and sentiments like
"She's dressed kinda feminist," NF
ineffables, let's try saying something useful.
The N is on her right breast, the F the left.
I visibly introduce myself to N.
She verbally introduces me to "F— you."
My grandpa used to say as we'd drive
the backroads, "Never forget, son, American
ends in I-can," giving me a license
before I needed it. I'd perch on his lap
to steer, he'd shift and work the pedals; hey,
it really looked like the world was racing
for me. Never swerved toward, "But, Grandpa,
so does Mex-ican—and where did that get them?"
Where would that put me? Agree with grandpa
and drive—dissent, boy, gets you nowhere.
Took years to see the bugs in the grill, the Sunday
roadkill half-dressed in a ditch, before grasping
the unspoken right-of-way. Amer-I-can,
really. One possum better off dead.
We've clocked the sneeze doing 90.
In seconds, it can work a room. My wife
seizes up and lets hers go in two iambic bursts.
(It's cute, it's cute.) Our sneezes, we know,
are ours for life, however accomplished:
my solid hoot, her teensy twos, the three or
more (I'm guessing) you're doomed to repeat—
just reflex. By history, then, do we mean
we want nothing to sneeze at? Jamestown
to James Brown in a few hundred blinks, Plato
to NATO in the space to sneeze. Is it me,
dear wife, or is the world looking less
like a "Man's Man's Man's World?"
Itsyou, she doubles up, itsyou.
Today even blood can kill, I can tell
through a bag marked BIOHAZARD. Doc says
my back is bad, recommends more foam
in the sole ("With these shoes you hardly
feel the earth"). Nothing's touching, I notice
around the sterilized office: tray here, pads there,
swabs over some. Gloves between me
and my healer, paper between me
and the seat, latex between lovers, what's it
coming to? Expanse's expense is a distance
you can learn from any pre-packaged fork
in the hospital café, eating in our cultural
fashion, with middlemen, no fingers. Clean
utensils for hands who knows what's on.
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| 548: I loved you... |
[04 Jul 2009|04:09am] |
“I loved you…”
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
I loved you, and I probably still do,
And for a while the feeling may remain...
But let my love no longer trouble you,
I do not wish to cause you any pain.
I loved you; and the hopelessness I knew,
The jealousy, the shyness - though in vain -
Made up a love so tender and so true
As may God grant you to be loved again.
Translated from the Russian by Genia Gurarie
Sorry this is so late, spent the entire day at the lake with my new in-laws. Happy 4th of July, Americans.
-g
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| 547: Last Testaments |
[02 Jul 2009|12:27pm] |
“Last Testaments”
Lorna Crozier
The cancer began in her tonsils,
she'd say that with a smile
almost expecting to be teased
for such a serious disease
rooting in that childish place.
She remembered her son at four
when he'd had his out,
the way he'd looked at her as the nurse
slid the cold thermometer up his bum.
She carried on as usual, cleaned the house,
fried a chicken for her husband every Sunday,
cutting the breast in four pieces, the wings in two.
The morning of the day she died
she took him down the basement,
showed him how to separate the clothes,
how to measure the soap, set the dials,
how to hang his shirts and pants
so the creases would fallout
*
The man with a worn-out heart, sold his tools
so his wife wouldn't be left with that part of him
to deal with. How he had loved them
in his hands, each so perfectly designed
to fit the palm, the wheels, bits and teeth
made for one specific use.
On the empty walls of the garage hung the shapes
of all the tools he'd ever owned,
sixty years of wrenches, saws and drills.
He'd traced around them row on row
so he'd know where to hang each one,
know what his neighbour had borrowed,
and failed to return. From his pocket he removed
a black felt pen and in the corner on a board painted white,
he drew the perfect outline of a man.
*
Before she walked into the river
and didn't come back, the woman
who couldn't remember the day of the week
or the faces of her children,
made a list of all the men she's ever loved,
left it for her husband by the coffee pot,
his name on the bottom,
underlined twice
for emphasis.
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Anxious to leave work!