The magazine was dripping with innuendo
It promised nipples and betrayal
The moon and Page 6 asked my hormones to dance
“You’ll never guess where Tom Kaulitz and Heidi Klum ….”
Began the headline I didn’t finish.
Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
Yellow
Posted in Poetry, tagged Heidi Klum, newspaper, Page 6, poem, Poetry, tabloid on October 18, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Participation Medal
Posted in Poetry, tagged crime, Long Island, New Jersey Transit, New York, poem, Poetry, quiet car on October 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The train coughed off its riders
Who would watch hockey or meet a friend
Or hoped to meet a girl
Some had been drunk on the train
To get ahead of the way they hoped they’d feel
A young teen explained to his friend
How to mug Long Islanders
“They’re so stupid, when you stare at them,
They just give you their money.”
Another woman chatted
As loud as she could
In the quiet car
And for a while it was enough,
For me to just watch the city
The firework box of surprises
Then I went to the street corner
And yelled “fuck” as loud as I could
I heard once the bulls of Pamplona
Like to knock spectators off the walls sometimes
And gore them.
And I remembered, no matter what city you’re in,
You really should participate.
Piano
Posted in Poetry, tagged Long Island, North Fork, piano, poem on October 16, 2019| 2 Comments »
The little boy played
The piano
Sad and cold and blue
Like he was on a ferry pulling out
Leaving you behind on the pebbly North Fork
Dressed in clouds hiding their tears
Lickspittle
Posted in Poetry, tagged lickspittle, poem, Poetry, Politics, words on October 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »
“That congressman is just a lickspittle, I said
“Lickspittle,” whispered my friend. “Lickspittle.”
He didn’t know the word, but he repeated it
Back to me
He had only heard the new word
Not my sentence.
He would try it out
In new conversations. Get it wrong
The first two or three times.
But he would improve his conversation
By using it as often as he could
When he talked to others
And by that I mean,
Improve the conversations with himself
I was glad I could help that relationship grow
It’s Inflating
Posted in Global Affairs, Poetry, Politics, Uncategorized, tagged Antonio Gramsci, culture, dollar, Federal Reserve, monetary easing, Politics, transgender on October 13, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I read about monetary easing
And thought of a guy painting a house
Who didn’t give a shit.
He was mad at trans people
He didn’t think of the Fed and his paycheck
He was thinking about chicks with dicks and bathrooms
And he was caught in economic deflation
And the degraded value of his labor
And the asset inflation made him wiggle like a mosquito
in a spider’s web
And yet he’s not thinking of excess trading value
It’s all those dicks, he’s thinking to himself, wriggling around
In an invisible dance of dollars.
Being pushed from job to job, house to house
The dollar making him whip it out, I mean his money,
And buy more expensive
Cigarettes and beer and chicken and barbecue
While people laugh at his overalls
And tumescent paintbrush
“All those breasts and dicks,” he keeps thinking.
Drive
Posted in Poetry, tagged car, drive, Lincoln Tunnel, New York, om, poem, Poetry, Shiva, Traffic on October 12, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The long line of cars fed the Lincoln Tunnel
Drivers were transfixed on their anger
A CD player played the sacred syllable “Om.”
While Shiva fed the digesting tunnel with destroyed memories
The tunnel and god-restored
River, the cold blue baby
Forgot who you were again, didn’t you?
There is no driver
There is only a constant forgetting of how to drive
Into the Many
Posted in Poetry, tagged dissonance, Music, poem, Poetry, Relationships, Wittgenstein on October 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Understood, she said
But she didn’t understand.
Message received, he thought, but they were
Using terms differently.
My green isn’t your green
My over isn’t your over. My silence is only my silence
Not your aggression.
You argued the words
And missed the sentence.
“Stupid” sounds worse to her than it did to me.
“I love your body” sounded like I didn’t love her mind
The resonant frequency of the building was ineluctable
The bridge jumped
Dissonance was the music.
You cannot live with two sounds now
You must go out
And live among the many
Self Help
Posted in Poetry, tagged bookstore, poem, Poetry, Self Help on October 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I went to the self-help section
To feel less alone
I was reminded by the cool book with the blue binding
It’s called self help because, in other words, you have to be alone.
So many of us stood together alone
Here in the self-help section.
On the Wrong Page
Posted in Poetry, tagged communication, Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown, magazine, Relationships, values on October 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The magazine split open between us
“It says here a couple must share values.”
Cosmopolitan broke into our fight like an outspoken drunk aunt
“If you can’t agree on religion or money, you’ll never agree
On anything else that matters,” she said with true hurt.
Well, sign the divorce contract on my back, then!
Helen Gurley Brown, the ghost witness to the tearing paper
And the rending pen.
Then three drinks of sad well silence
On the next page: “How to please your man!”
Beauty is Imperfection 