I ate a burger
I wondered if it’d had a soul
Smoke was the only thing
I kept eating
I have a soul
Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
Green Grease
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on November 14, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Light Being
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 10, 2014| 1 Comment »
You sit next to me, dishabille, with
the curve swelling
Dressed in the patterns of Sunday paper
afternoons (airplanes crashing)
Looking at your hair
blown by wind over the pillow. Lipstick. Sun
comes through the ocean screen ‑ a wet calm
from juniper trees outside.
The cat plays in a blue light camisole
We threw off the bed. Tweesers
next to a hair. Rarebit in
the stewpot. Kinch. Rind.
I felt your own hot tears on the
back of my neck last night ‑
You didn’t even ask me what was wrong.
A Poem About Cars
Posted in Poetry, tagged cars, poem, Poetry on September 24, 2013| 1 Comment »
Cars,
Cars, cars, cars
Cars, cars, cars, cars
Cars, cars, cars, cars, cars
Cars, cars, cars, cars, cars, cars.
Cars.
Paradise for Umbrage
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on February 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Offense as sweet
As a box of raisins
You didn’t call me.
To offend a wizened grape
Is to offend me
Your hand as empty as a box
Of juice; I take the rain
Like I take the noise of children
Every nickel lies so forlorn on the tray
Bitterly remembering every grudge hugged
Come let us transact coffee and steam
Let us make a league of the offended
Dividing the milk of kindness
Until we are all even
–Eric Rasmussen
“The Ice Divorce”
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on January 14, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Hoar ice splinters rattle,
Around the turkey warrens
Off the saltbox barn
In the Green Mountain, pumpkin vines
Smashed reds and yellows
Under the tongue
Of new frost
An alert nostril
Discerns the paper birch trees
The city dweller
Cold on his ice chains
Searching to find the brazen keys
A finger snaps against the icy thumb
Bone fraternal snow flakes
You pantomime old age
And slowly go inside,
make a cup,
vermouth, Old Tom gin and rye.
His wife removes his boots.
While outside the window
A marten fighting for bread with a weasel.
Cheap doggerel growls
A comic burlesque
Across the wood tableau
and the coffee on his desk
Spring doesn’t come early
Nature never shows its pettifrock too soon
No pout of cleavage, no flash of gam
Man walks in
Logs alight,
Effervesced and drinking,
Popping from the gold and green splits
While fast green grouses and big hearted tits
Remember how segmented ants bullied the tree
Sea, air and land,
Grass, grove and lea
Remember when she walked these halls
And rolled the cat mint into balls
Washed your ears and skimmed the soup
for winter’s necessity
Would the wood come
Closer
And open her yet again
Would she be a five or an eight or a ten
How many yards of night
Do you walk
To reach yourself again?
Her damp you will inherit tonight
But not ever keep;
Without the softness to fight
Or the strength to weep
Reincarnal
Posted in Poetry on September 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Reincarnal
By Eric Rasmussen
Love like accidental planets that crossed
Thick with mezzotinted atmospheres, moirés of
Opposing dusks
Life in a mere 80 years, like 80 minutes winked shut
For a few chiasmus-soaked cross-hatching lines of verse
To dote and fawn away, to fall in love but only for a day
Each time; mixed with mixolydian verses
That chink with the ice in lemon gin reverses
Seething with thoughts born only in momentary extremes
Then in words poured out with the mildness of cream
Thought (and life) lived only from the black to the white
Life breathed through a dilating glade
Slithering to the thought with the pallor of jade
But to think again, to love again, to live again
In the extremities; how does it like us, these?
If all that is thought is chemistry, if all we do is think
Then this thought will live again on a thin aired gloaming
Until there’s nothing left of it to drink
The Planes Had Autumn In Them
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry, poetry Eric Rasmussen on September 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The planes had autumn in them
Like a rose,
Shed its thorns in fury
They had in their bellies harvest
Reapers with shaggy trotting horses
To bruise and knuckle corn
Forlorn tanks of ambrosia, white under
The supple blue storm
Sheaves and tow and kindling wood
A lock of blonde hair pushed under a snood
Buckling coats and leather and boots
To knees high
A man walks between two full towers
Where the bees with industry multiply
Amid thickening motes of sour apples,
Pumpkins and melons that dapple
A small Pennsylvania meadow yard.
A spider like a cross
Hangs between the silos,
Below, two little red hands,
Smashed in child grip, the plane
Falls before it can transmogrify,
Like the sport of doves wherever
In dovecotes they linger
A child that sees the world’s bones
In the bones inside his fingers
And a man sprog is born
In an old woman’s labor.
When she cries, it cries
And like music from the
Jawing instrument of the ass
His noisome vapor promises retribution tonight
That God himself will rattle the cities
And gorge himself on the empire of glass
The Coffee Golem
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on August 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Her face is dappled in the window
Mottled reflection of the morning:
Pointillist noses, crisp burned curls
Of cat tail lip, coxcomb eyebrows
Until, lying again
She pours for me a pungent cup of her inspiration
Sallying, tart in the window
A recipe for breath, tongue, eye and nostril …
Soon a new face is brewing
Together we pull down the muslin corners
The sheet falls, a spirit rises within it
Last anesthetized night, the walls were furry with
Lilies and dried musk roses
Her blown skirt was to balloon–
Not afraid of what would be blushed into it, and
Was held down until we’d chased sleep.
It found us again at morning
Erupting from the bubble of what is indifferent
It crawled to the top of dawn, where every color
Is a different breath;
Every truth a little death
Last evening’s muse,
Now trimmed for flight
And I’m left heavy in the bed
as she flies away with her nectar,
No longer made of night
“Sisters”
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on January 26, 2009| Leave a Comment »
It hangs from a
single stud,
A belt pierced by a boutonniere and tailor’s needles
More than something they fight over:
A belt that draws sisters together at the waist
Two girls, undressed
By the same hands
passing the same cigarette back and forth
Kick around the closet rooting for shoes, brown shoes
Unscrewing notebooks and letters
And light bulbs and kisses
From old sockets
Scratching their nipples
comparing white, sickly tongues
Throwing tampons, tampons
Like cotton footballs, soft dross
of earrings
falling next to pictures of a man
In this closet, love is spoken in clicks and whistles
And anger is passed along the warm lip
of a brandy glass
(Originally posted Aug. 20, 2007)
Man Be Well-Traveled
Posted in Poetry on January 26, 2009| 1 Comment »
Bite off the hand and eat gold
From the dead arm of the Antietam soldier
Leave him on the lawn
In between the poles of ash
In the litter and Moses Wagon
They’ve drawn
Shear off your whiskers, anchorite, with metal noises
With the badge of confederate stripes
Your woman with high cheekbones
And pinched, Guatemalan eyes,
They split her open like a melon, and her eyes rolled back in her head—
They all used her good
Now paint a smile on her
And put her in the ground
Tucked as a pea,
A bump uncomfortable
for posterity
to sleep on
And after trading the bad specie
For new,
Shed the woman (still a note not made)
the gray coat and the bivouac,
Pulling up the rails behind you
Move to California (for
You were always Western in heart.)
You have hard tack in bags and
The Yankee’s gold chips
Raze the old mill house
And birth a livery
Tend horses for the unioners
Riding in with bloody uniforms,
Toothless mouths,
Spotsylvania-
Spittle covered hard stories
Clean the boxes with her portraits
And bury them all with the dead green rinds
Bury another dead wife and another
plucking from each sad one,
blueberry of a southern son
and they will call the business theirs in time
And history will then always know you,
Distinguished gentleman with a beard
(Originally posted July 29, 2007)
Beauty is Imperfection 