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.
Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’
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.
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
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.
A Car, Of Course
Posted in Poetry, tagged car, poem, Poetry, Relationships on October 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »
My car was white, hominy and dead in the sun
I had burned out the starter. I had not kept the tank full
She divorced me by dying
And sent me to move over land in a bus’s guts
“We are responsible for our own happiness,”
I said to her as they towed her away
“You were the wise one to leave me.”
So what a shit would I be to say a bad thing about her now
When she’d helped me see how relationships are?
I mean with a car, of course.
And You Will Be A Sparrow, My Son
Posted in Poetry, tagged alpha males, gender, machismo, poem, Poetry, sparrows on October 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The boy sparrows on the cigarette sidewalk
Came smiling dressed with their black beards
I told my son about the alpha males
How these tiny black chins
Meant those sparrows swung the biggest dicks.
But then I had to add the part about empathy and pity
And how to feel for and not dominate what is small
What is brittle, what is beauty—so he can be,
You know
a
better
human.
My burden and my fear, to teach him softness.
And meanwhile nature mocked me
While those tiny little birds hopped around
Pushing the girl birds out of the way
And swinging their tiny, little sparrow dicks
On the cigarette sidewalk.
Feeling, Trashed
Posted in Poetry, tagged ecology, environment, landfills, Pacific garbage patch, plastics, poem, Poetry, trash, waste on October 6, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The trash bag goes out.
My trash is the fossils of the feelings I had two days ago
And no longer remember
Hunger. Angry checks sent. Fear I’d starve the kid
And now my anxious beer bottles go porpoise-nosing in the green Pacific
Angry wrappers of chocolate. Cigarette butts that gave your lungs gas
And the thrill of paying for a small whiff of death
All these little skeletons, the spirit gone out of them.
Possessed and unpossessed.
While its despondent eyes turned toward new lusts
For breasts and thighs and legs and skin
And other things the soul makes into paper
Beauty is Imperfection 