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2013 Challenge: One Poem a Week

11

In progress...

So Chelsea Does My Reading

You look at my palm.

There you see
a heart line
a head line a life line

a hand opened to you,
enveloping your hand.

Somewhere there is a tree
newly nestled into earth
that will erupt straight

from the ground to the sky.
I know that is cliché.
I know. I know.

But can you tell me
whom I will meet
to finally stub this loneliness
away like a dead cigarette?​
I'm not sure this is worth continuing.

Part of the reasoning behind this particular challenge is that good poems take some time to be built, or be constructed.

I know. Right now I'm trying to build some kind of Frank Gehry image.

Not working, is it?
 
11 redux

Revision. Slight title change, moving the strophe breaks around:
So, Chelsea, Do My Reading

Look at my palm.

There you see
a heart line
a head line a life line

a hand opened to you,
resting in your hand.
Somewhere there is a tree

newly nestled into earth
that will erupt straight
from the ground to the sky.

I know that is cliché.
I know. I know.
But can you tell me

whom I will meet
to finally stub this loneliness
away like a dead cigarette?​
This makes it more uniform, which it not an intrinsic value, but I think (well, know) it needs major work.

Happy Ides of March (yesterday), anyway.

None of you are Caesar, after all.
 
12

Frankie Says Sonny's Working Late.

Yeah, Right! And I'm Veronica Lake,
you tell that to Sonny, Frankie.

Wait a minute, don't hang up!
You were my wise guy in high school, Right?
Remember Papa's barber shop?
me licking the peppermint stick
when Papa wasn't looking?
Pretending I was a bimbo, I said,
who still has a nice set a lungs by the way,
and how you sang Sherry Baby?

Frankie, you tell that sonofabitch
all I got now is an empty house,
a mansard roof on a Jersey cliff,
and his goddam view of the Hudson,
Tiffany chandelier, Big Deal!

And you tell Sonny the satin sheets
he bought me last week at Macy's,
I'm here with my digital camera on,
loving my finger where it ain't Sonny
for all the Corteses in Brooklyn!
 
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12 - The Poets Place

Empty bottles, long ago enjoyed,
stand on every surface, on top of
stacked papers, one holding a yellow rose
picked that day. And books, books everywhere,
pile upon pile, higgledy-piggledy on the floor,
on sturdy shelves bowed with weight and age.

On his disorderly desk, under ashtrays
drowning in hours of thought are
papers layered like last year’s leaves.

Here is the birthing place of poems,
some stillborn, abandoned under angry shrouds
of ink. Some merely zygotes, a twinkle
in the poet’s eye, an uncertain future
in a perpetual past.
 
12

cherry blossom ready
....to open—

...............where is the sun?
 
try try again

42 degrees. Soon comes rain.

The little woman holds an umbrella,
the man in black is shadowed,
standing within the cottage door.

Fingers ache sure as her painted face
is chipped, braids faded, dusty old
tchotchke planted on the sill. Outside

a mountain is revealed: naked trees
jumble through hollows the roads
twist the bumpy night undulates

blinks yellow then red. Stubborn
the moon and I stand back, a woman
shadowed in her kitchen folding

long bones to knit together church
inside, watching the icon still more
alive beside a globe submerged
in certain winter.
 
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13

Patrick's Doppelgänger

Perhaps I'm just a psychoactive
dream where a nurse put toadstools in
your intravenous stage four drip
after which the clock on the wall
decided to melt at midnight,

a good time to talk of our future
in Meredith, now a nervous wreck,
who after amniocentesis,
says she's really, really a Buddhist
and wishes us all the best,

or you're really drunk as a skunk,
the last of two fingers in your cup,
after Shaunessey smuggled you in
a fifth of Clontarf Single Malt
you thought might numb your esophagus

or perhaps I Am That I Am
you swore was a bad dream of Moses,
drinks before dinner five p.m.,
ten years ago September 4th,
willy-nilly is here again.
 
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13

The House We Lived In

settled like our marriage—
the corners all looked square and true
but if you dropped a coin on edge
in the center of the floor
it would roll south to slip
under a bookcase or a skirted chair
like a fugitive escaping into Mexico
minutes ahead of FBI pursuit

still, it sheltered us from rain
and while its furnace was never really hot
we didn’t freeze, either

or so we told each other
to justify our investment

we never really got our money back
 
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13 - Need

The taste of her remains
on my lips and tongue
like some exotic spice
burning a memory and madness.
To look up and see her arching neck,
the bridge to her beauty, to feel her
taut thighs tensing under my hands,
the need in me twitches tactlessly.
Her moans and cries wake me
to find an empty bed and
an unmanageable monument.
It is a tangible tenderness,
an actual ache that stays
with me all day, an urgency
only she can salve with her
warm presence beneath me,
her legs wrapping my eagerness
and her gasps of pleasure.
 
14

A Night in the Life of St. Lizzie

Lizzie wakes up when Miami creeps
sunset beneath the Collins Ave causeway.
"For criminy sakes," says Lizzie, "too late
for my syrup at Dade County clinic"
which could have helped her negotiate
the roses she sells to late night men
whose wives pretend husbands don’t lie
whatever they say or smell like in bed.

At midnight she takes a tenth of her profits
to buy a last soda for Harry
who will hitch from Memphis to Chicago
after he gets off the Greyhound,
persona non-grata at the depot
before she bought him a Salvation Army
button down shirt and second hand jeans
she zips up near the graffiti.

After she baby wipes each of his hands
Harry selects Diet Coke over Pepsi
from a machine outside a men's room
of basketball shorts drawn down to the knees
after which Lizzie says bye-bye to Harry
and visits a bistro dumpster to die for
her new tramp who told her last week
he's Vincent Van Gogh with a pocket knife
until Lizzie whispered love in his ear.
 
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14 - Hubris

Man!
He has taken
feathers by the ton
for ladies’ hats and fur-
belows, skins from big cats,
bear and bison for warmth and
honeyed vanity. Sea creatures large
and small, from tiny seahorse to giant shark,
netted for the betterment of man, for medicine,
established and delusional. Ground horns or penises for
perceived potency and ivory for the mantle beside the ormolu.
He'll plunder Earth’s assets until he strides alone across a barren world.​
 
14

Meryl Streep

There’s her cheekbones, of course,
and that remarkable ear—

how she can echo, mockingbird-like,
regional twangs,

and all the wrong word orders
natural to those unblessed with English.

But just look at her eyes:
she has smile lines about her eyes,

and that tells you she’s been happy.
And that even her Sophie was more joy than tears.
 
15

Eliot's Anglo-Catholic Confession

The seed was bad, ergo the blossom
I knew how to say in Lungworm or Latin
as if I were born to the manner.

A pound is a pound, Bloke, the rent was due
I paid with a love song, absent love,
and they named me a gastromancer

but how I wish my stomach had purred
and fur balls had twisted my tongue
insofar frogs live in my throat.

So bless me, Father, before I croak.
Bleistein never had slime in his eye.
I don't really know beginning from end.
April is kind, but something is cruel.
 
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inching along

Never trust a small man
with a big cigar. Nor homilies.
It takes a heap o' heapin
to make a heap a home
Mother often said. Paradox

is peachy except when it is
not. I'm a social hermit but
I don't care to discuss why
I'd rather divide the moon
into metaphors foaming

at the surf, a doll's face,
a banana flung at the sky some
thing about phase or phrasing
and by and by time after
time sometimes side by side
tautologically speaking

the dawning morn pushes that
fading smile off the map and I
flicker in the distance.
 
thanks for the memories

bitch Thatcher died, a bitter woman
so we’re drinking beer for old times sake
reminiscing about spreading jam on bread
then cutting through the woods
past the police cordons and state spooks
who, never having read Karl Marx
were busy seeking him out

the narrative was spreading tendrils
story lines creeping like triffids
a shaggy dog story getting out of hand
the lady named us the enemy within
it was a state gong we accepted with pride
scoured the newspapers for yet more lies
lies we’d collect like collecting cards

our raison d’etre grew each day
the drudge work, like a broken shackle
had become a memory of a tethered past
when we’d tramp across the yard like broken men
our future before us mirrored our past
but for the moment we were free
no serf, no slave, no servant of the rich
 
15 - The first bee of spring

Was she the chosen one
to leave the hive,
test the air,
set the course?

Returning with peculiar maps
of nectar itinerary,
decoded for her sisters
in a spastic shimmy.
The bee-line to blossoms
startled open by reflected heat,
azalea and iris, jonquil and crocus.

Perhaps the sun woke her
from her honeyed slumber?
Brisk and eager
before the summer drowse.

Was her effort worth the early rise
or are the blooms still dreaming,
hoarding pollen for a later date?
 
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3

Trickeration

I'm sick of synchronicity
tired of your name
appearing on some errant
record label an appliance
ad and no longer merrily
rolls the day because now
you're here.

One never knows coincidence
perhaps a message
susurrating by in a song
sneaky but clear enough
to trigger my imagination or
the voices in my head
depending on one's outlook.

Imagination you tricky little devil.

Now that he's here let's figure
out his problems and pronouns
and make him go away.
 
15

wind ripples daffodils—
........they nod, they nod,
....indifferent
 
5 - Fourth Date

As meals went, it seemed
ideal in terms of being just
what he envisioned for the
first time he'd cooked for her,

Italian...spaghetti with meat
sauce and freshly baked bread
with garlic and butter enough
that he could have seasoned

the pasta by wiping the bread
on it, but Murphy came over
for the night and the pasta was
a jumble of non dente that

had a sauce with too much onion
and sausage that was over fenneled,
while the bread had such a crust
to it he'd have sworn he grabbed it

from the day-old baguette rack as
opposed to the fresh, Italian-style
loaves that they baked daily at the
grocery he usually frequented, But

the wine had been a good choice,
and she'd smiled at his dessert,
which had lead to her dessert, and
that was really the whole point.
 
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