007 Challenge

[AmericanTrash]

005

My dirty little secret is that I love
hating John Voigt in all the roles he had past 40.
I cheer aloud to the crowd of one cat when Danny
fucking DiVito kicks him in the balls.
What the fuck? It's just fiction, right?

 

[AmericanTrash]

006

Andrea dreamed of returning home but her employer, an uncle, slept downstairs and kept the front door locked. "I was told if I tried to escape, the police would put me in jail. I believed it. I was very innocent -- I grew up without TV and had never left my village before," she explained.
Convinced that earning enough money to finish her education was the only way to help her family out of poverty, Andrea forced herself to work. But "doing whatever the customer asked" eventually took its toll. "I wanted to cry but I could not. I wanted to cover myself with a blanket. I had goose bumps because of the shame. I would feel like I was floating," she recalled. -- Source: CNN on Cybersex trafficking via webcam.

My Dirty Little Secret

Slut I said as if it shamed the said-of more than the sayer and even then
it didn't. No woman in a world in which men get at minimum 25% more money
and do only 15 to 25% of the unpaid work upon which ALL economies rest
which is to say no woman
No woman is a slut. But All pimps are vile.

 

[OpenField]

1: Rock Photographer

I watched you dance
near the stage. You took your shirt off
and threw it away like a flower
or a newspaper,

discarded anyway to let you be free
to surf the acoustic wave
the band beat out, beat out.
I wanted to keep notes about
what you were wearing, how your haircut looked,
how deliciously slim your hips fit
into your low-cut jeans.

But I was on assignment,
so only half the shots
were of your gyrating, perfect body.

In my favorite, Tyler tilts
his mic stand toward you as if to anoint you with oil.
But that is probably just me thinking

of how I would love to greet you in my bed.

 

[AmericanTrash]

007

The right size to hold a switch flap fan
on my lap you said purse? Oh.
That wasn't you but my
thigh tight against leather
just to keep it centered.

Where were we? Wasn't it
pimps where we left off?

Eyelashes butterfly under
purple shadow.

 

[OpenField]

2: Dualism

Your charm, your intelligence,
folds my emotions
like an origami crane,

fragile, yet sharp enough
to draw blood from a finger
or some other appendage, if
I attempted to clasp you to me
with too much force.

And that is just your mind. Your body?

Your body knows how to work
the machine of my body
gentle touch by gentle touch.

As Descartes might have said
had he believed in the flesh: Ego sentio ergo sum.

 

[OpenField]

3: Old Flames

When they left, or I did,
my mind fixed them as engrams,
a kind of photograph
that captured face, figure,
the lilt of their voice, the brush
of their lips on my shoulder,
that of my lips on warm skin.
They are always nineteen
or forty-three or somewhere
past fifty, and though I age,
they stay paired with the me
who was twenty or thirty-seven
or simply somewhere past.
Our love still exists, even
if encapsulated like an exhibit
in a natural history museum;
on lonely evenings I can stroll by the case
each inhabits in my memories,
read the curator's explanatory card
and marvel at the lost beauty
that they built in my history,
something amazing like Persepolis
or Thebes, but long deceased.
Old flames—the fire of our love
now mere ash, which I occasionally sift
for the odd artifact (an arrowhead,
a pottery shard) that hasn't completely
been ground to dust in my memories.

 

[OpenField]

4: Maturity

That we no longer live
to tear each other's clothes
off our mutually desperate bodies
means only we have calmed
the frantic desires of youth.

Or, more plainly, that we have aged.

So we are older. I still love your curl
into my shoulder, the twine
of your legs about mine.

That that sifts me more to sleep than sex
speaks more to contentment than desire,
which I luxuriate in,

locked in your arms.

 

[AmericanTrash]

Beautiful Poems. Thank you.

 

[OpenField]

5: Antinomy

Poetry,

instantiated as a clutch of flowers
spread over the grave
of my lifeless words.

And even though these flowers rot in time,
that you yet desire to read them
invigorates me.

 

[AmericanTrash]

001

Long time is the stride
barely talked stretched walked
arched feet reaching

That time televised
slime bucketed onto
Alanis Morrisette

One time I laughed damage
hands weren't quick enough

Sometimes she kisses me
first but not every time

 

[AmericanTrash]

Dream of

Dream of unmowed grass
crap. Stressing her out
already.

Dream of a tree so green
it purples at edges and right
there on the lowest strong
branch, I'm waiting

moon faced, constant
of expression -- cheerful
despite the rough ink and
old man's hand who drew

me, the tree, you, all
lines of demarcation. Now
it's dark enough for sky
to eat all the lines

cut all strings. I wouldn't
blame you for wanting
softer things. Bark
leaves its scabs on those

who climb. That's why I
picked the low branch.
packed a bandaid specially
made for shins.

Close your eyes. Let
red die then reincarnate
green. Dream, love

Dream I've climbed you
as if you're a tree.
Or you climb me,
either way

we're going to fall.

 

[AmericanTrash]

003

past this unguarded rope
well there should be a sign
obviously but budget cuts

past this plastic rope
cauliflower cities of
skeletal coral pale as bones
occupied by spike steel
urchins and accidental eels

past the rope squint
hard pinch tight
teeth on grief vast as
all the oceans
within us and without

 

[OpenField]

6: Cigarettes

After our divorce, I didn't know
what to do with my hands. I would hold
pens or highlighters
between my fingers the way
Bogart held his unfiltereds.
Sometimes, I'd even suck on the ends.

Then there were those nagging thoughts—
You two should get back together.
You made such a great couple.
Everyone agrees you were perfect for each other.

But I guess I knew she was never good for me;
the hanging out in seedy bars
by the vending machines,

the way she made eyes at any guy
headed back to the can.
I knew she was loose, but she wanted any man
in the joint, at any time. I finally felt
our relationship just wasn't working for me.

She was a bitch to get away from, though.
always in my face, making my nerves jump,
you'd think she had no one else to sleep with.
You'd think I had no one else to sleep with,
but that was true. So I had to ghost her.

Ignore her calls, her pleas, her scent
in every stadium I've ever been to. And even now
I have to plug my ears against her siren call,

because she is absolutely sex. And sex can kill.

 

[OpenField]

7: Functioning Alcoholic

The trick is to take it to the edge
and not black out. To remember
in the morning at least
whom you had dinner with
and what game you talked about
even if Desmond's sly asides
about the waitress's legs are lost
in your alcoholic fog. No one
wants to remember the things
you can't remember, anyway.

When it's the next morning,
you wake to a completely new world.
Very new. Very clean.
It's like you have never lived here,
which you haven't, forgetting
where you were last night, whom
you might have slept with, who
took pictures of you snorting coke.
But now it's morning, and you're good
to deal with customers and threats

and the garbage of ordinary life.
And if you're tense about how long
you'll have to wait for your first drink.
Calm yourself. Your friend Ned
can always give you a snort or a sniff
or some kind of kick that will set
you back on course to midday at least.

Here let me pray to the God of Intoxication,
about how I so want to be free of your lure.
But only after this one last drink.

 

[AmericanTrash]

One of Us

Fishbowls are never peaceful.
Pieces of fin go missing. One
fish may release all its biological
weapons as others nibble to death
the newest prisoner, but so
so quietly that any one passing
would not even recognize the violent
gang assault

Sharks offer business cards to all
but other sharks.

 

[AmericanTrash]

Two Star State

Texas is hell enough. I would not wish that
on anyone so when she laughs at people with
dwarfism I mildly remind.

Then she starts in on the 400-pound ladies,
the ugly poor, the drunks.

Lyle, grandpa Lyle, was an alcoholic. My mom
hunted through his kitchen cabinets
routinely, yet even when she found
what she wasn't looking for, she whispered to me
"It's a disease."

I do not tell this whole sad tale to Mrs. Texas because
living there as she does is surely
sad enough.

 

[AmericanTrash]

Three is a Magic Number

Tent headquarters flaps
the ad that it stands. Barely
it stands in the very same
sand. Desert's only gift
spills dry jaw drool only
prized by the water deprived.

Still I cannot say it. I bite
lip from spilling you were
no more loved than this day's
kind street sweeper. You were
loved. Intensely. In that hour.
Can't that be close enough to love?
Humane is more than
enough most days. Nothing
lasts forever but if you were my
sister I'd damn well try.

 

[todski28]

Fishbowls are never peaceful.
Pieces of fin go missing. One
fish may release all its biological
weapons as others nibble to death
the newest prisoner, but so
so quietly that any one passing
would not even recognize the violent
gang assault

Sharks offer business cards to all
but other sharks.

This is brilliance

 

[AmericanTrash]

Thanks

Thanks Todski

 

[AmericanTrash]

Curbs

right and left all along the way--
incentives and disincentives

here the greenlight speedsmooth
highway with all the turnoffs for
pancakes or western style boots
incentives

there the grooveedge warning
growling wake up! get in your lane!

here the tollfreee overpass

there the gridlock song of angry geese

last night I jumped clean up
free gliding sci fi dream
navigating the grid of some strange
Virginia town I've never driven

navigating from the IGA parking lot
to the church with jazzband afternoons

floating down slowly into 5am
waking before the alarm so it wasn't
the boss of me after all

 

[AmericanTrash]

molted

crow is antonymous to poet
because caws are laugh empty

crow is antonymous to poet
because wings and wings and wings

cradle all they prize
in the detritus of poets, words long

shed and forgotten. Crow
is antonymous to poet as murder

to love. Sure sign it was never
love is murder.

 

[AmericanTrash]

spit second

Spit man is back today
with the same green shirt
the same garbage bag on his head
the same tall tall body and constantly
calculating eyes

calculating all the numbers in the air
we don't see but he can with
his particular sanity

usually he spits in his hand and touches every
pole on the train car passing through
twice, pausing at each end to listen

calculate perhaps the number of fingers
or quantity of spit or
paces it will take to keep him
safe from us or perhaps
all of us safe.

Today the train was late and crowded
so he paced and looked and calculated
end to end without spitting
then moved to the next car riding a full
ten blocks between cars where suicides
contemplate leaping.

 

[AmericanTrash]

Credit

Just bad enough credit to get
catalogues assuring no money down
easy payments
sure

shiny things can be yours!

Just good enough credit for a taxi
home after folding my hand.

 

[AmericanTrash]

longing throat

the little mermaid after
bargaining away her voice
walks better now

knives worn down to forks
for feet on my ground

the way women walk
paint eat talk cook

actually she always cooked
always ate always painted
always talked like a woman

some day soon she'll walk
those long legs those
smooth long legs
back to the cushion
at my feet where all the pain

can be agreeably
repurposed

 

[OpenField]

1

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