Twenty-Sixth Entry

Well, it seems as if I MIGHT have found a place to stay but it's not set in stone.

After bringing in two of my best recent poems to class and not having them discussed, I'm now sure to be up for discussion this week, with a poem I hate.

Saw this first line in a collection I bought at the strand and I just had to try and write something of my own around it. Sorry if it offends any fans of the original author (not because of its daring, but because of its badness).

Here's my poem:

POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE FROM MAYAKOVSKY

I like to watch the little children die.
Like so many snowflakes dropping from the shaken branch.
You kick the trunk, angry with the stasis of snow.
Glistening children’s bodies, each unique in death
lay quiet on the yard, as if making snow angels.
Angels lay silent among the frost-capped shrubs,
patient sharpshooters sent by the one you love.
Inside, I sit by the fire, writing a letter to each parent,
but the storm has obscured the letterbox
and I throw them into the air and shoot at them with a shotgun.
The wind keeps each black ink word aloft,
an unseen parachute allowing me
to grab you and dance a rough polka
in the powder-burned confetti.
And our reddened cheeks rub maliciously together
as if we were trying to start a fire.

Twenty-Fifth Entry

I am still very homeless and very worried and am now accepting donations.

Here's my poem:

I HAVE YOUR SON: A "REAL" RANSOM NOTE

I delivered the letter on a sharp October night. 7:24pm, August 9th, 1976. The paper was typewriter-fresh, the ink felt to my parents’ fingers as if it had just dried. Inside, my mother continued to murmur, as if her voice was wrapped in flannel. My father, upon reading the letter, furiously began sitting on the stoop in his undershirt and black socks. And gray slacks. And he kept that up for several months, a nightly vigil. I had recently made a werewolf mask for Halloween. With paper. And several brown lengths of yarn dangling from the facade. I sat in the uppermost branches of our family oak, glad for the shivering sensation. Watching my father as he looked down our walkway to our street. In the suburbs each car that speeds by is rare enough that it commands suspicion. My father imagined each one of these unobtrusive sedans slowing to push my brother out to roll towards our doorstep. My father would sigh in between cigarettes and wring his Boris Karloff hands. It felt like a classic tragedy, and although I knew plenty about tragedy from nights spent comatose in front of the television, I felt I had nothing to say to my numbly resigned family, and I took a bus to the coast and I wandered around. Everyone’s face on the chilly boardwalk looked totem-like and, only being 17, I soon found myself in the custody of the police. In the drab cell I began writing a second note to my family explaining my sister’s kidnapping. I would disclose no terms. I would ask for no ransom. I composed the note in my head with the intention of typing it later.

Twenty-Fourth Entry

Hay problemas!

Anybody got a room for rent in Carroll Gardens/Park Slope? I'm not picky at this point. I'd take axe murderers.

In honor of a poet I like and admire (Steve Caratzas) and his poetic brevity, here's a short poem.

Or rather a normal poem with short lines.

Here's my poem:

UNDER VARIOUS HOLLOW LAMPS
I stutter
spineless
non-quixotic
weariness
furrowed
squinting
peeled
eyes
filterless
lucky
dangling
opposed
to timidity
paranoidedly
glancing
pel-mel
distantly
morbid
at
backlit
venetians
contrasting
flailing
silhouetted
torsos.
I blink my response and crawl up the stairs to you.

Twenty-Third Entry

I have no idea.

Here's my poem:

WHAT THE COWBOY MEANS TO ME

The spacesuit draped with sweat
appeared last night like the past whipping me in the lips.

I smelt the cigar smoke, felt
the shoulder cramp of huddling inside the heavy.

Did you hear the gunshot,
fading yellow across the street like John Wayne with Dutch Elm’s?

I donned my Stetson
and leapt from the roof into the arms of whispering stuntwomen.

When my skin was taken from me,
the desert felt of card game tables became my tuxedo.

My motorcycle twitches
with the Seminole fear I emailed you about.

Twenty-second Entry

I was just in an online magazine called Big Tex[t]. check it out here:http://www2-english.tamu.edu/pubs/bigtext/main.php

and as long as i'm at it, check out my poem in an old issue of Stirring magazine: http://www.sundress.net/stirring/archives/v7/e5/index.html i'm supposed to have something else coming out in there new issue. i think.

here's my poem:

NEW MEXICO AT NIGHT

Who mines the gold that paves the roads in heaven?
This miraculous highway with high billboards proclaiming ‘bend and toil.’
I stood quiet. I made precious love.
It was like crawling my body across a copy machine.
Each of these letters contains one of the results of that trial.
In a moment, a commercial will offer you majestic light.
But first the saint swings into your mouth with his sterling nine-iron.
This guitar is the guitar that coaxes open angel shells.
The person I’m describing laughs with a mirror-plate mustache attached with glue.
Like being high, I saw clouds and thought “don’t think about clouds.”
In the mine, blood leaks off faces and sinks into the intricate natural hollows.
Your dream where your fruit-like feet step across dainty wonders of your own creation.
That book about men.

Smoke exits the body and travels an unknown path.
The story begins with a character shaking his cape awake down the stairs.
IMPORTANT: due to the graphic nature of this program children are already traumatized.
You write your eternal nature on feathers and skin with an altogether original script.
When I began living in California the paint on the churches was faded piano blue.
This is the guitar we use to calculate light speed in our basement.
My brother Terry in the passenger seat, immobile, in agony, about to awake.
A vampire hawk swoops away when we had just finished rigging our net.
Each of these letters contains individual flecks of your body.
The castle of plastic that melts under the heat of an important supernova.
The unholy miasma cut down into the child’s crayon shape.
My body shrouded by the grim patagia of the barbershop awning.
But first this message.

From where does the cosmonaut pull the notes of his song?
Where is the hope of my wicked, fun-loving girl?
Who are you to explain the aura of my own sadnesses to me?
Did you hear the distant typewriter clack and ping?
How can I prevent the stranger from being the thief?
Where is your frightened calendar planning to go?
Who is the expose scumraker among my great-grandchildren?
Am I meant to let water slip from my palms to flatten on my feet?