Global Climate, Change?

me and asa did a workshop today at the local bookstore, building off Prof. Gillian's 450 model. this is one of two poems that came out of it. I think worked out pretty well, so we might do more in the near future. let me know if you might be interested in joining us next time!


Global Climate, Change?

I am speculating on the power
of technology to save the world,
listening to an article on NPR about
the latest and greatest answer to
global climate change, which consists
of having huge quantities of dust
rocketing straight up into the atmosphere,
and i am thinking about newton, how
he stated with such certainty that gravity
will return to us anything that we send skyward,
and I am thinking about asthma, the coughs
which wracked my chest as a child in
direct proportion to the pollen count
and i am wondering what it would feel like
to choke to death on progress.

I am speculating on the power
of technology to save the world,
while the scientist on the radio is
explaining how his project will
mimic the cooling effects of
a volcano, but on a grand scale.
i am still stuck on the small scale
remembering Mount Vesuvius
hitting Pompeii, the way a city
was mummified for centuries
in a matter of moments, and how
the marketplace must have smelled
of cooked fruit and scorched wood,
picturing the bodies buried beneath
a fine coating of dust, and thinking
that is about as cold as you can get

I am speculating on the power
of technology to save the world,
wondering if the dinosaurs also
did it to themselves, whether
their answer to a scarcity of food
was to call down sections of the sky
to scare it out of hiding. I am thinking
about big change, because i prefer
small change, i feel much more
comfortable with that, because
as i double click the reconnect
button on my computer screen I
cannot help thinking about human error.

so i wonder:
if we could use remote controls to
reconfigure fireflies, turning them
on and off at a whim, and with
a single button push create
geometric shapes out of their
living luminescence, would we
still spend an hour's staring to
admire all the angles?

Outdoor-Living-Room-Day

this is one of those poems when you just say something and it gets stuck in your head until you do something with it. hope you like it!

Outdoor-Living-Room-Day

today is outdoor-living-room-day, and
participation is mandatory, so everybody
grab an armchair or your loveseat
haul it out into the streets, and set it down
on the sidewalk, next to a stranger,
someone who has been your neighbor
for nearly a year, but whom you have never
spoken to, and say hello. it is 90-plus
degrees outside, so the temperature
should melt the ice before you even
have to think about breaking it.
unplug your television set and
bring the kids, let them rediscover
baseball, and kickball, and stickball
and every game that you can
possibly play with items purchased
at the local dollar store,

ladies and gentlemen, it is called
a community, and not from any
affiliation with the soviet government
of the last century. that is so last century,
yet your bunker mentality is still building
barriers instead of bridges, believing
you are only safe inside your house.
you are not safe inside your house!
there are millions of americans with
credit cards and the ability to climb
your fences, lets be realistic for
a second, i personally could purloin
all your possessions in the inside
of an hour, but i have no desire to,
except, maybe out of curiosity,
a desire to know the eyes always
peeking out from behind the blinds,
i would slip into your window like
an archeologist, unraveling the
mystery of what made you so damn
scared in the first place.

so instead, let's have a holiday,
a day of open doors, all of our
bodies and belongings strewn
across the streets, and lets stop
traffic with a celebration of
perfect strangers being perfectly
comfortable with each other.
wouldn't that be weird?
wouldn't that be wonderful?
wouldn't that be just so
easy to accomplish?
ladies and gentlemen, today
is outdoor-living-room-day,
I will see you on the sidewalks.

Children of the Glen

So, I just found out that if you set Facebook to update along with your blog, it mass-posts everything you've ever written on it. Oops. Guess its a good thing that this is still fairly new. Still, in that spirit of deluging my friend's news feeds, here's one more poem I wrote this afternoon. Its fairly self-explanatory. As always, feedback appreciated =D


Children of The Glen

i am spending my summer teaching children
to make change, in loco parentis, in place of
their parents, who wouldn't be their parents,
couldn't deal with their disabilities, so
they shuffled off their sons and their daughters,
granddaughters and grandsons, to a center
that claimed it could care for them unconditionally.
I've been working there for three weeks now, and
so far on the staff, there is only one woman and one man
who look at faces more than afflictions, and they are no
longer clinicians, but they still speak to the children directly,
in dialogue, not diagnoses, not the ABCs of Psychiatry,
that ugly alphabet of acronyms where
A is for Autism, and
B is for Bipolar,
C is for Conduct Disorder
D is for Dandy-Walker
E is for Echolalia and
F is for Fucked: Fucked if I know, Fucked if I care,
Not Otherwise Specified, See you next week.
These scribbled sheets of IEPs before me are
the decisions of doctors whose paychecks
depend on their ability to find answers that
fit neatly between the 4 axes of impairment.

i am spending my summer teaching children
who are not children, who will never have
been children. many are my age, but they
have been bounced between group home
and foster home, to the jailhouse and back again,
filling files and folders with their paper trail personalities.
I open them carefully, only to find that Philip's
last 7 years have been lost, and no one questions this.
Eric's engineer father underestimates his intelligence
by four grade levels: he doesn't belong here, but
he is polite to me, he counts himself lucky for
getting to go home on the weekends. And he is,
if only in comparison to Constance,
her grandmother is glad that she's gone, her
social worker says there will be no further contact.
A is for Abandoned and
B is for Betrayed
C is for Criminalized
D is for Drugged
E is for Emptied and
F is for the failing of the system, whose
death i document in this litany of indecencies
that I am keeping behind closed doors, because my closed fists
can do no damage to a doctor's orders.
i cannot save their souls from the pharmacies or
the licensed care specialists who couldn't care less.
I can only listen, when no one else does
I can only speak, where no one else will
i can only spend my summer teaching children
to make change.

Yankee Pride

spending my third night sleepless in the south. i need to be up in a couple hours for work, if you can believe it, but it seems i'd rather write instead of resting. go figure.

Yankee Pride

the log cabin behind me lies in the contagious quiet
that apparently all of carolina catches in the hour
and a half before midnight on a thursday, while i sit
smoking cigarettes beneath the star-streaked southern sky,
counting the constellations the north-east keeps suppressed
with layer upon layer of cloud cover and smog. years of city life
acts like a vaccine against such sleepiness. i plan
to catch up on my unconsciousness in the car.
this morning we made a wrong turn on the way
to work, because i was tired, so we wound up
driving down the dirt roads of your past.
i think that Puddin' Swamp is an absurd name for
a place to call your home, but you reminisce fondly
about bridge-fishing, the good eating that lurks
unsuspected beneath the highway. i doubt that
i could dwell in peace for long among the chickens
and the corn. your mother makes us sleep in separate
rooms when we visit her, so you shout your affection
across the hallway, but the bed i am assigned to still reeks
strongly of your absence. i fantasize idly about holding
the 80 dollar pillow beneath the bathroom sink in mimicry
of your shower-soaked hair, though i am at a loss for how
to recreate the smell of your shampoo. the moths dance
crackling across the light fixture, daddy longlegs creep
ominously about the wooden floor; i miss brooklyn,
and burgers, and condiments i can vaguely identify,
(i am so sick of chicken sandwiches and the special sauce)
but most of all i miss the way my mattress creaks contented
and sags beneath its familiar double burden.

seasonal

this sounded great at the time and i'm gonna leave it at that =D



there is a season for everything,
specific like clementines in spring,
and oranges grow all year round, but
they aren't half as sweet, you don't
have to wait for them, spring
is the season of lovers, popping out
of the wet ground like mushrooms,
for this reason, odd numbered clusters
of fungi always make me sad, make me think
about traveling, plane tickets and bus fares, i
want to be somewhere before i figure out
how to find it, my roots were made for moving,
they wear size 11 shoes though they don't
make dress clothes that fit me,
yet

Scrambled Eggs

This piece is much less slam-esque than what I've been writing recently, possibly because I wrote it around 4 am. I didn't realize how much I missed early morning poetry. Let me know what you think.


Scrambled Eggs

i keep a bottle of st brendan's next to the bed
and take a sip before i go to sleep
crawling beneath the comforter into
the space your body has warmed for me
your skin mixes against mine until
even our toes are tangled
i am glad that i didn't get out of the car
that i ground frustration beneath my feet
rather than letting it build in my belly

you are well equipped with what
we call a woman's weapons:
tears and a tapering waistline
over soft hips and a razor wit
sharpened on sarcasm
and the saddest smile
i loathe your arsenal; i love it
laugh as you cross your swords
beneath my chin, i grin at the thought
that you would cut me, my candle
built of hot wax and a spitfire wick
you push back the night with
the dances of your tongue.

in the morning, you make scrambled
eggs, the way i taught you to
salt and pepper, onion and ham
you do not burn the bottoms,
place it on a white plate without
a garnish; it isn't necessary
i tell you, time and again-
you never listen, you are
so stubborn that my stomach
rumbles at the thought.
i do not think i could've slept
if i hadn't seen you safely home.

she wears scarves

alright, so i kinda failed at the poem a day thing. it was a little overambitious for someone who had never had a regular blog before, but i thought it might be cool. once i've got a little more experience i'd like to try it again. maybe over the summer, i'll have tons of time in south carolina. anyway, i'm still going to update semi-regularly. keep the comments coming? they help in ridiculous amounts.

I wrote this last night at the Where There's Smoke There's Fire show, which was awesome incidentally. Hope you like it.

She Wears Scarves

we are never home
because home is where you hang your hat
and you don't wear hats so much
you wear scarves, which we
wrap around your head like shawls
playing at disguises and
super-fly super-spy fantasies
you wear scarves
because i don't like jewelry
because silver and gold look
gaudy against your neck,
i prefer it naked
a stretch of almondine desert
extending, when you tilt your head
i kiss your collarbones like correspondence
there is a message i want to send you
but what i can't seem to do is fit
the address of your affections
on the front of a white envelope
the postal service has somehow failed me.

but you are never home anyway, though
sometimes you stay at my apartment
in brooklyn, pull back the blinds
to let the light in, you tell me
that you feel safe there
that i contain a temple in
the curve of my spine so you
crawl inside when you need to hide
and shout for sanctuary
but you've never bled for brooklyn
no D-train dreaming, when you
wake your eyes unfold like the roses
that refuse to bloom easily in new england
needing south carolina sunshine. you
are a grapevine in a tapestry of temperance
and you are ripe to be picked
i want to feel the juices drip down
my fingertips when i squeeze you
build us barrels out of old oak so
we can age together

you are never home because
physical distance divides us, so
you criss-cross county lines
constantly in your car, though
i think that we have come too far
to find out that are hearts
are not elastic enough, that
they cannot stretch over any
homemade mess, surround it
and get over it

you rotate slowly in your sleep
as if the world revolves around you
and maybe it does, I have felt
the pull of your gravity sufficient
to believe you are the axis of everything
and i orbit in your arms, so
in such a central location
it is beyond protestation that we
are always at home.