What Love Means

oh man, i need to stop posting these poems post-midnight. there's just so much work to catch up on >_<

What love means

sometimes i find that i forget
what love means and, regardless
of what the linguists would have you believe,
Miriam-Webster is not the last word on everything.
I want to find the etymology of skipped
heartbeats, to lead archaeology teams as they
excavate the chasms of my chest, dissect
the surge-electric sent by stolen kisses.
I want to take the metric measure of
the musculature surrounding sorrow,
to know why it is easier to smile
than to cry.
I have been born a poem, whose
lines are inscribed in a language
I never learned, where time is
translated roughly into sandpaper skin.
I need a candid cartographer to
map me the message articulated
in my arteries.

sometimes, i forget what love means,
though there are songs that remind me,
and they are golden oldies, reminiscent
of the '60s, but by the time that I was 16
I had already lost my virginity to a
facsimile of affection;
forty years too late to love properly,
and not awkwardly,
to not be property.
I need a guidebook for generosity,
an outline of the boundary between
giving blindly, and being taken for a fool.
there is no scholarship or special school
to study my senses in how to turn
past tenses into life lessons.

sometimes, I forget what love means,
but I remember its smells and sounds,
tracks trembling under train cars and
the fragrance of a fresh-cut frisbee field.
you won't find feelings like these
in the dictionary, so I dig them up
from the cemetery, at midnight,
under the moon.
with dirt under my nails, I redefine them,
and the resurrection reminds me
what love means.

Run

ok, almost failed my goal at day 4, but this poem is only late because I was out in Norwich slamming with SUNY Oneonta and peeps. 4th place, hell yeah! I read this piece in our feature spot, kinda wish it had been scored, but one of the judges (Scott) thought it was a little too violent. Really, though, its about the opposite. Here it is:

Run

punch the class president when he
jumps on your back from behind, slam
his face against a steel fence, walk away
feeling nothing, don't look back.
you are too small to take their shit, so
accentuate your inches by raising your fists-
when they call you a midget make them pay.
make them run.

chase colin through the trees even if
it means getting kicked out of summer camp,
make your classmates restrain you
when robert has had enough.
leave your fingerprints on stanley's neck
so he takes notice, learns to use knives,
years later he will apologize anyway.
when asked for your wallet, give them hell,
hurl them through the doors the bus driver
has opened for you. when their friends find you,
run.

they will tell stories about you later,
lie to their friends, tell them you threw
a sandwich at the dean when he was being
disrespectful, say you were an arsonist, set fire
to a desk and threatened to blow up the building.
this is to be expected,
because you are building a legend
from the bodies of bullies and street punks,
hoping they will learn not to fuck with you.
hoping they will learn to run.

you want to pretend you are a pacifist,
refuse to make a list of your grievances
to anyone but god, because he is
probably not listening. black eyes and
broken glasses are not badges of pride,
you only did what you had to to survive,
to be taken seriously, to not
have to fight anymore. because
something inside you is never at rest
it is a dog at your heels and
a wolf in your chest and
he is howling
and you can't trust him

years later, you will be able to admit
to having anger issues. you will feel
small instead of strong, knowing
the perfect placement of a palm
that can shatter eye sockets.
you will feel sorry, wishing
for them to call you midget
rather than madman.
but you did what you had to
you finished the fight, and now
you are going to run like hell.

Two Hand Touch

This piece is from the 450 workshop I mentioned yesterday, because all the slam stuff has left me horribly behind on work in almost all of my classes. I'm spending the rest of the afternoon hard at work, writing a paper between reading 2 novels and 2 plays. Still, I edited this earlier out of a freewrite on the prompt "someone that sat with you in class". It's not quite the same as what I've been writing recently, but I kinda like it, so here goes:

Two Hand Touch

It was the second half of the eighth grade,
it was Field Day, and the graduating class
of Cavallaro Junior High was pretending
to know how to play football;
two hand touch.
We all wore light white shirts
and heavy black pants, so
your forearms were freezing, while
sweat pooled around your ankles.
We were celebrating spring, and
when I took a seat in the stands, she
surprised me with a sentence,
puzzled me with a proposition:
"Will you go to prom with me?"

Dorene had spent the better part of
six months of Spanish class forming
an intimate acquaintance with the
back of my neck, listening to
Sra. Torres's endless lectures of
"Stop reading in class, Brendan"
"Stop eating in class, Brendan"
"Pay attention, please, Brendan"
I was overweight, with square glasses
and a mushroom cut (visited on me by
some malicious barber). Back then,
I didn't know the term puppy love, but
I heard the barking in my ears over
an orchestra of astonishment. When I
managed to speak, all i could say was:
"Are you sure?"

I didn't dance with anyone else that June
(if you can call it dancing).
I brought her a corsage, and she
wasn't too embarrassed to hold my hand.
We went for walks along the Atlantic, and
I whispered every romantic phrase from
every movie in the last two decades.
It lasted two months,
but I thought it was a miracle,
the first slice of chocolate cake
fresh from the oven.

My Father Has a Golden Voice

alright, 1 poem post per day, day 2. I'm exhausted from Maria's 450 workshop, so I'm just going to post the piece I performed at CUPSI 2009 (thank god for fifth wheel slams xD) More newer stuff to come. Enjoy!

My Father Has a Golden Voice


my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so,
down at his favorite bars,
relics of the recent past where
being in the mafia mattered.
the bartenders are boyhood friends, they
met joey ramone together, they
dropped acid and mesc. together,
they lifted weights together.
they were there before the weights
made my father stopped growing,
before he grew the mustache that
makes him look like a walrus,
when the electrocution scar stood
bare to the world, above the
pit-bull bites, and crooked
to the left of his nose.
that scar is a relic of infancy, of
curiousity turned into tenacity.
you see,
there are 120 volts in
your standard household socket
and it took all of them to seal
his lips even temporarily

my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so. they
scream for him to take the stage, to
mount the kareoke mike, to
belt out his best rendition of james blunt's
"You're beautiful.."
my father is proud of his range.
he started off with sergeant pepper's and
strawberry fields, but he has since expanded
swiftly, into the realms of ringtone rap and R&B.
though i cannot imagine this middle aged, mostly-racist
spitting the lyrics to "Informer" by Snow, or "Get Low",
shouting "till y'all skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet"
but he does this nightly
and they love it
and this is what he tells me
when he comes home drunk
at three in the morning

my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so
though I have never heard him sing
i barely even hear him speak
he's too busy
between two full time jobs and the bars.
I find that I can't blame the man,
who wakes up at 5 AM to haul garbage
to pay for my college education,
for anything-
though sometimes i can't help wishing
we were a family more visibly,
that we sat down to dinner occasionally,
and maybe didn't battle over bragging rights.

my father has a golden voice, and
and all his favorite women tell him so,
and here, we are using a loose definition
of woman, the same way we are using
a loose definition of father.
more of a roommate, really,
and my roommate brings home brainless blondes
with too much make-up, all fumbling
to take up the role of my mother; i wonder,
which of them will be here when he dies
i think about his dying often: the when, the why
the way the skin on his arms is infected, red
the way the blotches blossom below his knees
the way that stomach ulcers spring up after stress
like poppy plants
and that soil does not sing
it won't be forever.
he won't live forever,
not like this, there is a limit
to everything, to everyone,
even to my father.
I try to tell him this, but he never listens.

my father has a golden voice, and
all his favorite women tell him so
and you know what? I'm glad
everyone should have something
worth dying for

Why We Go Alone

So, this is my brand-spanking new blog. The goal right now is to post a poem per day for as long as possible, and hopefully to get some feedback from anyone with spare time. Today is going to be a cop-out of sorts, since I just posted this poem on Facebook, not thinking I would have the time to set this up. Here goes:


Why We Go Alone

The boys bathrooms are monuments to frustration,
built on a foundation of faded floors,
scuffed tile, and trash cans dented from kicks.
There are never any couches; just
a legacy in dirty linoleum, a testament
to the type of mess that you can
never learn to leave behind.

The words scratched on the wall
on the other side of stall spell out
a highly abridged history of humanity:
"why can't we.."
"why wont you.."
"why don't I.."
"..Fuck"

Soap dispensers are empty, because sometimes
we can't seem to get our hands clean.
Paper towels are rough to make us rougher.
Every intentionally flood urinal was a metaphor
for something, and every broken mirror is a blow
to a face we've wanted to punch, at least once.

Sometimes a restroom is a refuge, a place
to smoke a cigarette without stepping
into the cold. The scriptures of that sanctuary
say "call gina for a good time", but this is only
because misery loves company. Nothing
spreads distress better than expecting
simplicity and being disappointed.

On our worst nights, we go
out to the bars, or bring a bottle
back to bed with us, but afterwards
will always hold the possibility of
porcelain prayer purging, a confession
in the confines of the one room where
no one is allowed to talk to us; where
established etiquette dictates distance,
degrees of separation to discourage snooping.

We stand 1-3-5 in acknowledgement of
lines that should never be crossed. We
make our signature scratches because
sometimes they are. An open window often
isn't enough to exorcise the stink.

Every day, across America,
a high school is evacuated for
fires in the toilet or
nearby trash cans.
In all honesty, I can understand
the why.