Pocket Full of Fireflies

Global Climate, Change?

2009-07-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T15:06:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

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.

What Love Means

2009-03-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-24T21:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

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.