This . . . is How to Read . . . a Pöem

Young male reading aloud from book at the beach
This is how . . . to read a pöem
with plenty of pregnant . . . pauses about to break . . .
water. Make them feel . . . your labor pains.
Let them know you suffer . . . to give birth . . .
to art . . . fart . . . Blow the world apart!

Continue reading “This . . . is How to Read . . . a Pöem”

Babble Bauble

Rejoice! The babblewalky is talking
again and flapping its finns again,
and whiffling along the Livy again,
flocking and cocking and stalking
again, snorkling verse and nursing the worst,
a perverse tongue, many tongues per verse,

a treacle, an icicle, an oracle, a tricycle,
a debacle, a miracle, you allegorical,
rhetorical, clerical ventricle, contracting,
expanding, snorkling blood into the brain,
talky walky, burbled you–it’s true!–but revel
elation nevertheless, shocking and mocking
the living bread of our lard and slather, for
nication of the nation, shout, whore Susanna evermore!

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Anything Goes, Everything Goes

anything anything anything
anything I want to want to want to
spill, spurt, spit, flirt, flash, fawn or fall upon

Gravity, that old drag, is pulling me down
down to my bed and its little deaths
down through the floor to the big sleep,
so I’ll prance about while I can,
jump, sing, fart, and fornicate.

But don’t remember to forget,
let the golden moments slide
and evaporate into memory
then decay with your brain,
until nothing remains, not even a tittle.
If every bird song were remembered,
there’d be no room for new song.
Forget and forgive the darkness;
it is as greedy as the light.

Once more away! The race is on,
so stop running. Tarry, if you will,
but do it quickly. Time’s wingèd chariot
fast approaches to carry you

into another day.

The Day of Life

For Rebecca Moorman

Bruised by too much purple
sunshine and the high coastal wind,
my forehead blunt as a thumb,
I fall asleep on ribbed sand,
salt-whitened pines crouched above me.

Didn’t want to swim at first too cold,
friends pulled me sputtering under waves.
When I resurfaced I could not stop blinking,
the sun in my eye like a silver nail.

Hours we splashed away, kicking fans of water
in the face of the moon, touching starfish,
letting sea anemones close around our fingers.

Rebecca, round as a stone and just as rough,
floated naked in a pool, heavy breasts swaying,
a translucent crab leg washing up against her back,
“Life may have begun in tidal pools like these,” she says.
“Life ends here too. Listen to the rush of the ocean
pulling the world back into herself one grain at a time.”

Soothed by the hush of waves,
senseless as sand, matter only,
I sleep like driftwood. How peaceful
to come apart with bits of crab and shell.