a.k.a. Ronosaurus Rex
Oh why? Oh, where? Alackaday!
You cry, you wail, you sigh, you pray.
Oh, eat the shitty hay and neigh
no more, no, no more nay. Say hey, okay!
Hip, hip hooray! Up, up, away!
We’re on our way; the way is play;
the day is gray, but we are fey.
Snickerdoodle dandy day!
Check out my poem “Last Supper in an Airport” (it’s a short carpe diem poem), which was published in Sensitive Skin Magazine, post-beat, pre-apocalyptic art. Photo by Ted Barron!
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!
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!
I eat paper like popcorn
page after crumbled page
looking for that tasty kernel
a little burnt with extra butter
but my fingers are greasy
and the idea slips from me.
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 fur that styles itself a cat
with the wet surprise of a nose
against her Picasso ear, clung
roundly, making her skull
as comfortable and tangled thick,
paws soft against her narrow lids,
and the inevitable tail caught
deep and dry in her gray throat.
Hills vague, rain
scatters like pins.
Crow hops an empty lot,
gum like ancient pottery.
Hard bud taps glass, beads
of water strung like teeth.
Rainbows melt on oily asphalt,
gutters down the grill.
Flying over the Rockies in a pressurized cabin
most passengers don’t even look, some
pull the shade to block the sun.
All of them dreamed of flying when they were young
and flew. Now that they actually fly,
they stay upon the ground.
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.
