POEMS LIKE ME

I’m Hot by Nick Demske

“Fire is inspirational.”

              —Richard Pryor

For Jenetta

After Mims, ODB, Jeff Bezos & Danny Khalastchi

Because I’m on fire. Because I’m a church. Because I’m Richard Pryor. Because I’m Google search.

Because O snap, Branch Davidian Gideon, a real burner, cinder incinerate drunk tank caloric intake shake. And bake. And I helped.

I perpetuated the mythology. I forwarded the message. I researched the glottochronology, desperate for a great grandparent to blame. Awe shit!—I wrote a poem about “picnics” etymology, the practice of picking a nigger for lynching. The practice of coloring cluster munitions the same shade as aerial food drops.

Because I am stuck in the lotus position. Because I nuked the leftovers, back to the Stone Age. Because—opah, etc.—Lake Erie exploded. Because Michael Jackson and Pepsi and toasters and bathtubs. I’m hot. Because I’m fly, a fly, a 747 fly into a twin, I’m 808, I’m 212, I’m a kindle that spreads jungle fire like Amazon, consummates the info ecology. This is why comparisons are odious. This is why all explanations fail. Because it is real. Because it is real. Because coincidence is mythical as God. A tree falls in the forest and no one’s around. It feels self-conscious, a stereotype. O koan, I’m hot because the Hilton’s on fire. Because the conference center is burning! I’m the severed breasts of my warrior mother, an ambidextrous archer. And I am the shit the entrepreneurs have taken on her honor.

Because I have survived extraordinary violence. Because I’m sensitive, I’m passionate, spontaneous. You ain’t. Because you not. An equation elementary as water. A formula of misinformation, a river that flows like mother’s milk. Let me explain: because I drank the Molotov. Now I am the revolution. Because I myself am hell. Because I myself am the pollution wafting from the Iraqi National Library’s ashes. I’m hot. Because I’m fly. You ain’t. Because you not. This is why. This is why. This. Is. Why.

Nick Demske is 4 real. Thanks BOMBLOG for this. Check out Demske’s first book, Nick Demske, out with FENCE books. He blogs here.


MM

After a Greek Proverb by AE Stallings

Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού


We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.
We’ve taped the broken window pane. TV’s still out of whack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

From the first issue of the 100th year of Poetry magazine.

MM

From “The Propositions” by Robert Duncan

3.

This is THE SENDING OUT.

I see the tree.   It changes.   Mineral
        vegetable   animal.   Of generations.
It exceeds me.

                              Come back. Come back.
Tell us of excess.
       What was the sign that limited?

Do not serve the tree.
This is the sending.

This place is littered with great stones.

       No more!    Return to the shore
we remember.   Do not go beyond our knowledge.

       Bring back that black thing.
       we did not have in our story.
       It alone to speak, to give strangeness.


In the field of the poem   the unexpected
       must come.

                         We wait.
                         It does not come.

There is a disturbance in the House.
I had forgotten its orders. The plants
      ask to be waterd.

If we have not set things to rights,
       the indwelling
is not with us, there are no instructions.


MM

January First by Octavio Pas trans. Elizabeth Bishop

The year’s doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
                                 tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.

I opened my eyes late.
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for time’s uncertain return
through crack in the horizon.

But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.

You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn’t yet accepted
being invented by the day.
- Nor possibly my being invented, either.
You were in another day.

You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us.
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleeping women.

When you open you eyes
we’ll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we’ll open the day’s door.
And then we shall enter the unknown.
                          
                             Cambridge, Mass., 1 January 1975

M M

Erthe Toc of Erthe or Earth Took of Earth by Anonymous

Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh,
erthe other erthe to the earthe droh,
erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh,
tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.

Earth took of earth earth with ill;
Earth other earth gave earth with a will.
Earth laid earth in the earth stock-still:
Then earth in earth had of earth its fill.

ca 13th Century

MM

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXX by Wallace Stevens

The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.

The robins are la-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,

Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

The wind has blown the silence of summer away.

It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:

In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

The barrenness that appears is an exposing.

It is not part of what is absent, a halt

For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

It is a coming on and a coming forth.

The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

The glass of the air becomes an element—

It was something imagined that has been washed away.

A clearness has returned.  It stands restored.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.

It is a visibility of thought,

In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

Thankful for friends, here and there. —NW

As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

MM

New York, New York by David Berman

A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one.
Why another, no one asks,
just built it, and they do.

The city is still closed off
to all but the work crews
who claim it’s a perfect mirror image.

Truthfully, each man works on the replica
of the apartment building lives in,
adding new touches,
like cologne dispensers, rock gardens,
and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.

Improvements here and there, done secretly
and off the books. None of the supervisors
notice or mind. Everyone’s in a wonderful mood,
joking, taking walks through the still streets
that the single reporter allowed inside has describes as

“unleavened with reminders of the old city’s complicated past,
but giving off some blue perfume from the early years on earth.”

The men grow to love the peaceful town.
It becomes more difficult to return home at night,

which sets the wives to worrying.
The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.

The men take long breaks on the fire escapes,
waving across the quiet spaces to other workers
meditating on the perches.

Until one day…

The sky filled with charred clouds.
Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.

Something is wrong.

A foreman stands in the avenue
pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark
moving towards us in the eastern sky.

Several voices, What, What is it?

Pigeons, he yells through the wind.




David Berman rules. Frontman for the Silver Jews, poet, and son of an evil corporate lobbyist. Berman, on the day he broke up the band in 2002, posted a letter (halfway down the page) to his fans about his “gravest secret,” and proceeded to lambast his father for being both a “human molester” and a “doltish thinker.” In light of the Occupy Wall Street movement afoot, his words, both poetic and not, are more prescient than ever. Check out his book, Actual Air.

MM

The Unbeliever by Elizabeth Bishop

He sleeps on the top of a mast. - Bunyan


He sleeps on the top of a mast
with his eyes fast closed.
The sails fall away below him
like the sheets of his bed,
leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head.

Asleep he was transported there,
asleep he curled
in a gilded ball on the mast’s top,
or climbed inside
a gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride.

“I am founded on marble pillars,”
said a cloud.  “I never move.
See the pillars there in the sea?”
Secure in introspection
he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection.

A gull had wings under his
and remarked that the air
was “like marble.” He said: “Up here
I tower through the sky
for the marble wings on my tower-top fly.”

But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight.
The gull inquired into his dream,
which was, “I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.”

MM

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.


This was sent to me by a very good old friend—NW