Bad Poetry

Legs buried under fragrant alternating stacks of you and me Sunday morning Why do I keep writing poems about laundry?

Got the image here.

Bad Poetry

There is something growing inside me and I don’t know what it is yet.

It feels like gummy creosote and spiny cactus leaves, thick green crunchy aloe ooze

It feels like making a right because that canyon road looks interesting (even though my map says to go straight)

It feels like stubborn succulents persisting in cracked and crumbling earth

I don’t dare to hope that it’s a sunrise.

Got the pic here.

Bad Poetry

Yesterday
I crouched under the sun
Sat back low in the long grass
Got slowly covered in layer after layer of dirt
sifting gently over my skin
like curtains in a lazy breeze

Today I sit in my ergonomic foam chair
Being bathed in fluorescent light
Straining for a glimpse of blue sky through the office across the hall

Yesterday
I weeded a bed of oregano and thyme
“How will I know if I’m pulling the right thing?” I asked
then spent the next hour
rolling leaves between the pads of my fingers
and smelling my fingertips
marveling at my toolbox body
good for so many things

Today I collate report after report
And the only thing the pages smell like under my fingers
Is toner

Yesterday
The biggest hornet I’ve ever seen
flew in drunk circles
like a helicopter going down
Furry spiders
ran for the folds in the fabric
of the ground tarp I was rolling up
A praying mantis
acted like a twig
until the cricket got close enough

And all of us city kids ooh-ed and ahh-ed
Because we knew that Today
All that would be left
is the ache in the deep-backs of my legs
And the grit
way up under my fingernails
that I didn’t scrub hard enough to get out
maybe on purpose.

Got the pic here.

Bad Poetry

Strange / Familiar

It might just be that you remind me of you
But I didn’t know that until we met.

When you’re not here you seem impossible
But your yellowing undershirts
share space in the hamper with my gym clothes

Maybe the collusion of our clothes
Will teach me to trust the fact of you
when you’re not in front of me.

Bad Poetry

The faces of my friends have been blotted out
Like photos in a housefire
burned through
angry-black-bubbled out of existence

You’re permanently obscured.

Where’s the girl I walked to classes with, bad bangs growing out, backpack on your back?
Is that still you in there?
Underneath the years
the different names:
strangers calling you mom and honey,
Mrs. so-and-so
underneath the baby growing inside of you

Have you changed?
Or is it just my unwillingness to see you without that backpack that makes you seem different to me?

And when I go that way –
will I disappear under the things I’m called and the people I create?
(will I be able to see myself in there?)

Bad Poetry

My Friends’ Husbands

You are a kind of family
Some very weird very distant cousin -
You are stuck with me and I’m stuck with you until death do you part.
Did you know when you picked her that you picked me too?

If we are a venn diagram then she is the middle and we intersect
And in this intersection
We sit, sexless, thigh-to-thigh on the couch
I help her fold laundry on a Sunday when you’re out of town, my fingers all over the hems of your shirts, the elastic waistbands of your underwear. (snap)

Her stories get confused in my memories
And I remember
the look in your eyes when you asked me to marry you down by the river
your hands on my knees when you went down on me in a back classroom
your cold pillow when you stayed out all night and never called
Makes me crazy

So when I see you I am clumsy
I have one foot in this memory that isn’t mine and the other in
this friendship that we didn’t choose
We sit, sexless, on the couch in a strange camaraderie
And she sits in the center of our intersection

But she was mine first.

Bad Poetry

I've been thinking about how subjective my own memory is. If my version of events is different than my friends' (and it often is), how can I trust my own history? In that spirit, here is a combination of an old poem and an older picture. They aren't related, but I'm not above sifting through the relics of my past and connecting them to see what new stories I can make.

Eenee
Meenee
Minee
Moe

Caught that one
Then let him go.

Eenee-Meenee-Minee
You

won’t go away
but won’t come through.

Eenee
(Meanie)
Minee
Me

Tonight’s no good
but Friday’s free?

Eenee
Meenee
Minee
Then

it’s back to me
and me
again.

Creative Writing Assignment

Tonight's creative writing assignment comes to us, again, from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones:

Write a series of ten short poems. You only have three minutes to write each one; each one must be three lines. Begin each one with a title that you choose from something your eye falls on.

Picture

I am cracking your bones over my knee
because I need tinder
to keep this fire burning.

Guitar

I’m not very good
But I keep plucking
those strings.

Sweater

I hold
What used to hold you
Since you went away.

Mr. Coffee

I feed you water and beans -
You feed me mornings in bed.
A fair give-and-take.

Bed

There’s pajama fuzz, crusted drool, and stray hair
in there:
A kind of stew of me.

Giant Coffee Mug

Oh, Phoenix of my Flatware:
Today you’re a teacup, yesterday you were a bowl of soup
Tonight you’ll be born again in the drying rack.

Bookcase

I just realized
All my shelves come in threes;
What would Freud say?

Air Conditioner

You look cold
In your towel and duct tape.
Winter just isn’t your season.

License Plate

Do you brag to the books
That you used to “be someone”
Before you became apartment décor?

Chair

Nubby, chubby, sprung in the middle
Little feet, big arms, ugly-pattern pillow
Craigslist find – meet my behind.

Bad Poetry

In order to avoid
loving one parent more than another
(a childhood fear more adult than boogeymen) -
I concentrated on loving the space between them;
and in doing so:
I missed them both.

Bad Poetry

I am amazed to find that writing more (National Novel Writing Month) leads to writing more. I don't usually title my (bad) poems, but I think this one's called The Weight.
------------------------------------------

When you carry things
that you need –
a sleeping bag
a good book
a gift
The weight is okay. The pulling swaying shoulder-crushing are like friendly whispered secrets.

But when you carry things
that you don’t need –
a laptop
someone else’s trash
guilt
The weight is so much heavier.

Where is the incentive to keep your body under it?
Much rather shake it off, like a dog shakes water
And dance the ache out of tired muscles
And leave it in the road.

Snapshot

This weekend, I flew from Seattle to DC - with a layover in Kansas. I wrote this at the airport bar.
-----------------------------------------------

People who live in Kansas are brave.
How do they do it?
How do they conduct their business at a measured pace –
do their jobs and drive their trucks and watch their televisions –
Like everything’s normal?

Like this is okay?

Me: I’m barely holding it together.
In fact, it’s all I can do to sit on this airport bar stool and order my Bud Light in a normal voice because what I really want to do is scream!
hide!
run! in terror from the reality of this great and terrible space.
Instead I’ll sit here and eat my french fries and talk to the woman on her way to Denver like nothing’s going on.

I know I should be taken by the beauty of the sunset through these narrow windows:
all those colors in all that sky.
But with no lumpy mountains,
no pitchy wet-green forests,
no sandy curve of rocky shore,
no distant skyline to fixate on –
I can’t get away from it.
I’m a spider trapped in the corner of a bathtub.
I’ve just said the wrong thing at a party.
I’m naked at the school dance.

I am exposed. i am alone. (i am so, so small)

This is why people live in cities: so we can mistake these doubtless buildings for ourselves. So we can forget.
People who live in Kansas are brave.
How do they do it?

Snapshot

If there are such things
as heart strings,
you’re playing on mine.
Your fearless fingers fly up and down my neck, pluck-snap me, slap-spin me around. Close your eyes, tilt your head right, hug me close, shoulders curving over the tops of me. I’m prone against your chest, helpless and pulsing out these big deep ship-belly booms. When you’re showing off, you push me away from you like LOOK MA NO HANDS and I thrum, thrum, so deep.

Coming back to my body I remember I’m not the only one in this underground bar.

You have transported that guy in the corner to another universe.
He has completely lost control over his face. From behind and to the right I watch his muscles working:
PainJoySexSurpriseHaha!YES

We clap for your solo.
Then you're off again.

Your d-double-kick gets caught in my mouth.
Turns my cheeks up.
Metal and snare and wooden sticks and your pink tongue poking out the corners of your mouth. I stick my tongue out too like we’re kids on a playground.
Your high hat tastes like freezer burn on ice cream, only better.
It gets confused with the watery whiskey sucked through the plastic straw burning down in my belly and my feet are tapping, tapping.

Bad Poetry

If this city is a light bulb,
then I am a moth.

Out of the darkness I am drawn to it.
My wings beat against the glass.
I rest my forehead against its smooth, hot surface before I begin my next assault.

And how do I feel to it?
all fluttery wings and furry body and blind wanting?

I don’t know what I want from this light bulb but I know I want it bad.
Furthermore –
I don’t know how to get it.

So I’ll just keep circling
and colliding
and pleading LET ME IN LET ME IN

Until?

Bad Poetry

Those three tanker ships
On Chesapeake Bay
Tug at my heart.
Gasoline, salt, metal and steam –
Great booming bellies –
Do they remind me of home?
Of pitchy logs on trucks
Of cheap portside beer
Of seeing that maybe I’m the driftwood –
not the water
as I had previously thought.