Some new offensive things

Reading Whitman's Body Electric 

      while taking a massive shit 

Let me begin by clarifying that I am not 

actually reading Whitman's Body Electric 

while taking a massive shit, but rather I'm parked

at this yellow cafe table imagining

myself sitting half-naked 

in the windowless room 

a few feet off to my left, in tender release.

I write all these imaginings while I coax 
an actual oven, but why 
imagine instead of action?

Because the body can only handle
so much extrication

and with the tandem poetry and propulsions,

the sacred expulsions would be too much.

Outside the windowed doors of the coffeehouse a storm breaks

and the trees burst flowing in unified downbeat, wiry branches interpreting the world in dance,

dancing the universe as a single procession with measured and perfect motion

how boldly their body electric in this lightening storm, still I sit holding,

clenching to the cleave of the clasping and the sweet-fleshed day 

lost in the embrace of love and resistance in own my body electric.

A storm breaks out-

side by side the lovers on the outside patio share a frozen coffee drink

with fingers numbed awkward from the rain and the ice inside the cup

and him with cold fingers only pretends to drink for here swells and jets

his heart because he has loved a woman sacred and that alone

is caffeine enough for his soul.

But oh my body!

Outside a storm and I imagine myself

still clenched in body electric, push

open the doors of the cafe and step outside

into the windwhipping rain with pencil and pages blowing wet,

the limitless limpid jets of hot and enormous, quivering liquid,

blow-white and delirious juice into the sheetflooded intersection,

I sing:
"I am the gate of the body.

 I am the gate of the soul."
Squat and unleash 
my body electric.

5:30 PM-- June 12, 2010

 

My mother's face

My mother's face as she stared

upon her sister's bastard child

was one of pity and desire masked

lightly by a smile hanging crooked,

like a painting hastily hung to cover

the stain on the wallpaper,

but really,

mother just wanted to squeeze

the little bastard girl, embrace

her like a deformed

deaf-blind puppy,

unknowing of her own

three-leggedness.

06/12/10

4:53 AM-June 12, 2010

Poems not involving bodily vulgarities

Since apparently I post too many vulgar poems,

here are some uploads of poems I've done that aren't outright base. 

This first one is based off of Charles Beaudelaire's charming poem titled "Get Drunk". 

Make Love!

Always make love. 
That’s it! 
The great impetus! 
In order to not hear the shrieks  
of lovers past and pharaohs 
grinding  into oblivion, 
make love and make it last. 
To whom? 
To winter, volcanoes, nectarines, whatever, 
just make love and keep it made. 
And if you sometimes happen to awake 
strewn naked across gray sheets and glitter, 
tangled in the strings of deflating balloons 
barely breathing in the dark of whosoever’s closet, 
fading in the shadow of God, 
ask the winnow, 
the babe, 
the jurors, 
the mannequins, 
ask everything that flees, 
everything that groans, 
or rolls, 
or sings, 
everything that speaks, 
ask how any trace of day lives on: 
and the winnow, 
the babe, 
the jurors, 
the mannequins 
will all answer you: 
“By making love!  
Make love and make life breathe! 
Don’t be a prisoner of your own ghost. 
Make love! 
Stay loved! 

On winter, volcanoes, nectarines, whatever!”   

03/30/10

*******

Recipe for Breakfast

First, you must drain the Pacific Ocean.

Then, pelt a few pinecones 
and knock the stars down, 
every single one.

Collect the stars before they are stale 

and drop them into the Mariana Trench. 

Then, make the moon cry. 

It won’t be too hard— 
the stars are already dead.

Now chill her tears in Siberia, 
and then pour them into the Pacific Crater.

Watch the stars float to the top. 

Next, uproot a sycamore tree, and use it  
to gently stir the bowl.

Before you can eat, you must pick a hemlock needle  

and climb Mount Sinai.

Convince the sun to wake up. 

It won’t be too hard— 
you’ve already made him cereal. 

While balanced on the horizon, half-asleep, 

leap up and puncture his golden skin,

then slurp the yolk.

11/07/09

*******

Alternate Recipe for Breakfast

First, you must take your shirt off.

Then, find a marker

and draw a dotted line

across your chest.

Follow the line carefully with a sharp kitchen knife.

Before continuing, wash your hands clean.

Reach inside the cut

and gently remove your heart.

It should resemble a bagel.

Do not worry—the hole is natural.

It has always been there.

Next, clean your hands again

and reach back inside.

This time, locate your lungs.

Spread your fingers around the membrane,

and then take a deep breath.

Gradually apply pressure

until the sacs are compressed.

Collect your breath on a small serving plate.

Do not worry—that’s natural.

The essence is something soft and cold.

Finally, knife in hand,

carefully bisect the bagel longwise

and split the halves apart.

Spongy side up, stuff your heart with soft, cold cheese.

11/08/09 

3:14 AM-June 13, 2010

Portraitures [tentative au cœur d'un jeune artiste, en colère]

Portraitures
[tentative au cœur d'un jeune artiste, en colère]

EXPOSTION A

Behind the skeleton of the cat are a
swallow ’s  beak and feathers , and
while it looks accidental , the brown
violence  on  the  lower-right   hand
corner  does have purpose.  A bird,
caked in saliva and mud, hurled into
the  canvas  makes  an   attempt  at
permanence ,  succeeds ,  and  dies.

 
EXPOSITION B

This  is  before  the   epileptic  cat   dipped   in   lightning   lemon
acrylics, a  seizure  liberally  applied  on  the  canvas. The  artiste
decides, “ Yellow ,  what  an  ugly  color ” ,  washes   his   hands,
and   abandons   this    phase   of    his    artistic   experimentation.


EXPOSITION C

The rest are empty bottles holding paintbrushes,
hairs  caked ,  a  stagnant  rainbow.  Stasis, the
spectrum  dries  ,  flakes  off  like  falling   sand.
In  the  bottle  on  the  last shelf, a relic from the
future,  electric  toothbrush,  for  his finer details
undoable by neither cat nor bird. Bristles in drip,
the brush is summoned; his art is run on batteries.

5:14 AM--June 10, 2010

Short poem written at Para Coffee in February

I sneak a fart

I sneak a fart
and the clockwork goes:
Across the table, the young professional’s hand
drifts from the keyboard, towards his face,
pink palm flesh soft over upper lip,
index finger under nostrils.
He holds his breath

and pretends to think.

5:02 AM--June 10, 2010

Stolen from Rachael's Blog

First, credit goes to Rachael for introducing me to this poem. I think poets crank out one of these poems once a year at their prime, something so delicate yet filled soaking raw. There is power in the phrasing of the words, a simplicity that is muscular, but graceful: it is the form that ice skaters strive to accomplish, the soft arch of a marble statue.

http://rachaelgtaylor.blogspot.com/

Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Jack Gilbert

I must read more of Jack Gilbert

2:43 AM--June 9th, 2010

Heart: so that you may return

Listening to Beirut, thinking about my old chapbook.

For Lisa Spaar's Intermediate Poetry class last semester we had to construct a chapbook focusing on a specific place of interest. I was taken aback by this project since I had never considered the "poetics of space" (as the course was titled, well thought-out of me to choose it, no?). Poetry for me has never been a thing of place, but rather a thing of people, object, and relations deftly wrapped in concise phrase. I can't really explain it; I have a feeling I will be trying to explain poetry to myself and to others for my entire life.

Anyhow, the previous poem I put up "First Intimacy" was the first poem I wrote for Lisa, and it was the start of my chapbook. That poem and this poem, "Heart: so that you may return" are my favorites of the whole chapbook. They serve as  the collection's "bookends": the former the head and the latter the tail.

************************************

Heart: so that you may return

Shh. Enter soft  

and extinguish light.

Tonight you return to the cratered ground, 

back, back through the kitchen knife exit  

of the cantaloupe sliced, the emptied core. 

Sight has no place in this familiar black 

and the light switch far far in the back, 

let us never, never again touch that. 

In here we fill our darkened universes, 

those spinning plates, our revolutions  

will sync again. Tonight you ease gentle 

into the lightless space and I will be waiting, 

feet set shoulder-width apart, I will be waiting. 

Tonight you return, and at the shadowed door,  

the wind will be my breath, a moist inhalation. 

At the doorframe, the light falling in like snow, 

innocence, it too will melt in here. Step in, 

and the fibrous ground will spring back. 

Amazonian topsoil, last season’s canopy 

is a silent rug, waiting. Shh. Just for tonight,  

lie down again. Familiar? The shedded foliage, 

a leprosy, the blossoms fell wet upon farewell, 

this gangrene ground, too heavy, begs fire.  

Lie down. You have come to set no fire, 

just lie down. Listen. Tonight, all the heart  

is music and flames, this air will quiver,  

this light will burst, and these walls,  

these walls will pound again.

3:06 AM--June 8, 2010

 

First Intimacy

Blog, I miss you!

It's been 4 days since I last wrote
upon your body,
I miss you, I miss you
I miss your expansive body.

This is the first poem that I wrote for Lisa Spaar. I hope to have more classes with her in the future.
****************************************************

First Intimacy

Ask me about Macau, and I will recite the numbers
one to nine in Cantonese, each digit marked by a tonal pitch—
nine phonic distinctions to which the world lays deaf.

Ask again, this time I will see the last thing I saw
in the cafetorium of the Catholic elementary school.
The bell rings and it is Morning Prayer for the flock
of schoolchildren. God takes messages in Cantonese at 8 AM.
A boy stands in the back facing the structural pillar
where the gray rainwater has puddled from the morning mizzle.
He is a flawless imitation of intimate speech,
index and middle finger extended like a gun barrel
he traces a triangle, the vertices divined by a tap
on each shoulder and forehead.
A silent lesson, and the watcher learns
intimacy lies in the gaps between words.

Again, and the last thing I remember:
A hand extends from behind and chokes the hairs upon the boy’s head,
with a violent musculature, the hand jerks down
and the concrete composes tectonic gaps across the skull.

First intimacy is written in bone. 

2:27 AM-June 8th, 2010