NaPoWriMo: April 12-13, 2012

NOTES FROM THE NIGHT

Magic causality.

Superstitions are abridged takes.

Daughter born with soft heart

because I grieved while I carried her.

Father’s leadfoot.

Can’t send out.

On the inside, petty.

Stuffing, ogling.

Now that’s a fucking queen.

Laughing at.

The phone is my shepherd,

hollow point.

HAIKU

The dog is sleeping.

I am so goddamned tired.

I think she is too. 

NaPoWriMo: April 11, 2012

A revision...

Scared            whorled                       

left in            analyzed bitten                       

aborted                        panicked

knackered  from treading           

subjugated   by ardor                       

and despairing            autobiographed                       

suckered            defenestrated figuratively          

lost            caved in

adjudicated            carried up up up up                                                        

how one             comes    away from     the foundation

fessed and fisted  hammed

gladded  and badded

baded   a hearty heart

NaPoWriMo: April, 11, 2012

WORDSWORTHIAN SUBLIME

My mouth

My south-

ern mise en scene

My boquita

My insolent and evil twin

taking my calls for me

making my calls for me

My raging and misfiring

neural pathways

O my stars

O my miserable French

kiss

My hair is all mine

My workout this morning

was solid

My how wide-ranging you are

My mama
My descent

My mine

My okay you’re okay

My etymology is song

and God’s promise

My poems are a crypt

My poems are the crypt

My tendencies: self-destructive

My impulses: well-meaning

My grandmother told me

I’d be a guitar

My oh my is that a gun

or are you just happy to be me

My word

My sakes alive

My slow jam

My prom dress made of wood

My admission of complicity

My oppressor

My divinity

My stunning and singular intellect pressed against the slop

NaPoWriMo: April 9, 2012

Today I wrote poems with my son. He wrote a poem based on Neruda's Book of Questions. He also wrote an acrostic about Super Mario. I tried to write an acrostic, but that impulse died quickly. 

I AM NOT AN ACROSTIC

Sometimes humble  but always             dragon

occasionally     out of range

taller than that                        Braver than this

pounding pavement                        into perpetuity

fan of heat            Sometimes             celebrate good times

trash talking                  the fountain of youth 

straight jeering   the night peters out    along

with my resolve              to  self-improve   Quite

shocking   when             I open my mouth

NaPoWriMo: April 8, 2012

These are the really rough bones for a poem,  but enough for today. 

FOUNDLING

The charlatan was a prelude

to the colors she’d see

Oh those razor-sharp

colors and their audacious

hullabaloo

She shook along

with their wizardry

Laughed the laugh

her mother left

in the cigar box

Two modes diverged

in that yellow mood

Once she was a bad hunter

NaPoWriMo: April 7, 2012

MINOR THREAT

My drag is a kind of elevator.

It’s like a title.

You’re soaking in it.

It’s chainmail and a courtesy for your likes.

I start my stories with it.

And when I’m hungry it opens the door.

The door is pop-up window into my soul.

Deep and meditative, a vertigo of soul.

My cruel, divisive temperament: my cross

to bear, we all bear it because of out shared

ancestry: lint, filth, water, sulphur. 

NaPoWriMo: April 6, 2012

Inheritance

Please, nuisance, mark your patch.

Kite, there’s an expression for people like you.

It’s not for mixed company.

Puddle, buy me diamonds. Buy me soul food.

Stick, make that gesture more fluid and more advanced.

Yesterday I came to the pond because I’m obsessed with absolution.

It keeps exploding next door.

New York City and what we once were, glitter dyad.

I keep working hard, working it, working for a living.

I shouldn’t have said that.

And then, the reveal.

Dry, she said.

Coat, I know you, coat. I know you’re the jealous type.

The gigolo keyed my frock.

Credit card, open wide. 

NaPoWriMo: April 5, 2012

SPRING

You’re a brassy spring.

The cloud and its plumage, a fraud.

I arrest my daughter to me.

We’re condensed into a crux. 

NaPoWriMo: April 4, 2012

Refrain # 1

Of course I            most often live on the most transgressive edges

of her illness and call it condemnation or measure out

feeble doses of devotion.             After all, I am daughter

and swindler.             Relation and parasite.  

NaPoWriMo: April 3, 2012

This is an edit; I'm cheating.Right now I'm formulating one about hair. I'll give myself three edits, like three wishes, for the month.

It cost              liaison and connection  peace of mind

what I had was nearly twelve         coins worth of  goodwill to   spread

over my         whole  natural life            prone    to trouble

not              wise          but back to         desire    the indulgence

cost     me       hours       of sleepless        remorse

it was black and white god that was amazing    rich but the day ends and    gets complex

inside time  lie wish     I had been born             a golddigger      wish

I had been born     with less   oddity    less    diagnosis

pity the self    that teeny weeny self the self   wants to be           unburdened  

of its    bulges

NaPoWriMo April 2, 2012

For a time my body was her body and that inside of being inside of my body is the counternarrative of our shared history. It happens when I find myself in her gestures. We both pluck errant hairs from our chin with our fingernails. We both trace words nervously on our pants over and over. I keep returning to this notion of being her copy because I once make the future from her. Now that’s ironic or terrifying. And I’m cast loose from seeing tomorrow. It’s a brown, cultural, daughter thing. Strangely though because when I touch my skin, it’s foreign because it’s not hers. I’m getting it there, gusseting it with worry and fat and leaving it ashy with neglect---

NaPoWriMo: April 1, 2012

I'll be posting sections from a long poem I'm writing for a new book. Here's the first. PRELUDE X (from THE BRIEF REMEMBER) I will be apprentice to this study for her. My best gift is mania, drives me into knowing vacuums. I copy her gaps for the context. I retrace the mapless meander of her logic for empathy. Because I was born copy and the honor of that. Inside her is gaps and bursts. Some days the bursts are the most heartbreak. Other times we circle the same spots, and I try to be as I know she was with me once, our bleak and common future to reverse the sphinx. I’m fair to poor copy. That you don’t know her is your misfortune. Know what was, which was a hot planet’s core, a late summer’s best light. Still that, but the center of her, subject of my latest essays. Language was always between us. My job is also to bear the knowledge for all of us. I seek it out as if it were a hunger. I tell my children her brain is pocked with illness, and I summon up the softest image to tell the story. It’s a soft pink vulnerable jelly. It is translucent and contains the future. In this reverie I hold it in my hand and against a lamp because this is my form of intimacy. My nails trace the brown spots that mark her losses. Beautiful and sad and strange, I say because I’m making it into something else.