You can’t write good til
you’ve written a lot of poems
Here are the bad ones
Some Days
I want to lay myself down,
like the simple object
of a transitive verb.
I want to have picked
myself up, only to have
laid myself down.
Both mind and body.
While the rest of me —
goes with the wind
touching the leaves.
Tethered, green,
and free.
Morning trip to the wells
I go to the wells for comfort
and by wells I mean what has always
worked- or at least craved.
Chocolate, the thought of sex,
starting therapy again, a long stretch
face downward on a mat. Putting
something in a shopping cart.
Stay abed til the last possible minute,
even if the sheets have a funk.
This time it is only the comic
I started drawing in my head,
the sketch of myself with a caption,
that opens up my ill-used body,
creaks my stiff muscles, tight chest,
free of my mind. Puts despair
into motion. Airs it out.
Read Me
Found a poem,left by a officeron the sidewalkof an unnoticeable building.Like the City’s violation checkerstuck a vivid ticketin your windshield,but for passerby.What did the poet say?We are made of carbon,all in our current formsby chance.By creation.By conspiring.
The Sound Equivalent of Seeing Stars
My–The night wind squeaks.
Or is it the air stutters?
An odd creature is formed
aurally, out of suspension
of disbelief and also noise.
Or, parts of an unseen body
displace its environment.
Next to my air-conditioned
and incandescent filters
of walls, roof, wiring.
It is later than I have
promised myself to rest.
But I keep giving myself
extensions. Could it all
be the balancing
liquids of my skull,
my inner ears? That blank
where I am one of the few
who have no mental images.
And so must strengthen
our other senses.
Common Poem 