What of this love?

Where do I put it?

Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry

Never before have I so resembled British Petroleum.
They--it?--are concerned about the environment.
I--it?--am concerned about the environment.
They--him?--convey their concern through commercials,
in which a man talks softly about the importance
of the Earth. I--doodad?--convey my concern
through poems, in which my fingers type softly
about the importance of the Earth. They--oligarchs?--
have painted their slogans green. I--ineffectual
left-leaning emotional black hold a self-semaphore?--
recycle. Isn't a corporation technically a person
and responsible? Aren't I technically a person
and responsible? In a legal sense, in a regal sense,
if romanticism holds sway? To give you a feel
for how soft his voice is, imagine a kitty
that eats only felt wearing a sable coat on a bed
of dandelion fluff under sheets of the foreskins
of seraphim, that's how soothingly they want to drill
in Alaska, in your head, just in case. And let's be honest,
we mostly want them to, we mostly want to get to the bank
by two so we can get out of town by three and beat
the traffic, traffic is murder, this time of year.
How far would you walk for bread? For the flour
to make bread? A yard, a mile, a life?
Now you ask me, when are you going to fix your bike
and ride it to work? Past the plain horses
and spotted cows and the spotted horses and plain cows,
along the river, to the left of the fallen-down barn
and the right of the fallen-down barn, up the hill,
through the Pentecostal bend and past the Methodist
edifice, through the speed trap, beside the art gallery
and cigar shop, past the tattoo parlor and the bar
and the other bar and the other other bar and the other
other other bar and the bar that closed, where I swear,
Al-Anon meets, since I'm wondering, what is the value
of the wick or wire of the soul, be it emotional
or notional, now that oceans are wheezing to a stop?

- Bob Hicok

Airborne

I let my heart hang with you.

It's grown with each encounter,
beating,
thumping,
pumping liquid life and profound love.

And when you leave
with each deployment
it seizes all control,

expands to ridges, peaks of sandstone,
valleys dark and deep.
This tiny chest explodes,
expands,
emits an elemental something

that floats across oceans,
past cities,
and overhead your head.

In heat, find comfort in its shadow,
in cold, warmth from its great size
while I, carved, cool, and shivering
blink winds to keep it far.

Precipice

I am hanging at an angle,
dangling a tiny toe
above an azure pool:


 

it's as if we're dangling over a cliff

certain that the bottom will come to meet us. But what if

what's been down went up// while you slept silently in bed, the rest of the world laid claim to the sea, breathed its aqua air, exhaled balloons the color of Belgian tulips

and made friends with the wind? Like an odd man out in a self-directed play

one of us climbed a ladder to the moon, drawn to the stars with the knowledge that 16 hour prior,

 we'd had our eyebrows waxed. Obsessed with the little things, unable to grasp the tremendous truth in a single set of arms.  And yet, plain-as-day realities are hidden beneath crinoline, linen chambers, and behind expressions trapped only in technology's wide clamp.

 We hide secrets in ourselves, to be revealed when they so choose.

No word more absurd than

tomorrow.

ROMEO  25   Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,  26   Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.       MERCUTIO  27   If love be rough with you, be rough with love;  28   Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.  29   Give me a case to put my visage in,  30   A visor for a visor! what care I  31   What curious eye doth quote deformities?  32   Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me.       BENVOLIO  33   Come, knock and enter; and no sooner in,  34   But every man betake him to his legs.       ROMEO  35   A torch for me: let wantons light of heart  36   Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels,  37   For I am proverb'd with a grandsire phrase;  38   I'll be a candle-holder, and look on.  39   The game was ne'er so fair, and I am done.       MERCUTIO  40   Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word:  41   If thou art Dun, we'll draw thee from the mire  42   Of this sir-reverence love, wherein thou stick'st  43   Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho!       ROMEO  44   Nay, that's not so.       MERCUTIO  44                            I mean, sir, in delay  45   We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.  46   Take our good meaning, for our judgment sits  47   Five times in that ere once in our five wits.       ROMEO  48   And we mean well in going to this mask;  49   But 'tis no wit to go.       MERCUTIO  49                               Why, may one ask?       ROMEO  50   I dream'd a dream to-night.       MERCUTIO  50                                     And so did I.       ROMEO  51   Well, what was yours?       MERCUTIO  51                               That dreamers often lie.       ROMEO  52   In bed asleep, while they do dream things true. Summary       MERCUTIO  53   O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.  54   She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes  55   In shape no bigger than an agate-stone  56   On the fore-finger of an alderman,  57   Drawn with a team of little atomies  58   Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.  59   Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut  60   Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,  61   Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.  62   Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,  63   The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,  64   The traces of the smallest spider's web,  65   The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,  66   Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,  67   Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,  68   Not so big as a round little worm  69   Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid.  70   And in this state she gallops night by night  71   Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;  72   O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on cur'sies straight,  73   O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,  74   O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,  75   Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,  76   Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.  77   Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,  78   And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;  79   And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail  80   Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,  81   Then dreams, he of another benefice:  82   Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,  83   And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,  84   Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,  85   Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon  86   Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,  87   And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two  88   And sleeps again. This is that very Mab  89   That plats the manes of horses in the night,  90   And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,  91   Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:  92   This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,  93   That presses them and learns them first to bear,  94   Making them women of good carriage.  95   This is she—       ROMEO  95                Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!  96   Thou talk'st of nothing.

Carbon is Made in the Interior of Stars

Autonomous connection,
we drew straws with shadows. Whoever could untangle from the jumble
that we knit together

could break out free, leave behind our memories
like some freakishly light child who walking even in the sludgy
wet sand after an especially high tide
leaves no footprints.

Instead, we bound together, weaving closer, sharing stories that
kept going on and on,
picked up the yarn,
the pattern,
the charm of our good qualities.

We were knitting blankets for the winter we were sure would come,

the ones years later I embraced on the tiny hills of dunes in December,
father's jacket hanging loose on narrow shoulders,
chip heavy on the weathered stock of Eastern Europeans.
How many times did I fight wind for blowing
exactly where it was meant to go-
bent into it, hellishly refusing to accept coarse
time.
There's no meaning, justice in the Gulf Stream's bend.
No cavern steals a baby seal to curse its hapless mother. Train tracks are laid over barriers,
around them if it can be helped, but sometimes
mounds
are easier to plow through than
find the rough hewn face in.

The Evolution of Relations

I don't know the town where I was born.

Playing House

I stood in the 9x5 kitchen washing a single dish like a doll in my very own game of house.
The bedroom's decorated with a parasol of paper, bonsai, and paintings made from the hand of my very best friend. Same song on repeat,
it's always the same. I am the same
tiny girl
squirreling away clips and inspiration, chords,
delicate melancholy riffs that shatter sadness like an icicle dropped.
That liquid/
vapor/
solid,
it's all the same.

long, long, long

 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWSFdIAEUU

twenty-one-cent stamps

We wrote postcards to each other, you and I, and sent messages on wisps of wind.
Our secrets pressed against dreams and wove seamlessly into moments evaporated by the sun.

You may have forgotten, or failed to feel, the kisses sent like pollen down the coast that pressed in breezy afternoons onto your profile. We wrapped each other like ace bandages around injuries from unrefereed games, those antics of youth.

May I make a request?

Can you call me Bloomberg? Bloom for short.

Track Star

What I would give to make sense
of the shadow trailing behind
a formless form,

the one attached to fingertips
this hand cannot,
though I wish it would,

wrap itself around. A barrel chest puffed
in opposition of the universe.