Skip to main content

NaPo #2

Image
By

Third Wheel Blues


Cockatrices in the bedroom!
I told you that shit had to stop,
no more calling animals in
when your surfaces elude the mind.

Some stars streak across the sky
delivering bootylicious nuggets
of light from years and years ago.
I bet they saw the Stones in Boston.

That night Keith shot up onstage,
and they played Sister Morphine
three times before anyone noticed.
I fell in love with you late on an Aerosmith

tour when Skid Row opened and Sebastian Bach
challenged us all to smoke a little Mother Nature.
Now you've broken the hymen of our time
together with a strong hand and a rubber glove

I feel as if I could unsay all those negatives and
you would jump on my back for another ride,
rolling our trousers and walking through the muck
of the Duck Pond in the Common at three am

when no one but homeless people are out
and you feel free to crack jokes about the Dead Pool.
It's a safe bet I still love you and the way the fine
hairs on your arm still rise when I enter a room

might give me the impression some bone-jumping
is in order but your period came four hours ago
and I am a hot mess pleading for attention in a poem.
Please don't make me beg; I love those bacon dog treat

commercials. They remind me of you and I, the way I beg
and you, well, you know what you do. The sun is rising
like a pillow from a removed head. The new day promises
lots of things but sadly, I've found in this poem that despite

all the things I've said to re-woo you, they're nothing
when compared with the love you no longer have for me.
I'll cart up my laptop now and my silly dreams and fly
into the east. That means I'll follow the sun, yes,

and never forget you or your penchant for tiny dogs.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

By
                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony
1 comment
Read more

Jim Daniels

By
Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to
Post a Comment
Read more

Paul Blackburn and Sexism

By
How does one respond to sexism in poets whose work seems to be filled with it, like Blackburn? The quick answer most people would give is: ignore it. Yet here I am, reading more and more, and yes, enjoying, the supposedly sexist work of Paul Blackburn and wondering why there isn't much if any criticism of his important work in the late 50s and 60s, when he served as gatekeeper and recorder of many readings which have helped establish the avant-garde presence and reading scene in New York as well as given us great historical insight into the poets associated at that time with the New York scene.  And of course I'm thinking about his poems, which kept him in the middle of things as a talent in his own right. It's not difficult, unfortunately to see why he's not read, and that makes me sad. His poetry is worth more than a few cursory footnotes to the era. I've come to the conclusion now, after dipping into the collected poems at length, but randomly, and reading fo
3 comments
Read more