Poem: “Utterfly”

I was an utterfly,

my wings dense matter,

colorless for they were every color at once.

I was the universe in the palm of your hand,

Too heavy.

And I sank, fluttering, into the gallows of your hollow stomach –

Was I too much to swallow?

How it tasted going down:

the flavor of incomprehensibility;

you could not take me, tame me.

And I burst from between your ribs,

turned you inside out –

An utterfly

is the sheer vastness of all things:

Knowledge – and the lack of it –

a reminder to learn so you can learn

to forget.

Because why should you remember the definite shape

of infinity?

The People Poem (Self/I/We/Others/He/She/Them)

“Self” is
The canvas
Clay
“I,”
The product
of mutation, a
Reflection
Of what you want,
It is
Whatever’s left after you
Tinker with
My self.
A blank page
With color added.
“We.”
It is a cluster
Conglomeration a
Group
Unity?
No such thing.
We’re all pigs
Floundering in the
Mire but
We’re not in this together, we
Don’t even like one another.
“Others.”
Division.
“He.”
“She.”
Distinct and different
We split ourselves
Like atoms
And what results
Is armageddon
What color is the self, exactly?
Slave brown?
Army green?
Combat-boots-black how about
Thirty-women-and-children-dead red?
Bruised blue, they’re ugly
The colors we paint people
And when we realize
That fact, when we see
How we’ve mutilated this world we
Create another entity,
The scapegoat,
To cover it up
And we call it
“Them.”

Poem: “Wistfulness”

Here is a house in South Dakota.

It is not where I was born, nor would I say it is where I am from,

But it is where things are simple and childhood is sweet,

And my best friend lives next-door to me,

And she still has two brothers and I all three cats,

And we watch cartoons and eat chicken pot pies,

And waddle through three-foot-tall snow drifts in the winter,

Bundled in overalls and heavy coats like marshmallows

Waving at the snow plows as they scrape by.

 

Here is the Pebble Creek apartment complex,

Where I resign myself to a life of listening

To the soft, unimposing drone of people going about their lives,

Blissfully without consideration of me.

It is here that I stuff myself into a dryer

To hide from a tornado whose roar I cannot hear.

It is here that I attend a Halloween party as a ladybug

And stay out past curfew to ride my first skateboard,

And where the coolest place for kids to hang out

Is the brown gazebo in the park.

 

Here is the house on Miramont Street,

Where nothing exceptionally dramatic has happened,

Except for this time when the neighbor’s German shepherd

Climbs onto the roof through a second-story window,

And someone calls animal control because the owner

Won’t answer the door when we knock,

And a few days later the cops come to find him

Dead on the bedroom floor due to suicide.

The neighborhood never makes a sound.

 

Here is the house on Hawthorne Avenue,

Which belongs to a suburb in the middle of the desert,

Next to an Indian reservation

And a casino.

I ride my bike for miles into the dust, never meeting anyone but the southwest wind,

And the only person who speaks to my family

Is an elderly widow who crochets fingerless gloves, grows cherries,

And waits for the rain to come.

 

Here is 108 Deer Path, in Manitou,

Which was built in 1864 and lacks air conditioning because

The mountains are just quiet enough for you to realize how hot it is,

But the alpine breeze makes you forget.

Tourists who wander into the town are rushed by the odor of marijuana and

The sour stench of hippies and incense,

And when they shuffle past the street kids playing banjo on the sidewalk,

The vagrants just smile, sleepless but kind,

Because they are attached to nothing, nowhere, nobody.

 

Now here is a little brick dorm room with thin walls,

In a city with which I am not quite familiar,

Where conversation crackles in the air like electricity and

I cannot keep my window open at night like I used to because

Inevitably a car horn or a drunk frat boy will sound and wake me

From a dream in which I am longing for all the places I have been—

In which I am yearning for the serendipity of silence and simplicity,

When things were young again and I could not possibly comprehend

The enormous noise of this world, this life.

Poem: “Gladiator”

Definition

A degree of clarity

I went to school to find it

But it wasn’t quite the same.

Regret is an ocean and I am treading the salty waves.

Who is this person in the mirror and

What have I accomplished with these textbooks when I

Could have been running through the forest, barefoot

A wild child of the universe?

Who

Am I?

What

Am I doing here?

Go ahead: call me a hippie                                                                                   (I’m fucking infinite.)

Animal instinct shreds flesh from bone—

I clawed myself open and stars spilled out.

I’m stepping out of this paper-thin skin,

‘Gonna howl at the moon like the wolf I was born to be.

I’m taking off these rose-colored glasses

And putting down the boring books;

They were never very useful anyway.

Dreamers, eat your hearts out

With forks and golden knives;

Taste the particular flavor of the void.

I hear you screaming for me and I swear

I’ll come back for you some day,

But my heart it runs on gasoline

And I need to fuel my soul                                                                               (I’m running on fumes.)

I can hear my engine turning

My embers are smoldering

And any moment now I’m gonna

Strike

The match.