Thursday, January 31, 2013

Parallel

I see time's new face, linear but parallel,
His time and her time and my time and your time,
But then they connect, loop together,
Wind around as on a cribbage board,
Having grown a beginning and an end.
Finally, time introduces itself
As a doorway through a doorway
Through a doorway, to the limits of sight,
A face for nothing but more of yesterday.
and I have no ideas but sleep.

To the World

I've seen scars raised by landmass-boxing.
I've sped down them, too–on skis.
I've seen a real-life Mordor
By the bluest of the seas.
I've seen pie-sized green eyes
Framed by rare red hair in curls,
and speaking in mathematical terms,
I've not even been to the world,
Nor know I my entire mind,
Although I know I wanna.
I've been as far as shelf's edge,
Not to deepest Mariana.
There are seven billion minds like mine,
Worlds of lightning and ridges and rifts.

In philosophical terms, no one's ever been bored,
Just too lazy to google-drift.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

A Whole Hive

A whole hive of people scurry and scurry
As they have been trained–industriously,
and I am right there with them.
We climb over each other, always seeking.
Thousands of us, poorly-raised primates
Playing ants, are crushed together,
and one question presses on the back of my mind–
Can I quit the human race now,
Or do I have to give two weeks notice?

To Belong or Not to Belong

I belong here.
I can produce the paper to prove it.
I can produce paper like a preposterously paranoid printer,
Hyperaware of its own impending obsolescence.
I have always been able to.  That's why I belong here.
That's why I am here.

I do not belong here.
I can present the posture to prove it.
I have no equipment.  I have no experience.  I have no authority.
I don't even have a role.  I don't even have a seat.
I don't even know why I'm here.

Study Hall

I sit in an uncomfortable silence, watched but unsupervised.
The unwelcome symphony of my every movement
Stiffens my worn, arthritic ears.  I yearn to stretch them.

I sit in a painful silence, supervising a room full of trained humans
Who have been told that their thoughts are irrelevant,
That the expression thereof is unwelcome.

The silence can make a silence uncomfortable.
Only the explanation can make a silence painful.

Intrusion will make that silence unbearable.

Typecasting Couch

Who are you, to ask me to sit uncomfortably on strange furniture,
and, by hours and by weeks, expose myself?
Who are you to watch a stranger, unknown, uncared-for?
You are a slow-motion pornographer, a stop-motion pervert,
and I'm sure both of us are wondering
What kind of person I am, that I would come and see you.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Sized to Fit Me

As long as I remember, plus, I've always been on stage,
Acting ignorant or confident or brainy or my age.
Any contradiction there's the mask sized to fit me.
I believe that, born in nature, I'd be contradictory.

I'll never know.  To cleanse my soul I found was too much work,
When church was no more effort than the saying of some words,
So masks, which most take off and change, all stick to me instead,
and who I'd be without my mask's a voice inside my head.

Social Insect

Some might call a life lived logically a life unlived.
Who asks themselves "what is the marginal increase
In enjoyment for going out at night,
and is it worth the expenditure of effort,
Plus the risks incurred: the potential to embarrass myself...
That I might say something I don't mean...possible car accidents?"
Nobody says that.  Well, saying "nobody" is a lie.
You see, I'm quite the social butterfly.



I suppose I have to be some sort of social insect.
It's usually just me and the crickets here.

Why I Write, Part x+167: The Battle Hymn of the Unadaptable English Teacher

A day may come when the traditional curriculum fails,
When we assign contemporary texts,
and let students choose their assessments,
But it is not this day.

An hour of rigor and relevance,
When the cultural canon comes crashing down,
But it is not this day.

This day we write!

By all that you hold dear, I bid you,
Sit down in rows.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Princess Charming

I'm not shopping for a princess charming.
Though their smiles are disarming,
Their spending's quite alarming.

I'm not looking to prescribe myself a nurse.
I'm not one cheek in the hearse,
and their needles and schedules seem a curse.

Though I'm not looking to anyone's faith disparage,
I don't like the sound of a multiple marriage
and too many babies to fit in a carriage.

The song "Punk Rock Girl" made me smile.
The girl sounds like she'd be fun for a while,
But imagine when that's over.
I'd have to move a thousand miles.

I don't have a craving for a squeeze or a spouse,
But someone who will join me on the floor
When my day (or the people in it) knocks me down?
Yeah, I suppose that could work out.

Masks

Facelessness,
Being one cinderblock in a great gray edifice
Is self-effacing and self-erasing
and safe.
Being a part shields the whole.
Being apart, taking off the one-mask-fits-all,
Means running your own race,
Being judged on your finish time,
Your form,
and displaying just the right differences.
There were no style points on the assembly line.
Homemade humanity is held to a higher standard.

Why I Write, Part x+166: The Poet Is...(Pt. 2)

The poet is a wolf, and thus a predator,
Taking cues, cooperating to take down his prey,
Be it one idea or the whole world.

The poet is a snake, and thus a layabout,
Lounging in the sun until it comes time
For one short, quick strike.

The poet is a worm, and thus slimy,
Eating a slitering-path through Eve's apple,
Tasting every sin in turn.

The poet is a wolverine, and thus a glutton,
Clawing at the language, consuming all he can,
Until he must purge.

The poet is a lodgepole, and thus patient,
Waiting for the muse's searing heat,
Waiting for the burn to release seeds.

Psychics

I have no answers to life's paranormal mysteries,
But if psychics exist, I imagine they're inopportune.
I imagine they always arrive when you're inventorying secrets,
Or, worse, in the midst of momentary obsessions and dark distractions,
Running the same bad line from the same bad song a hundred times
Or contemplating perversions not truly your own,

And as I imagine this, I can't resist remembering
All of the most irredeemable ear-worms
Or committing all of the most gruesome sins in my heinous heart.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Seeing Is Believing

Years ago, I came, and I stayed,
and as I was leaving, you said,
"But I love you."

Some years later, I invited you,
and you stayed away, later saying,
"I still love you."

So many times over the years,
I trusted, and you betrayed, saying,
"I'm sorry.  I love you,"

But seeing is believing.

What If I'm...

What if you're not prepared?
What kind of question is that?
What if I'm not a short,
Neurotic, unattached,
Broad-shouldered, long-winded,
Distrusting, Disruptive,
Disillusioned, Detached,
Short-tempered, self-centered,
Prolific, Pedantic, Plagiarist Poet?

We can only be what we are,
No more, no less, and no different.
First you get used to it,
Then, you learn how to use it.

Why I Write, Part x+165: I Assumed

When I was fifteen, I assumed my writing was all me.
My peers couldn't do what I did because they'd never be as good.
When I was twenty-five, I assumed I simply opened my writing,
That inspiration was a gift from above, or from friends slightly above me.

Now, I assume that the water of everyone's life swims with poetry,
and I'm the only one who bothers to drag a net.

The Lightbulb

The cultural metaphor for an inspiration is the lightbulb,
But only the great ideas are incandescent or fluorescent.
These are uplifting,
Elevators out of grip-reach of grasping mediocrity.
I've heard it argued that inspiration strikes like a comet,
Violently and inevitably reshaping your world,
But I find that inspiration is like watching Jeopardy–
I learn the answer before I ask the question.

Real Estate


Real estate is sold more or less at first sight
To tinkerers–people who do something new with the light,
Who put in and take out 'til things are “just right,”

But despite my bulk, I am not a house.
In fact, I'm packed – as by hoarders – with doubt
That two people who think like that could work out.

Perhaps that's why they usually don't.

Dregs of the Light


Common consciousness matches snow and clouds as white,
But here, water is glass, holding dregs of the light.
On occasion, that light sticks around until the deep parts of the night,
Painting a late and lonesome walk just right –

I can tell that the world is blue.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Holiday

Holidays are as welcome as paychecks,
If not quite as frequent.
Nobody knows better than the two of us.
We had a promising start
(Which is another way of saying fast),
and decided on a Christmas Break
From each other, three years ago.

I think it's working.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Recall

I still recall your intellect,
and the heights it soared too,
and I recall its soft surface,
The kindness inside you,
and I recall how well it all was wrapped,
The smoothness and the color.

The name on the tag is another matter.

Wolves

Men are dogs; real men are wolves.
A real man says two things:
That which is direct,
and that which seems a direct assault,
But is play-fighting,
So even the poets among us
Hold the quill in a fist.
Not everyone knows the difference
(Or the fact, unsophisticated as it is).

Though it may not be my responsibility,
I apologize on their behalf.

I'm not sure I'm sorry.

Sweet on You

I want you.
I am not sweet on you.
I want you.
I want to rip and tear.
I want your clothes in little pieces
Next to a witch's brew
Of your sweat and my sweat
and a little you-know-what.
I want to tear the wet sheets
Off the wet bed,
Just so we can do it all again.
I want to leave a mess
Next to all the furniture you own,
and I want to tear off your shiny,
Pretty, well-sculpted, and useless veneer,
Just to see what's underneath.

I bet it stinks like sour milk.

That Woman, a Poem-in-Monologue

“That woman makes explosions of raindrops.
The evidence is all in the eyes.
That woman will eat you alive,
Son, though her teeth will feel like velvet,”

I said to myself, and did nothing,
The intelligent thing,
Because I'm a total idiot.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Why I Write, Part x+164: Strange Fruit

I eat from the same tree in changing soil.
My life bears the same fruit.  My life bears strange fruit.
My dreams of becoming a running back
Were replaced by wishing I could run again.
When I was fifteen, I said I'd write five books in ten years,
Which wouldn't be so funny if I had written one.
By the end if this year, I want to write more poems than Emily Dickinson,
Which wouldn't be so funny if any were as good,
But I will put practice where she kept her talent.

Because I never wished or planned to learn my lesson,
I no longer say "I wish to" or "I plan to."  I learned my lesson.
"Wishing" and "planning" are for people who invite failure and change,
and I don't.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Nostalgenfreude, Pt. 2

I look back at every race that I've run,
Every play that I've made, every ski trick I've done,
and I think of how I could have been better.

I look back at my miniature, snub-nosed career,
The high-velocity writing I did in one year,
and I think of how I could have been better.

I recall this conversant life that I've led,
Look back on acidic things that I've said,
and I think of how I could have been better,
But it's the brainless accidents of unmeaning,
The words I've borne unshaped by thought
That make me hate myself with all I've got.

Why I Write, Part x+163: Black and White

I write prose, and I walk in that black-and-white ground.
I live plot; I meet characters; I see setting, hear sound,
But when bored, wanting literate color to see,
I still turn to writing some more poetry.

The Advocate's Argument Against Himself

I got a head start in my life's headlong dash.
I plan to teach English, so I won't stack up mad cash.
I carry twelve pounds overweight, and one gross unconcern.
I tell many stories of mistakes, and few in which I learn.
I rattle like a teenage car, could quit starting any day.

How many years did you think you'd get out of me, anyway?

To Stack His Blocks

He rushed to stack His blocks up high.
He bumped them, and they fell.  He cried,
But only for a moment's time
Before His tower made its climb,
Once more to grace His family's den.
He'll smile 'til they fall again.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Let the Games Begin


I knew you were tired, 'cause you laughed at my jokes.
These cynic's deductions reward more than hope.
'Tis human to spout words that give those hopes wings.
Then retreat, excuse– "I say the craziest things."
Words of genuine interest sound exactly the same
As half-thought-out kindness or a prelude to games.

Valiumtimes Day

Some call this singles awareness day,
But every singleton I know craves
Oblivion, if they can't find romance.
The desire, I guess, is awareness's absence.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Why I Write, Part x+162: The Poet Is...

The poet is a writer, and thus a masochist,
An imperfect mind, moving an imperfect hand,
Demanding perfection.

The poet is a people-watcher, and thus a voyeur,
Peering unasked into the windows of minds
Which behavior leaves open.

The poet is an athelete, and thus an egotist,
Stretching without thought to health or reason,
All for recognition.

The poet is a philosopher, and thus a hypocrite,
Always writing about living
From the safety of though.

The poet is a blogger, and thus a pervert,
Always posting pictures of his soul
In various states of undress.

Novice Poetry

Our jobs are not our living.
Our homes are not our living.
Our selves are not our living.
Living is novice poetry,
Beautiful and incoherent.

All's Well

I descended from the birth canal
Into a world of light
and things to fall off of.
For someone whose whole life
Has been lived inside a basketball
Legroom is a screaming horror.

Freshman Jon looked down
The halls of his high school
With the hatred of a pessimist:
Who wants the old passed off as new?
Who wants tattered clothes
Wrapped for Christmas?

Senior Jon looked down
The halls of his high school
With the hatred of a housewife.
Familiarity breeds contempt.

Dropout Jon looked down
The miles of corridors inside himself
With the wide-eyed wonder
Of someone too frightened to scream,
and saw nothing.
He is not a solid mass.
He'd only behaved like one.
He is an unbounded labyrinth
Of thoughts and decisions,
Not all of them his own.
Lovecraft would cringe from him.

Halls are narrow paths
With doors at either end.
Stairwells climb or descend.
They merely tire us.
Worse is nonexistence, the unbegun.
Worse still is infinity.

All's well that ends.

Genie

A genie is the common wish.
It's both the server and the dish.
Today the genie lives in wealth,
Exists, in main, to serve itself.
A bank is just a giant bottle,
A home for this old demon cripple.

The genie can only possess
Those things marked by emptiness.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

The Nobody's Prayer, Pt. 2

Dust is invisible,
Trodden and forgotten,
But enough dust together,
Sufficiently agitated
Can destroy the world,
Or at least blind it.

I thought everyone needed to be reminded.

May Not Stop

There are thing in me that go bump in the night
and the dawn and the dusk and the broadest daylight.
They're clawing to get out.  They may not stop until I'm torn,
But I can't help but wondering how they were ever born,
What exactly I've been giving them to eat
and where they found the room it takes to breathe.

Friday, January 18, 2013

A Long Time Looking

Time flows downhill, like a glass pane.
You'll notice after a long time looking away.
They stand sentinel, buttressed by dead trees,
Roofed by a shingle-fall, like a pile of leaves.
Somehow, as a group, they're no worse for the weather.

This building and I will grow old together.

1999

My old ticker keeps on ticking at its sixty beats a minute,
But I alone knew–and for years now–that there's something come loose in it.
They say even dead watches on occasion know the time,
But one hand of my timekeeper's on nineteen ninety-nine.

Past Restlessness


I couldn't feel my heart's resting beat
Or my two numb hands on the wheel,
Passing restlessness and fear of change
As I raced back to the same old same.
My eyelids and my foot got heavy.
I had the most uncanny urge to rest.

When I opened my eyes, everything was still there.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

What It Is to Teach

Here, in a nutshell–what it is to teach:
You clamber up to the top of your field,
and see what you can see–
You're confronted by reality,
and a vision of what it could be.

The challenge is seeing the path in between.

Heads or Tails

Bloodless men in suits fight a green-blooded war,
and I can't make heads or tails of which side's righteous anymore,

But I don't think it's the flip that I've got a problem with.
It's the whole damn coin.

More


The golden smile of the sunlight's glint
Off of your hair is, in your case, redundant.
More unique is your mind, like a well,
Which never runs dry, deep from heaven to hell,
Learning and knowing joy everywhere.
I said I'd like to take you anywhere,

But you said no,

and I've cursed more at traffic.

I know that behind every decisive, desperate moment
Are hours of time wasted, not knowing what I want.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Bushels

How many hide their light so well that no one sees a glow?
But there are other ways to hide it.  You can simply play it slow,
Or you can move too fast from inspiration to display and demonstration,
and short yourself success through work and process, concentration.

Bushels take all shapes and sizes, but are all of the same measure.
Bushels measure fear of the world.  Bushels measure fear of the self.

Greg House Would Dig It, Pt. 2: Bound To

A hive of nomad herders bound to transitory fates,
We transfer schools, move out of towns, quit jobs and graduate,
and all the while, "moving on"'s our grow-and-heal refrain,
Or maybe it's the old excuse for "people never change."

Greg House Would Dig It

Eyes are drawn from quite a distance to your slimmest little waist.
It's fair to say you're reasoned, inoffensive in your tastes.
You don't mind PB, but prefer to spread some jelly or a rumor.
You like movies that review well, plus some others with light humor.
You want a man to give you two kids in one marriage, 'til the end,
But I think normal's boring.  Introduce me to your friend.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Mercy...

I seek that which cows me into wrath,
That becomes to me both the woods and the path,
Both my true worship and my idol,
Both the distraction and the task,
Both the lust to take and the thought to ask,
Both pure affection and my tarnishing, 
Leading to nothing:  my everything.

I throw myself upon the mercy...

The Nobody's Prayer

I am but dust.
Dust carries no burdens
and yet it chafes.

I pray for smoothness.
Missing that, I pray for isolation.
Failing that, I pray to gain
The will not to chafe.

An Advocate's Argument Against Reason

You say you're not looking; we're nothing alike.
Am I heart-born, or lower?  Is my brain on strike?
We were born years apart, and I'm near out of season.
That's the point.  Love's there to say, "hell with the reasons,"
and I'm here to ask, "how to know, but to try?"
But say you don't want me, and I'll say goodbye.

An Advocate's Argument for an Indifferent God

I can't say she met me, though she crossed my path.
You see, she's disabled by my high-school math,
Timesing depth in inches by height in feet
Raised to eyeballs and neurons that just can't compete,

But the fact that ants fit in my hands means that I lose
Any and all hope of wearing their shoes.

The Seekers of Truth

The seekers of truth, for the most part, mean well.
The seekers of truth put each other through hell.
They look so hard and so close in their seeking
That they don't realize they all looked at the same thing.
The worldwide total of all the ants
Don't need any more than one elephant.
They will never truly meet the first.

So you hug a tree, and I'll grab a rope
(and no one will step on the snake, we hope).
Let's do this thing.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Nothing Like

There's nothing in you like the beach,
Where cold surf pounds and drowns the weak,
Nor are you a meadow 'neath summer's sun skies–
You're not wide and expansive; you don't hurt my eyes.

You're not like mountains, nature's wall.
You aren't capped white; you're five feet tall.
There's some in you which nature fixed.
The rest?  Good raising's artifice.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Consider It Done

Move at your place?
Consider it done.
Double date with your best friend?
Consider it done.
Romantic spa weekend?
Put in your cabinets?
Meeting your parents?
Help with redecoration?
Take out the garbage?
Give up one more hobby?
Take a hard look at my whole life?
Give up or get out, now?
Our relationship?
Consider it done.

There Are Others

There are others who start my mind from a cold standstill.
There are others who start my loins from a cold standstill.
There are others who start me stuttering,
Shift my heartbeat straight from second to fourth
and drop my unimpressive rambling to the floor.

There are others who stop my gaze to a cold standstill.
There are others who stop my working, my breathing, and my short-term memory.
(Pursuant to the second amendment to the United States Constitution,)
There are many others who can stop my heart,
But you are the only one I'm afraid of.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

...Said Mr. Claus to the Junior Astronaut

Why don't I stop being old?
Because I've owned it.
Because I've earned it.
Being young was something I learned
Making mistakes.  I survived the consequences.
I even outlived the consequences
and then I outlived my desire for them.
People don't stop being old.
They get better at it.

Collision

Pavement's dark expanse, littered with broken glass
(Antisocial stars which steal the like from brighter lights),
Has a pronounced and silent usedness for its past.
The meeting of great forces is art in fast-forward,
Rending and tearing the real into the recognizable,
and when the world takes away the pieces it thinks are important,
What's left, life, is sprinkled with disillusionment, and better for it.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Friction

We say time drags on
Because we do not roll over it.
It clings to us, roughly.
It leaves us gasping, pink and bloody.
I'll always be from Pittsburgh,
Even if I could become a Montanan,
and a student teacher throws away his backpack,
Carries a briefcase with the tag still on it.
Experience and close acquaintance are forever.
We can't forget, but we forget why we remember.
They are a never-ending Rorschach test,
Making shapes of whispy clouds and week-old bruises.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Becoming

The alter-wine goes straight from my head,
and I feel it.  I am drunk in its absence.
I listen and do not hear.  I look harder and see less,
Only myself, becoming nothing.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Violently Adrift

Every snarled nook and cranny
Of my miss-struck, malformed brain
Together make the shortest, slowest,
Most lightly-derailed train.
Through life, I travel by routine,
Or I feel a jarring shift
(Though sometimes I don't feel it),
and I'm violently adrift.
I cannot keep the steel-clad path
That God laid down for me,
That was sculpted by the hands of men
In the bygone centuries,
So I'm hurtling through the spaces
Most know not to contemplate,
That only open up when you
Out run, outlive your fate,
When the finest craftsman, destiny,
Will sell no more to you,
and no advice or wisdom here
Can tell you what to do.
There, I'm enslaved by freedom,
By my movement paralyzed,
Left to tumble and decay until
I wake up and realize
That the extra time I'm stolen here,
It shouldn't be a curse.
I stole it in the first place
'Cause what came before was worse.
I don't know why I got here.
I don't know where I'll go,
and though I hate not knowing,
I love getting to know.
So though my path is bumpy,
Doubles back, drifts off the trail,
I'm curious how far I'll go
Before my engine fails.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

The Ends

Life is constricted by unbreakable habit.
Death, culture and connection are the ends of all freedom.
With them, we chafe.  Without them?
We are never without them.
We choose misery as the safer option.
Fear is our word for the absence of change.
We recoil from the homeless wanderer.
The dead were not meant to walk,
and you and I are meant never to meet again.

Friday, January 4, 2013

To a Muse, Who Uninspires the Poet

I have the teenager's knack
For saying idiot things around you.
You are like a black hole
For my eighteen remaining brain cells
That weren't killed in my misspent youth
(and boy, do I wish you'd been around for that?).
At least then, it would have been “cute,”
Or perhaps “age-appropriate.”
Instead, all I can do is write you bad meta-poetry.

Seriously, read this thing. It's awful.