Saturday, May 31, 2014

By: Any Other Name

If you go back to the beginning, your entrance was unclothed.
No one's born answering to “Montague” or “Capulet” or “Rose.”
The world calls names and uses packaging so it can comprehend.
You've spent life wrapped in labels, living up–or down–to them,
But if the canners missed something, some ingredient inside,
and if it wants to see the light again, I'll take it for a ride.
See, when I was made, QC was sick, or sleeping on the job.
I can show you all the places expectation has forgot.

Friday, May 30, 2014

I Contain Duelists, or Walt Whitman Would Dig It

Whitman, a populist, contained multitudes.
I contain not a woman, and very few dudes.
I contain duelists, intransigent brothers.
One geeks out at some things; one's too cool for others.
One's politically cynical; one debates such things often.
One seeks to move on while one seeks the forgotten.
On nary a thing do these brothers agree,
'Cept if something seems normal, it isn't for me.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

To the Inoffensive but Defensive

I'm not a lawyer, a judge, or a court.
I won't snitch you down or write up a report.
I know you're not guilty (at least, I assume),
But I do kindly ask you to please leave the room
'Til you leave talk of following laws by their letter
and join our talk, of how one could do even better.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Dear Parents, Newsreaders, and Elementary School Teachers

Doubts are wise, and doubts are solid, when they pull reasons behind,
But without, they're the translucent, tasked with leading the half-blind.
Worse are hateful words and gossip, which nothing and no one serve.
Unnecessary and disgusting, they're LFTB made of words.

So go ahead and talk. The first amendment means the most.
Go ahead and talk. When thinking dies, it needs a ghost.
Go ahead and talk, because no matter what you say,
I won't let it shorten my day.

Friday, May 16, 2014

The Visceral Joy of the Biker

For years, I dreamed that I could fly,
But this dream didn't have to die.
Instead, it found itself replaced
By something different on its face
But similar in ways that count.
I pilot earthly, urban mounts.
I don't feel wind blow through my hair;
The rest of me cuts through the air.
I bank through turns as if on wings.
I hardly know of better things.
Just kick, stomp, twist, and off I go:
The closest thing to flight I know.

To a 1979 Honda CG

When first we met, my nerves of steel
Turned melted cheese and pounded veal.
To say I had reactions mixed
Is like to say you needed fixed.
But th'understatement of them all:
I love the ride now, bumps and all.

May 16th 2014

Brilliant plans of man, frustrated;
Students who procrastinated;
Mid-unit review holidays;
Side conversations and delays;
Lessons short-cut or derailed;
Passes, missings, excused, and fails,
Or things impossible to grade;
Review games just some students played:
Overall grade–
I'm glad I came.

An Anecdotal Argument for 1:1 Student/Faculty Ratios

Another girl learns
To turn
Her hair before a phrase.
Someone closes his mouth,
Turns his eyes to the south,
So he can get a raise.
Someone leads a boy to think
That prowess, courage, strength
Are for the body only.
It's amazing how rapid
Life can teach girls to be vapid
Or otherwise be lonely.
The worldwide water cooler
Makes it so easy to slip
Into celebrity gossip,
and another mind
Dies on the vine.
Let's get there faster next time.

Rectangular Humanism

My brain is inalienable,
Impregnable to invasion from outer space.
I was seven years learning right from left;
I'll be seven learning right from wrong.
These truths I hold to be self-evident:
That all men were created separate,
and were endowed by their creator
With somewhat more than the other great apes
In certain various dimensions.
I suppose that makes me the humanest.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Self-Portrait By an Artist Running Out of Paint, Pt. 2

We are only ourselves in our reactions,
Those small, unscheduled intermissions
In this practiced, improvised performance,

and I, by reading and reading and reading,
In my quotidian quest to learn everything
Am finding that all this reading and knowing

Have half-begun to compromise
My potential for surprise.
The mirror's averted from my eyes.

I see the painted back instead.
How long 'til I'm a stranger in my head,
In my own house?

Self-Portrait By an Artist Running Out of Paint, Pt. 1

I am not an art …
I teach an art as aerobic …
It is the only way to do so …
It is so much work to do so …
Like one who sets a food budget that leaves her …
I find I have never been so tired for so …
I find I have never been so tired of …
I find it useless to wonder if I could be an …
As useless as wondering if I ever was an art …
I am as much one as the other …

Friday, May 9, 2014

They All Look the Same

Whether bulls and crescent stars, or lame old donkeys and elephants
Surrounded by a sucking cyclone of superfluous sycophants
Speaking for a cabal of corrupt and crass and callous cads
By violating viewers' vision with a myriad of dreary ads,
They all trade on our worst fears so, we'll trade in our freedom.
I really hate election years, although I guess I know we need 'em.

My Red Rose, or Miss 338A

You sure know how to make a memory.
You'll always stay in the back of my mind,
Right next to that time I fell off my bike
Almost on top of road-kill ground-squirrel–
I never miss it;
I rarely regret it;
I'll never forget it.
You gave me lessons about life,
A short-story I never did write,
and the most awkward, most uncomfortable
Six minutes and thirty-two seconds of my life.
It's about time I thanked you,
Or maybe it's a decade too late.

I hope you read this.


I pray you don't.



Sincerely, Mr. Ninth of February, 2004

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Check Your Six

I promise I won't let the trash sit for days.
I promise I won't smoke 'til our house sits in haze.
I promise I won't ever say you look fat.
I promise I won't trash your friends or your cat.

I promise I won't just watch baseball all day.
I promise I'll go look for work right away.
I promise I won't blow you off all the time.
I promise I won't put our business online.

I promise I won't be charmed away by another.
I promise I won't come between you and your mother.
I promise that soon, I'll come to the point of this rhyme:

I promise this won't be like last time.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Consciously Irrational

The facts are in, though they've never been out.
The facts that came in can suit only doubt.
The fact that you're still green, and I am nearly ripe,
The fact that you aren't, and won't be, and couldn't be my type,
The fact that I'm a swelling oval, and you're parallel lines,
They give me little pause, just enough to say “it's fine.”
The fact that I can't bear what you believe,
The fact that you'd prefer I leave,
The fact that you're a completely different breed,
They cool my mind, but not my need.

The Sinner's Dilemma



I spent ten years trying to prove you don't exist,
Until age fourteen, when I turned too cool to persist.
Since I don't always think and I can't always feel
I spent the next half my life convinced I'm not real.
This problem I have swallowed so many hours:
To remove one of us from the equation's within our power,
But the people I've wronged?  We'll need another bus.
If you redeem the world, this town's not big enough for the both of us.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

20/40

As friends graduate, move on, my mind dwells on the road.
I've traveled parts with people; in the whole length, I'm alone.
It's best traveling light on such uncertain paths.
Once confident in the route, God changes it fast.
If you asked me a year ago what I'd be doing today,
I'd say almost the same thing, just half a world away.
Hindsight's not just 20/20. It's the luxury of rest.
And foresight, done at high speed? 20/40 at best.

Why I Write, Part x+260: Why I Unwrite

In my youth drawn by song into meter and rhyme,
But with no sense of my place in it, and no sense of time,
I've learned to treat great masters' sweat-born inventions
As an Empire to fight against, as merely conventions,
So I cover over them, thinly connect them, bite into them, a spider.
I'm no author of record. I'm only the unwriter.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Playing Doctor, Pt. 2

Diagnosis: Mood disorder that doesn't exist.
Symptoms Include: Tendency to insist
On passionate wording of grand declarations
Announcements, pronouncements, and their explanations;
Attempts to regale you with tales of past glories,
Or at least entertain you with shaggy-dog stories;
Preferring my eyes' lies to other, wiser senses;
Ignoring the banalities of income and expenses;
and disdain for life, contemning days and nights
For you, and somehow thinking that it's right.

Playing Doctor, Pt. 1 (Why I Write, Part x+259)

Diagnosis: Mood disorder that doesn't exist.
Symptoms Include: Tendency to insist
On passionate wording of grand declarations,
Announcements, pronouncements, and their explanations;
Attempts to regale you with tales of past glories,
Or at least entertain you with shaggy-dog stories;
Preferring my eyes' lies to other, wiser senses;
Ignoring the banalities of income and expenses;
and disdain for life, contemning days and nights
To write.

The Perils of Picking the Wrong House-Sitter

The roses are dead
and the violets are, too.
A thumb that's not green
Leaves vacationers blue.

Friday, May 2, 2014

Not Dedicated to Dogs; Better for Bears

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet.
It tastes better than poo.

Alanis Morissette Would Dig It

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
I've been known to write poems;
I'll write none about you.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Collegial Conference

Three eminent young scholars (or students, anyway)
Engaged in heated argument, sans evidence, debate
About digital expression, and specifically what face
One should show to those who've seen it (also, the NSA).