existential midlife crisis poem #147

waiting for 

a door to 

open my 

ambivalence— 

bottomless

sunday's prone & dreaming body

out the windows peeked 
the next intersection's stop-
lights repeat red, repeat red

hinted hills 
i do not see
tinted tree 
weeping its gold 
into the gutter 
reluctantly undressed its 
spindly limbs pinning 
the sky's cushion 
its gold streaming
and i am full 
of grief

outside, an invisible broom sweeps the moist parking lot 
so quiet and desolate, i wonder if the city has been evacuated 
and no one told me. outside the scatter is increased but 
in here i am lonely and flailing, diving lens long into petal 
and leaf, bark and blade. 

drowsily stepping into the coolest hue 
you could not ever possibly describe 
succumbing lately to 
the late night under pull 
hissing neon, target of the accused 
i told you
do not sing to me of spring 
in the midst of all this leaf fall 
entering the tunnel, knowing it's a long ride 
as layer after layer of mist is pulled from 
sunday's prone and dreaming body. 

accept what is, 
as if you could. 

the day is short armed 
and living too long a route to run 
for the promise of a vicious hit 

wearing a chain of dependent 
clauses around your breath 
that a piano's tinkling couldn't possibly 
solve anything and yet tries to anyway. 

strolling past your unmade mind 
you, habit's prisoner, want to 
crawl back into its bed 

as if you knew all along 
where you were going, 
as you tucked yourself 
back into your trap 

as if you knew, 
as if you knew...

The Naomi Poems by Saint Geraud (aka bill knott)

bill knott's collected poems can be found at the link below and downloaded for FREE:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_kyor0CFAKqUkc5clh4VmgxeDA/edit?usp=sharing&pli=1

autumnal to pieces

orange sweaters parade up morrison, munching their way toward the construction party.

moving van tows a sedan, front wheels lifted, while a giant, dark chocolate teddy bear reclines behind the wheel.

sunk too deep in his armchair, an older man, cloud singed and mistaken for sane, cackles alone.

outside and just below, a couple abruptly departs, clicking off the autumn show.

leather strap skinny, woman with a face creased like the oldest jacket you always wear, emerges from the pterodactyl wing of this pickup truck morning, barely filling her rancher's clothes. 

young woman sweatered in collegiate devotion deposits her Chihuahua in between the sidewalk tables as she stops inside for her morning coffee while her dog anxiously waits, leashed but untied, ears erect, head swiveling each way for sympathy. watching from behind the cool glass, i feel like an accomplice to this tiniest of trembling.

an unseen man sits at the furthest table, pushes with the tip of an index finger the plastic black ashtray  across the silver table's surface toward another unseen man, dressed in dark, his obscene need for nicotine grimaces him as he frisks the street with desperate dark eyes, risking publicity, it is probably too dark inside him to see any of this spectacular color, too dark to see anything but tunnel, brisk fingers scurry inside that dirty yawn for some needed, half-swallowed thing. he is shadow's squirrel stealing neglected last drags. i don't recall when he arrived or from where, my eyes couldn't hack his encrypted presence, and so back under covers he crept, unseen again. 

pasted on the back of the stopped bus, a mash of messages keeps my head up: can you have faith in your heart? 

leaping in the leaf stream, in the least little swirl.

alone like him, my healing routines fail to carry me toward love, and like him, i am a fish compelled by need to become amphibious, and thus, doubly exposed. 

long time taken 
as if you could 
measure that with 
a million year ruler 
such a long time taken
to escape the murderous.

sun parked in a white box across the street 
thirsty for color, wind swipes the dainty scarves
dangling from the young, now half-dressed tree.

you were never
invincible, 
just lucky.

deep dark & dangerous

this afternoon a young girl sheepishly approached the cash register and placed exactly one book, titled "DEEP DARK & DANGEROUS," on the counter. as i flipped the book over to scan its bar coded bottom, i noticed its price, $3.95, and thought to myself, how affordable! normally, thingshat are DEEP DARK & DANGEROUS are much more expensive than $3.95. indeed, they often cost your life...

the most loveless kiss

he stabs a pink ham hock paw into the black plastic gap toothed ash bowl, fishing for sick sticks he stares as he stabs, defiantly vulnerable in his need - nicotine lurched him, pried him from narrow daylight, exposed him here in the day's broad window. he is a hungry ghost that filches the unfinished, stealing strays, bored cravings abandoned too soon. how many mouthes has this man tasted? all that DNA smoked forward, lip to lip. how intimately he knows them, has inhaled the tiniest increment of their being into himself as he, the unwitting kiss collector, furls himself back into our agreed upon shade. dressed head-to-toe in degrees of blue, as if he couldn't settle on the exact hue of melancholy that he could comfortably wear in shame, all his clothes too huge, as if trying to leave room, a place of his own to hide his ash tipped despair. i don't remember him sitting inside with us, he just appeared, out there, his face a permanently clenched & swollen fist, stabbing & glaring, those fierce screwdriver eyes chipping sparks of glacier blue.

burnt songless mourning

i want the me inside your breath, the breath inside your me. all this weeping is making me unsteady, the penance though, is only intermittent. brief bursts of ransomless grief, what do you want from me? and who snuck all this casual color into the frame, pane pasted works of fire, flame filled geometric figures, such instant radiance, truly, i am autumn throttled. you running with your head up to track what soars between garden top & cloud cast, a coat rack of feathers burns flat behind the cool glass, but not for us. absence permitted expression, extracted in fact, piece by piece. it took weeks to complete the absence in time to freeze.  hey you, burning behind glass, how long is your instant? is it too soon? everything alive is reaching, why aren't you? scriptless among the leaf fall, jacketed among all this undressing disrobing unleafing. wear your crown of corrugated bloom, don your shield of bark rust, i will find some tree to feel when i need to lean against some solid being. racing circles stirs the fallen, only to settle again in their graves. scooping tenderness, finches flee the burnt songless morning. yarn bombed torsos, dressed in stitches like some kind of suture exhibit, parade past with their cups & saucers, seeking seats in the jazz den. on the other side, limbs expose the sky's diagram, begin the skeletal exhibit. and so you take your chapel cast gaze and scrape its blue chalk along the artfully sharded beneath you. dissipated bodies, divorced from affection, float amid the muck. in the spite pond, you eat your shade cake, ingesting spadefuls of darkness as you squat inside your light, wearing your shade cape, watching the tiniest hand claw free from wound.

afternoon of therapeutic monologues

afternoon of therapeutic monologues
uncertain whether i was reading
or misreading signs never posted
she arrived shut, a book determined
not to be read, yet
flaunting the presence of its text.
i arrived unaware of the stories
i was holding,
packed tight & hidden like drugs
for a dealer trying to avoid prison.
hoping to write a new romance,
confessing instead old guilts
we sat inside the afternoon
drinking a grassy tea whose water was
never quite hot enough to steep
we pretended the dragon was white.
leaning over the koi pond before we departed,
we admired that perfected pool of heaven
calm enough to reflect the overcast sky
such a slight distance from garden to dragon.

poem based on the picture "Billie and Seabird" by Corey Arnold

saltwater struck 
her icy eyes, her strong 
wind tested chin, the way 
her hair falls, storm tossed,  
like seaweed laid to rest 
across the deck of her 
cheek, just 
recently torn from deep, 
such ferocious placidity, 
inviting the bird 
to rest against her
motherly curves, the bird 
accepting, almost attempting 
to suckle above 
that sliver of moon 
peeks beneath 
the wave she wears 
over a heart
marked by ink.

Corey Arnold Billie and Seabird, 2011





http://www.hartmanfineart.net/artist/gallery/90/

if you typed "if you" into google's search engine and discovered a poem...

if you know what i mean 
if you give a mouse a cookie
if you seek amy
if you close your eyes
if you want to sing out
if you like pina coladas
if you told me to
if you could only see
if you leave me now
if you can't hang

if you, if you...

if you had to choose one gun, 
if you had to choose one financial statement, 
if you had to choose one food, 
if you had to choose one song, 
if you had to choose one ethical system deontological or utilitarianism, 
if you had to choose one rifle, 
if you had to choose one pokemon, 
if you had to choose one handgun, 
if you had to choose one book

if you, if you...

the suicide report

completed, as if it were a grade.

completed, as if they had passed,

and they had, they had. completed,

as if what was severed & stolen could

ever be finished instead of dangling

there indefinitely, limb torn by a storm.

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/465339