*
FABLE
I fall asleep in my little boat.
I love.
I keep looking for a question.
I say: River, don’t reveal my name, all my nets, or the trees.
RIVER: That is not the question.
LONELY ORBIT: Something alluring will come along and find you.
I say: And how do I assemble my life without it?
BOAT: You continue.
BOAT: You continue.
*
*
SHITTY POEMS
The day is just beginning here
Gray and gone humid
Air shucked out of its center
I hear only the emptiness of a room
Where someone stopped speaking
My mind is outside my window
I cannot stretch out far enough
Am tired of being the subject of my own inquiry
I would like to do anything else
String up lights around the eaves of a barn
Chew on grass in the summer evening
Or, conversely, fight an unseen evil
See, I can move very fast
And very quiet
It would never know I am coming
Not even love is quiet as me
Right now I see straight lines
They torment me
Like Gregory Peck in Spellbound
With his crazy black eyes
And his straight razor
Pressed against the contour
Of Ingrid Bergman’s cheek
When you get crazy eyes
I have to put on my glasses
And quote Freud
How irritating!
I am only drawing from a shallow surface of experience
I have lost my desire to juxtapose
It’s not easy to go jumping around in the ether
It’s not easy to sit in a chair by your window
Fearing the black hole in your head
I have a strong need for action in the face of decay
When you say, plunge through the planisphere
I get excited
I don’t think you can write a poem about stasis
The next line is a movement
It could be in any direction
Although you have still not got very far
You are still in a chair
And you could be anywhere
In the Corsican mountains
On a dirt path headed to the river
A crossroads
Which is where magic happens
Wendy’s teacher said if you’re writing shitty poems
You just have further to walk
Through the shitty poem forest
Keep walking through the forest
And you will be in a new forest
With different, less threatening trees
I would like to write as if I were dead
Why else would you want to shake loose
Your only hold on this world?
*
ILK journal 