Salt and scum of the earth

Automatic hum highways and passing landscape
inverted in the rearview mirror of memories
scribbled like crops the farmer collects.
Words like “death” hide in beeswax.
Lick your lips, taste the sweat
of infantile ideas. Damaged cuticle beds
hold nails but no hammers to hammer
thoughts into the plaster page of notebook.
Birds’ nest blues hark the hawks
of war, watch them go about their
bath and bed and battle times.

But tonight will be booze and breasts and,
oh, that’s so boring. The bar’s panacea,
a glass half-empty we’ll sip down
to buzzed bliss in our thirst for idealists.
Sirens outside, the squeals of squalor,
and cursive thoughts meet Columbus Circle,
try to navigate the subway’s cement.
Sift through crowds, flour through fingers, and
dear sirs or madams become Pound’s petals
you’ll always remember to remember.

Drop the paper, let the black and white
bloom like atom bombs in the tray.
You’ll find Detroit luminescent,
falsely beautiful; its caution tape lines
read backwards are paradigms of true
crime control in the police state of mind.
But forget this bag of bones and veins and
blood’s jail cells. It comes down to the
hair curls that float to the bathroom tiles
of everywhere, and the unheard razor’s song,
automatic hum.

writing prompt: making lists

beliefs and disbeliefs

I believe that the world is primary,
and that God is good
(or a good idea anyway),
and that everyone looks at the sun,
it's just so damn beautiful

I believe you should be honest and open,
because death is inevitable
(which is another thing I know,
but wish I didn't)
and everyone deserves a chance
for you to love them.

I believe in that Girl Scout credo
of leaving a place
better than you found it,
which is to say
that I also believe
there's no reason to eat meat

Maybe because I believe
we're all connected,
(not in some pseudo-Buddhist way)
so I think there has to be something
at least almost as good
as a "free market" sounds

But there are things I understand
yet can't comprehend,
like how the universe is
always e x p a n d i n g,
and how people often like reality TV
much better than reality

And I don't know how you could
marry someone you didn't love,
or abandon the someones you did--
I'd never kill a man
in Reno, or anywhere,
and I'd hate to watch him die.

See I believe in lots of things:
the sensibility of a closed fist
(during rock paper scissors)
smoking cigarettes in the winter
(to keep out the cold),
and avoiding cliches
(like the plague).

Maybe we're all believers.

From Katie's prompt: "Write a poem which includes the line 'ashtrays go astray.'"

ashtrays go astray
a gutted cell phone splays
cigarette butts and grey dust
over books whose pages
yellow like bruises
of atrophied memory

beer bottles crowd the table
like gravestones
commemorating cathexis
of long-dead nights
and the fan wheezes
weakly through nicotene
clouds of conversation

we swat away, lazily,
like the hum of flies
trailing from the open fridge
whose half-light casts shadows
where none were before.

when we remember
to check the VCR's clock
we'll groan at those ghostly
green digits-- 1:17
and collapse in alcoholic heaps

entwined on twin beds
rubbing thin beads
of sweat between our bodies
until finally the warm
darkness tugs us to sleep.

the rearview mirror
suspends my spectral
face over receding tree lines,
bifurcates metallic siding

headlights wink above grinning grills
and we freight forwards
for fear, for beauty
for maximum efficiency

the dash becomes my ottomon
and my shoed feet
obscure the flicks of white paint
passing with the seconds
piled like roadside rubble,
the rawest mountain of the landscape

its heaps of grey
unshared moments separate
us like the snake of a line
between one black dot,
me, to one black dot,
you, superimposed over
the sad pastels of
amateur cartography

bridge ices before road
and the speed is limited
to 55,
the sun licks my ankles
and the engine sings me to sleep

I will wake up in the
sepia dim of a tunnel
that slices through a countryside
I didn't miss,
and didn't miss me.

citric silence (a pantoum)

With our differences and a jug of orangeade between us
We could feel the world spin.
The engine hummed a Hindu mantra
And we just drank it in.

We could feel the world spin
Perched in the middle of a parking lot
And we just drank it in,
In the citric silence of nighttime

Perched in the middle of a parking lot,
You murmured something meaningful
In the citric silence of nighttime,
But only the moon could hear.

You murmured something meaningful
And the engine and I purred back.
But only the moon could hear
That the silence was most honest.

tag

I punched your shoulder—
tag, you’re it,
so it was your turn
to be a playful predator
and my turn to pant like it’s life-or-death
when it’s really run-or-rest,
like trick-or-treat,
you-or-me

and never both
because they conflict
and contradict,
playing their own game of tag, you’re it

where “base” is your bed,
the ampersand between our pronouns
and you always chase me there,
but the game’s over on arrival.

so I cover my eyes
and count aloud so you can hide.
And I can wish between the numbers:
“One…I…
two…wish…
three…it didn’t have to be like this,”

and at twenty I’m already hunting again,
and you are being hunted.

at least the rules are clear,
and our roles are clear,
when everything else is muddied like my knees
that prompt parental probing:
“What have you been up to?”

And boy, have I been up to something.

whichever comes first