My poem “Hips For The Hops” was recently published in “Learn Then Burn: a Modern Poetry Anthology for the Classroom.” The book includes some of my favorite performance poets and is edited by my homies Tim Stafford & Derrick Brown. You can find it on amazon or straight from the publisher at www.WriteBloody.com.

NaPoWriMo Day 3 of 30

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
- Leslie Poles Hartley

There is a woman with a laugh like a viking.
She is on the phone. Outside her office,
the one with the windows, the others in their cubicles
 
can hear because after all, walls are only walls
when they are walls. They listen because she
is a bulldozer in the shape of a smile.
 
Between a signature and a satellite conference
she leaves the building,
walks ten steps, lights a cigarette,
 
each one her last. She’d quit if there were time.
Back in her office there is a blinking light,
three new voice mails, two calls on hold, thirteen e-mails.
 
She answers a question, writes a memo.
One floor down a crisis averted. She bangs her fist
on her desk. They fall silent.
 
At home she will open a window,
kiss her fiancé, feed the cat, play spider solitaire
and remember the days when it didn’t work.

Happy Birthday Sis.

Hey folks,
I’m participating in the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge. 30 poems in 30 days. I’m not going to post all the poems here as many of them will probably be, well, shitty. If you’d like to check out the poems I’m doing this month go here: http://thecureforyourales.blogspot.com.

I’m sure I’ll post a few here too. Probably second or third drafts. You guys here at TCFYA get the good stuff. If you’d like to learn more about NaPoWriMo go to http://readwritepoem.org. If you are taking the challenge please send me a link to your work!

A short movie about Slam Poetry, Street Poetry, and Protest Poetry. There’s footage of poets on the streets of Chicago, at war protests in Washington D.C., and at the Green Mill where Slam Poetry started. Poets are some of the most passionate, corny, funny, serious, smart, philosophical, sad, and above all dedicated people you will ever meet. — Wes Heine (director)

I make a quick cameo at 1:15 right after Nina Corwin and Tim Cook. Enjoy!

The Bartender Dreams of White Moths by Karen Weyant

Of flutters pounding in her ears, tissue wings
snagging on loose wires of screen doors, burnt
crisp on streetlights, bent backwards around
the antennae of a car. She wakes up sweating,
thinking of bar napkins tearing on cans of beer,
bar stools, the heels of work boots heavy
with dust. One regular always sports jeans
stained with white paint, another wears
the wings of sweat stains under his arms.
Smoke rests in her mouth, coats her throat,
splits her skin. The jukebox echoes, Garth Brooks
scraping her hips, pinching her thighs.
She remembers all the last calls slipping
through the back door, hoping the night
insects grasping the screen will fly away.
They only cling tighter.

 
 
Dancing in Water

The ballet looked like
a school of colorful fish.
I have been drowning.
 
 

I apologize for this post. My love of puns and humorless jokes lead me here. I just couldn’t stop myself. With that said, I present to you Worthless Halloween Haiku…
 
 
 
Skeleton’s Birthday
Skeleton said, “It’s
the anniversary of
the day I was bone.”
 
 
 
Queen of the Nile’s Son
The child of Egypt
said, “That’s my MUMMY! she’s an
abusive parent.”
 
 
 
Pumpkin Pi
The ratio of
a pumpkin’s circumference to
its diameter.

My good friend Lindsey Mineff and I gave each other an artistic prompt recently. Here’s the dirt: We each made a playlist of songs we like on youtube for each other. We then needed to create a piece of art inspired by or while listening to each other’s respective playlists.

The playlist she made can be found here.
The poem I wrote as a result of listening is here.

The line that most directly relates to her playlist is “a song in the shape of a rabbit” and if you notice, the third video on her list is “Who Can Win a Rabbit” by Animal Collective. Mostly, I attempted to capture the mood and movement of her selections while borrowing a few lines from bits and pieces of some of my unfinished poems. I find it interesting that Lindsey and I both decided to revisit unfinished projects for this prompt rather than start from scratch.

The playlist I created for Lindsey is here.
Lindsey is a photographer by trade (Check out her amazing photos) but while listening to my compilation she decided to paint. She painted a piece that pays homage to Dr. Suess’ famous piece “Fooling Nobody.” She entitled her Suess-inspired painting “Fooling Everybody.”

Lindsey had this to say:
I originally started in early July and when I did I was trying to replicate Suess’ original exactly. I got very frustrated because he painted his ink on paint and I was painting well, paint on paint…I stopped working on it for over a month. When I decided I was going to finish it no matter what…I worked on it while I played your playlist. I don’t know if I can say at exactly which song it all started to come together but I realized I was better off making it more my own. That’s when I started to make it more of a ‘pop art’ version of the original.

Lindsey and I would like to challenge you to find someone to do this exercise with and share your playlists and artistic results here. Or, create a playlist, leave it as a comment, and maybe someone will use it as a prompt. I might just post the results! Good luck!

1.
i have always been a man on boats
unsure of footing on shore
a man of hats
of cover
a song in the shape of a rabbit.

I have always wanted
to be like smoke rings, clap-hands,
quick step, able to hold on
swishing rent week behind wrinkles
speech loud bounced off curtains
vulnerable reaching and tough.

when i speak of love
i tend to talk about myself.
these are my skeletons in the piano.
they swallow whole notes
and spit them back
like ghost fountains.

2.
under an angry moon
hairs on my neck,
like second hands,
stand at attention
a poor man’s werewolf.
I don’t offer up my scars.
All I said was.
the moment was small enough
to fit inside her palm.

we have lifted ourselves
across this dead city.
smiling street lamps
tear down the day.
we are creatures with fists
through our last defense.
i’ve said a militia of sorries;
the kind of apologies
that sink through wind like grenades
blow pieces of myself
into a thousand search warrants
wanting easy answers.
our stories are not crafted from stone.

we block out names in tree bark—
dogs at a stump.

3.
she is an early thigh
more bird than bourbon
flew from rooftop to shoreline
found me aging in oak:
whiskey on a bed of barley.
my nights teemed a frozen red
unable to escape the winter
in my stomach.

even now it keeps me
from remembering her hands.
while she is gone
they mix the pancakes here with milk
fry plantains without cardamom.
there are love letters
wrapped around our throats
but our mouths are missing tongues.

Which one are you? Why?
———————
Two Hangovers by James Wright

Number One

I slouch in bed.
Beyond the streaked trees of my window,
All groves are bare.
Locusts and poplars change to unmarried women
Sorting slate from anthracite
Between railroad ties:
The yellow-bearded winter of the depression
Is still alive somewhere, an old man
Counting his collection of bottle caps
In a tarpaper shack under the cold trees
Of my grave.

I still feel half drunk,
And all those old women beyond my window
Are hunching toward the graveyard.

Drunk, mumbling Hungarian,
The sun staggers in,
And his big stupid face pitches
Into the stove.
For two hours I have been dreaming
Of green butterflies searching for diamonds
In coal seams;
And children chasing each other for a game
Through the hills of fresh graves.
But the sun has come home drunk from the sea,
And a sparrow outside
Sings of the Hanna Coal Co. and the dead moon.
The filaments of cold light bulbs tremble
In music like delicate birds.
Ah, turn it off.

Number Two:
I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again

In a pine tree,
A few yards away from my window sill,
A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,
On a branch.
I laugh, as I see him abandon himself
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break.

as it happens

his raw hand
hot saucepan from stove top

oil splash hard wood
skin, a pink dough on rise

dinner bursts open,
a hot dam -

fire does not wait to be acknowledged
brain is a home pain strolls slowly into

cuts a swath
a building fills with smoke

pain will register
in the morning

white-heat shed kidnaps
the dry of a city-side

a spark barn-storms from chimney
the market turns bright ash

it bellows a flame’s tune