Thursday, June 23, 2011





Rhinoscapes, Eggscapes, Landscapes and Potted Meatscapes. We should all try to scape more things, sometimes. But especially when our chairs can't stop rolling over our donuts.

How super-famous are you? I'm not very super-famous. Not super-famous at all, really. But I do write poems, so it's only a matter of time.

That is just one feeling I've had. Another is this:

Letter to a Lover

Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport.
My heart feels like a field of calves in the sun.
My heart is wired directly to the power source of mediocre songs.
I am trying to catch a ray of sunlight in my mouth.

I look forward to showing you my new furniture.
I look forward to the telephone ringing, it is not you,
you are in the kitchen trying to figure out the coffee maker,
you are pouring out the contents of your backpack.

I wonder if you now have golden fur?
I wonder if your arsenal of kind remarks is empty?
I remember when I met you you were wearing a grey dress,
that was also blue, not unlike the water plus the sky.

They say it’s difficult to put a leash on a hummingbird.
So let us be no longer the actuary of each other!
Let us bow no longer our heads to the tyranny of numbers!
Hurry off the plane, with your rhinestone covered bag

full of magazines that check up on the downfall of the stars.
I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the moving stairs.


Actually, that's a Matthew Zapruder feeling, but I sympathize with it.

A few months ago MZ told me that the single most efficacious circumstance on his poems was when he read, on camera and at the cameraman's behest, to a single woman at a gas station. Being that close to someone who easily could not care was a revelation in voice and purpose and scope. Poemscope...to keep the poem both practical and mystical without have one devour the other. You want magic, yes, but you want the kind of magic that is putting in change for one soda and having two pop out. That is thinking of a loved one just before they unexpectedly call you. That is Apple Cider Donuts at the Farmer's Market. And yet, none of these things are beyond reason, resting somewhere between hope and expectation. I feel this is a good place for poems to be, somewhere between hope and expectation. A reverie, maybe, but more like the end of that poem...that moment your lover's head crests the horizon of an escalator, and your heart explodes a little.

A series of tiny heart explosions...

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