Not lost in my closet

There are 13 extant undestroyed love letters

with high metabolic rates swimming in my closet.

Not lost.

Invertebrate love letters from offspring pups^[10]

Carnivorous love letters from male dogs and boars^[2]

Love letter from a cold water putrified fish^[1]

All together, love letters are a raft. Love letters are buoyant.

But this depends on the temperature [and] the sheer

enjoyment factor which typically characterizes love letters.

Like making waterslides and [then] sliding on them or,

finding small stones and [then] playing with them.

NapoWriMo Day 24 Prompt: Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else –Here’s the Wiki on Otters I used.

who were you in my dream?

when you sleep with a window ajar

and a third eye that never shuts,

the brain tends to buzz like daylight television.

old, and fuzzy.

i’m not talking about the intensity of dream specificity

but an amalgam of mad men voices.

i’m trying to say Freud and his stupid little penis push in regularly,

asking about the promise of tomorrow:

could you live like this? his pupil intensifies through

a glass monocle. could you really?

maybe not without a beauty rest, i pledge.

maybe not without a first class sleep like

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, H.G. Wells, or George Bernard Shaw.

in this dream, sheep are for shit.

NaPoWriMo Day 18

& submitted to TSM

we never biked to the moon

we never biked to the moon or counted our steps.

we counted rail road ties and broken glass pieces.

we rode to Eisenhower or Brown’s park. we rode South of town,

to statues or waterways, to the swimming pool

with bath towels wrapped around our necks.

sweaty president heads, or Susan B. Anthony coins

wrapped between soft finger pads and steel handlebars.

when we rode closer to home, we smelled hamburger helper,

and counted the number of times mom cupped both hands

around the corners of her mouth to belt out a siren call~

“time to come home… time to come home… time to come home.”

so we went inside. locust shells hanging tight to the front elm.

we never asked for the moon. we never saw the moon.

NaPoWriMo Day 17

Dear Drunk Poet,

Do you ever stop talking to yourself –administering self-prose Prozac? Is this what you mean by employing whatever means necessary to get out of bed– climb, or free fall? How is it you land on this: there’s enough peanut butter and honey to sustain you.

I’m concerned. You say there’s a sky full of sharks to drink. You say you have the right to feel as much, and as often as needed. You study shadow puppets of the birds. How is it you dance through the monotony of descending a mountain of your own molehills? I’d like to know.

Dear Poetry Foundation Sponsor,

It is right and true I’m always drunk on something. I do love pale air, the midday sun, shadow selves, and sling-footed hang gliders. Wouldn’t you listen to the quiet of a tiger iris blossom sticking out her tongue?

I am a little touched by the forest as it breathes in her ocean. I chirp like a swallow rattling off about her seed, and found that I can laugh. It’s my only virtuous quality. I have learned to shake my shoes off, and slip into clouds for which to sashay down my mountain of molehills.

That’s all that matters. We can be one way or the other.

NaPoWriMo Day 11

I’m the love that you looked for

If you like pens & pencils,

and vintage postcards in bed,

if you’re into stickynote poetry

you’ll always be well-read

If you like short sentences,

and creative wine note breaks

with metered postage stamping

wavy lines over sex out-takes

If you like triple A batteries,

and chapstick from Miami marathons

I’ll meet you at the BestWestern

–the poet with all the run-ons

I’m the love that you looked for,

cranberry hands and gingham skin

lube protectant and bedside glass,

escape numbers plotted to begin

NaPoWriMo Day 10

7 before 8

One correspondence

made with tremendous split-second

precision — a declaration

of fiction wounded her in

mere hypotheses.

how could he begrude her

unbearable/8

I know all these words individually:

unbearable, lightness, being.

but I don’t know them in a row.

The title is entitled to it’s own story

i. the beginning

It started with Capote. In Cold Blood. I negated it with the obvious and blatantly wrong observation– Blood cannot be cold. Except when it is. Goddamned people. But, alright. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite book. I either took it, or stole it from my Dad like the travel Q-Tip case I thought I’d get more use out of than he would. I’m embarassed I told my lover the short version of Truman’s book (not my theft) before I got out of bed to piss. Did I really drivel on about the killings of a family of six out in the sticks?

ii. the middle

In the middle part of the telling of it, I liked how the words ‘Holcomb, Kansas’ and ‘Wyandott county’ and ‘Emporia hospital’ came out of my mouth as if I still lived, ate, and drank in Dickinson county myself. My poem self wanted to accent syllables with a prarie twang. Pardon me, if all poems end up being about myself. Even with a simple prompt, that some lady poet named Holly Lyn Walrath (which doesn’t trip off the tongue very easily by the way) offered up, I’m still wrapping this poem with my own streams of consciousness story, ribbons, and bows.

iii. the ending

Christ – Holly Lyn (which I prefer to call her) may as well have said keep away from Kansas! Never set your pretty foot there again. But what right does she, or anyone else (least of all me) have to say about the genesis of how a poem takes life? And how a poem ends with insolence sometimes. Perturbed poems need to get things off their shelves.

NaPoWriMo Day 6

nod to Chris Jarmick’s Ars Poetica prompt

Morning, Love

Often after sleep, it is morning,
when we stay in bed a bit longer--

I know we're lucky.

I want to say so many
words about your toes, ears, elbow

creases. But I'm inarticulate.
I acquiesce to belly breathing--

This is exact.

This is how you find my softness,
The entire point is to find me

open for a moment, if you're willing
because, time crashes in,

ending love's swallow songs.

Always talk to me with heart and hands
please. Our mornings are for loving.

 

NaPoWriMo Day 5

In a plain and dirty place

@SpaceLiminal.Bot

A girl can float by trash bins daily, not knowing she’s a Goddess.

A girl can practice the virginal state, in whatever state she’s in.

A girl can practice ruling the world, then harbor life in her stomach.

She can push through double doors, with good diction and new vocabulary.

She can be queen of nothing, and still have a pretty face.

A girl can practice her polish in a plain and dirty place.

NapoWriMo Day 4

“A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.”