Sick Poems (May 2010)

Transition One

The Atomic Nucleus (Family)

A Pamela

The cold dark spotlight roving that she seeks
Is the inverse of a prison break
So as she shimmies under fences
Crawls along beshitted pipe
She cannot bear that she’s not lit
That she is hidden from the crowd
Forever re-arriving
She digs herself inside
Back inside again
Back to that soft gray cell

A David

He spools his heart out into shapeless skeins
A kind of kindness far less kind, more blind
The threads enjoin; they molder - then
They form a burlap sack
As the drawstring closes over
That hot darkness takes him under
Forever re-arriving
He finds himself inside
Back inside again
Back to that nice gray hell

Michael

His toys are just outside his growing reach
In pools of light that dim each passing day
Eternity has shrunk: One size fits all
Imaginary friend
At least a poltergeist of one
Waits to play unfathomable games
Forever re-arriving
He turns himself aside
Back aside again
Back to some gray pale swell

Transition Two

The Protons (Positively Charged)

The neighborhood bartenders hated to see these two coming
She hung on his arm until she’d had a few
And then she spun around the room
Like a top with sharpened edges
While he sat back and laughed until she spun right back to him
Often as they poured the drinks the barkeeps thought -
“Where the hell’d they get the cash?”
As Carla pointed fingers, Gary calmed her lash
And the folks who lived below them rolled their eyes and wrote them notes
Their friends all fell away until they were huddled all alone
Two alone against the cold
Then there were two
Then they were one

Transition Three

The Neutron (Neutrally Charged)

1. She’s lessened all her loads, it’s true
2. She’s faced her demons down
3. But like a phantom limb they linger
4. Like the locusts lie in wait
5. So she sweeps the forest floor
6. She ignores that ghostly itch
7. And a faint echo of sin
8. Brings to her voice a hitch
9. Jeannie will share it with you
10. She must, you see, she must
11. Or else all that weight will reappear
12. Even though it’s made of dust

Transition Four

The Electron (Negatively Charged)

Circling the energy
Waiting for a path
No interior direction
No particle ignored
All the world’s a game
Energy encircled
Everything is will
All be black and white
Gray is for the weak
There is no doctor brown

QE3 (Winter '03)

Her name was Betsy
She was born Queen Elizabeth
I'm still sequestered in
Her empire long gone but festering
Yeah, I'm still court jestering

So tired of kneeling down here on the ground
Bowing and scraping to the crown
Banished from my sovereign land
Dismissed with a wave of her hand
You shouldn't draw lines in quick sand

Fa-diddle-dee-da-die
Fa-diddle-dee-da-die

Read your history books to see how long its been
You can hear the kind of song its been
Longing for nothing at all again
Sipping coffee at the mall again
I step off the pillar and I fall again
My head hits the pillow and she calls again
But its just Chuck Barris banging on the gong again
Reminding me how wrong I've been
But I would do it all again
You know I would do it all again

Now all the laughter is canned
Burn me like a book that's banned
At least then the ash would rise above the trees
Drift slowly towards the sea
I always knew I'd be a royal we
Fa-diddle-dee-da-die
Fa-diddle-dee-da-die

Her name was Betsy

Every Poem I've Ever Written

Have you ever been afraid that someone will find your diary and read it? That the unabashed revelation contained therein will be so embarrassing that you immediately curl up and die on the spot?

Me too. Which is why I'm revealing the existence of this blog. It is a preemptive strike, a revelation that will hopefully keep me from blushing too hard when these poems are actually perused.

In the beginning of 2009 I decided (perhaps foolishly!) that my next project would be to go back to every notebook of poetry I'd ever filled with scribblings and transfer them to a digital state.

Part of this was practical. I have so many of them, they sit around, they take up space. I wanted to feel as if they could be truly PUT AWAY. But I feared losing them, feared they would be damaged in a flood, feared I would spill coffee on them. So I slowly started the process of transferring 800 some-odd poems from old pen and paper to this newfangled notebook you are reading right now.

I would stuff three or four of the notebooks in my knapsack and bring them to work. Obviously my job is not filled with pressing tasks. I averaged between 30 and 40 poems a day while I was doing it. I worked at it from February of 2009 until late July. I've added a few new poems since then but in essence every poem I've ever written that I can find are here.

Some I'm proud of, some make me cringe. Some come from real events that I can pinpoint down to a facial expression, some I have NO IDEA WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT or who.

I wrote hundreds of poems before I actually wrote one that I thought was worth reading. You might get through the whole blog without agreeing with me. I started writing because I was a lead singer in a punk band called Fecund Youth in high school (hence the address of the blog). We needed lyrics and I just did it without thinking about it.

For the first few years everything rhymed. Then when I was in college and realized that poetry didn't mean it had to rhyme, I went through a phase of jotting anything that came to mind down, slapping a title on it and calling it a poem. Some of these are priceless! I read one William Carlos Williams poem and I was off and running.

I began writing my own songs in earnest in the early 1990's and it was only then that I truly began to work at it. If I was going to get a bunch of guys together, learn the song and play it in public, the lyrics had damn well better be good.

So. Here it is. My poetic history. Enter at your own peril. Oh, man, some of the ones from the 80's are fun, though! Teenager extraordinaire...All my lyric.

Excitable Ditch Digging (02/17/10)

There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between
mediocrity and accomplishment.

- Norman Vincent Peale

Oh that dirt could be a burden
It could break my back in two
The shovel could destroy me
It could cleave my skull right through

But the sweat that flows out
Doesn't care the why the where the how
It only joys at its release
A captor sprung from cages it had
Not known that contained it

So I swing the lead, forget
My chains, give over to that vision
Floating somewhere in my mind
Of what I might be building

A Coil Of Gray Snake (0213/10)

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

William Blake

Folding back upon itself so tightly and compressed
That were those twists to unconstrict the globe
They would encircle

A passageway once infinite compacted like
Bones pressed between a tar pit and a glacial spill
Until what had been a structure built for movement
Now sits motionless in stone

Where else could all that power be unleashed?
You stood in what seemed a luscious field
And were incinerated in a flash
As the tunnels once conduits to transport
Now funneled into furnace blasts of ash

Licorice Paper

I used to roll my own you know
A practice I felt happy in
I bought the flavored shorter kind
A brand I favored thick and thin
I mixed the Drum and weed most sweet
A cigarette with benefits
I smoked at leisure, wrote my tunes
A high without the pits

But Icarus and licorice both fly rather high
Daedelus had warned us from approaching sun too nigh
For years I ignored this counsel
For years I had my fun
But as Ben Franklin once opined
"If your head is wax, don't walk in the sun."

So now I take no smoke inside
No matter how I crave
I shun the sugar too you see
For it makes me rant and rave
But I miss that burning soar
I miss that turning flight
I give a bellowed roar
I kiss that flaming night

Not The Suit (02/11/09)

An imaginary man quoted his long lost father
As having counseled him in the following manner:

"Let them see you and not the suit."

Perhaps what leeched through in the end was something more, rather
A faux grandeur which gained strength from such a false banner

And left the point more or less moot.

The arch of a brow in response to the swirl of a gown
Holds us in sway as we tumble through grace that you grant

Carried away 'gainst our will to be loved and gently laid down
In the west where we may gaze at the flower you plant

While you perform back flips to boot.

The Breeze Is On My Back, Through The Window (???)

The breeze is on my back, through the window,
From the sky.
Writing this to while away the time,
Better than nothing.
Being used to pen without intoxication
Has not come about,
My words are clumsy.
My life is nicer, the trade-off.
My career may be over but at least I'm happy.
Talk of nickel backs and I-formation
Comes at me from my right side, funny voices
Meant for little boys and hero worship.
The running back almost broke free.

Fly In My Soup (10/22/95)

Only moments crop up, bad seconds.
This is an improvement, reversal.
Only stopped shooting my feet, no big deal.
Now, I'll tell you a dream.
I was a spy, running through the
Rain-soaked streets of my
hometown, late at night.
My heels, my black sophisticated spy shoes,
make a movie sound, bouncing off brick.
The roads are mild cobblestones.
Whatever I am running for, I am too late.
Prevention, intervention, I am not sure.
I had that dream five years ago.
Last night I dreamed that my best friend
beaned me in a charity baseball game.
Hit me right on the ass.
Point being, salvage the broth
and eat some bread.

River My Secrets (1995)

To the delta over sand I come
Over rock and under fault
To throw my freshness to your salt
To mix with fish to hear them hum

River my secrets to your ocean
Roll my riddles in your foam