Paper Tooth

She made a paper tooth for grandma
with plenty of gold and silver glitter.
What gaudy thing! grandma said, bitter,
as if expecting the tooth to have been better,
not flat, not a child's gift, not yet another thing
she has to smile at, useless as her own sweater,
as her own memories; her bones.  Her heart.

Time-Out

While we spoke of our losses,
of jealousy, hate, of troubles,
you looked out the open window—
as if to force a time-out
from our timeless squabbles—
to watch the rain-soaked boughs
heavy with kiwi blossoms.
But I was watching your face,
glowing against the hot rain,
your tear-filled eyes seeking
some cool hush beneath the bolts,
some dry patch in the flood of pain.

Last Fall

Leaves of saffron and marigold
mingled with canary and rose,
some shattered, some frozen
within the mud and early snow.

The scent of chilly air and soil,
the sound of familiar voices
rising up at once to a roar,
the feel of gloved fingers below,
all fused becoming something new
that grew more and more distant,
but she enjoyed her last fall; every hue.

Compassion

Compassion is not time
that passes without looking back
Or confused air
once a breeze and then the storm
It pours
not as water that freezes in the cold
It's not the sun when concealed
by darkness of a mindless cloud
Compassion does not cower
like fire in the downpour
Is not seduced by alluring words
Will not crumble beneath untold
unfelt sufferings of the world
Compassion can never be known
but from the experience of breath
through the revived reborn field
of heart that softly beats—
despite the ravages of time
howls of dolor
despite springs of agony still unhealed
and shattered memories that keep order
as fearful guards blocking the roads
despite the snoring snow-covered wolves
and homeless feelings running for cover—
having felt an openness and softened care
as if the city of heart is much much bigger
as if it's a room that welcomes and can hold
that and the breath and has room to shed a tear
as if the heart is vaster and warmer and wiser
beneath the damage and the falling snow
as if the heart is patient enough to wait
for blossoming spring and fruits of summer
But these are only words! 
Who could really know
why this time the breath had beamed with joy
returning all content
up to the mind from there

Tragedy of the Little Goat

The moonlit rows of roses guard
my garden's grace.  They taste so good 
to Goldberg's goat.  It coughs and burps 
and rams my door.  Gobbles my reds,
repays in dung.  The scent of stool
should guard my plot.  I shake my head,
I sigh, sit down.  But soon it's she
who turns and eats, my full goatee.

In My Own Bed

Sometimes I want to cry but I’m afraid
if I start I won’t stop until the whole of Earth
is filled and flooded with tears that hurt
the soil with salt that kills all trees and herbs,
daisies and gazanias, tulips and orchids,
and every heavenly stem of baby’s-breath.
So I must defend against destroying the Earth.

But sometimes I’m still more afraid,
petrified of something much much worse,
of shedding hot tears that always dry and fade,
of my choked weeping sounds that go unheard,
of roses that bloom, secrete their heavenly scents
just as before, trees that grow and folks who wed,
while I drown in strange tears alone in my own bed.

Woe.

I sing a sweet barcarole to escape grief—

its sores bleeding confusion, silence, disbelief.

Yes, we try chanting; airs afford us relief.

Thus men row; miseries ebb as harmony haltingly flows.

Melodizing is soothing. Mourners need a caretaker, however,

a spirit caressing and embracing humanity’s woe.

Because grief (a sullenness which protects, as heartland’s scarecrow

intends) when lingering, cuts—cuts, song's powerless to sew.

Discordant traumas painting a grisly show!

Melancholy dreams of reaching higher.

By contacting divinity, heartache generates

harmonic elixir of serenity. O God, vast Universe,

do allay the tide, so I, a crooner,

blissfully return amongst shipmates.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As an additional personal challenge to writing about the emotion of grief, my poem also corresponds with digits of mathematical constant, π/Pi.  First, the number of lines in each stanza is equal to its first few digits: 3.1415.  Secondly, and this was the most time-consuming, the number of letters per word, also correspond to the first 100 digits of π.  For instance “Woe” has three letters, “I” has one, and “sing” has four, corresponding to the first three digits, and so on.  Oh, and to represent “0”, I’ve used the letter “O” and words with 10 letters.  And here are the corresponding 100 digits:

14159265

358979

32384626

433832795

02884197

1693993

751058209

749445923

078164

06286

20899

86280348

25342117

0679

Forgotten Hideouts

We children hid among the rocks and oats.
We hid, behind the walls, our shameful parts.
Our frightened eyes we veiled with swell of tears,
Our hurts secured inside our padlocked throats.

And so it passed, the days and months and years.
But growing up so fast, we all forgot
The places where we hid our hopes, our hearts.
The pieces left: as rank as reefer butts.

The crumpled love letters and blood from cuts 
had dyed the grass beneath the lone bleachers.
We fled from all, but from ourselves much more,
Choosing to leave the ugly parts down there:

In bathroom stalls, behind the fastened doors,

In gyms, in Gale’s garage, never in class, 

But on the balding, moist, and yellowed grass

crowded with weeds.  Don't look, we're found nowhere.

Protecting Pain

Her wrinkled ground of psyche bears
the throbbing spoor of savage wills

She seeks to gather fearless strength
and build from hate a bed of spikes

It's not the light but shades she wears
reposing on protecting pain

Her skin was charred and she was shamed 
for all and naught and for her weight

She sighs as though an offshore wind
and arches faced with faceless void

She loathes herself as storm the breeze
and dies at sea as squalls abate

So fear and hate coordinate
in a harrowing harmony

Centillion Ways to Die

Hospital, hospice, laid in bed,
On freezing streets, in fancy rooms.
In timeless spaces, sunless skies,
Cubicles, prison cells...and tombs. 
In front of judges, parents, kids,
Audience—friend or strange—their eyes
Still staring from behind the lids
That speak the feelings left unsaid. 
With prayers, with grating cries, with sighs.
Unseen, unknown; unloved, unwed....
By force or will, with guns.  In wombs
Of girls whose souls have parted too.
Kisses on cheeks and pale foreheads,
Holding of hands, and swallowed tears,
With lonely aches and greedy fears.
Mystery, grief...then peace one year,
as pain searches, with wings unspread,
for warm and kind suffering peers
to help release the inner dead.

Disaster

I met with Disaster along the way;
She looked about a thousand years of age,
And tall as mountain ash but blind and mute,
And nude, aside from diamond knee-high boots.

I must have met her many times in guise,
Perhaps with grief that hurts, with grim surprise,
I felt her in the scent of homeless cries, 
Or faint sadistic laughter of a brute.

I shook her hand despite the nameless rage
That wrapped my body fully like a suit
Of sweat and shakes shooting from wilted roots, 
That feast on acid deep inside my eyes.

Don't you demand from me consoling lies 
To help you sleep soundly beneath the skies
That birthed Disaster long ago one day,
And doomed us both to meet unknown, en route....

Gentle Touch

To write a poem feels as though a game 
Like hide-and-seek: To speak but make no sound. 
Winnicott said that it's a joy to be
Hidden, disaster, if you're never found. 

Meantime I hide behind the rhyme and feet,
And hope you love me or the game so much,
To step around the words and reach inside,
To say "I see you".  With a gentle touch. 

What I Want

I want the leaves to never turn
I want the terror on the run
I want the limbs of anger axed
I want my grief now kept in urn 

I want the leaves to never fall
I want the love to never fail
I want this love to come and stay
I want this love to be my all 

I want the leaves to never break
I want the tenderness immune
I want our softness always safe
I want our hearts to never ache

I want my life to never bend
I want my trees to never age
I want my time to never pass
I want my verse to never end

Shelter

I hear the termites still inside my dreams
An aged lady dusted of her sins 
It's summer when her pulses hush and slow
I grieve the shelter, home I'd never know. 

 

At Times

So if it's all your fault   
Then I am in the right
But then the world's unfair 

But if it's my failure 
It seems the world is fair
But I'm the one to blame 

If no one is at fault 
Nobody is to blame 
But world's no less unfair

At times the anguish wanes
The fearful guard relents
The world and I are one

At times I breathe the air
The air breathes me in turn
And pain forgets its shame

Safe in the Face of Visions of the Wild

May you one day be born and live and die 
inside a cherished flesh and soul and mind,   
in loving places too, in loving times,
while safely facing wildest of the sights;  
for life's a grand adventure, too the sun,
the seeing eyeball of the pirate who 
adorned in azure, swings his sword of lights 
at times with loudest of the roars
that daily spies your unarmed morning bed 
and yet you sail waves of drama unharmed.

Buried by the Shed

Beyond the shed and past the troughs, I shed  
dry tears synonymous with voiceless coughs—  
the music of the operating room,
where maggots swelter, born buried in work.
  
The past exhales as though a sour simoom
that scatters scabs of unrequited love
that choke as ashes clog the live windpipe,
or fast monsoon that floods the living-parched. 

Frankenstein

God had indited Shelley's eyes and she  
the shameless fiendish mortal Frankenstein 
upon the pages prostrate 'hind the door
the lashed lids agape as though undead.

Seeking Closure

Behind a dark peak
Of clavicle bone, my two
Faiths sunset afresh.

American Crow

So near a starved/sick American crow,
And spastic flaps of both her frosty wings— 
Perhaps a sign of life-force in passing—   
Beneath shade, of huddled slouching willows,
(that seemed concerned as if the young bird's folks),  
I stood, my back against the gnarled barks.
Unread are rimes God Almighty's composed.

Awash in flurry here was I at once 
In spry bodiless feathers, iced, rainbowed—
Perhaps those of a violet-green swallow—   
Tender as tulip petals, dewed berry; 
Or voiceless flame long sapped, and sewed long slow 
Into the seam of dark, the graceful corpse; 
by glacial gusts anatomized, unmourned. 

Sergeant's Wife's Orders

Mosquitoes dead so red against the glass. 
In wok the frog legs jump and dance, sauté.
The keen scent of citrus and lemongrass 
of cleaner won't allay my nerves, tonight.
Kangaroo paws and dogwoods, pinks and mums, 
police the flagstone walkway.  Sergeant's wife, 
her boyfriend, with their standards, class, and such,
would they consider this bit strange, bit trite?
Bring the caviar, suckling's head, and change
out of your gray jumper.  Recall they asked
for black pudding, sweetbread...I know the guests
will judge us people always judge you judge.... 

Rain

The rain must pour, the windows fogged; 
The gurgling cyclone spits and gongs
inside the bone-spring of acid 
where mucus seesaws up and down

The selfsame fountain feeds my eyes 
Aboil as conscience of a saint; 
or fish soup that prolongs the strain 
of homeless underneath the rain. 

You Said

You said
Wish you
Were dead

Your mouth had opened and the words fell out 
Your tongue the launchpad of guided missiles
Your lips the gates of your inner prison

Each one feeding the same shy blossom 
of suffering, reopening the same wound in me
with their alphabetical poison, sinking like ear drops.

It was much later, at five o'clock in the evening,
sitting on my fast rocker, pouring wine, enough
to wash the brain, immerse and suffocate it....

That I recalled you never said nothing to me
except with your eyes and left corner of your lips
that raised enough to let out a sigh full of dead words.

Dirty Eyes

I woke up covered all 
In fragments of a dream,
All sticky like the scent of skunks
That sprayed my storybook last night.
—Wash up!  the voices shrieked 
And pushed my head madly beneath
A pool of tears until I drowned 
Again inside another dream.

So tell me whose tears were that soaked 
The leaves I'd flipped through all last night 
With every flutter of lashes so moist.
So speak but make it soft and clean
And hold my hands and smile and joke
And only then describe my nightly scene 
The screens projected on my twitching lids 
The ghastly films my dirty eyes have seen.... 

Library at Night

A homeless man beside the library
His sleeping bones arranged to hungry dreams
Cracked lips that blow as if in ecstasy
And fingers holding fast the Bible dear
His starless head pushing against the wall 
A pencil 'gainst a broken sharpener. 

Grief

I haul my grief up
The hill to the burping pond
of tears for stiff frogs.

Common uses of a poet

Here some common uses of the poet:
Mutate city into unreal city
thus make it poem-real.
Keep fire from melting ice
and rusting a red wheel barrow.
Reverse-translation into Ashbery.
Use words like iridescent, thicket, and
petrichor; never feel.
Prophet, politician, and philosopher; now
poets hidden in half a page
Of this week's New Yorker.
Impress other poets.

Bless Me

Oh bless me Father (muttered I) 
for I have sinned, for I have sinned, 
for I have roved against the wind, 
and over lands that house the hands
that—blithe—unfold beneath my feet.
The branching hands, with love imbued,
thus reaching out they've made me food.

Ungrateful yes, but blind I'm not,
for I have known the sun, the lands, 
the trees that fruit, and blooming shoots,
the taste of figs (I've not forgot),
the peach has long perfumed my hands,
the grapes and dates, angelic fruits.

I've seen the moonbow over falls;
the snowfall gather over roofs;
about the coast, descent of gulls;
on grassy plains, the dance of manes,
I've heard the tune of trotting hooves.    

Yet I have stepped on aging leaves, 
and drank atop their withered roots,
I took and took but please believe
my heart is not so black as soot,

Now here tonight I'm sober, weak,
this conscious-guilted rueful thief
inhales the scent of grass with grief.

I beg you father now once more 
to bless this worthless selfish soul:

For I can not—Oh I can not!

Feast of Today's Greeks

First we sat to feast on fatty pheasants
Stiff the frosted feet of us two peasants 
Stuffed with softest fruits and finest foodstuffs
Fast we raised our staff to faces present.

Greek guy gobbling up a cooked egg Dagwood
Yakked with gangs of geeks in King the Burger
On coagulated globs of gunk gagged
Choking gave the litigation finger. 

The Ghosts of a Room

When the moon shines red
And the darks cascade
When the length of room
Has become light years

When the ghostly hush
In the silence yawns
Through a hollow tune
With the breeze for tongue

Now compassion swoops
Through the cloud of tears
Down on injured hearts
Filled with lonely fears

Filled with homeless rage
And a scalding shame
And strangled with guilt
Of venom-clawed blame

Then compassion flies
With the hearts in beak
Over ruby lakes
What is there to seek?

Soon the wordless room
Breathes the scented dawn
Everything the same
But the dew-kissed lawn

Shoulds and ifs and whys
Never here reside
Outside the window
Of the room inside

Only lady bugs
And where grass now parts
There the earthworms romp
Wee-little, their hearts.