Lunch Poems

In the spirit of Frank O'Hara (but not necessarily the style), here are some short poems written on my lunch hour.

The Long Long Aisle

It'll happen in its own time, I tell myself.
I am lost among the avocado again.
But that's not the half of my problems.
It is, in fact, all of them.
It is muffling, the greenmeat,
which is why my arias are so wet.
We aren't going anywhere,
says the avocado. But in fact
it is I doing all the talking.
Certain things come to mind:
frogwaters, stippled plastic confit,
the end of a movie with Bela Lugossi.
I try to imagine the warmth
and sovereignty of homebodies.
I run upwind, tossing off my scarves
among the dried fish. I feel like somewhere,
my car is slowly sinking into a lake,
or the yellow pages. I am among the nicest mush,
turning my skin-flower towards the flourescents,
to the angle called bask, because bossa nova,
because avocado recalls heavy-lidded cow hearts.

The Monstrous Ballerina

Some days I feel more beautiful than others.
Your thighs, Melinda. Something has got to be done.
My bubbling has become beastly, woebegotten.
There is a gurgling in my belly like the sound of a drunk tuba.
I'm waiting for the day I can say 'joy' without irony.
I would like to surround myself with scientists and white.
I would like to start a family or a list of things that went wrong.
There is only so much that herbal tea
and mango bath oil, you know?, can do.
Eggs look so comfortable in their cartons.
I would like a good boy's head in my lap
like the credits of a well-meaning movie.
There is a red losenge nesting
asleep in my warm pubic beard.
Every time I look away a part
of my body grows more distant.
I wish I could put all my falling in a crushbox
and bury it like a wet seed.
I am the brainfevered ragamuffin,
twitch-dancing in the hey.
I am smiling at you. Look up.

Sonnet

Do you see the potatoes?
No, neither do I.
But I thought if it seemed
like a serious enough question
you might say, "There they are,
humpty-dumptying over the soil horizon,
the apples of the earth,"
and I'd say, "Yes, by George,
sweet Idaho brown." and we'd forget
our names, watching them tater-tottering
away. What is the one thing
that will unite the human species?
Who doesn't like potatoes?
These are two very different questions,
but the answers are the same.

And We Will Say "Hello"

Come with me, my lady, my belly-button diamond,
come with me this sheep-filled night. We will go to the hill
that overlooks the city, and I will give you the bottle
of Budweiser that I've hidden beneath
my floorboards ever since the day my father
returned from America. I'll wear my cowboy
hat and you can wear your ascot. We will wake
up the old wino that sleeps in the guardhouse
who knows what time it is in three languages,
and we will say to him, English, and my reassuring
gesture will fall on the small of your back.
"Won! Tu! Oh! Clock!" he will call, and will nearly
tumble off the cliff, and as you laugh
you will look at me, like Texas, like 1600 kilometers.

Seven Dozen Simple Steps

Close your eyes.
Are you right where you left yourself?
Is it the grumble of submarines
it most certainly is? Or is it rather.
It's not fair, at this hour of streetsweepers,
to deserve so resplendent a pink vibration
and then find yourself merely fragrant.
Imagine a field--or don't!--of checkered lollipops.
Now picture all your distant farms engaged
in this sweet agriculture. Isn't it what
we've always wanted, and why not?

White Noise

It is almost over.
What do you mean by 'it,' you ask.
I have already forgotten.
Sometimes I forget what day it is
and my boss says, why are you here,
it's Saturday, and I say why are you
here and he says it's not really Saturday,
I was only joking, but by that time I'm
already at home in pajamas, eating raisins
and watching the Korean gospel station.
I'm neither Christian nor a speaker of Korean,
but it's for these reasons that I find it strangely
calming, which are the same reasons why
I like listening to the phone ring.
If other people are in the room
it drives them nuts, why don't you
pick up the goddamn phone, Beamish,
but to me it's underwater chamber music,
like the cadenza of a dying pulsar,
so tinntabular, so knowing.

I'm Just Sayin

all y'all old-school lost causes
could do was someone else's ought-to,
and as such it came to pass that
shiz-nit, y'all! day-um!
which was an unexpected departure from
the woolen mood we were accustomed to
rubbing. all that once the world
wanted was now aloud.
oh mygod! ohmygodohmygod!
what kind of musical instrument
are we even trying to invent
with all this tomfoolery

Hooray for Delay

With your English and my saltwaters,
we might just be onto something.
The salad days of our split
infinitives are over, but that doesn't make
us ikebana or any other sweetmeat, not while
our broths are still clear and our alphabets
folded into small little squares.
What we need to pretend to look like
we're doing is all over, but your little eye
is a little green datum
and together, what we forgot
to overlook has only just begun.

The Epistle

aren't we or aren't we then just
the picture of fraught elegance,
a great jujube in a forest of brass organ
pipes, the way it has been curling,
the focus of the tides
or rather, from a stolen point of view
the last inoculation, the reluctant bacterium?
enough. it's no use. the only thing
left to do is to play dead, aromatically.
or undead, indeed, undying.
the only gorgeous thing
left in this world, I'll tell you what
it is, but you have to promise
not to laugh.

The Persistence of Soil

I'm thinking of a number
between 1 and 10.
It's masculine to the touch,
or else it never has,
but is planning on it.
Phalanx of mice carry it in a sedan chair.
It peeks out from behind the veil
in a gesture both coy and textual.
It says "Bof!" before breakfast,
which is French for, "Oh I don't know,
it's all the same to me."

The writings of men shall never reach
the heights of our pink domes
nor shall our magic number
suffice it to say what it came here to sing.

Pan-Seared Bordeaux

Alright, alright. Let's start over.
In a past life we were or maybe
it was a movie I saw once we were blinded
with science, mathematicians who regard
infinity as a disease or else
we had learned to sing opera with our belly
buttons. Our pauses were much more pregnant
underwater what does that make us now,
marine biologists? Are our eyes
made of tapioca and murmurs again?
We are afraid the answer is yes but
we are more afraid of the whitewashed
patience that follows and the corpulence
of the presiding flavor that tells us:
wait. now. wait.