A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

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August 5, 2014

I’m Drunk and Having A Conversation About God With My Mother

“The body, sluggish, aged, cold–the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;”

-Walt Whitman, “Continuities”

When I told my mother I did not believe in her Christian God,
that I wasn’t going to make it to Church on Sunday,
it was her birthday, and I didn’t see the question coming
but I coulda swore  I did see her smile tear off her lips like
communion bread ripping the body of Christ
crippled, the body of Christ compelling nothing but
stale silence.

I was already drunk, and what wasn’t angel
wings had already lifted my heavy head,
and what wasn’t singing sang to me anyways,
and what was tequila struck receptors
most unready for truths like these,
with my mother who built me,
questioning how God has left
her building, her neck,
creaking and heaven-bent.
My mother, she keeps a smile for situations
like this. Conversations like this. Confessions
like this. The one with her sons questioning
her God until she is at odds with her own maker,
her own making. Her brow, a wrinkled sunday blouse
ironed by a question I expect she is afraid to ask,
but asks anyways,

“Where do you think you go when you die?
What do you think happens?”

I look at my body, and realize now she is
concerned with the owner’s spiritual aftermath.
And I’m thinking she wants to talk about the soul,
refer to the manual,
heaven, hell or who knows so instead what I said was
“I don’t know where I go, but I hope it is beautiful”
and she didn’t say anything, the silence
stretched seconds longer than
Sunday sermons, but what was she supposed to say?
What was I supposed to say?
Sorry, dunno Mom. Guess I’ll just waste.
Perhaps my soul sketches itself into
some other waiting skeleton.
Suppose I’ll stay in the earth until something wakes me up.
You know when you’re exhausted beyond tired
your body lifts into a dozed off dove
repairing its wings by forgetting 
the ground, maybe it’s a bit like that.
I think I’d like the soil, with all its stories.
Don’t Mexican men always have the dirtiest hands,
anyways? How many Mexican men and women
have dug their fingers into the ground,
and made a harvest happen?
How am I different?

You know the Aztecs believed life did not end at death?
That’s why their deaths were so brutal,
because farewell doesn’t always have to mean
we are finished, it simply means
forever is the only thing a fire is fixed to
so we become stories told next to them,
regenerated in the retelling,
ritual promotes rebirth,
so why can’t I celebrate
myself until I am a Church?
If I cut my heart open
and ask for love to aggregate
isn’t that the same
as an offering plate?
I don’t always pray but
I write mostly every day.
Is that so wrong?

Yes, Christ was a good man
but I am too, Mom. 

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August 4, 2014

What Ate Charlie Brown Ate Me Too

According to Charlie Brown,
“There’s nothing like unrequited love
to drain all the flavor out of a peanut butter sandwich”

What’s brilliant about this
has to be
how quick
Charlie learns of heartbreaks simple
taste.
How taste is nothing more than
the ease in which a peanut-swimming tongue
decomposes
watches love parachute
disappear
turns to brittle upon exit,
and the nuance of never
having what you want is
now a second language
you can never leave behind.
You chew it, only to feel familiar flavor
vanish with the saddest velocity
swallowed conjugation
changes the root of everything,
settles with meaning you cannot decipher
or dance with, for that matter.

What’s the point of being tender
if all you get is lost in translation?
What’s the point in saying love
if all you get is sad sandwiches?
You speak it, but your breath is left out
bad bread, bad heart weather brewing
the yeast into yesterday’s yearning,
your most precious longing
something you can no longer eat
long gone.

Why is it that we describe the missing
with length? As if losing someone
or something is a matter of rulers
as if losing someone is a matter of rules,
heart breaks break all rules,
despair does not care for the distance
between you and your beloved.
We all know the feeling
the feeling of star-gazing peanut butter
sleeping on the roof of your mouth
as if leaving was ever
an option, and we all know the
feeling of loving someone so much
we cling with every fiber of being
because holding is all we can remember when
we’re this close to being chewed up and swallowed
and we all know what the name
of our beloved does to the chemistry of our tongue,
the way it turns to peanut butter
hungry for roof, a chimney of umami
blooming like lunch time, 

I have counted each syllable of her name 
picked them up like peanuts
and no matter the sound, each fraction
of her still smothers me smooth
then lifts, coddles,
then composes, and I suppose
you expect the same pop rock sensation
to happen from the mouth that says your name too
but you think of her mouth, and what flavor
you bring to her teeth, if you are slush or much more,
so you become comestible, an easy conquest
until you are unrequired
until your love is nothing but quiet
until your love is no longer together
until your love is one unrequited meal

The peanut butter sandwich I made for
lunch has already started to stale, along
with her name still stuck to the roof of
my mouth, the palate being the only place in the mouth
that will tell you the truth. 

Charlie,
I make a peanut butter sandwich
and think of you, I think of how both love and heartbreak
are such easy recipes, and how this peanut butter sandwich
is simple like rain on a sunday
I always say simplicity is conditioned to be everlasting
but you don’t have to be a clock-maker to know
nothing lasts, and even if you love with no questions asked
what do you do when you make the person you love a peanut butter
sandwich, but both her heart and stomach
are fasting?

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June 22, 2014

WHEN I AM EMPTY PLEASE DISPOSE OF ME PROPERLY

 

When the blender blade I left out on the kitchen sink
grabbed onto my skin like a midnight conviction,
I could not refute its symbolism.
Sloppy universe, I smile to myself
while the steel burnished
dagger grins, bedaubs the taut tarp
that keeps me buried within.
The crimson song hurries out
just
deep enough, I witnessed
the white breakable body beneath me
adulterate
puncture 

picture this: the entirety of my essence exits
from simple exposure.
You should know,
I concentrated the blood until it dried like plums
until aplomb is all I would ever become,
ablaze by the harvest moon, conflagration
of certitude, long overdue, all this belief
no longer absconding but leaving the body
alas, turning blue flame true.
Imbued by the imperative nature of my own leaking,
the thin tissue, indignant at the incessancy
is now a precursor of how I’ve come to be. A leaving
behind of what makes me lighthearted
suffice to say there is a surplus of
ordinary sadness in whatever I say
whether it be silent or amplified,
there is a history of empty
staying alive.

There are an inordinate amount of words to describe leaving the body
but they all lead to empty, a extinct future of eventually, this is the kind
of goodbye no one likes to memorize, you know,
the kind of death that spring performs
the erasure of winter,
dead trees
daring to be great
when even the air they make
turns against them, their bodies
forgotten. My body forgets its make up
all the time.

You should know, when I saw the bare minimum of me,
my own blood was all that I could think of, leaving, cells
succumbing to oxygen, color by breath,

the radiance of it—

This sounds improbable, and it probably is
if you’re anyone but me but you should know
how I stopped the bleeding, the leaving.
I wrote L-O-V-E in blood on paper,
watched the trees swallow the plums
in seconds, and just stared at the only thing
that’s ever left me and still spoke love
and let it last.

Let it be the last of me.
Oh please if I am not to last,
when I am empty—
please dispose of me
properly.

 

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May 27, 2014

Perception, Or Nothing

I close my eyes, done with dreaming
The whole scattered sky steps out
Mouth azul and ancient, accustomed
to this speech.
I listen, and shine accordingly.
Swiftly the songs stack.
Quick as quiet comes
It runs
I consent to its speed,
eyes slow dancing, what do I make
of the tremble?
All its oscillation
unordered,
but a pattern I must protect.
I am not afraid of what I see
Feel free, I will
myself to follow the trees
that breathe like me. Surrounded
By a beauty incapable of deceit,
I recreate the tenderness just
by telling myself
“seek”

I have watched the wind burn its bitter in the glory of gold fields
Seen wheat split itself into a single grain and still stay gold just by
the way the stalk holds it.
Passing by, I feel my throat widen harvestready.
I gulp a voice bright as morning
and black as coffee
A bushel of both gentle and intense
The voice brings me water without asking, fills my musicbox with her own song:
Perception or nothing!
Now move along.
The last thing I have to say before she is gone is
the promise of returning.
The only wrong left to be done
is running too soon from
what you know most to be true.

I open my eyes now,
unterrified by the vastness
and more certain because of it.
the absence of an ego is easy
when the earth does the forgetting
for you.
Goodbye stupid analyst.
Stud of stuck.
Honorable holder of hurt.
It takes so much work to waste.

I touch none of what surrounds me but my skin shudders senseless nonetheless, claps wild at the cusp
of creation
Silent, I leave the craving to speak shut, the mighty bodies around me
collapse at my infatuation, forget their own forever and feed me
I give the stones a story just by listening.
Them to me, an ovation
What do words do but make room
For the surrender?
But the breath of birds, clouds speaking in gentle grey tones, towns tucked into the shadow of a memory…

Forgotten.
Just ahead—
Bales of hay needleless and therefore
nothing to covet.
An eagle claws the glass teeth of a street side beer bottle—this is not the river he dove for, unclean and no amen to keep.
Grace is a billboard but nobody
is built to look up, closed hearts, even the sky skips a beat, the reality of being eaten by down below,
What can salvage a spirit if not a quest to hear its sounds?
Driving through a town that is not home, merely here for now, I see
A woman bag deep in her own belongings
Who does not feel as if anything has her name on it.
so she sits at a bus stop, still waiting
to excavate the rest of her light
still waiting to see the sun, should
I tell her it’s coming?

The grass, its green prayer, answerable just because it left the mouth, as all prayers pretend
to mean something but holy is held after it is spelled between the teeth
Only no one knows
So I say it so
You are god
also.

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May 1, 2014

30/30

WELL DARLING, I AM LEAVING

Everyone keeps asking where I’m going like I know direction.
I have been lost so many times I forgot what it means to lose.
I may be a story of defeat but that does not mean surrender comes easy.
I’m not leaving, just taking my love with me ‘cause nobody’s gonna stop me.

Not even me. Crowned King of Broken is breaking away from the tyranny
of himself and I can’t wait to rip this skin off and start anew. Spring will
be done soon and when the summer comes, I will remember the nights
where all I had for supper was whatever my mouth tried to swallow.

I have dug teeth into myself, broke into my body like a bar-b-q pit
Ripped the meat clean from the bones, took my heart apart like brisket and chewed the fat with a Texas fury.
No part of me passes through you without taking your tongue too.
That’s why I’m not leaving. I’m just taking whatever the fire didn’t.

I chewed a toothpick until I had to pick the splinters from my teeth.
Spit the soft wood off the tip of my tongue and watched a piece of something vanish.
I have decided to do the same. Most of me anyway is a broke bridge too tired to burn.
After a long while, you forget what you don’t have.

Don’t expect me to arrive anywhere anytime soon.
This Spring has been nothing but knowing a new softness.
You’d be surprised how much my teeth taught me tender
All my mouth ever wants to do is learn to love without having to leave.

But oh, the tongue is a running river that will not stop itself.
I cannot withhold what happens when I tell stories to strangers.
But oh, if all my fury goes forgotten, I swear to lose my taste for rotten meat.
Swear to smile the kind of smile that shows all my teeth, and nobody’s gonna stop me.

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April 30, 2014

29/30

I am singing Usher’s U Got it Bad
under my breath
past midnight
at a coffee shop
when the table I sit at
suddenly becomes the cafeteria
at my middle school which
on some Friday nights
became the dance floors
I would find myself wearing
a Ralph Lauren polo
and shoes that are not built for dancing,
but my sixth grade body don’t know that.

I am looking at a picture of my eleven year old brother
before his first middle school dance alone in my room
when suddenly my heart forgets its
hard promise, pours clean from my chest
like a punch bowl drunk with fresh fruit,
bodies ripe with sugar and the want to spill
everywhere.
I imagine the celebration that becomes of the cafeteria
as soon as he enters.
Wearing a striped Ralph Lauren Polo
with dark denim jeans, his hairstyle so slick
He smiles like he’s trying to earn his first kiss.
I imagine his ankles turning to air before all his friends
find their hips, and the girl he loves to tell me about
laughs at how he knows every lyric
to every Bruno Mars song that comes on
and I have already lost myself
thinking about how he tries to shake
the linoleum off the floor. In fact
I have already wept twice while writing this
but that’s okay cause my boy Kyler,
oh he is a King of loving things
even at eleven,
a boy believes in his body enough
to watch it burn down one night
only to have it back by morning—
That is my favorite part .

 

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April 29, 2014

28/30

I burned my throat while looking for you this morning
but that isn’t fair to say
because I was drinking coffee too.

On both sides of my coffee mug is a typewriter
with the words Just My Type beneath the brim
and before I can smile at the wordplay, I open my mouth
for a kiss. My lips slobber sleep, my tongue sits still
a tired ribbon pretends to do the same, as it stays
wrapped up in picturesque porcelain until it is
ink free and all my teeth are stained with something
remarkable to say.
But your name taps out before I can even say
good morning.
I type your name out, each letter lost keys,
turning into me, a jagged memory,
a picked lock, a space bar struck by a thumb
over and over again, the distance within
being without you
will always be a burning bridge
a fresh brew that caffeine chews the type
of silence you wish to remain so,
but even the rot rises, like it too
wants to be forgot,
a lock turning into a chimney,
lost love learning itself in these
letters of mine,
I have let my tongue bear the mark of brimstone
because my coffee mug is a typewriter and
I burned my throat when I tried to spill the stories like steam
because I wanted to say what mattered the most
and then watch it leave
but nobody knows how to do that
and how is that so?
That is, how do you speak the very thing that swallows
you whole?
 

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April 29, 2014

27/30

27/30

Sorry, meet your mouth.
Your mouth is my mouth.
Sorry, our mouths have met
a thousand and one times today,
at least. Let’s skip the pleasantries.
We both know what we’re doing
isn’t love making.

It’s a scuffle of skin, I give, you take
I bleed and you make the red disappear
until I no longer crumble crimson. Fuck
I want so bad to be fixed
but your mouth made me forget my own
and now I don’t know whose teeth to trust.

Now biting my tongue is the same as feeling sorry
for myself, and silence is an apology I never meant
to grow into but the roots have already adapted.
I confuse truth for what refuses to leave, self-included.
What’s included with most of my self is a stairwell
of sorry’s, all leading out my mouth and back into it.
It’s a stupid kind of stuck, having a sorry mouth
It’s a stubborn kind of love, having a mouth
that is never enough and always sorry
for talkin’ too much.

 

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April 28, 2014

26/30

It is Saturday night in Elgin, Texas and I have mastered
the art of standing still while spinning violently

I won’t blame the moonshine because there’s no need
no need to name the hands that take you from tenderness

Besides it wasn’t like that. See, what I did was soak what
sunk me in matrimony between the people that let me go

Without ceremony. I said a few words about how I’m tired
of loving the leaving, left some sentences in the form of dead skin.

The wind picked me up like a good friend, said things end
and set me like down as if it was the beginning, again.

I was so drunk I stopped recreating the past and didn’t even get sad.
I was so drunk I stopped recreating the past and just looked at what I had.

Looked at the night sky pinched by starlight and stillness and
couldn’t help but see myself similar. Hasn’t this body always been

Strewn about with bits of light? Skin so thick, it has to be borrowed
from the night. Heart so bright, has to be all alone with all that light.

I can’t blame the moonshine cause now it all makes sense. The stillness.
The spinning. Oh, I can’t blame the moonshine when I am the full moon

Tonight.

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April 25, 2014

24/30

She told me                           
No one is alone in their suffering
then looked at me as if to say                           
Yes, even you
and my eyes met her mouth like
honest truth or fresh fruit
either way, she spoke slow and
I saw all my favorite colors fall out
her bottom lip, saw them blur 
into a bridge, or a plank, or some other
distance one must make if he wants to
see the day again.

I tell her how I keep every beautiful thing I see
that way I can leave it behind when no one is looking
and how I call that positive pollution, and that I am
overwhelmed every day by what some might call
the breeze, but what is most obviously a river of what’s next,
a universal breath knocking against the stars
we have stuck in our chest,
and she is glowing
like she knows
like she knows what it means to collapse 
and come back
brighter than death.

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