I do not surrender!
These eggs need salt!
The smile is still my natural habitat.
Chicken soup says I love you.
I haven’t set an alarm for my heart.
Sleeping in late is actually a form of medicine.
All your ex-girlfriends agree:
you did nothing wrong.
This just in!
One day, your name will be someone’s favorite song.
9/30:
You read a poem
And a woman says
Thank you.
You finish your set, covered in sweat,
and a man praises the rhythm
in your voice, says he could the hear
movement, feel the intention,
Says he could see
the craft behind all this
excavation,
assures you someone is always
paying attention.
A mother comes to you,
her voice is quiet but nurturing,
tells you about the sweet
sensitivity between each word you say,
how when you said how you felt,
beauty was all she could see
and you are buried by
The sincerity.
Before you, an audience
who has come here to hear
the stories you have to tell.
Someone asks to buy your poem
but none of this has ever been
about profit.
You were sixteen and sad
and a journal was all you had.
You were seventeen and sad
and a voice was all you had.
You were eighteen and sad
and the language had one purpose:
To Fix.
Then you step on a stage
and everyone knows your name.
You can’t keep your thoughts
to yourself, but everyone
still listens.
How lucky are you?
At this point,
You are twenty three and happy to announce
after the poems are read,
and the poets have left,
and all the audience believes
in poetry again,
you still have to stop and breathe it all in
you still have to hug every poet
because you could not be here without
them, because this is your community,
and when will your life ever be this meaningful?
this true?
Even when the poets have gone
love is the last word in the room.
Son, the first time you come
to Flavor Town, you will want to eat
everything. You will look
at your hands
memorize the size of
what you can hold.
Only fools rush in
so wait for the invitation
learn to love food
by the dance of heat.
A woman’s body is not for you to eat
not for you to pick apart
but to ask for the recipe,
to see what you need,
in hopes of being needed,
to be worthy of her kitchen.
I don’t care how hungry you are
you don’t get fed
just because
you hear a
growl.
Don’t just show up.
You need an invitation.
Make sure not to chew
with your mouth open.
Are you hungry?
Are you hungry?
Are you hungry?
Are you hungry?
Do not confuse
I could eat
for
eat me.
Do not confuse
I’m hungry
for
I’m hungry for you.
I beg of you. I’m hardly a perfect man.
But when the food is hot, wait your turn.
Just because your mouth is open
doesn’t mean you get fed.
When you hear
it is time
to break
bread,
think of your mother
washing your plate.
You don’t always
get seconds.
You are not even promised
first.
If she doesn’t want you
in her kitchen,
say yes, Chef!
When she says her body is out of bounds,
say yes, Chef!
You are, after all, a guest.
You cannot savor the dish
until she sets the table.
6/30: REJECTAMENTA
“The poem that is merely painful revelations:
my impulse to tell you everything –
which may destroy everything”
– Theodore Roetheke
I know how it feels
when you trick your heart
into being someone else’s treat.
But smiling alone
with you
is how the blood
in my body
refused to rot,
rejected deceit,
rose like a wave &
now the mystery is
who wants to swim
in the mud of love?
who wants to break
the cycle of breaking?
No, I do not know all
my hauntings by name,
but a history of hurt is here,
constant presence, always relevant
but this
is not a poem about defeat.
This is merely pain revealing itself.
This is a monsoon of magnolias
against the grey blanket of morning.
This tired legacy of failed reciprocity
does not bewilder me, the promise of new joy
is a gentle riddle lust cannot solve,
if my heart is knotted, don’t let love resolve,
untie or cut the twist, I just need you to
show up and mean it.
I’ll forget the history of hurt
if you just keep showing up,
turn this historic loneliness
into something we can both fix
the both of us,
your arrival,
the beginning,
apotheosis—
finally, all my fear
furnace bound &
lovemaking
is the quiet smoldering,
which may destroy
everything.
“…woe is translatable to joy if light
becomes darkness and darkness light,
as it will—“
-William Carlos Williams
On the day of the spring equinox,
I fed myself strawberries, ate black plums,
someone called me handsome and I hummed
to myself in the kitchen.
A quick note on the black plums:
the first time, I grabbed one was an accident
had to be the summer before last
the one I spent alone in my apartment
baffled by want, a linguist lost in love’s speeches,
studying for four months to take a test
so I could go to school for three more years
then take another test at the end of it. Anyways.
That next season, I read a poem out loud
to three other English majors in my Modernism class
about stolen plums, the deceptive sweetness
of language, the immediate contact with the present,
the need to reach through with what is wholly you,
and in that moment, the poet comes to know
the image is more useful
than what it represents & that’s what I’m saying!
I bite into a black plum not by my lonesome
but swirling with significance, a cloud of moments,
the long day stretched out like a highway
I cannot help but get stuck in the traffic
of my own imagination, impavid and impatient
& imagine me humming a number
equal parts lovely and somber, with plum breath
and the confidence of a compliment.
I think of all the mouths I let on my flesh,
eyes closed and touch filled with expiration,
like they expect the sweetest thing in season,
hoping for a brief revival just by holding my body, and
how this explains their reason for leaving, because who doesn’t understand
pleasure, who doesn’t eat a plum on the first day of spring
and throw the pit in the garbage, forgetting forgiveness,
you know, that violent business.
Show me all the possibilities
on how not to be alone.
I am telling you I need you.
The rain won’t quit looking
for a body to swallow
It is telling everyone to need
each other, but people do not
have appetites for people.
People just have appetites.
I don’t long for the company
of another because I am hungry.
Every day I perform for love
but the audience is stuck in traffic
The show does not go on
even when my mouth does,
even when I say what I mean,
and who knows what I mean.
I am under the moon with a woman
who does not know my history with rain
who looks at me like the first days in spring
and suddenly the sensation of sinking is gone.
How do I explain the absence of love
without looking for it?
I am my heart’s only detective.
The mystery of meaning
is knowing without saying
but I cannot do both.
Show me, show me, show me.
All the possibilities.
How does anyone stop being alone?
Does the sadness pile and pile or
does it serve some other purpose?
Say my name in the middle of a sentence
where sadness cannot reach.
If my day is truly good, I will tell you all about it.
Don’t let me slip away with simple answers.
If ever I make-pretend, take away my hands.
Both my hands are open and only you can fill them.
When I trap myself inside the house lonely built,
tell me to open my curtains.
Outside my street, live oaks longer than longing.
Behind my house, a whole street called Moonmist
Early one morning, a grandmother teaches her grandson
how to rake, shows him where to place his hands,
and how to build a mountain of fallen things,
and he is trying so hard to gather, to put his hands
where his hands should go, and even then,
his body is not big enough, he cannot do
what he has to do, but what difference does
that make?
3/30
I wish you could smell this flower.
I don’t know the name of it, but
the pavement is blushing lavender
or a color in the lavender family, maybe
a first cousin to lavender, only more lovely
because it is in front of me and nameless,
but petals and petals and petals of beautiful anonymity,
how terribly difficult it must be to love
something you cannot say, ask to stay.
With me is Billy and we just ate ice cream and sorbet
after leaving San Dolores Park by riding a slide down
to the playground where just moments earlier,
a Mexican man earned his living by selling slices of pizza to smiling people
who still had room for want and and despite my distaste for fractions
it is nine-tenths a perfect day when
a little girl kneels down on the sidewalk outside the ice cream shop
and picks up this flower whose name could not possibly
achieve its purpose of explanation
or offer meaning without leaving too much room for
interpretation, but of course it has a name,
of course it belongs to something we can all say,
but what I want to say is,
a little girl knees down and picks up this flower
and puts her mouth up against it
like she’s part of the family, maybe a first cousin
or a sister, or a mother, or a daughter
and she pulls whatever sweetness there is
with her mouth, with her nose, with her whole body,
and I wish you could smell this flower.
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.
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 .
A POEM A DAY 