A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Tag: poetry

April 8, 2015

7/30: GUY FIERI GIVES HIS SON “THE TALK”

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.

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April 6, 2015

5/30: THAT VIOLENT BUSINESS

“…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.

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April 5, 2015

4/30: MOONMIST

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?

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April 4, 2015

3/30: I WISH YOU COULD SMELL THIS FLOWER

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.

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April 3, 2015

2/30: AGATHIST

I am twenty-three and my heart feels the breeze
even in my sleep. I squeeze a blood-orange and
smell the perfume of citrus on my hands. Even my touch
grows braver the sweeter the songs I sing.
Like last Sunday, I set my body before the sun
lowered my mouth and saw the spring moonlight
pour out, like a melody, parody or parable.
My mouth is a house of blue solitude, wide-open sky,
you should see the trees that give me shade
and the guests who never stay.
I am twenty-three and my heart feels the breeze always.
When someone asks about the potholes in your heart
do not mention the bad days, the flat tire, the reckless speeding.
There are only good days and on good days
survival is the only the answer. I have so many questions
I do not want to ask. The weight of what I don’t know
lets me know plenty room is left to grow.
I don’t always want to finish what’s next.
Whatever happened to breakfast?
I slept through mornings because the cost of living
was not convincing.
I could not remember what waited for me.
I know lonesome does not deserve my love
but that conversation is such a hard thing to do.
I hear my gift with words is such a blessing.
I hear it’s not fair because you’re better with words
I say it isn’t so simple.
When you’re afraid of what the dark can do,
Language is the only room to run to.
Being good with what scares me most
is not a badge, but a casket of truths. Yes,
speech is a gift, but I never asked for a mouth,
for this matrimony of what I feel always coming back out,
never asked to love the significance that
always invites itself over and under my sheets,
but it belongs to me, is mine to sift through.
The pulchritude of an April afternoon tells me
it is too soon for anger.
I am twenty-three and my heart is caught in a breeze,
this poem is an invitation for you sway with me.
I am an architect of kindness and I require your spiritual congruity.
Take Agathist, derived from Greek, is a person who
believes all things reach toward an ultimate good.
Let that be me.
I have a history of inconsolability I do not want to repeat.
Rinse my mouth out with all the color I want to keep.
My mother leaves a voicemail I listen to while
I stir a pot of beans I made using my grandmother’s recipe.
Outside, the birds and the bees sing and sting,
I watch, stir and smell the steam, the weight of what
I do know can feed a family, can find meaning
even when my belly or heart is empty,
damaged by the translation of want and need,
even then, love is instructive,
even then, love is this scene, the one where I leave my house
and everyone is happy to see me.

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April 2, 2015

1/30: VILLA CONTENTO

Did I tell you about the cardinal
in my backyard?
I saw a bright red body leap from the ground
and didn’t think it looked so tough.
Thought of my heart, thought of how hard
it is just to pick up the pieces, but
did I tell you about class last week?
I ask my students to read their poems
out loud to one another.
A student asks me what it means
to be vulnerable and I am not afraid
to tell her the truth.
She tells me she’s only
nervous in front of one person,
whispers his name because it
is still soft and simple, and I can’t remember
the last time I whispered a name like good news.
Did I tell you about the good news?
Cindy Phan is going back to Vietnam.
Cindy Phan is my barber and she calls me handsome.
Cindy Phan hasn’t seen her family in six years
Cindy Phan crossed the ocean because
she was sick, and now she is better.
Did I tell you about the time I got better?
Oh, it wasn’t very extravagant.
Everyone just said they loved me
and meant it.

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October 28, 2014

Why I’m Not Where You Are

Because I spoke soft to you in the morning /but your mouth hit mine like snooze /leave, leaves loosely left behind like /lips split open/turning my body/ into a fountain of come and find me/ because you never came and found me/ because wind currents spoke to my feet/ until they fell asleep and I could not feel/ where they were taking me/ because when I reached for you/ and your glass-blown, smooth and hot skin to kiss my hand/ you let your body turn to sand/ because people are not pivot points/ not the front of buildings with doors revolving with the sun/ because even if I rose with you/ my heart is still sleep-talking/ I reverberate but nothing translates/ language is not so absolute/when every letter is filled with loose change/ pennies that slipped away/ careful copper-talker, when you don’t shine/ no-one takes the time to ask why/ because house-guests don’t always get breakfast /because hunger is hardly enough reason to stay/ because ache is a place between your face and my face/ and there are miles of highway pretending to be asphalt/ but nothing that smooth is true/ because you are beautiful and true /and that is so new to me/because all my grief grew into a pomegranate/and you didn’t want to pick me apart /because if you asked me to stay/ I must have missed the transmission /because when love was said/ your mouth turned vacuum/ nothing was safe / not my name/not all this tenderness/ I saved for you/ because you can’t be angry over something you aren’t willing to ask for/ and I’m not willing to ask for you to choose/ because the sky doesn’t ask to be blue/ the sun doesn’t choose to come up/ because love is true regardless of choice/ and that is the triumph that puts lumps in our throats/ I’m not where you are because when/ I pressed my head against your chest/ there was no thump, no wild rumpus/ no chorus that played, no slow song/ that made us sway/ and what am I supposed to say that?

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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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