Ode to Room 330

You don’t know what you missed
when your shoe broke on the bus,
the room spun out of control
talking of sweat and chest hair.

The voice meant to read, makes
my words more pure, even
exhorting me to get real, get
a skateboard, get a baseball hat.

We ran our hands through the sand
near castles greying like pigeons, framed
ourselves in repetition, rhyme, numbers
and pants. Someone made love to a guitar,

it wasn’t me. I read, and wrote
sitting next to clear beauty, cold
air on our shoulders like film
stars without fur coats.

The young walk off to a summer
they won’t remember. I am here
to remember for them, the mother
in my room full of burning poets.

Today is the last day of poetry month. It is also the last official day of my poetry class. I have been blessed with a group of talkative, interesting and iconoclastic undergrads who made me see things as I hadn't before. My TA deserves special mention, not only because he is a great poet, but because he helped me see things in a new and different way. And he's getting married! I would write him a poem, but we all know how I feel about marriage right now, so it's best I leave that one to the romantics in the group.

Why

I am not trying to do anything
other than say
the unsayable, create meaning
between the words, on the empty
whiteness of the paper, find sound
where there isn’t a whisper, silence
can be louder than a scream
from a blackbird in your ear. To tell
you this is water, and I am infected
with poetic fire, you will know I exist
somewhere between madness and ennui,
the horrible disease that killed Edwin.

I love you means nothing. I am
aware. It is all you need.

Last Summer

The garden stands as still as a lake would
when no breeze can find you
in that chair, legs sticking to the wicker
leaving bumps that itch like bites. You drink
slippery wine with ice, unquenched.
A book, spine-bent in your lap, idle under
an empty hand. Waiting for tomorrow's

something to happen. A girl
bouqueted in daisies peers around
whistling without a sound, a storm
collecting itself to blow away the afternoon.
Thunder forgets, we run for pines. Except you
stand on the path, white dress running
like glue over tanned and naked boughs.

This is what is referred to as radical revision, so it's really not cheating at all. I took one line from an earlier poem and wrote a new poem. The original is here. Expect more things like this as we near the end of the month, end of the semester.....

Watcher

Scattering bird and prey
toward jagged rocks
he tucks his wing, dives.
Tethered with a string
a solitary kite, he floats
on wind that cuts our spring
coats, we shiver as he hunts
to snare a snake, lift it twisting
to the cloudy sky.


I am cheating somewhat here, because this is a revision of a poem I wrote earlier this year. I have to revise six of my poems for class and turn them in Thursday along with the originals. Revising is where the true work of poetry comes, so I am allowing myself this one.

Number 26

I am going to buy a pair
of cowperson boots and teach
your gorilla how to sing. It is the end
of something here, which might be
also the beginning of something else,
or not, the door and window may both
remain closed for now. I will bathe
in my solitude like a rat, and something truer
than those boots, that black hat, and the notes
from my old flute will survive.

The Poem Suffers

Indulging myself, nothing else
for thirty days is the claim he makes
against writing a poem a day. Something
about the suffering of Buddha. I don’t buy it.
It’s an excuse, isn’t it? A reason to not
write a poem.

Not Poetry

Oh happy meat and Yahoo! glue
put it on a pole, not a plate
complex misogyny aside
going naked for the fur
is sexist enough, no?

My evergreen soap dish with Oriental
underpinnings and colonial dishtowels
are hooded and bare like prisoner
costumes. Indigenous translations
lighting recipes of bone-in thighs
slathered with pot butter used
furtively to impregnate my daughter.

There is a strange movement in the writing world to put keywords into Google and mine the results for a poem. It has been suggested this is similar to what Burroughs did with Beat Poetry a while back, but I disagree. At least he was interested in creating meaningful and important work that informed the world around us. These outliers are specifically trying to write bad poetry - to what end I do not know. My teacher gave us this assignment to write this type of poetry, and since I am such a good student I did as I was told. You are all the beneficiaries of my efforts.