three bed poems, feb 2013

Every semester I make 3 cut-up poems alongside the students in my EWC class. It's a nice way to put a finger on the pulse of my subconscious. We deliberately let go of the idea of grammar, the idea of making sense, the idea of "proper." We follow our instincts, succumb to the sounds of words, the rightness of clusters of images. We let go of the outcomes and accept what we are given.

This time, we wrote about beds--our earliest memory, our current bed, our dream bed. Then we chopped up our writing and made poems with pre-selected titles. Here are my three poems for the semester:



#1: breathing out

        submerged and falling not a
motion sink soft into the watercolor
        through the waving growing seaweed
                down through layers of deepening night

the unspoken truth
        slowly to coral the upper air like clouds
hooked c of the arms of the world
        waning and filling the day so i can feel
                at home.



#2: like moonlight

desert moon rush across the black
waking up cold and twisted
        at hip and ankle

predatory cat in my memory
remembered fear: warm and earthlike
smelling of unexpected nouns
which surrendered the fight

tiny room beneath silent unseen fans
windows like moonlight
sleep is gone and so we
        and so
                and so
                        towards the landing



#3: seeing you around

you take the warmth. it all runs
        to morning and
the secret verbs are soft and solid
curved summer across our winter dreams
portholes in the sunset are
                lost mariners

dreams are treasures
bound down with gravity and
sinking soft

although i was never there
and love has a memory
of ourselves from the side
i wonder what else we believed
so many years fooling everyone
        guess i still do

                i hope you do too

Barbarians (πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος)

everybody's talking about

the war that no-one's talking about:

sizing up sides

stitching flags on the insides

of hollow eyelids

branding the kids with irons.

everybody knows

it's everybody else's house 

that's on fire.

everybody's banging on

the drum that no-one's beating:

sounding alarms

moving back to farms

of their ancestors or

trading cash for a subdermal chip.

everybody knows 

that hip 

is the new death of hip.

everybody's hearing horses

at the gates of gilded cities

just off the edge

of the white map of sleep.

we each decide

if we walk or we ride

if we're out or inside

that circle of light.

everybody knows

the barbarians 

are always right.