hopebe:

I can’t write today. All of my thoughts are false starts,
no movement, no cohesion. Rusty doornails will give you tetanus;
shots in the arm as a child, and the doctor would only count: one,
two. A Scooby-Doo bandaid once. I don’t think you need to be
angry, or resentful. I don’t need anger. When you moved to Boston,
I knew you would have a life there but I have no imagination

for such things, so you hardly crossed my mind. You said you watch
online chess matches in your free time, grand masters and novices.
What a strange detail, very like you. Random bits of memory and
dust are catching on fly paper, no flies today; the backs of my
hands, stuck, peeling tiny hairs from their safe houses. When I am
left alone, which is often, I tend to wander. When warmth had
finally settled on the night, I walked down to the football field,
silent and emptied out, numinous. I pretended I was a professional
athlete: pushups and situps and leg lifts and flutter kicks; and I ran

in circles but I have no imagination for shapes and less stamina,
so as my breath heaved from my body, I lay flat upon my back
and gazed at the stars–how could anyone piece together
constellations from this endless, fragmented mess? Dream about
masks and carnival games, soda machines, strange trinkets
lining the walls, another dream about a mansion, a labyrinth,
a corn maze; I never find my way, another dream in which I am
missing something unidentifiable and my teeth fall out one by

one. Along the Liverpool harbor, I told her about you, some
odd form of projection. I said, sometimes you hang onto another
person because you find a necessity within them, a need, and
to be fair, the relationship is give and take; the need may be
temporary, unreturned, unresolved, falling violently or gently
away. I occasionally imagine her walking back into my life
in a casual way, ordering a side salad with Balsamic. I owe her

money. The other day a coworker asked why I was single, but
I think I have more than explained; if anything, it’s my poetry.
I say that I am a concrete person, put me in a mixer and pave
your city sidewalks; once, coming upon wet cement, too
afraid to put my hand down, my foot down, any body part,
too cautious to leave a sign of my transitory passing. Now
there is time to worry, to take care, to take shelter where
there is shelter, to save, to plan, to let the sun reinvigorate skin
as clouds drift overhead.

Writing some poems in this google doc for a bit if anyone wants to join me now or edit/fuck with/add to it in the future

Fr Ed Leedskalnin

Ed works tirelessly by lamplight, moving coral blocks with techniques unknown to modern science. The sexual practices of coral are not readily visible. So many bones in the river. A heap of snakes, just unfrozen. Augury can only tell us so much about the empire. And we can see a lot of birds from here on the parapet. We can see a wedding in a village. We can see the smoke in the future, hear the sound of a flute drowning. I turn to you with a question, but you are an orange tree. I guess I am not much more than a snake myself. Nowhere to put a wristwatch.

Thousands of miles away, Agnes sleeps. That morning, she does not remember having any dreams.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read a thing about Ed and listened to some Hermeto Pascoal and did a little improvisation. I think I want to revisit the story at some point, maybe in blank verse as part of a series of mythological poems, but for now i am just having some fun after a stressful week

Image by Archigram

carmen + error

o i swoon so! envision a roman
moon somewhere waxes even as i wane!
wrens soar as i rove now once more over
mere corners. o same corners over,
over! no new view arises. no warm
caress, roman sunrises seem a mere
reminiscence. no minor vices now
vex me; iron worries my sore arms.
minimizes even minor verses
(minor now are verses i can coin)

voice on ice now, i moan “o someone
ransom me, even raze me. resize me
to urn size; ever in urn, remove me
no more, so I can receive some zen in
a coma, no cease ever!” o woe! non-roman
ears receive nonsense, no more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Just finished Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn and really enjoyed it. It got me all hyped up to do some constraint based writing. Decided to try my hand at the prisoner’s constraint: all letters with ascenders and descenders are banned. I ended up writing about Ovid’s exile because apparently I’m a piece of shit. But actually, a banished poet is close enough to a prisoner, and the fact that so much of his misery in exile came from his inability to communicate with anyone actually makes it an appropriate story for a poem written with a moderately difficult language constraint maybe? idk.

artist unknown, unfortunately

PYRAMUS AND THISBE

Have I given up entirely
on Pyramus and Thisbe whispering
through a thin wall in Babylon?
When I look at the wall I can only imagine
a searing digital blueness on the other side,
six bluenesses squeezing.
When you’re not watching,
they don’t broadcast anything.

When you leave the grocery store
all of the fresh produce deflates
and a man with some warts gathers it tidily into a beige sack.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(secretly just a poem about how i don’t want to do my latin homework)

art by Salvador Dali

I have too much hair and like usual it is pulling me towards space. It keeps its alliances secret from me, but I hear it plotting when it thinks I am asleep. I guess I will just have to do some plotting of my own, I say reaching for a pair of scissors, but it’s too late. The scissors have already decided which side they are on. The razors too. I go into a building with a roof and lots of canned goods in the hopes that I can just wait this out, and some people emerge from the cans, playing violins with just enough anger.

A place I have been thinking of as a museum or maybe a crypt
is actually a photograph and like all photographs
it is a flying machine someone made before 1903; it sits now
in a basement, talking to wallpaper glue and unused wrenches.

When you go into a photograph
do you become a part of it, or do you become
a different photograph? I have a picture of my family minus my dad
but it is more a picture of my dad, who is holding the camera mostly steady in the wind
that later tore the colorful ski-slope map from the ground.
(a ski slope map is tragically unprepared
for the challenges of navigating a ski slope itself)

In the photo, you can see my dad’s eye from behind it’s yellow surface. Watch him
thinking about the mountains in Europe that he has never touched,
the impending iron Monday
busily crushing little snakes into a fine juice
in preparation for its meeting with him soon. Every week,
he has to drink the juice.

I try to fix up the flying machine
and at least give it the satisfaction
of stalling out in midair and plummeting
into a lake somewhere. I try
to use the wrenches when I do this.

The content of this poem has been removed. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond our control conspired to force us to remove the content of the poem. We leave behind this brief notice as an artifact in the hopes that in the future wind will make interesting sounds as it blows through the skeleton of this poem, maybe in a poorly dubbed kung fu movie. Thank you for your understanding, and please have a nice day.

I remember when I was a bell tower in Michigan. The bell was a peacock with exactly seven feathers, and the feathers were tea-kettles filled with claws. Every time a mailman froze to death, the bird would rattle its feathers and I would have to bend over and pick up the mailman, and put it into a basket. Every week, someone would come by to empty it out. I don’t know what he was using the mailmen for, and I have often wondered if the letters they were carrying ever made it to the proper addresses.

Now I am a lighthouse in Kansas. Every so often, Dana comes to town and we go out to dinner. When I open my mouth to take a bite of fog, a beam of yellow light dribbles out. When I try to make conversation, my head turns in a slow circle. The waiter is avoiding us. I think it’s because he’s a large steamship, and he’s scared of running aground on our booth in the corner, but Dana, at least, never seems to get blinded or dizzy. She talks about her dad; she says he just got hired as a mailman. Every day he goes out into the woods and waits around with the same package, but the woods refuse to sign for it. “They think signatures are beneath them or something” she complains. I am pretty sure nobody ever taught the woods how to write in cursive. A foghorn bellows, and our dessert arrives with a tremendous crash.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(i haven’t posted here in a long time, but we are doing surrealism/prose poetry in class and I got super nostalgic…do any of the writers I care about here remember me? probably not…)

Drunk. Feeling Poetic. If anyone else is awake at this ungodly hour than click this link to this rad ass Google doc and we’ll write shitty/cool/weird poetry together. If not I’ll write shitty/cool/weird poetry by myself which is cool also. Also put stuff in my ask. That shit is fun to respond to cryptically. Yeah, cool, you’re a wonderful person probably. Or maybe you’re a misogynist in which case reexamine your fucking life choices. Yeah

nickrizzuti:

I will remember this experience in dark shades and
Violent images.
I will remember things coming for me through my own mind
To stop my heart from beating and I will remember defeating them.

Deep in the heart of a forest, I can picture a freezing river.
I am putting all of my efforts towards moving this river across vast distances
towards me, to wash my small human form

Away into Finnish woods.
I am uprooting trees in Finnish woods
And I am a smooth fire of flashing images

Now I have one million arms for the world
I am an umbrella of warmth and peace,
Not a fishing net full of nails
Moving through the sea.

Hello I am back again. I’ve been going strong with my new year’s resolution of writing a poem every day, just haven’t been posting them…I’m queuing up the sort of good ones now in my other blog so they are coming out 2 a day until I’m all caught up with the current date. Um…ok that’s all for now I kind of want to do some more of those freeform collaborations I did with unknowmenclature and urbsantiquafuit and others would anybody be down for something like that?

nickrizzuti:

I CHOOSE TO BE COLOR

I am living bright plastic and
I am living colorful frogs in the jungle 
And when I am looking at a great sunset I 
would even like to live violent sky witches.

Wow
I live color only with the moth feelers of you
The past I choose is the past of brightly colored dinosaurs.
The science I choose is the science of bright liquids in beakers
early on Saturday morning TV for kids

The science I chose is the most useless but the most beautiful science.
I choose astronomy as the science of me

The poetry I choose is the fox constellation of you
when I am awake in cold grasses

nickrizzuti:

MESSENGER

Go somewhere cold and just think about 
a messenger.
She has been walking for so long;
She has never not been walking across great oceans 
of snow or of the cool shadows of trees or even
great oceans of houses and offices.

The birds and the animals give her more space than she wants or needs.

Now she is out of food in a tundra so endless it is a planet made of glass
And now she is hiding from her enemies in the tall grasses of America
And now
she is sleeping beside a small and gentle
river

You take her fatigue into your body 
and keep it safe and comfortable.
You teach it the important lessons as it grows larger until
it is big enough to surround you completely
in the coldest hug imaginable

I need you to hold that position for a long time because
glaciers hold a lot of power for me
and I just want to talk to them but I can’t find the right language to use

Yesterday’s poem, for those who might want to read it, but didn’t see it

nickrizzuti:

½/15 — THE RAIN MADE A DOOR FOR ME AND I CAME THROUGH IT

All of a sudden, there are mountains and
they have been here forever, filled with
skeletons of tremendous animals from the beginning of the Earth and
I am grey like a dead seal in a living ocean,
and I am young and powerful like the weather is powerful
and I am powerful like six volcanoes
and I am powerful like an empty tower made of trees
and I am powerful like the last swan dying

And I am powerful like the rain is powerful,
I tell myself, looking into a lake at dusk.

I go deep into the woods of Pennsylvania
and practice magic
so that I can create new and exciting weather
for my friends when they die

When Noah dies the rain
will make six black horses
and ram them into the gates of a great castle

When Jack dies the rain
will make a great library
and nobody will be able to read any of it
or walk through its vast hallways without collapsing eventually in tears

And when Ryan dies the rain 
will make
in the right direction, and all of the people will follow it

And so on for centuries until a thousand years from now I die 
and the last rainstorm stands as a monument to the beauty and power of 
driving home long after midnight.

Ok here’s my new blog and the first poem of the year! The January first poem got deleted :(

The title (and jumping off point) comes from the novel Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrel which is a really great fantasy novel. I really recommend it for a long read that you can really immerse yourself into. The author does a great job developing a whole, really cool history for her world and communicates it just right so that it supplements rather than distracts from the story. She also does this cool thing where it feels like she is genuinely writing in the 1850’s even though she started the book in the 90’s and it’s very impressive.  And it’s just a strongly written novel; good characters, cool plot, good writing, just great. That’s why I wanted to write a poem from it!