An Exercise

SYNTAX

Writing a poem is a piece of chocolate cake:

inside of each atom is a tiny stanza

waiting to greet us the way lemon juice caresses freshly brushed

teeth,

the way the scent of bread burning in the kitchen toggles one's nostrils,

the way waking up to find a bloody 5 dollar bill in the front

pocket of your pants tickles one's curiosity;

Travis and I spent the better

part of an hour staring at seals who

barked from the bottom of the Puget Sound -

but there were no seals in the water

that day and, if there had been,

they would not have been barking;

GILD MY LILY

writing a poem will never be anything

like eating cake,

there are 3 sides to every apartment

in all new Americas

and a specific meter for any and all

neutrons.

on BAKING A CAKE

In the chapter of Natalie Goldman's book Writing Down the Bones entitled "Baking a Cake" the author begins by discussing the process by which one goes about baking a cake. She states that if one takes the ingredients for a cake and mixes them together, all one will have is "goop." It requires heat (energy) for a cake to take form. The point of this metaphor is that simply writing down the details from one's life experiences will not make for an intriguing read - one must add energy, which, in this case, refers to "the heat and energy of your heart" rather than that of an oven. What she seems to be saying is that passion is the glue that transforms the details of one's experiences into cake, or, in this case, purposeful writing. Simply relating to someone the details of an experience without adding one's feelings about those experiences will render the telling dull and ineffectual. Goldman implores the reader to "caress the details," to give them life. She also discusses how some writers use only heat (i.e. energy) to try and bake their literary cakes. Such dishes, she states, leave the reader with "nothing to bite into." That is to say that they lack the details, the spice, the emotional reaction to one's experiences that shape a good piece of writing.

Interestingly enough, Goldman does not, an any point in this chapter, attempt to explain the delicious nature of no-bake cookies.

"Figuratively descriptive" or "descriptively figurative"?

HYPOTHETICAL INTELLIGENCE

You can teach a hen to answer the

telephone, but you can't fake an egg

or catch a pocket on your tongue and

wait until it rains to wash your hair.

I would still go to sleep if I

shrank to the size of a pea: that's

what screwdrivers do. I mean, who wants to eat

spaghetti off an ax or carry foxes

in quart baskets until their arms melt into unfamiliar mushrooms?

Irony is breathing miasma to tolerate balloons. Go back to

dragging your snowflakes like a tail across my teeth. This

exercise has answered that very same question.

on TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT

Late last night, I found myself at a friend's apartment watching Spalding Gray performing Swimming to Cambodia in the film of the same name (directed by Jonathan Demme). The original stage production of Swimming to Cambodia (for which Gray won an Obie award) was four hours long and was performed over two nights. If you're not familiar with the piece, Gray talks about his experiences in Cambodia during the filming of The Killing Fields (incidentally, Sam Waterson and Ira Wheeler are listed as co-stars, although their only involvement in the film is the inclusion of a short clip from The Killing Fields).

Spalding Gray eventually jumped off the Staten Island Ferry after watching Tim Burton's film, Big Fish. He was 62 years old and had been suffering from clinical depression, which had worsened after an automobile accident in Ireland 3 years prior, for quite some time.

He never, to my knowledge, published any poetry, but he came to mind this morning when I was reading TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT DISMEMBERMENT by Bhanu Kapil Rider (although I might be hard pressed to explain why he came to mind - perhaps the dynamics between Eastern and Western societies that are a theme in both works caused me to find an affinity between the two). Kapil's poem is a whopper, in which she states that she "would never do anything so English as write about art. I said I'd write, instead, the book of blood." She refers to two chapters in the aforementioned book - the first chapter is a description of naked Hindu women being tied to eucalyptus trees by Muslim Indians in 1948 with their "wombs hanging out of their stomachs." This imagery is driven home by Chapter Two as "there is no Chapter Two." Next the voice of the author is reading the Denver Post - presumably in the early 1990's as inside of the newspaper is an article about Serbs raping Croatian women, cutting out their wombs, and hanging them on poles (it should be noted that the author breaks to sip tea before she finishes reading the first sentence of this account). As she transitions into the final stanza of the poem, a meditation on the many different types of rain that fall (possibly an analogy for different cultures and geographical locations as well as ideas of transience / permanence), she tells of a "Punjabi monsoon" and states that the rain reminds her that she is "always facing East; the direction of water: its rapidly dissolving salt." I found myself returning to the first line of the poem at this point, wherein Rider states that "When it rains, the grass is filled with blood." This poem is full of images of rain and blood, just like the name of the book contained within.

When I was living in Surakarta, there was a time during the wet season when much of the city flooded. The irony was the storm damaged a large water pump that supplied our neighborhood (and several others) with running water. Until we found a well in our neighborhood that we could use, my roommates and I relied upon the rainwater to wash our dishes with and bathe in (I still recall taking off my shirt and soaping down in the street). A week or two later we were still without water, and so the water company started sending a truck of water to our neighborhood each day. When the truck came, people would shout and grab any variety of empty containers and run to the truck to have them filled. The atmosphere felt like a party: everyone looked so happy to see the water truck. When the running water was finally restored, I felt a little sad; I missed the water truck and the jubilant environment that it encouraged.

To summarize, I choose to invoke the words of the 16th president of the United States of America:

"Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes."

3 Love Poems

I.

We wrapped our shoes and laces like leopard spots

On the torso of the sign explaining

Where and when someone comes to fill the pots

In the kitchen with noodles, proclaiming,

"Green air, black clouds: it's still the same two skies."

And it is, regardless of who's around -

As even when atoms arrive on time

TORNADOES and who could just put that down?

We've been blown around like bus stops before;

Who hasn't been to Love's? Eaten at Hardee's?

Every grain of sand, each apple core

Has spilled to stay and watch something recede

As some have climbed like cordage for their toes

When glass is dogs running bare in the road.

II.

Bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells -

What a waste of time, even birds agree;

Beaks have gone barking, "Jesus, what the Hell?

Go make eyes in Lansing, this is our tree."

I live to climb, watch it in my elbows;

They make a splash, a sandwich in fractions.

There's no pavement left for them to behold,

Them that's so burning like fresh as fashion,

Together as: Notebooks = that won't happen.

Arms aren't made of twine and paper fiber,

Digits aren't scraps of felt to be fastened

Like brittle cucumbers, cold as tigers.

Why lurk like rooms with eyes in small onions?

To ring like sleeves in sweaters with function!

III.

"Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;

And yet methinks I have astronomy"

- William Shakespeare, XIV

If it was a pumpkin, not an apple,

That William Tell arrowed from his son's head,

Then this is the squash with which we must grapple,

The seeds inside of the bowl by the bed,

The gas mask, the hot tub, all that beeswax:

Skinhead ex-boyfriends shoplifting vodka,

Burnt toast and popcorn and suicide pacts,

Straight Edge girlfriends who use Oxford commas,

Pillows who sang like blankets from the floor,
"Let's trace small lines through the strings in our lungs,

Let's smoke our way through the lock on the door,

And bleed bad breath for the soup that we've sung."

So our curse is always chirping something,

Crickets long gone in search of free parking.

3 Poems Including 15 Words or More

A HOBO IS JUST A TRAMP WHO'S TOO PROUD TO BEG

There are kata kata you can

dig like

lemons & there are images I

may taste like holes.

Drop one in the garbage like

a pastry wrapper. Spit

one up on

the sidewalk after pudding. Wrap it

in a blanket and sail

it down the

river. I'll

be your R.S. on a ladder. All unpacific

spindrift and stairstepped

representability. In the lunchroom with

striated

palisades and trilobites. Breathing inter-

mittent epochs and

Carboniferous crinoids: your

basic

carbonaceous what-have-you ... Sessile,

Cambrian, Silurian. It

should be stated that, on the

ground, I'm

nothing like him. I'm

a shark, wet

behind the ears. Happy Sargasso.

LET THE LOG ROLL DOWN THE LADDER / SKIN THE CAT UPSIDE-DOWN

A page in a book:

Representability.

Barren veins:

Trilobites.

Thesauri:

Whatever you want them to be

(Crinoids, epochs, etc.).

A pillar of salt:

Palisades.

The opposite end of violence:

Unpacific.

Intermittent spindrift:

Silurian.

Almost everything:

Carbonaceous.

Bodies of knowledge:

Stairstepped.

A cipher or maze of sorts:

Carboniferous.

Sessile remnants:

Striated.

Cambrian:

trilobites.

COMPLETE SEAFOOD

Complete seafood: Silurian, tropical. I like

that. It's a Cambrian thing. So intermittent.

Palisades? Yep, everything. The spindrift

is carbonaceous. They do this Sessile thing

with the crinoids. And the epochs are

striated with trilobites. It's very unpacific.

We usually go in around noon or

twelve-thirty. Last Friday we stairstepped

yoga and went straight there. The representability is

Carboniferous. You couldn't ask for more.