Tonight's your birthday. Death, too,
feels like a number. The goat climbing out of his tail
a sign, a feeling that you are nothing, pulse
naked in the constellation, blind as the present zeroing of blackness
weeping like distance. A bit of blackness
shining on a horn. Mood, you are my jewel
part beauty, part scorn. The power's out, so the world
inside is Nagakami and Chekhov by flashlight. A drunken search
up the mountain for the priest, hanging
upside down inside the woods with his sleepless
blade, meditating the bride-riddle:
will you kiss fate, if it's forsaking you? It's hard to find
how far you have come to know
the empty beaches
where you did not know who you are. Attila
Jozsef killed himself at 32, but he poisoned himself with gold. Tonight's
his hunger. Inside my year is
lit by a silence, leaf-beaten by that small tree
eating the body's warm winds. O Heart
your birthday feels like that complete darkness before
language, when we were mothered and sightless and the seas
outside were speaking to the teeming
dark hearse of the blood
asleep--O pulse, while you were threatening me.
A HYBRID NOTEBOOK OF POETICS AND PORNOGRAPHIES
Pornography Disclaimer
This is a an imaginary diary of facts, confessions, or messages. This is a notebook of working but broken ideas, lines, images, notes on books I'm reading, writers I admire, and brief fantasies of language. Here unfiltered all mannerings pseudo-private, publicized, ur-. Here I am art and unrevealed: poetic, political and pop. These are my moonlit rough beginnings and should not be taken literally, directly, truthfully, reliably, and none of it is legally binding. These lies are all choreographed, but only haphazardly. Beware.
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Poetry Disclaimer
My work has been awarded the Katherine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Swarthout Award, and has twice been nominated and shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize. My first book, A Book Called Rats, was selected for the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry (Eastern Washington University Press 2007). I'm curating editor for the online journal of poetry: PISTOLA and my poems and reviews most recently appear in Massachusetts Review, Beloit, Ploughshares and RAIN TAXI. I currently teach writing and literature at Santa Monica College in southern California.
1 comment:
you thief!
you butcher!
how dare you swindle this feeling from me, you maroon carnivore!
you ripped the flesh as if we were still young. but now, like a master, your incisions are precise.
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