Bedtime Posy

Let me slide beneath this lily-world
And slowly sink in my dark pool of dreams.
Let me slide beneath this lily-world
And sip the muddy mere of what might be.

 

04/03

Sanitary

Oceans of clean white sickness,
A cloying semisolid of some depth.
Thicker than expected at first touch,
Softer than at first glance—

But this is not a thing for firsts,
Only for constancy—
Desperate for it, amnesiac to it.
It expands.

 

9/04/07

Dreamt

The worst dreams are the good ones:
Their every denial
So fluidly forgotten.
That moment—when questions should arise—
Flows past.

The worst touch is the old one:
Its last soft grain
So nearly buried.
That place—where an objection should grow—
Unsown.

The worst fear is the one unrealized:
The phlogistic threat
So stolidly smolders.
That ember—who should soon drown—
Breathes on.

The worst effort is the same one:
Its primordial failure
Lingers so in obscurity.
That notion—how dark and timeless—
Dreamt.

N-Train 10:45

You meet someone
Who smiles
Your life sideways.
You leave
Things unsaid.
The train slides away
With your smile.
You won’t meet again.

 

11/14/07

Jack the Dragon

Jack the Dragon
Flenses skin business-like,
For walls and such–
Tapestries taught, proud abode.

Taxes slacken
Familiar donor-victims
Become less so.

Jack settles in–
Smell and taste and texture–
Oh! the same.
Dragon crushes prey,
Finds crushed sameness
To be inflammable, inedible, less–
Sweepingly, cumulatively less.

Jack the Dragon appreciates this
In tapestry.

 

08/07

The Book of Five-Dollar Poems

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
Ye Rosebuds are trampled to pave the way,
Bright Rage is snuffed out by monotony,
And Nevermore is please-not-again.

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
We contrive Haiku,
Careful with our syllables,
Not saying a word.

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
My mother digs me a pit of despair,
dying with her bloodied spade in hand.
My father says something
not very astounding, like
“Everything ends with ___”
“Responsibility is life’s greatest ___”
“You just have to fill in the blank.”

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
i-AMBS oft-EN come OUT sound-ING back-WARDS,
But then the rhythm’s salvaged by the rhyme!
Keep reading ‘til you get to the rewards;
Blah, blah, blah, but then they save it just it time!

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems,
Right after that chapter
Ringing of cliché diem, we move
Into the acrostic style, which
Takes some word
And writes a poem
That cleverly
Involves the given word.
Next time, just
Give me a dictionary.

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
Exclamation points can str!!!ke at any time,
Assonance always appear as alliteration and
Consonance depends upon coincidence.
Paradoxes are often oxymoronically rational,
And word play feels more like Pun-ishment.

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
There’s a section for So-nots
Where love shan’t ever last more than eight lines
For Petrarch’s true love always cheats on him.

In the Book of Five-Dollar Poems

Centered is the style

punctuation I hear is for suckers
and
with
word art WORDART
W e r e D’Art
i t’ s a n

i i i i i i i i i i

i i i                     i i i

i i              eye                i i

i i i                     i i i

i i i i i i i i i i

for an I

But, in the Book of Five-Dollar Poems
Every p!oem is a piece of a person,
Every imitation underscores an original, and
Every word has value, if not significance.
Flexuous parallelisms and
Esoteric connotations can be followed by
A slap in the face:
Some poems are only good for
Making fun of.

12/03