poetry corner

wOOt!!! More poetry from Stacey? She must be ON FIRE or really bored and dragging out old stuff. Enjoy?




Paths and Furrows


Going into winter I have nothing.
Nothing has been dried, stored, salted away
in any way made safe.
Autumn's sun takes on a paler light
The golden fields will be plowed under, soon
grey under the grey moon.
One could easily die in winter.

Say she breathes between us
you and I
the morning as her blanket
her body a bridge connecting two distant sides
her small warmth thawing this cold bed.

or her body a wedge
widening this distance
as with every needy belly cry
I mark the difference between you and I
scarred and husk-hollow
I will still give her more
tethered in this relentless bond
while you could decide, any day
to walk away.

if I could see our future
read our image in the stars
if I could lay out the cards
(empress tower lovers fool)
if I knew I could do this thing I would

but I can only see our past
the cooling, always cooling
the icing over
the slow march into the fading sunlight
and the long, brutal winter coming on.



How's that for depressing? I love me some depressing poetry w/a semi-feminist bent! I had a hard time not titling this "Hollah!" because I was thinking "hollow"... and I have a terrible time being serious w/ my titles. I actually got docked from an A to a B one time on a history/politics paper for my goofy title, I swear. It's hard for me to restrain myself.

poetry corner

Hey! It's been way too long since I've posted anything so I decided to stop messing w/ this poem and just post it already!




CAT

Once worshiped, you have fallen a step below
these clumsy gods of hairless flesh and aching bones.
Stolen from the desert lands, the burning sands
you ran with perfect grace
captured to the traps, the laps of men.

The song of your purr is a siren call
that holds the promise of softness
but there lies a certain anger in your eyes
your eyes reflect the light you salvage from the night
even in the darkness shining.

Into this darkness you have always slipped away
into the shadow beyond the campfire's glow
into the cobbled streets of rotting cities
between the rafters of countless barns you slide
slide into the suburban night
sliding so quickly, so surely, with a flick of the tail
into wildness.

poetry corner

I am the dying ember of a fire that was born banked
already hidden and glowing before it was sparked
left overnight to bridge the daylight hours
never alive, never a thing itself
only a pale reflection of what came before
and will never come after

because you're never too old for some angst...

It’s funny how it works
you never fit in
with the rednecks or the rockers
the nerds or the jocks or the drama kids
not even with kids who quote movies until they have
an incessant private language
but you work and work at it
to at least stop looking so out of place
to at least quiet the loudest laughter
to get left, finally, and at long last, the fuck alone
Until
one day you are (alone), and the only place left
that you’re out of place
and on the outside
and being judged
is inside your own head
and, suddenly, David Byrne
is smarter than anyone you’ve ever met
my god, what have I done, indeed
letting the days go by

Haiku, just for you

Summer Texas sun
saps the strength of better men
(and women) than me

Inspiration drought
leads to longish silences
on an empty blog

One would meekly crave
indulgence of his readers
plural implies hope

Is there more to tell
on "Your Voice is Everything"?
Talk amongst yourselves

yet more poetry (old Spencer stuff)

We are students of the same subject, you and I
strangely quiet in our comfort
drowning ourselves
in the inexorable

When everything that has been
has been spoken, and everything that
cannot be is safely catalogued
we can still remain here, alone together
in the last chance of a dying moment
in pictograms and sonoglyphs
that give our histories the lie
and smudge our self-portraits

Will these heretical monuments
to an imagined circumstance
be rubbed and dated, reinstated
into canonical glory someday?

Listen, it's simple:
simply smile at enervated intervals
wait for the signal fire to light,
and in that crucial figure find a moment for yourselfish desires
the kind that roll around the tongue
and dance in desperate measures, full
to bursting with their own depravity
real enough for our time
and our time, too, is real enough
for the children that we were (not) to grow, old already
inside, far away

Concordia St. (old Spencer poem)

It wasn't even dark when you got back
I mean, it was dark -
But not as dark as it would be in five more minutes

When the street light nearest your house clicked off
as if by magic, by whimsy
When the halo that hung on the moon
felt the chill of the clouds
When the ash-end of my forgotten cigarette
finally winked out in the ashtray
When you closed the front door quietly
and put out the porch light

It was dark, I guess, as I was left
walking down the street away
but it wasn't so much dark as it was black

Lover (old Spencer poem)

The smoke curls gently against the ceiling
having parted slowly from your slightly parted lips
We both know that it's killing us
as we pass it, slowly, back and forth

(there is no urgency at three o'clock in the morning)

Weightless as the promises of happiness
sold by shameless hucksters
to the quiet, younger, gullible me
and the older, wiser, cynical you

For we have made those promises ourselves
tied them together with bundles of old books
Shared a bed and in the sharing of the darkness
discovered we could still see the differences
in outlines dancing without a pattern
without a hope for reconciliation
dancing in the slow breath of the shared room
to the flicker of a borrowed candle
lingering, beautiful, until it is exhausted
shadowing and foreshadowing the room itself
and you and I and our time and our time

There is no urgency at three o'clock in the morning
there is only you
there is only me
only time can teach us differently

poetry corner

One for the roads, collar off the cuff
lightening the ties that bind and
tightening the lies that blind
in a synchronistic euphony
"Oh, la la la" and so forth, onward
(quiet, damn your non-soul, quiet
lee the wind inside yourself
and it can still the panic)
highly liquid sounds are flooding
chambers of quiet
who is next to fill and be filled?
there isn't enough room here
for simulspontaneous steps backward
three tries, just like the carnie barker said
who is next to take their chance?
if I still walked in the evening
like the first man, taking the guard in
with some summer scheme
I'd want it to be just like this
not forever, just for now
with four winds raising dust from
non-existent corners and piling it up,
dune-like, in a mound big enough
to be buried in
in deed, in heritance enough
for me

life is stupid and it sucks

I have had the extreme misfortune to have had the opportunity to write premature eulogies lately to two pets now; one of which became tragically appropriate a few months later, and one which we're still hoping to make irrelevant.  Our cat, Emmett, is at the vet being treated right now pretty much around the clock, and the prognosis is still not good, although he's hanging in there.  What follows is the result of an overabundance of grief and the effects of recently having read William Faulkner.  Please keep Emmett, and Heidi and I, in your thoughts.  I'll update on his condition as we keep being updated ourselves.



it was bright pink flowers and some bright yellow like daffodils and the green of stems in a birthday bouquet and the corpse white of lilies thrown in and it was perfect for what it was and for six ninety-nine or eight it was what it was and the flowers were nice in a vase with the stems trimmed maybe a little too short and arranged to where the white and the pink and the yellow were almost irresistible and so they maybe were on the first night and getting home to the cats' mess of them and the bleed of pink into the water like chum for sharks it wasn't real the bright pink petal was a carnival poster come-on color washing out into a pink like blood in the water and there wasn't much mess after all a little bit eaten and a few petals fallen down now white like paper with the lily white of the flesh damaged too but not much not too much but enough to so the cat (the youngest one) plucked from a tree in a small town in Texas took a mouthful of the lily of the valley of the shadow of a few bites maybe at the most but it was more than he needed and more than he could have known because who could have known and who didn't know that it was in his blood now and it was real now like the pink in the water acute renal failure was what they called it but it was Emmett on the counter and the lily flesh white and the carnival pink and it was real enough now and too late to know too late that lilies for a small Texas cat are pink in the water like blood like corpse white now

The Heretic Bard

So I was thinking about what you said, "Peeve-Poetry" or something, so I decided to try it out. It's terribly terribly out of line w/what Joe Public thinks. It's awesome! So here's my attempt at pop culture peeve poetry...

We Will Outlaw Nature's Law

Miley Cyrus fell from grace
because she showed more than her teenage face
and a tightly jean-clad bottom...
It was the naked back that got'em
smooth and white and completely bare
forget that the girl has pubic hair
and has no doubt gotten her menses
Society puts up fences
between "woman" and "child"
So we will not dwell
on the fact that at twelve
her body was probably ready for mating
Our society says dating
should wait and degrading
oneself with sex tapes and such
should be done at a later date (if not much)
And if she hungers for touch
let her feel shame
if her body cries for sex
let her feel shame
if she masturbates in the darkness
let her feel shame
because we say she isn't ready.
Now, make her pretty
and put her back out on the stage
make sure she acts her age
flirting sweetly, gently
saving the split beaver shot 'til she's twenty.

poetry corner

So this is not a good post for you to read if you're fragile right now, because this is a post about the cold, hard fact that Heidi and I had to euthanize our foster dog Tula today. Tula had always been fearful and anxious and a little unstable, and we were working to help her deal with that and instead be happy and joyful and calm, and for a time we felt like she was there.

But just in the past couple of weeks her anxiety turned outward into fearful aggression, ultimately turned toward new people or unfamiliar people, and that was not something that, as a pit bull especially, she could or should live with. Her fear was again dominating her life, and that is no life for a dog. So even though it was the shittiest fucking unbelievably insides-wrenching thing that Heidi and I could never even believe we could imagine doing, the right thing was to end her life, so that is what we did. It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, but it was what happened, and it was all we could do, for her.

I could go on for pages and pages, but it won't help me get over it and it won't be a positive reading experience, so I won't. I did, however, write more about it, and that's posted below.




if we could be your gods
your for all time would be an endless afternoon
a blur of grass and paws and teeth
and always running, and always sleeping
extending the few pure moments of your joy
(and our joy in the watching)
to unendurable forever

I thought I knew what goodbye was
but each one has a different taste
with always salty undertones
and bitterness, bitter regret
it isn't often living hits you, in the mouth
don't look for fair, don't ask for time
those are your words, they are not mine
life says, but in a gentle voice
like granite wrapped in velvet cord
and like a final moment, gone

so if we are to be your gods
and give you what is ours to give
then we will give you nothingness
and hope that at long last
and to your troubled mind
we can at least give
peace

poetry corner

Une Poeme in three parts (but not in French)

I.

Attraction is a woman in a dress of maroon velvet
lined with blue silk and stars
The fabric falls open to the top of her taut, white thighs
She beckons me with sugar-sticky fingers
Her touch is electric.

And this is the seduction:
red silk beneath denim
the heady scent of cinnamon
and though you call it lust
I trust
you'll fall if given the chance.

II.

She always seems to find herself here
on the edge of something
the waves carve her another border
daring her forward
break through they say, in gentle wave-speak
but she knows they can become dangerous.

There is a photograph of a tiny girl
wide eyed in her mother's arms
heading into the water.
She has always known how to swim.
Solid land is the difficulty.
Sometimes she feels the ache,
the unbearable weight
of her ancestor's bones as they crawled from the sea.
She has always known how to swim
(but probably not well enough)
A hand takes hers
and she turns, returns
leaving fragile footprints
already being washed away.

III.

Autumn stills the house like nothing else
and in the silence the bones of last year's ghosts
clack like the lid on some forgotten pot
left too long on the fire
as water seeks its release in steam.
The ghosts, unlike the pot, not easily forgotten.
She sits in the sudden silence
remembering what she no longer has
holding hard to what she does.
She is often alone now
wrapped in a fading robe
cradling in aging hands a coffee
(touched with the heady scent of cinnamon)
for an artificial warmth.
She is haunting empty rooms,
sharing the silence
with Autumn
and the bones of last year's ghosts.
She is often alone now
(but she would call it free).

Poetry Corner

This edition of poetry corner gets a feel-good story with it, no extra charge. I wrote this during the time that Heidi and I thought that we were going to have to put Tula, our foster dog, down, because she was just so fearful and unhappy that we thought she would never have an acceptable quality of life.

Thankfully, she has really shown a LOT of improvement over the past couple of weeks, and we no longer feel like she's unhappy. Best of all, though, is the news that it looks like we're going to be able to get her into the Best Friends dog sanctuary in Utah, which is the same place a lot of the abused Pits in the Mike Vick case ended up. They do really great things there for dogs that otherwise almost certainly would not have a good outcome.

So, a bleak poem, but a bright future for Tula! : )


if it’s windy out, it’s just the atmosphere that’s playing
hot and cold air, with some pressure changes too
and if it’s cold, it’s just an earthly tilting
counting off another lonely year
and it’s my job to be your only buffer
warmth from cold, and calm from storm
and everything, and everything
and always, and forevermore
but it won’t work, it never works
that way, or even nearly like
and my successes skim the pool
and leave untroubled
that great night
I fear for you,
when I can't understand
at all the thing I fear
and so I mourn imaginary loss
and cheat the demon once again
anticipating, in our quickening,
the moment that at last I'll have to mourn

Poetry Corner

For Psipsina

My catfaced creature
nuzzling your pillow, dreaming
sunny afternoons and soft blankets
I really could sleep forever,
sometimes,
when sleep comes so easily.

Would it surely wake you,
my light hand on your soft stomach?
Would it prompt a long, lean stretch
a breath-y catch, a wakening?

Then I will wait, impatiently
savoring the precarious (vicarious)
pleasure of watching
you
sleep.