Too Cute

A House-Warming Poem For Bobby and Emily

After bringing in

unorganized piles

of miscellaneous

and unopened

wedding gifts,

Bobby placed

two stuffed monkeys

outside the door.

I went to grab them.

No, leave them there.

Mischief was in his eyes.

Look what I found?

Emily came to the door.

Oh, our first house-guests!

Let’s give them a tour.

Modern Art

Two split-logs

leaning against each-other

sat on a pedestal.

It was in an art gallery

so I assumed there

was something to get

which was over my head.

I moved on.

A picture

of a steel pipe

Sept 84

written on it.

Next to this

was a series of notes

written on

hotel stationary.

Different

hotels

with different

amounts of time—

but the same sentiment:

I promise

to be a good artist. . .

in 5 years,

in 15 years,

in 30 years.

I hope I’m not

the one who’s

supposed to judge

whether or not

he kept his promise.

The Rose

[Here's a poem that me and David Loti matched up with The Rose by Bette Midler. It's a poem-song.]

Some say love, it is a river

That drowns the tender reed

Some say love, it is a razor

That leaves your soul to bleed

Some say love, it is a hunger

An endless aching need

I say love, it is a flower

And you, its only seed

I say love is five kicks to the junk

a sugar-high, and a hangover.

It makes you feel all sorts of things

all at the same time:

leaves you unsure

whether you’re laughing or sobbing;

your heart is smiling

while your colon is feeling pensive

and your liver can’t shake

an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

Love makes you want to listen

to a strange medley of ACDC,

Hank Williams, and Marvin Gaye.

It’s the most beautiful thing in the world

that makes you puke every time you see it.

Love gives you intense vertigo

then forces you to free-climb mountains.

It's the heart, afraid of breaking

That never learns to dance

It's the dream, afraid of waking

That never takes the chance

It's the one who won't be taken

Who cannot seem to give

And the soul, afraid of dying

That never learns to live

I have no idea how love

enjoys such a great reputation.

It is a porcupine fetus

you give birth to

every time they brush up next to you

or laugh at your jokes.

It makes you want to punch Bette Midler

square in the face

even as you nod in complete agreement

to the sappy lyrics of song

you know you’re supposed to hate .

It’s a peaceful-easy-feeling

that pushes a Rototiller

straight through your guts.

It’s a railroad tunnel

painted on the side of a cliff

that you believe every damn time.

When the night has been too lonely

And the road has been too long

And you think that love is only

For the lucky and the strong

Just remember in the winter

Far beneath the bitter snow

Lies the seed

That with the sun's love,

In the spring

Becomes the rose

They say

when skiers get caught-up in an avalanche

their brains get knocked around,

so that when they finally stop

they can’t tell which way is up.

When they start digging

they’re just as likely

to go down as up. . .

Love is like that

except warm and nice smelling.

Love may be a flower,

but it’s not a kindly one.

It’s one of those spikey-asshole flowers

that everyone seems adore

despite it’s proclivity

for dolling out scrapes,

cuts, and other stinging injuries.

Learning Three-Year-Old

He yells

something

in three-year-old,

a language I’m only

partially proficient in;

so I paid it no mind.

I was playing tag-along;

he’d only met me

a half-hour earlier,

I assumed he was

talking to his nanny,

who is fluent and practiced.

“There’s a park!

There’s a park!

There’s a park!”

He repeated

with urgency

and bouncing.

Nanny offers a quick tutorial

on listening: “Jake—

he’s talking to you.”

“Oh. . .

There is a park.

Good eye!”

A Reason to Hope

[This poem owes it's main idea to a Wendell Berry poem. Also, this and the previous 6 poems posted were all written in one hour at a coffee shop today. Most productive hour of writing in my life.]

A dark sky

littered with stars

ought to be celebrated

because it is not

ordinary.

At midday

even clear skies

give no reason to hope

for such a spectacle.

No faint glimmer,

no single clue

left to betray

the billions of suns

burning light-years

from the top

of blue skies.

When night comes

the thinnest layer of cloud

can hide all lights

but the moon.

City lights

obscure the view

on clear nights.

Living in a big city

on a cloudy coast,

it’s easy to forget stars—

out-of-sight

out-of-mind.

Clear nights

far from the city

are treasures;

reasons to search-out

an empty field and lay down,

head on bunched-up sweatshirt,

stare

wide-eyed

at what was always there

invisible and now

revealed.

Like Mildew

This Loneliness won't leave me alone

-Otis Redding

Living in a basement

is cool and dark,

good for long summer sleeps.

But an abundance of free time

spent alone

leaves me restless.

Restlessness

in dark cool spaces

breeds loneliness

like mildew.

I wonder how much

they think of me,

and imagine the worst:

eyes rolling

when they see

“Jake”

in the caller ID,

parties

with everyone I know

raging,

and toasts

to my absence.

Living in a basement

thinking too much

about myself,

waiting for my phone

to save me

from these lonely thoughts.

I need to get out

and go for a walk.

Wealth and Leisure and Bunnies

On Jericho Beach

the retired and semi-retired

walk along the edge

of a field of black-berries.

Cameras

with large

expensive

lenses

dangle from

their necks.

They bend down

to photograph

families of rabbits

feeding an arm’s length

from the brambles.

I run by

in fancy shoes

bought with money

withdrawn from an account

set-up for me

by my grandfather.

If I wasn’t

already prejudiced

against those with the

wealth and leisure

to photograph bunnies,

I’d probably find

the whole scene

beautiful.

But instead

I rolled my eyes

and turned up

the volume on

my iPod.

The Grandeur of God

The world is charged with the grandeur of God

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Light comes

bouncing down

through deep green leaves

on a day exploding

with the grandeur of God

Cheery thoughts swirl

through my mind.

I smile at curly-haired

midgets in strollers.

Nod at the East Indian

construction workers

lounging around a cooler

on a much needed break.

An appreciation for the Lord,

His very good creation,

and all his beautiful creatures

swells up from the bottom of me.

By my ear

a rush of air

presses close.

A crow swoops

up to an overhanging branch.

A dive bomb ambush

aimed at the back of my head.

Damn crow!

Caws rain down.

Fuck you crow!

I’m trying to enjoy

the majesty and wonder

of a summer morning!

Leave me the hell alone,

damnit!

One Hour in a Coffee Shop on Commercial Drive

Coffee shop conversation

tosses back-and-forth:

stories of border-crossings

and Meat Puppet concerts

and Michael J. Fox.

Why do I always

feel the need

to document

my eavesdropping?

Apparently, Vancouver

is some sort of mecca

for punk rock—

talked about in LA,

London, and Toronto.

It’s when I kill time

and feel the need

to bring back evidence—

a souvenir, something

to show

I did more with the day

than nap.

Camou cargo-shorts explains

the necessity of firewall

and the rowdiness of Bellingham locals.

Transients

Memories

used to be suction—

boots

ankle-deep

caked in heavy mud

taking multiple tries

to free.

Now they pass

in-and-out

quick

without incident—

transients

wandering the streets

they used to live on.

I Knew I Should Have Brought a Sweatshirt

clouds laid siege

to the second sunny of summer

the sunshine was closed-in

starting to feel cramped

all this was worrisome

an hours walk from home

in sandals and jean cut-offs

Lepers and Prophets

And they said to one another, "Why are we sitting here until we die?"

2 Kings 7:3

The thing about prophets is—they’re all poets

so half of everything that they say seems like bull shit

and the other-half is non-sequitur

and the people who go into that disreputable profession

don’t have an ounce of common sense in their body.

Contrary to common belief, they don’t just start

spouting metaphors, parallelisms, and warnings

about locusts, and exiles, and the wrath of the Lord.

Those of us who’ve had the “privilege” of growing up with them know—

they’ve been saying crazy since they could talk,

and then people started listening to the crazy,

and then some of the crazy started coming true,

and then it went to their head, and then they started

beginning their crazy with the phrase “thus sayeth the Lord,”

and then their poetry wasn't categorized under bull shit

and non-sequituiers, instead it was labeled: “divine oracle.”

The crazy started a long time ago

but Elijah added something new.

There was a cocky swagger about him,

not a typical curmudgeon-ed hermit—

when the boring prophets of boring gods

challenged him and were clearly on the losing end of the challenge,

Elijah taunted them “call louder, maybe your god is on the shitter.”

After that he called for fire from heaven,

and God, ignoring what this action would do

to inflate the size of Elijah’s head, obliged.

The whole thing gained momentum,

and then he took on an understudy:

Elisha.

Through a series of events I don’t quite understand

our city came to be “under-siege,” which made our lives worse.

Leper’s already have a shit time, but add to the requisite

loss of feeling in limbs (and subsequent damage to them)

and being ostracized, labeled as unclean, and forced to beg;

add to that, living in the entrance of a starving city

and you have the recipe for quite the pickle.

This particular siege looked extra bleak

people were eating horses,

making deals with each other

to eat little boys.

There weren’t many food scraps

making their way into our bellies.

And then Elisha opened his mouth

“Hear the word of the Lord. . .”

This phrase is usually when I stop listening,

because it’s almost always bad news,

and the outlook for me is always bad anyways,

so I figure he’s not telling me anything I don’t already know,

but that time I listened.

“Tomorrow, at this time (ish)

a bag of flour will sell for 50 cents

and two bags of barley for 50 cents.”

Whether or not I believed Elisha didn’t matter (I didn’t)

because I didn’t have 50 cents. So I said to my friends:

“Why are we sitting here until we die?

If we stay here, we’ll die.

If we go out to those asshole Syrians

they’ll probably kill us, but maybe they won't.

They may give us some food.”

The logic was sound.

So after dusk we went out to look for the Syrians.

And their camp was a ghost-town—there was no one.

All their stuff was there, but they were gone.

So we ate—the best food we’d had in ages.

We ate until we were full, then we drank until we were drunk.

Then we pilfered all the shiny stuff we could find.

And then we found hammocks.

And then we lounged.

I was the first to sober up, and when I did

I remembered the people in the city,

and how they were planning on eating children,

and how it felt to be hungry.

And I realized we weren’t doing right.

So I rolled out of my hammock, found some nice gold necklaces,

and a silver bracelet (to show the gate-keepers

I wasn’t lying, and feel rich for awhile),

and I found some more wine

(because I was starting to sober up);

then I started stumbling back to the city.

Before I knocked on the gate

I remembered Elisha’s words,

and realized that this whole fiasco

would make that prick absolutely insufferable.

I killed the rest of the wine

then knocked.

They didn’t believe me at first.

But when they saw my nice stuff

and how drunk I was

they decided to check-in on it.

And low and behold the crazy leper was right.

But all anyone talked about afterwards

was Elisha this, and Elisha that.

In the years after the story got streamlined,

details were cut-down and pointed towards a particular lesson

about the faithfulness of the Lord and Elisha’s prophecy.

Most versions cut us lepers out of the story,

and none of them ever remembered our names.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter much

whether or not our names are included in a story—

at least the gatekeepers remember our part

and they always make sure we have plenty of food and wine.

Gatekeeping, now there’s a respectable profession.

Inefficiency in Rhododendron Pollination

A team of bees

and one butterfly

worked frantically

on purple Rhododendron.

I leaned in to watch.

They had no system:

no assigned quadrants,

they didn’t work from top down.

The bounced back and forth—

seemingly at random.

I wondered

what their supervisor would think

of such inefficiency.

The Twins

The twins were small

7 pounds—he said

looking down.

He was a big man

and they fit on his forearms

like footballs—

their tiny heads

in the palm of his hands

legs dangled

on either side of his elbows.

I wondered

if holding them like that

ever got old for him,

if his arms got tired,

if it still stirred

the same deep-down feelings

as it did the first time he held them.

I asked him

how he told them apart.

He grinned

said the only way

he could tell was

the color of the booties.

Where Dreams Go to Die

A Poem for Black Saturday

All those dreams

stirred-up

carefully cultivated

then yearned into substance

were lost

in a quick succession of events

observed through eyes half-asleep.

The days after passed;

hours were weeks

prying at clinched fists,

till each man

hiding in a locked room

in confused impotence

gave up and lost hope.

Denizens of Mischief

There are hundreds of

henchmen, minions, and goons

all out to get you.

In poorly lit rooms

in empty warehouses

they listen inattentively

to super-villains and evil wizards

explaining needlessly complex plans

to entrap you.

So suspect:

dollar bundles of asparagus,

cheap flights to Portland,

by-one-get one free

packs of fancy underwear,

every beautiful girl

fascinated by your art

and topics ranging from soul music

to medieval theology.

Behind every one of these

is a half-dozen denizens of mischief

with bottles of chloroform and pre-soaked rags

ready and waiting with anticipation

in the blink-of-an-eye

you’ll be tied-up with scratching rope

dangled over a vat of a boiling liquid,

acid, you presume,

while a surprisingly eloquent miscreant

regales you with the details of his plan

for the doom of the city, after he rids himself

of your meddlesome menace, of course.

So be careful:

you have more arch-enemies

than anyone as mind-numbingly mundane as yourself

could possibly warrant,

each one focused on the single task

of removing you from this world.

They all have at least

five plans to ensnare you:

they know what you like,

where you live,

and what you do;

you would have been wise

to invest in a secret identity.

Mulch

These thoughts are weeds:

coming up thick and fast,

spreading.

Pulling them takes all my time;

my hands are tired, worn, and cracked—

I need gloves and hand-lotion.

But I wanted a garden (damn-it!)

full of bright colors, fruit trees,

and vegetables in orderly rows;

each happily knowing their place

in soil and season.

So I keep digging,

adding to the pile

of uprooted and unwanted;

maybe someday

it will make good

mulch.