Recently in Poetry Category
July 23, 2008
Of poets and wabbits.
A few weeks ago, none other than former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins published an essay in The Wall Street Journal called "Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit", wherein he extolls the virtues of Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes cartoons. He outlines their influence on his work, and even includes four poems from his first published collection written about the four pillars of Looney ("Bugs", "Daffy", "Porky" and "Elmer"). I love this highbrow-meets-lowbrow mentality, discussing the pleasures that can be derived from these works that most English professors would probably publicly deride – and it's not just knee-slapping humor that Collins advocates, but also the bizarre takes on sexuality and cosmopolitanism that run rampant in these classic animations. I've long believed that there's plenty of rich material to be found in classic popular culture, and hearing a poet laureate share that opinion is wonderfully vindicating. Now to write my epic poem based on Terry and the Pirates...
May 1, 2008
Postmortem: 30|08.
Well, that didn't work. The last time I did a "30 poems in 30 days" project, it was two years ago and I wound up writing them poems in huge blocks. They were much shorter and all followed a similar theme. This time around I tried to do longer works on wider themes and, well, it didn't fly. Part of this is because I haven't been feeling very poetic lately due to my brain being stuck largely in analytic mode due to work -- lots of writing being done on the MIT side of things. More on that in a minute, but the upshot of 30|08 is that it was a great idea but faltered on the execution. Oh, well -- I'm still proud of some of the stuff it generated, but next time I'll be sure to set aside more time just for that type of project.
Better news coming monetarily!
April 18, 2008
30|08:13 Baba Yaga
It was her fingers that undid me,
long, spidery things half again too long
and knotted with extra knuckles,
skittering things, scratching things,
grasping, grabbing, groping things,
they took hold of my pleasant delusions
and unraveled them with a harsh nasty tug,
popping loose the seams of my amorous intent
before continuing on to my very heartstrings,
drawing them out from between the meat of my ribs
until nothing remained inside myself
but thread and yarn and red.
30|08:12 Mad Hettie
The ghost beside me shudders and shakes and swears,
clutching her purse in crabbed old claws,
wracked and wrecked with something old and cold and fatal
I'm grateful I'm not permitted to know.
There's a tiny something knotted in her hair,
a kink, a snag, a snarled ball trapped in her snakes,
and with a start I realize it's a tiny baby bird,
killed before it ever opened its eyes,
the blue marbles on its odd featherless head
as still and sightless as the lady's own,
rolled back in her head, placebos, placeholders,
seeing naught now but memories and the future.
30|08:11 MBTA
Longing for release and it's not even Wednesday,
I close my eyes and blink to better coordinates,
folding myself through a tesseract and squeezing through
the tiniest sliver of an escape clause,
I renege on this weather,
I reject the contract that keeps April cold,
I turn my back on the bullshit compliance
that maintains this ridiculous hegemony -
I stand in this subterranean expanse,
leaning heavily against a squat, tattered column
and spluttering in these failing fluorescents,
I shift from foot to foot, I curse, I sweat,
I swallow my frustrations, no good, no good,
my feet scuff the concrete and my teeth grind to razor points,
honing calcium into furious fangs,
with each passing minute I devolve, more feral,
my hair growing long and my nails unsheathing sharp from quicks,
I am this beast that prowls beneath Harvard Square,
a minotaur's path worn deep into ragged bricks.
30|08:10 Protest
I will spin my hair into silver,
my skin into leather,
my eyes into milky marble,
my senses into stillness
and my days into memories of ghosts.
I will grow and weather and buckle and fold,
collapsing in on myself as the trongest of towers
finally yields to the subatomic cracks endemic to its mortar.
Get Kurzweil on the phone, ring up Gray,
tell them I have complaints to lodge,
pleas to make, petitions to file.
I rail against the fading of my genetic sequencing,
the collapse of such simple bonds
and infinitely fall fractures,
the flaw in my design
that fails to render me
immortal.
30|08:09 R
The boggart stands in the center of the room,
feet apart, jaws agape,
glaring defiance and astonishment at his loss,
spun gold mountained in each corner,
and the stolen babe still in its mother's traitorous arms.
The fury in his eyes is iridescent,
his last hope for an heir spoiled,
his secret in the open and his enemies well-funded
through his own dearest tricks of the trade.
His arms are empty, his stomach full of ice,
he trembles at the thought of what his wife will say,
or if she will even open the burrow door to him,
or if she will simply silently up and leave,
searching out a better man with a more virile name.
April 6, 2008
30|08:05 Boom Baby Boom
Like a rock concert in the middle of winter,
Like leather pants on a man old enough to be your daddy,
Like a convertible in a thunderstorm,
A pop reference still too recent to be retro,
A line from a sitcom nobody ever watched,
This is the way she would walk into the room,
Too cool to be cool,
More heebie-jeebies than CBGB's,
Stepping way outside what my little mind could handle,
Refracting the culture of a thousand other places
Through the pretty pretty prism of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,
Sashaying down the corridor like nobody's business,
Standing in the street like nobody's daughter,
Dancing in the field like nobody's home,
Leaving in her wake a trail of nothing more
Than scattered, heartbroken, bewildered stares.
(Late due to veterinary emergencies yesterday.)
April 2, 2008
30|08:02 Femto
Blink, no, too slow by far, not F-16 fast,
throttles full open and engines at full rip-roar blast,
still not fast, not ultra-fast laser fast,
moving an atom's breadth, dancing in femtoseconds,
weaving and cutting and welding and building,
erecting great monuments on the surfaces of semiconductors,
entire civilizations on the backs of things too small to be perceived.
In Michigan 300 terawatts flex through titanium and sapphire,
primed to divide cell from cell, bond implants to bone,
change the limits of time and freeze electrons in motion,
actions so small as to be nearly infinite,
not unlike the minutiae that drew me to you.
April 1, 2008
30|08:01 Sunteeth
Tiny bits and pieces of something removed,
Artifacts that hint at a larger thing, a greater device,
A clockwork the size of the sun, perhaps,
Its warmth and fire generated by eternally grinding gears,
Shooting plasma plumes each time a tooth catches,
Darkening sunbathers a million million miles away,
A cancer machine crouching between clouds
Growling and gnashing its comfortable jaws.
These are the pieces of it that fell to earth,
Tumbling in the wake of David Bowie,
Granting us hints at its true malevolent intent,
My daughter scoops them up in the folds of her dress
Snatches them up in tiny fists,
Ignoring their heat and their smell,
And rushes to my office to thrust them into my hands
And insist that I string them into a necklace,
Sunteeth jewelry to impress her friends at school,
And I take them from her, one by one,
Holding them up in the light streaming through my window,
And they glint as they are reunited with their parent radiation,
I swear they glow red and gold with trembling frustration,
Yearning to gnaw through my fingers, the sky and space.
They'll make such pretty, hateful things.
