Tag Archives: poems

a break in the flow

Red painting on white background of two oxen yoked together, feeding on plants, beneath the words, Good morning, good morning. It’s quiet here, and grey, and chilly, and peaceful. The dog is curled up on the rug, waiting for me to be done on the shiny clacky thing so I can come play.

I spent my morning writing time complaining about things I’m not going to share here. Suffice to say, for now, that the writing helped, even though I’m still mad. And this.

I spent my ride home from work yesterday reading about R. Kelly. And then the news about OJ. So maybe not a great day, yesterday, for the fight against sexual assault and domestic violence, or, you know, femicide in all its forms.

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it all stays (es bleibt alles)

Poster on a stick, pink background behind a line drawing of a house; inside the house are the words Good morning, good morning. Upstairs, the bread dough is resting on the breadboard. I wake up to a room smelling of wild yeast, dough rising. I think a house should always smell like freshly baked bread, or about-to-be-baked-bread, don’t you?

Sometimes you make a decision and you feel something land in you, a place of possibility opens, a thing of yes hollows out all the no you’ve swallowed, and makes itself at home. You become a place where yes can live. Where future can live. Where tomorrow can live. Where hope can live. Some days you are all outshine and coffee grounds, you are the flicker of the flame and you are the flame, you are the waft of steam rising from the green tea and the hum of the wing of the hummingbird hovering over the blossom’s throat, you are the feet finding a new path, you are the fingers welcoming an old stone. You are the gist of a sentence, you are the stamen’s statement, you are the ripening peach, you are the lengthening glisten on a growing beach, you are the bean. Some days you are more than yesterday’s ache, yesterdays no, yesterday’s grief and loss, you are more than garbage, you are more than what was thrown out or ignored, you are more than the book left on the shelf for years, unread, unheralded, unblessed. Some days you are the cool chill on the neck of a sleeping deer, nestled in a place safe beneath a copse of trees, some days you are the copse of trees, you are the safety, some days you, even you, are the safe place. Your body is the safe place, your hands are the safe place, your mouth is the safe place, and your heart, as you know your heart, has always been the safe place.

Some days you are echo and dance, you are willpower and dive, you are forget and forgive, you are revenge, you are remember, you are never forget, you are anger and you are yes and you are power. You are the child curled up on the couch and the youth hiding in the closet and the young man walking down the street with a strut he thinks he doesn’t deserve but doesn’t know how to live without. You are the without. You are the strut. You are the do until die, you are the fake it until you make it, you know how to make it because you have made it here. Some days you are more than the account balance, you are more than the hours of life traded for money, you are more than the receipt, more than the transcript, more than the record, the data, the bits of information floating around in the world about you, you are their aggregation, and then you are more. You are the flicker of the squirrel tail, you are the faint hoot of the owl in the woods, you are the place of promise, you are the finger of regret and then you are the finger that scrapes through cake frosting and brings sweet to your mouth.

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“know it while you have it”

256px-Charles_Bukowski_916Good morning good morning. It’s hot here, and the sun is already high in the sky, coating everything in yikes. How’s the body of the earth where you are?

Here’s your tired writer, two mornings in a row getting a late start because I had a late night because… well, two nights ago I was out late at the Erotic Reading Circle, listening to powerful writers share their gorgeously hot work. Last night I was up late reading Martha Beck’s Leaving The Saints. If you find the through-line that ties those things together, let me know.

I’ve got two workshops this weekend I need to prepare for (Dirty Words on Saturday (join us if you’d like!), and Dive Deep on Sunday); also, I’m performing tomorrow night at a long-running reading series called Perverts Put Out, and I’ve got to write something for that show, so I don’t have much of a blog for you today. (I’m hanging out at the Peet’s near my place, the one in the shadow of the new and fancy Catholic Church they built at the edge of Lake Merritt — maybe that will provide some inspiration. Wish me luck.)

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“the slow, unglamorous work of healing”

graffiti of a small man with a net chasing the shadows of enormous birds, which remain free, flying, uncaughtHi over there. This is me waving with some new words. This is a quiet morning, or more like a thick blanket of quiet spread across fat noise, clanging cymbals (I wanted to write symbols, which, also, yes), the marching band of the soul. That’s how it feels this morning.

I have a poem as a prompt or just a reading-to-be-with this morning. I spent last night with a book of poems I’ve loved for many years, and it felt good to go back into those words, into all that they’ve held for me over the last decade plus. This is one of the books that I wrote about for my MA thesis, so I got to push really deep into these lines, wrangling with metaphor and possible meaning, stretching out onto my own pages the emotion and resonance that they brought up for me about desire, about claiming one’s own passion even though… (whatever your even though is: someone else doesn’t like it, your dad tells you to get a real job, your friends make more money than you, your lover wants to know when you’re coming to bed, etc.)

So, this is one of the poems from Alison Luterman’s The Largest Possible Life. Use it as a prompt, if you like. Notice what lines or images stay with you, grab them out, drop them on your page, and go. Write for 10 minutes — follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go. Continue reading