Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Robert Frost

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Always looking away.

"I am always looking away,.  Or again at something after it has given me up."
--Frank O'Hara--

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

The Now

"Remember, I told you that ten years ago," my brother said over the phone the other night and of course, I remember, of course, he was right.  That doesn't bother me.  I am far more in tune with the realization, over time, that advice given to me in the past, that I either ignored out of stubbornness or didn't act upon due to my position of personal growth at the moment of the giving, was often right.  There is no shame in learning this later on.  I am tired of feeling 'shame' or 'foolishness' or any of these other emotionally taxing reactions to the world around me.

     He was right and I was glad to hear it.  It means, that even if it took ten years, I realized what it was he had tried to help me realize so long ago, now and there is nothing more powerful than the now.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Color Theory by Alexandra Teague (from Mortal Geography)

Color Theory

The Home Depot salesman says, "Remember, you won't have to live
with your choice:  You'll have to live inside it."  I imagine each gradation--unpacking

frying pans and toothbrush; paperbacks strewn
inside Plum Wine, Arctic Lilac, Chiasmic Violet.
     On the glossy card they've chained beside the racks

of color, I learn that purple promotes drowsiness and nausea:
not recommended for kitchen or the pilothouse
     of boats.  Yellow, while energizing, can make one irritable,

unable to blink naturally, too anxious to swallow.  Which shade
is it that makes one likely to remember turns
    from years-ago samba classes, make perfect hollandaise,

sing like Bernadette Peters? Which color will help me find
my mother's citrine ring (borrowed and lost
in seventh grade) or remember the name of the Australian

band that sand "A Girl", or find the hotel where Klimt awoke
in a light sweat after dreaming The Kiss?
    If I paint the living room First Green and the office

Eggshell and Mist, what primordial creatures will hatch
from the doorway clouds, what storm fronts
    sweep my bookcases empty?  Will my insurance refuse

payment for accidents resulting from color--the Supernova Blue
that caused me to fly kites from second-floor
    windows or the Miami Sunburst trimmed with Japonica

that enticed me to juggle butcher knives and pomegranates?
To make things simple, I'd like on color
     that will make me want to sing, cry, fuck, write letters

to strangers, wear fishnet stockings, buy irises, walk barefoot,
listen to Coltrane, move out, stay forever,
    have children, and understand winter.  One can, well stirred.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Accepted for the 'Revisions: A Zine for Writers at Queens College 2011' magazine

To whom it may concern,

    It’s funny that you should ask.  Sean Gabler, a fellow poet and a friend just wrote a piece in his blog about this very topic.  It is a common internal dialogue that I have.  One of my brothers asked me this question about a decade or so ago, when I began to really consider myself a poet.  “Who do you write for?” and my answer at the time was, “I write for myself, nobody else.”  Well, I’m inevitably older now and I am constantly vigilant as to not mistake stubbornness for wisdom.  That being said, the answer has changed.   Below is a brief list of the 'who' I write for and of course, a little bit of the 'why', as the two can never be separate from each other no matter how much one tries.
     The list of who is endless, amassed from the front-lines and trenches of the consciousness as well as the unwavering, churning about of the primordial bisque that is the unconsciousness.  As I write poetry, my words are often aimed toward other poets, dead or alive, past and present.  I've written sorrowful odes to the sweet, executed Garcia Lorca and hopeful epistolary poem-songs to old Walt ‘I contain multitudes’ Whitman.  I’ve formulated rebuttals from the tides, as though I were a spokesman for the sea, to Pablo Neruda, the king of all things weathered, stone and pebble.  I've called out to the ghost of Frank O'Hara while in the midst of my very own emergencies and meditations.  I’ve sought along my neighborhood streets the sunset drawing down of blinds of mourning for the dear boy soldier poet Wilfred Owen.  I wondered about Rilke and the dead he saw, who go about so free of worry, so unlike their reputation.  Whether it is John Milton or Stephen Crane, Mrs. Lady Lazarus Sylvia Plath or Louise Gluck, their imaginary approval for my craft is the very skin and sinew around the fingers which moves my pen about the page. 
    Of course, my own family is a frequent topic, an easy target and an endless source of inspiration.  In poems, I’ve made peace with the Italian grandfather I never got to know; whose psychological warfare waged against my father has spilled over onto my brothers and me, so much so that we carry heavily in our hearts the patriarchal refuse of misguided affection.  I’ve written so often of my Irish grandmother who I miss dearly. She and I spent many an afternoon together, her, lovingly buttering me up with her famous quiche, her soda bread and the bottomless mugs of root beer only later to put me to work moving furniture, gardening or shoveling snow down that endless length of driveway that I have now been shoveling for 25 years.  After a lifetime of repressing her childhood memories of impoverished county Roscommon, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, she told us all the story of her and her brothers being shot at by those British brigands known as the Black and Tans, while hiding in the dreary, damp fields of Ireland’s peat.   Some stories should not be forgotten and as my friend Sean Gabler says, “We rescue them and introduce them to anyone who is willing.”   
     My brothers, oh how often I write with them in mind, for the want of pride, my brothers, who have been unparalleled outlets for my yearnings toward the literary and the arts.  What they did, I did, where they went, I went, what they read, I read, true to my role as little brother pain in the ass. Above everyone, I write so that my mother can look at me with that stare that says, “I knew it, I always knew it”, and I know she did. 
       Places, I write for places as though it were family.  I meter out the silent testament of soot, blackening the headless statues of saints in a plaza in Valencia, Spain.  I give voice to the bar stool where an American, a New Zealander and a Japanese tourist have taken a moment to indulge in Pilsner, to rest and reflect upon the day’s adventure through the wintry streets of Prague.  There is a cold spot on the train station platform in Paris, the Gare d’Austerlitz, where a man laid dead and a few feet away a frantic, desperate spot where his wife fell into her sudden long descent into loneliness.  In a New York City subway, where everyone hides in plain sight between their tiny headphones, an attractive woman won’t smile back at me because, well, New York is as hard on single men as it is on women.  This city, it brings out the voyeur in me, it brings out wonderment and lust, desire and rage. 
     I write for things and concepts.  I have written to bathroom tiles as though they confidants.   I frequently trip the boundaries of the real, to the realm of the inanimate, the fictional, the archetypal; none of which is uncommon or unique to my being here in the world.  I’ve tripped up lazy starlight and covered parsecs in the span of a bus ride.  Like many, I've accosted the gods and their army of frozen cemetery angels.  I’ve mocked Time as it swaggered past me free of empathy.   I've praised the honeycomb, and the rotundness of its makers.  I've looked for the face of Emily Dickinson among the dots atop a fluttering snowflake.  I’ve set the trap for human nature and waited till I burst with longing; I’m still waiting.   I’ve professed that the number 11 is the one true representative of infinity and then called it out for the nothing it does for anyone.
       What about Love?  I write for Love as well. Love, with his unnatural agents, lingering always just out of reach, promising in whispers a future where joy springs eternal.  I have written for the eyes of past lovers only and for the moments where we made love on the waterside, exposing our rawest of energies to the bug’s eyes, there, where the warm wind lollygagged through the quiet wood.
   When asked, “Who do you write for? Why do you write?   Who is your audience?”  The old response is no longer true.  In my younger years, I think I was scared to admit that I actually have or want an audience.  Somehow, I felt it made my work less authentic.  I accept the audience, real or imaginary, in fact, I craft the work for them.  Time and all its minions have taught me well, so far.  Last week, I attended the Queens College New Salon meet and greet for the new US Poet Laureate Philip Levine and he said something that pretty much summed up my current perspective on writing.  Professor Nicole Cooley, MFA Director of Creative Writing and Translation here at Queens College, asked him whether or not, and I’m paraphrasing both her question and his response, “we, as poets, have a responsibility to society, the world at large?”  He answered, in an adamant, matter of fact manner, “No, we don’t have a responsibility to anyone except ourselves.  We must be true to ourselves, not to anyone else.  If you want to write about social justice, go for it.  If you want to write about the secret life of angels, I don’t care; just do them both to the best of your ability and stay true to yourself.”    The activity of writing always released in me what I call the ‘Hope-adrenaline’.  No matter how bad things are in my life, when I start to express myself in this medium, something flutters within me, a fresh wind rises up from the deep and only Emily Dickinson, the grandmother of American poetry, has ever gotten as close to pinning the feeling down, with this quote, “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.”  Who do I write for? Why do I write?  Okay, final answer: I write for Hope, because I believe in it.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Rainer Maria Rilke....one of the best!

“…Weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

Friday, October 14, 2011

I am not contained between my hat and my boots....

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) "

--W.W.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Next year


Next year

The wooden key-chain
is a souvenir that I acquired
from my time in Madrid.

An emblem is branded into one side:
a bear pushes up against the 'madrono',
the strawberry tree,

standing firmly against the darkened grain,
beneath the seven stars of the north,
and the arc of a thin crown.

She said that every time she looks
at pictures of her time in Australia,
she is overwhelmed with sadness;

she promises to herself
to be back within a year.

I have heard those words before,
I have uttered them myself, in my fits of desperation,
when I cannot stand my fellow New Yorkers any longer,
when I am tired of saying what I myself do not believe,

when I am thirsting for one more Spanish night.
Next year I say, perhaps, quizas?  Next year.

I am here, in Queens,
and I can't blame all the
'next years' for eluding me.

So many opportunities exist,
while my souvenir quietly hangs
from the zipper on my old blue bag.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Neruda announces his dead...

Its the end
of the season and
the clouds huddle near

while Neruda
announces his dead,
the sea stops to hear.

The new poets
align with the old
on the line,

their words
they are ripe
for the change

while the bombs
cluster on and
continue to fall,

the cell phones
explode false blue
light in our face.

And I with the clouds
inform the sea, that she has
been dead for more than an age.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

What are you looking at?

a poem-- to New York, from New York

What are you looking at?

I’ve noticed you’ve been staring at me and of course,
behind my severity I adore the attention, but I won’t return the gaze,
well, only for a second, but the look will make you wish you were dead,
and why not, you’ve spit upon my streets, you’ve stained them with old gum,
murder and urine; you’ve hollowed me out with hot metal and traveling things.
You’ve dressed me up in endless layers of deception, advertisements
and corporate agendas and don’t you think for one moment that I haven’t
noticed how you’ve bolted and bridged me together to garner the praise
of your engineering cronies, how you’ve tried so hard to drown out the displaced
and woeful cries of our no income housing with your foodie network channels.
You’ve brought me shit and silver, the gold and the dregs of the world.
You’ve poked me through and through till I bled steam into the night.
You’ve covered my walls with lead and soot, but buffed away the spray painted
voices of the nameless masses, silenced by your appraisals of property value
and I can see you now, staring at me, but I won’t return your gaze because
it’s  hard for a city like me to let down her guard and I’ve yet to forgive you for blinding me
with all the goddamned flashing artificiality, strewn across my boulevards and rooftops,
covering these old eyes and disconnecting me from my one true affection;
that handsome pitch black darkness and his dimples of a billion lights. 
I cannot forgive you for making his stars and sky irrelevant.

Monday, August 15, 2011

time for new material

I have pretty much officially run out of material....or have rehashed old material to death.  I need new poetry,, inspiration, you are welcome to shed your wisdom any time now.... anyday now. we are waiting.  Thank you, carry on.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Basta con le chiacchere: Artificial

Basta con le chiacchere Part 3: Artificial
1.
We entered the apartment,
where the centerpiece caught my attention,
Stretched across the living-room wall,
in between a chaos, 
the unbreakable one-eyed gaze of Christ,
Surrounded by the torn flags and ocher patches,
Bloated with umber spots and smeared 
in the bluest blotched-blue sunshine
And there, there above it all,
Ah!—Basta con le chiacchere!

2.
He stared for so long at all the colors
That he couldn’t see them anymore, 
Not via the simpler gestures of just looking  
And so he twisted his neck instead, almost to snapping
and bent over into himself, for that upside-down vista 

—its there the colors shine again, its there he reconnects with the reconnecting!

”Do you see them,” he says
The both of us bent sideways, staring hard, 
cross-eyed for clearer vision,
“there, there they are!   How do they look from this perspective?
Its all about fresh beginnings, with everything in this life”
.

I agreed.  We toasted to fresh beginnings, 

and I convinced myself free of old colors
—fresh beginnings, from traveling to poetry to painting , 
from sagging rooftop angles to sad-blue sidewalk angels—
“new beginnings and keeping your body happy,” he declared,
grabbing for his bag of baby carrots and a carton of soy milk.
 

And almost forgetting again to be a friend he turned to me 
and said, “yeah, so, what else is new with you…”
and I thought;  Ah!  —Basta con le chiacchere!

Not the solution

under construction...

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Best Cigarette

I know that many friends of mine do not smoke and infact are quite vocal about how much the detest it and our stink we carry with us and our yellowed teeth and our coughing and our disregard for our health, but this poem, is all too true about the act of smoking and those moments that you have/had with smoking that are unlike any other moment there is.  Not better, just different.

The Best Cigarette
by Billy Collins

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Lorca 113th birthday, Poem below published by BARE HANDS POETRY: ISSUE #1

     It just seemed worth noting.  Well, for one, its Federico Garcia Lorca and when isn't he worth noting.  Secondly, may father and I just happened to be speaking about him at dinner last night, about his death, about the early days of the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's arrival onto the mainland to begin his 3 year campaign to impose Falangist rule over the Iberian Peninsula, more or less.  My father, well, he is of another breed, an old school fascist mentality, bred from upper middle class, lower-fading-out aristocracy of Northern Italian post-WW2 culture and so every now and then he says "Viva Franco", "Viva El Caudillo". 
     What can I say, he seems to have sympathy for the murder of a young poet who supported the leftist government yet dined frequently with Falangist party members, old friends of his.  Old friends who almost lost their lives for being friends with Lorca and of course, nothing could stop the impending death that  made its way to Lorca's  home that August 19th, 1936 to drag him from his safety, up to the hills in the darkness, to quiet his canta honda and who knows how it went down for sure.  Did they kill all the other men first, to make Lorca watch and then turn the gun on him?  Did they beat him and then as they rained down anti-homosexual slurs and kicks, put the gun up his ass and pull the trigger.  Did they blow his brains out and burn his corpse in a heap with the others.  Its no little thing that all those other men who died with him have names that I don't know, for that I apologize.  Being a murdered poet doesn't make you better than any other murdered man, you just get more recognition is all. 
     Either way, it just happened that we were speaking about Garcia Lorca and to my surprise, between my father's salutes to El Caudillo and the stories relayed to him by the Silvia Bernanos, a friend of my fathers and the wife of poète et auteur fantastique, Michel Bernanos, who spent time in Spain during the Spanish Civil war along with his father and minor French philosopher, George Bernanos, my father began quoting Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias: "At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon..." 
     All this prompted me to look up some of Lorca's poem, poems which I have not looked at for half a dozen years or so, mainly since 2003 when I was in Spain, I have put Lorca aside for other writer's and poets and novels etc, thinking Lorca has already served his purpose but alas, he is never done assisting me, from far beyond my comprehension, another time, another way of life, another scent of death I cannot relate to, he comes back on his very birthday of 113 years and reignites my yearning for my own canta honda and I am close to his age when he died and I have very little to show for it, no pity party, just one of those strange occurences in life, Keats dies at 24 and produces some of the greatest poetry written in the English language.  Rimbaud writes from the age of 14-19 and then stops, but in that time period writes exceptional poetry; father of the modern poet, or so some call him and yet he was but a child.  Lorca, writes from a young age, acts and plays music deeply, flamenco and the songs of the gitano, guitar and piano and produces plays and does all these things with a passion I have yet to unearth in my self.   It astounds me.  I will take as much and as little as I can get, when I can get it and Lorca, even though The Clash say in their song Spanish Bombs that you are "dead and gone...", you are never far away, never gone.  To The Clash, I know, you don't mean it like 'that', it just helped me end this blog.  Love your Spanish Bombs.  "Viva Lorca, viva"

For Lorca, on his 113th birthday


I dine
on your memory,
on the weeping of the last, slow sunset,
on the weeping of a long, hot wind
that stills itself at the very
mention of your death

and maybe no one
ever truly sleeps at all,
but it was in dreams that
you showed your face to me,
your bullet riddled smile,

and I wept for you,
from the corners of the morning,
from the cracks of your whitewashed walls
where the sunlight still dances
to la canta honda.

I dine
on your memory,
and I can't get enough of your face,
perched upon the curl of  your hand,
your blood, split recklessly upon the soil,
where it burned beside the oranges.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Where you gonna run to...

"I said Lord, please help me Lord, can't you see I'm praying. But the Lord said, Go to the Devil....so I ran to the Devil, he was waiting, I ran to the Devil and I cried out, powerrrrrr, powerrrrrrrr!"

So todays nonsense of a Rapture has come and gone.  May 21st, 2011. 

Friday, May 20, 2011

Quote from 'Triggering Town' by Richard Hugo

Hey Wally, i still didn't forget about you....I am such a private poet, and I am working hard to not be restricted by my obsessiveness.

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn't bother me
that the word "stone" appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that "wind" and "gray"
appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn't use them that often
I'd be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same
poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost's statement that he
tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it
couldn't be.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Sheenless


Sheen-less

The uneasiness

leaves me wool
grey-eyed and sheen-less,

clumped lifeless, a lump
of lint in a belly button,

unsettling the mind

like warm pillows
in the summertime.

The voice that we wait for,

the weight of the air
that irritates,

like mosquitoes chattering
in the endless night.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Public House

PUBLISHED IN THE COPPERFIELD REVIEW: Volume 10 Number 4 AUTUMN 2011 Edition



The Public House

The public house
challenges me to a duel again.
I walk to it as though
I intend to answer.

Behind the sky
the great senseless
eye un-blinks at me.

The clouds roll overhead
like knotted mounds of change  
as I go shuffling along into
a field of a lesser yield.

The harvest:
bloated gobs of shadow,
the overgrowth of the forgotten
and the tomorrow nights.

In the bar room haze,
we keep to a steady sway,
clinging to the drinks in hand

and howling
to the rafters
like a naked choir
in the Church of night.

We clink
our hanging heads
in obscurity,

little mechanical phantoms,
grazing together on the edges
of a muffled horizon.

Friday, May 13, 2011

A glimpse of the eternal(2003)

I counted the steps today
on my way out of the apartment.
It's not uncommon. Children do it all the time.
When I was little, I was always counting.
I always hope a staircase will have precisely eleven steps.

Eleven is the number that matters,
two lines running ever parallel.
You can't say the word parallel
without evoking the spirit of eleven
--a manifestation of some primordial magic!

In separating things, we are forever linked!

It is not uncommon.
Baseball players and golfers do it. 
Musicians, accountants, actors
and suicide bombers do it.

Maybe even big boss Bush does it,
"seven blinks in the left eye, five on the right
and now I'm ready for a thorough lie-fiesta, yee haw!" 



While we are on common, well understood themes,
Time, that other deceiver, catches me in its voracious jaws
and joins in on the fun; chews my mind like a licorice twig.


I don't wear wrist watches anymore, especially the digital ones.
My mother says to me, "when are you going to join the adult world
and get yourself a watch. Maybe for Christmas, I'll buy you one."


I turn her down. I cannot wear them anymore.
At first it was a playful thing, silly fun, then I became addicted.
"Look", I'd say to my friends and family, "1:01 and 01 seconds".  
A minute later, waiting to pounce on it,
"look now, 1:02 and 01 seconds". The apex of it all,
exhausted in a sweat of obsessive delirium,
"look, look, 1:11 and 11 seconds."

Five ones in a row, my straight-line guides to infinity. 
They mean that I have somehow captured the eternal.

They mean, nothing at all! 


All day I would be trapped like this, in a cage of moments.
When I saw a clock change to 1:23 and 45 seconds,
I thought I was using my time appropriately. 
Sorry mom, wrist watches are forever banished.


Pocket watches I can manage. 
If I have to reach into my pocket to get the watch,
Without really wanting to know the time for practical purposes,
my mind becomes aware of the pending lunacy
and the mania fizzles out with a series of deep breathes.


Something about symmetry, inherent and omnipotent;
Numbers, sidewalk squares and bathroom tiles. They soothe me.


I'm tracking the quiet movement of things,
propelled by a need to know.  I'm aware of the patterns,
keeping control on top of a bubbling planet!


Its not so bad anymore, not that I care much for those terms
That bind us to our fears, the phobias and the disorders.
Yet sometimes I search the bricks on buildings

or count the drops from a leaking faucet,
--at eleven I start all over again, 'again and again, 
--always eleven, eleven, my control and my relief!

Monday, May 9, 2011

We children who become men...

We children who become men


We children who become men

I will not speak for everyone.
In fact, I am less and less comfortable
with the 'we' as the years go on.

We children who go fast becoming men,
we who might not pan out before the day's end.

I will not educate with my experience,
you will learn by watching all the others,
we children steeped in our becoming
and the empty shell casings of our undoing.

Then there is the matter of my family.
Among that 'love' I am the last to let them know.
Among that 'we' I am the last to let it go.

I will not speak for everyone,
because so many, they may have chosen to forget,
we, the children who resist becoming men.

Outside the word

In the safety of skin

You have to know when to keep certain things separate, its a delicate trick.  It may seem like a fine idea to put some people among the snakes but in the end, the snakes would rather rest beside a hot stone and be free of bad breath and snapshot judgments.  "We are not the same" they'll say,  "It is you who created the devil, who laugh at the moon and sea and masterbate all over the quiet face of goodness.  It is you, not us."

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Fondness Now---For Nelly(2001)

Fondness Now
--for Nelly

It was the day
that we drove to Tuxedo
up the 17 North
and we stopped to eat pizza
and you convinced me
to leave without paying;
they were so unaware,
preoccupied with motocross
and racing things.

You got up
to use the bathroom
and then slipped
out the back door.

I watched you
start the car and 
then I scuttled along
and we went driving
up the 17 North

to cliff dive
where the spot
on the ledge said ‘jump here’
spray painted next to it,  ‘Pink Floyd’
and I forget
what color it was
painted in but I am sure
that it is up there
even now.

We made love
before the bugs eyes
and the waterside

and walked among
that hum and quiet
in-between the highways.

It was that day,
I remember it.
I remember you so well now,
Your nervous laughter
and your music
.

I regret not thinking fondly of you,
for so long in that period that
came after us and now it’s gone.

I am still
the same but I am not,
still gentle and hiding a sorrow
and perhaps you know
what I mean.

It was that day
that we went driving
Up the 17 North

to little tucked away Tuxedo
And all my pizzas now are paid for
with the fondest memories of you.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

So many buttons

The first one is the original version which has been published in Askew Poetry Journal: Issue 10, Spring 2011

So many buttons
In Madrid, I was catching street signs one by one,
dragging them behind me
in the long loose net of the day;
El Pintor Juan Gris, Alcala, Gran Via, Lope de Vega, San Bernardo.
All the names weighed less and less with every ‘avenida’ I burned across.
Todos son flush, perfectly in place upon my memory
like so many buttons on a winter coat;
so many plazas and stones, so many footsteps make a road.
I drank café con leche everyday and my words
tur
ned this warm stain of moreno, bubbling in a froth of sweetness.
In Madrid, New York, Austin, Honolulu,
my desires have been dragging always just behind me, too close for me to see.

-->a revised version was written before the acceptance by Askew and is my current version of it.

So many buttons

In Madrid,
I was catching street signs one by one,
dragging them behind me in the
long loose net of the day:

El pintor Juan Gris, Alcala,
San Bernardo, Lope de Vega, Gran Via,
sign after sign, they burned me alive, 
I drank in every avenida 
like I do rioja.

These memories,
they are imperfectly in their place,
hoisted high above and weightless, 
like so many buttons on a winter coat,                                                
so many plazas and stones, 
so many footsteps make a road.  
   
I drank cafe
con leche everyday
and my words transformed
into a warm stain of moreno,
a sweet bubbling froth
of lispy castillano.

In New York,
my desires had been dragging
always just behind me, 
too close for me to see.