First Post with a Poem Inside

I decided to start trying to keep some of my better poems in one place. Here is where the are going to come and wade about in this mucky muck.

Some of my poems are in a chapbook made by Bennet Bergman and I called On the Savagery of Children or Abby Feeding the Fawn by our own press called Baleen Press (www.baleenpress.blogspot.com). There are places where you can buy it (in Chicago, New Orleans, Bloomington, IN, and Seattle for only five buckaroos!) or you can email and I will send you one.

I think I will do only one poem for each post, but I will do a few posts now.


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Elegy

I.
The floor was my mother
once. With the motion

of my whole body, she pressed
at my head, held my back,

let myself be a thing that could relax
like an old sack.


II.
Later: It was as if I was the last of something
only vaguely of value
and you were the last person in this city.

It was dark out.
The street was wet.
I was mud
covered.

You had just washed
your hands. Inside was cold
and smelled of plywood.


III.
A warning: I wasn’t built for swimming,
but crashing through things

so everything/one that ever wanted
to touch me could have the chance.


IV.
Be still.
Let’s keep our bodies
to ourselves
this time.

V.
Nevermind.


VI.
Lover, once lover, ex lover, I swear I’m sorry for those things that exhaled on me. It was the bicycle with its hushed whirrings and how it splattered mud on my back, breathed into my body cement. The way new bed sheets touched my legs and the floor again how she—

Oh fuck. Dear god, no
you, neither of us could even begin to understand.

I’m sorry; I took the bus home on Tuesday. It was packed. The woman next to me caressed my hips and I didn’t object.





---April 2009