This is garbage.

i decided to try and turn that self portrait from the two posts ago into a book. this is my first try at anything like this and i think it is garbahshe but important to document i suppose. maybe you will like it. i hope you can tell me what i can do better.

(click to enlarge. annoying for this sort of thing but okay.)

Poem 20: Found Poem and My Own Words

A stray deer, a bulb, a briar,
a blunder, the unemployed
my ancestor occupied;

now we're talking.
When walking home just now
I saw an old woman cutting
carnations, a simple weight
attached at the bonfire
of her irregular rattle,
and thought of you.

I said once, if I love you,
we'll fight, and I meant it.

This morning began with a flood.
While my body was heavy with the weight
of the unwanted gift, you
were in the garden, said,
a weed is anything
in the wrong place.
I'm worried but I'll wait it out.

mgb 11042010

Here I took 3 sources (not sure what they were) and took some words, some lines and rearranged them to make my own poem. There are a few of my own things here too but it feels like mine anyway.

poem 19: Self Portrait at 21 Years

Self Portrait at 21 Years

I.
I have tumbled upon that ridge
so many times I learned
the language of that single mountain.
Lately I’ve been yearning
for that western state
where I could have drank myself
into a coma after this world started trying
to burn me up (or drown me).
I’m just putting my cheek to the wind.

Even here, in Ohio, with her slow
transition into winter this year,
I’ve been a harvest ready
apple with no predator.
I have never been afraid
but I admit that the end of autumn

terrifies me. It would be easy
to love this place less.

II.
And of all the men I’ve slept with
and all the women I’ve wanted badly,
I know that like two different species
we could never need the same things.

But somehow I loved them all.
It’s taken me all this time to learn to live,
but lovers, I understand now
your lives are your own lives.

III.
All the ways they called me animal:
-feline
-avian
-wretched
-some sad, wild beast
-already extinct and gone
-I’ve missed you so

IV.
I am the negative of a photo
of someone you loved once.

Tape me to the windowpane
next to your bed; at night
hold me up just once
to the artificial light
of your reading lamp.

V.
In the bedroom, the bar,
the hull of a ship, in the attic,
his studio, the post-harvest garden,
in the dry basement of a friend’s house,
I heard it. You either hear it
or you don’t—that pulsing echo,
its way of saying: none of us will make it
out of here alive. Its way of saying:
you wolf, do something with yourself.



-m.g.b. october 9, 2010



Notes:
This is a first and last draft of this poem. It seems appropriate this way.
A sentiment from a couple of lines from this poem has been lifted from James Wright’s “Voices Between Waking and Sleeping in the Mountains.”

poem 18: On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

I hear my city at war,
or maybe I’m hearing
my own heart like a war

with its million ammunitions,
million missing limbs, its slow
roaring movement through loss.
I was the barrel of a shotgun.

I was the wrong way out of town.
I was a lone moving animal,
trying to find the door to your house.

In times like this I try to ignore
the numbers, the body counts,
the orphaned young. But this war
makes me a listener so I understand

the crashing, my body moving:
a mistake. Let me warn you:
I bring the hurricanes, the forest

fires, the non-God fearing baptisms of the earth
and they take me in their arms like a familiar stranger.
As a moving funeral in this drunken city,

I leave bright trinkets in my wake.
As a moving funeral in all the other cities,
I leave the already worn land, the dry brush, the barely lit

match. I leave the ghost towns behind,
later drive past the washed out houses,
the burnt branches of that mountain.

I wish I could say those skeleton lands
have never moved me.

-marlo barrera

june-september 2010