Category: Poetry

https://cair-la.salsalabs.org/usc-cancels-valedictorian-speech/index.html

Helicopters like mosquitos, like small

Fires in the sky.

Every young person has their head

Slightly below the clouds

At the constant drone that

Drowns the singing,

The poetry of the grass,

Wrinkling smooth necks.

Blue beetles in their hardshells

Scatter like daisies, like molded

Cobalt over notes of wood and

Vermouth. The distress of these

Blossoms is fragrant,

A motif in a song no one wishes

To sing. And safe in beds or

Locked for exposure, you

Can’t help but remember

Something you’ve never lived,

Which is the terror of those mosquitos

Descending upon you in your

Own home, creating dust

Out of grass and murdering children.

I just turned 80 and

Here’s my fourth son

Got a hand deep in my pocket

And I’m pulling out a gun

Jumped it too,

Lips are blue

And now I’m speeding up

Lights are red here

On this street,

All wet from people’s sweat

Here it comes,

My bleeding gums

Not just the lights up there are red

Now my son,

You are young

Before you know it

I’ll be dead.

But here’s the thing,

Green lights sing

And in my eyes

I see green

Forget my debt,

Everyone else has

I’m just as good as

God to all these plebs

You’ll get my jet

And not my skin

And you’ll probably

Live a hundred years.

EGYPTIAN RATSLAP
Kings and queens of every known suit
By slapping hands are rendered moot
By the rodents in the gutter,
Profanities they utter,
And the Crown Jewels they come to loot.

FINDING SAM
A sea of people stretch before me
Faces morphing in synchronicity
But, egads, in the crowd
Dyed hair endowed
And my beacon stretches up endlessly

GABBING
The most divine activity of all
Greater than giants on shoulders tall
Is yapping into an endless void
Gabbing relentless, baffling Freud,
Forever delaying our curtain call.

DT COPY
Bless each line with the gift of sight,
Comb each word’s locks coil them tight,
To join the kingdom of the confirmed
(Or so the editors have this act termed)
For public consumption these comments we write.

IRISH FAMILIES
In the throes of each Thanksgiving
Irish families talk not of living.
Instead, across the table
Each mouth talks of fable:
“Survivor,” weekly for all sitting.

You know, in those moments of in-between,

I often find myself among transit:

Things always suspended between two scenes,

There and back, and the people all seem it.

*

All the biggest, youngest, smallest, oldest

And me, their compatriot, in the air,

We merry clay pigeons of the cruel coldest

Sun, prepped to land just about anywhere.

*

When are we one thing, but then not?

In fact, when did we become something else?

Perhaps we pigeons are what’s left to rot

Once our dear Sun has left her birds to melt.

*

Until that moment, we remain up there

Incomplete members of the whole affair.

***A sonnet built around Press Space to Stop’s song “sean”

He wakes, where could he have ever begun?

What could have brought this poor boy’s verity?

What could possibly bring some man’s grandson

Close to their bedroom’s singularity?

*

Revered for the infinite art inside,

Funneled down canals in shirtless youth,

Sounds digested for status, art aside:

Unfathomable art, there for a sleuth

*

A body made entirely of teeth

With nerves and endings not quite ev’rywhere

A blossoming head adorned with a wreath

Endless happy false starts without an heir

*

But surely if it’s good enough for God

Then Sean will bear it on his shoulders broad.

Sí, si

Estaría hecho en olas

Y no echo holas

*

Sí, si 

No estoy un planeta abrasado

Y tu mirada abrazado retrocede

De la lente de tu telescopio

*

Sí, si 

Me siento como un cosquilleo en tu sien

Y no uno de cien granos de arena

*

Sí, si

Nuestras gotas se pueden coser juntos

Estirándose a través de una taza

Y encontrándose a un tasa insondable

Mientras su velocidad les permite cocerse

******

In English:

Yes, if

It would be done in waves

And I don’t say hellos

*

Yes, if

I am not a scorched planet

And your embraced gaze pulls back

From the lens of your telescope

*

Yes, if

I feel like a tickle in your temple

And not one of a hundred grains of sand

*

Yes, if

Our drops can sew together

Stretching across a cup

And meeting at an unfathomable rate

While their speed lets them boil

**Starts from the end of the original poem**

And so with gentle graces we

With eternally preserved love enter

Into our un-noticing dear society,

My love toted with balanced center

May visit with the fine gentry members

And delight all with her agreeable visage.

Porphyria beside me, sitting sentry,

I stare adoringly at her unblinking image.

Other marriagers scowl with envy:

Never made in recordable recency,

Has there been more perfect a match than we

Our union’s success requires no evidence … 

Our sole disparagers nevertheless disagree,

Because one crowd remains unconvinced:

Porphyria’s fellow women gaze upon us since

Of the verity of our adoration,

They will not be made to believe, instead

With fear, frightful in their admiration.

They avoid the sapphires within her head

Almost as if they believe her dead!

This place makes me despise myself.
These people are beautiful.
I can’t stand these people.
They are so kind.
They are hideous shells.
I am among the gods as one.
This place makes me a believer.
These people drain me of hope.
They are radiant.
This place is not meant for me.
I long for even a taste of them.
This place is mine.
I belong to them wholly.
I can’t bear the weight of belief here.
These people offer me a violent death.
I can’t stop listening to them.
How are they here?
I have never found a better place.
This place is a new chance of life.
How am I here?
They are despicably predictable.
I am blind to their sensibility.
How could we be anywhere else?
This place is mine.
This place is ours.

Oh, it’s undeniable. Oh, it’s divine. Have you ever noticed it? The way an abdomen softens like a stream into a creekbed. Have you ever noticed rounded shoulders? I have. Soft hills that blend into the valley that crashes between the collarbones. Did you know that Rome was built on hills? 
I can see it now. A Parthenon balanced on the clavicle. Human anatomy, so precise and yet it could never capture the wonder that is the way an arm can blend into the shape of a body as skin spreads when pressed to the chest. Rounded shoulders that make the valley of the neck are the waterfalls that turn into rapids at the elbow only lead to fingertip estuaries. 
Soft faces, warm chins, plump cheeks and plump apples that emulate the stars and sate the hunger of the moon.
Oh, the creekbed of the abdomen into tummies soft t and the rings of Saturn surround the hips as sweet flesh and fat. Oh, the tapered harmony that belts an aria only protected by cellulite of the legs, as dimpled flesh trickles downward to pool at the knee. The knee is a dam and the flesh turns smooth as the calves introduce the tricky ankles— tricky indeed for they appear to be the most delicate part of the body and yet they reveal the bipedal beauty of a woman who stands barefoot in grass.
The sweet hymns of her legs plant her firmly to the ground and she is perfection, she is divine. She stands in the shape of life, she is breathtaking, she is a solitary ace and is the beginning of all things. 
And when the curvy body was born, when Eve rose from blood and guts and when she shed blood and guts, her body was round and it was celestial and it was Earth. It was divine, it was fat.
Thunder struck Earth in droves and the sound throttled the world into submission and the sound itself echoed as if God stood up from his great big chair while Creation was seated at the table, for God knew he had reached perfection with the plump physique and He should like to take pride in His invention.
He looked and could barely believe the anadiplosis polysyndeton He’d managed in one body, a body that was magnificence and a magnificence that was flesh and fat and bones and a trillion lonely daisies held together by twine. 
And so when night struck and the thunder ceased, the creatures of Earth would never again feel that moment of weightlessness where their senses were fooled to think all that bound them to this earth was a lie and their eyes told them not to blink for if they dared to blink, they’d be blinded and never again behold the indulgent, generous femininity that in one moment ceased to exist and in the next simply was and forever would be under God’s kind will. 
These creatures learned the meaning of prayer as this moment ceased to exist, and yet it is no longer the time of Eden and night still befalls a world that fears night because it does not know how thunderstruck it could be be at any given moment when one beholds the beauty and wonder of cellulite and stretch marks and overflowing flesh.
And now people fear the night and they fear flesh and they fear those treacherous things of the night and they fear fat and they pray for the light of day, only to find the light of lightning’s generosity and the sanctity of curvy bodies and the will of God for it’s all we’re subject to and it’s something we should not escape for our own good. The most treacherous things happen in the nighttime, don’t they? Don’t fear the nighttime.
God whispered in their ears, you know. For the sanctity of curvy bodies is that they know something no one else knows.

Thunder is in my throat

And I am the whole of this world

My great throat swallows

And I am parched

And it is true that

To a grain of sand 

I am a titan

Aren’t I

But to a titan I

Am now a titan 

And all of our footsteps

Are the percussion of this great beastly earth

And you’ll never have to beg me for love

It’ll weep out of my ears

And the sanguinity of infection

Will course through me

And we will be barrel riders

Down the tides of adolescence 

As we emerge in valor

As blazing sons of suns

We have crossed onto this

Lengthy bridge, finite bridge

That makes the ground

Seem anew