Poem Draft for Revision

This should be recognizable. I wanted to veer away from my discourse on the 9-5 grind and attempt to engage something a little different. Here, I wondered what sort of conversation I might be able to forge between two different generations. **Digital Natives is a term used to refer to those people of the Y Generation born between 1982-95**.Sorry about the wacky spacing...MS Word hates me big time.


Digital Natives


Men at twenty-five howl over shrines of conquered beer cans,

Chanting their victories into the 3 a.m. that always listens.

Men at twenty-five, lost in their drum circles, smell of weed,

And the grimy chorus of that Zeppelin song everyone knows.

They’re camouflaged in decades they’ll never truly understand.

Having slipped the silk noose and action item reports for

torn blue jeans and Ginsberg, men at twenty-five tremble

At words like equity and mortgage, that corrosive gargle

Etched into the graying temples of men twice their age.

These boys, like their fathers, branded with a single letter.


On 48th at Manny’s, men at twenty-five sift through wax coated sleeves.

Those once slick novelties, their ripped edges and weathered faces gone “vintage.”

Draft for Class Revision Week 14

Paolo

"O anime affanate, venite a noi parlar, s'altri nol niega!"

“O battered souls, if One does not forbid it, speak with us!"

(Dante's Inferno, Canto 5)

-----------------------------------

I feel her hands snap shut, 

the feel of quaking steel. 

No longer my own, her hips twist. 

Her arms pull me into plummet. 

My shoulders snarl against 

the vapor stone of her palms.

My head stitched to her hollow chest.

I leave my words with you, Poeta. 

I follow her in this, our waltz,

as the sulfur aches between us.

(Sadly, this is one of those drafts that’s fallen by the way side, which bothers me because I want to know what this draft has to say. At this point, I the draft obviously begs for more length. I’m going to try generating some fresh language and tinker with it. I would appreciate any thoughts or criticism. Dr. Davidson suggested I veer away from expected language of this circle of Hell. Trouble is, I don’t know where to go. )

Poem for Workshop on 11/16

[Untitled]

A pair of hands, gone metronome, directs a smattering of brass and cloth,

The green and white colors tuned to a surgical precision.

Snares quake and tubas wheeze in the sweltering mosquito heat,

The matted canvas etched with yardage chalk.

Lost in their murmur, the brick of my generic pastoral apartment simmers                   against my back.

Their footfalls thump my chest. As I watch them, my Marlboro peters to                        nothing.

Understand them, or their guttural practice? No. I’m thinking of you,

Your flat above the grocery in that London street I’ll never see again,

With its swollen door jambs, and stalwart window frames.

That TV ten years my senior, always blaring the BBC. 

I remember you, shadowed down the back stairs in bare feet and the midnight             of my t-shirt

For chocolate and Kents after a night out with the staples from Marketing.

Heavy with Bitter, I said that you sounded like Julie Andrews. 

You labeled me drunk as the teen garageband in the corner wailed                                  some Kinks anthem I don’t want to remember.

I smiled at their fascination with America, the land of cowboy politics and                       pioneered grease wrapped in wax paper.

Later, I stumbled on those stairs, your fingers sunk in my shoulder blades, guiding my rubber knees through the door.

We emerged two weeks later, my love for the Queen nailed down beside those aching wooden floorboards.

I wonder sometimes, if it’s still there, rising with the heat, against the husband and wife who quiver, lost in their eyelids, in the soaked fish-eye lens twilight. 

Draft for Class Revision Week 13

Apocrypha


I believe now in the owls that roosted in our mortgage.
Your mother's bone china grating against the joists,
its blossoms, now grotesque, slipping, going Rorschach.
I believe in your father's police uniform, still sharp 
in its gasp of cellophane. 
I believe in the olive oil smoking on the stove,
the flayed tomatoes, their skins soaking the grout. 
The aged reds, dust heavy against the baseboard, 
the rotting corks, lost in the beef's casual haze. 
I believe in the hunt for keys as another gentle minor third
slips into yesterday, and Tracy Chapman's gravel legato 
smears the living room walls. 

Your hands will always smell of tea, cigarettes, 

and Summer's last gargled ache. 

Where are we now after the glassy shriek of nights?
Children half our age draped our skin once.
They wore our clothes, uttered our names names as carelessly 
as one tosses a spent match. They knew we wouldn't last 
the sweltering decades in this quiet town with its Technicolor 
lawns, postmarked Alexandria, 1984,
because children half our age seethed over fabric softener, 
Pine-sol, and botched Chinese take-out. 
In the space between yesterday and today, 
my basil sweats in the afternoon heat. 

Draft Revision Week 12

Riff off Mark Doty's "Broadway"



Under the faded tin roof
beneath a fistful of stars 
a coyote wails in the distance.
Far from this moment, but close at hand. 


Desert sage sways under 
the stiff and cracked heat, 
its thin pink fingers caught
in splintered door frames, 


opening and closing, 
those tiny knives, 
a lifetime of snagging
elbows and knees caught unawares. 


The store front groans, 
its faded tattoos 
whisper the age of 
its oak skeleton. 


Glass eyes covered,
blinded with old type print, 
rusted nails turning its grin 
to a pit of abscesses. 


Vultures perch along its spine, 
waiting, always waiting, 
their stomachs roused
from their delicious sloth. 

Draft for Class Revision Week 11

1993


I believe now in the owls that roost in our mortgage.
Your mother's bone china grating against the joists,
its once pristine blossoms, now grotesque, slipping, going Rorschach.
Your father's police uniform still sharp in the last gasp of its cellophane.
My mint stacks, Roger Clemens atrophies in that cardboard mausoleum.  
These things, that burn between the planks,
 have hardened and moldered for years.


I believe in the olive oil hissing on our stove,
the flayed tomatoes, their skins soaking the grout.
I love the quake of our bodies. Your hands
smelling of tea, Sweet Aftons, and Summer's last gargled ache.


I believe in the hunt for keys, while another
gentle minor third slips itself into yesterday.
The strings of my hands twinged. Where are we now,
after the glassy shriek of night, my shattered arm rejoined,
the silt of my wrist glazed in holy steel?


Children half our age drape our skin. They're laughing at us.
They don't believe we'll last the sweltering decades,
because in that quiet town from our Technicolor memories,
postmarked Alexandria, 1984, children half our age
seethe over fabric softener and Chinese take out.
In the space between yesterday and today,
cords tumble on February's Berber slab.

Expansion Week 10

Taken from week 9 Calisthenic
 Trolling for Alligators with my Grandfather


June 2009. 15 miles north of New Orleans.
Like wraiths, we skiff across the womb that birthed us.
Gnarled cypresses dig their cuticles into the sweltering decades.
Our nylon livelihood nuzzles into their contortions.
Steely wolverines shiver in that belly of wrought sheet metal.
The tags salivate in their denim lairs,
 hungry to finish what the rifle will start.
The blades idle, sputtering and wheezing,
the way my grandfather drank himself into an elegy
the bayou will never stop revising.
The three quarter inch high test line trembles,
quivers with promise, a mass of scales and fear.
Behind me, the panoramic lens understands all of this.


Expansions:
Idling for Rommel in the Cradle


June 2009. 15 miles north of New Orleans.
Like wraiths, we skiff across the womb that birthed us.
Gnarled cypresses dig their cuticles in,
peeling back the sweltering decades.
Our nylon livelihood nuzzles into their contortions.
Steely wolverines cower in that belly of wrought sheet metal.
The tags salivate in their denim lairs,
 hungry to finish what the rifle will start.
The blades idle, sputtering and wheezing,
the way my grandfather drank himself into an elegy
the bayou will never stop revising.
The three quarter inch high test line trembles,
quivers with promise, a mass of scales and fear.
Behind me, the panoramic lens understands all of this.


The camera sees this, just as my grandfather did, 
years before his mind slipped into the same murk 
where this year's Christmas simmers. The gnash of 
his oars against the braided roots, his tired pistol 
edged into the corner of his splitting boot soles. 
The keel, knifing its way through those schoolroom windows,
draft papers and German advances. 


[will expand further]