Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Muse

Muse Katie Kidder

Oh, it's so bad
to get stuck with a muse you don't want.
Why couldn't I have been assigned Bobby Frost's muse,
or someone with something like grace?

Mine belches and scratches her ass in the hall.
She has the sickly sweet smell of children
and stale Nilla Wafers, as though she was sprung
from the foam of the sofa.

She grabs at my smokes during the two-point conversion,
and she swims in my wine like a gnat.
I trip over her, by the bed, reading Plath on the floor
at six in the morning when I get up for tea.

My muse is nothing like me.
She waxes perverse in the thighs of thin blondes
when we've a perfectly good blonde at home.
And that bitch burns my old lovers' letters
and makes up her face with the ashes.

Kissing my muse, I imagine,
is like swallowing a mouthful of honey and rust,
and twisting your legs in her legs in the cold comfort of dark
is like spooning, in the sea, on the rag, with a shark.

My muse works with the mercy of bullets, falling.

read about the author © 2004 Contrary Magazine

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Sunday, July 29, 2007

From Walking the Black Cat, 1996


I have been reading a lot of about Charles Simic lately. He will be playing a starring role in my thesis if and when that ever gets completed. Simic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia immigrated to the United States in 1954. He's won numerous awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The World Doesn't End in 1990. His poetry is influenced by philosophers such as Hegel, Breton, Nietche and especially Heidegger. in his essay, "Negative Capability and Its Children" Simic decrisbes the influence of these philosophers on contemporary poets thusly: "Their poetics have to do with the nature of perception, with being, with psyche, with time and consciousness. Not to subject oneself to their dialetics and uncertainties is truly not to experience the age we have inherited." ("Charles Simic and Mark Strand: The Presense of Absence" by Richard Jackson) Fascinating the way the theories of an individual can eventually make their way into to the collective unconscious and that the spaces they hold can eventually evolve into new ideas, which in turn spread into new spaces.

But enough of philosophy. I really chose the poem Blood Orange because I liked the idea and can relate, at least today to the feeling that, "Everything is teetering on the edge of everything/ With a polite smile."


Blood Orange
By Charles Simic

It looks so dark the end of the world may be near.
I believe it's going to rain.
The birds in the park are silent.
Nothing is what it seems to be,
Nor are we.

There's a tree on our street so big
We can all hide in its leaves.
We won't need any clothes either.
I feel as old as a cockroach, you said.
In my head, I'm a passenger on a ghost ship.

Not even a sigh outdoors now,
If a child was left on our doorstep,
It must be asleep.
Everything is teetering on the edge of everything
With a polite smile.

It's because there are things in this world
That just can't be helped, you said.
Right then, I heard the blood orange
Roll off the table and with a thud
Lie cracked open on the floor.


Friday, July 27, 2007

Drunk Ole Bukowski, Drunk

Charles Bukowski has been a huge influence on me. He is a misogynist, vile, raunchy, sad and beautiful. I can't help but love him. Love is a Dog from Hell is one of my staple books of poetry, and I revisit it often. Although, he has only recently garnered some respect critically, Bukowski has had wide public appeal for a long time. I think it is because of his accessibility and his candor. Look for more from him in the future, and I will try to point out specific areas of his influence in my own work.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Dreaming in Blue Linens


This, like most poems, was a long time in the making. I originally wrote it as an undergrad at LSU. At the time it was entitled The Color of Longing. Well, many moons and many, many drafts later it found its final resting place in the 2005 issue of Ellipsis. Enjoy!


Dreaming in Blue Linens

I shouldn’t
because you’re much too young.
You’d come too quick
and leave too soon.

Still…
You push me up
against the bedroom wall,
one hand up my skirt,
pawing at my body
like climbing a breaking ladder—
clinging, frantic.

Buttons pop off
like bunk fireworks, as the smell
of your hair and breath fills me. We stumble, laughing,
almost fucking
but bound at the ankles
by our underwear.

Until our laughter becomes
sighing, moaning, those gentle
but forgettable declarations
of desire, love maybe, something dirty?

In the dark I stutter the name,
(and it sounds nearly like crying for help)
of a god I won’t consider in the light.

Then it’s done
and life is ordinary again.
I look lonely
past the miles of blue,
miles and miles of pale,
blue empty sheets.
I light a smoke and think
Baby, you should have been here.
You were great.

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Monday, July 23, 2007

Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

This poem by e.e. cummings comes to mind periodically for me and it has been on my mind as of late. Enjoy. Check out more info on e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Accidents Happen

Ok. I have created an accidental blog. How does one go about doing such a thing you might ask? Well, I was attempting to post something to Fais Do Do, a blog you should check out and stumbled into creating my own. So what the hell, I thought, why not? I will see if this keeps me entertained.