Monday, June 7, 2010

Ars Poetica: An Interactive Relationship

I fill up a balloon
in three breaths
to tie to a string
then drop on pavement.
I am waiting for someone
to pick it up
and play with it


1.
I am a creature of habitat.
I’ll have a cigarette.
I’ll masturbate with my shoes on
to the time you tasted my sweat
from the hot night that morning
our friend was in the bathroom –
I never thanked you for that
and I’ll tell you next week
at the assisted living facility.

You’ll see my grandfather
not remember the day of the week
as years unwind
before his plasma screen.
I struggle with this
but he doesn’t.
I binge drink
for a year
when he dies:
I only cry for hangovers
because life revolves
around me.

2.
The moon – or can we
talk about you again?
If the poems wrote themselves,
I would publish you this:

The Nipple of the Evening
Your breasts were smaller
than they were last winter
and your pre-teen nipples
no longer make me shudder.

3.
Pardon my implosion,
these are the poems I want
to see printed.
Engage with the audience,
make them feel withdrawn
from yesterdays emotions
and tighten the muscles
around their wry faces.
Wait, read it from over there.
Those lips are red
and look like eyebrows
instead of a mouth.
The image changes
with immediacy.

4.
I’m thinking you into a battery
because that winter you kept me
from freezing. I remember you
only this time (last week)
your body is too skinny.
I’ll write you into being again
before this is done
I remember through words
that make language interesting.

5.
Time-travel is tangible:
memory sags
and the right moment
is not how it happened.
Notice anything different?
Pirouette those grotto toes darling,
our doubt tastes
like chocolate covered strawberries:
hard sweet
then juice
dehydrating.

6.
Easy.
A balloon blown up
with breath,
tied to a string,
and left on pavement.
What happens next
is not important –
I will have made it up.
I am not the poet
who wrote any of this
and you are not the woman
with the skeletal chest.

We are in this together,
waiting for the poem
to end.