Filed under: info
Hey everybody,
I just added ‘Oka’s toes’ to my Myspace. This is the third poem I’ve put up on my profile there, after ‘Linea Libra’ and ‘A girl in the hand is worth two under the table’. Have a listen and add me as a friend!
Thanks, Joe
Filed under: info
Hello all,
I added ‘Linea Libra’ to my Myspace page’s music. Recorded it today. Check it out! It’s pretty quiet — my mic sucks — but if you turn up the volume a bit, the quality is great.
Thanks for the support,
Joe
a big breakfast,
and Tom’s cat,
him peering in like
a little lost boy
who’s come home to discover
his parents have forgotten him,
and they’ve thrown away his clothes
and his bed and his little red firetruck
and there might even be a new son in there
somewhere.
Cinnamon
sits poised to sprinkle
somewhere
over a large ceramic bowl on the countertop,
and Tom’s cat
opens his mouth wide and demonstrates to the world
the seriousness of his intentions.
he yawns.
somewhere
in the house a fat, cow-colored cat,
the new son, if I must say it,
watches at every window (7)
for his rival
to appear
and Tom’s cat
appears and the fat, cow-colored cat
shadows him as stealthily as a fat,
cow-colored cat can shadow.
and Tom’s cat,
before peering in like
the little lost boy
whose name he bears
at the sliding-glass door
with the swollen, wooden frame
and the rusted runners,
is little more than a brushstroke of
brown across the overgrown lawn.
Fleetwood Mac plays on an endless loop
somewhere
in the front of the house.
(”Rumours.” “No, it’s all true.”)
The fat, cow-colored cat stands one aloof,
sentinel,
at the sliding-glass door.
he yawns.
Filed under: poems | Tags: books, capitalism, Cartesian dualism, Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag, Laplace, mechanism, philosophy, positivism, psychiatry, psychology, Ray Bradbury, the ghost in the machine, vitalism
Lasting contributions of our fathers
to mankind:
iPods,
and high definition flatscreen
televisions;
Bluetooth headsets
and hybrid gas & electric
automobiles;
iPhone apps,
and dual-core computer
processors…
As if we would die
were our fingers to stop;
as if the world were
a list of tasks to be ticked
or a stack of papers
waiting to be filed.
As if to deny Descartes
we need replace the ghost
in the machine
with another machine
and the mind with
Faber’s silver needle
to guide us,
toward logic.
As if the darkling plain
were something inside us waiting
for the incinerator
of science to illuminate it;
as if the heart
is a void to be filled
like a display at a
grocery store.
As if poetry
were a danger
and safety just the staccato babble
of Mildred’s ‘family’ on Montag’s walls.
As if anyone
was home.
As if the house
wasn’t on fire.
As if Clara crying
was little more than a passing humor,
to be diagnosed
and fixed like
a bad internet connection.
As if it didn’t happen.
As if we don’t remember
anything at all.
Filed under: poems | Tags: Cinco de Mayo, clouds, long walks, rain, Spring, swine flu, time, water
Pinch,
punch,
taking a walk.
Trash in the creek,
an old foot-massager,
and trees that release
cotton snow
you run away from.
A young man sits on a stump
near the bike trail
with some luggage,
beneath a tree
to hide from pregnant clouds.
The rain makes
footsteps slippery
and outside
everything in sight
is wet to the touch.
Downtown is packed with
Mexican revelers,
celebrating the passing of
the swine flu scare
or a holiday or I don’t know what.
I wrap my arm around
your side and chest as you sleep
and think about
the passage of time
and then you draw me close.
May days make
springtime slip
into summer
and outside
everything in sight is
wet to the touch.
Pinch,
punch.
Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, birth, books, fiction, fingers, genesis, Mallarmé, media, paint, physiology, semiotics, truth
Your skin is a transmission;
a message speaking of days spent
at the easel and loves
that touched you. A small
silhouette sits on the cover
of your bookish back. I
can read your name in the notches
of your spine and the signs spoken
by the movements
of your impure hair.
In my mind I see you turn towards
me, stepping gently in kinetic verses
punctuated by the grammar of your flesh
and your verbose hands. I
think of you as a story some have
read but none
understood; only I know the tale
told by your body when it was first formed
in the womb. That first fold was
the closing of a book.
Your skin is a message
emanating from your hips;
a broadcast in code your lungs
sent me and which the fine hairs
carry still down the small of your back. I
pore over the cleft of your
breasts, my fingers finding Braille in
your freckles. The medium enfolds
me like a story I’ve only begun to
understand but have read many times.
Literary legs draw me fast into this best
and last fiction.
Filed under: poems | Tags: autumn, city streets, dirt roads, dust, light refraction, neglect, Paris, rain, strawberries, suffocation, summer, sunstroke, the Seine
Sometime past the solstice summer
will kick up dust, shuffling
down a dirt road in scuffed
Converse. If he asks, about to pass
you by, you’re waiting for the fall,
when sweet breezes blow in;
and if you look to the north,
you can almost see autumn, but
for now summer’s heat pervades and you catch a whiff
of him
as he walks by -
sweat, of course, slick
as first rain’s oil on city streets,
and beneath it strawberries,
over-ripe,
and red as rays
of light left after
blue has blown away,
red as lazy, lightly sunburnt skin.
You smell cheap beer on him under
it all, and dry brush and scents
so fused with tattered clothes they seem
woven in. Grass stains on knees
of jeans
and the soles of his shoes.
He wears a white tee, faded,
about the color of his chapped nostrils,
which breathe in the dust and
dirt in shallow draughts.
A flick of fingers sends
the brim of a red ball
cap to his crown,
and beneath the light,
colorless hair
covering his head,
dim, diuretic eyes
and a crooked smile.
He pulls at several days’ scruff
with blistered, damaged digits,
black strips of flaky skin and dirt and food and blood under
every fingernail.
A dry wind sweeps in, northbound, as he ambles off,
and brings with it the stale, sweet smell
of death arcing
off the young, sunsucked man to the south -
a scent of Paris,
of the Seine
in hot August heat:
of elderly French madames
in stuffy tenements,
lying still in bath water brought
near the boiling point
by his relentless assault upon the
Bastille walls.
And as he stops, and turns, and takes
one last look
at you, the high noon
sun hits him from above,
and summer’s shady face is not a cheery color
of wild strawberries, but
a deeper crimson,
blotchy and purplish, like the cheeks
of a child left in the backseat of a car
on a June afternoon with the windows
rolled
up.
And as
he touches cracked white palms to a sweaty forehead,
brushing the hair from his face, behind his hands
his eyes spark with wanderlust of a dog
when the Fourth of July has
brought him out of his cage
to run spooked and mad
with pads raw and red dripping
into the streets.
Summer drops his hand
to his side,
and his thumb leaves a thin streak of blood down
the right side of his face, red
on red on red;
and he turns, and he walks on,
and the northbound wind resumes, whipping up
dust in all directions.
