Category Archives: CW

Compulsively Allergic to the Truth
by Jeffrey McDaniel

I’m sorry I was late.
I was pulled over by a cop
for driving blindfolded
with a raspberry-scented candle
flickering in my mouth.
I’m sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
I am not the egg man.
I am the owl
who just witnessed
another tree fall over
in the forest of your life.
I am your father
shaking his head
at the thought of you.
I am his words dissolving
in your mind like footprints
in a rainstorm.
I am a long-legged martini.
I am feeding olives
to the bull inside you.
I am decorating
your labyrinth,
tacking up snapshots
of all the people
who’ve gotten lost
in your corridors.

What Is in the Closet?

No less than five zip-up or pocketed hoodies.
Two L.L. Bean flannels.
Dress pants, dress shirts,
Several long and one short skirt.
Sweaters folded and stacked on shelves,
Too many shoes to count down below.

Magazines in all shapes and sizes:
Christian Century
Skin and Ink
National Geographic
New York Times Book Review
and Time.

School back packs and bags.
Back pack for hiking that never has hiked.
Canoe camping dry bags.
Purses: never used.

Photos in boxes.
An old Mac Plus.
A guitar that won’t stay tuned.
And a naked light bulb.

Several skeletons.
Friends.

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–

–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past–

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man’s grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–

modern–all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown–

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos–all these

entangled in your mummied roots–and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul

too, and anyone who’ll listen,

–We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

What poem will you write today?

Ah! Sunflower Sutra

Sunflower tips tracing sun
head bobbing agreement with progress
seeds dropping descendants.

Metal cyborg flowers grow tall
heaps of ashes phoenix stems
buds open too fast in warmed globe.

Petals fall.
Dreams die.
Progress progresses.

Alpha Zulu
by Gary Lilley

I know more people dead than people alive,
my insomniac answer to self-addressed prayers

is that in the small hours even God drinks alone.
My self-portrait; gray locks in the beard, red eyes

burning back in the mirror, the truths of grooves
and nicks on my face, one missing tooth.

I’m a man who’s gathered too many addresses,
too many goodbyes. There’s not much money

or time left to keep on subtracting from my life.
Except for needs I can pack everything I have

into my old black sea-bag. To all the bloods
I’ll raise a bourbon, plant my elbow on the bar

and drink to the odds that one more shot
won’t have me wearing a suit of blues.

I’m so exposed, with you all of me is at risk,
and if that’s only one side of being in love

that’s the one deep down that proves it.
Here you are sleeping with me, narcotic as night,

naked as an open hand, and the skinny of it is,
what makes you think I am afraid of this

when I once lived in a cave, moss on the cold wall,
all my bones scattered across the floor.

Modern Day Jesus Song

Alive am I in you; you alive in me; we alive in we—
prayers you hear and sometimes do not answer.

Alone, a lonely hawk on wire bobbing rhythmically
eyes searching for food. You take care of these. Too. It feels like instead.

Grooves carved in pain and sweat, sweet anguish, a
tooth clicked, cheek sucked, knocked to ground. One less.

Addresses, envelopes. Envelope me in your greedy, ready,
money laundering. Send money but don’t write. It is only

life after all. Lived long without much food. Poverty. The poor
have social services to live by. Turn the other fat cheek and chew.

Bloods dripping diseases. Famine distending bellies. Apathy. Coffee
bar slips our drinks and we go crazy. One shot? I said two. Add one

shot, and the blood pours for diamonds, clothes, shoes and we sing the
blues over spilled milk. A man sits cold, on the corner. And we

risk nothing. Seven cloaks in the closet. Demons. Skeletons. But
love? Greater love has no man than to lay down his life (or give a coat).

It is finished. But the world turns on, turns off, turns on again.
Night turns. Day turns. We turn away. Insular. Isolated.

Is this what love is? Do they know us by our love?
This is what love has become. They know us by our latte, our full closet.

Walls built keeping out the vagrancy, degeneracy, otheracy, only me you see.
Floor-ed. Cross-ed. Double cross-ed. You and me. Not you and we.

Pastoral
by Jennifer Chang

Something in the field is
working away. Root-noise.
Twig-noise. Plant
of weak chlorophyll, no
name for it. Something
in the field has mastered
distance by living too close
to fences. Yellow fruit, has it
pit or seeds? Stalk of wither. Grass-
noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt
and chant. Something in the
field. Coreopsis. I did not mean
to say that. Yellow petal, has it
wither-gift? Has it gorgeous
rash? Leaf-loss and worried
sprout, its bursting art. Some-
thing in the. Field fallowed and
cicada. I did not mean to
say. Has it roar and bloom?
Has it road and follow? A thistle
prick, fraught burrs, such
easy attachment. Stem-
and stamen-noise. Can I lime-
flower? Can I chamomile?
Something in the field cannot.

Something in the field cannot.

Something cannot breathe
smothered under the ground
as it is by the sod.
Little eyes and little claws
scratching blindly at the roots.
Gnawing noises, sawing noises.
Slip up. Away. No lawn mowing
above the tiny beings. Head down
the blade swings fast. Vole. Mole.
What’s the difference? How are they
the same? Tunnel. Tunnel. Dirt and roots.
Slip through, slimy little skin.
Blind eyes. Claws. Long claws.
Moth balls choke. The smell.
We cannot breathe with those balls
in our tunnels. We retreat.

A Pot of Tea

by Richard Kenney

Loose leaves in a metal ball
Or men in a shark cage steeping,
Ideas stain the limpid mind
Even while it’s sleeping:

Ginseng or the scent of lymph
Or consequences queasing
Into wide awareness, whence,
Like an engine seizing

Society remits a shudder
Showing it has feeling,
And the divers all have shaving cuts
And the future’s in Darjeeling—

Blind, the brain stem bumps the bars
Of the shark cage, meanwhile, feeding,
And the tea ball’s cracked, its leaves cast
To catastrophic reading:

Ideas are too dangerous.
My love adjusts an earring.
I take her in my arms again
And think of Hermann Göring,

And all liquidities in which
A stain attracts an eating,
And of my country’s changing heart,
And hell, where the blood is sleeting.

A Princess and Her Pee

Princess dressed to attend the ball.
Trouble is brewing, pain is steeping.
She is troubled inside her mind—
Will she survive, or like her colleague, end up sleeping?

Wracking cough of mucus and lymph,
All around people are, at the sound, queasing.
From here they wonder whence
she commences her seizing.

Princess expectorates with a shudder
and onlookers get a sneaking feeling
that in her spare time she cuts.
Did she pick up consumption in Darjeeling?

After the ball she hits the bars,
picks up a few guys and proceeds in feeding
every stereotype of her caste.
And the reader persists her reading.

The behavior of the princess is dangerous.
Don’t share her necklaces or earrings.
She goes to the free clinic to get tested again—
her monthly voluntary goring.

The test is necessary. By which
disease is dying. Which is eating
her body, her mind, her heart?
Her hopes are dashed by diseased sleeting.