Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
994 · Feb 2013
Song #5
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
Das Fuehrer gefüllt mit Flöte.

Listening 2 yawns,
meditating on medication,
lisping a cry to Das Führer,
I proffer a pray,
im morgen Früh, im morgen Führer,
im morgen nah; hören Sie mich.
Not 4 pleasure yearning 4 unright
Unctuous crimes. Not with U.
Not with boast (yet not with hate 2).
Hating the bath water with the babe
as it bashes Reaper's polemic
hellfire falling out of window;
Still me, in that kindness enters
my home, bowing cuz the doorway is 2 large.
Guiding in black ink,
writing a way
out of loyalties mouth,
out of sclerotic liver,
and contumacious throat.
I tongue an act, a play,
staying guilty in U,
saying guilty in Us.
Lemmings encouraged to revolt,
Offending in U,
Rejoicing only in Us.
Witness our joy, that Xanex protects
against dull moments, forgetting Us,
bland blessings rightly
Surrounded by Yawn's shield.
988 · Jan 2018
The Cadence of She
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2018
There is a Soldier I know

Her short cadence
with military precision
is always careful

At every bridge she
breaks step
to avoid foolish
oscillations a peeking midriff jog
pounding shoes
on asphalt pavement
hard could these send infatuated
hopes to destructive swing

Who knows what chasm
fantasized are crossed
Who knows what war
wages and what broken
battle of bulges lost
Why burn another Leader
ego living in some
Downfall Bunker

There is a Soldier I know

Her short cadence
in boots bare run faster
than legged strut

Every night she comes
through a backroom window
protected by a silver
Spoon at best
and every morning she
survives as golden tongue
poetry written on
our wired cages

There is a Soldier I know

Her name is Eden
and her hands are hot
with Dante's inferno

Her adolescent face is cool
and on each ear
a ring of Blue Herons

Every day her short cadence
brings rouge life
to our clay complexion
and every night
her milky whey
lips wonder lost
in our King Lear
kabuki song
987 · Nov 2015
Another Cricket
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2015
I thought
the carbon monoxide detector
was malfunctioning,
her pulsed chirps
pierce so sharp
unlike any stray
songs of carousing
cat

Supposedly, she brings
good luck like rain
on your wedding
day

A dreambot cricket
more machine
in sound than any slumbering
Kafka insect
bed bug mate
I've every slept
with

She wakes me
in nightly false
alarms but when her short
life is done
maybe I'll miss
nocturnal jolts
like I miss
cold misty
rain
981 · Nov 2015
Echo
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2015
It's a valley carved by moving water
It's a face wrinkled by time's current
It's a hike across the valley's face
It's a trek in through our granite life
It's a shout into the cool mountain air
It's a spike tracing our cloudy memory
It's a familiar echo bounced  
It's a family reverberation gone
The mountain has moved
The river is still
981 · Apr 2013
SACCADES
JoJo Nguyen Apr 2013
Pop songs play on overhead speakers. I stay tuned at Dunkin' Donuts.
I'm writing poems free on the internet, waiting. It's clean, as most D&D; are. A clean, well-light place for dragons.
The coffee is mild, black and busy. Talking people keep me awake but I need dopamine to catch saccades.
Are you sitting with me here on our failed distributed network? Poppa don't preach, I'm in trouble. Can you hear still born pop songs playing overhead?
978 · Aug 2013
Breakfast
JoJo Nguyen Aug 2013
Sit.
Eat the food.
Drink.

It's morning
stillness,
and time for Breakfast  

Simmer down.

We can fight
our brother,
tease our sister
later.

We can argue
toddler politics,
torture tease
to God knows
who
is right and wrong,
later.

Afternoon
fisticuffs and
nightly
*******
will always turn
on the morn
to timely
Breakfast.

Drink.
Eat, because I know
with our mouths full
we'll stop babbling
if for just a second!

OK.
We go,
meet the day
as we will.
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2018
(I came into a Stagg Street bathroom.)

There're only two-- the shared one in the hall and in a master bedroom.
Our shared lid was down, and spotted with a yellow accident realized.

(I sopped up the mess, and dropped spilled Toilette Paper into flushing water.)

Why is there a Vietnamese renter sitting in the bathtub?
Was he trying to crap in the tub?
We talked and he said the toilet was stuffed, but it wasn't.

Ta Ree's bathroom looks out onto the pool.

(I shut the bathroom door and locked it with that weird turning lock, and looked at the pool, another inside room.)

(I see a slender hand.)

We adjusted our dreaming angle, and it turned into a young Ta Ree.
She had on a remote face, already detached from us.
Under slumber's possible tendrils, a small smile appeared on her face, connecting my Inside with our outside.

(I laughed; She was still with us.)
968 · Feb 2014
Baltimore
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2014
In greying room sits my idle stare
glassy I outside see Baltie air
foggy white whiskers, a comely face
Smiling mouth vacant. A circle lace,
Within contact eyes sparkling fair
Uneasy on moving teeth despair.

Zoom, zooming a Prius black streaking there
in between Baltimore, heaven's stair
up collective vibe, woodie brown palace trace
knowledge bit worker, foe uncommon hairy race
Discovering an escaped boar upon hidden lair
Greasy lit padding with dollars flare.
951 · Jan 2014
Frosty roads and Way
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2014
Two paths diverged,
and I, wood in hand
made it my own
with tended shrubs,
arranged pebbles,
and wild pelt
for game.

Twas a good road
until a harpie
came to roost.

"Such a beautiful Way--
let's woo and trick  
more trekking feet
to feed our hungry
family" she says.

Now there's a Free way
turning my Ki, driving
me solo somewhere
with no family, friends
or even a fornicating Fable.
932 · Jul 2015
Gwendolyn & Ed
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
Who knew of Gwendolyn
as if I should know
as if it were February
on the history channel

Is it odd that Ed
finally introduced us
after so many years
as if he should be
suspiciously Caucasian

like Ed who
I really don't know
from Baltimore
growing up white
against black because
that's how America was
and is lovable,
hardworking, left-leaning
with a racist mother

or not like Curtis
who's Pusherman
from Chicago deals
I don't know waht
because I've got no
streets but enough schoolin
than most deserve.

I didn't know Gwendolyn
and that's not ironic
motivation to deal
more poetic *****
up for us to huff.
From the poem by Ed Skoog called "Gwendolyn Brooks Park, Topeka" I discovered another poet. It's a poem-a-day poem @ poets dot org.
921 · Feb 2019
Low Bound Theory
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2019
This might be the Real
Transmission Mechanism

The niggerly water
lubricating a Trickle
Down

Greens in Rich hand
gets miserly saved

Yet earned on Poor back
miraculously makes it Rain

Washingtons fall
a few Jacksons scorch
land in lap

Even a Benjamin
swallows Trick Dollar
to **** a positive cash
flow

Bills stick on teats
just enough to buy

a comfort Doritos
bag a Brand name

snack for her little boy
So he'll grow up knowing

What value-added Marketing
taste like.
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2016
did we know that today
in 2016 we'd be reading the future
about the Great American
soft
depression interlaced
August 16 with Lehman
Goldman
Sach King David
how this time it will be
different but the bubble
starting
in 1995 always burst
even if its only two years
later Elizabeth Montgomery
died we were joining the Academic Mafia
around Circle Drive
Korean BBQ
Blues Caravan and
cruising around East Los
in a Blue Toyota pickup truck
now
there's a parked Prius
because we're too busy
running
numbers a racket
in Cambridge that leaves us
just a bit of fried egg in the morning
with coffee vorleser-ing and documenting
just
as any moral Hannah would do
in 1939 to say hey this is the way
we wanted right boxcars leading
to abattoirs today we do our best
imitation
of a weak McNamara
mea culpa
914 · Feb 2013
We hobbits
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
How do we do it?
How many quests?
How many fellowships
formed and broken,
going on to separate ways?
Doesn’t the heart rub a bit
sore after each parting?
Are we fools thinking
our’s the most arduous journey,
a long trek into Mordor,
to scale the heart of Doom?
Are we a bit of Merry weather
and Pippin riding on a shoulder
of an ancient forest?
Do we fight the Nazgul?
Are we foot soldiers
once more going into the breach?
We go truth be told
with no magic, no ring,
just cheerful Hobbits with secondsies,
snacks between full meal,
brief taste between breakfast,
and lunch, filling ourselves with joy.
899 · Jun 2015
Fear Walking Primates
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
You gotta remember
that we're just
upright primates
full of fear,
pounding chest,
full of joy,
vicious in survival.
Small band of the Hand
clumping together,
increasingly clustering,
like fractal adolescence.
Fighting and *******;
Cuban Missile Crisis,
and Free Love Sixties.
Proof that solutions
for small Hand & Bobono
don't fit sullen temperament
of precious preteen.
892 · Jul 2015
Clay Beauties
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
The clay comes from Earth
just as we
clay motion people Wurm
our way up

In a miracle we fool
ourselves
thinking transmogrification
has Calvinized calves
into bronze molded
legs shaped by a wise Maker

Instead of fast steel Forge
industrially heated
within Narcissus' Crucible

Hot from the oven
our Make-over face,
rouged from fused
sand calls
us Beauties silicon
-enhanced
JoJo Nguyen Aug 2016
Dreams they drown
under the Stone
under the Star

At least we
Stole The Show

Our Houdini act
of failed dedication
defiant to the End

Fragments float
up scenting a
stream with rotting
love locked
in the truck
876 · May 2016
interlacing
JoJo Nguyen May 2016
I'm interlacing with Lehman
again what does
that mean I
don't know but maybe
the answer connects Dean
with Ella and
him with us in Film
on TV through VR
singing Broadway Medleys
in a cool Grandfather's wobble
in a crystal Voice
like Mom's clarion call
a silver thread
running through our dull
tapestry I'm mixing
metaphors
muddling music
weaving songs before work
before heatmaps
Seurat R packages
multicolored modality
in higher dimension
again what does
that mean I
don't know but maybe
we just keep interlacing
875 · Apr 2015
Breanna's Change
JoJo Nguyen Apr 2015
Force is mechanically
easy to solve
like a heart squeezed
in a surgeon's gloved
hand deep in cracked chest

Rib cages dried bones
in High Plains of Reno
or was it White Sands of Nevada?

Nuclear blast equations
of forgotten love ancient hate
and modern little cheats among
the billion of us Forced
over seconds to leave
deep craters

How strange the integration
happens to give same the area
but different under curved ***!

Do we like long hot shafts
or voluminous D-cups?
H-bomb holes or a Grand Canyon?
A quick poke or grinding strokes
watered down over centuries?

The math's the same
sung in Smithery
in Bessie lilt
about a little sugar
in our bowl
about a hot dog
between our rolls

"Stop your foolin'
and drop somethin'
in my bowl"
872 · May 2013
9.
JoJo Nguyen May 2013
9.
It's the matrix ****,
the primer luck,
in deeper Muck,
around a curved duck,
all for a radiant Buck,
in demon stuck,
paying mechanized ****,
to voice a roast Chuck,
mixed with raisins. Yuck!

Everything has an UCK except...
dried darkness.

It's the primer ****,
the deeper luck,
in a curved Muck,
around for a radiant duck
all demon Buck,
in mechanized stuck,
paying a roast ****,
to voice with Chuck,
mixed everything has Yuck.

It's the primer, a curved demon paying to roast dried darkness.
In deeper, around radiant mechanized UCK, we find the exception.
It's the matrix, in deeper all for a radiant, paying mechanized dried raisin.

Yuck! uck...
866 · Jul 2015
Mangoman!
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
Over fitting curves
to Noise. There's a drought in Puerto
Rico and Los Angeles.

Water from the Rio La
Plata is low and wow is Sierra
in her young days,
with full snowy capped
*****.

How the drooling Mangos
all crowd her on a Carnival Cruise
-- a blinding which Sun?

Somewhere even in the noise of Umma
crying, even along a low river gurgle,
a yowling true love
Signal is found. Maybe.

Probabilistically.
A friend is in Puerto Rico. I have daily poems from you and
The Sun in Bemidji, Minnesota by Sean Hill @Poets dot org
The Strangers by Patrick Hicks @writersalmanac dot org
859 · Mar 2013
Steel Black
JoJo Nguyen Mar 2013
In the hour of chaos we belong;
chaotic good people right?
Misbehaved Spectrum disorder
transitioning during breath
and sigh, as we fight too evil.
Burning, over turning squad cars
in fat-tail distributions,
retribution on lawful evil,
ordered and repressed love at
tender protest mass.
859 · Mar 2013
Bootstrapping
JoJo Nguyen Mar 2013
We live our single lives
whether with friend, girl, boy
husband, wife or family.
We live our single life.
That is the American Way,
and certainly not
the United Way.

We're taught to lift
ourselves up, bootstrapping.
So I keep sampling
my heart with replacements,
hoping against the odds
that mean means something,
and normal distribution doesn't
give Gaussian grouse.

Or could it be
I'm strapping myself
to the wrong boot
and all my recursive
iterations are yielding
a false curve
to my zero coupon life?
856 · Jun 2015
Mom two
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
It's raining-- her
favorite short lived
season of Los Angeles.

Waves propagate.

It's all a messy
interference pattern
on our pool's surface
disturbed with memories,
tiny droplets, tears
from Savior's sky.

Perhaps it feels similar
to old emerald
Vietnam ponds, except
here the rain
doesn't go on for too long,
unless it's a Hemingway rain.

It makes me wonder
if it's not Monsoon
season yet. Our tiny pool
built for Valley deluge,
would flood faster
than any sandbags
could delude.

She never asked
how long to fight
just kept on walking
cooking and loving
until her heart grew
too weary.

In the end, three loops
around the swimming
pool in the rain is enough.
It's the same as walking
5K while doing dialysis.

She sits next to me
on our outdoor swing
chair, and smiles,
rested.
853 · Jun 2013
Cafuné
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2013
Should it be Blond straw Cafuné
Or fiery Auburn silk
interdigitated;
Slender twine prehensively Black
On hip Chestnut rope
fingered?
843 · Nov 2016
Shaft of Sunshine
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2016
A shaft of Sunshine
thru the Looking Glass
window

Dust dance
in Brownian Motion
atop the air

Reality's trembling
leaves flicker on my
Plato cell wall

How long have I
gulped Heavy
water?

Fire! firing
currents on greasy
Myelin copper wire

Spray the ABC
at a spreading Cortical
depression
Fire.Heavy water>interlace.//http://hellopoetry.com/poem/395053/firing/
821 · Feb 2013
Circles Again
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
I draw circles because
I like them.
They are the hardest
Shape to draw
at the beginning,
a long time ago.
I steady my hands,
by making curves.
I like them.
I color them in
and know which can say,
that is right
and this wrong.
My favorite is green.
I draw green and
purple circles,
liking them in full circle
again.
820 · Jun 2013
4-25-1994
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2013
Clutching for words, I sink into silence.
Your waxing smile soothes, but light
Not the darken sea nor calms the violence
Wrecked upon my soul by a still tongue's blight.
Your laughter, bells that chimes heaven's bliss;
Your touch shivers that skin feels *****;
Yet my world yearns for a tender kiss.
Through havoc and chaos comes something perfect.
Gentle madness and crazed frustration start
When silence through your sensual stride
Take pass my smitten heart.
Dazed and stranded, beach by your tide
My castaway heart sits upon a broken keel
For which only your love can heal.
Oh my. I wrote this almost 2 decades ago! I must have been pining after some girl. The longer you live, the more the years seem to get compressed, each passing without notice in bunches. Did I write poems like you are now?
811 · Jan 2017
Gravity Heart
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2017
My heart is gravity
My heart pumps Pb

Our weak ventricles murmer
Our bloodlines muddle

All is as it should be
With a strong sad smile

A short wink hooded
Our precocious Facebook children

With mutant gifts crinkling
Brow concentrating in deep

Play practicing trying catching
Pokemon policy phrases

Riffs to redeem siblings lost
Down Kentucky mine shafts

Yet tribal rite remembers
How blacken heart recapitulates

In our habitual memory
We abdicate poetry
We abhor progress
We abjure peace
806 · Dec 2015
Math of our Love
JoJo Nguyen Dec 2015
There's an elegance
to the math

but

it's too complicated for
us to understand much less
make a career of writing
ring looped code
or father toddling

equations.

At best, we fancy Newtonian
relationships,

common sense ones that any 17
century young Romanticist
would Realize

The faster we accelerate into Love the greater
the Force of our relationship
and the Mass of our egos multiply the effect

A Love in motion stays in motion

If only we live in vacuums

our fairy tale would never end
and the forever after is locked,
safe behind Castle doors

But our stories are more like Grimm Tales

Impulse
forces of liberated Egos
change the trajectory
of our real

love.

Random white cue *****
bounce us into a side pocket.

And who's to know?

Are the cul-de-sacs
any worse than
landing in an odd corner,
bunched in with only
a stripped
or solid ball?

At least we didn't scratch
against some misshapen Black
eight
JoJo Nguyen May 2015
One Sunday Morning,
Josh & Nicole woke up
to find they had metamorphosized
into Jellyfishes.

As rosy fingered Dawn met
their night breaths and stirred the Sea,
an intense Grace sighed,
dreaming effortlessly on misty
shores still wrapped in silky
emerald sheets of caught
infatuation, hooked
on tasty morsel
twisted in loves net.

Their waking sinfulness
forgets the vast Ocean
even as their jellied skin glides
and melts together
under gentle undulating waves
and watchful Sun eye.

For the rest of their days
together, Josh forgets
to stare at lonely lands
and Nicole imagines
the next day together.
I'm following Nicole (freeyourminddd) & Joshua Ohmer (joshua-ohmer).

As an exercise, I've mashed their poems, Sunday Morning & Jellyfish, together! It's how our brain works. Events that are juxtaposed close together in space and time merge together and cause us to look for meaning in their random closeness! It then makes us remember that specific day better!
802 · Oct 2015
We Samsa
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2015
This daily Trial
has transformed
tadpoles to chicken
liver-- a Metamorphosis,
a selection process
most Unnatural.
Darwin's joke,
light humor
to ease our
quest for Waze
into the Castle.
790 · Nov 2015
Simple queries
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2015
They go thru flow cells
and return a million read

Weekly poems sent
anonymously to be sequenced
in a massively parallel
batch job

The hits come back
in blinking dots,
ephemeral likes, individual
happy flashes from
bar-coded singlets.

But how to know
when a solitary spot
has read our entire
genome?

Have you binged
on the DNA
of our identity?

Can you tell us
who I are
and
where I are going?
782 · Feb 7
And then there we are
JoJo Nguyen Feb 7
In our mid-50s on a poetry site for our kids in their 20s. Not on top of the world. Not really. Not in real-time.

And you'll be with me
won't you?

In Paris, never really seeing but always trying not to step on all the sh*t.

And you'll be with me
won't you?

In Berlin, looping around endlessly on some Bahn, making crosses.

And you'll be with me
won't you?

In Rome, running another marathon. OK. Maybe you'll run it and I'll just cheer you on.

And you'll be with me
won't you?

In Los Angeles, in the end-- at the peak looking back to see us coming and foreseeing us going.

You'll be here in our seething cities, cities by the river with me.
Won't you?
782 · Feb 2015
Play At
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2015
Had a father name Zeus
One day Jane's Addiction
woke up and found my daddy
gone

Had another mother name Mary
One day brothers
Peter and Paul
read her suicide note

She'd loaded her pockets
with stones, waded
downstream in indigo
mood.

They named me Mo
Each day we
dog Clan follow
Jo scavenging
Eden.

We've left a garden
to build forts
with discarded sofas
and hurl play dirt
and nip our throats
in mock death.
781 · Feb 2013
Song #4
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
JB and the String section

Can I get a witness
over here helping with
mercy hearing my call
Young men diss me honor
searching the lie on Web
Can I get a witness
Pie for my piety
sake when I come calling
to stop awesome is not
searching stillness in bed
but knowing left from right
since I ask to believe
and you ask for what good
facing us lighting in
Hand and glad joy in heart
at the thought of a meal
and wine grown to slumber
under Yawning safety
Can I get a witness
775 · Oct 2016
Magdeburg postdoc
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2016
and here I sit, at the bottleneck.
a postdoctoral headlock squelched
in an economic ice age.
what idiosyncratic feathers
will we evolve to make stolid
careers ****?
is it possible these colorful
plumage have unintended
consequences of flight?
early real down
or Icarus waxed illusion?
a poem fished out from one of my past streams! is it already 5 years?!
JoJo Nguyen Aug 2015
Is love like riding a horse?

Is it like straddling big
powerful steeds, jumping
over rails, and lazy
brown foxes?

Sometimes we need a crop
to whip our pony to that final
spurt, stretching a Black Stallion nose
across spent finish,
glistening with sweat at besting
the crowded rest.

And if we fall
we're suppose to just get
right back tall
into that saddle set
Superwoman like

rather than some crippled
ghost rider, a Ritalin
paraplegic Reeve coming out
only to fake her maudlin bout
around another racetrack night.


Maybe love is like jumping
out of a perfectly good aeroplane
without a parachute
hoping
falling
watching
to see if a ridiculous Bond
James will HALO
drop
us desperately out of danger, a ripping clutch
released
at ten thousand feet.

Love sure is like an action-adventure movie!

Our love in mundane lives
spills laughter till our sides
burst,
till our hearts explode
sending
pieces too far off
cities
shell-shock
amnesic
and hungry for new horse races
with a spotted Mustang.
765 · Jun 2017
Thou shalt not kill
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2017
It is the sheep in
wolf's clothing
killing with
a smothering love it
is a viper in the eye
**** the amygdala
condition

It is Zod kneeling down
with both Hands
on the wheel

It is a tied die
shirt we wear an
autoimmune shooting
a Lupus in disguise
an Ewe in disgust

Can I get a witness
764 · Feb 2013
Song #2
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
Anger anger plot der Erde
Furrowing crease and knotted vain
von kingdom versus Kingclan comes
Manacle laughing yoke on us
Mocking a Himmel Wutand fuss
Angering Zion mount der sits
Angering clarion das Gesetz
Father begot as forgotten
Son asks me there for a kingdom
Casting iron tinted shadow
On a Klei nation listing fear
Enter a Son past prayering
Enter a wry Serpent on wrath
Breathing away perish belief
Blessing ember after babble
764 · Sep 2013
bit Player & a Foot
JoJo Nguyen Sep 2013
We want heroes,
stars, emperors,
and sun kings
to lead us out
of Darkness.

We want
Mommy & Daddy
to make
the hurt go away.

But what can I give?
I'm just a bit player
like David says
in the pilot
of a new sitcom on
the Comedy Channel.

At first, I make whole
my career a foot
like Wesley's child.

One day, I pull myself
up with a thousand hands
twirling, connecting
in dendritic arbors.

I stand at last bare
face against Absurd face,
naked as a rolling Stone.
763 · Aug 2014
Mercury Rising
JoJo Nguyen Aug 2014
Do you like this painting by Friedrich?
YES or NO,
A binary one or zero answer please,
true or false.

I like recognized neural solutions
posed to logistically regressed ideas.

Do you like the color
BLUE or YELLOW?

YES, I did like GREEN,
so slender and bright
faced in her youth.

We were adolescents with too many connections
And maybe not enough pruning.
Or maybe we were just mixed and mash-up,
media saturated?

What do you think?
Did you lust for GREEN too?
YES or NO, true or false.

And now, are we adults or autistic kids?

We withdraw, refuse to recognize faces,
limit human touch because it's all
too overwhelming-- reduced to visual cats,
difficult to herd by old Hands
and cooperative Rules.

We wanderer above the Cloud
seeing answers from a Fog of Random data.
Old world romantics, Greenhorns
in the brave new world of hard logic
and emotional detachment.

If we randomly assign
BLUE = false, YELLOW = true, and GREEN = lust;
logic tells us false AND true must equal false.

A novel recognition that sometimes when
BLUE mixes with YELLOW, we are again BLUE!

By sheer force of color faith
and romantic human sensibility,
we mix falsehood with truth
to arrive at what we desire.

In our blue hearts, and yellow skin
we still green after romance.
759 · Jun 2015
Enough by Robert Creeley
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
<quote>
...
Your body is a garbage can.
Your body is white, why

let others touch it, why
not. Why

my body so
tentative, do I
...
</quote>
Another white dead guy talking...
Search for "Enough" by Robert Creeley to read the full poem.
748 · Nov 2016
Breakfast Mine
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2016
A thin egg coats
fast breaking
Morning

Mushrooms read
as crowded flatmate's
Onion

Beads of brine
sweet from Sopressatta
Mine

And a Cheesy foam
crest upon our Coffee
*Sea
742 · Dec 2015
for Matthew Brennan
JoJo Nguyen Dec 2015
Does our family speak to us on cold winter's night?
Even if there's no creek to crackle,
no stiff spines, no furry trees,
nothing but a Van Gogh room
in Somerville
and digital clocks ticking.

Does our family still speak?
Chattering away,
Background processes,
Garbled noise, garbage without
wisdom because we've lost the sophistication
to crack ancient encryption.

We hear the history,
and mimic vocalization like a song bird,
dolphin or elephant
each with converging neural circuits.

Members living the same stream?

It's easier to hack the data line,
when we've trained on same sets:
a missing wife,
black and white photos,
and a grandfather clock.
I was inspired by a poem!

Matthew Brennan @TWA:  "Nights Our House Comes to Life".//http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20151216/
739 · Jul 2015
Lehman like, Songs by David
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
And another day starts pushing
first poetry like lines
from a retired Marine
Larkin cookbook who stops
singing because I asked
if he was Army

I've never heard Das Veilchen
but Mädchen hitch hiked to hear
Reggae Prince far wide beat
in and around
Aalen perhaps the softest sound
from a Brother I've never
heard or had.

Joan and her Wild punk song really
icon and cult forms
from Assisi 142
Mercy mercy was
it my whole faith then
and now
735 · Jun 2015
LuvFit Quiz
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
As I walk the streets
I wonder about Eddie
and the Cruisers, mashing
my makeup with my believe.

Have you taken the latest quiz?

It's one of the quickest
way to
drive site visits.
That and lists. People
luv lists!

Riddle me this Batman!

What kind of narrative has no quick
answers to political questions?

If my Brand answers
can't match stock candidate's
sound bites
does it mean I don't
believe anymore?

It's complicated and I have issues but no policy.

60% match with Rand, 70% match with Bernie
and the dichotomy is split.
Libertarian or Progressive?
Yin or my yang,
Always a montage of my yang!

We've come in nonsense
face, believing Third Vehicle ways,
like Tea, or Green,
or Green Tea Party Girl!

My narrative doesn't match yours.
Does it mean we can't date each other?

There'll never be a complete
fit, no
soul mate here
for our consensual policy
making.
731 · Oct 2015
Fast leaves
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2015
the leaves are changing colors fast!
just two days ago, they were green on the inside,
fringed with yellow, gold and crimson edges.
today the jaundice seeps in bunches and bushels,
reaching in along the veins and branches
into the capitulating green core.
tips of exposed twigs reveal
falling, failing tribal leaves
in the autumn cool air.
skeletons of Halloween start to stick
their bony hands into the even darkness.
726 · Jan 2016
Leaf & Snow
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2016
It's like steps, baby steps
in puffy, winter's clothes
from protective parents
bundles of joy, pushing through snow
white, pure,
in innocence

It's as if seasons ago
we ankle biters collected Maple leaves
as the colors changed
and froze them in between
pages of a college student's
journal full of love and passion,
in hope

that the spring of our lives
will come too soon,
and the dried leaf
and the driven snow
will add up to
something, anything
before the winter sets
in again.
720 · May 2015
Breanna Winn
JoJo Nguyen May 2015
Breanna Winn is fictional--
a composite character. She
follows the decaying poems of
unnoticed flies and rough
cut diamonds ****
in the rubber grooves of
adolescent sneakers.

Ignoring
and ignored all at once
scraping and grinding
each step of pressurized,
carbon against concrete
we walk down neighborhood
sidewalk with fossilized
fly pebbles
stuck in heel.  

Anthropomorphous dogs
walking people in woods,
forest, and dense city
jungles filled with Lord
of forgotten
flies swarming the air
and paving the ground.

Breanna silently,
carefully, narrates the life
of a drifting, morphing
black clad super-org
tribe.
707 · Mar 2013
Baltimore
JoJo Nguyen Mar 2013
A morning hum
from the heater
rushes my warm
January winter
in Baltimore just
a month before.

Past sits alone
at Millie's table
while Ed sleeps.

I write compressed
time late at breakfast
table, too early
after driving
up work's hill, daily
pass February
sunrises.
Next page