CE Green

CE Green Dec 2018

Perhaps

The furnace won’t kick on and my heart is sick. There is no purring or growling from its mechanical insides. The heater, not the heart. Poetry is the cupboard that won’t stay closed, it wants to show you what is behind its shanty stubborn door. The cupboard is heart sick too; with less romantic implications involved. Poetry is the robot that wants to be A.I.
That wants to out perform its human counterparts, and yet empathizes too much with warmly lit LED eyeballs.
Yeah. Sometimes that’s what I think poetry is.

CE Green Dec 2018

Waking from Dream #3

All the US states out of place
Backlit map illuminate my chest and face
Montana near Miami
Florida like Kuwait
White rapid water problems
Suddenly irate.
Three birds drunk on salt water
And a feeling I cannot shake.

Part of the “Waking from dream” series

CE Green Nov 2018

Who Turns the Lights Back On?

For a series of seconds at a time
I catch myself.
Do you catch yourself counting?
mulling over innocuous extravaganza?
Pardoned on proverbial Main Street while adding raindrops to puddles?
Carrying the 3 and wondering so many things!
But mostly
Who turns the lights back on?
When one is swept away.
When we are busy wrapping our most precious belongings and tucking them away for unprecedented purposes.

Now, I can't imagine you've guessed who keeps the lights on.
After all, they were gone before you could blink and Netflix was an afterthought in your dream riddled head.
***** and provocative her wool socks turning you on inhaling burned sage, department store perfume so perfectly autumnal.
More rainfall obliterates electrical transformers, everybody's famed ******.
But who turns the lights back on?

CE Green Nov 2018

And so

And so
There you were. I saw you last night, you were unapologetically ****. Common and so uncommon, and said to come in.
And so
I did just that. I saw you last night,
You were ruefully majestic, and you were glowing. I don’t want to say glowing, actually. I don’t like that adjective and it’s over romanticized; but there was light about you.
And so you stood up, and I held still
And so I saw the whole of you, every last bit.
And we let stark grey November light spill into us, into the room. Not our room, just yours.
I was gawking and I felt subtle shame stain my heart.
And in that moment I decided not to feel that way anymore, ever again. And I wished for just a second that I could call you my own, or a part of me at any rate.
My head came down. The bluebird peaked his head out. Yes, he is still in there. Chuck doesn’t weep. I’m not like Chuck.

CE Green Nov 2018

So you think you know futility

Slipshod Tender guffaws aloud
Breaking endlessly high fiving crowds
The error of our ways lead us around
Like horses by a hand with nothing endowed.
No settlements or dowries
No soldiers of clay
No back breaking memories
Or vertebraes remain.
When Eliot said: “it ends with a whimper”
It troubles me to think, it was said in a whisper.

#rhyme

CE Green Nov 2018

Derby

How many mistakes am I allowed today?
It’s how we start.
Virtue tallying with dense hands all around so LIT by halogen lamps.
Discovering red hair strands.
Was it that long ago? It wasn’t and you know it. You want to stretch time thin. Arrest your memories and place a giant ink blot over the canvas of your ******* “woe is me” think piece. Clementineian.
In that moment it’s not so interesting, and you find other things to talk about and words offered allow you to take the pulse of the situation.
Written on a whim, forged with adamantium ya ya ya.
Catapulting your empathy on the fly, playing catch-up with a thorn in my foot.

Oct 2018

JJ Hutton

Smoov

There he waits,
the Nice Guy,
looking academic
and out of reach
in his tweed.

There's something
feminine in the way
he crosses his legs,
draping right over left in the fainting chair.

There you are, across from
him, at this party your
roommate dragged you to.
And you ask how he is.

He ushers you to his chair.
Sit down, sit down. I insist.
You know, he says. Most people
would tell you they're good or just fine.

The Nice Guy reassures you he is
not most people. He's a Nice Guy;
he's down with feminism, waves
One through Three.

He has a dog named Atticus.
They frequent open-air bars
in the summer.

He's a Nice Guy, an old soul,
someone who should have been
a young man in the 60s.

God, he has so many female friends
he tells you, leaning on the banister,
sipping on Glenfiddich.

You wonder how he is. This was your question.

He has so many female friends. Notice
how I'm stressing the word friends, he says.

I do, you say.

He's a Nice Guy and all these female friends
they're all the same. They love the bad boys,
the rich snobs, the ******* jocks.

I don't, you say.

Oh, sure you do, he Nice Guy-splains to you.
And there's a golden light coming from the chandelier
behind him, and he looks so holy and pure as he tells
you how one day Tara, Sam, Whitney, and Amber
will wake the **** up and realize just what they're missing.

But by then, this Nice Guy will have rambled on. He'll become
someone's second husband. A Good Woman will see how precious, how rare this Nice Guy truly is.

Okay, you say.

Prove me wrong, the Nice Guy says. He leans in closer.
You can smell the scotch. Prove me wrong.