"carhartt" poems
You almost kissed me,
and you shouldn't have.
On the gingham tablecloth in the yellow light,
you lifted me from the counter top onto my feet
putting your hat on my head and tickling my ribs.
You know it's my sweet spot,
leads straight to my heart if you're gentle enough.
I told you to stop and you walked away,
eyes lingering on my bare skin between where my top ended on my waist
and where my dark denim jeans began to hug my hips.
I flipped my hair back around, joining in some conversation too late
between a girl drunk on grape juice and a wedding crasher straggler
in a forest green flannel with camel cigarettes in the pocket.
That's when you came back over and started yelling
some story that happened to you the night before.
You told it well,
the circle captivated, me mesmerized
by how blue your eyes stayed all this time without me noticing.
You had the whole room laughing with your wit and stupid vernacular,
but I was smiling because you looked so beautiful in those drunken
honest moments
where I recognized the person beneath the banter
where I saw you.
I was saying my goodbyes to the carhartt boys and their one night girls
when you grabbed me by the hand and spun me around
like we were dancing,
pulled me in by your hand pressed on my shoulder blades
the other around my waist
I gasped as your lips almost touched mine,
but then you looked down at me
with those same blue eyes
and took a deep breath,
slowly letting your hands glide down my back then to your sides.
I just stared back at you,
wishing you'd forget the logic and put your hands back where they were,
tracing your lips with that almost kiss,
and I could feel how much you wanted to be in this moment
desperately searching for a way to my lips
but something stopped us.
And I think it was because we knew it would only lead to something messier
than where we were at
it would be a backwards romance, reversing our ***** footsteps
in something we've tried and tried to understand
that it never works out the way either of us plans.
We were both doing so well, moving on
but in that moment we almost gave all that strength up
gave into something too tempting and too wrong.
Because we can't really stay away from each other all that long.
I mean,
you almost kissed me
and you shouldn't have,
but I swear
I wish you would have.
Jan 31, 2013
Jan 31, 2013 at 1:14 PM UTC
"Don't tell me the poets ... "
I write poetry that is both incorporated
And incorporeal ... and un and un and un
It is done
On the pad : and off
Hop - Lily
On the tailgate
In the truck
Boots on the ground
In the muck
Put on your Carhartt's
It's time to get *****
Even better
Grab your Old Man's work clothes
Finish the job
That He didn't want to start
Don't tell me the poets are ******* crying
We're living
And we're dying
Careful though
The warlords have come into the jungle and slaughtered before
But we live again
A little more angry
A little less wise
--> **** **** up, juveniles
Shoplifters of the world ...
untie
Sep 18, 2014
Sep 18, 2014 at 11:58 AM UTC
this morning on wednesday
april seventeenth
two thousand thirteen
a man was found dead in the parking lot
of a walmart
on a cold
drizzly spring day
wearing an old carhartt
splotched by cloudy ink stains
a white tee
and jeans so faded and worn that
there were quarter sized holes
dotting the fabric
and an old red and
white-gone-gray cap
that framed his cold
stubbled scarred scabbed face
in his pockets the following were found:
a wallet containing
seventeen dollars and sixty three cents
a bottle of forty antidepressants
minus around a hand full
the hopes and dreams of a seven year old boy
and a broken pocket watch
Oct 6, 2013
Oct 6, 2013 at 5:17 PM UTC
Double knee Carhartt pants
in rusty brown,
a cotton cornflower blue
long sleeve
shirt.
Stains from cooking about my tummy,
cuffs of my pants I'm soaked in mud n dirt.
Everyone already had some wine
an they are feelin' fine,
but I'm not in the mood to flirt.
My hair up in a messy bun,
a colorful scarf around my neck,
you say I still glow
I'm looking sweet,
I throw up my arms
an I say what the heck?
I look like crap I'm smelly too,
this ***** vest? I love it true,
Your cheeks are cherry red
your eyes they sparkle too,
You say- it's just what makes you -
you,
an you are so very BEAUTIFUL tonight.
Ma Cherie © 2017
Apr 8, 2017
Apr 8, 2017 at 9:01 PM UTC
you weave through the heifers with your arms out,
palms down, barely sweeping your fingers across their
hides as if you were gliding them along grains
of wheat or stalks of tall grass, with careful footsteps
as if only you know the way through the hay and straw
(the way you look at me says that there's a difference)
sometime at one or two am you are out walking among them
again, and they all rise with their burdened bodies, swishing
their tails and swaying from side to side with their engorged
bellies, softly groaning and parting. You are some sort of holy
man, they're smart, they know when to move, you say. But
I think differently, there's something in your body--a gentleness
that emanates softly, a warm light that cuts the denim coats and
steel-toed boots, you're hard but your voice comes out in this
southern sing-song that makes my chest ache, ears red and a
laugh as rare as normal midwest weather.
you don't mind, do you? and you fall into the recliner next to me
It doesn't feel the least bit wrong to sleep next to you, doesn't feel the
least bit right to let you do it because i can feel your heart swelling
through your carhartt, don't like to look at you when you're
leaning into the side door, because the sun does you some sort of
righteous justice, spilling into your irises--streaking through your
lips when you speak as if ending every sentence with I dunno is the gospel itself.
just let me know when you make up your mind
the inconsistency of it all doesn't fall on you, I realize,
once again choking on my own insufferable selfishness
not brave enough to make the right decisions (probably)
convincing myself that things can just work out as if
the most wrinkled material doesn't need an iron, needs some steam
needs more than that's just the way I am, this is just the way
you are, and here I am tortured by the thought of telling you
to shut up, how can you have pricked my heart and
still be
So far
Away
Mar 30, 2016
Mar 30, 2016 at 3:57 PM UTC
On Monday, my husband waits until I get home to say the words.
I go to unload the car and carry back tears.
Sitting, stirring, I begin to take out stitches on
a strayed shawl for the third time.
An artist and an adventurer, she sipped Dickle and ate meat
and raised chickens. She slept in a small house to live spaciously.
Erin was tall and never knowing of how she showed me to
express, explore, expand, to exist.
On a long ago Friday, with frayed Carhartt pants, we were
chatting about women, and their depictions in magazines,
Erin says,“Well, they’re not shaped like a real woman.”
For a lasting moment, I see from her wise and lovely eyes.
Erin is a stitch unlooped from our tight knit.
A drafty gratitude, a sudden shiver. She was here, with us, with the world.
And now we are looping onto each other, tenaciously.
Even so, what are we to do with slipped stitches and this hole?
May we purl pain into artistry. All we have to do is add the t.
So we will paint. And we will climb mountains.
We will tear and we will cry and live and bleed and die.
Until then, we have no other task than to knit ourselves together.
Apr 18, 2019
Apr 18, 2019 at 1:51 AM UTC
my mom and I are walking through Big R
when I ask to leave, nervously crushing
my keys in my palm, the lady at the
front has this pleasant accent and talked
to me like I was a woman--I brush my fingers
across all the stacks of denim embroidered in
silver thread with gaudy buttons
we are in the parking lot and she says you didn't find anything?
and I think that all the carhartt hoodies looked like your chest and
all the jeans said you ruin everything down the seams, all I could see
was me swingin' around a hardwood floor that didn't exist--attached
to a hand that was fading away
but I say, no, nothin'.
Apr 29, 2016
Apr 29, 2016 at 8:15 PM UTC
he sat out on the back
porch with the dog and
tugged on her collar.
it ain't your fault for doing
what you know
he said quietly, a swig of
water afterwards. and the
sun went down real slow
like behind the trees casting
purple shadows on his
carhartt boots
she'll not mistake your
nature, she knows what
you are and she loves you,
he said in hushed tones
as she moved through
the kitchen.
she loves you.
May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013 at 11:32 PM UTC