"cookbooks" poems
The love of a grandson
to a grandmother
is a special bond.
It cannot be broken.
A grandmother's presence
in the eyes of a grandson
makes him behave
more like he should behave.
He looks up to her.
I look up to you.
I often wonder
what experiences you've gone thorough.
What has made you into the you today?
You've gone through so much yet,
I've only known you
for 22 years of it.
Through that time,
you've shown me
what a great grandparent is.
You attended most of my
Concerts
Plays
and Musicals
with loving support
Every birthday,
Christmas,
Valentine's Day,
and Easter
without ever missing a beat
you would contact me.
I thank you
So
SO
SOOOOOO MUCH!
I often feel guilty
for not always contacting back.
I really need to get better at that.
As a kid
there was nothing better
than looking forward
to your Christmas presents.
The science toys,
the cookbooks,
and of course,
the Hot Wheels.
There was nothing better to me
than knowing
that I would get a new track to put together
or a new car.
As I've matured,
so have the presents.
the Alinea cookbook
is like a sacred document
I look at it often
and it always amazes me.
Thank you for inventing
"Grandma's Orange Stuffing"
Its always my favorite part
of the Thanksgiving feast.
(Way better than dad's)
Although this poem
isn't very poem-y
I hope you enjoy it
for the rest of your life.
You're the only real grandparent I ever had,
and I love you with all my heart.
Thank you for all you've done.
Nov 18, 2014
Nov 18, 2014 at 4:56 PM UTC
I tear through cobweb-curtains
in the attic of my mind and gather
dusty memories and things long lost
I never thought I'd find
Delicately, I collect old photos
of forgotten smiles and love letters
that once set my heart alight
and broken lamps, love-stitched quilts,
worn cookbooks with my mother's
notes, and my trusted, rusted trike
I pack them in a cardboard box with
a smile and a wish, and with pride
I tie a balloon for every year of my life
and watch the memories rise
As the box wanders into the clouded
arms of the blue father-sky,
the shackles on my ankles are undone
and as I take weak steps like a newly mobile
fawn, I know that I am free and my
haunting is now gone
Feb 20, 2012
Feb 20, 2012 at 12:51 AM UTC
Rays of the morning sun
Encroached the attic
From a very notorious
Broken piece of window
Exposed the little specks of dust
Suspended
In the rotting wooden walls.
Some sticking in the peeling paint
Some lying
On her mother's once famous cookbooks
Now being devoured
By selfish
silverfish and fungi.
The dust
Telling stories of her childhood
Settled upon the rocking horse
And her favourite little music box
And a carton full of holiday polaroids.
The dust
Such a dry commodity
Moistened some old memories.
Reminiscence.
Isn't it amazing?
Feb 10, 2015
Feb 10, 2015 at 1:23 PM UTC
Rock n’ roll music, Folger’s, and paint-smeared hands.
Dresser drawers filled to the brim with undeveloped camera film.
Blue bonnets and overgrown grass, pecans and crunching fall leaves.
Dirt roads and river-rocks, typewriters, polaroid cameras, and feather-quill pens.
Those hand-me-down blue eyes and brown ones that are “sometimes hazel.”
Crystal clusters and Lord of the Rings.
Countless mosquito bites and play-pretend games in the clubhouse.
Early-birds and night-owls.
Trudy; and Randy Hayes.
“Don’t touch everything you see,” and “If you say you’re bored, I’ll find work for you to do.”
Sweet tea and okra and southern dishes blackened and drenched in cheese or gravy.
Grandma always burned everything to make sure it was fully cooked, and to her, it was never burned, just “well-done.”
Cigarettes and carpentry and cookbooks. Wild blackberries and birthday parties at the lake.
Sleeping in all day and staying up all night and procrastination.
Shepherd's Pie, potatoes, and four-leaf clovers.
“Nil Desperandum. Never Despairing.”
I’m from a whole house that eats eggs for breakfast, and I’m allergic to eggs.
And trees as tall as buildings and buildings as tall as trees.
“You should never take the lord’s name in vain,” and “Jesus loves you, so you should love others.”
Day-dreams and stargazing and thunderstorms.
“All or nothing,” and “There is no try, only do.”
Old family pictures in dust-glittered frames.
We are crystals. We have facets, each one makes us who we are.
With only one window of our lives to express, we’d merely be glass.
I am a part of each of these things just as much as they are each a part of me.
Feb 25, 2021
Feb 25, 2021 at 12:36 AM UTC
Our politicians preach hope
While our nation struggles to cope
Stacking woman into binders
Deaf to all but hired reminders
Treaties & agreements for peace
While riots rage on in Greece
Told that we are doing just fine
As more join the food stamp line
American banks engorged with greed
Planting in free soil a debt ridden seed
The next Great Depression has already begun
& It matters not which candidate has won
With our cancer ridden healthcare
Attempts like duc-tape to repair
Voting to raise the debt ceiling
An American father kneeling
Praying to God to find a job
While outside “we the people” form a mob
The 99% chanting in the streets
Stubborn legislatures don’t budge from seats
C-span listens to recipes from cookbooks
A dull murmur of televised crooks
Unemployment continues to rise
Prophets sure of the world’s demise
Dec 4, 2012
Dec 4, 2012 at 3:07 PM UTC
It's rather cold in here. So I went to check the heat ducts. They were buried beneath a tangle of lies, deceit, and old cookbooks left behind from the family that once lived in this place. It was no easy task, mind you. I dug through the shambles for days - shivering and blowing hot breath into my palms, now coated with a film of forgotten moldy pasta and an affair gone wrong. After a time, though, I finally reached them. And it was not what I expected. It explains the reasons why I am cold...
You see, it wasn't the dead bodies so carelessly crammed in the heat duct that made me cold. The mummified corpses of parents holding their children, the children holding their cat, and the cat holding a half-eaten and long rotted rat inside its stomach. It was what they were whispering. A whisper of a melody of truth that sent a chill so frigid and lifeless so far deep beneath my skin I feared I...'d freeze right inside that heat duct, forever sealed to a fate of the shells before me. It was a traveling tune.
The milk man on 4th and Main heard it as he locked the door of the lonely housewife behind him. The postman felt it resonate in his mind, already crowded with a million voices - many telling him to load his gun and end the monotony. Tears of the local priest fell as he danced to the haunting melody breathed from the mouths of the dead, dancing with his hands on a member sworn to celibacy. A nun in her habit drowning in a habit that only the Lord and the devil know about, she heard it as well and peered cautiously at the others in the convent, criticizing them with her mind knowing full well she wasn't the only one who heard the whispers.
The whispers echoed within this heat duct, within the house, the town...the world. And they were oh so cold....
May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013 at 11:27 PM UTC
You, with your cookbooks and cardigans
And me, with my pretzels and poetry
Together occupy a tiny space in this great big world
Your fire melts me and my cold tempers your flame
And together we evaporate
leaving behind nothing but traces of your love for me
and mine for you.
Dec 30, 2015
Dec 30, 2015 at 12:54 AM UTC
We grew up in the muddy puddle
That was our coffee
In a begrimed little café.
We ate in little bites of each other,
Rolled our tongues in our mouths,
Tasted each flavor and each seasoning.
I gulped you down and digested each little mishap of you.
I undid all the sordid belongings residing in your mouth,
You were the embodiment of shame and failure,
And I made it all such a part of my gut,
That I haven’t shaken it off
Thirty years hence.
How did I make it to here?
This is such a foreign rest.
The only familiarity was that,
Which settled around the corners of your eyes,
In the crevices beneath your *******
And the clarity of your skin.
There were snacks,
And books.
You had your brown sweater on.
Your moist brow was so restless that day,
That I was reminded of all of my desperation,
All the stories I hurled at myself,
All the children I knew were all right.
Oh Nara,
Your brow vanished all that I held true,
Even you, Nara,
Your brow swallowed you whole.
Oh Nara,
You killed a part of me that day.
You exploded into chemicals,
That stuck onto my skin.
Into hot tea that surprised me every day.
It crept into the jasmine oil smell of her hair.
In the sweat of her neck,
Into our lazy evenings filtered through with years
Of careful exclusion.
Everything I owned was only me
When I was naked, and writhing,
A baby in the womb of something so desperately motherly,
That it forgot to give birth.
She noticed, Nara, she noticed me.
She noticed these hands shaking through everything they did.
And she hid.
She hid into her red, pleated saris,
Into cookbooks and cakes,
Into soft butter, and hardened cookies.
Everything has been seeking to destroy itself since, Nara,
Cigarettes would paper itself into existence.
Now it burns smoke and blindness.
The trees move in fast forward,
They are arthritic fingers
Grasping for something,
Long since out of their reach.
Acid has been running in the veins of this house since years,
The wood is out of place.
The rot in the bamboo tables is only concealed
By the tinted glass.
And sometimes, I sit at the cadaver porch,
You are a mindless zombie of a woman,
Who decides to stay with me,
And leave me alone.
Destruction had become your favourite hobby when you were that real.
When did poetry become so important to you that
You quite forgot me?
Jun 19, 2013
Jun 19, 2013 at 4:37 PM UTC
*i don't mind the precision of such quests of investigation, i hardly think you constantly think to keep scientific facts afloat, for me thinking and scientific factual itemisation is like an iceberg, the former above water, the latter beneath the water... snorkelling beneath the water will not change your thinking as such, the upper part seen will still remain the same sized self that you are, readied for the new experience and the closing of all scientific books... you're hardly the ghost thought of libraries, you're the living body among cookbooks and bars; the iceberg's torso and other limbs will remain beneath water, encountered by medical students - if i were you i'd care for the titanic about to hit that head of yours bopping above the waterline, much smaller and smaller even still, while shrinking with all those theories concerning a single sound so italicised as the ego for grandeur of "theories", how about sesame street alphabetical arithmetic? if only the verse, an ***** of kindness in your head where knowledge of chemotherapy actually is in someone else - under the grand curtain of life's theatre... selfish ******** selling crap and islam; what? he came from the merchant class... what's he selling me? i didn't even buy a crucifix or an icon of a saint from the tourist shop in the ******* vatican!*
slavic eyes are reminiscent
of the mongol conquests
and reintegration via copulation
with the germans.
Mar 19, 2016
Mar 19, 2016 at 9:27 PM UTC
my life in cans of arizona on the desk on the floor
cliff bar wrappers and crisp bags and old bits of
tissue my life in clothes littered everywhere scrunched pieces of fabric
my bedsheet pulling off the mattress a box of
granola bars flattened on top of another old socks and artwork
pennies and cups i’ve yet to wash my life in open windows and closed jars a
container of cough syrup and books i haven’t read my life in old papers and
boots broken plastic and bubble wrap my life in textbooks and
wires and cookbooks and hats and cans of arizona and things that should be in the bin
i
don’t want to leave
i just
want to be back there
Mar 13, 2013
Mar 13, 2013 at 9:22 PM UTC
*Divide the moon into two halves,
You'll find inside a million lamps,
Also cut the heart into two halves,
You'll find inside blood and valves.
Romance is trapped in a Shakespearean novel,
He buried it under the centuries with his shovel,
And the modern fast pace modified the human brain,
It's only a repetitive pattern of falling in vain.
Juliet has a husband, he's older by twenty years,
He's never home, she's always out shopping new fears,
Romeo is jobless, searching ups and downs for a key,
He heard life starts in the aftermath of a dream.
The old witch sitting in front of a glass bowl,
Now broke and retired, all her cookbooks are sold,
And the wolves are out, ruling the woods,
Magic's density in the air, isn't as high as it should.
**So plug the stars out, pluck all the electric flowers,
The universe is now running low on power.***
● ● ●
Jun 13, 2017
Jun 13, 2017 at 5:22 PM UTC
I’ll talk about the way I’ll never let you step into a puddle again. When it’s raining out, don’t forget to call me. I’ll rush to your side and carry you on my back—don’t ruin your shoes because of a little bit of water. When you’re hungry, tell me what you’re craving—I like to read cookbooks during my spare time just to keep up with your taste buds. I’ll write you letters if we’re ever apart—to my love, from your love. Three, two, one, I’ll count down the seconds to your birthday and surprise you with a cake I worked meticulously on the night before while I suggested you go out with your friends. When you come home, the house will be clean and your bath will be running. I can take care of you—I can’t take care of myself very well, but scout’s honour that I learned how to treat diamonds during my time in boy scouts. When the sun is setting and it’s time to retreat to bed, don’t forget to sleep in my arms; I wait all day for the moments where I get to hold you. Have I ever told you how much I like to watch you sleep? Sometimes you adopt the softest snore and you always, always, always wrap your body around mine as if you were afraid I would leave. What you don’t know is how afraid I am that I would wake up and you wouldn’t be there—well, I’m awake now.
And you’re not there anymore.
Aug 7, 2014
Aug 7, 2014 at 4:14 AM UTC
It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.
Dec 10, 2017
Dec 10, 2017 at 5:23 PM UTC
Power deceives,
And ill minds contrive.
Follow as you are lead,
Be happy to be alive!
Pay no attention to foul deeds,
Schemed and completed behind closed doors.
There lay flowers and candy for those,
Who forget wrongdoings forevermore.
Beware of hungry beasts,
That knaw on your tender mind.
To those who create of their own free will,
You are likely the last of your kind.
This angry world has no room for lovers,
For those who cherish and support.
All too often, it seems like fear,
Is the last, and most effective, resort.
False lives are drawn up,
And strung upon coathooks.
Observe beyond and you will see,
These lives were derived from cookbooks.
Cookie cutter lives.
Oct 4, 2018
Oct 4, 2018 at 7:54 AM UTC
It starts with a needle. The needle could be anything: a bad breakup, the tyranny of your father, physical bruises in unmentionable places that a person you trusted created. Then, it floods your veins and this very thing soaks my being with a rainbow. Now, your pasty skin is turning colors, from purple to red to green to blue. You know that having waves in your body is wrong, but it is not from a single substance alone. It is more of a feeling, a pulse, a sensation. It feels like a shard of glass that saws ever so effortlessly between the layers of your flesh because it wishes to get to what is underneath. This emotion is overcome with desire, but sometimes it still makes you want to stop breathing. Sometimes it makes you believe that laying yourself to rest in an easy place where no one would find you or even try to is the only way to deal with it. It comes and goes for no reason when you are depressed, and it is the factor that drives you to the edge, as well as the very element that keeps you from jumping. While, in one sense, you are no longer you, it may be changing you for the better. After all, this type of person and item can be fixed, altered, morphed into a better human being and thing. This creates a tighter and stronger bond between people who are in the same place. It allows stories to be told that would ordinarily be hidden on a dusty shelf among outdated cookbooks and magazines. Roots of intolerance can be severed when we realize that everyone experiences this, and it may cause us to view everyone as a person rather than a label. Because we are damaged, we know that we will ascend from this place of despair. In essence, brokenness is a paradox; it makes you feel like dying would be easier, but it is also the only way you know you're still alive.
Oct 23, 2014
Oct 23, 2014 at 10:37 AM UTC
The Hidden thought
It is said our unconscious fear of death
pushes us forward to achieve something before
the great Nothing descends,
for writers this is prescient they struggle to leave
behind words on paper, and not erased
as leaves on trees when the cold wind blows.
Others skydive from mountaintop cheating
the reaper, yet hope to live long enough to tell
their story of daring do.
Architects fear death too, that's why they built
the tall skyscrapers that will stand the test of time
and celebrate their foreverness.
The chef in his kitchen thinks of death when he
prepares a meal a signature dish where his name
will appear in cookbooks.
As it is unconscious, most people are not troubled only
when waking up at four in the morn before
birds sing and you can taste the stillness of death.
Mar 9, 2017
Mar 9, 2017 at 5:15 AM UTC
One interesting thing seems quite clear:
the number of cookbooks appear-
ing for people to buy
seems equalled by di-
eting books, year after year.
Dec 3, 2016
Dec 3, 2016 at 2:53 PM UTC
The taste of stale cigarettes
On her lips
Mixing with the stinging cherry
On my own
Is a flavor I'll probably never forget
Or trade for the world
Dec 22, 2018
Dec 22, 2018 at 6:29 PM UTC