"guestbook" poems
Tread the bourgeois carpet
of 5000 feet
caked in airmiles
Enter the ornately crafted
nondescript facade
passed the chap in the tall hat
Rank and file -
standard issue pleasantries
Sign the guestbook
of illegible memories
Acclimatise to the room
of temporary devotion
devoid of belonging
or emotion;
the ruthless economics
of designed practicality
The impending ideology:
that what you pay for
you dont get to keep
That nameless hotel
dressed in uniformed vulgarity
is the fourth to be welcomed
as Home this week
Mar 7, 2013
Mar 7, 2013 at 4:14 AM UTC
Where did I come from?
A country of what?
Big hearts?
That's what the guestbook said,
And the amnesia makes anything else suspect.
Still...
A chipped Greek frieze;
Shade inching over insalata Caprese;
Piazza Cavour from a smudged helicopter window at noon;
Faces in a crowd at LOVE park, rapid fire;
Dusk in an Irish cemetery;
Lakeside heather.
This departure is like rewriting
A book from memory.
How much of me—if any—is there?
Apr 7, 2015
Apr 7, 2015 at 1:24 AM UTC
All the flowers you left me,
when water went away,
died on my back porch.
These hours manipulate,
disguise the days,
smells like rain.
For every lucid hour,
weeping on all fours,
blistered bones felt the pain.
blistered bones felt the sore.
If you were so special,
would you look me in the eyes,
they're red like a dust bowl's,
allergic surprise,
forging our guestbook,
we invited the lies,
she said it was useful,
to hide in the sky.
Mar 28, 2018
Mar 28, 2018 at 2:38 AM UTC