"sterilizing" poems
I like immigrants, immigration. Legal immigration,
Jane passionately corrects. Actually my goal is a borderless world.
Gathering the neighborhood like family.
The men discuss sterilizing welfare mothers. I say You're working
around the edges,
humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet,
even those with jobs. And spouses. And houses.
Yet it's an idyll of an early summer evening, new cut grass,
two baseball teams of children playing in it. Safe from Pakistan.
News photos of Muslim refugees, women in blue robes, biblically
carrying children away from holocaust. The fundamentalist army
not far behind, beheading sinners, sure in its righteousness
as the Holy Roman Empire.
Somehow Joel Osteen the evangelist comes up
while talking about how the Catholic Church is irrelevant in North
America,
even Latin America and Africa are going evangelical.
Izzi likes Osteen, awesome extemporaneous speaker, no teleprompter,
up from bootstraps message. My wife says he's probably Jewish.
Fortunately no one claims the Holocaust never happened or slavery
was voluntary.
What is the carrying capacity of the planet?
In China is it each couple or each adult that gets one offspring?
As life expectancy and standards rise,
family size diminishes. We draw together into greener, tighter cities.
The children of three monotheistic religions, atheists and agnostics
play in city streets, work farm fields, explore forests, deserts,
grasslands, space.
Two ancient female poets: Enheduanna and Sappho
are a revelation. The clarity of their complaints:
lost lover, lost city.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 10:48 AM UTC
"This s.o.b. has got Tourette's.
Who knows what he might say? We'd better
Get him under before he rises.
Sterilize something fast!"
I'm awake for the time being. When sleep comes
I shall play the perfect display of my bacillus. Reposing
On the white table like a necrotic pieta. Off to my
Left I can hear those touchstones spinning in fine sockets,
Sterilizing my hands by binding my feet. Soon I will be
A paragon of grunting celluloid, clutched at by
Heated hearts to wrinkle and shear.
I can already taste the cleanser.
Rubber foam, steel clamp and tongue depressor.
Excise the black portions with a serrated life,
You might as well. Because it doesn't matter
How much morphine sits in the delirium drip.
I'm still alive: the crush and blink in Boris Karloff eyes.
When I gather up my self in the morning.
I will be instructed to take all Ten a day
And check in regularly. Despite the cold,
Despite the heat, the embryo has quite failed.
Mar 1, 2010
Mar 1, 2010 at 10:34 AM UTC
*Fairytale Evolutions,
Terminating Digital Mutations,
Simulated Sensations,
Transcendent Revolutions,
Hybrid Generations,
Altering Stagnant Amplifications,
Shape Shifting Constellations,
Sterilizing Implications,
Eliciting Blissful Animations,
Decoding Kaleidoscopic Flirtations,
Fabricating Holographic Dimensions,
Reflecting Labyrinth Ramifications,
Transgressional Diversifications,
Empathetic Extortion,
Serene Distortion,
Subversive Contortion,
Forging Conceptual Inoculations
Violating Illusionary Variations,
Incarnating Prototype Deviations,
Radiating Subtle Speculations,
Catalyzing Crystallized Civilizations.
-01:09AM*
Feb 28, 2017
Feb 28, 2017 at 2:57 PM UTC
I suffocate my brain with gin.
Again.
I'm seashores and tin.
I bend.
Proximity alert.
The priest becomes megaphone. Spilling my guts when the circuit breaks.
Privacy. Harmony.
Quickly decode the differences.
Hollow bones.
Betsow a vision.
I ask to receive.
I feel the answers.
Too light to break this Earth's atmosphere.
Too late.
Behold,my vision.
The infant sleep of Mother Earth.
A great extinction.
A man is born with grey in his heart.
His thoughts unformed.
A ridge of her leaking core.
A beach with sterilizing water.
Meeting and leaving.
A pool of molten glass.
A lake of cold translucent glass.
A rock to fracture the truth.
A crack forms.
A club is pulled from there.
Echo. Echo. Echo.
Nov 21, 2016
Nov 21, 2016 at 9:37 PM UTC
in the garden of my heart
God planted a mustard seed
gave me the gloves
& departed
i gave the mustard seed
love & devotion
& for a while
rooted myself in
God’s ground
and then the roots spread
some into the soil
& some into the gravel
& in the gravel i found
most of my sustenance
the devil had found his way
into my garden
& his ashes spread over the fertile ground
suffocating & sterilizing
the roots in the soil of God
found no water & withered
until they crumbled like dust
a ghost of ancient veins
& for a while i found my happiness
the devil can make rotten fruit
taste like the sweetest honey
so long as you smile
for him
until one day
the devil grew tired of my smiles
& he found doubt in my heart
his fruit was not so sweet now
my roots withered & burned & putrefied
even in the gravel that had once been my home
i was a mustard seed
small & scared & alone
i found my love & devotion
and was careful to sow only in the soil,
though only on the edges
for surely God could not forgive
i had eaten the forbidden fruit
until one day
God beckoned me further from the edges
He gave me love & devotion
just as i had given my mustard seed
under His love i grew
and spread my roots firmly in the soil
and there i was no longer a mustard seed
but a lily blossom
Feb 19, 2016
Feb 19, 2016 at 7:28 PM UTC
paranoia of farming
they are watching
they know
the way you grow
is different
connected to human growth
attached
unbroken from the past
fastened to nativity
proof of how we evolved
scary
intimidating
like aliens
not trusting sustainability
to the machine of hyper-distraction
they call technology
paranoid and worried
when they realize
the fresh variety the garden has
when they realize agriculture
is burning them alive
sterilizing culture
paranoid anticipation
a native alien
immersed in plentitude
Oct 16, 2016
Oct 16, 2016 at 1:01 PM UTC
My dear, this is my admission of guilt, I never meant to break your clock hand, despite time being our best friend, that match stick we lit, trying to reinvent a bonfire, for the hell that only harmonize with us, I whispered bible verses to you, a hint that maybe you'll see the faith under my rib cage, but you thought I was sterilizing your ego, I've always let the tap in the sink run, believing the fish bones will swim, and we'll never have to go fishing, I'm sorry for depriving you the freedom of learning, I know we used to let open all books in the library, and let them stare us making love on the floor, hoping every moment was documented, I'm sorry for smoking at your dad's funeral, I know cigarettes caused him cancer, and your sisters adored my lunacy, oh poor girl! I'm really sorry, please come back home at 2am, I have fixed the clock.
Feb 15, 2014
Feb 15, 2014 at 4:40 AM UTC
Where does pumpkin pie go
to die
in the spring, when everything
smells like pollen or else nothing,
air conditioning sterilizing the air
into bits while everyone sits stuck
to their chairs and
if there’s a scent in the room
someone asks what’s gone wrong
but scent is right sight is
blind he couldn’t
smell carbon monoxide
Nothing comes to life in the spring,
it springs back to life
it wasn’t dead, it’s
back, from dormancy, it wakes
up,
and everyone knows the dream
is better than the reality
But in the season of warm pies
when air smells of cold,
I can taste the snow and I can
taste the sky,
and everything is bright
and snow appears to swirl not down
but up all around and your eyes are
just the shade of brown
that can
probably smell cardamom, or
cinnamon spiraling in chai and
he smelled warm fire and cool
sky and it kept him alive
and olfaction, olfaction
the only sense we can’t remember
technically
with neurons but we hold it anyway
because sight is blind
and come May—
Mar 21, 2014
Mar 21, 2014 at 8:28 PM UTC
Bottles of alcohol squat on the counter, and cigarette butts
like yellow dead June bugs on the floor.
Bottles of shimmering reasons to not care about a hangover,
to leave prom early and rejoice in your parent’s absence.
Glistening necks, elegant glass nubs with no cap
tipped up into mouths screaming proud and hoarse,
We are STUPID! And CONTAGIOUS!
our ***** voices breaking under the radio sound
to a loud song whose generation no longer cares.
But we do, dumb boys and girls in a truck, rolling around town
like Haylee’s bottle of Jack Daniels in the trunk—
aimless, optimistic, and looking for reasons, so
buy a pack at the Chevron and let’s go smoke!
That’s enough, after all, isn’t it?
Reason enough to crack the windows, find a Carlyss backroad,
waste away midnight and half a tank of gas.
Still, as I drive on, a 90s rock station stimulating rotation of the spliff,
that smell puts my mind out of guitar solos and into placid hallways,
Smells Like a night in my dad’s apartment,
the stubbly couch with the nicotine blanket,
the Marlboro tone in the air, concrete crumbs and a lighter’s grating chrrt.
Divorce sounds like alcohol—
a word that burns, something sterilizing and for adults only.
But I don’t care, it’s my turn on the spliff,
and the backseat of my truck sounds more Alive
than the old horror movie rentals he would put on.
And why should I worry about what sobriety means
when we’ve been planning this night for months now?
All stocked up on Bacardi and Smirnoff Ice, Captain Morgan’s, Svedka, Mike’s Hard,
Swisher Sweets wrapped up in the **** bag—
We shoot our *** soldiers eager to start the war,
that war against a domestic unknown enemy,
an enemy dangerous and subversive, like sober-minded aspirations.
And while Zack rolls the blunt, while Jack finds his Camel pack,
while you ask for a hit of Haylee’s cigarette,
I fill a glass with water, my intention to hydrate
exactly as genuine as my intention to forget about it.
Feb 7, 2019
Feb 7, 2019 at 3:39 PM UTC
she wore a white dress
and believed in magic
now and then
she wrote stories on city streets
on inked notebook pages
and crafted memorials into ghosts
sterilizing thorns of roses
praying
who knew?
they clapped hands
and she decided
she'll never look back
again
May 31, 2017
May 31, 2017 at 6:40 AM UTC