"undramatic" poems
This strange egg you've incubated
has sprouted skinny chicken legs.
It follows you around clucking at
every throaty word you nasty-utter.
Pointing and pecking at your guilt
borne by some years ago sin which
all others hatch from and you keep feeding,
Remorseful grains of misdeed shell grit
to harden its anxious green shell.
With no law outside itself the taint faint
heartbeat of your reproof I hear beating
like fear's unglued false eyelashes
You soft swaddle it with empty gestures.
It gestates in every grimace of piety.
I watch it govern your vocation of drab
and undramatic mastery of feathered illusion.
I want to tear shreds in your black satin cape,
To avalanche your fears into frosty exile.
Burn them screaming in the blinding white of
anemic unconscious,
the blacking out.
Hang a trophy **** of your winged demon
taxidermied with glass eyes above my bed.
My compass needle has lost your polarity
there's just a crude representation of pain
I will plant this seed you gave me, in Lethe;
The River of Forgetfulness on its grey shore.
A watery landscape without vanishing point.
Where a white heron will weep tears of sorrow,
like a human to feed hope's tender shoots.
Nov 4, 2012
Nov 4, 2012 at 4:31 AM UTC
Small berms of snowice and cigarette
butts line beneath the awning sidewalks
of Yulitsa Pushkinska, impenetrable.
We have yet to decide
how to slice ourselves open, how to
conspire for casualties. Desire
lingers like four days’ melt mid-winter.
Who really feels day to day that
nothing will change? This faith
in schedules, taxes, credits, furtive
moments with a familiar lover, this
lack of spasms and undramatic intent
can suffice for half a lifetime, but you’ve
become an unreliable narrator in your own
novel, prone to
wild speculation and impulsive looks
at other women.
Mar 5, 2013
Mar 5, 2013 at 3:06 PM UTC
Once I spent a winter
with a poem; everyday
in the woods at work
I would say it, never
writing a word until
I had it down in my mind;
it became what I called
a floater, a work song,
a chant, until it sounded
just right and undramatic,
and then I wrote it down
in the dirt with my boots
without changing a word
leaving it there for the birds
and the worms and the roots.
Jan 1, 2018
Jan 1, 2018 at 1:48 PM UTC
i fear
that folded
slip with my
father’s stages
chronicled
in fading
script and
quiet list
of my
mother’s
final
condiments,
whatever
might make
death taste
less bitter
i don’t
want grief
to tear
anything
our parting
should be
like clouds
drifting in
shear
soft and
undramatic.
Jul 30, 2025
Jul 30, 2025 at 1:13 AM UTC
“gas your trash paintings of jesus’ head
and exchange your cross for some cash.
It’s a known fact that god is dead; we fought,
he and i - bashed, he passed,
simply automatic, undramatic as that.
I yelled to the sky, “the guy is gone, at last!”
I danced on his grave and bade his descent,
and the next holy role call, he was marked absent.”
-Hehehehe in Hell
“just shut it, satan,
you are the worst.
i’m writing a poem,
go eat some dirt.”
-Wisdom William
Jan 16, 2019
Jan 16, 2019 at 2:42 PM UTC