"zoetrope" poems
Why do I feel compelled
To describe you as imprinted
On the bone face of my skull?
Am I in there, rattling
Around with each curt nod
When you offer me your time?
Hurled against the stretches of the mind
The head's own incubator
Some Palaeolithic cave
Where the only inexperienced scrawlings
Are your portrait
In this cave I have invented film
Starting with a rickety old Zoetrope
Of the first smile; lips bracketing
The teeth, enabling
The tongue, to churn out
The voice, your nuclear voice
Hanging my Nagaskian heart by a hair
I haven't needed irradiation
Like the hand-canter of a harp player
I have been plucking my scalp
Hardly Lilith but perhaps
Deforesting Eden
Will tempt you from Eve.
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 5:18 PM UTC
I met an old woman on Leander Avenue
who told me, “Don’t breathe or the earth
will swallow you whole.” I
stayed very still and didn’t move.
A butterfly could have landed on my nose
but I sneezed so I may never know for sure.
After that I remembered that my generation
doesn’t have to follow their elders, so I
walked to the corner store.
I bought three candy bars that I would
never eat and tied my shoelaces on the front porch.
My neighbor watches old films. He calls them
Lumières, and sometimes invites me over.
I watch the hand-cranked film flicker
black and white over his screen.
A troupe of acrobats flip about and wave
the French flag, large women kneel and scrub
endless linens in the still river, the gardener
punishes the mischeivious boy. I smile every time
they look at the camera.
The slats in the blinds yawn widely
and seeing them, the melatonin strikes.
Flowing, forcing, endocrinal.
The wind whispers Greek words in my ear.
Helios, zoetrope, khaos.
The trees outside of my window
spell out foreign letters.
They only make sense one at a time.
I can’t spell a word but I speak and
realize I can still make a sound.
I fall asleep.
I never wake but dream
of exquisite lavender pillows doused
in holy water from the lips of a
spouting statue. A Carnevale clown waves
at me in the corner and takes off mask after
mask. Confetti rains softly from his eyelashes and he
quietly laughs into his palm. I want to hold your
hand but remember that I am just
a raindrop streaking down your car
window in a mountain spring storm. I
open my eyes.
Jun 12, 2011
Jun 12, 2011 at 6:05 PM UTC
The weathervane slept high above with a lolling head.
Clouds were holidaying excessively in Spain.
Sun was lost in a haze after chain smoking cooling towers.
A lethargic wind, moseying low with cat-like whiskers,
I hear it complain “I’m tired” in child-like whispers.
My hands are sweat-sore with callouses
And salty enough to summon the call of gulls in numbers;
I find shade, imagining myself as a cartoon Huck Finn.
When I put dry grass between cracked lips and think of dustbowls
In a zoetrope of sun-stroke, I vanish through my buttonholes.
This is now where one would rise, wake or come to.
Nothing I recognise, else the world is enveloped in storms.
I strain my sight, blink repeatedly to force myself awake,
The angels are listening, I hear wheezing, see fingers in my dreams
Gripping tightly to milk thistle stars, bursting at the seams.
Amongst the angels, whispering too! Did the stars imprison you?
Free-spirit like mother, but I slept our childhood through
Sustained by knowledge gleaned from canteen floors—
My eyes feel somehow sharp, heavy, like spears more than eyes;
I thought I saw the weathervane spinning madly, unraveling the skies!
Nobody talks about the weather.
There is a good chance of wrought nerves.
This is a time of stillness and dwelling on doorsteps,
In doorways where death sits among us, resting his eyes,
An end to the ration that was harmless reminiscence
As memories go up in the heat like celluloid;
Now the stars are a steely prison
Heaven’s lustre is lost, missing.
Through the angels I have seen that this is a time of living -
Through our dreams I have seen that this is a time of living -
Outside the confinement of the Holocene.
—I have dreamt of drowning...often. I always seem to wake up out and breath and feel I can taste the salt in my mouth but fear does not play any part in these dreams.
May 1, 2016
May 1, 2016 at 7:20 AM UTC
I pen my thoughts
upon the bottom of a hidden lake
that reflects a moon,
in the way old men shake
with quivering lips
that worry bead
each any every breath
that zoetrope lives mislead.
I too rise each day to a cellophane sun,
that tricks and flutters
vertigo dreams
upon a bed of Hazelnut wings.
Dec 22, 2010
Dec 22, 2010 at 6:46 PM UTC
I once knew a girl who dragged cheese graters across her ribs
just to hear them clatter against her skin
she would repeat on end:
if you hold your hand out the window long enough,
something might rip it out of its socket
when she was young she would poke the pin of a poppy under her palm on the 11th
and jump from one barrel of hay – she flew for three summers;
someone came one night last month and clad her in stone
her face was pressed in a pillow and she didn’t scream.
she pulled her nail back farther than it was meant to
she was told she’d see a map of her thoughts underneath
she just saw the marsh where the grass used to brush her
-- the pussywillows
if you push a button she will slide down a conveyor
right in front of you
you can take her clothes off with your teeth
put your ear near her mouth to feel –
proceed
a zoetrope of faces, bodies
if you press hard enough you might see
her blood line pulsing
if you find it, track its beat.
Jan 29, 2015
Jan 29, 2015 at 8:19 PM UTC
Picture, picture, picture,
Vision, vision, one,
Two, three, hundred,
Chasing me with a gun.
Visions, hundreds, chasing,
My mind is a Zoetrope.
I'm losing my mind, is losing me,
No mind, a kaleidoscope.
Dec 21, 2016
Dec 21, 2016 at 7:27 PM UTC