It’s All Relative.

My mother’s voice keeps me still.
I walk backwards.
I have eyes in the back of my head.
My words mean little to anyone else-
I have been raised by a street lamp.
The stars beam down on me.
The wind glistens like rain.
I am desperate for noise,
for music-the clarinet just won’t do.
Did I just say that? I didn’t mean
how it sounded;
didn’t mean the words that came
from my mouth,
that were uprooted from the ground.
I take myself out for lunch at McDonald’s,
and drive home to read a new Danielle Steele
novel.
This is the extent of my day.
It makes me happy.

Wizard's Alchemy.

Shitttttt, "Wizard's Alchemy" is over 130,000 words now. Le Sigh. I MUST break it into a sequel or trilogy.

Still some editing errors. Frack.

Update on vampire story.

Crap...my vampire story is only 12,671 words long; I want to get to 15,000 words, 12 thou is still considered a novella, however, I just like to round up. If I can't, Harlequin still accepts works that are under that amount.

I only need to write in a few more scenes.

Update on synopsis ideas.

I started writing a new science fiction novel. It is called "Wager's War" for now; I came up with this other title before and I forgot it. Uh oh. I also have this other idea for a science fiction novel called "Sun Dogs." A sun dog is an atmospheric phenomonen in space, primarily associated with sunlight by small ice crystals. Kinda hard to explain but you can look up what it means online.

Winds Exhausted.

In the dark, my eyes are bitter, the winter winds moan
And beat at glass windows.
Hunting season has come to pass-the October nights
Are chilly and the water falls into the well.
Darkness comes. Shadows heave in and out of dark
Lights, space is continual as a drum-
I left you alone late one night in August,
Your heart is temporal as doom. Some nights I dream
About Sylvia Plath, toiling and tossing in her
Feather bed, humming dead languages in my ear.
She left me here, alone, like Poe, alone, like birds,
They shelter me like words of wisdom and whisper dead
Things.
In the dark, I cannot rhyme worth a damn. I think about
Vermont and Kentucky, where my bitches reside,
I think about simple promises and things I have lost,
And use my thinking cap like they taught us in school.
No one admires me. Everyone says I am a faggot,
A black sheep, something to be used and thrown away.
No one in Europe hears me sighing, only the doves hear me
Crying.

Resiliant.

My grandmother sat in her rocking chair
Spouting songs of war-Vietnam, World War I,
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She said she’s seen them all.
My husband bought a new car, parked it in the driveway
Of our new house. I stood proudly, admiring
His efforts-the love of my life, my secret admirer.

I met him at a barbecue seven years ago,
At my father’s house-he brought the ketchup and
Mustard, and charmed my neighbor.

She was sixty
Years old and later that year, moved to a nursing home
that was run
By the government-the rooms cost three hundred
Dollars each.

Poems fell out of open mouths like ashes.
My husband said he would give me the stars if it
Made me happy.

Radio Waves.

Nouns bounce off of broken radios.
My mind goes on like a microwave.

I am not Einstein. I am not awake,
I am not feeling-many people think
Of me as a blade of grass. As a piece
Of cheese. Something to be eaten,
And spit out.

The grapes stick out of the vine. (Whine.)
Many people crowd the alleyways,
Sticks and stones break through differences
And crossroads disappoint me.

I never remember what I say after a hard
Day’s work. I never remember everything
When I go to the grocery store.
Tomorrow is another day. I troop up
And down the stairs like a mother
Hen waiting to be fed. Waiting for
Someone.
My husband angers the gods.

Scripts.

Dang! I really want to write a script but those are very difficult. Plus, I am smart, so I have no life.

Awake, Loved.

What the blue rivers say are not
what they speak,
what the green bells waving in
the brown grass.
Waving leisurely in the wind.
An elephant lumbers past.
War is transparent, a piece of leaf
is caught in an updraft.
You held me, befallen,
in a piece of paper,
in a riddle.

The ground sucks up all the juice,
the sky is blue above me.
What, what say you-
how high does your voice rise,
clear over a clear day.
Clearer than what I say.
I am tired.
My ears flap like an elephant’s.
I read books,
and shun black baskets.
My back aches,
my breasts heave for you in
the dim and the dark
and the sound of the rain
wakens me. Welcomes me.
The still of the night won’t let
me down.
The beat of your heart shelters me,
love.

Walking To the Store.

I walked down the street to the deli store
on Fifth and Crayfish,
my stomach rumbling. I hadn’t
eaten
anything in
seven hours.

Cars drive by on the highway.
Lights are
reflected off the street lamps.
Mona waved to me as I walked past her.
She had been my friend for a little over
three months.

I walked into the store,
and ordered pimento loaf-
it was my favorite,
I slathered it in mayonnaise and
ham. The cook smiled at me,
offered me a free cookie-

I exclaimed "Thanks!" and drove home.
Tomorrow was another day.
It was not the same day as the one before.
Tomorrow I would have to eat something
else,
or else buy things from the grocery store.

Jessie said this was okay.
I said maybe I should write a grocery list.
And stick it on the refrigerator,
upside down.

I read once that William Carlos Williams
wrote a poem about a grocery list.
I wondered what happened to it.
Maybe it was in some museum in Rome.
Maybe a thief stole it in the night.

Sometimes we don’t know why things
are gone,
or if they ever come back.

People are like this.

Hmmm.

Wish I could write poetry.

Oh, and I wish my sister wouldn't eat all of my candy.

Do Not Feed the Bears.

My mind is corporate.
I speak little.
My heart is broken in two pieces.
Like shards of glass,
I take them out and throw them
down a well.

In Africa, they do not have water.
In Africa, the children have no shoes.
Think about your thoughts before you do
them.
Think about sorrow’s forbidden muse.

My friend is in the hospital
and has been for seven days straight.
They fixed his heart and lungs,
they fixed the arch in his forehead.

The sign outside reads "Do not feed the
bears."
Sometimes, I forget that part,
they are harmless as fleas.

Stars and Rivers.

The rivers are forgotten dreams.
Misplaced and misshapen as birds, gouges

on shadows of spirals and time clocks.
Where you are is not where I should be.

The palm tree in your backyard-
looks like it needs watering.

I drift on a lonely fog, my mind incorporate
as a bog. Clouds wrap around congruent

shapes, mathematical shapes
that crisscross
blue signatures and blue flowers.

I awaken to a pelican barking in the night,

at sea lions on a warm rock. The sea lions
shine like moon stars and snow saturates
the trees-

Good poetry web site.

www.poems.com

;d

I think for myself, Mom. Thanks.

Sonnet.

I was reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay on Romeo and Juliet and I wrote a sonnet.

I have written some before but they are awful. Here it is:

Ode to the passes of the symmetry,
that revere in greatness and in grandness-
taught with the sameness of the hand,
I revere your heart, you cometh less!
Hark! Devil’s cruel hand! That gaveth
the dew that tarnishes the land-
a bitter dream of revelation,
a begotten hand,
a bird perches near a ledge,
and eats all the berries from the hedge.

The trees are bare; the sounds fold,
churning the water of tarnished gold.

Just for references.

Rattle rejected my poems.

No surprise there.

Sometimes I wonder if poetry is fading from literature. :/

Muse.

If you are in fact a blank piece of paper
where are the words? Where is the flower

that snuffs out the bread, where is the
bold metaphor that calls to me

in the dark of the night, wanting to be written,
waiting to be heard? I have
not eaten the bread yet nor have I sniffed

the life out of the flower,
the beginning of a new poem, the beginning of
something that has not yet been written.


(Found this old poem, for your reading.)

Mammals in the Driveway.

I fear the porpoise on the lake will
melt into oblivion and the day will not come open
like shadows stardust withers in plain sight
I move my garbage
can to the
middle of the driveway
Momma comes up the drive and
asks Where? Where?
Her eyes like stars

sometimes I rush into things I am not ready for
and I feel like taking the time to look at different
web sites on the Internet like myspace
and sometimes I stare out
the classroom window and dream of walking
hand in hand with a perfect stranger
but the words never come out right

Another Day.

Tomorrow a new day will come and I will
not be ready.
Ready for what, I don’t know.

Ready for who, I cannot say. I used to write
mysteries on the backs of used napkins
and then I spread them into the wind like
leaves in summer.

Tomorrow the world will be ready for me,
and I will sing to the moon and kiss the stars

my hands open and embracing the world
I have come to know as myself.
The date is marked on my calendar. The night
is of shooting stars.
I avoid broken windows and messed-up
bicycles.
Sometimes, I wish to reach
out my arms.

My New Story.

It is about 10,000 words at the moment. I hope I can get to 15 thousand.

jordan complained,

Jordan complained she could not breathe well-
the doctor said it was asthma.
The sun was shining down.
She stood in the doorway of the living room,
holding a plate of bread, looking tired
and torn.

Jordan complained there was no way for
her to get around. Her mother bought
her a scooter, and hid it in the garage
until her birthday.

Jordan found it before the present was
given to her-her mother was happy
she found it first, and gave her an extra
candle on her cake.

Jordan liked magazines. Her father bought
her a magazine every month-usually "Vogue,"
or some other fashion magazine he finds
at the dentist's office where he works.

Jordan likes.

On editing.

Some of these poems are kind of terrible, I know, but they are just my "first" drafts, not my final versions. The final versions will be written when I'm old and gray.

The Woman With Yellow Tulips,

who was not my mother, sat on the porch leafing through a tattered magazine,
Newsweek. She said something about polar bears and the news;
cut the faces out and paste them in her scrapbook.
She loved scrapbooks, and had dozens of them in
her bookcase upstairs, where the grandfather clock sat next to
it,
the clock hands that do not turn clockwise. I wondered if it was broken.
The repairman said it was not, that it just liked to go that way on its
own accord like apples or oranges did sometimes.

The faded trunk from World War II rests at the head of the stairs,
gathering dust and mildew and who knows what else. It contains postcards
from Germany, Spain, and Nebraska, where my father was located
during the war. War is terrible.
The history teacher taught me
this, he has large lips and eyes like saucers. He still teaches at
the same school to this day, trying to teach his students about the Depression.
He hopes there will not be another one.

My dog, Mr. Parkins, barks outside, hoping to bond
with the squirrel chattering
in the trees.

The woman with yellow tulips speaks of corruption; of greed;
of self preservation. Her grandmother lived on an Indian reservation
in the thirties and saw harsh things. She did not remember the wolves.
Or the memo stuck on the refrigerator, reminding her to pick up the
tomatoes from the garden.

On the Train.

The shadows on the ground mark the days that past:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and
every day in between.
I get on a train.

The gently swaying of the
cars lulls me to sleep.
It is hot outside; the day has just seen rain.

My heart beats fast; sweat rolls down my back.
I force myself to relax, relax,
think about other things
for a change, other than
myself.

Writing Update.

I do not feel like posting a new poem. I have a headache and an earache, but I AM working on my new short story, "Prey." I have eight thousand words. I have a laptop now but the ac adapter broke and I have been trying to find the right one. :( It proves to be exceedingly difficult.

Conversations With My Mother.

My mother calls me while she is at work,
and chats about the weather and the war in
Iraq.
She says she has seen thirteen patients in
four hours-mostly the elderly who complained
about everything from applesauce to
the climate change in New Zealand.

I do not have a job. I am a freelance artist,
and worked ten to seven pm every day,
painting pictures that will be thrown in the
trash later, just because I didn’t like them.

I only managed to sell one painting when
I was seven years old, and my grandmother
gave me fifty cents for a portrait of herself
I had drawn at school.

I remembered school. The place with the desks,
and the books you could take home.
My mother is still chatting away, on and on and on.
I looked out the window at the
flower on the windowsill,
and thought about Israel.

My Father Builds Houses Out of Driftwood.

My father has a brain tumor.
He lives in an apartment in Pontiac,
building houses out of pieces of driftwood
he found on Lake Michigan one summer,
back when he was a trucker, back when
they hadn’t yet to diagnose him with
cancer,
back when he thought he had more time.

His mind is somewhere else-on his mother,
God rest her soul; on the blue truck in
the parking lot, that sits and rusts; and on
the train that whizzes by on train tracks
down the street, near the old train depot
that was closed down.

Everything is closing down in Michigan;
from the stores; to the banks; to the flower shop.
No one wants to live here anymore.
No one wants to be the one to tell their grandchildren
they failed at peace, that they failed at everything.

They give each other questioning looks, "Who’s going
to tell them we failed first?"

New Story.

I am working on a couple new stories now.

One of them is called "Prey," about vampires; one is about werewolves; and I am still working on "Horn of Neverwhen" and 'Forge of Magic, Bind of Bone."