Thursday, February 25, 2010

Little Sea.

Little sea, you are red and full of light-
Little sea, you glow from Beijing, China,
Your hand is atop your head. Fixated on the
Chandelier in the living room, you glare at me instead.
Little sea, you rest on walls in pictures. You are here;
You are gone. Oh ancient heart, o still mind,
We walk here and come to Chinatown. In Illinois,
We are shy of movie posters; we are fond of people
Saying things. Back and forth, we grumble; we howl
Gruesome words atop our lungs. An author admires
A lowly writer. I walk down the street, swinging grocery
Bags, hum to myself. A famous actor dies in the streets of
Chicago; a wounded warrior bears the tattoo of a bartender
On his chest, not knowing why he has it-knowing he has
No direct age. The thoughts are of the flesh. The thoughts
Are rotten still. Stiller than a photograph, he breathes life
Into it-
Sadness permeates him, he is not aware.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Dreams Are Straight Lines.

My life is a straight line.
My life has changed.
From one day to the next.
Nothing is broken.
Nothing is faded.
We care about what is between trees.
We care about what is between water.
Water is faded from the mist.
We are mad hatters.
The mad hatters are this:
Turning like spinning wheels,
Turning like things are broken,
The hand is eschewed on broken
Lines.

We dream dreams.
We speak dreams when nothing
Is a dream.
We are not a dream that is not
Circumvented.
We are awake and nothing
Is sleeping.
Pour the water into the well.
Pour the water into the gravel.
We let men wear top hats.
We sing songs to sad rainforests.

I stick up for stick people.
I draw them on desks in classrooms.
People force us to speak to classrooms.
Men are drawing lines
On gravel roads.

My life is a straight line.
Don’t stick up for me.
Don’t draw stick people.
What it’s gotta be,
Is what we see after we see.

We dream dreams.
We walk on straight lines.
We are broken when things are mended.
We catapult into the air and onto
Dead grass.
The grass is dead at my feet.
The shoes are worn and faded.

I wake up tomorrow, and talk about the
Negative.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Making Us Go Nowhere, Finding Nothing.

Which shadow is strongest?
Which shadow mocks darker shades?
His eyes see inner worlds.

His eyes see cooks making things.
The sun clouds over; the sun clouds over
Bigger than anything. No time to get back
At people. No time to stop mourning the
Turning of the clock,
The turning of the time that has stilled.

In my deepest despair,
I linger here,
Forcing myself to gaze into the haze
Of a burning sunset.

Trying to stop myself from wandering down-
Down the streets, back to the basics,
Back to the turning of the clock,
The darkness has stilled, willed,
We speak in meadows and meadows
Are gone.

Which shadow is strongest?
Shadows are nothing compared to
The nothingness of time,
The fertility of what we are.

The banging of doors closing.
The banging of doors opening.
The silence. The loudness.
The moon overhanging a monsoon.
Too hard on me; too hard on you;
Mothers and daughters live near rivers.
The rivers run into the ocean.
Sometimes, the oceans go nowhere.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Little Volvo.

The little Volvo sits in the driveway.
My husband opens his newspaper.
It is Sunday. Time for him to see, to know,
To experience, the ways of the world.
Time for him to ponder the ways of things-
The ways of darkness;
The ways of reason. Without the us,
There is no void, there is no reason to speak in the void.

The color of his shirt changes from day to day.
He looks more handsome in a blue shirt,
He bought it at an Internet café.
My mind is caught between awake and sleeping.

He is me. He is the face within my soul,
The spirit that moves gracefully across the veil of stars.
The stars is the promised land,
Nelson Mandela wrote late one night in November,
While the wind crashed noisily outside the house.
My husband is like Mandela.

He knows. He speaks. He digs up graves.
He used to live in a house in Mississippi,
His mind torrential as waterfalls. He glistens when he sees.

The color of his shirt changes from day to day.
He speaks reason. There isn’t reason inside anything.
His mind is bitter waters-
He is cold, his mind is bitter,
He lives in cities that are bitter.

He tastes of salt.
I drink him down.

Thoughts of the Human. Thoughts of the Bold.

I am human.
I am the thoughts of human.
I am the flesh. The warbled voice speaks.

Coocoo, coocoo,
Over and under,
Barren as folded lands.
Paper is rotten like flesh is rotten.

Over steel hands, his fingers wave and bend,
An array of colors.
In the distance, sky moves,
A voice-
In the stillness of us,
Nothing speaks,
Heartbroken, shadows spoken,
Of movement and time has stilled.

I speak to you.
You are the wind.
You are the wind that moves.
You listen. You see. You fold gently.

The trees. They bring me into it.
They bring me into the void.
The flesh is the void.
The sound is silence.

All wind moves in the silence.
The silence hears your voice.
It whispers, and speaks of shadows-
In the heart of silence,
The dusk of mildew.
We wave and bend. Time is translucent.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

how to outline novels.

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

Incognito.

Incognito

You
You are
You are myself.
I am the ghost in the twilight forest.
I am the advice you seek for your job.
Desperately seeking resolution.
Desperately seeking the voice in the hills.

You seek temptation.
You are temptation.
You rise out of the temptation of it all.
The color of noise.
The rudeness, the awakening, on the back of old
Tampons,
The back of old wildflowers.
Goodness, you seek. Old sordid news.
Borrowed and faded.
Times will not bend.
My ears have been slammed against the window.
The window opens and shuts.
I am the opening and shutting of the window.

I am the sordid tears.
The widow who keeps forgetting nothing.
I am the forgetter.
I am insolent. A dumbwaiter.

We are the thinkers. We are the whisperers.
The wanderers of shadows becoming,
Unknowing-

The feeling of it. The righteousness. I am myself.
I am the hood of myself. Thoughts flood tender gates.
Gates move the wind. The wind is water. The ocean
Flows, flows-

Doesn’t know where it ends, its polar opposites.

My mother said not to take me back.
The boat flies out of the shore. The shore of the mouth.
He thinks he is not home.

His mind is somewhere else. He forgets. He is always forgetting.
His words are round and sheltered things,
He is an ocean of voice, of truth-
We are books and books live on forever.
Forever we speak. Forever we glean, sheen, disappear-
Fade forever from wandering dreams.
You think you are lost.
You think the dark is lost. That I am nothing. That humans are nothing.
The race is nothing but splendid colors.
None sees. We do not see. Nothing sees anyone,
But ourselves wrapped in ourselves. We carry a package
Up the stairs and place it at the foot of the stairs.

Stars

We see stars in the hills.
The hills are filled with snow.
We don’t know where they go.
They sing sad songs of daffodils.
We know of light where light doesn’t know.

Monday, February 08, 2010

Where I Go

Where I Go

Zebras in Africa form triangles
And make movies and mountains
On different doors.

We are bright with
Colors, bright with the madness,
Bright with the darkness inside of me.
The words are a spark of brightness;
The wholeness inside of me bears
The fruit of redemption,
The fruit of colossal colors, we dream of beasts
Hidden inside of nothing.

We are the nothing.
We glare and the shadows move and fade
And time is not still. We are autumn leaves turning. We bear the fruit of
Goodness. Eve and Adam; barren of the world. We trip over polar
Bears, icebergs. We can go anywhere. Anywhere we go
Is fine.

Zebras in Africa form triangles
Over smooth lands.
The landscape is ever changing. The landscape is mine.
You are mine; forever, my love, you whisper sad songs
To the trees and the trees giggle and laugh and energy overflows
Me. The sadness inside of me is translucent;
The energy is whole. We take borrowed things.

We take movies
And place them on stone steps.

We force ourselves
To sit and stare and glare at the stars, burning fiercely in the heavens.
Our words are naked.
Our words are hollow.
You show me the world and the world is reborn;
Again and again,
You are reborn, love.

Hoping For.

Hoping For

He is the hint of love.
He is the hint of sacrifice.
The plainness of his eyes; the breathtaking beauty of them.
He is not here to make mistakes. His solid arms,
Protecting me, holding me against the stark brightness
Of the universe-the world is forever in flight.

I am hoping for a miracle.
I am praying for something transient like a motorbike.
I am hoping for darkness. The steeple jumps off
The platform. The learnness of it. The yearnness of it.
We are the tides of the clouds,
The shifts moving and folding-
The open of the doorway,
The light in the sky shoves forth in the night.

We are the. Nothing else moves.
You take my heart; fold it in two. I am emotional this,
Emotional that, nothing lasts forever.
He is silence. The silence of memory. The lost forever
Etched in time.

He is etched forever-
The sorrow of it. The sordid seats of the bus.
The blue, the green. Daffodils fold. I wrote for him.
On blackboards, on ancient works of stone.
He is the old one. The fabled one. The tired one.

His heart aches.
His heart moves. He moves.
The wind sighs, sad and lonely as thunderclouds.
He sighs.
The world sighs with it.
We sit on the world and look down at it and the gladness is wrapped;
His heart moves. The wind sighs, sad and lonely
As thunderclouds.

I say to him, “I don’t know much about those answering machines.”
He laughs and spews raspberry from poured lips.
His eyes like thunder. Thunder burns. He is bright as sunshine.
His mind whispers in the dark.

Starship.

The city was a dome.
The last man on Earth lived in a dome in the ocean. The ocean was vast and wide. The man’s name was Wilderec Dandor and he was a Martian. He had flown over a million miles to land on a rock and found no one left alive. Wilderec’s starship crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico. He had found their movies; their archives; had seen their last moments on Earth before the starship crumbled from exhaustion, the exhaustion of seeing far too many nights alone, afraid, and ashamed. The shame burned inside of him. It was the year 3000, according to a computer calendar on the wall in someone’s office in Roswell. He had seen their last moments and it was a sad, fiendish thing that rose up from the deepest darkest fears of the midnight sky and the midnight sky roared and flesh changed to gold and red as well as the sunsets. The man’s name was Wilderec and he was alone, tired and alone, tired and alone. He abandoned Roswell, and walked a long time. Sought refuge in an abandoned villa off the coast of Miami; Miami was one of the first to go; dust and dust had turned to rubble. Rubble turned to nothing, the flesh turned to fire and fire burned and the fire was of flesh and nothing was left. He was exhausted. The exhaustion came from gathering firewood to warm the house and he dropped the firewood by the front door and trooped inside, his mind pondering over what happened. He had gotten a message from Earth from a space station near Jupiter. His people had gone past Jupiter and Neptune and Terra Firma. They had gone past those planets and had never returned-Wilderec decided not to follow them. He sighed and rubbed his face warily. He was exhausted and the exhaustion was his alone. He puttered about the house, fixing things; made pottery from clay in the backyard. He had thought about making a garden-the garden would be full of radishes; carrots; onions; peppers. The peppers were the most difficult to hoe. The garden was going to be plentiful. It was spring. Wilderec had been living here for three weeks. End over end, he had lived here, walking up and down the streets, trying to find someone left alive. No one. The houses were abandoned. No dogs barked anywhere. The abandonment came from somewhere deep within the core of the earth and the core of the earth was bitter and filled with venom and the animals were gone except for the birds. The birds flew in the sky and it was a mystery they survived he didn’t understand how the birds survived and none of the other animals did. Wilderec pondered how he was going to survive. His starship was crashed. It was burned to smithereens after he went through the Earth’s atmosphere and was ejected from his starship and the starship was dead.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Renaissance Man.

Renaissance Man

In the course of our history,
Nothing has ever been as remarkable as the
Feat of
Self-recognition. Self-reliance. At the foot,
At the top of it all,
The temptation of burdening clouds
Shines down upon the world.
Light is self-resilience.
The secret is life’s
Temptation,
The bitter feud,
The encumbrance of it.
The sore spot on the groin.
She went to the bottle house late one night.
Her eyes are fiercely burning.
They spin midnight oils in dark
Spaces;
They spin darkness in rags.

I cry solidly in stones.
I break myself.
I am broken. My heart is
Turned to stone.
We fear nothing.
Old as time.
Old as time in continuum.
Old as rivers that beat,
Supportive,
The heart and dusk of. Night.

We speak-
Turn dials on old clocks.
We jump docks. We steal clocks.
The music whispers from sad spinning tales,
Mood has turned sour.

The cheese.
Is.
Forever
Into it.

Monday, February 01, 2010

The Still of the Mountains.

The tall sycamore tree
Pierces through the veil of summer-winter months;
Exhausted out of old breathing sounds.
Sounds thrum. Hum. The wind moans;
It is my mother. The wind is a guest at my house.
Outside my house, the wind mutters and moans
And my baby sister enjoys baby-sitting,
Making me look bad in front of people my age.

I am better off alone.
I am better off not seeing anything. Not driving. Or climbing.
Better off not seeing anything but the river
Gurgling and chuckling to itself. The darkness permeates the world
And the world is whole with its noise,
The world is whole and ripe and the fruit are ripe and thoughts
Trickle like water, trickle through dark things and the darkness
Wans and the moon is bright and full and sometimes
I stare and think about wolves running through the woods,
Running naked and not being able to climb over walls.

The flowers open in spring.
The mood of the spring runs dry and the dryness runs
To the sun and the sun is a great, big ball of rock,
Fierce and hot,
And the sun is spit back out.
I am better off alone.
I am better than the stillest mountain.
I am better breathing what is deep inside of me,
Oxygen fills my lungs and I can see, see the dark things
That wave, move, bend-
Colors flock across the sad, sorry sky.
I am worthless.
The whole of the world is a coin that is tossed on
The bending note of all the oceans-and the oceans are bright
With noise and the noise of the wind moans, cries,
The world is exhausted of its breath.
I can’t see. I am better off alone. I am better
as an illiterate.

DNA

DNA

It is the memory of the folding chair.
The lily bursting open in a song.
It is the memory of who you are.
It is the memory of myself.
I am not forgotten.
I have not been forgotten.
All of mankind holds grudges-
China, Germany, England, France,
Old women wear top hats and
Laugh uproariously at nothing.

We are not in Nottingham.
You speak when none speaks.
I glimmer down sad mountains.
The mountains is made up of water,
Water is the core of our DNA.
We speak truth.
We are truth.
Truth is etched, carved in the doorways of time.
Carved in the doorways of nothing.
Some people hate.
Dr. King, Malcolm X, Gandhi,
Except Gandhi roared at lions.
Hatred burns the flesh.
It tears the flesh in two.
Sometimes, the flowers are withered
And we can’t find ourselves without looking
Backwards, without glancing outside of time.

Sometimes, golden mountains rise out of nothing.
Sometimes, we are dead when we are alive.
I chose to be neither.
I am the neither.
We break bones over sad mountains.
The fir tree glistens in the sun.
The sun is a diamond.
Mommy, are we there yet?
Mommy, are we in cars?
Father this; Daddy that;
No time to ourselves.
I am sitting in a chair, reading the newspaper-
My teacher, Mr. Allen,
The man who breaks cars,
Stole Haiti and gave it back.
He is enraged his child is ill.
He is enraged about a lot of things.
Only a flower can calm him down.
Only the folding of a flower and the opening of it.
We are flowers folding inward and outward.
He feels he is forgotten.
I never spoke the word that lingers
In me, of stardust and words-
We speak of bones. We dream of bones. He can’t find me.
It tears him down like the moon is torn down.

His child is ill because she does not speak.
He is angry about a lot of things.
Haiti falls on his lips.
Here is the hatred of himself, the flower opening
And closing.
And the hatred of Haiti.

Night Soldiers.

Night drifts in from all sides.
Sounds pour from all sides.
Speakers are in the walls.
The sound of winter enters from all sides.
The sound of winter is in my veins.

I walk on prose. Prose is gray.
It drifts through a stormy day.
Frogs walk on goodbye sticks.
Stones move over solid mountains.

He is a stalworthy soldier,
A sentinel in sheep clothing-
He eats macaroni and cheese,
He sings songs to the ocean.

Night drifts from all sides.
I can’t speak reason without breaking
Reason. My heart, o glorious wind,
You dry your tears and the tears are still.

I perchance. I perchance miracles, perchance
The doorman, he sat on a foot stool,
Whispered melodies to sorry green rivers.
I am free.

My worries are bothersome. They make
My mother, my brother. They scout
Across deserted landscapes;
Wave crests drift, naked, on the desert floor.

The rose was left in a mudbank.
A man in a dark suit walks across the mudbank,
His eyes stare blindly into the flower.
He is the flower. The flower stills. Stiller than breath.