Category: poems

Inspired by DrBombay’s new Bombay Thoughts

Is every prose poem a stream of consciousness, or just this one? And do all streams of consciousness really just flow in a big circle back to talking about consciousness and/or writing about consciousness, or anyway being conscious of the fact that you’re writing, which is damn near writing about consciousness, because the written word is really just consciousness commodified and collected on paper, or screen, or wherever it happens to be, in the same way playing the piano is really just music commodified or collected or something. There’s a word here that means what I’m trying to say, but I can’t think of it just now, and I hate when I can’t think of words because it’s like a part of my brain is malfunctioning. That happens probably a lot more often than I care to admit, my brain malfunctioning, and words not coming to the top of my head when I want them to come out of the top of my head is really just some kind of malfunctioning byproduct. I’m like the top-of-the-headless horseman when it comes to words and remembering them. If this weren’t stream of consciousness, I’d stop to think of the word. Probably stop for a long time, and by the end of it, I’d have found the word, but it wouldn’t seem quite right. It would still seem like there was a word out there just a little bit better than the one I’d finally remembered, and I would still be unsatisfied, dreaming of a word that was just a little more perfect like some kind of deja vu for words.

Ode to Sharpie

thick black marker
perchance to pen in permanent
perpetual ink
shiny surface stealer
staying true to your words
words staying true to you

 

Instance Poem

Life is one long poem
beginning to end
verse after tedious verse;
each thing we write
a small instance
of a larger poetic picture.

 

post it note poetry

Sticky side down
short and yellow, little
reminders, remembrances.
Placement is key, put them
where a poem is
least likely, where
words can surprise.

music fueled files
chilled audio chunks
brittle sound bits
one-ninety-two per second
composed quality over compression
ripped vibrations channeled
stereo into ear esophagi
drum tunnels drilled
as if into a wooden skull
plodding, pounding, pleading
worming, wriggling, weaving
taking over nerve nexuses
brain tissue intersections where
dance moves are stored, triggered,
toes curl, discontinuous spasms
in knee joints, elbows, fingers
curled around an ergonomic keyboard
lifting and falling in lilting sporadic patterns
trying to sit still while between
headphones and hard drive
a symphonic catastrophe

gnats on parade
long slithering snakes of ants less parading and more commuting
fat black flies banging heads on windows
tiny round winged moths battering against lightbulbs after midnight
insect motions filed and cataloged
groups of highly specific evolutionary traits
creating behaviors that seem alien to us, foreign,
yet we bang our heads on walls,
we participate in parades, for seemingly little reason,
we do the locomotion.

flying in and out of real life
some kind of psychic link with the interface
the lines between computer and human blur
hands that don’t leave home row
shift into the computer
until I am attached at the wrists
the typewriter eating William S. Burroughs
has nothing on me because
I am eating the computer, my eyeballs
sink into the monitor like drops into water
the surface tension pulls the rest of my head after
CTR-W, CTR-W, CTR-W, but it won’t close
I can’t ESCAPE, CTR-ALT-DEL does nothing,
but I’m able to CTR-C, ALT-TAB, CTR-V myself
into the next document
noting the timestamp here is much later
and there is no bloated Word markup
marching at me from the margins
I’ve CTR-S’d myself,
for the moment at least, and I
breath a comma of relief

He’s showing off his new phone
the one he took to the strip club
coughing every time he took a picture
because he didn’t know at the time
how to turn off the fake shutter sound.

So we’re all standing around
squinting at this tiny, grainy
picture of a naked woman at the strip club.
We are twice removed
from real sex.

The poems from today sucked. So you get this unfinished tidbit instead:

—

defragment your fat
the plastic circuit surgeon
snips a few bytes from under your input devices,
and you’re good as factory refurbished
out of the box beautiful
gorgeous command lines
command line curves
root like a rose in june

On Creating Crucifixes

It is only natural for them to build things in their own image.
Believing, as many of them do, that they were built
in the image of one who built them in his image.

 

Believing in destiny after the fact.

Because it happened,
The thing that happened
Was meant to happen
Duh!

 

Logic will only get you so far.

Imagining too few possibilities
makes everything logical.
Imagine too many possibilities
and nothing is logical.

Your markers foul my brain
with their lovely scents
and their highlight-like colors
screaming your white praises
off the wall at the merest felt stroke.

Your holy whiteness
marred by years of words and lines
left too long on your alter of ivory,
surface shiny like wolf’s teeth,
you are the hunter’s spear-head.

You exist for storms of brains
from torrents of cold frozen brain-hail
to light-pink brain-rains with a chance of
grey-matter sunshine peeking out from pink clouds
later in the meeting.

hot metal lines
etched on grass colored plastic
silicon envy
bigger and better parts
pressed flat for fitting
with case fans and power supply
slippery slithering electrons
team up to tell stories in pixels