Flinging words at the page

I have run out of paintings to post with my poems.  I have a few that I haven't photographed, and I am working on a new one that is constructed of 1/8 inch wide strips of paper cut from the text in Interview magazine.  It may take me the rest of my life to finish it...  Meanwhile, two poems containing the word "fling..."

ANGELS TRAVELING TO THE HOMELAND

sometimes I long

to do nothing more exciting

than wear a hat, 

study the tax code,

and wait for visions.

sometimes I put on my pink pants,

daring to dance around the edges

of the social scene, managing to fling myself

through life as though through 

the temptation of a plate-glass door, 

demanding more

than the typical shatterproof woman

has any right to.

but behind my ribs,

behind the cage of these silent bones,

I am filled with dazzling words,

vibrant, colored threads of sound.

at night I am vocal,

tying random images together,

but in the daytime I bend,

and when I contemplate the end of being,

I forget taxes,

I forget pants,

I forget words.

STILL

Between the caring and the not caring

it is the fluctuation that makes life hard.

One sets the stage for disappointment,

while the other lets the necessary energy leak out

slowly, until movement becomes impossible.

Swinging like a pendulum surely winding down,

we eventually end up stymied, barely pulsing

near the center, in that static phase,

perhaps what we wished for 

when we craved contentment in the first place.

Full circles.  Empty hearts.

And we blame it on hormones,

and things that happened to us as children.

I've tried to build strength,

tried to brace myself against sudden drops in altitude.

But I seem to have a crack in my breastplate, 

a small opening where my good intentions seep out

quite unnoticed till I need them

with the desperation of a bleeding hand.

I feel as though I have written this before.

Nothing new to say, no revelations,

no new sensations,

yet I follow the string, and like song lyrics

thoughts flow down the page

willing themselves to become art.

Filled more with stop and start than meaning,

lines gain momentum until I notice their accumulation.

Then my hands try to be still.  Try to be still 

when you're churned up inside.  Not easy.

My hands flutter like birds.  They want to fly.

They want to leave their shadow ciphers on the ground

to be found centuries later and marveled over.

But these words are temporary

and I probably won't print them out.

I won't spring them on the world

anymore than I will fling myself over the edge.

I worry that such writing sounds like the whining

of a pitiful dog.  Devoid of beauty and voice,

only sentiment remains.  But sometimes it seems okay

to write about unimportant things,

like the way the sun shines 

on the girl's hair in the window of the coffee shop

and the fact that there stands a pyramid of oranges 

off to one side. 

Sunday, Sunday

AND BY THE FACT ITSELF

From Conversations with the Virgin

 

Lady, my thoughts of you are as thin

as the skin on the backs of my hands.

The star in my lucid dreams you are

and it seems that I can’t even take a phone message

without automatically adding a reference to you.

Holy Mother, I once read

that those wishing to control dreams

should spend their last minutes of life

each night studying their hands.  You see,

 

and I know you do, that our hands are the things

we see more than others,

more than other objects,

more than other expressions, digressions…

more than thoughts throughout our waking sessions.

 

Ip

so

fact

o

 

when we see them

in our sleep, our deep subconscious minds design scenarios

in which we’re able to function as though we are awake.  And so

sound dreamers function in their sleep.

 

My eyes weep tears of blood

but slumber goes

the way of wonder

the way of distant thunder born of memory,

the way that gender

can’t explain

the differences between our legs, and so we run

and run and run like dogs asleep

and never still, we keep

the sacred pacts of childhood.  

More Than Corduroy

(I am posting this poem from the series Falling Bodies at the request of Rachel Tobes.  I thought I had lost it in the ether, but it finally surfaced.  I guess this is appropriate for a poem based on accidental discoveries.)

MORE THAN CORDUROY

So, maybe you were right,

you know, about corduroy,

about it not being accidental,

not like post-it notes, assumptions and electricity,

and about how the push-pull

of such a two-way fuzziness

could come between two people

with so little surface tension.

 

And maybe you were right,

you know, about this other thing—

this escalating dance,

this shattered calm, and how,

more than corduroy,

it makes my fingers move

in trancelike patterns,

makes me bite my lip,

and giggle,

and cry.