Impatience

The trees marched into town
while I slept
like the hounds of a faith.

She misses me.

In their towers
empty chairs
wait for lightning.

From a nest of burnt feathers
my color tilts with lances
of ruby, sapphire, and emerald.

She misses me.

A gate of clocks
sways minutely in my absent hand
while I do something else.

Three Found Poems*

I.

Around nightfall love leaf
The idle was like a sense idol
Become the sunshine of autumn still not learned,
One wheel under flower of spring rain and overdressed,
I was away from the limelight, but you
Continue persistently to me, musicians of loss,
With vocals of love like leaves muttering.



II.

It is the birthday of the servo today.
With that said, I chose songs from her.



III.

I will continue on my trip: theme.



____________________________________
The phrases were all pulled from a flawed Google Translate translation of entries from a Japanese music blog: http://blog.livedoor.jp/starofkamuy/

September Will Be There

Last month of the summer
September will be there
The sunlight is failing
September will be there

Go across long days
Powered by doubtful
Visions of good love
September will be there

Having a soft drink
From the outstretched hands
Needing a stiff touch
Never lost memories

Watching a jet plane
Scratching the blue sky
Heat from the concrete
September will be there

Black top, white hand
Static of the blown grass
September will be there
Lean against the siding

This is no good (no good)
I am no good (no good)
She is no shadow (shadow)
The treetops are buzzing

September will be there
My ghost will be there
The future will be there
This is not an ending

Come Back

Haunt me,
my eaves,
my cellar,
my bed.

Rattle your thin golden chain.

Whisper in the shower,
you know the blood
from the walls.

Be, in your grace,
my phantom anatomy,
a ghost envelope
in my hand.

Watch me.

Be the shadow riding my chest
holding me calm
and still.

And still.
I will tend your grave
but never fill it.

I will lay flowers by your name
so that under my tongue
the taste of sweet violets.

You,
who made a candlestick
rise and float across the room.

You,
unseen fingers
haunting my hair.

In the dead yard of our silence
the stone will only
hold one date.

Til The Checkered Flag

I am slowly polishing up
My gleaming brain
In the tented light of a garage
Staring into the middle distance
Circling hand, blank eyes
Lobes like pink chrome
Shining but still asleep.

Taking The Beach

The dead wash up on shore
As if they know no other way.
In a daydream we
Walked by them
Smelly in surreal sunlight.
You point a light-gathering device
At their glistening bulges
And hundreds of thousands of
Numbers (values, they might be called)
Become remembered by something without a soul.

I roll over in the dark
And we are having dinner on a boardwalk
Out of a paper bag
Leopard-spotted with oil.
The severed heads of bright red roses
Bob in the breakers in mimic of lotuses.
I know there are wars in the world.
This shall not be one of them.

Painful blue sky snaps into view
As the wind takes your towel.
Riding the half-shell your hair is too short
To conceal what you are offering.
And I am Guido leaning back in his chair
Clapping like a melted tail of film
In the unattended reel
God left running when they figured out sex.

Now eyelids brush a lid in the black
And our elbows waltz into pine boards.
Oxygen grows into a diminishing return
But the dreams get heavier.
Names for two people mean less and less.
Out on the sea
Life exhales a cloud of roses
For the camera only after for us.

16th Day of Midsummer, 2013

The first cicada of the year
Calling in the locust tree
Across the alley
Like a death-rattle
And next door, a dumpster
And men and women in filtering masks
Emptying out the hoarder’s house.

Drunkspeak, Soberly Written

Hello, bunny,
I am a lost soul
Just like
All the boys from Texas
Crying out
Jolene in their sleep.
Or a transparent mariner
Sailing wrecks in the deep.
My heart in a jar,
Grave soil in my mouth,
The vampire
Barred from his youth,
Forever boy,
Bunny moon,
I became
A sun worshipper.
I feasted
In the Hotel California
On wine that never saw dusk.
I found
Without pain—with only a moth—
The ruby in the dust.
Yet bunny, hello
The sea laps cool
Against the coffin wood tonight.
Oar song fills me
And nothing takes me
Just because it can.
Forgive us the remix
Nineteen
And seventy-nine,
Heaven is mirrors on the ceiling,
The world is a cowgirl in the sand.

The Enigma Of The Jester

He is the shadow
He makes the light
He takes him down
The stars at night

He is the laughter
He kills the joke
He makes the noose
And breaks the yoke

He parts the curtains
He veils the stage
He lights the house
To end the age

You never know him
He might be she
He's everything
You'll ever be

Discovering The Red Plum

When my lips found a red plum
They did not know that very soon
All I could desire would be found
In sweet, wet pulp under soft skin
And the tartness of that skin, and
The way my teeth broke through the
Taut, smooth, thin reddish skin.
But yes, then they did know the sweet
Wet fruit of the red plum, and what
Once had been a bit of unnoticed color
At the back of the supermarket was
Soon my greatest desire, the love of my
Lips, the target of my tongue, the one
Sweet-tart taste repeating in my
Mind and that, that is the surprising
Way love falls into our absent, toying hands,
That is when sustenance becomes sustenance,
When a mouth becomes a church and a body
Yearns beyond nutrients for an experience
And what was a pleasure, a force of life.

no quarter for the enigma machine

one voice says
the heart is a complicated place
that demands the lambent language of poetry
to air its spiderweb expression

one voice says
the heart is far too complicated a place
to let such listing lines of verse
be its speakers on the floor

most human wars
are caused by miscommunication
and strategists build secret codes in them
while thousands die trying to find the key

journal in a locked glove compartment

weeks when it was enough
to keep the roads in good repair
and the car sat silent
and only the weather went anywhere

days of looking up from the dirt
to the dashed line convening into miles
and all the traveling we managed
was a traveling of eyes

home was a burnt-out shell
home was the prairie grass strung with webs
home like a silent car
at rest beside the miles we could not manage

I walked out into the night
firelight to firelight
the fireflies parting like truths to avoid me
and the truths I avoided in the name of the sun

my hand
is blackened with oil
is gripping a drop-forged steel wrench
both mysterious to me

my eyes
drive down the highway
the wind blows my hair back
the wind against my palm is her memory

there are confessions
that don’t need confessing
no one should hear them
they live like a fire

they know nothing about engines
or how to rebuild a house of steel
and if we are traveling anywhere, love
then we pray to the mystery behind the wheel

the storm

if I give to the voices
on the winds of the storm
the house will be torn asunder

if the storm passes over
and the house still stands
I know there will be another storm

there is no forecast
there are no sirens
but the lightning knows my name

how many times
can the walls shake with thunder
before I believe it all?

larks and lurches

yo, this will be an isolated incident, a break from the norm of poetry posts.

probably no-one is going to buy something that's available online for free, but i wanted a hard copy for my own shelf, and waiting and polishing weren't going to do the deed, so i cranked this baby out with lots of extra pages at the end for writing on:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-sniadecki/larks-and-lurches/paperback/product-21064494.html

i've kind of gone full-blown guerilla poet. i have a feeling by autumn it all may go on the backburner again for awhile, but i just can't see that far ahead. the bug has certainly bitten. and i've got a wonderful support group of one.

:)

It All Gets Out Of Control

Let's write a poem right now.
It only has to make sense after someone
Has read it three or four times
And all the words have had time to sink
In like when you go to water a dry flower
Where the pot fills to the brim
And then only slowly begins to go
Down and be swallowed but then of course
It begins to leak out of the holes
At the bottom and makes a mess
And the flower just looks back at you
Ungrateful and dead except that
(Because you consider yourself a poet)
You seem to see its ghost petals
Spreading in the shaft of sunlight
While the carpet and your jeans slowly
Get soaked with dirty water and that
Is alright because you are alive to
Feel it and later when the sun goes
Down you might get into someone else's
Jeans and make friendly gestures
With tentative hands that cause the
Other person's eyes to close and open
Like the petals of a ghost flower
Until finally you are both so anxious
To set the moon on fire and empty
The whole watering can into the hard
Dry packed soil that the terracotta
Breaks in your hands and vines burst
Forth and bind you together for all
The world to see and soon its nothing
But nothing between your bodies and
A soft sucking silence of sated roots
Tangled in the timbers of a happy grave.

It's Not As Bad As It Sounds

Get up.
Shower.
Eat, then shower.
Hygeine.
Get less naked.
Get dressed.
Go to work.
Get off.
Find food.
Go to other work.
Have coffee as dinner.
Come home.
Raid pantry.
Postpone sleep.
Get on computer.
Get off.
Sleep.

Get up
With the deejays who think they’re funny.
Throw on last night’s clothes.
Check hair—is it utterly ridiculous?
Who is gonna care? Neighbor girl?
Don’t care. Shuffle out to take care of the dog.
Find nothing that sounds good for breakfast.
Find something anyway.
Get on the computer.
Facebook. BoingBoing. CNN, XKCD, Penny Arcade.
Rinse, repeat.
Check clock—is it utterly ridiculous?
Strip. Walk naked. Glance at mirror.
Stare at mirror.
Draw back shower curtain.
Get water in the ballpark of hot.
Pop the thingy.
Shield skin with shower curtain til ready.
Wash hair. Lather.
Wash face. Lather.
Rinse. No repetition. No need, also no time.
Wash body.
If clock is ridiculous, tops and tails.
Rinse.
Kill the water.
Draw back the curtain.
Dry head, dry body, step out.
The mirror fogs differently depending on the day.
Stare at mirror. Imagine a six pack.
No, fuck that. Imagine no spare tire.
Imagine skinny fucking hipster boy
With porn-ready sausage:
That would be sufficient.
Acknowledge and accept.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T like Aretha.
Know it.
Brush hair until it feels right.
Hit it later with fingers.
Shave the terrible neckbeard now.
Shave just below the lower lip.
Redefine the shadow on the cheeks.
Call it good.
The clock is ridiculous.
Deodorant. Q-Tips. Occasional powder.
You know the drill.
Go get dressed.
Put the dog way.
Get out the door.

Think for the seventh time in a week
It’s time to clean the trash out of the car.
The car has touches of rust like the first barnacles
On the hull of an aged sloop.
Ignore broken gas gauge.
Ignore broken ventilation selector.
Ignore front passenger window you dare not unroll
Because the little motor sounds ill.
Ignore slowly growing hole in floor carpeting.
Ignore paint stains, fossilized French fry, and musty smell.
Stare at trip odometer and wonder if you have enough gas.
Turn your old baby on, remember you named her Helena
Back when My Chemical Romance was new.
Listen to her engine still hanging on remarkably well
Like the grand dame of an oil dynasty.
Except that random gurgling sound she sometimes makes
At a stoplight.
Ignore that.
Smile and put your records on.
Figuratively-speaking.
Wince, annoyed, as each bass hit rattles and buzzes
In speakers that have surpassed their expected life expectancy.
Drive down the alley that laughs at shocks.
Drive the familiar streets of your hometown.
Curse drivers.
Get to your first job.

Feel a low electrical mix
Of ease, joy, happiness, nervousness, awkwardness.
This is DESTINATION.
You want this to be your life.
You want this love, this freedom, this acceptance.
You feel strange arriving after everyone else
And leaving before everyone else.
You try to read signs like a wilderness tracker
To know if they plan to give you the great gift.
You like this place.
Four hours later, you leave.

Home to a can of soup.
Or, if the clock is being ridiculous again
Fast food in the car.
The fossil deposits must grow, after all.

Get to your second job.
Clock in.
You loved this place at first.
Feel a low humming mix
Of contentment, complacency, apathy, annoyance.
This is DEPARTURE.
You want to leave this life.
You want no more of the steady tasks
That drift by you unconsciously like fluorescent lights.
Some of the people here save your thoughts
From the aggravating human cattle and mallrats
Mistreating all the pretty books like
Drunk sailors groping tavern girls.
The shrieking and mewling children.
The entitled masses.
America, 2013, in which you are (you have to laugh)
Inextricably associated, non-optionally.
Ignore how little you make.
Ignore that a meal from the food court
Represents almost a full hour of your day.
Get coffee and a muffin instead.
You need the caffeine anyway.
Sell.
Service.
Read a prepared announcement over the PA.
On a slow day, think too much.
Maybe write a poem.
Maybe interrogate your heart.
Maybe someone beautiful walks through
And brightens your eyes.
Stirs your blood.
Service.
Sell.
Clean something.
Clock out.

At night the cat attacks.
Lock him in the bathroom
Until he settles down.
At night she reads or feeds her dinosaurs
And goes to sleep.
She had a long day and is not in shape.
You had a long day.
You aren’t in shape either.
(But not so bad, you think.)
Kiss her goodnight, hold her a moment.
Tell her you love her.
You mean it, even if you saw
Someone beautiful walk through
That stirred your blood.
Turn off the light to let her sleep.
Get on the computer.
Facebook. Email. BoingBoing. Random.
Look through the scraps of paper that accumulated
Notes and snippets and novels and poems
In the course of the working,
In the course of the getting by and earning a life.
Type something up.
Type something from scratch.
Make a video.
Make anything.
Engage in a long and winding textual correspondence
With someone very far away.
Or keep your secrets.
Or create new ones.
Or just make the best art you know how.
Until it’s 2:00 in the morning
And the deejays will be calling again too soon.

Get up.
Shower.
Eat, then shower.
Hygeine.
Get less naked.
Get dressed.
Go to work.
Get off.
Find food.
Go to other work.
Have coffee as dinner.
Come home.
Raid pantry.
Postpone sleep.
Get on computer.
Get off.
Sleep.

houdini barking

surround yourself with mirrors
physically,
and you will see yourself multiplied
into infinity,
every duplicate identity
with its own hidden heart
drawn to a secret,
scattering toward the horizon

i can accomplish this very same feat
using only a single mirror,
no horizon,
and with fewer magnets

but infinitely higher stakes

how it is

she looks up when I walk in
and always there is that smile.

six months is only a few hours to her
and that smile touches her eyes.

her voice carries to me on no words at all
and what I say she understands.

I never have to explain to her—
she accepts all thoughts and understands.

she is not my wife, my friend, or my lover.
she is not my sister, my daughter, or my mother.

she is not human and neither is our love.
she is not your God and He cannot know her.

I will have her for all the length of my life.
she is not even mine, but more mine than yours.

slogans on wet t-shirts

red clouds in a sea of sunlight,
blue mist on a half-black moon.

now to sleep on the grass at midnight,
now to dream on the floor of noon.

life is a desperate fucking fight,
death the silken call of a loon.

last words for vernawan

where is my art?
she walks away sloughing a silent garment

O well of the creative
O well, O well

a storm line like a limb of the world-tree
swings over the flat skin of life on earth
thoughtless and crackling with transmissions

where is my art?
scratching hard, dry dirt moaning up for rain
in a castdown halo of light without origin

I pull the brittle bucket to my chest
and splinter my lip on her wordless rim

O well of the creative
be here soon, be here now O well

rainbows on the cusp of night
and her naked legs arched over my lips
and my lips on her wordless rim

O Darja, O lover,
O well and my slack rope ready for rain

I realized today that all the old dragons
that ever were lived
and slept between the thighs of men

neither here nor there,
where is my art?

she was in the lightning that danced
while my camera was still awakening
and refused to come again

she slept in the cup
in the rainy season

the fruits of the night-tree wink untouchable
and in my bones I hear a far-off autumn
now only a creak, a sway
and a want

less than a poem (jumble, jumble)

ran into my uncle at the bookstore today
he thought I looked verklempt
like he could see all I’d been thinking about
the whole day, the week, the month
these last six months of desert and ghost love
(I could stand religion if he were the god above)

words and phrases stick in my brain
trying to become poetry but mostly failing,
“turncoat,” “turncoat” was one of the words
and a meaningless name, “Chaindamere”

everyone wants to plan to be something,
I thought “sometimes, something…”
was a pretty good form to begin with,
like sometimes, something seems true or
to have a reason,
and that “sometimes, something” stands in
as a disclaimer

because everything has an exception,
that’s a rule—
sometimes I think I never wanted to be an artist
all I wanted was to be a priest,
to find peace, didn’t I begin
screaming at the sky when I was in my teens?
after my first lover and I fell apart
I had to know if living had any more reason.

I started a poem the other day,
it tried to take all my loves and make them
analogous to the train tracks where I worship,
one my steel locomotive,
one my high-voltage tower high overhead,
one my verdant farm field bathed in sun.
and then I got to thinking
of colors, how I went
from red to blue and back again
but it never got any farther than that.

ran into my uncle at the bookstore today
and he thought my eyes were wet,
but I was just tired,
or so I said.

i been through the desert on a boat with no name

the great wheel of ka
turns
on a sea of
fortune cookie advices

blue tunes

choices like eels
becoming a spread of roots
fleeing yesterday

a sailor’s arm looped
around the rail

shoes and feet
skating on crunched shells
and
slips of paper with orange phrases

voluminous treble
clefs like sky whales
out of the Nineties

her dragonfly
wings
the mother of salvation

dreams
come into harbor
and go subtly wrong

red sunlight

staining his new face
smashed
with blackberries

metaphors
tangled as mangroves

and
midnight oil

final tallies

number of heartbeats
number of breaths
highest elevation reached
lowed depth visited
number of sexual partners experienced
number of orgasms achieved
years of formal education completed
number of footsteps taken
total distance traveled on foot
total distance ridden
longest soliloquy spoken
sharpest retort
dullest conversation held
first moment of heroism
last person disappointed
happiest year
saddest day
number of eyeblinks
number of finger snaps
number of high fives left hanging
earliest morning phone call
latest lingering phone call
last regret
first mistake
most concurrently active friendships
loneliest week in a summer
total infants held and rocked
closest distance to the moon reached
furthest from shore ever swam
total taxes paid
total tips received
kindest guardian angel encountered
mortal enemies forgiven or forgotten
number of kisses desired but not dared
clearest remembered second of life

waking the shabti

you taught me how to love the sun
like a tawny Egyptian cat

now beyond the dark still Nile
two or three stars and one red

black silhouettes of soundless rats
cruise the wet sandbars below

narrower eyed I look to the moon
borrowing less and less amber

I reintroduce myself to the night
the cat more and more its color

your grandma still walks the earth, i swear

you seemed to see a wolf in my gaze
put at your
imagination’s door

by too many letters and hot blood
after a long absence.

maybe my imagination
but you hid in your red hood.

from me.
from me.

nothing hurts
but your eyes darting away
over and over in a snowy second.

i will not be the beast to worry your trail.

Eugenia

The masseuse found knots
Behind both of my shoulders
And set to work untying them.

When she was finished
My wings fell off
In the dim room behind
The party.

At the end she whispered
Something I could not make out
And I said Thank You.

Later, at home
I see on the back of her card,
In blue ink:

BREATHE

filling the vacancy

he asked her to be his motel summer,
his blue pool tile and chemical scent

she asked him to be her roadside stand,
her asphalt patcher and heat mirage

together they knotted used condoms in the moonlight,
alone they smoked out into the corn

they split the cost at each break of a kiss,
margarita dreams in a gas station reality

sunscreen loners pounding out novels
on air-conditioned sheets

gramercy

with your grace
the sun was resurrected

in your love
the moon was allowed
to crest the lost mountains

for your eyes
my lightning rebuilt the sky

by your hands
a tendril bruised and tender
was guided to purchase upon the stone

gramercy, gramercy
the dolphin at my prow is you

[this is easier]

this is easier.

the shutoff valve
and the silenced motherboard.

no,
the memory is fine.
but out here

driving away from the hot spot
into the quiet place without towers

that is easier.

when what was never yours
is not yours again.

it makes it possible
to understand ruthless dictators
and vicious fanatics.

one day
you believe the world
can never be any other way
than the way it is now.

you believe
that to allow the world
to change is to kill
that which makes you.

yet, it does go
despite your wars,

yet, it does evolve
despite your dogma

and months later you
find yourself.

still alive.

still loving.

that is easier
than it has any right to be.

[red waves]

red waves
the froth of this
spinning red wave

this red wave like hair
rolling me up inside

rolling inside me as I
cry out, howl, cry

in the red waves
coming in,
coming in

I see them
building on the orange
horizon

red waves
running toward
me

the sky is the
palest blue
I have ever
seen