Gabriel Gadfly's Blog, page 27

Extraction: Mogadishu

After the Black Hawk falls out of the sky,

Little Bird swoops down to pluck up

the hawk’s spilled chicks.

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Exodus

One day, someone will ask

for volunteers to leave this place

and I will go.

I will leave behind the trees

and the seas and the bluest skies

and I will leave you, too.

I will leave you.

I will venture out

into the starry unknown

and find what lies beyond

this wet marble of a world,

aching, I will leave you

and I do not think I will return.

You will not come with me

and you will not ask me to stay.

We have always known this

about ourselves. You love closely

and I love from far away.

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Excerpt from “POETS: An Owner’s Manual”

Chapter 8: Troubleshooting

If your poet is not responding

and has failed to produce poems

on demand, there may be

a number of reasons why.

First, check your poet’s

sense of outrage. He may be

deficient in a certain

internal disquiet that poets

need to properly lament

the current state of society.

If this is the case, apply a

healthy dose of images

of disaster victims,

transcripts of pompous

politicians jabbering,

or have him thumb

through a few pages of

Snooki’s latest book.

If your poet is sufficiently

outraged, then the problem

with your poet may lie

in a too-happy heart.

Everyone knows poets

thrive on grief and maybe

a little self-loathing.

To correct this deficiency

and restore your poet

to proper working order,

gently crush his heart:

take another lover, perhaps,

or murder a dear parent,

and poems are sure

to gush forth.

(Alternately, if your poet

is too despondent, you

might need to make him

giddy. Try kissing him,

and if that doesn’t work,

you might need to resort

to something drastic, like

giving him a book deal.)

If the methods outlined above

fail to improve your poet’s

output, your poet might be

defective or obsolete and

in need of replacement.

Watch for these warning signs:

an plodding obsession with

Blake-esque rhymes,

a flagrant disregard for the

rules and structure of your poet’s

language of choice,

or the telling inability to name

any other poet who is not yet dead.

The post Excerpt from “POETS: An Owner’s Manual” appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Estuary

Today, I walked out to the river,

took off my shoes and my socks,

and sat with my ankles in the water.

I watched a maple leaf

float by, bobbing like a ship

on its way to the sea,

and thought of joining it.

How easy to would be

to slip into that water

and ride it into the ocean,

so far out the sun has

to come down and drown behind it.

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Egg Eater

Dasypeltis scabra wraps

her lips around a plover’s egg,

jaw unhinged, toothless,

swallowing another mother’s

unhatched chick whole.

The egg slips down the

slick channel of her throat,

an apathetic anti-birth,

a clench and a crack,

she sucks out the yolk

and spits away the empty shell,

never stopping to wonder if

she might wake one day

to find someone has slunk

into her nest and swallowed

the eggs of her own belly

when no one was looking.

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The Shade Tree

From you, I learned the world

does not allow both

in single trunk of flesh,

no matter how many

sun-charred children

you gather under your

wide-swept branches,

no matter how many

crinkled leaves of gold

you rain down into their

hungry open mouths.

This kind of healing

puts a dose of poison

in the roots, it comes

with sterile soil,

with a daily loosening,

and they will never know it,

not even when the trunk

begins to list and groan

in the wind issuing

from their wailing throats.

It would be such a simple lust,

to ache for aching

like they do,

to just give in to it

and ache like they do,

to swallow no one’s pain

but gallons of your own,

to feast on yourself.

Forget this strange nutrition.

Even if it lets your roots

knot their worried fingers

deeper into the hair

of your lover the earth,

even if it brings strength

beneath the earth,

it withers the limbs above.

It shades no one.

It would heal you with a cost:

a shrinking ring of shade,

and the sun rises ever higher,

it burns ever hotter

and here it never sets.

It lays hot on your back, yes,

but it sears these children

of sticks, and they are

already smoking.

Let them huddle closer.

Stretch your limbs

to encompass as many of them

until your bark cracks

with the strain of reaching.

Bathe their bodies, feed them,

and grow dizzy with it,

feel the earth kiss you

even as she loosens your fingers

from clutching so tightly,

teeter and hunch and splinter

but never stop shielding

the blistered beneath you.

How valuable is a shade tree

if it could not

come crashing down

one day?

Teething

Forget all else I have told you.

There is no calm inside me,

no serenity

no silence.

I have told you

I have nothing more to say

but I do

I do

and it comes out

only in wails at myself

when I get away from you.

I have hidden what I am:

a teething child

snapping at tombstones

and bricks.

I have chewed a box of knives

down to their handles,

gnawed curbs and sidewalks

for the taste of the moss in their cracks

and the feet that tread them.

I have ground my teeth down

to a mouthful of grit

and bloody nubs of gum.

I polish the back of my throat

in swallows.

Even that brings no quiet.

Call a dentist, please

please please.

Build me

a new grin with pieces

of chalk.

I was born with

a blackboard tongue

that needs scrawls

bitten into it.

Crevice

You wake up one morning

with a great black splintered crack

through your belly,

edged out hard,

and chalked over.

This is what happens

when a crust of ache forms

on the froth white of hurt

and then breaks:

it sunders and splits

down the middle of you.

But listen close,

listen quiet,

listen

to the sound issuing

out of it:

the hush-shush of sea

blue notes, the whale-whispers,

from your conch belly hollow,

the sour tired song

of a cold choir,

it scrapes back its chairs

and slaps its chests

with numb slabs of hand,

the mother rock wren

flits in with dead grass

and tangled hair

to nest down in your gut

and sing her dry trill song

among the spotted eggs

she’s laid.

Anchoring

If I had hollow bird bones,

you’d find me

in the corner,

filling them with buckshot.

Oh, I still want to fly.

Far up, higher

and higher

until blue air thins

and lungs catch fire

for scarcity

but you know

I’d never

come back down.

Weigh me here

with heft,

with burden,

crow’s feet

that never leave

the earth.