Secretly Ironic

Dark Tide

On January 15, 1919, a poorly-maintained storage tank spilled over two million gallons of molasses into Boston’s North End, killing 21 and injuring hundreds.

Your home’s a shrine to bad decisions
a monument to deadlines blown and maintenance deferred,
the lassitude that brought disaster down at last.

As often as required, or less, you bathed and dressed
performed your life like people
caught knee-deep in cold molasses.

Blame weather, shoddy ironwork or sabotage:
Either way, the tank is breached
and you’re as good as drowned.

When the moment came to run
you should have known you’d freeze
and fall, encased in amber melancholy.

(First draft here)

Sheer Curtains

Not yet sunrise, and in an upstairs window
behind a curtain across the street
a silhouette puts up her hair, leans forward
ten degrees to set her breasts in place
before an early shift.

Drunk alone and up all night again
with mute and stupid hopes, but even I
know better than to speak,
not well enough to look away.

I lean against the sill and let the focus fade.
Her light goes out; when dawn begins,
my head is hot against the glass.

(original version here)

Melancholy

As often as required, no more, you bathe
and dress and walk upright like people
knee-deep in mud.
Your home’s a shrine to bad decisions:
Mail-piles tombstone over deadlines past,
Whole years of chores put off
spawned tumbleweeds behind the couch
and you across it, greasy supplicant of melancholy,
ignoring calls and hiding from the landlord,
wasting days in helpless sleep.

Signal Problems
“Everyone’s going to work well not me I’m not going to work.”
– James Moore

Excuse me sir are those—
Sir, I’m going to have to ask—
Sir, don’t block the subway door
      with your bundled lifetime of regrets.

The nameless ghosts of there but for the grace
      of sheer bad luck and poor decisions
      of guilt and guilt and idiot shame—

They fester like corroded wiring
      hunger like the living
      for something they can’t name.

The lights flicker and the train stops
      and we all put down the Economist,
      stare and meet no eye and—

And now what? Nobody’s going
      to work now.

Office Life

The lobby’s lined with thick bromeliads
deep green and hothouse-reared
rubbed twice weekly with Shultz’s Leaf-Shine
by a man who spends breaks napping
on a chair in the service elevator.
They wilt beneath the polish and the sterile breeze
and are quietly replaced.

A poet’s trick for getting unstuck, although it probably applies well enough to other art: Take a stack of index cards cut in half, or blank business cards, or something similar. Write a single word on each one: About 80 to 90 percent concrete nouns, with a handful of verbs and adjectives, maybe a couple abstract nouns. Mix well. Draw three. (Glassine. Ignite. Stamp.)

Got an idea? No? Try again. (Cement. Bile. Plasma.)

I learned it during the CTY poetry workshop I took about fifteen years ago. The instructors called it a personal universe deck. (Rare earth. Extinguish. Bait.)

I’d more or less forgotten about building one since then. But writing more than occasionally requires a bit more effort, and that requires some kickstarting. So I made a new one this week. (Squash. Arsenic. Crutch.)

It’s kind of fun. And sometimes you get poems out of it. (Appendix. Air-filter. Larva).

i. The Epiphyte
Sprouting from folds
of trunk and branch,
it reaches up to sun and down to soil.
The narrow tendrils twist and choke
to gain support.

The scaffold dead, the vines persist upright,
supplant the frame that formed them.

ii. The Brood Parasite
Before she killed her stepsisters,
she’d memorized their mother’s plumage
Her brighter mouth the most insistent,
the others starved to weakness,
she pushed them off the ledge.

Laying now herself, she picks the host
who most evokes the nest that she destroyed.

iii. The Blood Meal
Buried in the skin, swollen
she awaits the males.
Spermatophores with legs,
they exist to mate and die,
and to renege:

They turn their pointless mouths
to her immobile bulk.

iv. The Adelphophage
Each womb’s a feeding ground
where sharp-toothed fry first learn to hunt.
Of eighty young, just two survive to birth,
their brothers sacrificed
to bring them up to size.

We know the strong
by how they thrive.

God bless the pretty girls
in skirt-suits and sneakers
office shoes in plastic bags
swaying up the subway stairs.

I stare; they look away.
I follow them up
outdoors up
through the park up
indoors up
among the flickering cubicles —
We’re all alone on this train.

iii. The Blood Meal
    Up to four males have been found feeding on one female Ixodes holocyclus tick…

Innate imperative:
Seek a host, dig in, and swell,
and wait.
The males, spermatophores with legs,
don’t even feed.

Or shouldn’t.
Their stubby mouthparts useless on a mammal host
They climb aboard their mate’s immobile bulk:
the doomed stealing from the unborn.

iv. Adelphophage
We don’t pick the winners in this game,
just set the level field and watch them run.
Unkind, perhaps, but fair:
You’ll know the strong by how they thrive.

Each womb’s a feeding ground where
sharp-toothed embryos first learn to hunt.
Of eighty fry, just two survive to birth,
their brothers sacrificed to bring them up to size.
We know the strong by how they thrive.