June 2011
29 posts
5 tags
The Responses (Sometimes, Too Much)
For PWD
It comes with a sigh,
the inevitable emphasis
pushing past comprehensibility,
an image can’t just be
an image, but a spill
too large for this towel.
The words parading loudly
like ice falling in glass,
then stuck to the skin
as they are separated,
trying to part a cube from the mass.
And every once in a while,
a brilliant taste lost
in a flooded mess,
like licking a...
5 tags
I try to let each conversation
go with staircase wit,
knowing God was always there
or ignored like a stain
or run out town and left behind
a few books on the mantle.
Emily, I say, I don’t understand
the abruptness of speech
peppered with holes you
try to convolve to bigger
holes — I’m only a first
year surgeon trying to
correlate the contents
with a stitch. There...
6 tags
Reject 6
If love is collected in the finest napkins
and forged into ingots of precision
gouged into my heart, then we convey
on a geyser the incongruity of empty
peanut shells and beer bottles
that lay between entwined feet.
-C.S. Henderson
5 tags
This Is As If To Say
We’ve made a dent
in the moon spitting sun
flower shells from the cab window,
made every archi- bow
as we buried our widows,
fished hell from the sky
with only coffee stirs and minnows,
made English venerate our names
and upon submission, we reject, no.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
Reject 5
If love is saying, “Dave,
what is this shit you’ve laid
before me, a bunch
of mumbo jumbo and bone
mumbling about bodies
left on the ocean floor
and sovereign nations
made on gravel deposits
and drunk nights at the zenith
fighting the indefinite shapes
of a swarm of flies?”
then you’ve fucked up, darling.
-C.S. Henderson
5 tags
Sometimes The Environment Worries About Me
Ozone, potability, photosynthesis,
sunlight, vitamin D
for that bad case I had in 2003
sound waves and a weightless ocean
for sound to swim through
a spectrum of animals to cook
and light to see what’s cooking—
I take and give
nothing
but unrecycleable
take out containers.
*See: Sometimes I Worry About The Environment
-C.S. Henderson
5 tags
A Forest Maw
I equate another friend to a TV personality
and get asked if I’m on mushrooms again
and of course I’m not
but the forest is a maw to dig
out of and spelunking
isn’t a fun word
when we’ve attached it
to the heart
without realizing
all veins eventually lead up.
Leap if you must!
I’ve got no wings
in a blues song
to give you around
a campfire that
could...
5 tags
Sustainability
The ability to maintain
a means of civil activity
able to express
great potential in the present
without promising the future
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
Fugue pt. 2
To bay at the moon
And beat the bones
Your ancestors
Dig up
The wild gods,
Laughing at
The written tombs
For having big emotions.
Babies, big words,
And bird down
Protest wolfing
Raw, uncooked eggs.
Towns of ice
Boom into dreams
With a cup of coffee
And a hangover.
*See: Fugue pt. 1
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
Fugue pt. 1
Hung over
A cup of coffee,
Dream of boom
Towns of ice.
Raw, uncooked eggs
Protesting the wolf with
Down of bird
Babies with big words.
Having big emotions
Written on a tomb
Is laughing at
The wild gods
Who dig up
Your ancestors
And beat the bones
To bay at the moon.
*See: Fugue pt. 2
-C.S. Henderson
4 tags
Sometimes I Worry About The Environment
and I’m trying to be green,
but even puppets knew 40 year ago
that it’s not easy, and what’s a cup
but a remodeled home for a crab?
A plastic bag, waterproofing
for a nest? A carburetor, a new pet
project for a dolphin?
Because if a trash can tips
over in the middle of the street
does anyone hear the hobos
fighting for our insensitivity
in ignoring a parent?
We...
4 tags
Off The Wall
After Michael
Even at home, you wander
the neighborhood at night
hoping to find a voice
to peer into.
Even at home, you find
it hard to make friends
without sitting in your
room and crying.
Even at home, you’re lonely,
repainting your nails
with hot sauce and molasses,
trying to open the pattern
of flavoring moods.
Even at home, you venture
to the hedgerow borders
and...
6 tags
Reject 4
If love is anecdoting about
a rip in the moon,
then I can’t look at you
in the voice,
all our tenderness leeched
out like a wound.
-C.S. Henderson
4 tags
Tuesday Conversations (Before The Rain)
It’s a schnitzel, not War
And Peace, this order should be simple —
But it’s mostly bullshit,
Like picking out forks
And I have no interest in
The intricacies of a place setting.
If we can’t get lunch by one
I should go hang myself with hunger,
But I have no chopsticks to stitch
the rope.
I’ve splintered in the mouth,
There’s no way
I’ll get...
6 tags
Reject 3
If love has expressed himself
in a momentive gesture like escaping
from jail then abetting
with coffee and lumber might be
the only means of bringing
the parameters of expectation to light.
-C.S. Henderson
4 tags
While Doing A Crossword At Lunch
No, I do not want 8 grains
in my bread, pesticide-free
migrant-free vine-and-dirt-free
tomatoes, chickens given
free range to learn to fly,
lettuce organically grown in jokes
about how to be friends
and ketchingup,
only something
to eat that will keep me
sated until
Realness is trending and
all of our comedians
are poking fun, as if we
couldn’t see the error
of our way out...
4 tags
With Sanity Comes
The loss of unsubtlety. I keep trying to sell my poems in the subway, but no one is buying once they’ve seen I’ve painted the bloodshot in my eyes with 3 pots of coffee and Hoarder reruns (unable to escape feeling like writing is just stuffing rooms with things to their brim so rats can raise nice families in designer apartments of kid clothes and expired computer manuals) instead of...
4 tags
Sat against an uncomfortable tree to remember our natures are not always complementary But we all have the same nature In moments, the tree and I share this
Watched the robins hop in a tense hurry, stop in quick statue-stances looking for the gentle edges of soft moving dirt worms from a damp earth
Blue jean girls bask gnats condense to the first clouds of the year The slap of oars...
4 tags
Guest List
If there is a contingency of answers
then I’ve started too many poems with hypothetics.
Each begins with a question and attempts
to see through it enter a menagerie
of fault lines — a crack in the septic tank.
Is it gaming the system to ask for a better meal?
Another question without an obvious conclusion,
though 2 on Wednesday sounds like a good time
to try and solve it. With...
4 tags
Conversations In London
“London put ‘a bottle of champagne
to be shared with friends’ in the rider
and if I spill a little ilk
it’s only because Spring hasn’t
turned the room green yet.”
“Am I anthropomorphizing your bed again?
With the creaky back I don’t know
who else is going to translate for him
once we down.”
“The creases in your fire
look...
6 tags
Reject 2
If love is trying to make
shadow puppets with only one good hand, a ring
around the roses is a logistical nightmare
best left to city planners
with big dreams like aquarium installations
in the center dividers.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
Reject 1
If love is having her quinceanera and you forgot
her present back on the dresser
next to a photo of your great grandmother
who never married then a trajectory
towards an ocean is too romantic for you
to bask in as a story you use at a bar
when trying to buy a girl a drink.
-C.S. Henderson
4 tags
Someone’s trying to speak to us from the outside
window. You’re feeling like you’re heating,
that heat is all you are,
that any day now we will burn up,
and you want a story.
I tell you about how I spent ten years
as a dayfly, alone, and discovered
why butterflies dream in Japanese,
not unlike discovering you bathe in
old skin of lovers, not unlike discovering
you...
4 tags
The Planets Swim Quietly
The planets swim quietly, their projections stretching eternity
to eternity, and in the small hours I ponder a thing called “me.” He’s not ours,
Like a vase, utensils set, lap dog, or visions stitched from up-all-night dialogues.
More or less, he’s like the muffled strands of light coming through the sun-burnt might
of city haze. These days there’s not much...
4 tags
Mimicry: A Primer
As a child, you should learn the art of animal mimicry. For example, there is a fly that looks like a bee, eliciting the same screams and sweeping of hands. It hovers, though, like a fly which a bee can’t do — it can be discovered as false. You then grow up and learn that people can pretend, too, about many things: liking your favorite band, knowing the way around town,...
4 tags
Montage
There’s a collection Of polices regarding If you should be kissed At a funeral, or danced With in a movie, baked a pie To welcome the summer, or Have a drink to mourn Your newly deceased tomato Plant. Your renewals are Coming up, and the rates Are almost unliveably high, So it’s time to pick which Circumstances you’d like to Carry to a half-deserted Retreat against...
4 tags
Good Morning
Somewhere in the ceaseless development of new ways to talk about collecting burns, we are trying making art out of the ruins of our last century before the cranes arrive.
I am standing, alone in the woods of Vermont, waiting for an orangey sky to bloom into a conduit of sense.
You are standing, alone in the marshes of Florida, awash in a dingy flow of unrequited searching.
If love is...
4 tags
Accident
The ink bled through the page onto her white skirt Looks a bit like Africa I told her She threw the pen upon the table unamused Take it off I said no skirt is worth this much trouble
-C.S. Henderson
4 tags
The girls wait for their elevators to ride up in front of a suit training down their blouse, flattening their skirts, necklace slipping a pulsey millimeter. They’ve come upon us, beautiful and lively, with keys to the hearts of the city and spires catching their lightning as they look at the chipped polish poking through a wedge, matching the tile of the twelfth floor.
-C.S....
