The Target Bird

October marks, more or less, the half-way point of this experiment (for those who don’t know, The Target Bird is my attempt at writing a poem a day for a year), and I’m amazed at how rapidly the time has passed. I’m humbled by the many people who follow along and provide encouragement to continue. This is a project for myself, but I’m thrilled that people seem to enjoy reading this blog as much as I (mostly) enjoy writing them.

Some things I’ve learned/relearned since I started doing this:

-Having a deadline to meet (11:30 AM EST) is a great way to get you in the “zone” even when you don’t want to write (similar to squeezing that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube).

-At its core, poetry is a list of obsessions.

-Inspiration (capital I) is mostly BS, but inspiration isn’t.

-Poetry = conversation.

-The muse is treated holier than it should be; it’s a base and friendly creature, wanting not sacrificial wine but a shot at the bar.

-I like questions, but no one ever asks them.

-I like questions, but I don’t ask my poetry enough of them.

-This project can be exhausting.

-Nothing beats exhaustion better than reading an exciting book or poem.

-Tangentially related: I wish I had more time to look at #the feedback project.

-New York is easy to write about; insurance is hard to write about.

-Poems often surprise me with what they reveal after I’m done.

-Whole truths are often half truths, and vice versa.

-I don’t recognize the poet who started writing these back in April; he seems weird.

I’m going to be pulling some poems in the next couple of weeks to revise and send out for publishing. Also, I know I have a lot of followers I don’t follow back — I don’t 1:1 follow, but am always happy to meet new people and see some new stuff in my dashboard, so please say hi.

for a million ephemeral years
and with a fondness that breaks
my heart, you smile at the split
of the fragile parabola caused by
the open door. As I leave for work
I’m cast out into the wonder
and cough it up for days.

-C.S. Henderson

If love weren’t so hot
it wouldn’t be so difficult
to move across the room.
I leap from the bed to set
the air conditioner to frost,
hoping it will retain
the empire in Egypt,
our pale pyramid bodies
floating along the breach.

-C.S. Henderson

My grainy youth waits in the bathroom,
washing his face of the poems he composed
while running away from me. I hate him,
his sneer at my disgust with his modicum
of understanding that poetry needs to collect
the sweat he’s laid across the streets of
LosAngelesBostonRaleighBrooklynTucson,
and splay him with a broken toothbrush.
He bleeds vanilla and gold and I am sad
he hoarded such antiquity in a world
that looks out from a lawn of plastic mint.
I feel I am dying as I smell the floor
creep away from my feet.

-C.S. Henderson

We filled our pockets with sand
to commemorate the final dance
as we waded out across the
Mediterranean. Raise the rhythm,
they cried, make it as attractive
as she, pointing to the clouds,
develop our narrow, antiquated
image, yelling into Copurnicus’
telescope like a dictaphone.
We invaded a ring unfit for an
encore, the floor gouged by
the fine ladies’ heels, and if I
remember correctly, I wept
at the foot of a bloody spear
and begged to be crucified
in the sky at the horns.

-C.S. Henderson

We’ve elevated the laughs by leaving
security outside, the bandaged tooth
a ruse to protect our misquotes (was it
Chandler who said alcohol was love
in three steps? Pass the flask before
I bleed all over myself). Would you lend
me a hand? Sincerity’s grown so heavy
and I haven’t worked it out in months.
It isn’t a joke that every shock from exposed
light leaves me a little more orange for you.
For the sake of our metamorphosis,
let’s box up the rebelling and have a quiet
evening around the coffee table.

-C.S. Henderson

If I found time and wanted more
to wear winter away before it reached
its apex at our toes like the tide,
then I’ve found why it comes apart, too.

I spent the first five years with a plan,
but left the bones in the desert,
only the elephants examining what I’ve done.

I meant no harm, but step out of the car;
your eyes are filled with sand
and you left your mouth in the trunk.

-C.S. Henderson

I climbed the wall to hold my compass to the sun —
the cold North eludes me by directing itself in French,
and I don’t expect this to signify anything, but I can’t
be sure when I can’t tell you where I’ve been (my history
plagued by detours through Israel and Rimbaud, the holiest
poem lands, so holy I obscured it by wearing a lampshade
like a drunk (the other side of the coin is stumbling around
like a man 3 days clean, Windexed out of existence, a cold
and melting cube of soul), a trembling, solemn time
I’d prefer to show in pictures instead). The cold North is less
a philosophical description and more a bed to lay in
when struck with grief. I promise I only spent a week there,
plus a day for the irony of finding laughter at the supermarket
next to the chips — the bachelor special, so I’m told.

-C.S. Henderson

I had to leave you there because nothing’s
stainless. You know how my dreams have become,
the last thing we need is more shots. Everything begins
to sound like French: remontoires and I’m yelling again;
sonneries and you’re searching for quiet in the dark.
Please let me have another cup of coffee, I can’t share
another bed and si no vamos a hablar a mi boca en boca
¿qué nos queda?

Can we assume everyone in the magazine
articles are fake names? No one wants to reveal
the source of space between their words

and the minutes keep stopping, causing a bit
of yellow in my belly to spill over (if this is love
I’ll have to find a better way to hold myself together).

So what if I made a big deal about a box of nothing?
It’s not every day I find myself content with being empty
(the space between our sides didn’t exist until we folded).

-C.S. Henderson

My dreams are rusty, building
palaces of dead coral and letting
an hour be an hour. In a yellow midnight,

I lay awake with the sea, blew cobalt
bubbles in her mouth and watched
her cough up all the sugar in her coffee.

Occasionally, I’m allowed to miss you;
here’s a box of nothing, I was thinking
of your at the store (the cereal aisle
conjures you grainy and pieced apart).

I waited at the pond for moth music
and flames and you, a shadow bent
backwards, a dancer whirling the rain.

-C.S. Henderson

I will tell you what “the marvelous”
is if you’d stop playing the piano
like a blind man.

                  Half an avocado
is not lunch and a hand on the knee
is not an invitation to call the night
“beautiful.”

              You can’t go home until
we’ve properly phrased this with wit
and dry ice, packed it for publishing,
and shipped it to Washington as a
debt relief package.

-C.S. Henderson

What if we are wrong about the city
and it stands apart from itself and us,
stand making conversations in asides
we don’t hear. Dareisay the audience
is dead and no one can interpret the
symbols for us anymore, thrusting
authorship back into light and shrivels
up and dies because we forgot we
need to water everything, lest we end
up kissing the desert everywhere.

What if the city is another icicle
dripping off a porch, a spear or treat
when we’re too poor to eat or fight
like the rest. In a spell, we’ll forget
that it can be water as well.

-C.S. Henderson

You had started like ice, listening
to the dry bone cracks of cogs
slipping unlubricated past each other.
Fear of time abridged you when
shifting outgrew, arrow-pointed
tongues shot lines to each shore
of ‘berg. “The Earth has me again,”
with tears welling up, wanting
a glassy sea to gleam at your feet.

-C.S. Henderson

If love has come back to the open season
of sea, hunting the echoes of laughs thrown
into a void with fortune cookies, then I’ve wobbled
off course, feeling flustered at the thought that
the West is sequestering anyone with a head
cold and I can’t get rid of the sniffles. My attention
is lost, floated off in a canister suited for bears —
no wonder I can’t look you in the eye these days.

-C.S. Henderson

I painted fire in the hotels
to spare the world the drear light
of Zoo coming over Brooklyn.
I feel winter in my belly, wishing
snow lead my paths over roaring dusk,
battered out on a skillet as a poor man’s
remedy for migraines — the brain lies
fragile as China, the lips split
and left unable to have a fourth finger
later tonight. Instinctively,

New York reverberates at my feet,
the windows shaking in my skull.
The edges of my shirt will not make it
through hell, the cask of eternity
drained to douse out the burning
ballots of time.

-C.S. Henderson

If love has tossed its ball of yarn
into the howl of heaven, waiting
to unweave a kiss (the heart
of dust, the lungs of wax shifting
their place settings at the table
after a brushing thigh), by the end
of the night we’ll have to run
away from myth.

-C.S. Henderson

Left at the ruthless edge
of pillows, she waits noose-necked for
a breadth of light from the bending heart
of dawn.

The wayward slash of crow
across the finite house
in a nova of suburbia,

moments of rest tending
to remain restless, fecking
her hands away from time.

Space waits for her
at the corner, a cup of coffee in hand.
Or, it has already boarded
the plane.

-C.S. Henderson

A lonesome cat prowls about
the fire ladders, blood blue
by calculations, closeted
dreams, and dinner. There are things
still to tooth on an eave,
sleep spills out on the step
before Autumn. He wastes
the waltz of lives waiting
for you.

-C.S. Henderson

As a poet afraid of dreams,
I can’t tell if you’re joking
when you tell me the head fills
with ice and spills orange onto our
fists when you sleep.

As a poet afraid of sincerity,
I stammer when dyed blue
by the presence of mountains
at the edge of the closet,
reminding there are still things
enough to sink a tooth into.

As a poet afraid of mosquitoes,
I filter the blood into a rope
of misquotes strung across
my waist and untied only at dinner,
when the simmering of a perfect
mole upon a perfect shoulder
calculates the steps needed
to trace a waltz to sleep.

-C.S. Henderson