February 2012
31 posts
7 tags
I'm Still At The Office
Looking at four postcards of ocean
and deciding whether to dip my coffee
into tonight or wait until it tires itself out.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
In Which The Poet Thinks Today Is A Piece Of Shit
I.
Whereas the present takes about two weeks
to get to us, a blindside rough-house plowing
over of my sense of direction and subtlety,
I’m fleecing the city out of its gold fillings
for taxing me every time I even look at a thing
I love. What’s harder to deal with than that?
That the clouds are an assault on blue?
That the typhoon whistle nags even in the subway?
That...
7 tags
Reject 40
If love is the ultimatum
between daydreamery and
decimation, horizontal or
not we should lock the bruises
in a vault and wait for the awkward
surge of vigilant light to crumple
the passports for our depth.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
Brooklyn From Atop The Khan Building
A cloud hangs on the line like a coat and bridges
give way to a chasm that amplifies the chime
of blood colliding in measureless hail.
The half-intermitted bursts of man about the honey-
dew morning flails a summer fragment in the hunt
and watch caribou give way
to the carbine. A fountain sprays a mazy dance
against the broken teeth blue and dying,
finding in the flood a splinter of...
7 tags
Reject 39
If love is a paper airplane crumpling
as an affectation of daydreams
left in the cold and croaking for depth
in the lightness of our youthful bruises,
it happens to be a judgment of
the horizontal vigor that forces us
out of affection like we’ve forgotten
our passports to it in a vault.
-C.S. Henderson
9 tags
In Which The Poet Dreams Of Former Loves
(this is an edit of surprising the night
super-imposed to a pinch of trees blushing
in cardinals in a false winter. this is an edit
of mockery, a practical joke with a punchline
that ends up spoiling the dance party) —
When I should have stuck to coffee I tried
to wake up in pursuit, or is that a sentence
minutely reversed now that I’ve gotten to work?
It’s bitter purple...
8 tags
Can The Interstices Be Written Into?
I would have muttered “breeze,”
but there’s nothing promising about it
or a crumb of wall to escape it. And then
there was the day we named the clouds’
shapes “shiftless” and after their onomatopoeia
blowing through the roofs.
We ended up with all sorts of words
that tried to set first for the insurance claims.
They assured us
they had it under...
7 tags
582 Love Sonnets to the Rock: 8
After the idea mentioned in this post by lazlazlaz
What existed here before we
were able to measure
the residue of unhappiness
in the shapeless carats of diamond
sized city? The question outpours
a million glassy eyes caught
in spontaneous howl and gnaws
at our clamoring enamel.
Could we have made a thing
exist as a thing without form,
the difference made between the soft
lingering...
9 tags
In Which the Poet Naps in a Garden
The catalog of forms gnaws
at me in inessential melancholy,
praising postcard cities over the present.
Why do you do this, catching what memories
are erased in words by surprise as if you haven’t
already lost them? Or is it that as you sway
cocooned in a hammock you do not think them,
conjecturing that memories do not exist outside
an indivisible existence galloping out a network,...
7 tags
In Which the Poet Arrives, Dwarfed in a City
I do not expect sleep to pursue me in revolt
of sincerity and the wooden palettes
I was forced to put up after the whole house
started imbuing outside with a sense of grief.
My doctor said the only unironic image he’s seen
in his days of practice is a man weeping outside
a supermarket for all he could never get
himself, or officially, “the heart’s broken feet.”
To...
6 tags
Waste Management
Both sides of the road are lined
in guesses, and better to leave
them dried up and corked to save
sentiment from spoiling them.
It’s not that my legs are tied
as my hands often feel, that being
unable to push my way past the moon
when it pants with its tongue out
and whines unfetchingly doesn’t mean
I can’t run away; it’s not that at all.
Except, I’d like to...
6 tags
Straight against the cross light
I confuse and clutter the merry
tickets for admission into
this cold afternoon - feels
instead of rot-gut radiance,
spilling onto my lap
in beer and frost.
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
Time Management
The minute I start talking about being
on a bus headed to Boston
I’ll have to address what bled
and has been drying for the last 5 years
and left the Newbury brick tainted
in corner store shutter manic-at-closing
metal tinge when I breathe: in some half
window of night, the irreversible
spatial investment of the body
interjected from its dream jungle of concrete
forms left...
7 tags
The Consistency of Nostalgia 5
Everything is gray outside and beautiful
packed in grocery bags and concert
jungles of dreams bulletting out of my gut.
I keep shattering the landmarks of the city,
I thought the Chrysler building would be OK
if it fell off the coffee table — it’s a matter
of having to rely on something internal
like a compass or smoke signal or heart
murmur, something obviously brittle
and...
7 tags
The Consistency of Nostalgia 4
The lifespan of a fact is how long
it takes to roll out from under
my nose, it’s a shame I have to
apologize so much for that —
I think it might be more helpful
to crawl into the snow than let
the sun throw mucusy tissues
and UVB all over me and make
it OK to get sad in the winter
as long as I remember the Demerol
clouds are just a trick of light.
The weakest part of the...
9 tags
Reject 38
If love has held your body close
like the horizon’s scream and meant
to dissolve the sledgehammers
of wistfulness that pound each great
holiday song into the gardener’s bed
but instead sang to you the revenges
that trot over today like the grapefruit
at breakfast, constitute your want
into a pinpoint of light, wrap it
in cellophane, wait for it to elate
in its dust and...
thoughtsbetold-deactivated20120 asked: who's your favorite writer and the reason?
7 tags
I tried to raze the ceilings for creating
the appalling gap between me and the cosmos,
but fell asleep in its rainstorms. I wake up
and am forced to interpret and reinterpret
the trees and door knobs and bags of chips
and think its ludicrous to have to think
so much about the world’s forms.
Later today, I’ll pick up the sun,
but then I don’t know what to do with him,...
7 tags
Reject 37
If love is between laundry folds
and metal ores yet to be separated
and shimmer as an afternoon banjo-
plucked porch light clack of teeth
in a vaulting kiss over the high bar
of our desire for one another
to scream when dark crumples
around us, then we might as well
shower while we wait.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
Reject 36
If love stuffs the horizon into a box
in a box in a box in a box in a joke
and mails the world off in a concession
to the rising prices of everything
in malls and stores, making Valentine’s
day an impossible feat to weather,
let’s give it an award for at least
sticking with us long enough
to let the inky bruises green over.
-C.S. Henderson
7 tags
The Consistency of Nostalgia 3
The rainbows terrorized the bread crumb
city, reminding it of the serpentine flood laying
it its hole. And so it invented decay to ward
off the heft of its sky. A taunted god is a mean
drunk and calls throughout the night.
Things separate in order to appear, the city
had to leave to let the cranes and scaffolding
rise in layer cake and steam-blowing stacks
of muffin hovels. It tries to...
7 tags
The Consistency of Nostalgia 2
The whole idea fell apart, ascribing clouds
to the cult of objects, which only begets
a culture of objects and its poor analogs
of exhaling and shitting (an arch has about
as many calories as the whole land
of bison and I can’t fathom adding a second).
I try to retreat from the stones and
only imagine the arch, but without
the stones imagining an arch between them
they might as...
7 tags
The Consistency of Nostalgia 1
the pitch of the city throws the clouds
into nothing — treating objects like
culture evicts the culture of objects
leaves a ring on the table
and capitulates magnificence
into the moment trash is put curbside
analogs of breathing and eating
are unreliable narratives
wishing looks good as a diorama
but there are some misplaced trees
and a tear in the corner
leaks indiscriminate...
6 tags
Saigon Still Stands With Cleveland, Laughing
Shitty little pyramids sprouted out
of the sand like acne, leaving
out adolescence where everyone
can mock it. How shoddy
the angles, how boring the shape.
Snap the twig blue sky
for the moment to release
its motion like tea,
filling the pockmarks burrowed
by all of our rocket ships.
(Why do we expel
ourselves into a sea
with too many
dimensions to cup?)
-C.S. Henderson
6 tags
We were waiting for an awareness
of want, bundles of ghosts folded
into half-light notions we’d rarely
use if we weren’t all of a sudden
tired all the time and focused
on sillier talents like juggling
or frying eggs. The ground is small
and how do we even know what
we want when we have to contort
so much to stand up to the other?
That little lyric moment when trees
ignite...
7 tags
The slub of dopes bound
to the ogre spike of dreams
wept at the poor return
of the city, mimicking them
in their desire for signs.
-C.S. Henderson
8 tags
Nostalgia remembers its consistency
as burning copper pushed to the breast,
running through a forest of unachieved
branches and recovered the height of the future
in technology foreign and unpossessed.
There was a realization that dreams
erase the impressions not fully worked up,
and that elsewhere is a negative mirror
thrusting ripeness back into its idea,
waiting a life time of dreams...
7 tags
In Which The Poet Remembers His Childhood
I.
The one that operates death
stacks me in LEGO bricks
until I’m a pirate ship.
II.
Everything smells like aloe vera
and has the excitement of the first spring
of an unhooked bra, the wind repeating
everything like it birthed
a new set of teeth.
III.
There are shards stabbing
my feet, eyelashes mast
catching all vision at my back.
There’s an ebb, to move
away from...
9 tags
An Initial Offering To Face You
Perhaps it was the angle of teeth in the light,
or the trip-up of the circle’s continuous orbit about itself,
or the new sound of freedom blaring in a metallic 17 second
clank that convinced the slack-jaws that a bad man’s
life is fun to lead. But they left a note by the bed,
a monster of 21 faces scribbled and laughing
at how much we left at the table when we decided
to poke...
My poem, "A Woman Is A Woman", published in the... →
Read this young man’s poem, please!
6 tags
Spit-shine Eternity
or at least wipe off the dust.
It gets old to always stare into
the future as if it’s looking back
(if a mirror reflects all
mirrors does it reflect
itself? Know your
paradoxes!):
Cleaning every memory in salt
water and fear drowning;
wishing for steak but hating
the wait of a heating stove;
loving everyone and drinking alone;
getting drunk and still loving everyone;
getting...
