All These Rooms

Here’s my contribution to Worsty’s monthly challenge, which I neglected to revise like I thought I was going to.
It starts how it ends,
or maybe there’s no beginning, no stopping at all.
Either way, when I walked on all fours
and my dreams at night were lifting my hands, were
faces making faces,
I don’t think I was what I […]

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Everyday a fair amount
of risings and of knocking down
still unbending as she wore her crown - the one she did not know before -
she wore and wore and pimped and whored
and went to battle both with and not-so-for that little bourbon body
carried her through the streets and up
and up to touch the tops
of mountains and […]

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nolovernobrothernokeeper. 
In a land where grass won’t grow
this is a field
imagine the grass is knee-high and touching
the grass is the wind tuning
this field. 

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if your heart turns
to mud
to avoid the bitter glances
of the sun
do not call for it—
tell your tongue to
follow
it down.

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If you want the hallowed whomper stick (TM), you must win the following challenge. And since you are naughty, asymmetrical little (all these) room-mates, I challenge you to write a somehow-symmetrical poem. The symmetry can be something like lines of equal length, number of letters, number of words, etc. Or pick some other type of […]

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watching the faces
in the mirror above the bar
red cheeks underlining shallow eyes
magenta lipstick trying to hide
wrinkled lips
I think up metaphors
to quantify their sadness:
miles of birdless telephone poles
beneath an absent sky,
five unreturned phone calls,
or maybe it’s just one brother
with dreams of scarred elbows.
I don’t know.
but I think that
sadness cannot be quantified. it just pours
out of you […]

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When the whole crowd is circulating such that soon everyone is covered in blood, and I call for him
Fearful Frank! Fearful Frank!
No one turns for me.

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Without it becoming complete crap? Or just something kind of absurd, surreal? Seriously, I’m trying to start a poem for the Dorothy poetry prize, because why not, but I keep writing crap.
You guys have any favorite “happy” poems that I could read for guidance?

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YOU CAN LIVE
7.1.06
Waiting for the sunrise
I walk down to the Hawthorne
bridge. I’ve decided. Today,
I’ll be the brother
who has died
and you can be the one
who fills his pockets
with rocks. You can throw
them at the parked cars
as you pass the open mouthed
mansions in Ladd’s addition
as their windows dart
and twitch with that last
burst of dreaming that comes
just before […]

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Song

A sudden lack of desire
strips the night from the waist up -

Bare-breasted night,
Lime-leaf Night,

Night of a thousand catfish
feeding on the surface

of a city pond in spate -
the sky’s discarnate twin

disturbed by their blind hunger.
This is the night

mother would sing of
from the bottom of the well,

the one that […]

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