February 2012
1 post
In case wondering
you may misdirect to: www.proemproem.tumblr.com for p(r)oems/pictures/such
butcha dont have to sucka.
March 2011
7 posts
He Could Have Been Sleeping
There is a hum beneath our layer of the world,
sly as a vent turning on in the night,
unbroken and low.
-
Mother sometimes pushes my head down
so my ear can almost meet that sound at the thin
divide. But she does not know
-
there is so much earth between this place
and the other. There is so much silence
and movement. So much fire
-
underneath even the hum, and under the fire,
a red blanket with...
Please do tell me if this poem makes any sense
Last Night at Home
-
and my mother goes with the dogs
for a walk. I toil with laundry bins
and bleach, drying the last of my clothes
in the dark. When they’re tumbling, I sliver
outside to my father’s backyard.
-
I pick a snail up from the dirt
then put him down again, miles off
on the lip of an ivory hydrangea.
He curls inside himself when I whisper
You live somewhere else now,...
Sunday at 10 p.m.
and you are painting
cobwebs over a body,
intricately crossing silver lines
-
in mid air above my stomach,
turning each to a tangible, sticky string
with your luminous voice
-
which in this place is tinny, whistles
like a steam train in the darkness
that my dreaming always brings.
-
When I wake I cannot rise
for fear of being caught, so I
turn over, press my ear to the...
I don't know what to do.
February 2011
5 posts
Colonial
Outside there are people waiting.
They have lights on their heads and they
are standing very still and tall amongst the trees.
-
Inside there is nobody. Nobody living
next door, nobody sleeping beside me,
nobody checking the windows or touching the taps.
-
Outside there are streetlamps waiting
to take me. They are so loud! Everybody
has to go deaf or die unless they listen.
-
Inside there is...
Los Angeles, 2011
There is something going on outside, the dog
is lifting her ears, see? The muscles in her jaw
are tightened, too.
-
The backyard is an ocean
nobody is swimming to find me—the doors are all
locked anyways—but that wont stop something
from going on outside.
-
Once I looked out there and saw
a light around a body, and that body
bent over itself and there was no one else.
-
That is how I...
Adult Swim, and Kristen
has her hand around mine behind the changing rooms,
an inch deep in the mud, our toes squirming
under the gaze of Older Boys who can swim the deep end,
but cannot swim now.
-
I feel like I am swimming sometimes
when I’m not. I want to plug my nose and
close my eyes. Kristen’s mouth is wide
and she is talking for me.
-
Everything is simmering down this summer.
Even the trees are quieter this year....
The Blue Dresses
The dead sometimes
rise up in us like grass,
like weedy yellow flowers
with sour stems. You said
they reach you, roots moving
in night. You dream
of everybody colored
by a strange veil.
-
The dead sometimes
spread within us, wide
lawns of blue dresses,
long-sleeved and all
the same shade. There
is always and never
a face there, I think of it
like a fact told by
somebody else.
-
The dead...
January 2011
5 posts
When Suddenly Night
There are salmon, red muscles swallowing
river, diving down into cold water. They
are not cold like you are cold, huddled
in between two pines with your knees at your chin.
-
It’s evening. The light is hushing itself
out of the trees, out of the ice splintered river.
If anyone else is around they’re quiet too.
Only the salmon are splashing softly.
-
I watch your eyes moving beneath
flimsy lids. I...
Antonio Burn
Flipping over the tar, sun drinking
behind your head as it beams with the sweat of July,
I remember how August looked on you last year,
how your lips caught each bead.
-
Your muscles bunch up
around my waist, pushing me face down
on the duvet, but my night terrors still
are of you breaking open (you haven’t
yet), seething only the terrorist screams
of a man at the mouth.
-
I rise from you like...
Alternate Universe
I see the spindle spinning
in the corner of your eye, the city
where Samson is holding his hair
and Delilah is singing. The way
the plates of the earth move, so
do all of us shift and take our turn;
somewhere I am lifting my shirt;
somewhere I am touching the tendons
of a horse’s legs; somewhere
you are in a supermarket holding
a cantaloupe. If so, there is a place
where Samson sings too, a...
Plea
Fingertips against the flimsy
glass pane of my grandma’s
front porch window, with my breath
making storms on the glass,
whispering Oh Universe! I ache
for you! as if I know
what that means, what that
could possibly entail.
And if the Universe answers me
it is only in the way the sky looks
at night in refinery towns,
how it billows and flashes
with a strange light I have not known
anywhere else....
Mckinley Bridge
It still takes all of me
to not slither like a cunning snake,
to not cower like a hungry little dog,
to not wail like a cat with its claw stuck in living
room furniture
at the sight of the shuddering
silver alighting
from the sudden refinery breath
beneath our wheels.
And if this is how the world ends,
alright.
And if this is how I go,
let’s go.
Let me go as sudden as
a light flashing once among...
December 2010
3 posts
Overexposure
He had experienced fifty years of
direct loneliness.
The close and constant contact to
the skin made him grow
like a silver-backed gorilla.
Once a nightlight, he turned into
a panther. Sitting over the clouds
there was a god of water sending
oceans in all one direction.
He could have pushed his way
out of this typhoon, this bulldozer
coming from the fingers of every
body else. Wonder...
Does anyone else like "I Survived..."?
I have never heard anyone talk about it or read about it anywhere. To be honest, I am not even sure if they’re still making the show, but I still watch it.
It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. I mean, it’s ridiculous and horrifying and upsetting and all that, and the whole show is pretty much just people sitting in dark rooms talking (PS I am not kidding. That is...
November 2010
14 posts
Baby Moon (another poem I have no memory of...
They built a light that would
hold the moon.
It was undetectable and fragile,
quiet and cold.
-
The surface moon was a bit lighter,
the water glistened,
ice frosted with
years of longing.
-
The internal layers were
burning, though,
even in the cold,
with textbooks and
an unspoken pouring
of language feeding
fire.
Lures for the Eyes
Sometimes when there is a storm
that is not yet a storm, rather just
an idea that the tops
of the trees dreamed,
I find myself watching the holes
in the leaves.
-
Sometimes when there
is a storm that has always been there,
the growing dark centers
of each of your terrible eyes,
I find myself watching my face
in the spots of dead mirrors.
-
And the holes do not know
what is coming, but are...
You Come Home
On the back porch looking
at the beginning of all
of the trees, the stark opening,
our man-made forest,
our backyard and all
of our neighbors’;
-
at the glass table watching
the nighttime, the shadow
of dark matter shielding
bright fire from galaxies
too far away;
-
on my knees which are biting
the floor, on my hands, now,
the cold of my stomach just
finding that point of such...
Why do I always do this to myself?
Friday Night:
1/4 bottle of white wine, 2 Four Lokos, 4 (ish?) bowls of weed, about 6 shots of Vodka, half a Vicodin, half an ecstasy.
At one point, and this could have been the paranoia, I thought I was going to die.
Once
in the field of his alien bedroom,
i was taken by the wrist
by a disembodied hand that looked
like mine.
-
it pushed me down into his drowning
lust, broke open
my chest and helped him pour
his terror into me
-
as if my body needed
anything, as if my heart
weren’t full enough
with blood.
-
so many little girls are eaten whole,
raised up by others’ arms
to eucharist-rich mouths,
-
then slowly...
The Return
I have heard it said
that death gives one
return, just
one.
-
The dead
come back
for a moment or two,
often only minutes
after leaving
as if they’d
forgotten something
then forgotten that
thought, too—
-
see, they won’t take
anything, leave
anything, say
anything; their hands
too slippery,
their mouths
too tight.
-
Sometimes
I like to think
I’ll take a sight
back with me, like
my mother
who...
Another Country
First I ran out of postcards, then
I ran out of money, then
I ran out of words, then
I ran.
-
It didn’t matter, really.
If I’d told you,
you would not have
understood. Its one
of those things that burns
your eyes
unless
you’re looking it right in the face.
I dreamed last night
that I was married to Rachael Smith.
And we had a six year old son named Artemis with blond hair.
And we lived in Godric’s Hollow.
And we were listening to the new Sufjan album, and crying all happy and stuff.
It was a pretty ace dream!
October 2010
2 posts
About to turn this shit in. Thoughts?
“Lust for Life”
I am tasting the backs of my hands
so that I will know them as well as anyone,
leaning drunken on the greasy seat
of a speeding Boston taxicab in Autumn.
My friends are beautiful and cruelly
mine. I want to taste the backs
of their hands, invest my body in them
like a vine. We are swaying slightly, all of us together
as if air were running water and we’d
-
all jumped...
September 2010
7 posts
Isn't it great when kind of stupid movies have...
“I don’t know what I’d do without you. I don’t deserve to cut your toenails! Although it was the highlight of my breakfast.”
-Maid to Order
I find myself not missing anyone.
Except my mother.
I mean this.
No one.
Why?
I am only posting this because my Microsoft Word...
Sometimes it’s as if
your backbone is only
pretending, a sham of this
breaking canine body slumped
in front of me. Your knees, too,
seem lazy and hateful.
Your chest plate pops in
and back out and aches. Your pelvis is always wrecking itself
before it ever has time
for checking itself.
Sometimes it’s as if
your underbelly is grappling
with the floor, to the death—
bloody Dog: I know it’s not
your...
Manic
It’s late and I
am still awake,
my father’s blue
eyes roving wildly
beneath their lids
in dreamy fits
of reluctant sentimentality,
each surge of flaky vision
cardinal, those first roots bursting
from the violence
of the bulb.
-
The mind is planted
long before it opens, like a tulip,
which must be buried in November
and forced to feel the chill
of dead December,
whose callous bulb refuses
to just...
Apparently I wrote this last night?
Okay, so I write a lot of poetry, and sometimes I will forget I wrote something and then find it on my computer and be confused for about two seconds before I remember I wrote it the night before. I just found this… I guess you could call it a poem, which Microsoft Word is telling me I created last night. I have no memory of this. There is only one line that I have a vague recollection of...
What Hometowns are for
You threaded the rope,
tied the knot,
put the lasso ‘round
your dainty neck
then wondered why
you couldn’t leave,
why you
could only run in place
and couldn’t breathe
August 2010
8 posts
Jupiter
there are all these little
souls still awake.
and i watch them sprout
little roots in the night
like tulip bulbs.
are you worth
all the money in holland?
when my mother cuts
flowers from the yard
they litter the dining
room table with smudges
of bruised color.
even this is a blessing.
we are not jupiter.
we are happy in our
atmosphere.
we swelter in the heavy luck
of living...
I DONE THUNK
HERE’S WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE SWITCH:
Okay, so I’m a woman. And I know I want kids, somewhere deep, deep down in my ovaries I know I want kids, and I want the father of those kids to be someone like Ben Affleck, who wears flannel shirts and can fix the plumbing and whose genes belong solely to my goddamn children.
So keep this in mind when I say that this awkward, too-long movie has ...
