Poetry From the Vault
For the last three weeks or so all of my blogging energy has gone into our business blog over at Fresh Ground Consulting. But I have not abandoned the personal blog. A poem of mine from 1993 or thereabouts, below, one of the few that had held up over time for me.
At the time I wrote it, I was reading three or four times a week all over Long Beach, California, and a feature reader once a month or so. Oddly, there were more coffeehouses around then than now, at least in Long Beach. People would rent a space, throw the espresso machine up on sawhorses, put out some rusty lawn furniture, and call it a coffeehouse. And they all had open mic poetry nights, providing at least one venue every night of the week for poets who wanted to read.
You can’t get away with the sawhorse and lawn chairs anymore, but it was a fun time.
Intestinal Fortitude
Run away, run away, run away. --Monty Python
Protocol prohibits the absence of flavor
when referencing childhood.
Gray memories are disallowed
by color commentators guarding the gates.
Your father wounds must be red
and your mother wounds a smothering shade of
not-quite-white blankets stacked to the ceiling.
Breathlessness and breathlessness.
I sit on my hands.
We were all of us fools gold for our parents.
And now everyone wants to be a comedian
but no one can take a joke.
They keep bleeding all over my shoes,
leave rust thumb prints on my forehead,
go fishing for gaggles of children inside me,
write epitaphs:
He was careful.
Then he wasn't.
And this made him lucky.
My ambivalence is hermetically sealed.
The windows here are the thickest damn windows.
I cannot speak your name without dreaming.
Family is an abnormal topic,
like sponge-fungus pie or cows with ambition.
The true name of this poem is Give Me Your Blessing.