In an Echo

a turned wrist accounting for all
but one stretched tendon
its particular curl reconstructable
only in the event of
a more formidable turn of events
perhaps a twisted finger
or rapidly torqued thumb

I am still a Patriot

flag snaps the air in anger
taught, its striped back stretches
furls
and springs, whipcord

were I still starred
and straight backed
coddled over the cobbled
streets of

were I still spangled
spattered with the
cold darts of winter
starlight

I would walk on the crisp ground
and leave heavy prints in crystal
and leave heavy water molten
and roiled in my heavy tread
and softly, stick swinging in arcs
once circumscribed by
Finn, and Saturn, and all those

you might remember what was said
when the first lines lashed
with this winded page
when the first lines lobbed
and lo'

there might be my shadow
there might be a ripple under my shadow
that twins me and my distortions and
there might be my shadows shadow, which is all light and
lingers on my back in brightness so I cannot see
it and my shadow but it
and my shadow steal glances
of one another over my shoulder
and play footsie beneath my feet

and, when I am distracted, I
think they hold hands behind me and
confuse the lovers of light
with their twined fingers of shimmer and shade

but I am not the only one

FYI

So I'm doing a thing to make my writing better. Here is the thing.
Every week I'm going to write a couple poems. Every six months, I'm
going to publish a long posts with revisions of the past six month's poems.

Hopefully they will be less bad by the time they show up the second time.

This isn't the first time I've posted a bunch of revisions of previously posted poems, but before I had classes to motivate me to do so, whereas now I'm doing work that's about as far from poetry writing as can be reasonably imagined. Anyway, I hope it works.

bad poem 1

In the awful hollows between
stars and planets, I wonder if there
is stretch, or torque, or some other
non-trivial force on
sedentary helium

which brings me round to my question.

In the spaces between
the breaths
of our
shared
sentence

what torrents and vortices have
coupled?

Perhaps another day will find us folded
or stretched like disks among the stars
as Aasimov imagined.

I am candid

Dash and Clip
Collared.
On Aberdeen Avenue, at the intersection with the purple stoplight
but another time, maybe

full air

The most important coffee invention of the 21st century.


Recommended by Experts.

When used properly, produces a remarkably good espresso-style coffee and an excellent American-style cup. In fact, it produces a better espresso-style coffee than many home machines that cost twenty or thirty times as much.

The most important Experts use properly.
When recommened, produce a remarkably good and excellent cup, in fact.
Better coffee. Many home cost twenty or thirty times as much.

What nipple of tongue tip. What track of the line.

Listed, shirked.

One day Experts will crave to be recommended, be left because they cost twenty or thirty times as much, will drink in the dark bitter draught of their, well.

A better espresso-style coffee than many.

someday-saplings

Foulmouth, remember the
trip of tongue, the stale
taste

Not paired, or barely brusque,
bands of dark stone stumble
bads of brusque pears and peach pits
(bads: pl. groups of grotesqueries, holding not much appeal beyond the morbid)

With a thin knife, the slip-slit
with a snicker snack the apple, cored for consumption,
deprived of seed,
Reduced to fruit, food, from the pulpy womb of
someday-saplings

crisp, like the taste of autumn, and
like autumn, folded in faint must, is it strange
that while spring smells at first of rot and winter
stabs the nostrils with the blank tang of steel and
there is, about autumn, only the musk of age, as if
grandfather had empty his pipe all across the
summer and mothballed it to scent it (like he used
to do for our cedar linen chest) and winter
only came when Anya, the cleaning lady, lifted the
cushioned lid and emptying it sprayed febreze and
mint and bleached each
and
every
sheet blank