Blue Fire
When in the morning, the star grass
Freezes like frostweed,
I feel at home.
Save for this brown button-up, which chokes
Half my neck. These clothes
Are a costume, and though all clothes are (costumes),
Some suit me better,
& I know, like Plato his Forms,
That my costumes elude me in the closets of strangers.
Nothing
Of mine fits,
Nor do I like anything
I own.
The dog is wrong
The food is wrong
The furniture suffocates
& this house is too small for its fire, which burns
Within, & whose flames’ tongues
Are too long & too blue
For the square feet
They’ve been given.
Variation on Gwendolyn Brooks
First fail. Then fiddle.
Read a poem. Decide to mimic.
Fail. Do this first. Then fiddle.
Take someone else’s idea, try
making it your own. Realize
you can’t. Let it go. Let years
go by.
Find what you think is your voice.
Find out it isn’t. Find out
it both is & isn’t.
Return to stealing.
This time fail at failing.
Steal well. Steal
only that which you need.
Know it was never an issue. Know
you were the issue. Change. Know
how to change.
Self-Portrait
He wants to be
a brutal old man, everything
Robert Creeley has described
in his perfect poem, Self-
Portrait, which one would like to be
a portrait of one’s self.
But it is not. One is not
a brutal old man. One is
a young man
who wants to be a brutal old man.
Who wants to be aggressive, & mean
spirited. I am
a young man who does not want to be
young, perhaps because he is not
young enough, & so would select
death, instead. Or perhaps because he does not feel
young, does not feel it is right to be
young
& therefore happy. Perhaps
he can forefeel
the dread,
the slaughter-room
babies must enter one day.
Vonnegut spoke of the artist
as a canary
keeling over
in the presence of disease.
When I was still
unborn, I wrapped a cord
around my neck
& hoped life would choke me
the moment
it happened.
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