DAY 14: Without a net

Sometimes
my heart is on
the flying trapeze

launched into nothing
but a spinning, free fall
of motion.

My stomach is an acrobat
flipping end over end
in my midsection.

I practice this routine daily.

Each time
I wonder whether you
will be there to catch my
outstretched hand.

DAY 13: Sunday- Another week, another day off

Just got back from peer leadership. Working on the lit mag. Taking the day off.

DAY 12: Day Off

Taking this Saturday off.

DAY 11: Something old

I have to leave for a retreat in 8 minutes. So here is something really old- it is actually the first poem that I wrote for Slamicide.





9:00 am

Third day

British Lit

When He asks arms, crossed,
booked closed,
legs extended…
first row,
“Why do we have to read this?”

And there it is,
the question that sticks
out like a giant hairy mole;
the one on a first meeting that you try to ignore
but you can’t;
so you are left uncomfortable.

And I stall, because I know the
real reason;
it’s what I’m supposed to do.
It is covering the ground set
by navigators that
I know
are
lost.

“Well you see,
Beowulf is a historically
important text to Anglo Saxon culture in England…”

“But we are in America…”

And suddenly my classroom is transformed
to the OK corral,
the showdown has begun
and even though he is right,
I draw and try to shoot him down,
cause, after all

mutiny on the first week is never
a good thing.

“Well, it shows us the cultural ideals…
The hero was what a man should be in that society.”

“But that isn’t our society…”

And he’s right…
We don’t have men willing to
humble themselves,
lay down their weapons,
and fight
bare-handed
because it is honorable.

Weakness hides
behind blue steel,
black powder,
and a trigger.
Cause that’s what
makes a man.

Or else it is six
on one
beat downs in hallways and
bathrooms.
Turbulent seas of baby blue…
as if cowardice has become
something to be strived for.

Boys sulk away from
obligations to new life like
an armless Grendel
to sink themselves deep
into the marshy fen of the
next naïve girl.

Father figures are
fading fast and
what remains are
simpletons
that tell our boys that
passing pills and
making money is
more manly than
doing right.

I want to defend the
planks of these
hall-my Herot,

Rip off my shirt and
stand bare-chested

“You want this place? You gotta get through me first.”

But I know that Beowulf dies
and I’m not sure that I’d take with me
the dragon that plagues our young men.

So I stand there, book in hand--
broken sword.

And fight a
question
that can’t be silenced
or answered
in 180 days.

DAY 10: An apple a day

So in honor of Syracuse, I did a speed writing exercise with my last period class. You throw ou a theme and everyone writes for at least two minutes on that topic. When someone yells STOP, everyone must do just that. The stopper shares and calls on five others. When they are finished, the stopper picks the next theme. Repeat.

Someone threw out the phrase "an apple a day..."

I decided since I need to post and writing poems about fruit will win you a National Indies Champ title that it was worth a shot.




Someone once said
that you cannot peel an apple
inside your imagination.

You could spend hours
thinking of each curve
the way the light reflects off
its skin
be it red, green, or yellow.

It doesn't matter.

Once you try to
slip off the flesh,
strip it of color,
it will change.

The bruises that
appear will shift
their location.
The knife will
melt into another
knife when hidden beneath
waxy skin.
The length of each peel will become distorted.

They also say that
an apple a day will
prolong your life.

But I think that
if you keep trying to peel it,
you will improve
so that as your
last breath slips like
an orchard breeze from your tongue
heaven will appear.

But not as a brilliant white light,
but as a naked apple that will never turn brown
sitting perfectly beside one
complete
unbroken
peel.

DAY 9: Sick Days

Today my hatred of the outdoors
is liquefied
and sloshing around inside my head.

Mucus is an incubated chicken inside of my skull
it is pushing against every side
pressing against eardrums
chipping at the slimy, white prison.

I wish that when I heard it stirring
I could get crocheting needles
and prod into my ears
that have been as congested as the
New Jersey Turnpike since birth.

I would spray those standing too close with
geysers of thick yellow snot
like a liquid light show
that smells like sickness
and ruins clothing.

More than anything, I wish my kids would realize
that the reason that I am screaming
is because they are screaming.
And I in addition to wanting to lance my own ears,
it is painful.
Every time I move my head to shoot one of them a
look like "I will cover you in snow first."
the contents of my head shift
like a poorly packed moving van.

I would take a sick day, but I can't.
I know this is my fault.

This is the same reason that my father set out
pills made of his sickness
the fever that plagued us ever time the temperature rose.
His routine of protected him until the pollen
settled around him with the falling leaves.

If he missed any work
it was for the most serious of ailments.
He never hid from his flaws but instead
took them in until he became immune.

In my class there are 6 empty chairs
in a class of 29.

Maybe it is too easy
to hide from our flaws.
Take a sick day from our problems.

But what if we took them in-
inject indecision under my skin
like an allergy shot,
take two doses of my own passive nature,
and call that someone in the morning-
the girl with that smile that causes me to look away,
the better job that complacency has prevented.

I would spread symptoms and cures simultaneously-
to the close mouthed kid that the only way you are going
to overcome the speech impediment is to speak.

That we need to take in every bit of our
problems until we learn to deal with them,
so that we never have to call in sick again.

DAY 8: Driving/ Not Paying Attention

Well here ia an idea that came to me while driving. It is a new post though nothing to write hoem about. Day 8 down.




I want to tell him it's too late.
That steel plus neglect always equals
screwed to the power of slow decay.

But these are not things you say to someone suspended
fifty feet in the air,
working nights,
pissed off,
with a welder.

But he knows better than anyone
that once water slips like a lover
beneath the sheets of paint
that you either catch the symptoms
or begin the process of deconstruction.

But this overpass has been forgotten
patches of brown flakes
creep up the side like industrial ivy
and these men are asked to revive this city like
some secret garden.

But in the tending of
sparks and flakes
they are sowing
splinters of metal that move when you press them
even years after the restoration.

Their fathers planted
marigolds of sickness in their lungs
through years of
sucking in the pollen of their livelihood.

But some circumstances only allow so much growth.

So sons of blue color grow to
fill the same gaps in the latticework of
Baltimore that their fathers did.
Once this life slips like water into your lungs
You begin the slow drown of blue collar.

Each night as his wife winces
in the dark at the touch of his hands
from the roughness of his neglect,
he wishes that he could turn fingertips like
briars back into
thick mounds of tilled soil.

it's too late
but he already knows that.

DAY 7: Something

THOMAS

Yellow lines lay down like the perforated promises.
St. Christopher hangs from my rearview as necessary as an appendix.

Dusk descends—a Pentecostal spirit—as my eyes begin to sag with Jesus-posture bearing their cross of exhaustion.
Terrain as barren as her eyes when she said, “It’s been fun.”
The sunburned dust finds comfort in the baptism of twilight.

I pull up to the solitary stone figure on the landscape,
a psychedelic light show of stained
glass illuminated like a multi-colored moon.

Smiling seraphim
Welcoming.
Oak doors, wide as possibilities at age five,
Thick as close-minded hate.
Take the hammered steel handle in my hands
And pull with an almost-prayer
To find the house of God is closed for renovations.

Chuckling Cherubim is laughing his angel ass off.

Excommunication,
Return to the roads flagellation…mea culpa.

SERVICE STATION 1 MILE
Steeple of double crosses, slightly slanted
calling me to repent the road.
I must confess my faith is restored
in commercial gas chains.

Gospel:
Willie Nelson wailing the commandment,
“Thou shalt not let thy babies grow up to be cowboys.”
Sacraments a chili and cheese dog with a Coke.
Jim, grease stained pastor, dons his vestment overalls and cherry Skoal breath

Another 158 miles to my next confession…

DAY 6: At home week 2 (a sestina)

Something from an old notebook; I am going to count it as my at home this week. (Be minful that this online format may change the line breaks a little).


Parole
First memory of the morning—footsteps
that sounded on the dusty ground of the prison
like steel-toed raindrops. The sleep that barely found me was the eye
of the storm that brews in the courtyard below. A tear
slides down my face, for the hunt
in progress has ended my slumber—jarred by the stirring beyond these walls.

Shake the morning’s dew from my head and find the far wall
is papered by a large, dark man who steps
cautiously towards me as if he were hunting
some furious beast. “I assure you I’m not dangerous imprisoned.”
He smiles, he doesn’t know my language, but tears
me from the urine-stained cot a sadistic satisfaction in his eyes.

A priest greets me at the door with sorrowful, avoiding eyes.
He would like to help me, but I see the crucifix on the wall
behind me and think, “Who saved him?” If only I were still Catholic…long since torn
away from that disillusionment. I turn from him towards the steps
that lead me to my release, far beyond the prison.
Rays of light strike me like the arrows of the sun-hunter.

Frantically try to shield myself—hunting
for clarity. Hoodwinked by the light’s haziness, my eyes
finally find themselves. Guards line the farthest side and a sniveling mass of a prisoner
the other. Fuego. The ground becomes a palate blood, saline before the canvas of wall.
A uniformed man steps onto the Dias. A guard tears

my knees from function with his stick. Shirt torn
from my back—a flogging maybe—the man hunts
for the words—conspiracy treason. Sticks step
across a drum. Sadist offers me a cigarette and a blind for my eyes.
Take the free smoke. Towed to my predecessor’s pool, I wish the wall
would embrace me like a protective lover. Another priest from the prison

asks me if there is anyone I would like to write outside the prison
I blow smoke into my eyes. Maybe I can blame it for the tears
that have arrived like unwelcome guests. My only love, the wall,
knows my sole desire. My hands hunt
behind me for a door that I hope my eyes
had missed. The priest hangs his head in the soon to be memory of me and I step

back hard hoping for mortar of the prison will give way. Fuego. Bullets hunt
my organs with precision as they tear through me, leaving me with a dozen blind eyes.
Painted on the wall with each bullet’s brushstroke, I crumple. Sadist takes my cigarette—I die to his fading footsteps

DAY 5: Day Off

Using Saturday as my day off, but oh man do I have an idea.

DAY 4: Random Picture Exercise

Ok so for this exercise, I decided to type a random word into Google images and use it as a jump off point for a timed writing exercise.

So here is what I produced with the word RANDOM typed into Google images. (Apparently it is a picture of a random alley in Vancouver). (Ah Canada).




There is something reassuring in an alley.
No lanes to choose.
You pick the pace
and if someone else turns in,
you hit the gas

drive baby.

You’ve committed to the outcome;
no turning back now.

Just drive.

Knock over debris.
It might be all that stands in your way.
Maybe that’s why it's here
you’re here-
we’re here.

Discarded.

Your city life lead you down claustrophobic corridors
far from the predictability of
suburban cul-de sacs
with plenty of room for avoiding mistakes.

Not you.
No convenient K turns
or places to pull off.

Drive baby.
This is your rebirth.

Pushing us out into something better
a road that leads somewhere-
regardless of whether it is
a final destination or
just a throughway to something else
temporary.

Some help

In case you need something to write about each day:

Links for Inspiration:

100 quick prompts
www.timesaversforteachers.com/index_page0010.htm

Writer’s Digest
www.writersdigest.com/writingprompts.asp

Poetry Power
www.kristinegeorge.com/poetry_power.html#Candle_Flame

Short Story Prompts
www.shortstorygroup.com/exercises.htm

Writing Fix
www.writingfix.com/leftbrain/!Left_Brained_Poetry_Home.htm

DAY 3: Suggestions welcome

From staples to self esteem

Do past flings find
pink slips in their minds the moment
that you move on like
they’ve been fired as the CEO
of your heartache?

Like there’s a memo informing them
that they can forfeit that nice parking space in the moments of your silence
where thoughts of them bubble like a water cooler.

Is that why they come back?

Groveling for their job and
your affection
that they didn’t mean to fall
asleep drunk on the job
and let someone else in.

That they’re requesting
severance pay for the weeks and years
of riding shotgun through sad songs.


Apparently they missed the classified ads in your eyes where
you sought to fill the loneliness
with temps, flashing help wanted.
So desperate that any warm body would do
taking applications no matter how unqualified
or inadequate
this position needs to be filled.

Just to find out that
this one is worse than the last
can’t even begin to make correct change in a damaged life,
or worse yet
steals office supplies.


Isn’t that always when we
find that promising new applicant
with overqualified laughter
and kisses like good references.

But isn’t that the Monday morning
the disgruntled employee of
last loves comes
barging into our office
and says “You won’t get rid of me that easy.”

To which you respond, “I’m sorry.
someone new works here now.
You can look for employment elsewhere.”

Because there is nothing more satisfying
than firing the source of all your sorrow,
and watching them realize that
everything they’ve taken
from staples to self esteem,
like them, can be replaced.

DAY 2: In Case of Emergency

When I was young, my mother would
come into my room, check to see that I was breathing
and go back to sleep.
Since I moved out, she has no other option than
to pace the floors and pass the hours until she can call and
hear the reassuring sound of my breath.

She says she’s
been having dreams again—
the ones that find me
handsomely dressed in caskets.
She’s been having them all my life.

These dreams are not premonitions.

These are exaggerated memories.
These are contractions three months early.
These are the tears of
water breaking before it should.
These are the nightmares of a woman who almost lost her first son.

Because by all accounts,
I should be dead by now.
The survival rates of premature infants
in 1978 were so low that
two pound babies didn’t live more than minutes.

The average birth weight of a child
is eight pounds.
I was born six pounds incomplete.
Sometimes I think that some of my missing pieces
remained, settled somewhere in my mother.
She’s carried the weight of it ever since.

So every time she paced the kitchen
floor was my mother rocking back to sleep
her worry that roused in her like
a restless child.

After her latest dream,
she asks me to carry my next of kin,
in case of emergency.
Says she can’t go on wondering.
Every time she calls and gets a machine
rather than my voice, she settles in for the worst.

I tell her that I do,
but the part that I don’t tell her is:
“If I die, you will be the last to know.”
I’ve made sure of it.
If something should happen
her phone will not ring.
Paramedics will place long distance phone calls
to friends to cities hours away.
Word of my demise will travel down highways and pay $6 in tolls
to be delivered.

My parents spent three months watching me grow
inside a plastic womb.
Time with their son revolved around
intensive care visiting hours.
Mechanical beeps and buzzes whispering,
“It is OK.”
“He’s fine.”
And so machines will not comfort them--
It will be flesh.

It is out of love that
I’ve listed friends rather
family to carry the casket
of bad news to my parents.

And this isn’t a premonition.
This is a memory of the strength lacing my bones.
Memories of hearing about my father, who, when confronted with
bad bedside manners from a doctor who said,
“You might as well leave; there is nothing you can do.”
He responded with “You are talking about my son.”
It took two grown men to restrain him.
Two men to pull back strong shoulders, force him into another room.
And I am his son.
So don’t worry about me.
While I may have been incomplete when I came into this world,
I am whole now.

My life has been an audition for others.
For people strong enough to carry me
through this life and to the grave if that’s what I need them to do.
Shoulders strong enough to support you, Mom
and carry your tears if I don’t come home.

So sleep,
sleep now and
know that this weight
is no longer yours to carry.

DAY 1: State Lines ( a work in progress)

2 hours before I leave for work
12 hours before you leave the continental United States,
I am in a state of denial.

I ignore the fact that like all the
other women that I have been interested in
you are leaving the state.

It has reached such a level of predictable absurdity
that dating me should come
with baggage
but I mean real baggage
like suitcases and steamer trunks,
cardboard boxes for the stuff you will inevitabley
pack up and take with you.

But somewhere in the silence
of this morning
I have found the boarding pass
for letting go.

The Project

Section V:
30 Days

Start date_______ end date _________.

To follow in Morgan Spurlock’s footsteps, you will have to do something for 30 days. But not just any task, you will have to maintain an online writer’s journal (blog) for 30 days.

I will provide you with a blog site that I would like to use.
www.blogger.com (this is especially good for those with gmail)

Your responsibility will be to post to the blog regularly for 30 days. In that time you will:
-Post written works or writing exercise responses every day**.
-Once per week you will post your at-home (complete piece).
-You will network with the other members of the class and read their blogs.
-You will read and post substantive comments on at least FIVE of your classmate’s blogs per week.
-Over the 30 days you must visit and post to every one of your classmates (ie you should not just visit your five friends and ignore everyone else).
-** You will be allowed one day off per week. You must post the words DAY OFF or it will be assumed you did not post that day.
Your blogs will be monitored on a weekly basis.

On day 31, you will post a reflection on the blogging process and what you enjoyed or would change about it. This response should be no less than 500 words.