Body Political

I awoke
to find myself political.
My skin was political,
as if I were papered over with
the Sunday Times.
My face was political,
whether I showed it off
or kept it veiled.
And I saw my hair was political,
whether I cut it off,
or kept it long,
or let it be natural,
or did it up.
And my tongue was political
no matter how I kept it--
working or still.
And then there was my voice!
(That, I always did suspect
might be a little political,
you know.)
All I said was political, or
if I sang,
even if I said nothing,
and sang nothing.
That was political, too.
Political body:
political breasts,
political belly, political hips--
and no, those politics did not
stop you know where.
And this understanding has moved my
political feet,
do you get me?
I awoke
and found myself, political--
so that's just how
I'll be.

The World is Broken

The world is broken, so it goes,
imperfectly round and madly off-kilter;
running hot and cold, and wet and dry,
the earth is not a place for life
lived too conservatively,
oh no,
it's for life on the edge,
the fringe, it rewards
the strange and the beautiful,
and it embraces the freaks and the
light
that would have been occluded shines
in a broken world,
and this is a pleasant thing to find,
I myself being somewhat
broken. And strange.

Little Things

The little things that aren't kind,
you mind.
It's not the big things, really,
no--you could face a disaster
without a hair out of place,
but the lightbulb blew,
or the pilot went out,
or the door wasn't locked--
that thing threw
your day. And then you knew
the bottled fear that the payment
was due--for a moment.
The little thing could have been
nothing, or maybe the penultimate straw
before the fracture of the
dromedary's spine;
and yet the breech in your mind
is such, that little thing though
this setback was--you wonder.
A little thing?
A little thing a lot,
and that is probably a description
of everyone's experience,
unfortunately.

And washed our hands of it

Mistakes were made,
unknowing;
choices settled themselves by committees
who picked up the choices that fell to hand,
unthinking,
carrying out the important business,
undoing
the work that should have been done,
that could have been done
that became quite undone in advance,
unquestioning
due to the importance of the task
set before us, so we thought
unpleasant
consequences were bound to arise but
they were merely byproducts of
unravelling
the dumb dead albatross these stupid
circumstances wreathed around our necks
and so we dropped the chemical
unfortunately
to the tune of many, many, many barrels,
to undermine the flow of our
indiscretion,
Unsatisfactorally,
of course, some are never pleased,
the turtle-lovers, the sand scrapers,
the people who weep at any pelican
or baby dolphin
or whale, smothered.

Unbelievable, these people,
unable
to accept that the deed is done
and there's no use crying over spilled crude.
Unfathomable,
really, that they'd expect more than what we're doing--
but what will come?
Unknowable--
aren't we only men?

(Unless you mean--aren't we gods?
With dirty hands and dirty feet--
yet we can wash the dirt away.
And still not know the future.)

Unnatural as it may be,
we're deeply apologetic,
and we won't be doing anything like this again
on any of our other rigs,
extant
or
unbuilt.

Probably.

This is a poetry blog.

I know that's weird. Poetry and blogging--meh? But I used to write poetry on a regular basis: some of it crap, some of it I'd like to think not especially crappy. But it isn't a form that always communicates an exact message, which is usually the point of blogging. I don't know exactly what I want from this blog, except to write in a way entirely different from what I do in prose, and get back in the poetry habit.

Also, publishing my poetry via the internet is a liberating idea to me. I jot down ideas or lines often, discard things often, save little. But if I do a poem as a blog-post, it's like I've fixed it in amber in a way. I guess if I really hated something, I could delete the post, but it's more effort than tossing out a shopping list with a haiku on the back, you know? But at the same time, I'm self-publishing. I guess that means I'm saying--here's my stuff: judge.

Well, there it is. Here's my stuff: judge.