The ‘Poems of mine’ Category
Every autumn
The wind sweeps dust off old trees
like a french maid, nose in the air, her iPod earbuds jutting out,
lungs soundlessly exhaling lyrics of forgotten songs.
Those empty pop tunes breeze past you and me,
and with a shiver we see the accident as it happens.
In all the cleaning, leaves have started to fall.
The red-orange veins drop in slow motion sunlight,
and we watch the wind trying to catch them.
Everything stops for her, she leaps and slides under each leaf
and almost gets every one. They pirouhette and stall.
But there are too many, and
one by one crash on the sidewalk.
For the rest of the season, the wind will try to gather
all of them in neat piles, to put back what’s been broken
before she gets too cold to care.
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Still writing. Another month of a poem a day. I’m so thankful for my life and the ability to find these moments in it.
The artist and the canvas
After dark, there’s an unveiling;
a curtain dropping from your shoulders.
And then the ballet, the paint brushing canvas,
the pen inking notes like flags through our lines.
We trapeze over the hushed crowd
and limbo under a flaming sunset.
Afterward, on your back I draw plans
for skyscrapers and airports,
wineries and dog parks.
In studying the blueprints of your shoulders
I find the best floor for a fire escape.
I’m scribbling a poem
in front of a twentieth story bay window
overlooking this new country we have built.
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That is the April 22nd poem in my month-long effort to write a poem a day. It’s coming along great! Way past the halfway mark, and I’m considering just keeping it up into May and beyond.
Penciled In Poetry – Episode One
Welcome to Penciled In Poetry, a twice weekly podcast about my poetry. This episode I read and discuss “As she begged me to slow down,” published in my book There Is Nothing Poetic About Fish.
As she begged me to slow down
The car flipped, we exchanged ground for sky,
and in that second, you and I
found the truth more solid than ever before.
My right hand gripped yours,
the left white-knuckled the steering wheel,
and the autumn sun tiptoed through the windshield like
a disco-ball slow dance on fire.
Baby, the truth is,
sometimes we’re a forty car pileup
and nothing will ever fix that.
The tax break
Paul sits down across from me and the tower
of paper I call the last year of my life.
He’s probably 22, but looks 12,
and the cocky sonofabitch straightens his glasses
his tie his comfy H&R Block job
and checks his notes before saying
There’s a new stimulus package handed down from on high.
You may qualify if you promise to
lay down your pen and never write another poem.
It’s quite simple actually:
we’ll deduct every poem not written,
every moonbeam undreamt,
every gull sailing from the edge of the sea
to your lover’s arms…
He’s shaking now. This job is getting to him.
I’m not the first poet he’s seen today,
and he’s become intoxicated by the imagination he’s helped destroy.
He’s a giant hose siphoning the gas from my car,
and he’s babbling now, his arms spread wide
but I’ve stopped listening. I’m too busy spending my money,
my new mansion plucked straight from a Pottery Barn catalogue,
gold orthodontics, a trophy wife serving me diet lemonade
in glasses made from the sun, and all smiles.
Finally, I’ll be free.
————————————————————-
For National Poetry Writing Month, I’ve been actually writing a poem a day. This one was from the 7th.
I like poems about completely giving up poetry. I’m trapped in their irony.
My featured poetry reading
Sunday’s reading went marvelously. In fact, I felt like it was the best reading I’ve ever done.
For those who are interested, here’s one of the new poems I debuted that night:
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Johnson Elementary School’s 12th Annual Spelling Bee
Men do stupid things for women,
and in sixth grade I learned this
when Kennessa Marshall bet fellow classmate Brigham Toskin
twenty-five whole bucks
that I’d take first place in the spelling bee.
So, two weeks later I stood on the stage,
a snap-on dangling from my collar
and the microphone growling at my nose.
Without proper study habits
I neglected to study any words
more challenging than “vice president.”
The first word for me was “undaunted.”
My mouth became an aquarium
with algae sliming my cheeks over a fake coral reef
and “undaunted” lay sideways on the surface,
dead and stinky.
I had to stall, so I asked my questions,
and the judge made the facts solid for me,
that my rotting fish of a word
is synonymous with “courage,”
or the latin coraticum,
cor meaning heart –
and he never finished
because right then the windows
on all sides of the auditorium shattered.
Seats rumbled and doorways splintered.
The earthquake crawled through the aisles
and split the stage open like a pomegranate.
The rest of the contestants, still in their chairs,
fell through what was left of the stage
straight to the molten core of our planet.
There were no survivors.
And that’s how I won my sixth grade spelling bee.
My book is now available on Amazon!
That’s right, order your own copy of There Is Nothing Poetic About Fish at Amazon, through the following link:
http://tinyurl.com/Bens-Fishy-Poetry-Book
Good times!
My first book of poems, available soon
So, I’ve finally done it. My first book of poetry, There Is Nothing Poetic About Fish, is due to be out in the next month or so. I’ve just sent in my files, and if all goes well, I’ll have a proof in my hands by the end of the week!
So, check out the cover below!
Me, Myself, and Ichthyology
Over dinner, Nicole asked me “So,
what the heck is poetic about studying fish?”
And no sooner had I opened my mouth to reply,
when a movement hooked my attention
down to her glass of coke.
A sea horse, Hippocampus fuscus,
blinked at me between icebergs and carbonation, floating
through a galaxy of bubbles previously sworn inhospitable.
I tried to ignore it, fish wasn’t on the menu, and I was thinking
of the perils of a first date gone terribly wrong:
Nicole choking on a somewhat saltier drink than she had ordered.
And at that moment, a bang of thunder fills the restaurant
like six year-olds squeezing the bubble wrap
that is the fabric of space-time,
and all over, fish appear and fall.
A calico rockfish into one lady’s steak pizzaola,
a kawakawa knocking off her man’s toupee.
And as the fishfall turned from a drizzle to a summer storm,
waitresses and busboys twirl their umbrellas from who-knows-where,
and I swear I could hear a collective chim-chim-cheree,
but believe me: I found no part of this magical.
That was when I decided I wasn’t leaving a tip.
Flicking a goldfish out of her hair,
I grabbed Nicole’s hand. We dove through the front window
into the street, throwing a fifty over my shoulder
with the urgency of a hand grenade. And I would have ducked.
I should have looked away, but I was reeled in to the scene.
Right at that moment, Ahab tumbled out of the bathroom,
I crap you not, pegleg and spear and crazy eyes
and he was screaming something fierce. When he hurled
a harpoon into the kitchen, that’s when the whale
breached the wall; the air shuddered like a depth charge.
That was when I turned to Nicole, and I answered
“Nothing.
There is absolutely nothing poetic about fish.”
Introductions
Stay quiet when she says,
“my God, I think I know him.”
After all, she’s from this town.
It’s to be expected.
And then, when she whispers,
almost conspiratorially,
“that’s my Animal Behavior professor,”
simply nod assent.
The rest of the table will try to joke
about what one says to a professor
when he’s sighted off-campus, you know,
when his behavior can be observed
in the confines of his natural environment.
Be a gentleman. Keep your eyes down
and smile to yourself.
But when she waves him over, and says to him,
“I really didn’t know how to approach you
in a manner befitting your subject.”
that’s when you turn to him and say,
“I thought it’d be a good idea
if she went over and sniffed your butt.
By the way, I’m Ben.”
Gemini 8 and a rough landing
Gemini 8 and a rough landing
By Benjamin Lawless
Neil Armstrong grit his teeth, I’m sure of it.
I’m sure he grit his teeth so hard
they wanted to fall out of his head.
He sat and tried his hardest not to freak out,
spinning above the Earth’s thermosphere
years before the moon and you and me.
And in this winter night in the 21st century,
where our breath makes the ghosts of words
drift toward heaven, we’re trying to save our mission.
Trying to save face, to keep every
secret name we made for each other
secret from each other. We’re trying to deny
we’re saying goodbye.
And on Gemini 8, the misfired thruster
twisted the capsule
into a nuclear powered barber pole. Neil had no hope
but to go down with his ship;
after all, an ejection-seat suicide,
what the space monkeys call
a pop-fly into deep left,
would’ve been very bad PR for NASA.
And that’s when we close our eyes, turn around,
and by all instruments, we’re flying off course,
a shaky free-fall into the the black.