Some poetry, I reckon

Wherein I post some stuff I wrote for Techniques of Poetry sophomore year. Take with several grains of salt.



Siege

Bait,
Lay,
Fray,
Fail,
Flail,
Flow,
Glow,
Potion,
Potency,
Procure,
Curator,
Cut-rate,
Cute,
Croon,
Droop,
Broom,
Boots,
Beach,
Peach,
Liege.

Transgressions

We skip.
We Bic.
We fake sick.
We steal shit.
We sip mad lean.
We hog blunts.
We blow xannies.
We rail addies.
We mix brass monkeys.
We pound Mad Dogs.
We flee slow jeeps.
We get so fucked.
We black our eyes
beating
the wrong front doors.

Lament to Benny; or, Voyage of the Beagle

Benny, you worst dog ever sat,
You stub, you nub, you eating machine,
Chewer of Venetian blinds,
Shatterer of flowerpots,
Eater of three-hundred-dollar boots -
Did the rabbitfur tempt?
I've yet to eat a meal that expensive in my life,
Fiend beagle, flop-eared madman.
And your whine, that simpering squeak -
Feedback? Amplified bee? Witch's weep?
I don't need it, dog, but I did need
Those six chocolate cookies,
Those half-dozen donuts,
That multivitamin pill,
That mechanical pencil,
Those artificial flowers you confused for food.
Some puddle-rich, post-rain days, though,
I miss you, fool hound -
A chunk of light brick, kicked, chuckles down the walk
And we're all too sane to give pursuit.

Scavenger Hunts (II)

Everworld: Search For Senna - K. A. Applegate - 1999

• shiny malls
• Taco Bell
• straight-as-a-ruler streets
• stuttering cries
• the bad-ass act
• the feel of chill
• some hardcore jock
• some black guys
• some white guys
• smaller, olive-complected men
• the cracked, white leather seat
• flickering skull-sconce torches
• tarred, split logs
• some insomniac up late
• a memory of a dream

Everworld: Enter the Enchanted - K.A. Applegate - 1999

• the locker combination
• the light of the dragon's fire
• a mocha and a pannini [sic] made with hummus
• freezing black blood
• a sort of tough-girl slut
• another drama guy
• a feral snarl
• National Merit Scholar
• faint flashes in the gloom
• Barnes and Noble
• a god, shrunken to near-human proportions for the moment
  

Bad Scans (III)

Tate Regards A Trampling At The County Fair

The number pinned to my back was itching me
When the dust whipped around
And the crowd made the sound
Of a horrifying afterthought.

Crones in a wet tent cradled paper boats
Of salt potatoes in their laps
When the leathery snap of splitting halter hit.

Not that a horse's fit truly breaks
The ringtoss din, the screech of bolts, the chit-chat;
It was a narrow commotion.

Just like you'd test a cake for doneness
Was how the polished hooves gouged
His legs, his chest.
He balled up, his wounds met.

Each step of the Clydesdale's
Peppery, undignified dance
Hurt him worse.

I don't blame the beast for treading him
But I do blame him for spooking.
Everybody, horses included,
Gets scared when they can least afford to.

Plenitudes

Snow Soup

A brief mix.

1. The Crabs - Love and Hate

2. Tapes 'n Tapes - Moldy Bread

3. Hood - Biochemistry Revision Can Wait

4. Sebadoh - Punch in the Nose

5. Drake Tungsten - He Was Soon To Undergo an Experience for which his Long Training as an Aristocrat, a Gentleman, and an Officer Had Scarcely Prepared Him

6. Hood - Beware! Falling Ox

18.66 mb; 11m16s
http://www.mediafire.com/?mdyyedezdyz

Scavenger Hunts (I)

Katie - Deborah Aydt - 1980

• mole-colored Datsun
• hollyhocks
• Lavoris
• starter brassieres
• glazed eyes
• iron pills
  
• small green chunks of chile
  
• a stray bit of crust
  
• tart, cedary smell
• round-tipped scissors
• lurid iron-ons
• Jeno's Frozen Pizza
• a fresh, juicy grapefruit
• a cold, glittering rush
• a beautiful silk cord

Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter - Victor Appleton II - 1968

• a hissing sound
• a coil of thin nylon rope
• Bud's smashed platform
• a portable ice bucket
• pistol-like weapons
• prime Texas steer
• a combined TV and telescope
• a few cosmetics
• a well-aimed punch
• Martabat's solar plexus
• a cushion of magnetic flux lines
• long, curving saber-sharp horns
• some interplanetary snooper
• non-antigravity pancakes
  

Dreamt

It's a brutally cold day; everything's icy, so my guess is February or an especially cold March. I'm running through the town of Potsdam, and this isn't that frustrating drowning-in-caramel type of dream running, but rather the really liberating kind where you take outrageously long strides and your jacket flaps behind you. I realize at some point that Lil Wayne is also bounding through the streets too, matching my pace ahead of me, and rapping/auto-tuning/whatever you care to call it all the while. He starts leaping from building to building on Main Street; I think he jumped from the roof of the movie theater over to the Clarkson Inn. The sky is barren white and the trees dark and spindly. I can see our breath.

With one last flailing jump, he's on top of Sergi's as seen from behind, near Videorama and the laundromat, where THINK POSITIVE is spraypainted on the brick. There's a crowd at this point, and he either tosses or lowers something down. It's the frozen-stiff body of a small girl, who I take to be his daughter. There's a note pinned to her lapel with a variety of medical information, and it explains that her heart has been removed and put on ice for use as a transplant. He's still up on the roof, grieving her death. Now a red and white picnic cooler is lowered down.

Somehow, Lil Wayne has performed the necessary surgery on his dead daughter to harvest her heart for an organ transplant.

Calentures

Poem For A Burner On High

Bent,
Over the deadened red signet
Of a stove's heated coils
Lighting a menthol Signal

The heat on my nose
The welt on my chin
The Hotpoint, the introductory rate
The muffler, the steak ranch
The mailman's wake
The air so grassy and thick as sour cream
The flannel, the Cutlass's Turtle Wax gleam

Jealous of the healthy girls in shorts smuggling
Mister Boston in Snapple bottles
To paneled basements
What boys admit to them
The length of summer break
I can't tell you how much of their gum I've stepped in
Hoofing it to work...

What's left of varnish
What shone in 1961
The beef hash, the boasts, the gun rack, the Cope
The traffic rumbling over the slope

I just sell unbreakable combs
I could never give all these dogs good homes

Forfeits

Joyeux Bastille Day

Get together a few hundred of your best friends, surge into an undefended outer courtyard, and kick a pastry cook in your groin.

Or, sit out in the sun and watch a few Guided By Voices videos.

Bulldog Skin

Teenage FBI (live)

The Official Ironmen Rally Song

Cachexia

Confirmation Bias

Shin splints and a burning stye
The sky was doused with purple dye
The Sting cassette I gave her mom
All smeared with mentholated balm
Cooking sugar for divinity
She doubted my virginity

Behind Food Lion on Pentecost
Those tongues of flame were just exhaust

The Petroleum By-Products - "Rat Face"

Friends and family

March 1988




















December 1988



















December 1988

Malone: 4 Haiku

(i)
New Lamps - Tan Here Now
You see two basketball hoops
Next to a small dam.

(ii)
A pancake supper
Held in the Adult Center
At 4 PM sharp.

(iii)
Self serve honey stand,
Bonesteel's Gardening Center,
Firewood, gas meter.

(iv)
Yankee One Dollar
Soup and stamps, carpeted ramps
And dryer lint sky.

Pairings

Bad Scans (II)

Bad Scans (I)

Dinner party for Ghostface Killah, Mary Rowlandson

Appetizers
Boston Baked Beans
One handful of ground nuts
Jellies
Tartar sauce

First Course
Samp with broth
Ziti
Half of a horse liver

Second Course
Kansas Fried Chicken
A piece of a fawn
Blood of the deer in the paunch

Sorbet
Strawberry kiwi

Entree
Big round onions on a t-bone steak

Dessert
A mess of wheat
Chick-O-Sticks
Buttercrunch joints or something

Some doggerel

I don't know how to heal a sprain anymore
I never feel like tasting rain anymore
Every day is not Samhain anymore
I'm so sorry I lent her my brain anymore

...

I wrote a toast
For the wedding of the Holy Ghost
Brother in law
To the heavenly host

...

Eunice went for a mammogram
The nurses laughed at her tattoo of Yosemite Sam
She held it together in their mobile lab
But wept at lunch over Rangoon crab