Wednesday, December 23, 2009

To Be Crushed




Bigfoot didn’t come that day in the car.
(Shane thought it did, but he’d been smoking.)

When we held our hands high and voiced echoed in those ever, ever green trees, where the orbs had been spotted? 
They didn’t land and I felt let down.

We raised the devil and raised hell, but those ever showed too much more than the scar on my right knee from the tennis court incident.

I put my hand on a curling iron once and held frozen peas until morning.

It was really bad the time I picked up my brother and he was a vomiting wreck and shaking, shaking so hard, and he needed $300.

Waterfall cove, where you jump in and under, but the boys didn’t know you had to be heavy in order to come back up and didn’t tell me and I was under just long enough to fill up my lungs.

When the snow fort collapsed and crushed me, that hurt.
They all hurt.
But.

On my worst birthday, I sat in the kitchen and ate cake alone in the dark and crying.
I was seventeen.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Einstien's Theory of Relativity -December Poetry Project-Day 6

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity


There once was a bedroom at the top of the stairs,
Where a boy and a girl said their lullaby prayers.

Their heads on the pillows, they closed their eyes
And dreamed about spaceships and pretended to fly

Until just after midnight when they heard a loud crash.
They ran to the window and saw a green flash.

As the smoke settled down, they saw what had hit:
Moonrocks and stardust and a tiny spaceship!

The stairs lowered down and the green light turned blue,
The girl grabbed her hat and laced up her shoes.

She climbed down the roof, with the sheet from her bed.
The boy stared out the window with his hand on his head.

“Don’t go!  Oh please!  You don’t know where to!
That spaceship will take you to the dark side of the moon!”

“Or further!” She said, “ Up past Pluto or Mars!
There won’t be the people, their money, or cars!

“There’s got to be more to this whole galaxy
And I think this green spaceship just might be the key.

“I want to get out, to see what else is here.”
She shut the door and set out for the last frontier.

She was gone for an hour, a day, and a year
Whizzing past milky ways until the sky became clear.

There were whirlybabs and blinkets, asteroids and stars,
Flashes of gorda rays, flomdukes, and maytars!

The dust blew through the space and the stars came with joy
Until that fourth year when the girl missed the boy.

She cried just a little and the days just got worse
Until she turned the ship around and headed towards earth.

She travelled a year, a day, and an hour,
And landed in the yard, with a crash, in the flowers.

She turned off the green light and ran into the house
And crept up the stairs, quiet as a mouse.

She swung open the door with her arms open wide.
“Dear brother!  I’m home!  And I’ve missed you!” she cried.

But there wasn’t an answer and nothing looked the same.
The room was empty and white, with no spaceships or planes.

Where had she come?  And where was her brother?
But time had changed for the little girl and another.

Since she boarded the ship, four years had passed
But on earth, three decades had slipped through the hourglass.

The boy had grown up, had a house and a car,
And forgot about the girl who’d gone to live with the stars.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

For Edie, Love New York

.
Little holes of light
run around
circles
     circles
          circles
of the billboards, singing
"New York, New York!"
And the cars oh the cars
let out their long legs for
fur-collared pin-stripes of
diamonds
diamonds traded for taxis
because they fall of fingers
like heads.
And the red carpet speaks
of the girl,
the girl in the tragedy who
ends in
Warhol-obsessed leopard graves.
And so the city goes.

Followers