Day Eleven Theme: Swimming

DISCOUNT LOVE

the
heartbreak
hotel
is
available
on
priceline.com
for
forty
bucks
a
night.
I
hope
it
has
a
pool
and
hot
tub.

Day Ten Theme: Road Trips

 THE GRAVEYARD OF ABANDONED SHOES

We stopped for an unauthorized piss

at the side of the road in central Mexico

in our Pinto hatchback, the kind

of car that explodes when you rear-end it.

We had stayed well ahead

of the other cars, but it still seemed

that we weren't moving fast enough

to conceal the fact we had stolen our license plates

from an abandoned pick-up truck in Iowa City.

Any cop running the numbers

would see that we weren't a Chevrolet Silverado,

and we'd be pissing in the corner of a cell for sure,

but we weren't in the US any more.

We were in a Mexican field surrounded

by all manner of shoes,

plastic sandals in women's and children's sizes

crude muddy hiking boots, hastily discarded,

stiletto heels by the dozens,

tennis shoes with holes in them.

Someone had thrown a pair of shoes into a tree,

just as folks like to do in the states,

they swung in the breeze like a merry corpse.

Word had somehow traveled

that this was the ultimate destination

for the release of unwanted footwear,

perhaps with a glossy catalog advertising its charms.

We completed our own release, got back into the car,

pulled onto the dusty road,

and watched the shoe graveyard recede

in the rear view mirror,

hoping that nobody had seen us.

Day Nine Theme: Going Nowhere

 I think I was going for a sort of Richard Brautigan feel with today's poem:

PEANUT BUTTER TRUCE

This argument is going nowhere,

it is like peanut butter

at a February picnic--

both of us

trying to spread thick cold words

with a tiny plastic knife,

yet the bread keeps breaking into holes.

We keep at it anyway,

frustrated, attacking the bread over and over,

until only a pulp remains.

It would be better

if we can just be quiet for a while,

and forget that we were ever hungry

in the first place.

Day Eight: High School

MISFITS


In sophomore English
I sat next to a boy
named Kevin Dick,
an unfortunate moniker
for an unfortunate lad.
His head was misshapen,
as if it had begun the process
of melting and toppling from his body
like ice cream from a cone,
and his hair sprouted in irregular patches
revealing shadowy bald spots
from where he had pulled it out
during fits of nervous self-deprecation.
Kevin had plans to own a mansion
when he grew up,
and have Bach piped in through speakers
while he worked on his masterpiece--
masterpiece of what, he never explained.
He had a tittering laugh,
manic and high,
like the call of a sandpiper.
Most people avoided him, but I
was in love with his mind,
so I talked with him whenever possible
during breaks in class,
about books and writing,
life after death, which both of us doubted,
our deeply rooted disgust with everything
and our mutual desire
to escape from downstate Illinois
as soon as we graduated.
Once the teacher changed the seating chart,
moved everyone away from their friends
except for us, whom she inexplicably
placed directly beside each other again.
We were astonished, and overjoyed,
and she told us she had done this
because she loved listening to us talk.
I thought this should be enough incentive
for Kevin to love me,
so one night
on a school bus returning from a play
I said to him, “Kevin, I really like you,
do you like me?”
and he replied that we were parallel lines
in the universe, drawn to each other,
but we would never cross.
That was the end of Kevin,
until years later,
I was passing through downstate Illinois,
and I heard his heart had exploded--
he had died slowly and quite painfully
from taking too many pills,
that he was gay
and had never stopped living with his parents,
and soon after he died,
their house burned down.
I was always a such poor judge
of whom I should love.

Day Seven: Family Matters

This assignment was especially difficult for me--not because of the subject matter (I'll write about anything) but because it was written at the end of a very long and arduous weekend.  It's more of a work in progress than anything else.

MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS

I never knew who my father was
until I was nearly nineteen,
my mother spilled her guts
after six or eight Schlitz malt liquors,
explained that I was a love child
conceived with a man she'd met in Old Town
who suddenly
jumped onto a table in a coffee house
and began chanting poetry,
while young women, including my mother,
clamored around his feet, begging for more.
Somehow
this never surprised me a bit.

Day 6-- Three Haikus

New age chanting guy
pretends to be Native American,
I guess we all are.



Driving past strip clubs,
Kung fu, Vietnamese food
No espresso for miles.

One perfect tulip
Droops to the side of the vase,
Barely past its prime.

Day Five Theme: Embarassment

ROLE REVERSAL

Relaxing at my battered coffee table

smoking a bowl from a glass pipe

on a mellow Friday afternoon--

then suddenly the door bursts open.

I startle reflexively,

dropping the bowl on the table,

wondering whether a neighbor called the cops

and if they still do that in west Aurora,

a town with a Protestant church on every block--

but it's my teen-aged daughter,

staring at me

with a look of horror on her face.

She gasps, “MOM!

What are you doing?!”

in a tone of such stunned disapproval

that I am instantly embarrassed,

and I stammer, “Why are you home?!”

“It's a half day at school” she replies

with her head turned sideways,

pointedly avoiding the coffee table

with its damning evidence

of my heinous marijuana addiction,

something I'd sworn she knew about for years.

She retreats to her room,

staring at me with a sort of terror,

mixed with with an odd sadness,

as though I was suddenly a stranger--

and I am left alone with my shame.