jesse poe.is writing

She said she had to squeeze it but she… then she…  David Bowie, Suffragette City

She danced the edge and beautiful space
Of every letter,
Pronouncing her incantations
With thighs and elbows.
Wedging
The moist air into separate compartments
Beckoning
Me to follow
And create those letters
That without my own body
She could not.

Letters to words
I have never heard,
Demarcating sound,
Prior;
I have never understood.

My back
Is brittle
My body a siren,
In morning dust and stained sheets.
Short of breath and parched,
My head is clogged;
Stopped up with new understanding
Of words learned
Of love
As if a holy word;
Unpronounceable
Without
Her adjoining form.

from Broken Songs

Father is revealing,
The art of gambling.

Mother says it is cheating
As she moves the cracked clay plates
From soap tub to rinse.

I prefer to
Refer to it
As artifice,
He says, palming a spade.

Uriah is practicing
His black-key scales
On the accordion
Father won–
Through artifice.

As father pulls diamond
After diamond from the deck
He says that he will win a diamond
Band for every child that Mother,
But the crack of her laugh
Covers Father’s words.

Ahh, but I won
Your heart, my love
Flinging a two of hearts
From between tobaccoed knuckles,
Landing it in her soap tub
And that he says
Lifting his now cardless hand
Above his head like a flamenco dancer,
Is not artifice.

She sighs
As her flung heart
Sinks into the suds.

Father’s mother is blowing
Rings of smoke from her cob pipe
Chasing them over and around a
Floating spoon.

This is an ancient
Form of foreplay
Amongst the gypsies
Father informs us
Tracing the path
Of the smoke ring
As it ensconces the spoon.

Minor scales fall
Constantly to the floor
Swept methodically
Onto the porch
By my sister,
Sumitra,
The most beautiful girl
In Andalusia.

The most beautiful girl
In Andalusia, she sighs,
Keeping time
With her broom

Uriah mirrors her mantra
With his minor scales
The
Most
Beautiful
Girl
In
Andalusia.

It is beginning to brown
Here in the mountains.
Next month we will stack straw
Against the walls of our wagon
And Uriah will spend the winter
Sneezing from the dust
That blows through the straw.

Mother sews and resews
The minister’s long black coat,
With the red stitched cross cuffs,
Carefully repairing the clasps
That were torn open with a single stroke-
In a rage of passion
Revealing the path to his sacred heart
Salvation for the women of Andalusia.

I run my finger down
The fenced horizon
Of my father’s ladder-back chair
Framing my family
Through the space
Between each wooden slat.
Soon I will be a famous cinematographer,
I dream, staring at the warm flicker
Of the oil lamp hanging
Above my father’s brown hand
Of red and black,
And as I dream,
Trying to blink away the spots
That the light has put in my eyes;
I think that I see:
Phantoms of my ancestors
Floating content
Between the bright green
And the purple freckles
Luster like dust
In the Autumn sunlight
Happy to be seen, Pentimento
As in the x-ray light
Of a masterpiece.

from Broken Songs

On the train to Viareggio
An old couple in front of me
Occupy seats that face each other.

The man turns, delivers
A slivered scorn
Through the train seat V

At my droning the ” ʤ ” (zhur sound)
Found in pleasure.

He scowls
Seemingly pissed
At my elision of everything around me
But this beautiful Yod-coalescence
Of buzzing teeth , whistling tongue

I lift the sides of my lips,
Ruck my nose
Give him some teeth
Continue my droning
Overtone

His fob is coarse and functional.
Glass beads treasure her slanting neck.

He moves across the aisle
Arguing with his wife.
Dominate emotions
Fold around his oldness
Her top lip has lost its lust,
She doesn’t breathe as much as blink
But her eyes hold the color of her beads
Watching Luca’s soft hills pass behind
In his heavy sunglasses.

I am sitting backwards on the train
Not so far from old,
But happy with the lines
I’m folding into my face
Happy snarls
Of pronouncing
Pleasure
In a continuous tone.

And I remember
How I was four
G.I. Joe and Tonka Trucks
Strewn across the floor.
And I remember-
I was scared,
When you threw
Our green Hoover
Through the picture window.

We sat in your dirt brown Duster
And ate MacDonalds-
So cool,
Your straight black hair
Boxer’s build
Mexican skin
Stretched tight
About six feet of muscel and bone
You tolerated me
To fuck my mom.

And I remember-
Building blocks
You bought for Christmas
Four by two
Smooth
And how they stung
My skin.

I remember I was ten-
How you said
I could never be a writer
An artist
“Those things take talent”
They do –
More than I had then.

from Broken Songs

We stand on the afternoon light
Of a black and white bathroom floor
Both of us naked
Except for jeans
Yours  three-quarters
Mine long in the leg
Cutting each other’s hair
Yours in a straight line
Mine crazy like spiritualized

I talk while you cut
The music echoing down the hall
From the empty bedroom
You in deep concentration
Stop to correct my pronunciation
I don’t know words like you
But I can hit the key

Breasts brush my cheek
While you trim around my ears
Once covered in kisses now tarred
With sweat and feathered

Like our clothes in times of closeness
Our once engendered hair waits sexless
To be swept up and discarded
With cigarette wrappers
And egg shells.

from Broken Songs

November’s wet boots
Are muddied by the falling
Of last month’s blaze,
And I can’t help but wonder
If you are still taken
With the mystery of gray.

You must be forty-nine now,
Next year makes a quarter century
Since I have taken
For granted
The nakedness
Of your Quattrocento beauty.

Surely it has aged
Alongside my memories.

I was told,
By unreliable sources,
Of course,
That you left
Because you were pregnant.
How many hours
Have I squandered
Dipping into our palette
To paint a child

Half as beautiful
As we were- a tattered
Faded flag,
Grey skies
Crimson bed
Blue skin

I still make
That content,
Sentimental sound
Of obsession
In my throat
The one you steeled
Your heart against

It chokes me
When the sky makes a study
Of the mystery of gray.

from Broken Songs

And I’ll never grow so old again….Van Morrison, Sweet Thing

Occasionally your thoughts flock
And cling to your head
Like a weak fly
In your childhood church
In summertime

As you sit waiting for the eulogy
To be free of your church-starched clothes
And find your way
As fast as your bike can
Past the two story yoke-colored house
To maybe catch a glimpse of her
Coming home from church
Or maybe on the way to the pool

And you ride real slow
Sweeping from gutter to gutter
Peddling backwards
To hear the zipping
Of you free wheel crank

Sweeping from one side to the other
So fluidly
Like this was the watercourse way
As if this was your own Taoist art
Waiting for that two second window
Between the fence and the house
Where you can see the backyard or at least
The a corner of her white patio
The foot of a wicker lawn chair
Where she sometimes sits
And some grass

And with the right angle you can sweep
In the direction of that precious space and see
The beginning
Of her bikinied thigh

Not knowing that you were building that gap
Between her house and privacy fence
Onto your own ontological house
To sweep past that space forever

And the sound of free floating gears
Being spun backwards reminds you
Of who, at the time, you thought was your true
Your only and your first

But you begin to remember the girl
Who never sat next to you
But loved the boy with Eczema
And cowboy boots
And you’d race to be the other boy
In the boy-girl line of Red Rover
Knowing full well that when they sent her
Right over, you’d be left holding
His chapped hands

And you’d remember church, your parents, god
And the felt board where they stuck Jesus and the leper
Showing how god answers prayers
So you’d pray as hard as you could
Without putting your hands together,
For them to send you “right over”
So you could slam into her arm
And drag her down on top of you
On the dusty sun-bleached
Indiana grass

But those prayers  just fell to the ground
Without the direction your hands
Pointing them to heaven
So you’d just stand there
Holding the corded hands
Of her boy, the boy that should have been you

And you remember that she came before
The girl with the yellow house
But you can’t remember her name
Just the yellow stitched cowboy boots
Wondering if you were the only one
Scared to hold hands with him

And occasionally you remember a name
As if that name had been lazily orbiting your head
Like a mid-summer guilt-cymbal
That you swat at in futility
From your first kiss
To the feel you copped a year later
In the church basement
Rushing to the bathroom afterwards
To scrub the hand that felt her coming breasts
And you can’t remember if it went to her
Or the girl in the yellow house
Or the senior you kissed in the photo class darkroom
Your sophomore year

You try to forget it all by remember names
Or sequences, but all that comes are details
The crack in the plaster that ran down the wall
Of your first big break-up
The stitching on a boy’s boots
How white the sun shone on the patio
The red stripes on the shirt you lifted
A mirror
Recessed filters
The smell of a basement toilet
Fog lifting in the morning on your way home
From a dorm room
The sound of small spoons on coffee cups
The book next to a bed
A bed
…this poem.

The tongue lingers in the teeth
In a star-tarred night

My sweet summoner pardon me

I’m so far from where I should be
Slatterned slipshod and drunk as fuck

Can you ever go clear

Beyond the hem of the city
The clouds lay inside the mountains
Set to wake

Down here in the smog
The river yawns turquoise in the coming sun
Lip-caked bottles
And onionskin thin
Napkins from all night bakeries
Are swept up between the rolling pinch
Sounds of metal storefront security doors
Ruddy lurch bartenders slam down
And across the street
Puffy-eyed baristas
Heave up.

It is just too far beyond us, Love,
To reach our every thought
Before the morning
Sounds of dawn

from Broken Songs

Maybe somewhere else will not be half as cold as me….
Snow Patrol, Same

There is a limit
So, I draw the lines
Of her face

In each new place
I sleep
It comes so slow
Pulled behind you
Like an old car
Covered in snow

Open wardrobe
Dress left hanging
Old bag of underwear
Stuffed under the bed
Reflection of you
Fixes her hair in the mirror

What can be said when
People move on, but
Not everything moves
At the same pace

The mind gnaws at your
Reflux face
A wind so strong
It holds the birds in place

from Broken Songs