Poems

So guys, it's been a while. Things are going well out here in Vermont. I hope you're all doing well. Seems I've finally found myself with this whole writing thing. I'm going for a straight Literature concentration. I'm planning on doing some art installations around a poetry project I'm working on, and I'm preparing for a spoken word show with two other people. Normally, I'd post a story, but I've been taking a pretty demanding poetry class (the first I've ever taken), so I thought I'd share some of those.

Your Guitar

Your guitar wails from
the depths of your house,
burns out the summer sun
bleeding into a dark sky,
and probably got you laid.

Its chords shine autumn
through scratched train windows,
wet leaves starfish clinging to toe tops.
The Blue Line perched and serpentine,
slithering through the city's veins.

Your played it to yourself mid-March--
your mother's medication flushed, your
older brother, bare knuckled,
brought his fists to her face.
It took weeks, but you learned to scream over it.

The guitar that you rescued
from the Midwest.
The guitar that taught your fingers
to blister, to bleed, to callus,
its hollow body howling.


Father Figures: A Villanelle

The men below me still wear their wedding rings
and I can hear their coughs come through the floorboards.
They sleep with their cigarettes lit and whisper lonely things.

I can hear them twisting in their sheets, or breaking
chairs, or ripping the phone cords out, or
punching the walls with the fists that wear their wedding rings.

Their throats bark and bleat as they try to sing
together or alone or to each other. they forget the words
and wail off key, and sing only of lonely things.

I used to wake up for work, but now I'm taking
days off. Most mornings I see them at the corner store.
They've hawked everything except for their wedding rings.

I never talk to them, though when they're drinking,
I'm drinking. I used to use excuses, but what for?
I can't keep track of such lonely things.

At night I think about the men while rolling
cigarettes. I make myself a drink, then I lock my door.
I think of reasons why they still wear their wedding rings,
but quickly lose count of all those lonely things.


The villanelle was really hard to write. It had to be in that form and focus on "thinking of something so as not to think of something else." Check out "One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop or "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," by Dylan Thomas to see some incredible villanelles.

Hope this term's treating everybody well. The leaves are turning! Fuck yeah. Also: I quit drinking. There were habits honing my potential for alcoholism, so I put it to an end. I'll try and update again soon.

Please check out my poetry teacher's new book. It's breathtaking and agonizingly beautiful:

http://www.amazon.com/Apocalyptic-Swing-Karen-Michael-Braziller/dp/0892553537

Here's a link to one of her poems:

http://www.cstone.net/~poems/savemcal.htm

-Emmet