19/30 fibonacci series on the topography of lines

Euclid
named
our boundaries
with out remorse.
death wasn't a good name.

Newton
'invented'
measurement for
our decline rate
when we sort into tables.

Copernicus
coat-tailed,
displaced us
from the center.
reformer of even the church.

Jesus
emptied
his veins.
streams of God
eroding the babels I build.

18/30 Waking Up In Springtime: An Introduction

Set an alarm.
You should have already been doing this.

Before you press the gumball dream crank of your snooze button,
Make yourself try a few things. 

Get out of bed. 
If this is too difficult at first, start talking to yourself about last night. Or
better, find faces in the ceiling bumps and tell them
about last night. You may find motivation to take up
today’s second chance in the stories reflected back at you.

Pretend you are swimming freestyle.
Don’t mind your legs looking like scissors for the moment.
You are cutting afresh into the waking life.
This will get your heart going, which you’ll need
if today is going to be anything good.

Take a shower. 
Of course, this requires you to first get out of bed, which could be trouble,
but you might want a clean slate to see today’s sweat for what it is,
or to pen remember a cute phone number. <3

Blink. Quickly!
Have P Funk programmed to downbeat with your alarm.
Move coffeemaker next to bed.
Sharpie YOU ARE LATE on your ceiling.
Replace beside lamp with a strobe light.
Let your pet spider out in your room.
Or just,
look outside.

At this point, extra sleep only rots holes 
in otherwise waterproof days. Outside your door, 
morning bird voices and people and flowers have all 
hung up their coats in closets not to be opened until the sky
shawls itself again. This blue green yellow blue is a gentle hand
to sit inside, a gesture signing us hope with the passing of seasons.

17/30 horses.

Horses are monuments to a people
who used to live off the land.

Before we roped hundreds at a time
under the hoods of our cars.

I rode here on a horse walking
the tightrope of my ancestors.

Some would say God made horses to
show us paths from doubt, others to bring us home.

This is only big as a wagon with roads to learn.
Have you heard them run?

Their gallops sound like four carpenters hitting
four well-placed nails in unison

Each step to mount browning pictures of old glory
for us to remember. When whole herds migrate, it sounds like revolution.

So we keep them between fences mainly.
Places where we can sit on top of them.

When a saddle is cut, does a tree fall in the rainforest?
Does anyone hear it? Does it sound like rodeo yells?

Horse, I stable you under the hood of elegance,
a vehicle we are still learning to see.

16/30 a psuedo-fibonacci poem to the red-haired gardener who slept here last night

walking back from my 8am

I wondered where you had planted the bombs.

we both knew it wouldn't last the day.
or maybe that was just me.

last night's movie reminded me of
the way we all have headstones
and how clocks look like fuses.

in between the two thoughts
my mouth went flytrap i grew
pirate leaves sparks flying up my neck
morning kissed your delicate starving face. i'm sorry
while you were sleeping i hid the bomb in my throat.

15/30 in the kitchen

I scooped up the snake and worm babies with my basket,
Took them to a safe place.
Look I see another one!
Let’s scoop it up before Maxxon eats it.
Maxxon, your religion can’t spread here.
These are our babies.
Stop eating all the babies

Stop eating all our babies

Stop eating all our babies.

14/30 europe jumps first.

Summer lies like a deflated hot air balloon over the grey stairs to Europe’s apartment door. Every Saturday he reaches up with a clever idea and rings the doorbell. Europe sets Nietzsche down next to the adolescent wine, struts to the fish eye in her door and looks through annoyed to see Summer’s white sailor’s cap and rumpled yellow tie.

I do not want you anymore, she mutters to her faded red door.

Summer cannot distinguish whispers through all the traveling he’s done to arrive here. He chooses to hear that she just needs to tidy up a few things. He remembers in these minutes all the flowers and airplanes he’s given her. He remembers the way her hair shined like brunette certainty when she let it down and how she would lay stately on the beach in a shade of purple he had never seen.

She returns to the kitchen, slits her wrist over a sparkling crystal glass and sighs,

If I let you in, I let in everything I hate about the world.

After some months, he turns the handle to find the door is unlocked. He pulls himself in slow, lies with her limp body on the blue tile floor for a moment, then raises a glass filled up half way on the kitchen counter to his lips. The mouths between cameras and sunglasses in his basket smile widely, asserting with shaky fingers that they have found the truth. He congratulates them from a voice deep as time, recommending through his teeth that they secure accommodations for next year.

13/30 late. (late is the title of the poem, though I understand I'm posting it a day late)

You sit there with that someone
and it's so late you start asking stupid questions
you don't even care to know the answer to like the Guinness
Book of World Records rolling off your tongue wearing
a cover that leans in quiet, whispers "I just want you to stay."
in italics like white noise conversation,
inside of a seashell washed ashore by first kisses ocean,
and you say with your eyes,

I heard this is exactly how it should sound.

So boring. We're stubborn as schoolchildren tempting the wallclocks
in our gaze for the bell
when we'll run out so reckless
that our backpacks of still-trying-to-forget
are slung off on the playground
and our lips grow into hands scraping
the bottoms of our pockets for
offerings to the ice cream truck.

We'll read a line or three
from the other's printing press,
journalist curious.
My fingers dance on typewriter keys daily,
I'll unlearn the moves they've taught pages so every word
rides back up to the source before we humans knew how
to write this stuff down.
Sometimes our ears don't read more than shuffling pages,
but for the moment ,
it's everything we've been wanting to hear.

But before lips fingers trace
printed playground geography,
we have to pull them out of
our seashell lungs.
So I'm sorry if my questions
sound stupid. It's just that
I want you to stay.

12/30 john speaks. happy easter!

The only thing between Mary’s tears writing
“gone” on her face and his tomb
were the craters we’d make in the dust chasing him.
I admit, neither of us knew the gravity of that morning,
but I know when you’ve heard the eternity in a man’s chest,
seen him order father-son to an open mouthed tempest,
heard him call you friend, seen him raise a man from the dead,
then watched him wrapped up and planted in a garden,
if you hear he’s not where he said he’d be, you run.

Peter kept three paces behind me, not for ability so much.
I heard once, every denial is a step back, like stepping out of people
you were, leaving their ghosts like buffers in the space between.
and I don’t want to get touchy subject but it’s never
the one running faster who has something to hide.

The truth about someone can be so much harder
when you love them. And maybe that’s why I stopped
short. Maybe, it’s why Peter stepped down first.
feeling the pull weight of conditions in his commitment.
Maybe I should have felt mine.
Jesus called himself a stream of living water.
Maybe I envied Peter's dry throat. Maybe I was scared
to see Him still lying there.
I’ve wondered if decaying corpses and open graves break
rivers of poison in our noses because our bodies aren’t
ready to be there yet. But this morning, there was no odor.
Only a pile of linens, their emptiness denying death’s hold
on an Only who didn’t deserve it. A pile of linens who played
the holes in His hands like trumpets making thunder so earth
shattering we felt it rolling stones in our chests.
He’d always said he was spinning himself a cocoon,
and when the silk fell away a new temple would spread wings.
More real than a lightning strike, gentle as a dove,
He tabernacled the room, saying “Peace be with you.”
Like we’re all slow runners and
those three days were three paces toward us.
Stepping through the ghosts of our past.
See. Hear. Forgiven.

We locked ourselves in contemplation for fear of the Jews.
But inside that house, a man called God spoke
“Peace be with you,” to ten men,
breathed His spirit into us,
like a wax seal of ownership,
like fire falling in raindrops.

We left a narrow path hotter than the blood of stars,
every footprint a crater of white clouds declaring,
“Peace be with you, Jesus is Risen. “

11/30 beet.

Beet.
My favorite purple vegetable.
When I set you on a measured table.
You are taller than my feet.
Beet.
You could be a spike on a porcupine
Which I’ve never had in skin that’s mine
Pointier than Cream of Wheat.
Beet.

10/30 sleep child.

And when you finally slip into the warm delicate dark,
do not wait to throw applesauce fireworks on the walls.
Paint orchards of wallflowers, pick them gently.
Tell them they have branches to hold.
Let your elbows straighten out.
That mean boy on the playground is not allowed
here. He covets the wonder of frail hands.

Hold rhinoceros feet, tell him he can trust.
Behind his tusks he is learning how to read.
Plan a play date with tiger cub.
Her mother pours warm milk,
dips her stripes in to make it chocolate.
Join your friends dancing on a moon cloud.
Don't let the adults in the hall tell you
the moon is walled in by pervasive nothing.
Watch M birds you drew lift off the page,
flap their arches slow and huge majestic as they
fly up to your cloud nest to feather brush your face lightly.
You are inside a pink velvet soft sun, hugging you, drying your eyes,
restoring to your face the warmth
it needs to glow.

9/30 recede.

Recede.

The settled sand storms
you tip-toe will rise again.
Once they have dried the fluid and moving part of you,
saved only the salt, they will rise up again, for they do not settle,
have not forfeited their sting.
Sleeping dragons side by side look like horizon,
one you dance upon in pursuit of new warmth.
But your legs are boomerangs, steps self-addressed,
they come back swinging with the same inferno teeth
that past perforated your heart.
Dragons are all in our heads, you don’t get to watch them die
in this lifetime, so recede back west.
Recede. Into the Pacific.
Pacific sounds like specifics, and before you crawl
confident over beaches you need to figure some of those out
and see not all of them are out at sea. Some are landlocked,
only found when we throw enough self into the shoreline
to come out rivers learning topography after kindled dragons
return to sleep, settling the typhoons in our restless spirit.

8/30 *

you were born an asterisk.
a thought causing second thought
a snowflake singeing the skin
a target too hopeless for arrows
from quivering lips
a star incessant on my pages
as if there's more to say

7/30 greenlake.

Springtime is like a fortune cookie.
Every day another word
sliding slowly through its barely eyelid
like sun through window blinds.
Our wonderstruck eyes search prodigal skies
for eggs hatching romance, some new
purpose, nourishment.
We play decorated in shorts
and sleeveless shirts
or less
to soak up the day's intent.
Baby birds, beaks open to
our returned familiar mother.
But there are others.

Others whose skin holds safe to darker suits
and pitch dresses and we ask if they are tasting
the same thing. They sit comfortable between
walls made of counterfeit forests.
They watch calendar squares fall
like names of acquaintances,
doubtful any of it is true.

6/30. anastasia.

I miss my mom.
No because I have
to stay after school.
She is stuck in bed.
She has no voice.
How? I don’t know how
to make tea?
My dad? I don’t have
a dad anymore.
He wanted to be a girl.
I don’t know.
Her name is Sarah now.
She seems happy.
Now I guess I have two moms
and kind of a dad.
He’s my mom’s boyfriend.
My mom’s boyfriend and I have
the same birthday and we both
live with her so she has to make two cakes!

Let’s play a game.
Here’s the rules. You can’t step
on shadows. It’s like tag, but if you
step on a shadow – you’re it.
But also if I tag you, you’re it.
And if you hold a cold metal pole
you’re safe. Yeah, I guess we can
watch four square for a little while.
It’s just I mainly play by myself.

Now let’s play the opposite.
Shadows are safe, but it’s tag still
so you try to catch me and if you’re
running in the daylight you melt,
then someone else who’s running
has to step from their shadow.
And tag you to unmelt you.

I didn’t really want to play either,
it’s just how I feel most times.
Will you hold my hand?

5/30 last night

Beside me in the bed lays a mob car,
black as a box absorbing every color my chameleon
skin has envied, and slick as its impersonal leather chairs.
Every boy I've been is pressed, eyelids pulled back,
against my cornea like a floor to ceiling window,
breathing heavy in my ears,
Drive.

I tell them,
blood boils hot regardless.
I've shoveled coal into of plenty of fist-shaped furnaces,
but in hindsight I was just signing my name on someone
else's poem they didn't don't know to write yet and tonight, kids,
I'm disinterested even in the bleaker spaces evicted you for immaturity,
so let's let our feet sleep grown up tonight. Tomorrow's a long day.

Kids don't lie down easy.
I feel sneaker foot steps inside; younger cleaner hands
clasping my optic nerves like rudders to turn the sails
surrounding two colored headlamps. I see
On a coat rack above me hang books
made of bird wings white as daydreams
before you speak them.
I feel their anxious confused breathing against the glass,
and I tell them,

I put those on to get here, but they have retired until morning.
Please, I have work tomorrow, let me do the same.

4/30 slow dancing

Tell me something.
When you grabbed my wrist, my hand,
Leaning into the hammock strung from my
shoulder to clavicle, smiling face pressed to leave
an impression, turning lights on behind my eyelids,
making sleep impossible,
were you just fish out of water shipwrecked for these nets?
I've been swimming a long time, but now baby,

I'm up here.
And I'm not winter migration
when things are cold elsewhere.
Some places are too familiar to visit,
even when I'm starving.

Heart flutter echoes through your delicate
flippers, gentle pats tapping an endless sway of ballroom
floor with your search for home. And all I'm asking is
you grow feet. Kick out the driftwood in your spirit,
like practicing to walk stable ground, 'cause

baby, I want to dance with you, to Pull you up
out of that ocean and hold in my hand
a hand.
to feel the waves we've both broken on birth
some tender swing in our steps you can't tell apart.
But I need you to tell me
you're ready
to rest.

3/30 every time a clock is built

Behind every cloud, the sky is always the same.
The sun is always out, so space dust vacations
inside caves on comets, with darkness a most
sought after souvenir. By now so much has been
brought back that stars have to push their light
through space with sewing needles, weaving
a blanket to keep us warm.

Hearing what our sun is saying takes longer now.
We sunburn because the sun only sees our oceans’ obedience
after almost ten minutes of orders and feels it best
to discipline us like children.

Behind every cloud there are air molecules starving for attention.
The oceans feel the suns thread and in response weave a second
layer of themselves, reminding us
they too are made of string. But the air of our breath is a jealous
lover and never misses a chance to tell any new concubine like fabric,
especially one as opaque and doleful as cloud, that gravity
has its way with all in time.
And we feel their ambitious hearts unraveling in our gutters,

Because below every cloud, there is a cell: a city,
a household, a skin suit.
And the inside of every membrane
is always the same. Some cog
of a greater machine believing in billboards
for advance from servitude, unknowing
that even the sun is housekeeper
for a body less automatic.

30/30 Poem 2

Behind the veil of your memory the distance between
Here and Leaving
felt my hands closing around its neck.

You looked at me like an empty paint bucket
removing its own lid, like a credit card declined on third dates,
couldn’t finish the monochromatic mural colored momentum I’d spilled.
But even if I had anything more to give, it would have been the color
of no surprises and momentum without a body to ride its waves crumbles
like last breaths into movie credits. A dark theater lit only by the names
behind a mask, and Here in my movie, they all spell Leaving.

A film canister holds only an hour or so
of images, which is more time than it takes
to cover walls with my thoughts when I’m careless enough.

I’m sorry for the way the room looked like a road sign going somewhere.
I will scrape out whatever drops are worth saving, put them in a can
looks like a poem. Recycle me dear, hold these tears like promises
to paint something you can stand on. I might just return
something clean, something happy to hold your reflection.

30/30 Poem 1

This blog was created to post poems for the 30/30 challenge, to write and post a rough draft of a poem every day for the month of April, National Poetry Month. The first post (below) will be yesterday's poem as I was a day late starting a blog... and then we'll continue from here! Enjoy!

To Chairman Mao

I am the grass.
I have let myself down into the resistance to say "stay."
I will play to your posters sizes of buildings.
I will bow to your limo as it kicks dust
on the feet of your prisoner lovers
but I have laid myself so virus
that even after you have
heard radio talk of my
underground you
will never dig
out my last
riot.
I will be the sore spot in your eye,
the moon in your sky as you wish
to paint yourself with stars
I am the laughter at your funeral, the gravity
as you leap for pantheon
I am the humans buried in the Great Wall of China,
I am the bee stinging your fist and I am
never letting go.