currently untitled, or actually, temporarily titled "THIS IS MY GENDERQUEER POEM OKAY?"

If there are words between the words—honey in
a windowsill—then what shall I call the rainwater
rusting this commodious bucket?

Tongues, thick and prone to falling for the
closest approximation of a sound—bacon-sliced
and butcher-papered—stumble, settling as silt.

Indelicate, the assignment of names; malevolent,
the sublimation into precept. Afterwards, countless
abandoned rooms, numberless doorways.

I sought these spaces and took care in naming, but
on waking, still occupied the diffuse light of “woman.”

Help me!

Hi y'all. Sorry I haven't posted (ever), I promise I'll be different from now on!
Here are two poems I wanted to put in my chapbook but that I have not edited. So please be brutal and honest with your comments.
Thanks, see y'all tomorrow in class!


Romancing the Button

What do you rub on?
it’s a failed

quote-droid
your ass is glorified
and it’s an issue
pretty mean, I am not a mile
stretched out on a lion
cows on Wednesdays
and the wigs
are freaking me out

the waves went on
forever


Into the Pan

any plastic one
freaked out
long metal
pick your own nose
pogo stick on the lawn
monkey bars and
kokopellis
don’t think straight

we’re in the water
chicken wheat paste
in a pickle
someone else?
I’m going to vomit.
Pauly Shore,
you’re on my leg and
it hurts.

Needs sleep

Fun game. Some textual excerpts from a certain online medium, reformatted/organized:

(This is lovingly inspired by the amazing Nin Andrews' "Dear Professor, Do You Live In A Vacuum?")

"Share"

1.

And so begins

the weekend that determines the rest of my life. But really,

a single weekend

determining the rest of my life? Yes,

you read that correctly folks, it's high

stakes.

2.

Life is too short

to wake up with regrets. So love the

people who treat you right. Forget about the one's

who don't. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a second chance, grab it with both

hands. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody

said life would be easy, they just promised

it would be worth it.~

Post to your wall if you

agree

3.

My refrigerator sounds like some mutant

electronic didgeridoo.

4.

home sweet home, and I can't wait

for my bed!

5.

is pretty excited for her first lab report

grade to come out as an "F" on the account of a space

cadet. Mind you, I have been working on the stupid graph

for over an hour too! Dear weekend,

hurry up and come here before I lose my mind!!!

6.

I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs

put one of the final nails

in the coffin to print journalism. Hello, iPad ...

goodbye newspapers

you can hold

in your hand.

7.

dear facebook,

how am I supposed to be a pimp

if you post

all

of my activity?!

8.

wow

this class is DUMB!!!!!

9.

hates

excel

.

10.

Dad: "When I get old, I want you

to buy me a surrogate. That way

I can go play tennis with you

in the park." Guess what movie my dad just watched.

Just take a wild guess.

11.

Homework sucks....

12.

That State of the Union Speech was BADASS! Go

Obama!

13.

For Sale: Parachute. only used

once, never

opened,small

stain.

14.

all

this

savage

talk.....

15.

We must look beyond politics and political correctness, beyond tradition, beyond personal preference, beyond our small point on the map -- to the love of Christ,

looking back without discrimination on

ALL

nations, calling us to love in the

same way.

16.

"Save

the Savages?" Sorry.

I can't support that.

17.

Don't know

which is more entertaining,

watching the President's speech, or watching

the politicians as they respond to

the speech.

18.

is wondering if there is a nicer way to say, "You're an

asshole...."

19.

I built a time machine; a musical

time machine... The year,

1985!

20.

Dad's 50th Bday and going

to Vail for the weekend! Yay for snow!!!

:)

21.

Holy Nervous

ness

22.

Thanks to everyone who played the game, today!

It was fun!

I'll come up with a new way to entertain us all in the next few days.

:)

23.

The secret is out! Joyce guessed correctly,

first. So she wins the game. The answer:

we're moving back to CO at the end of February. Can't wait to get

home!

:)

24.

just picked

up her dress for brennan's wedding!

25.

doesnt know what to do!! DEBBIE

DONT LEAVE ME!!

26.

had a great time with my brother, can't wait to see

him again!

27.

realized that the ideal temperature

for Dwight is

one degree cooler than anyone sets the thermostat.

to test this theory, I've been turning

the temp down by one

degree every half hour to see

if he reacts. mission accomplished, it's

57 degrees in here.

28.

absolutely love my sisters

and brothers, but why

are they so impossible sometimes!!!! uhh

making plans with them is ridiculous,

end of story!!

29.

hates technology. Its

supposed to make life easier

but really just puts you in a

bad mood.

30.

absolutely love my sisters

and brothers!!

31.

knitting is knotty

32.

just took a nice little nap at work.

I feel fresh

33.

Two weeks from today

I will be in Colorado...

34.

so...I just applied for a job on craigslist, only to find out

that it is a position

in the office I already work at....

FML

35.

wants to be the best

I can be . . .

and I will be . . . soon!

36.

's musical ears have progressed

past his playing skill: id est, I think

I sound bad. :)

37.

Im

so confused...I dont know what

to do...

:(

38.

Day 3

of 5 woohoo week

is getting shorter!!!

39.

Clean

vanilla

protein smoothie for breakfast=

a beautiful, and delicious start to

my day! It's too big, though. I think I can only

handle half!

40.

is glad his Hebrew and Yiddish

Came in Handy!

Exquisite Corpse Experiment (Alex & Patrycja)

Alex (Greenspan) and I created this after an epic waffle breakfast this morning. For those who aren't familiar with the poetry game, we each wrote a few lines and then folded over the paper so that we could only see the other person's last line. And Voila!:

Waiting for Waffles

This opus of a halfling: half-eaten half-life

core, shaped flower, shaped cunt

seeds patient, or dawdling. Decent? Darling

am I decent? Is it

crispy? Resentment flows

like pancake batter; feel it

between your toes and

that other soft space, roof of the mouth;

the underside of some steamed lid:

we’re cooking bow-tie pasta, darling,

sautéing anxieties on the side.

                        Sorry about the tattoos

            and the miniatures; the butter-

            knife wounds I never shared:

            can we still be friends?

Can we still sit--all dimples and clenched teeth

            and squirming toes?

            Watch for blueberries

underfoot; thorns and dragonflies;

love and reading-glasses.

We wish we could wait, unassuming,

the way a browning artichoke does

                        head chopped off,

head atop the slender neck

of a vase. Dead chess set. Herniated

            piano-fake eyelashes. The cranes

                        are drying. A poem is cooking.

                                    Let simmer until supple.

Creation Myth

in this beginning, some ambidextrous Lover is

plastering hand shadows like gumbo on a butt-naked wall,

and taking the tick-tock out of clocks.

this Paramour smoothes city-wrinkled foreheads

                                                       such poor puckered half-lives

to un-bottle a tempest;

paint harnessed, splattered onto

a starred canvas woven

by a Curiosity strung out

on open space and open-mouthed altitude.

            the kind of canvas that would stitch shut Time’s

            puppet lips if

            drunken banter didn’t so amuse

            this western Welkin.

no longer masked nor latticed, hard-hearts

give way to a tenderness like

pulp, a malleable Love with estrous hands

                                    reproducing some meaty minute, some

                                    lip-lock that dislodges the tempest;

                                    makes pollen.

pollen: a pulse, a blossom, a heat.

no longer such poor puckered things giggles (this, that, some) God. 

Seeking Syndrome

I've never been willing to believe that it takes time to do anything worth doing...

Why waste? They're always there, the whiles,

Bathed in one another, waiting.

Every one can be won, and not one is worth

but the worth of another.

Beyond the belief that hard work and sacrifice will get me what I want...

I can see it now, dear. The baubles. The trinkets,

The ornamental sludge and the really, really cool thing!

I wish I could show you that

Hard work and sacrifice will get you... Hard work and sacrifice.

If I can't have it now I don't want it...

If I can just taste it on the tip of my, tip of my top,

Then I'll know that I didn't get it, and forget it.

To all others, those things that are not yet here,

To me, all that I find, exactly where I am.

Here it is, the thing I've been waiting for!...

Built before I noticed, an astronomical phenomenon.

A carefully constructed coincidence,

Clearly the creation of a Creator...

Clearly!

Like a day, it's so plain! Plain as day...

So plain that some kids come and paint-spray it away.

here is something that I just wrote. It's one poem but it feels like two different poems but I want it to be one poem. Help.

Kids are so weird.

Today I watched one fill his fists with gravel

and then open them over the sidewalk.

The gravel went everywhere except the designated gravel-place.

That was at the park.

There were a lot of weird kids there with their normal parents.

Given what we all suspect to be true about heritability,

it's a wonder parents take their kids anywhere.

My hands and forearms were cold, but it

was nice to read in the sun anyway.

I only got interrupted by an errant frisbee once.

Now I'm writing this in my warm car in the parking lot.

It's a sort of halfway house for the reluctant park-leaver.

Here is a work-in-progress

To be is to metaphor, I believe

(Inspired by a list of words, selected at random, from George Oppen's “Of Being Numerous”)

in nothing. Irony shows us ancestry built the vehicle tomorrow. A child can preface this, but morality has dropped. What is this, seated caves? Less. Poor unknown: me, he. What, in a moment, incredibly rasps into unlikely plant grass poetry: artists sail poems. The single source of memoriam, the artist, the theater of william. These literatures are foxholes. Then the artist, what? In memoriam of all materials: all the poems yield excitement from their sources within artists. Incomplete occurrences between speech, never power never exalted, speak on numerous apprenticeships. e.g. “The monument smiled at the pedestrian by night.” Solution? Structure; branches. Comes glass, constructs preface, admits acknowledgements on the matter dear oppen dear niedecker dear matter. A child can outlast language and all its sea. Poems are almost primitive and I doubt the miraculous can be. The sea is dark, the cabins and their planets soar about us, we; animalia. A girl might say the symbol means sign, the light might show there are numerous subways, only few white women. The savvy, plain infantry bulks in halls, ready to undertake the night in relief of a solution, a reconstruction of idiom. As the ladies at parties would sorrow in their discrete notes and pillow books, true artists wool their tongues but in a good boy fashion, all that which they know. However, enlightened by longitude the crowd thus pounds on starlit, killing definition; and I? undoing. It is a neoclassic scene paved by one argument: The infantry stormed the hull, and beauty was felt by all.

First foray into interweb publication

Hi everyone. Here goes nothing:

Howard.

It’s an honor to be here with you, Alex.

No, Alex, the honor
is all mine. It’s something
ingestible: something I’ll keep
until the next piss.

Would you mind telling us a little about yourself?

Yes.

How is it you came to be drunk, slumped
over your own doorstep, talking to yourself?

It all started with
Chopin. I find
if I press my face
hard enough
into the venetian blinds,
maybe he’ll go away.

And the others?

It’s hard to have friends
when you wear a different
head for each of them. You
have to do more laundry that way.
Heads should be good for more than one wear
like pants.

So, how do you do it?

I’ve managed to assemble
a working self from the rummage.
Managed to glue
the face together,
to make out the smile
of someone who thinks they know you.

But would you ever really want to be friends with someone who speaks the way poems are written?

Hark, the crumbling leaf
stapled to the wall, glowing
embers of gemstone dragonfly
table lamps, the artichoke
in a vase, pastel
pictures of me groping
for my own back.

Now you’re just listing things in your bedroom.

Depends, whose poetry
are we talking. I’d never
kiss someone who writes
poems like mine.

How is it you write so haphazardly?

As with clouds you
have to be on a first name basis
with your poems.
This poem goes by his middle name.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it

Welcome hoodlums, wanderers, paragons, Svengalis, and hoi polloi! 


I've talked to some of y'all about workshopping outside of our overly elephantine class. My idea for this blog is to use it as a forum for sharing our work & giving constructive feedback; in addition, it can serve as a impulse colloquy (I'd love to see posts with words/ ideas/ poems that inspire your work, whether avant-garde or orthodox).. 

If we decide to step out of the cyber realm, I see wine & scribbling in the near future of this collective ;-) Who knows, maybe a chapbook could come out of this. Whatever happens, all I ask for is a propinquity to poetics and a desire to include this blog in your stockpile of procrastination gambits. 

And please, don't hold back on feedback!


Jibber-jabberedly yours,
Patrycja