September | 2010 | SensibleUnsensible

Archive for September, 2010

The Hip of Our Golden Orb

Taking a French leave
To a Roman holiday
My car keys
Propped under the arm of a dead-drunk Jesuit
Draped in the hourglass
Of a dancing girl’s waist
Sleeping in a stupor
Her face a Chinese wall
“Goodbye,” I breathe between clamped lips

But my word fell, a tiny stone
And lay between the fat and spilled spirit
Of yesterday’s bacchanal
On the cloth of tomorrow’s new feast

When reverie mounts the sky
On the round hip of our golden orb

(And who shall wear the starry crown?
Good lord, show me the way)

Portait of chris

She looked better naked.

She always wore clothes that were all wrong for her and sometimes ended up looking like a peacock with a neon green hat, a great orange t-shirt, and a floaty umbrella skirt. She wore big fired clay beads and Birkenstocks.

She went to traditional Armenian dance society functions and recited poetry with a nasal reverence of the first time we had sex and she said somewhere, she thought, something really good was happening because of what we were doing at that moment. She believed it earnestly.

I tried to let that comment wither on the vine.

Zero Bound Hero

Posted in Uncategorized with tags super hero lana lane doctor doom zero bound hero on September 8, 2010 by unsensible

I wear my underwear on the outside
They’re red, which is more than tradition
A sheet, tied around my neck
In a rakish slipknot

My wide window open
The night breeze calls like a lurid woman
Smells of cigarettes and blossoms half rotten

Lana Lane, Lana Lane
My eyes roll languid
Down the impossible ogees
That greedy hands sketched you

Dr. Doom, Dr. Doom
My blood rushes faster
Just knowing you’re out there

Have you slipped off together
In his domed hover craft
With the top rolled down
Wind’s fingers in your hair
Cruising all the way down to Desperation Point?

Don’t you know I’m the one chosen to
Incite you, excite you, indict you?
Stand at the edge of the newsprint grey night
Thinking of the drop, the fall, the fight

Pow!
The grass flies faster than my feet anticipated
My old sheet smells like pulp paper
Pixilated print, vermilion, and damp vegetation
Another night rendered semi-safe by desperate dawn patrol
Till twilight

1 Comment »

Lights Out

Posted in Uncategorized with tags Lights Out silence alone on September 8, 2010 by unsensible

When the lights are out in the house
The phone is dead
Computer sleeping
Silence hums like cicadas

Hushed you talk in past tense
Stare with eyes three-quarter slits
Make hazy outlines of the flickering world
Look past the shoulders of people you once knew
To peer at candlelit strangers around you

You can whisper to me in this darkness
But I make no warranty I’m listening
Sibilance and assonance absorbed
In a cloud of cotton gray
Muffled thunk, think, thunk in the darkness

These words, I don’t promise to return them
You’ll find them scattered
Amid a pile of half-written letters
And unopened party invitations
Wherever I’m lying
If you look for me in the breast of a brighter day

1 Comment »

Captain Something

Posted in Uncategorized with tags superhero poem silly moving mountains on September 7, 2010 by unsensible

Let’s make a superhero
Someone everyone can care about
He’s got a cape and a mask
And wears his underwear on the outside
Which is more than traditional
(It makes for easy getaways from the phantom cheetah ladies)

Alright. So, alright. Can he fly?
Does he have the strength of ten men
For carrying furniture or heavy groceries?
Is he tall enough to grab things from the top shelf in a single reach?
Does he have psychic eyes that look right into you
Like x-rays but without penetrating your regalia, uninvited
Penetrating your soul

But mostly and chiefly
He can
He can
He can simply move mountains

Which is not to say he knows where to put them
Conflict!
Maybe he moves a mountain and that mountain was supposed to stay where it was
Maybe he has park rangers all over the world hunting for him
Because he fucked up Jellystone or Yellowstone or Mt. Vesuvius

It’s a specialized power
It only comes into play in certain storylines

Is he invulnerable?
No.
He is vulnerable to both conventional and non-conventional arms
Missile, melee, and energy attacks
Effected by both heat and cold
Incinerated by atomic energy, fricasseed by electricity
Special weakness to neuro-gas
Poisons, toxins, and alien diseases
Elemental furies, severe thunderstorms, and unfavorable chills
Virtually helpless against magical and mental assault
Name calling is the worst

Because vulnerability makes the character more accessible
Right?

But he’s totally dedicated to his sense of justice
Whenever he can figure out what that is

And he can move mountains
(If you need a mountain moved)
Few people ever really do

SensibleUnsensible