4.19.2011

POEM

Some days are like
bringing rabbits out of a hat.
Some days one must
hide one’s light
in a barrel. Some days
one’s heart doesn’t want
to to stay where it belongs—
it keeps going
flippity-flop flippity-flop.
Some days there are
unexpected pleasures
that leave you in a kind of
impressive pause
that lasts long enough
so that any random sound
will make you jump as if
gazing upon the nucleus
of the neurotic.
Yes, unexpected...
like over-hearing
someone say, “art gives me
the willies” or like tonight,
while flipping, or flopping,
through the Complete Poems
1913-1962
of E.E. Cummings
that I had recently obtained
from an antique store,
I discovered a pressed
marijuana leaf on page 776,
covering a poem titled SONG
where lines from the poem
such as “precisely ours /
is the now to grow” & “our summer
in fall / and in winter our spring /
is the yes of yes” befits my
inflamed discovery just as
“strolling slowly(mind in mind) /
through some green
mysterious land” caressed
the underside of the leaf
on the very opposite page.
& then I grew anxious for
more discoveries
so I flipped through the
thick book where I was
thinking that perhaps
I’d find money? a tiny birdie
with golden wings? & suddenly
on page 383
I made another discovery:
a four-leaf clover
that had perhaps been aching
to be seen again after thirty years
like a corpse that longs to be seen
in a wax museum.



4.18.2011

ACCENTS

My thoughts are often thrown
through mill-wheels,
treading like

a secondary accent,
like one’s wisdom teeth
never cutting through.

The way that certain people
breathe, it’s like
they are telling fibs

through their ribs.
What could alter a voice
when one

“has a strong foreign
or regional accent . . .
the individual with the

less obvious accent
will naturally try
to mimic the stronger one”?

Was it the Toronto-native’s
eerie drawl that I mimicked,
or was it because

I sounded like
James Mason’s accent
in Lolita 

when he attempted
to delicately illustrate
his “mature depth”?

I speak in minimal scruples
when I am anxious,
like peppermints

melting on my tongue;
pearly taste where
taste-buds dance

as if at a polka party.
What of the accents
of eyes? Mental glottis, like

sweet scents of gardens.
A Beauty that is out-of-place
“like discovering a prim rose in a swamp.”

What of the accent of change?
the way that I spun around like
a frightened lamb this evening

as the dishes shifted like
the grounds underneath
a nuclear plant

after a major earthquake.
Should murderers be dipped
into radioactive lakes?

This poem may be about
accents, but it may not be.
This poem could be about

scaling up a wall
towards a window
(if I were that tiny)

where a fly buzzes around,
sounding like a dozen ‘copters.
The fly lands on the window,

cleans its antennas,
its legs moving as fast
as hummingbirds’ wings,

producing winds
that nearly throws me
off of the window sill.

However, I scale further
to get a closer look
at the phenomenon;

the fly’s multi-colored eyes
glistening off of my face
like a prism.

Has every accent been betrayed?
Perhaps Yogi Berra would take it
a step further, saying,

“It ain’t over ‘til you’re buried underground.”
Perhaps with a tooth
-y smile, like

a cobblestone road?
Accent of disappearing
from your body:

new verbiage for your
eternal destiny, passing
through, becoming

a “rookie” in the
Vast Unlimited shape
of it all, where

we are mere fibrils
in the
Universe’s body.