The First Part of Something Larger

Things have been busy these past few days. Quite a change from the fallout doldrum of the end of the school. I've started working again and it's good for the soul, I believe, even if the job itself is fairly sour. Anyway, I came here to post part of a poem I'm working on. I think it stands alone fairly well, so if you read it, I hope you like it, and if you don't, please tell me still.


1.

I spent the morning knocking cobwebs
from the metal rafters of the first Baptist,

and an early evening facedown in bed, four fingers
of bourbon in my belly, no blankets, no pillows,

stretching my limbs to the cardinal points.
Tomorrow I wonder when she’ll come home,

across the border, a daffodil behind her ear,
and show me how to pine for Guadalajara again.


Thanks,
Andrew

Ugh

I've been having a rough time completing things lately, and I've spent so much time grinding away at this poem. It still needs work, but I think I'm going to just move on and maybe come back to it when I figure it out.

Protest Song ‘08/Old Noise


We are the little
squeaking ghosts
with cardboard mantras
and bruised pamphlets.

Our dissent
blooms in the pinched
ignition of paper
matches, deliberate

and bright, as if
they could speak
to slow us down.
Amateurs—yes,

we squeak, fists
in the air, and ruffle
the fuzz, whose parade
of peekaboo lights

and bullhorns add
only static. We invoke
the city’s whisper—
the unrequited pillow-

talk of blind justice.
We stir the old noise;
the murmuring underbelly;
the hand-me-down appetite

quieted by a night of cee-lo
and booze. Alone, we find
the slow vigor in our list of demands
that we don’t expect to be met.

First Light, Last Light (part 4)

Eyes opened, head bent to the side, I saw the pale blue of the pre-dawn. Emma's head laid on Roscoe's shoulder. Roscoe puffed on the exhale. I got up and stretched. The aura of the sun was just penetrating the eastern horizon. Roscoe and Emma woke slowly as I was beginning to walk away. "Hey!" Emma shouted and came running after me, Roscoe following behind. The gravel road was in a thin haze of fog for all the way home.
The kitchen clock read 7:35am when we got home, with the small arrow casting a shadow in the white space between the 7 and the 8. With sun up and raining in through the living room windows, Roscoe and Emma crashed on the couch while I threw together a mound of Krusteaz pancakes and brewed a pot of Americana coffee.
Roscoe got up and put the needle on some dusty, Neil Young wax. I came out of the kitchen—hands full of flapjacks and plates, pot of Joe, one coffee mug—to “A Man Needs a Maid” and set everything down on the coffee table.
“Thanks a lot, man,” Roscoe said. Emma nodded.
“No problem.”
And that was all that was said until everything was devoured—just Neil Young, those pillows of fried batter, and black black coffee all for me.
I took a cool shower while Roscoe and Emma passed out in the living room, then put on my best clothes—a pair of black jeans and a burgundy polo. And I was out the door and off to the bus stop a block away.

First Light, Last Light (part 3)

People often say autumn is the time of year where everything dies, where nature around gives itself up to the vacancy and frost of winter. In the orchard with Emma and Roscoe, I could have never felt that way. That thought misses the whole charade. It doesn't allow for the subtle grand finale of the turning of smells and colors. And not to mention harvest season.
All around us was the burgundy of Empires hanging from the vigorous limbs of the trees lined like soldiers in a grid. Roscoe was beginning to sober up.
"Maybe this wasn't the best idea," Roscoe whispered.
"Oh, who cares?" Said Emma, grabbing a nearly perfect apple from a tree. She chomped down on it, getting its skin stuck in her gums, and she wiped from her face its ample mist.
"You've got one silly-ass grin going there, Frank," She said.
I yanked off an apple for myself and didn't say a word. I took off my shoes and sank my bare feet into the tall, wet grass. Everything was crisp. I squatted against a tree and slid to the ground. Emma sat next to me. The moon had escaped the clouds and left her pale forehead aglow. She pulled her hood over her short, brown hair. Roscoe stood off a little ways, staring down a row of trees that looked like black licorice.
Emma leaned over to me. "I love you, Frank" and she kissed my cheek, got up, and danced over to where Roscoe was standing.
The last thing I remember before the alcohol fuzzed over and I fell asleep was the faint sound of them singing "That's me in the c-corner, l-losing my religion..."

Eyes opened, head bent to the side, I saw the pale blue of the pre-dawn. Emma's head laid on Roscoe's shoulder. Roscoe puffed on the exhale. I got up and stretched. The aura of the sun was just penetrating the eastern horizon. Roscoe and Emma woke slowly as I was beginning to walk away. "Hey!" Emma shouted and came running after me, Roscoe following behind. The gravel road was in a thin haze of fog for all the way home.