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.