two new poems!

so it's been awhile since I've last updated. I self-published a book of poems since my last post, I decided to move back to Brooklyn instead of going to Denver, I have read hardly anything over the past month but the past few days Kenneth Koch and his Collected Works have been keeping me up at night. Despite all these happenings or non-happenings or realities or unrealities I have written a couple poems that I think are decent and worth throwing onto the internets. so enjoy, commment, eat them.

I am the ancient well

I am the ancient well.
I have fed your thirst
for a year.
I grew your flowers
so purple against an orange-tinted wall.
I accepted the wooden bucket and
peered passively at your sky
from the depth of clay walls,
melting from the inner heat of earth.
I caught your rain.
I became your rain.
water is water is water.

the romans drank my sustenance.
they fell.
I am not poison,
it was their pride.
do not dip in me anymore,
you too will fall.


if I were more French

if I were more French
I would eat cupcakes glazed with only
pure cane sugar burned on the islands
that some Italian guy explored 500 years ago.
I am American though and my frosting
tastes like the inside of a Sarah Lee container
and it is pink to make it seem regal
or like Marie Antoinette's dresses
which makes me more French
I suppose.

I suppose I could write about a cupcake being baked
and the oven overheating but us and our hearts
narrowly escaping a sure death.
We did not escape.
We pillaged the crevices between our breasts for signs of life;
there were none.
Instead we ate cupcakes and made love
on the back porch as an oven
became flames in a bakery in Paris.

My friends and I have seen Paris.
( I will not mention their names here; they fear the publicity)
Separately we stubbed our toes
in that once medieval city that
Haussmann upended to quell the French spirit,
to extinguish defiance that I by chance was born into,
a Bastille Day baby with a heart of fire
that even the most novice of campers could
control with a paper fan and
rearranging of fallen logs.

I, defiant child, only attract the enfant terribles.
They do not eat pink frosted cupcakes that
my mother bakes,
they drink coffee black and burn cigarettes with the stove light.
I drive them mad with my yearning of freedom from Americanisms
yet I drink Coca Cola,
sucrose anointing my spirit.

My three souls do not indulge sanity
as if it were sweet pastries.
My three souls,
one for music
one for poetry
one for unconventional strangers
did not burn down the apartment in Brooklyn baking cupcakes.
It was my kindred soul, swept in at five AM,
damp from riding the late night F train,
that rubbed brownstone of Old New York together
and lit a surprise blaze that tore through the floor
but left me this poem.