Select Comfort-A Syllabic poem

Syllabic poem= where each line has the same number of syllables. An interesting exercise in restraint to be sure.

Select Comfort

These are the nights I
appreciate my
new queen-sized mattress
and the rituals
involved in sleeping
next to another.
At first, I wanted
guidelines, directions.
What about nightmares,
tossing and turning,
endless bickering?
Easily enough
they became parts of
a nightly routine:
you lie next to me,
we pretend to sleep
until it happens,
we do not have sex
unless we want to.
Political, yet
sympathetic to
the truce we make when
we undress, and brush
our teeth, wash taut
faces. The hygiene
of self and other—
examination—
judgments forgotten
when you turn the light
in the bathroom off
and slip under the
covers that hold me,
house us like orphans.
This is our retreat
from stress and pressures,
my weakness lying
next to your body.
Our hearts listening
for the other’s beat
while our body heat—
exoskeleton
fills in-between space.
Light breaths harmonize
yet not in tandem.
Shut eyes imagine
how we now appear:
tired, unguarded,
graven images
softly releasing
domestic incense—
I have never felt
such skin like parchment.
Forgive me for that
rude comparison
to preserved calf skin.
Don’t think of yourself
as the sacrifice,
you, an offering
to a night that has
brought us together,
but at such a subtle
cost that unnerves me.
A special terror
of mine betrays this
closeness, for I can’t
help but think that I
might wake up alone,
your shape having been
flatten into the
wrinkles in the sheets
sometime before dawn.
I would never sleep again
if given the choice
to watch you sleeping,
to know you would stay
here lying near me
the rest of your days.
My willingness, then,
to close my eyes, sleep
my back echoing
the promise in yours,
is my neglected prayer
that you will stay here,
and stems from the fact
that I cannot watch
time slowly take us
away from this place.
I am afraid to
witness your passing,
though it is rehearsed
practiced endlessly,
by time’s bipolar
flipping the light switch
that moves us from here
to the day after
by no personal
means or decisions.
Do you stay here when....?
In my dreams, teach me
to awake from what
I cannot leave yet.

My First Response Poem

This poem is a response I've cobbled together for Sean Patrick Conlon's poem "Something Else," which can probably be found online somewhere, though you only need to know that the repeated sentence is the first line of that poem as well. And yes, this beast is memorized. At least, hypothetically.

The first cock I saw was in a catalog.
I was on my way home from school,
tracing the daily route from my first grade classroom
to my family’s apartment with my younger sister
and her friend Stefi walking with me.
We stopped in the nearby park
to swing on the swings.
I took the opportunity to throw away my math assignment like I always did
so that when the babysitter later asked me
if I had any homework I could honestly tell her I had none.
I was a bad student,
more concerned with the chocolate milk they handed out at snack time
than with my grades.
I learned that trick from my best friend Max, whom I will always admire because
he once told that he lived on a farm and owned a pet fox.
I still wish I could have a pet fox.
I’d probably even name him Max
though I can’t remember what he looked like
except for the mole on his left cheek.

The first cock I saw was in a catalog
After launching ourselves in the air repeatedly,
we were tired and ready to head home.
Stefi, on the other hand, seemed hesitant to leave
and when I asked her about this, she told me
that she had found something cool, would we like to see it?
Yes! We enthusiastically shouted.
After quickly scanning the area to make sure no one was watching us
Stefi led us to a thicket of bushes
that were twice as tall and three times as wide as we were.

The first cock I saw was in a catalog
There it was in the underbrush:
a tattered magazine
out of which someone had ripped each page,
its leaves were scattered among the roots of the bush,
wrinkled and covered in dirt,
like they had been used up and thrown away.
A man stared at me from the ground.
He wore nothing but a gold necklace and tennis shoes.
Not even socks.
There was something extraordinary in the image that
I could not look away.
I could not help but think it strange that someone
forced him to run naked and oiled like an ancient Olympian.

The first cock I saw was in a catalog.
There was something about his smile that made staring down at him feel natual,
almost as if it invited me to look at him,
to hold my attention while I recognized every single detail of his display.
I was inexplicably mesmerized.
Noticing this, Stefi told my sister that she thought I liked it.
They both giggled.
I mumbled a shameful no while keeping my eyes on the man’s body.
It would have been useless to try to look away.

The first cock I saw was in a catalog
before I had ever heard the word cock
or known what it meant.
The V of his legs drew my eyes in
to a mass larger than my fist.
This was weird sculpture put on display for ignorant eyes.
What would the photographer have thought,
seeing his trade on sale for the wrong audience
and watching it be misinterpreted as something
far more innocent than was intended?
This was an athelete; I could not explain why he was naked
nor why it stirred something in me.
It was safer to keep staring than to think about what was happening.

The first cock I saw was in a catalog
on my way home my heartbeat returned to its natural pace
and the blood left my flushed cheeks
asI began to look forward to watching afternoon cartoons
and to not doing my homework.
Sometimes, the miracle lies in the fact that nothing has changed.
Now I remember it as a Fall day with gray clouds,
a day when my younger sister, her friend Stefi, and I
went to the park to swing on the swings
before walking home.

List Exercise (a Draft)

There are Enough Good Enough Things

Don’t eat alone.
Invite a friend to eat with you at lunch.
Oh, you have class?
Well, maybe something later in the week.
Talking on the phone with your parents
only counts as half of an encounter with a real person,
because really you’re still only by yourself.
If you spend more than two hours on the computer,
you must spend most of that time on homework.
Continually refreshing the browser in the hopes that
a new email will suddenly appear will only sour your mood.
Staring at computer screens can also dampen your spirits
and cause eye strain.
Looking at pornography is condemning yourself to a mossy life in a well.
Please don’t talk to yourself.
You are tricking yourself into thinking it’s normal,
and it unsettles the people around you,
which will only lead to further isolation.
Can you see the outlines of these ripples yet?
Carry your swim trunks in your backpack.
That way when you overhear a conversation about
people going to Rocky Point over the weekend,
you can pull out your bathing suit
and ask if you can buy the second round of drinks.
Stop writing things down.
Removing the English language from your working memory
will make you happier by making it harder
for you to articulate just how alone you feel.
If you have no language, you have no need to express your depression.
Ask him out for coffee.
Ask her out for coffee.
Ask the next person who walks by out for coffee.
You don’t drink coffee, but you know saying,
“Hey, let’s get tea some time?” would be vaguely deviant enough
to deter even your mother from doing so.
Don’t sigh.
There is no guilt in expressing relief that your life is almost over.