Poem 9 -Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a great couple of holidays.
Because I am extra sentimental after a night of drinks, I'm posting now. There's no telling what kind of treacle you'd have to swallow if I blogged tomorrow.
I started this poem a while back (2004), but since I just finished Stumbling On Happiness, an anti-self-help kind of book by Daniel Gilbert, I wanted to revisit this poem.
This poem has a title.


Poem for Grandma

I'll bet you anything there are houses on streets
where cast shadows of horse chestnuts,
larches, oaks fall against naked paint.
Between door and window,
stand walls forgetting the shadows
of boys and girls-
building houses of forget.
I am starched out there,
stiffening against the days,
in a fifteen-year-old photograph,
like tulip bulb in November dirt.
I know years before I sat on the stool,
smiling with my mouth closed,
before the gloss flattened
me into a frame
and more between taking and looking.
But now I steal glow from young cheeks
to light cells in gray matter.
Where in me is that boy?
And you will say the eyes, the eyes
and if we could hear him laugh...
and I say, the boy never grinned;
we made him today
with Kodak paper and sun,
drying rain on glass.

Poem 8

This poem goes out to anyone who ever waited for a cab outside of the 3B in Bellingham after an 80s night. It's been nearly a year since the place closed, but I still miss her. As a bar she was good to us.
I have no idea where the first two lines came from.

Our names shouted in Russian,
our names spoken in Gaelic:
the twin choirs,
wind and rain,
exchange harmony over
the newspapers sheltering our heads.
We steal glances down the block
and scuttle for a cab.
We are drunk.
We are drunk and hoping for a ride.
We are drunk and singing Journey as loud as rain.
Running for the cab,
we are laughing, and steam
from the tailpipe warms faces.

December happened; we weren’t looking
or else we ignored the scatter of days over months,
and here we stand,
the yellow door propped
among each raindrop,
(There are so many raindrops I could swim.)
soaks up and scatters with our bodies:
Each one a plan from God, and we ruin it.
Drops delivered to the backseats of cabs,
delivered to my hair and pillow,
your head on my pillow.

Poem 7

It's been at least a week since we had a city-crippling few inches of snow here in King County, so I feel justified in posting this poem and not motivated by nostalgia brought on by weather. I promise it will be the only Christmas poem (to be fair I never use that word) that I post this year.
I've got the bad feeling that Thomas Kincaid, painter of light that he is, would somehow approve of this one.

To see green yellow red blue
lights on the snow,
I might walk through calf-deep struggle
on the sides of the streets
and hear the shuffle of tires
in snow, the lines they draw.
You could string light
around trees in spirals-
ponderosa bark clinging to wire-
or tack it within windows,
the nimbus of color against blinds
curtains, drapes, black glass,
or framing a living room:
the adoration of chairs
over a coffee table manger.
I am here now, my collar up
the ladder creaking against the eaves
cramming light into tiny packets,
portioned out so that it is
strings of waiting.
Each staple marks a day spent
in months without a twenty-fifth.
But we could find waiting tonight
with the wind,
with the sound-hungry snow,
with the lights,
and the sky pink
with a city’s patience.

Poem 6 -Five Unrelated Non-Haiku

I successfully avoided the temptation to issue a Christmas poem, but will undoubtedly post one soon.
Here are five poems that should be in haiku form, but I don't like to write in iambic pentameter or use end rhyme, so I think it's only fair that I piss on another culture's arbitrary conventions by not counting syllables.
I had fun punctuating these.

a. Fourteen horses: murmured sleekness, brown grace on the earth. b. The moon knows no grass, yet grass shines back; here is breath. c. A four year old, knowing her raincoat is yellow,glows in the downpour. d. Rain dragging down the gray: we wash the streets; we wash apple blossoms e. The sun on a soccer field, students with bare feet – they are deciding.

Poem 5

This is a poem about sand and my relationship to it. I mostly wrote it when I realized later than most that glass is, at a basic level, melted sand. I think most people realize this within the first decade or two of their lives, but I never really grasped the concept until my early twenties.

Giving inanimate objects human qualities is called "pathetic fallacy" by scholars. I like doing it anyway.

Silicon

Giving away the sand,
a beach clings to human feet,
sneaking between toes,
inside swimsuits,
stuck to the bottom of a cooler.
She makes leaving into taking.
A mineral parasite,
she scatters on kitchen floors.
I have swept her out of tents
and found her still in old shoes.
Beach blows across windy noons
forcing us to cover eyes
and mouths or else spit
tastes of her on to the towel.
But occasionally she
finds a clarity in herself-
flowing amidst heat to
stillness in a frame-
and shows a boy the rain,
even as it runs down her in pearls,
or the red of an autumn
that stings his eyes.

Poem 4

In honor of Derek, the man behind the awesome photos at
the munky house, this poem is better than half-done: we're looking at a 5/8ths-complete poem. I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving. This is another driving poem.

After a Movie in November

Warmth crawls over the hills.
The 20’s of November, closing to 30,
and the chill can almost fade before
it’s night again and the stars
mock us, bundled huddles,
buzzing through the parking lot
of the cinema,
our footsteps rapid-fire.
The car sits and waits
deciding to reverse,
when once it had leapt from
driveway and parking spot.
Leaf shadows and moon slipping
over dry paint and chrome,
tires on dry gray and black:
We ride past teeth of frosty grass
whiter in moonlight by far
than teeth in your smile,
but not the skin on your cheek.
Your head on window
leans against your reflection,
and I find only engine-churn
and clicking turn signal to say
what this all means.

Poem 3

I tried to make this as unsentimental as possible, but seeing as how I am a sentimental bastard at heart, it gets a little bit that way toward the end in the "coda". I hope it's clear enough why I tacked that part on.
There are a lot of conjunctions in this poem.

When someone is here
she lays out her own proof,
evidence. For example-
everyone a set of examples-
hands, white hair on knuckles,
and a back turned up on a bed,
and eyelashes in sun
and used Kleenex
and a pot in the sink soaking
and the crease behind an ear.

But, when she leaves
things step through curtains of symbol-
guesses and hopes.
Warm moisture becomes
buzzing signal on copper
and consonants on paper
and a picture under the shirts
of a bottom drawer,
a ghost of a phone number
remembered in a bar
when a song plays.

In the big war
ladies sent letters
-epistolary caresses-
dashed with their perfume.
Molecules slipped through
supply lines, cheating distance
in tiny floral ways.

Poem 2

I'm not sure when I wrote this one, but I think it is about coming back to Bellingham when I realized that it was my home town, and Spokane, the city in which I grew up, seemed unfamiliar.

Herds of cars tumble over the pass
as the snow builds on trees and rocks
and smoothes the change from
forest to grassland.
Tires fumble against cold road
and hum with a song
you whisper into the car under the stereo.
This drive evacuates Spokane again
with Christmas packed in the trunk,
and you flee back to candles:
light on a young woman’s shelf
that bounces off book spines,
and evenings smiling behind a mug
and loitering, a pile of heat,
in the bay’s wind.
Each street there, you could pry it up
and find names you almost know
and bars with cheap pool and cans of Rainier.
That cold there, after the river, the mountains,
the plateau.

Poem 1

It makes sense to start here.

I wrote this when I was eighteen (1999), and it won an award. Basically, I exaggerated my own experiences of feeling frightened in the presence of my grandfather while I was a toddler. Abuse of any kind was never an issue, but the place and the man scared the hell out of me even so.
It reads as a little bit over the top now, but some lines still surprise me with how good they are.

Haunted, a Sestina (April-May, 1999)

Suddenly a creak startles the silence of the house,
one of those creaks that sounds
exactly like a footstep. A thirsty wind
rages through the fields of Pasco tonight.
When the dark comes to this land, I want the lights to stay
on until the sun fills the empty

sky. Even though family fills this place, the emptiness
I cannot shake; fear lives in every corner of this house.
Grandpa has invited us to stay
here for the week. While the others sleep soundly
I lie awake by the open window as the desert night
rides in on the back of the wind.

This place of ghosts, wind
and deathbeds has emptied
itself of tenderness. Grandpa’s tears dried-up long ago in the nights
and deserts where he and Grandma kept house.
Years of cigarettes made his voice sound
like the earth where Grandma permanently stays.

I was two the first time I stayed
here. He stood taller than a radio tower, with wild wind-
blown hair, shoulders of a tractor, and boots that sounded
too loud on the green linoleum floor. Empty
of little-boy courage, I could not hug him or love his house.
Grandpa, God of Night,

Spoke the language of fear: phantasmal grumbling in the night.
I imagined Grandpa as a ghost, staying
on earth only to scare me. He roamed the forsaken house
opening rickety doors with work-rough hands. The wind,
especially to a boy like me, made the empty
halls even more desolate. But any sound

is better than silence: the death sound.
I am still alive. The gaping mouth of night
hasn’t eaten me yet. Older now, I know Grandpa emptied
his youth into expectant desert soil. Wind-
torched fields and farm machines forged his soul. In this haunted house,
perhaps the ghost of his innocence is me, condemned to stay.

When I become a grandpa, I will not stay
in deserts, watching my child-self ride away on desert wind
and wearing out the boots of my hope in a suffocating house.

Welcome to my blog. Would you mind having a few questions answered?

What the hell is going on here? -A surly inFAQ

Who do you think you are?

My name is Matt. I teach eighth grade in King County, WA. I write poems in some of my spare time.

How long have you been wasting time with this?

I wrote a very bombastic poem about AIDS when I was in seventh grade. It was shitty, and I knew it. Since then I have tried and succeeded in doing better in writing poems. The poetry here begins when I was 18 (see “Haunted”)

What’s with the title?

Since I have been fiddling with these poems for the past year and am now only releasing them one at a time, they are not really done in my mind. I could and probably would revise them until I die, but that would keep me from writing anything new. Eventually, I have to declare some things done.

Don’t you realize that no one wants to read a white, middle-class poet anymore?

I’ve heard that, and my poems are certainly from an outdated and perhaps boring perspective. I am not a minority, or female, or gay (no matter how many times you call me “fag” in the comments section), or a victim of rape. I have nothing new to say, and that might be my only saving grace. I hope my poetry can resonate with as many people as possible and that I find my own way to say things that have probably been said before in higher quality by better writers.

I would apologize for adding more data to an already burgeoning internet if it hurt people in some way. But as long as any old schmuck can post any old trash on a blog, I’ll continue to drop my two cents into the vast digital void. (I am actually a fan of those two sites.)

If you want to hear some poetry by marginalized voices, by all means point your browser to it. I’ll probably join you.

What do you hope to accomplish with this?

Not much. The market for poetry is definitely a buyer’s one these days. If I somehow get published, it will most likely not be a result of posting here. Like I said, I am posting here to declare some work done and build momentum for other projects.

I’d also like to share my work with more friends.

There’s no way all this stuff happened to you.

That’s not a question. The poems here are autobiographical in the sense that, as Vonnegut says, this is how life feels for me. I do not guarantee the objective truth of any of these poems.

How much of this crap am I supposed to read?

I don’t know how many I’ll post. I’ve got about twenty-five poems lined up.

Who else is responsible for this?

My friends Brieanna and Georgia are the two biggest instigators of my writing. Otherwise, I blame e. e. cummings, Li-Young Lee, Sharon Olds, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Marvin Bell.

No Bukowski? You write a lot about drinking.

Not especially.