Glory

Native American male. Early twenties. About 6'2", 190 pounds.
Has the evening for a face.
. . .

Day 30: #TheSealeyChallenge

A Glass of Cold Water

Poetry is not a code
to be broken
but a way of seeing
with the eyes shut,
of short-
circuiting the usual
connections until
lioness and
knee become
the same thing.
. . .

Day 29: #TheSealeyChallenge

Each Sound

. . .
Back then it was easy to have teeth,
claw our way into the trees---it was
accepted, the monkeys loved us, sat
on their red asses clapping and laughing.
We've forgotten the luxury of dumbness,
how once we crouched naked on an outcrop
of rock, the moon huge and untouched
above us, speechless. Now we talk
about everything, incessantly,
our moans and grunts turned on a spit
into warm vowels and consonants.
We say plethora, demitasse, ozone and love.
. . .

Day 28: #TheSealeyChallenge

Diary Entry

. . .
We are not examples and have no slogans. We are extinct in conventional time and don't have to be jealous; once fucked by ecstasy on the fire exit stairs, always fucked by ecstasy on the fire exit stairs. Proper nutrition is not an issue, nor medication, nor the possibility of contempt. We don't have to take vows or keep hours. Rip down the boring memorials: it gives us a headache.

Day 27: #TheSealeyChallenge

PRISM

. . .
4.
When you fall in love, my sister said,
it’s like being struck by lightning.

She was speaking hopefully,
to draw the attention of the lightning.

I reminded her that she was repeating exactly
our mother’s formula, which she and I

had discussed in childhood, because we both felt
that what we were looking at in the adults

were the effects not of lightning,
but of the electric chair.
. . .

Day 26: #TheSealeyChallenge

My Instant of Forever

. . .
In the hot sweat of why not,
In the cold dark of who did,
In the battered dish of she dare
In the absolute dead middle of all-around
---I dug my flesh until I was a wound
And the day sighed out its light, and the white kingdom
came.
. . .

Day 25: #TheSealeyChallenge

Recovery

. . .
Years ago he had promised to take her to Chicago.
He was lovely then, a pigeon
whose pulse could be seen when the moment
was perfectly still. In the house

the dark rises and whirrs like a loom.
She stands by the davenport,
obedient among her trinkets,
secrets like birdsong in the air.

Day 24: #TheSealeyChallenge

Friday the Thirteenth

. . .
Slaves of plastic! Leather-shoe chino-pants prisoners! Hair-cut junkies! Dacron-sniffers!

Striped tie addicts! short hair monkeys on their backs! Whiskey freaks bombed out on 530 billion cigarettes a year --

twenty Billion dollar advertising Dealers! lipstick skin-poppers & syndicate Garbage telex-Heads!

Star-striped scoundrelesque flag-dopers! Car-smog hookers Fiendish on superhighways!

Growth rate trippers hallucinating Everglade real estate! Steak swallowers zonked on Television!
. . .

Day 23: #TheSealeyChallenge

Ghazal-Head by Terrance Hayes

. . .
I could care less for your deluxe vacuum
Suck your own luck you no good Hoover, that's what.

Gulp, gulp, I yelled at your mouth when I saw it walking
Across the room like a no good rumor, that's what.

No count number. Indentured mumbler.
Blue shoe stumbler. Beer belly bumbler, that's what.

And I know you know I know and I could care less.
Your ailments into amens; angst into anger, that's what.

Slow down, I told the boy with the knife.
Give me a hug, I told that mother hugger, that's what.
. . .

Day 22: #TheSealeyChallenge

Mabel

. . .
Mabel I don't know how to write this
poem which is after all a love poem
only about the way we often
looked at each other with something
like the plain pleasure of two women who
have guessed what it was all about
and wished they'd lived next door
for at least ten or fifteen years
maybe sometimes within a fifty-mile radius of each other
on a fast road

Day 21: #TheSealeyChallenge

Boy Leaving Home

. . .
He is very tired of escaping
and the reason the thought of it scares him
so much is as simple
as it always was:
absolute absence of option.
Because where?
Wherever you happen to go
it's the same thing all over again.
First, you find yourself there
waiting for you. And then
you have a place
you'll have to leave; you leave
to find a place . . .
So many rooms now, the house so much bigger,
homesickness already beginning
to tighten at his throat,
and he's not even gone. He is,
of course, quite gone. And yet
here he is---someone else figure it out.
Yes, it seems to have doubled in size;
either that or he has just turned four.
There's nothing that can't happen now.
. . .

Day 20: #TheSealeyChallenge

Appetite

. . .
He's ready to take a bite
Of the pink tomatoes while his mouth
Is still full with something else,
To hurry it down his throat
With a swig of beer, shrugging
When his wife says, You're setting
A bad example. It doesn't matter---

Too many eyes without centers
For one day. Too many
Dice, cards, dogs with faces like sharks
Tethered to chains. It gives him
An empty feeling below his stomach,
And all he can think to call it
Is appetite. And so he will lie
When he kisses his napkin and says
Hits the spot, as his daughter will lie
When she learns to parrot him,
Not yet knowing what her own appetite
Points to.

Day 19: #TheSealeyChallenge

The Figment

Outside the coffee shop the first snow
is flying, but downwards, not like anything
is supposed to fly.
I shoot something.
It drops with the first arrow.
What have I shot?
I have passed the life span
of a lion.
I have lied and lied:
for instance, no moment
ever chiseled me.
I am walking aimlessly
to the post office
with no way of knowing
someone has taken off
the bronze hands of an old clock
and mailed them there.

Day 18: #TheSealeyChallenge

From "The Whipping Rope": Yellow Carpenter Bee II

You,
in erratic flight
through the scorching wind,
spot a cluster
of flowering milkweed
just below
the closest sand ridge;
your anxiety builds.
The ancient gods
and goddesses
have listened
to your prayers.

Relax, they say,
all the nectar is yours
for the sipping.

Day 17: #TheSealeyChallenge

Gacela of the Dark Death

. . .
I want to sleep awhile,
awhile, a minute, a century;
but all must know that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips;
that I am the small friend of the West wind;
that I am the immense shadow of my tears.
. . .

Day 16: #TheSealeyChallenge

A Trick of the Light

. . .
Now, there are no oranges at all in the whole
of San Fernando Valley, no oranges, just names

of streets: Orange Boulevard, Orange County.
The way we do. Naming what's no longer there.

Here was an orange grove; here was a brown boy.
I bow down, in my suit of hand-me-down spikes,

into the coop where the warm fowl slept against him.
The hens do not love him. Neither do the oranges.

But they survive together: fuel for the future:

A picture of a feather without the bird,
A picture of an orange without the tree,
A picture of a shadow without a boy.

Day 15: #TheSealeyChallenge

The Hand

. . .
Even before he was fully born, when he
looked around him, he seemed content,
I saw him in the little birth-room mirror,
his bluish head turning, his shoulders and
body inside my body, as if in this
new life, from the neck down
you wore your mother.
His eyes seemed even then to focus,
as if he knew this place, or had not
expected to know it.

Day 14: #TheSealeyChallenge

I Feel Drunk All the Time

Jesus it's beautiful!
Great mother of big apples it is a pretty
World!

You're a bastard Mr. Death
And I wish you didn't have to look-in here.

I don't know how the rest of you feel,
But I feel drunk all the time

And I wish to hell we didn't have to die.

O you're a merry bastard Mr. Death
And I wish you didn't have no hand in this game

Because it's too damn beautiful for anybody to die.

Day 13: #TheSealeyChallenge

Lullaby

. . .
My sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of myself,
my stung skin as alien
as a loose bolt of cloth.
I will ignore the bed.
I am linen on a shelf.
Let the others moan in secret;
let each lost butterfly
go home. Old woolen head,
take me like a yellow moth
while the goat calls hush-
a-bye.

Day 12: #TheSealeyChallenge

Binnenwerk (Inside Out) by Bert Schierbeek

when
when my father
(he so wanted to reach ninety)
had reachd ninety
he then fell down
that is: he went out

. . .

you drive by
you see the smoke from the chimney
(the crematorium)
and you think
there he goes
altho it's not even certain
that it's his smoke
and you see him strolling
one summer morning in his long
underwear through the garden
he spoke with the trees he said
and the birds that he heard
(altho not at all musical)
and he stood still
(singing is the finest
thing there is)
and you see him standing
by the Orinoco River
to music of Villa Lobos
on islands lonesome
among twining lianas
wed to mighty trees

Day 11: #TheSealeyChallenge