I wanted some ice cream
Look what I got:
Rodents ’round a big milk pot.
(Do I want mice cream? I do not!)
I asked for chocolate chips
So how
Did I get a gooey garbage scow?
(A chocolate ship? No, thanks, not now!)
That’s two wishes gone, and just one left.
I wish this genie wasn’t deaf!
Jimmy, Oh Jimmy, jumped into the jakes.
Why’d he do it? Goodness sakes!
When his teacher pulled him out
All the children commenced to shout:
Jimmy, Oh Jimmy, why did you do it?
See that hole and jump into it?
You’ll have to move far, far away
For no one will marry you after today!
My Nana gave me jelly beans
And so of course I went and ate ‘em
I don’t know how to tell her this
But – oh, my gosh, I hate ‘em!
I wouldn’t say that they were bad
I’d say that they were worse than awful:
They’re gruesome, noisome, smelly beans
And ought to be unlawful.
One tastes like bile; one tastes like grout;
And one’s like liver mixed with trout.
But while my Nana’s watching me
I daren’t spit ‘em out.
Some taste like toadstools on my tongue
Some taste like vipers might have viped ‘em
Some may have come from Baby’s diaper
After Baby diaped ‘em.
I wish I had a time machine
So I could tell her not to buy ‘em
… And those are all the reasons why
I will not let you try ‘em.
After a drunken night, the fog starts to clear . . .
What the fuck?
Where’d that mountain come from?
Old snake
Never stays around long.
He knows someone will tell that story
How he lost his legs.
Listen, so our lamp
goes out – it just means
there was someone needed light
more than us; it just means
we had enough.
Maybe
that light went to someone
underground, who now sees
the cave of wonders she
was stumbling through before;
or else a midnight thief
is about to be discovered;
or maybe the place where
it’s noon right now just got
a little bit brighter.
Anyway, you and I,
we both know there’s really
no such thing as the dark.
I.
My Grandpa’s house is clothing for a ghost.
Do you recall the time bears got inside,
unlatched the pantry door, but couldn’t solve the cans?
No more do I.
That’s something Grandpa saw, or says he saw:
The cans were dented, scattered,
labels shredded, and intact though battered.
Later, when he opened one,
the peaches tasted sweeter than they had,
and smelled like honey, heavy on the tongue.
You could rest your head back,
shut your eyes and swear you heard bees hum, you could taste the sun,
open your throat and feel the sweetness run.
So Grandpa told me many times,
as if the tale were true,
as if there had been bears in his New Hampshire youth.
II.
One day the rain made mud and pulled it through the town.
It was his mother’s garden drew it down,
the way the pansies dried and cried for dew,
the way the robin redbreast wove its nest,
back when the world was new.
He was a boy like you then, wild and young,
the future bears of story yet to come.
III.
But anyway, he didn’t die there by the lake.
He died in town, and his old house
is just another place.
It doesn’t hold his ghost.
That, like the bears, the rain,
like all of that,
the half-remembered jokes
are just a midden of his past,
and mostly balderdash,
confused and dis-caboobalated, as he’d say.
IV.
Paddy me boy, he’d say, Don’t shill for sense
or value history over eloquence.
I didn’t go out when he died
to stand with Father at the cold hole’s side
or read the requiescat on the stone.
I bought a can of peaches, and stayed home.
Old man sung up a crow, imbued
him with all kinds of mess,
a million ways of saying Yes
to anything that’s crude
He was divisive, he could slice
an ordinary stone into a knife
as if what cut might somehow be alive
and thrive on strife
Some said he’d killed the lark
Stone dead, that’s what they said
(though others would insist instead
her own song broke her heart)
And she – she was a battle, never right
so when she opened up the door, blew out the light,
who knows which one had won or lost the fight?
— Then it was night.
Gonna roll out in pajamas
Can’t be bothered, can’t be late
My hair ain’t combed, my teeth are stale
Don’t mind, don’t care, can’t wait
There’s a train ain’t waiting for me
Leaving while the rails are clear
Won’t be standing at the station
Might just leave me here
Got to leave your one and only
When your moment comes around
Got to leave your things behind you
When the walls come down
Used to be a little baby
Mama sang a lullaby
For to rock me into sleeping
While the trains rolled by
I’ve been waiting all my lifetime
For that dream to end
I’ve found love and I’ve found pleasure
Haven’t found a friend
There’s a train not waiting for me
Leaving while the rails are clear
Won’t be standing at the station
Might just leave me here
The true poets, seeing the world in a grain of sand, do not ask Why then so many grains of sand?
The true poets lie once then spend the rest of their lives shoring up the lie.
The true poets hum along with themselves, visiting in drafty castles, hunched over stone tables all night while the wind whistles through faulty windows, thinking themselves so very clever.
The true poets, despairing of meaning, wrestle with sentences; despairing of words, contend with syllables and are overcome.
The true poets do not agree with sharks and worms, they think the world is too much with us, they lie in bed at night fully clothed but never sleepwalk, they sleep deeply instead, fail to howl at the moon, and wake with rumpled shirts, fully rested.
The true poets spout the future’s clichés and die never knowing their true worth, never knowing it even after they have been dead a hundred years.
The true poets plot getting from here to anyplace but jump ship en route from Mexico without waiting for landfall, vanish into the dark swollen sea that undergirds the world and live forever.
The true poets, good for nothing, win the Nobel Prize in their dreams, wake to scrambled eggs toast and coffee, wishing for marmalade.
The true poets are patrons of failure put to the truth of others.
Bag of Anything 