Daily Poems for National Poetry Month 2009

1) 

Negotiation

I want a hand-rolled cigarette,
only the best tobacco--
I am not an amateur.
I have been at this a long time.

Brown-gold leaf
rolled in sweet rice paper
warm rush inhaled
from a thousand thousand fires
our ancestors kindled
announcing mastery
to predator and prey,
carried by coals
instead of lighters.

Blast of nicotine
brain to attention, pulse quickens
galvanometers will tell you
what you already know:
this drug will juice you
this drug will goose you
there's no excuse, you--
Your mustache reeks of it.
You've stained my teeth with it.
My gums recede from it.

This drug will stiffen your bronchi
and petrify the air sacs
into fibrosed honeycombs
then there's the cough, hack,
mucus, wheeze, blow, cough,
hack cycle, searching for butts
in the sand of the theater tray,
freezing your ass off in the night
'cause nobody gets to smoke inside.

Let me go, my GodTobacco,
from the valley of addiction
to the mount of holiness
from the pit of damaged will
to the city of willingness.
Make me transparent as water,
let no cell go unturned,
untwist the mutated DNA
in my distant bronchioles,
say halt to plaque in coronaries, too.
I'll burn sage in my doorway
for the departed spirits of fire
from a thousand thousand fires
once carried as coals
all in homage, desperate homage
to the fiery rootlets you have lodged
deep in my mind's mind.


2) 

Taxidermy

Who has shut the fortress
of my mouth and trashed
the drawbridge of my tongue?
Whence my silence?
I was a poet once,
words spilled out of me
like coins from a slot machine.
I'd collect them in rolls
organized by topic and flair
and call it poetry.
Now the machine won't spit
a silver metaphor,
much less a copper one.

I once calculated
how much I'd earned
by writing poetry.
It came to pennies an hour,
pennies an hour.
The minimum wage in California is $8.
I should have mopped McDonald's floors,
assembled burritos at Del Taco.

But all of this is false collage,
pastel paper on wet cardboard.
You know the real reason:
It's a disease, this scribbling,
Polynesian dance of fingers,
a mania for exploring attics,
for squeezing fruit until
unrecognizable, give me
a young mind to mold

and I'll squeeze all the juice out of it
and drink it up to inspire
my own poor enervated muse.
Beware, old poets can be parasites.
They want the glory of the disease
not the stolid echo of past publications
hanging like dried roses
around a stuffed horse's head.
Stuffed horses, yes, what Roy Rogers
had done to Trigger, there's a feat
for any taxidermist to admire.