Away From The Woods

1. Write and send love poems to President Obama asking for help.

2. Be kind to strangers. 

3. Tell a stranger why you are sad.

4. Listen with yr heart all the time.

5. Openly and happily agree and disagree with other people.

6. If someone makes you angry write a love poem for them.

7. Write hopeful poems on your t-shirt and wear it everyday until you feel a change.

8. Don’t be discouraged by anything too smart or complicating.

9. Ask a stranger to help you understand a little more.

10. Try to have friends from all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

11. Don’t let politics get in the way of empathy.

12. Pray for a freer and fair life for everyone.

9/27/2011

Give Me Back My Pony

My Little Pony

just got uglier, shinier

and richer. On the streets

hardly anyone knows

americans are upset

about student loans

no jobs and lost homes.

My Little Pony

used to be nicer and prettier

when everyone had a job 

didn’t need student loans

and had a home.

My Little Pony swam offshore

to secret islands, Seychelles

and sparkles in offshore accounts

filled with everyone else’s money

only a few other ponies know about.

9/27/2011

Oh Hell No

Love, be close or far
As California stretches
From here to there. Love,
Let me talk about you
Without knowing what love is
But with pure faith
In Virginia bumper stickers
And the roads that lead
To other bumper stickers
Let the meadows full of radio 
Hit the balloon hours
In happy detachment our lives persist
Remediated, sung and spun, hand me
A lung of this century 
To understand where I am.

9/26/2011

Because when someone vies for your attention it starts with public humiliation. This is not a way to begin a friendship, someone said. But the humiliator went on, put dishes away, threw fodder around. And the humiliatee tried to be graceful about it, grinned, and picked up the humiliating remarks to study them. What were they for? For love, someone said. But the humiliator wasn’t even sure about love in the same way chickens peck indecisive.

9/25/2011

Feliz Molina

Feliz Molina is a sentence. A sentence has a beginning and an end. Is she a simple compound sentence? It depends on the weather; It depends on the stars above. What is the subject of the sentence? The subject is your beloved Feliz Molina. How many verbs are there in the sentence? Eating, sleeping, and fucking are some of its verbs. What is the object of the sentence? The object, my little ones, Is not yet in sight. And who is writing this awkward sentence? A blackmailer, a girl in love, And an applicant for a job. Will they end with a period or a question mark? They’ll end with an exclamation point and an ink spot.

9/24/2011

Having To Skype With You

It’s a lovely game. To have your eyelashes
hover over Skype when you might as well lean in to kiss me,

don’t “test your sound” I only want to watch our voices

inflect all over the place
like a watery derivative of Pollack; a mouth blurred

by some technological yawn outside it used to rain, that is,

once there was an outside. While you talk I notice we are in love

through everyday mediation, a facial expression attributed

to some form of television and both of us are aware only after. You catch yourself

invoke the talk show host inherent. I stare at leaves and turn up the volume red
for no reason; an impulse on my side, understood

because you once hid porn from your mother.

The days shrink into solid paragraphs. Lacking grammar in the backyard

there was a tennis court I followed my shadow

around a game of love/love hoping one day I’d meet “an equal”

not thinking so many years of handball would succumb to a Blog.

An affection or aluminum balloon starts to rise
just before you disappear. I carry you around the house
deflating the tragedy of can you hear me now? when all I want
is to hang up holding hands throughout static years to come.

9/23/2011

I walked to a park and sat on a bench. On the way, I saw a river that goes into the Great Lakes and kind of wanted my body to go with it.

I stood there watching water tuck its yellow pages towards an unforeseen ending and felt something turn in me. I stared at my gray coat as though cut and pasted onto a body,     understanding loneliness as an entryway to freedom. But then I moved an arm.

I remembered the Los Angeles Times quoting me when Pope John Paul II came to visit Los Angeles in 1987.

The LA Times interviewed two families, one Irish, the other Filipino; to promote cultural diversity in the Catholic Church that knows no cultural boundaries unless it means colonization for one of them.

This four-year old body sleepy with eye boogers that didn’t know yet the difference between dream and time to wake up.

A reporter came rushing toward my tired family in a van with a microphone.

I woken up from all the noise and asked, are we in heaven? The newscaster thought it cute but I was sincere.

I knew we were going to see the Pope but as a four year old I expected more than that.

Twenty years later I dreamt for a new life on Craigslist,

Irresponsibly dragged an arrow up and down the columns of Barcelona and Rome.

9/22/2011

1. Collect all your favorite poets and writers tongues,  tie them to a tree with your hair. Stand under the tree, wait for it to talk. Call home. Tell your mom what your doing.

2. Walk into town. Go to the hardware store, buy a lot of white paint. Go into the woods, paint all the animals white. Get water. Wash them all off. Walk into town. Go the hardware store, buy a lot of black paint. Go into the woods, do it all over again.

3. Write a poem for a friend. Find a pay phone that still works. Call the friend and read your poem. Don’t wait for a response, just hang up.

4. Write a nice poem for the president. Mail it to him. Wait for a response. Keep sending nice poems until he responds.

5. Find an astronaut that is willing to carry your poem to outer space. If its safe, ask the astronaut to release the poem into all that darkness.

6. Try your hardest to write the best poem you’ve ever dreamed. Try for as long as it takes. When you think you’ve written the best poem you could write make yourself the poet laureate of your life.

9/20/2011

The House

A house stood

between the living and non-

living, not utterly

either one.

What could be done

to make it go away?

* * *

Stars stare back

inside a static headache

The house has been there

before my parents,

before television.

* * *

Am I indecisive for the fun of it?

I remember a line from another

poem “the rain is wordless

and still we get wet”

It’s almost like the house,

not entirely sure

what it stands for. 

9/19/2011