nomopoetry

cache of calming

a room will settle quick enough

once the door is set against its jamb

once the red curtain drags against sun’s light wake

but better to leave it there

and let it gather

a tenth of light or less

a fraction of sound sun brings out

a woolly cache of calming

for brains that need shadow shush

for veins ticking behind the eye

for lungs that fill with muffled breath brushing out against muffled air

8th Day, Phoenix

one pays extra for pourovers

like one pays out compliments

to the mildly downtrodden

or like one taps up a cigarette

to stop a stranger’s mouth

pardon my everyday

for no good reason

for certainly stress reveals

as skin burst through by bone but

aloe vera cactuses wear their unbloomed flowers

    like bananas

and it’s so opposite of dithyrambic

        a slow ode for twenty voices

        that petaled up past each voice in the waking hour

        and suspirated around numb lips

        as sleepsight burned off of lighting eyes

anyway, one pays for pourovers

or tends to

an expense that rarely improves much

much less one’s half-stirred Haitian with cream and the

    contents of a single packet itself brown into the froth

    and onto the dark-marble counter dissolved

but how improved, the one and the other

who exchange “I see you own your own exertion”

and one goes on with the afternoon

or sits under the palo verde overgreen with city water

pouring through the sky it sits beneath

its minute confetti half-stirred with heavy power lines

nomopo’s napomo napowrimo reboot

last year i did a poem-a-day challenge for April (National Poetry Month) and it was … exhausting, terrifying, depressing, and rarely productive of work i could even continue working on, but also neat, periodically enriching (via others’ work), and periodically encouraging (via my own and the response to it).

let’s call this a start for this year. i will need to have a program and will probably need to alternate between poems and revisions, essays/long tweets, and explaining to you why i didn’t get anything done. so, tomorrow a poem. let’s say.

i know some people are not thrilled with this idea to begin with. (the most exquisite napomo hate i know of comes from rauan klassnik (example), whose twitter feed becomes a diary of captivity as the month goes on and his captor more and more, deliriously hateful.)

it’s a dodgy bet, and a lot of half-baked poetry will give you a tummy ache.

all the same, i’ve read a number of journals today, and i already have one.