redrose's blog: "Rosa del Mar"

Words like an ant dragging a moth. Words like a tomato rotting in the sun. Words like windshield glass and blood on the road. Words like a toad pressed flat onto asphalt. Words like katydids shaking silence out of night. Words like a blanket of bees patrolling the grass before pyramids. Words like a drop of blood from a diabetic's fingertip. Words like a drink in an alcoholic's hand. Words like breasts of an old woman in her night gown. Words like a cluster of harvetmen on the side of a house. Words like a scabby dog chewing a bird hit by a car. Words like a toothpaste tube at the bottom of a trash heap. Words like a crack in a wall. Words like a bicycle without a kickstand. Words like a car in a motel parking lot with all tires flat and dry-rotted. Words like a mouse's heart beating. Words like a doll without its head. Words like a French fry in the beak of a crow. Words like a seagull atop garbage in a dump. Words like an ashtray spilling over. Words like an opossum's skull packed with dirt. Words like a hawk sitting on a telephone pole. Words like a ham sandwich wrapped in plastic. Words like avacados not yet ripe. Words like the silent scream of your dreams. Words like a section of pages missing from a book. Words like earthworms dissected in high school biology. Words like the mustache shaved off a hairy woman's face. Words like a foot path into the woods. Words like . . .

It's almost too much to bear when you admit to yourself that it's come to this. You haven't sold out, but, then, what's there to offer? You're glad for small things: 29 and more Chinaski books, 4 cats in and 3 out, a man who not only works but cooks and shops and has the touch that sends you spinning. You sit outside on a plastic chair--cement patio below your feet, Mexican country music audible from a neighbor's trailer, a few cicadas awakening to shake the air--and think you really need those jobs you've applied for. Lot rent, satellite, gas, electric, phone, internet, car insurance, mobile home insurance, cat food, credit cards keep you seeking employment in something, anything, as long as you don't have to kill yourself too much. As it is you feel yourself checking out a cell, a hair, a crazy thought at a time. You think you can save small scraps of yourself in words, but it's no use. They're only crumbs after all and the words that come are worse than crummy.

I hate being confessional in my poetry, all those scabs ripped off and waved around like a license to write or rant, all of it quite scant in its poetical content. I want to be invisible as the air I breathe, as silent as the beating of a shrew's heart from 50 paces off. I don't see the point of pulling off this skin only to cut it up into little wordy shapes to paste down onto a white page for your Peeping Tom inspection. I hate being confessional in poems or anything with my name hanging off it like a genital wart, but lately I've the mind of a fat caterpillar shitting out what it chews to let it fall wherever--perhaps into your half-empty coffe cup as you sit outside to enjoy the morning air.

Here's a frog dried flat onto asphalt looking like something excreted from a mucous membrane then baked down hard so that it has to be peeled up in order for me to inspect it properly. Call it my brain or whatever you please. These days are tossed away like the frog in the street.

When the colors run dry, all you're left with is black and white. And when days run one into the other so that each is a repeat of nothing in particular, you look for small signs that today isn't yesterday or tomorrow isn't today. When you're reduced to collecting scraps of what you thought you once had and come up with less than you expect, then patting the cats' heads and putting down food and fresh water and scooping out their litter boxes are the most concrete things you can do.