Palinode 20

                        I ask the pardoner

To pardon the times I locked

The keys in the car—so far

My intentions are to keep

Newness alert and happening

Sometimes I lose track of time

I am not as

grounded as

I think I

        \Move lightly like hedging\

        \your\

        \your dollar now\

I want to growl at the homeless

        /what can I do against it/ \bees are disappearing\


am I am an animal

and

after leaving I saw birds claw on concrete and they move sideways like I move

get drunk and can’t hear the phone ringing

there are so many watering holes we

peck at speaking men

clean crumbs without regret

and hear the others talking

        /birds claw on concrete/ they move sideways like I move/

        /aren’t we the same animal/

to sum it up

                /say/

we locked the keys in the car
we peck the lock like little finches.

Palinode 19

To make sense is not the descent of the artistic.

I try to be as grounded as I can.


The concrete the
               newly refurbished sidewalk
you can talk
               about the
great Delaware river           or you can the

you see the trash bags floating

               but you cannot get a good egg roll in                      this

and the water quality in Pennsylvania is apparently          superb

but no animal can make it here
               I just wanted a canary, but am afraid I’ll
forget to feed it or abandon it, leaving
               for a vacation and only realizing
it was left after the leaving

“we”
don’t have the patience
          to move aside           lightly

“we” stomp our feet           to
          make room for the other lessons

how does one          clean anything
          without feeling a
sense of regret about it         chase away the bed of hot springs make room
          for the ammonia water

cold&clean.

What clean thing would
          just pile up sounds and call them
something? I can feel myself doing it already—
I can hear myself                     speaking.

Palinode 18

We move the deer aside

Make room for the

Fodder.

I brush my teeth in horizontal

Patterns

To try to remind them

How to do it

To run or gallop—

            [Luckily the naked noise doesn’t follow
            it keeps its distance
            I don’t let it get in everything
            like your pubic hair got in my soup]

There

Must

Be

A

Million

Asian

Students

At

The

University

Of

Pennsylvania

And

Apparently

The bees have disappeared

Horded the honey—

Honey I’m sorry,

I mentioned your pubic hair

In public,

I cannot hear myself speak.

Eat your dinner.

Yours truly was asked to clean the apartment

Alright:

I     see     a      potential     pile.

              [Is this a form of cleaning?]

Straw

And

Sternum

Make

Nice

Sound

Piles

Why

Don’t

They

Make

More

Sense?

How things work...

I just wanted to lift the veil on a few of the secrets behind all the mysteries that seem to happen here, in blogland, neighboring your reality. Well, the chapbook was not just miraculously formed by my Epson Stylus C88. I'm sorry to burst anyone's bubble about that. If it makes you feel any better, I believed in Santa until a VERY late age. That being said, I would like to just send out a thanks to the DIY Publishing Blog run by Shanna Compton. It basically provides all the info you need to publish a chapbook or zine, or whatever it is you publish, without waiting around for someone else to do it. It's a fun process, and worth investigating, if you are poet or not.

Secondly, the Palinodes have been coming more slowly as I'm trying to also post poems on a new project blog The Ping Project.


This is more of a collaborative blog, with Nikki Roszko, a poet, coworker, and friend, who is interested in investigating the relationships between internet spaces--looking to cross reference the work of other bloggers, with one's own poetry, these poems rise out of communications and, for me, word banks, provided by other bloggers. It's worth checking out the blog, and if you're a poet, perhaps you can join in the ping-ing.

More poetry soon, and better.

Palinode 17

To decide between the bees
Settling into supper
Still quiet
Picks a different cup

Bees scatter and sense—

        I start to undress the noise, but it follows

Still
sounds too loud

the winded population is
a stomachache
a pot-roast most people dress down

I didn’t want to pile up my clothes
the same,
I say,

anti-

anti-

anti

and I became a pumping steamship

        --green lakes flat as hard wood this would be quieter--

and I became a pocket purse and waited to get full

No buildup of brandished waves
No sloppy liquid lake splashing out of the sink

I can recant the messy afternoon—

Quiet the quieters hushing me

It’s not the humming bees that bother

I have forgiven them

When will the winded, the noisy, hush up its--

              -renowned
    -surround.