The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sat 3/24/2007)

[RetroLounge]

Waiting for my foot to ring

I picture his stomach outside his body in the hands of a nurse
or on a small platform built to hold the stomach.
The operation began an hour ago when an eastern blue jay
landed on the gate that belonged to a fence years gone.
It's common for poets to pretend to write in the present tense.
I assure you the now I'm at my desk is the now
they cut into his body to remove a section of colon
overgrown with polyps. My right foot is on the phone
I stole from an office at the University of Michigan
by crawling the ledge of a building two stories up
and opening a window. It's black and has a dial
like it wants to be a safe. I have sunlight on my hands
I'm thinking of putting in a box and sending
to the people who weigh sunlight. A throbbing sound
comes from the fields, the cricket pulse of the day.
I like fights in bars about order and chaos, words
like entropy and system at particle accelerator speed,
alcohol quoting Marx and Parmenides until baseball, someone
loves the metaphor of the game and it's summer
and I'm not listening because there's a name
cut into the bottom of the table I want to read
with my fingertips. It could be true that most operations
are common, operations like addition and subtraction,
the bootstrap operation or the operation of large machines
painted yellow to bring color to construction sites.
I was told about a poet who wrote a poem the day
his wife was put in a box and given to the ground
like it was Christmas. The person telling me
had on a green shirt on which trees of a different green
were imprinted, he thought the poet was sick
and I thought the poet had a mind that only lived
in his hands. When my father was fifteen,
he trained his dog to sit with a piece of hamburger
on her nose until he told her she could eat it. If things
don't need to change until we let them, I would never
leave the waist-high grass. I used to take can openers
and TVs apart, there was always some small thing I forgot
to put back yet I was never deprived of soup or westerns.
My father will wake lighter, carrying the sense
that he's a balloon. This is the working hypothesis
of my waiting. Every time I write, I try to hold
the world still by noticing how the world moves. Butterflies
fear the pins of this method, I fear what happens
after the pinhole at the end of this sentence.

Bob Hicok


****************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[RetroLounge]

1. Hello?

:shrug:

RL

[BlueIris]

2. Bob Hicok is so great.

But I think you and I are the only ones in a poetry mood today, Retro.

By the by, could you please explain your avatar to me?

[RetroLounge]

3. My friend Haruka got Tombstoned

I miss her...

RL

[wildhorses]

4. first of all---

:wtf: are you talkin' bout...got tombstoned:wtf:

who, what, when, where and WHY???? are you talking 'bout my friend hookah??? i demand a PM

as for this poem...

'...Every time I write, I try to hold
the world still by noticing how the world moves...'

i know this feeling very well

capture a moment and
put it in my pocket
save it
for a rainy day

thanks for this rl:hug:

[idgiehkt]

5. wow

this is amazing:

"I was told about a poet who wrote a poem the day
his wife was put in a box and given to the ground
like it was Christmas. The person telling me
had on a green shirt on which trees of a different green
were imprinted, he thought the poet was sick
and I thought the poet had a mind that only lived
in his hands."

Thanks for that. :hi: