Head cold
The house is pinned
under heavy snow.
My head fills with mucus.
Icy limbs strain
to reach the ground,
alternately melting and freezing.
I drip in the noon-time glare.
Let me be replenished
in nightly increments.
Poems on the topic: house
Poems on the topic “house” on Poets.by.
Stone
The stone isn’t dull;
it’s just too shy to shine.
The stone isn’t still;
it’s just practicing an extreme economy of gesture.
The stone isn’t mute;
it’s just making up its mind how to begin.
When I lived in a glass house
it was my most honored guest.
Snow Globe
Bits of white suspended in solution
swirled past the window after every upheaval.
I found a pencil with a blessing on the side
& decided to start a list
of everywhere I’d been.
I filled three notebooks just with the hiding places
in my parents’ house. At this rate, I realized,
the pencil would be gone
before I made it halfway to the street.
Under my hat my hair continued to grow.
The pilot light burned like an insomniac
in the back of the oven.
The Hollow (22)
not knowing
what’s around the next bend
five-year-old me
the headless hunter’s
lantern on moonless nights
in her quavery voice
more frightening
than our neighbor’s ghost stories
those wooden legs
I still look for her house
but there’s just the red privy
its vacant hole
Song of the Millipede
International Rock-Flipping Day 2010
I lived like a hundred-legged king
in the faceprint of an idol
who followed my every move.
What drew me to that house made of twilight,
whose rooster swelled like an ingrown toenail
trapped between toe & shoe
& never flew?
With floor turned ceiling,
where would the weather vein?
What rod would rout the lightning root?
Unreal estate no bank would back,
underwritten only by undertakers,
each inch of space had been stolen from a grave.
From time to time, I caught
the musky scent of soured hope
The World Makes No Fucking Sense
how can you stand there
and smile and laugh
in my house after all that you've done?
how can they stand there,
relaxed and carefree,
as they laugh
with you?
and how can i be the one who's scolded
for refusing to be polite and
warm and welcoming
to the monster who ruined my life?
Domum
One day I was walking
And I discovered an abandoned house
It was an old house, to be sure,
Rotten and strewn about.
Inside this house there were pictures
Of those who inhabited it before
People of all ages
Their lives centered around this old eyesore.
From what I can tell, they were poor
But strangely enough
It seemed like they were happy
Despite it being so tough.
A makeshift swing hung in the yard
Worn from constant use
Despite years of exposure
Not a single string was loose
You've Ruined My Evening / You've Ruined My Life
i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish
only as one i contain the complications
in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant
i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels
and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts
the actors bow gently to me and i envy them
their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world
i would be eight people each inhabiting the other's dreams
walking through corridors of glass framed pages
telling each other the final lines of letters
picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another
only as one i contain the complications
and the images are the same, their constant presence in that
world
Your Hands a Poem of Love
While you put your hands, that,
Our surface
Crossing a bridge or
The other way around the back way or head on, coming
to it
To discover the rules
Written into the distance
while your hands
The house, filling with smoke, the angles used
To talk straight, on,
At last be able
To name.
Your hands naming the thrust and space around it, that,
I would bring you bringing me
Close upon it, so we will look, go through
Hands and smoke
To Jeffie
Jeffie with your house full of
cockroaches,
In the oven of your house by the sea,
We came - we came, ready for
refreshment,
To the creakings of your house -
To the mussles and sandcrabs on the
beach and in your drawers -
We came to you, in a rush off the
highway,
While you, calmly and pregnantly
cooked artichokes in the kitchen -
Then we all lay down together
Underneath the night sea wind
That played across our tired bodies
Like spanish moss.
* * *
no shadow is cast
then coming in from the sun
I find the house dark
Memory
our mind-sea foggy clear
hides its scaled creatures
twisting turning movies with their
jungle passions ancient times
crusaders’ flaming crosses
pitiless in ‘faith’
as much a part of me as this treed
half-raked lawn
you hide your armies images
wrapped in your bones
sharing that sea
an attic's cast-off
gowns and gestures where
so many loves and knives
lie buried
in this marsh teeming
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
Or try: