[identity profile] alwaysashipper.livejournal.com
Cold nights make me think
of frozen bagels versus fresh
versus my warm bed versus sleeping
and dying under the overpass
sounding impossibly tragically
funny to me, like overruling
the undertow or high-fiving
the guy who lowballed his offer
on your collection of hawk feathers
and string. In the Museum
of Horrible Outcomes,
the Unfettered Capitalism exhibit
runs from sea to shining
and slowly deoxygenated sea,
and includes human beings
in popsicle form, about which
the docents have been trained
to say, Fuck yes bad things happen
to good people, right on
right on right on. Anyway. And then
you move on to shiny stuff
like the Porsche 911 Walt Whitman drove
while writing Leaves of Grass
My Ass, Leave My Shit Alone,
that most American of poems
about the un-American dream
I pray we wake from
any day now and say Now what
the hell was that?
[identity profile] duathir.livejournal.com
Calling Him Back From Layoff

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been

confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was

and it turns out I’m OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars

painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that’s a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle

for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said

he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean

and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through

with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod
which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions

as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried

with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward

than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other

and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other

forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones

hear?

by Bob Hicok
[identity profile] rainebm1185.livejournal.com
By Bob Hicok

The best job I had was moving a stone
from one side of the road to the other.
This required a permit which required
a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.
Yet because I hadn’t finished the job
I had no salary, and to pay the bribe
I took a job moving the stone
the other way. Because the official
wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit
for the second job. When I pointed out
that the work would be best completed
if I did nothing, he complimented
my brain and wrote a letter
to my employer suggesting promotion
on stationery bearing the wings
of a raptor spread in flight
over a mountain smaller than the bird.
My boss, fearing my intelligence,
paid me to sleep on the sofa
and take lunch with the official
who required a bribe to keep anything
from being done. When I told my parents,
they wrote my brother to come home
from university to be slapped
on the back of the head. Dutifully,
he arrived and bowed to receive
his instruction, at which point
sense entered his body and he asked
what I could do by way of a job.
I pointed out there were stones
everywhere trying not to move,
all it took was a little gumption
to be the man who didn’t move them.
It was harder to explain the intricacies
of not obtaining a permit to not
do this. Just yesterday he got up
at dawn and shaved, as if the lack
of hair on his face has anything
to do with the appearance of food
on an empty table.
[identity profile] switchercat.livejournal.com
I needed to type this whole poem up to insert it in the appendix of a paper, and that was a lot of work, so I am softening the blow of having to do such labor by also sharing it here. It's in a pretty intense style. If you don't like the first couple stanzas I suspect you may be turned off by the rest.

*

[Occupied Territories]

My dog puts her head in my crotch, presses her nose
through, to the other side. This is good morning.
I turn the computer on, put seven cups of water
in the coffeemaker, this will yield, will hiss
and gurgle six actual cups, where does the other go,
is there a purgatory of coffee? Fog on the mountains,
a representation of consciousness, I think, pretty
I think. I pour coffee, check e-mail: photo of my niece
holding her “Maximum Really Fierce Triceratops,”
an ad for better cum-shots, message from a friend:

yesterday a rocket, from his stomach he saw a house
become where a house had been, birth of absence,
of a hole, memory is the gap between things,
there was no one home, they killed dishes, a clock,
the woman will rebuild, will live on a scar,
he made a chair for her from three broken chairs,
he is reading Neruda, misses the arcade in Ann Arbor,
what was the name of the river into which he jumped
from the trestle?

This is how I don’t respond: Huron. I am sorry. )
[identity profile] switchercat.livejournal.com
My wife gave me a tie made of the thread
of life. I was afraid to wear a tie
made of the thread of life. That it would snag.
That I'd spill coffee on it. But I wore it,
and every person who looked at it
saw something different. One
a waterfall, one a lava flow, one a forest
primeval. Coming home, I took it off
and forgot it on the bus. When I told
my wife, she laughed and said,
Did you really think I'd give you a tie
made of the thread of life? That was a tie
made of silk, which is the memory
of cocoons, which are wombs, you were wearing
birth.
I told her her thoughts
are the happy childhood I didn't have.
The sun was in her hair, where it stayed
until she combed it out that night.
[identity profile] writtenbyhand.livejournal.com

Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings.
How I said a thing, how I held a lamp
to the night. These should walk without us—
words, the dark—is perhaps your view
of existence. I can’t know, 

you provide no puppet theater,
no tumbling routine for me to engage
in spirited discourse. That a face
comes with every body, and a body
with every name, makes it seem 

like we’re the same species,
when a cursory kissing shows how multiform
any one puckerer is. I’m sorry
I’m not the Wednesday or club sandwich
you expected, imagine my surprise

that you’re not the world peace
I really do want, it’s not just a thing
I say to the judges inspecting my cleavage.
If you’ll try again I’ll try again,
however trying we are. “To the puppies” is a phrase 

I carry around in search of the context
in which shouting it will change everything.
If you have no such rip-chord, we really
shouldn’t be seen together in public,
for you are the matter for which I 

am the anti-matter, and as “Lost in Space”
showed us if it showed us nothing else,
it’s not good for life when they meet,
and I want to do what is good for life,
because I want life to return the favor.

Bob Hicok

Dec. 19th, 2011 12:03 am
[identity profile] togey.livejournal.com
Bob Hicok
 
Small Measures
I went home and climbed back into my mother.
Origami was involved, I was a crane for the first time
in my life, but my older brother was already there,
claiming dibs. In the desert of her womb, he was dressed
as Peter O’Toole dressed as Laurence of Arabia
admiring his robes in the mirror of his knife.
I left with an understanding of why I failed
the essay portion of my sex-ed final. The question was,
is your mother’s vagina an escape hatch, to which I replied
yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes,
since it was an essay question. When I pointed out
to my teacher, who was also the football, wrestling, debate,
intravenous drug use, and jai alai coach, that this
was a yes or no question, not an essay question,
he made me do three hundred thousand squat thrusts, I finished
when I was thirty nine. My mother used to kiss my forehead
as I left my school, put her mouth to my ear and whisper,
you can never go home again. Every day the lock
was changed, or she had moved to another state,
or there was a different little boy in my room, his chakras
more clearly aligned than mine. Still, when things get bad,
as these clouds tell me they’ve gotten now, these clouds
of puss and anthrax, these gray sacks of dumbbells,
this lament whipped into a paste and smeared across our tiny
window onto the universe, I think of myself
inside her, no job, no lovers, no waist line, no fault line
no noise but the oompa of her heart, and feel
the tiniest bit better, like .0001 percent better,
maybe a tenth of that, maybe a tenth of a tenth
of that, which is still, as they say, something. 
[identity profile] tijolos.livejournal.com
Hello everyone! Would y'all be kind enough to share your favourite poems about financial struggle? I'm feeling pretty drained due to lack of moneys, and I don't know. Anything helps.
Thank you.

As a giveback, here's some underrated Canadian poetry.


I've tasted my blood by Milton Acorn

If this brain's over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I've tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to.

But my mother's look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.

Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!
One died hungry, gnawing grey porch-planks;
one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;
and many and many
came up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.

My deep prayer a curse.
My deep prayer the promise that this won't be.
My deep prayer my cunning,
my love, my anger,
and often even my forgiveness
that this won't be and be.
I've tasted my blood too much
to abide what I was born to.



xxx.
[identity profile] iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com

If you’re inside me at the hockey game,
you’re inside the arena
when the winning goal’s scored and octopi

thrown onto the ice. A Detroit thing,
as in Cambodia, they don’t play hockey
or call it Cambodian food, it’s just food,

but if you’re inside me and I go
to Angkor Wat, you see how tourism
destroys the past. This love of ours

has done little for you thus far
in this poem. If you’re inside me
when I write a letter urging my senator

to vote against the death penalty,
you’re ineffectual in your outrage too.
But it feels good, doesn’t it,

when I can’t decide if I need
a four or five inch bolt, to be the voice
inside me saying, does it matter,

as I am the voice inside you saying,
I am the voice inside you, the voice
beside your voice inside you, the voice

holding the hand of that voice,
which is anatomically impossible
though romantically essential. If you

are inside me I am lucky: I am lucky:
therefore you are inside me: that’s called
a proof. I’m serious: I don’t know

what good the death penalty does.
“Cruel and inhuman” sounds like a law firm.
You sound like everything to me.


source
[identity profile] iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com
I told the waiter there was schmutz
on my machete. He informed me
I wasn’t sitting in the Yiddish section.
Being bilingual, I told the waiter
there was gunk on my machete. Oh, he apologized
then and brought me straight away
a new machete, with which I sliced
the brisket as if clearing a path
through a forest to a temple in a life
more glamorous than the four dollars
and thirty-two cents in my pocket
with which I couldn’t possibly pay
what I owe Jean-Paul Sartre for writing
“No Exit,” since walking out on that play
introduced me as if for the first time
to the moon. Try feeling crushed
by the void of existence while staring
at a waxing moon with or without
a full stomach before or after
cleaning your machete on your sleeve.
Yes, that’s a dare, a double-dog dare,
to talk as kids used to talk in a time
of innocence that certainly never existed.
[identity profile] togey.livejournal.com
O my pa-pa
by Bob Hicok


Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
form the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given your Mother’s Taste
for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”
They’re not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.
[identity profile] ballpointsword.livejournal.com
So, I have been more or less a Hicok addict for months. It seems like every poem he's written that I come across is great. This one is from the newest Forklift, Ohio that speaks to me, somehow.


One Interpretation of Your Silence

Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings.
How I said a thing, how I held a lamp
to the night. These should walk without us--
words, the dark--is perhaps your view
of existence. I can't know,

you provide no puppet theater,
no tumbling routine for me to engage
in spirited discourse. That a face
comes with every body, and a body
with every name, makes it seem

like we're the same species,
when a cursory kissing shows how multiform
any one puckerer is. I'm sorry
I'm not the Wednesday or club sandwich
you expected, imagine my surprise

that you're not the world peace
I really do want, it's not just a thing
I say to the judges inspecting my cleavage.
If you'll try again I'll try again,
however trying we are. "To the puppies" is a phrase

I carry around in search of the context
in which shouting it will change everything.
If you have no such rip-chord, we really
shouldn't be seen together in public,
for you are the matter for which I

am the anti-matter, and as "Lost in Space"
showed us if it showed us nothing else,
it's not good for life when they meet,
and I want to do what is good for life,
because I want life to return the favor.
[identity profile] lonelybusiness.livejournal.com
Absence Makes the Heart. That's It: Absence Makes the Heart.
--Bob Hicok


Waving hello versus waving goodbye
is an interpretative act. We could make it
directional: from left to right is hello,
right to left, goodbye. The buoy

clanged all night so my sleep
would know where to go. I could pray.
Tambourine myself to death.
Electroshock the worms. Wrap the maple
in tinfoil and decry the lightning
that splits it as misguided and deceived.
Nothing I do will bring you back. So this

is freedom: being ineffectual. Here
is where spiders set up shop
during the night, here is where a crow
decided to perch. Then it gets up
and perches over there, beside
where another crow perched last week.
It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.
During the storm, I would like to be
the storm. If you're the storm,
there's nothing frightening
about the storm except when it stops,
then you're dead and the maps
are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,
a man at war writes home:
this is like digging a hole in the rain.
[identity profile] iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com
Long, thin clouds as if the sky were smoking.
I tell it to stop or share, it doesn’t stop or share,
this is what happens to my requests: they rise.
When I was a kid, a neighbor man
had a few and tied a cherry bomb to a pigeon,
it flew furiously until kaboom. Feathers
and bits of what made the pigeon go
landed on the Smitky twins playing hopscotch,
they looked up, I looked at them looking up,
two of everything the same, as if their parents
knew the odds of needing a spare. My wife
wants to fly in a hot-air balloon. I say to her,
I’ll wait here with the turtles. I try to save them
from getting squished when they cross the road.
They don’t know it’s a road or what a road
is for, getting away is what a road is for,
then coming back, then wondering why you came back
is what a road is for. My wife’s people
are Ukrainian, beets are important to them.
I tried to arm-wrestle her father once, he said,
Why would I do that: if I beat your arm,
the rest of you will want revenge.
I never looked at it that way. Forty-two years now
I’ve tried to look at it that way. The other day,
some kids knocked a ball through our window,
one of them asked for it back, I said, Sure,
if you give me the bat. He did, then asked
for the bat, I said, If you give me the ball,
he started to hand it over when I saw understanding
bloom in his face. That never happened for me:
understanding blooming in my face. Not the way
I wanted it to. So I’ll die and someone
will have to deal with what’s left, the body,
the shoes, the socks. The last person on Earth
will just be dead: not buried or mourned
or missed. As with kites, I cut the string
when they’re way up, because who’d want to come back.
So somewhere are all these kites, as somewhere
are all the picture frames from the camps,
and the bows from hair, and the hair itself
I saw once in a museum, some of it, in a room
all its own, as if one day the heads
would come back and think, That’s where I put you,
as I do with keys when I find them in my hand.
[identity profile] ballpointsword.livejournal.com
O my pa-pa


Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Give Your Mother’s Taste
for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”
They’re not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in Our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.



Cross-posted in my tumblr.
[identity profile] aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com
A Primer
                  -- Bob Hicok (2008)


I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
[identity profile] moireach.livejournal.com
An old story
Bob Hicok

It's hard being in love
with fireflies. I have to do
all the pots and pans.
When asked to parties
they always wear the same
color dress. I work days,
they punch in at dusk.
With the radio and a beer
I sit up doing bills,
jealous of men who've fallen
for the homebody stars.
When things are bad
they shake their asses
all over town, when good
my lips glow.
[identity profile] thewickedtongue.livejournal.com
Backward Poem

The poem ends in death so I’ll walk it

backward home. The heart of an 87 year-old woman
starts on July 7th and immediately doctors
syringe morphine from her veins

and her daughter puts a tissue

together and steps from the room. There’s
a general turning from dark to light
and what she said to grandchildren

then she says to grandchildren now

only the words face the other way and blood
removes itself from scraped knees and all
her photographs resolve to black

as she lowers the camera from her eye

and sleeps it back into the box. She waves
as if erasing the sky amid the turned-around
hissing of the ocean and the elated

leaves retrieve their green and jump
into the trees and sex culminates with something
like warm proximity, a simple radiant fact.
Remembering her body old, she frets

the evaporation of liver spots

and tightening of skin, interrogates the mirror
as gravity gives the curves back and begins
her first date with my grandfather

operating a quick stranger’s stride.

And soon I’ll send the poem the other way and soon
she’ll turn soft in bed as my mother shreds a blue
and powdery thing into finer dust

and just before the inevitable

I’ll write a baby seeing the sky for the first time
floats with antecedent, which naturally molts
to the last wind to touch the body

is all the body becomes. If time’s

no more than the flesh of space arching its back, what’s
to stop the limber words from making geraniums
bloom in winter, what’s to bind

my grandmother to an oath of death?

I declare her young now and leaning on a sill with color
supplying the field, throats of the flowers open
to the pilgrimage of bees, the sun

dead above hoarding the shadows for itself.


Bob Hicok
[identity profile] aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com
So I know - Bob Hicok
He put moisturizer on the morning he shot
thirty-three people.
That stands out. The desire
to be soft. I could tell the guy from NPR
that's what I want, to be soft, or the guy
from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says
we should chat. Such a casual word, chat.
I'm chatting to myself now: you did not
do enough about the kid who took your class
a few buildings from where he killed.
With soft hands in Norris Hall killed.
This is my confession. And legs I think
the roommate said, moisturizer in the shower,
I don't know what I could have done
something. Something more than talk to someone
who talked to someone, a food chain of language
leading to this language of "no words" we have now.
Maybe we exist as language and when someone dies
they are unworded. Maybe I should have shot the kid
and then myself given the math. 2 < 33.
I was good at math. Numbers are polite, carefree
if you ask the random number generators.
Mom, I don't mean the killing above.
It's something I write like "I put my arms
around the moon." Maybe sorry's the only sound
to offer pointlessly and at random
to each other forever, not because of what it means
but because it means we're trying to mean,
I am trying to mean more than I did
when I started writing this poem, too soon
people will say, so what. This is what I do.
If I don't do this I have no face and if I do this
I have an apple for a face or something vital
almost going forward is the direction I am headed.
Come with me from being over here to being over there,
from this second to that second. What countries
they are, the seconds, what rooms of people
being alive in them and then dead in them.
The clocks of flowers rise, it's April
and yellow and these seconds are an autopsy
of this word,
suddenly.
[identity profile] packtnredy8466.livejournal.com
Calling him back from layoff
Bob Hicok

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been

confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was

and it turns out I'm OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars

painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that's a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle

for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said

he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean

and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through

with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions

as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried

with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward

than what you learn in the shower. )

March 2025

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