One Word: discreet
This doesn't really work, but--hey--it's only 60 seconds!
His phone numbers were discrete
so that he could keep his relationships discreet
Each assigned a number
Discarded when interaction curtains drew to a close
12.29.2009
One Word: birdhouse
dainty butter daffodils, hollow grasshopper stems contorted by pooled weight of coalesced water drops dripped off the empty birdhouse. canary flexed and drawn to ground-level by gravity. rusty conglomerations trickle down into yellow trumpets, soon to be lowered and splashed on the ground.
dainty butter daffodils, hollow grasshopper stems contorted by pooled weight of coalesced water drops dripped off the empty birdhouse. canary flexed and drawn to ground-level by gravity. rusty conglomerations trickle down into yellow trumpets, soon to be lowered and splashed on the ground.
12.27.2009
One Word: circuit
1970s elementary students run PE circuits
gather beanbags & chalky erasers
deliver them to opposite gym ends
try to avoid slips and splats
prevent huge hematoma lumps on knees
result from smash against white tiled floors
1970s elementary students run PE circuits
gather beanbags & chalky erasers
deliver them to opposite gym ends
try to avoid slips and splats
prevent huge hematoma lumps on knees
result from smash against white tiled floors
12.22.2009
One Word: tray
little bones still held together by tendons and ligaments
connective tissue jellied by days soaked in strong bases
small clumps picked off and dropped onto a worn aluminum tray
slowly, the bones became cleaner, the edges more precise
little bones still held together by tendons and ligaments
connective tissue jellied by days soaked in strong bases
small clumps picked off and dropped onto a worn aluminum tray
slowly, the bones became cleaner, the edges more precise
11.15.2009
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
by t. zoey benally
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
Pull out the nanoid stainless steel cog on my Nixon watch
Daily life etched and scratched like happy smile wrinkles onto its face
Stop the second hand, painted sticky Washington ripe apple
Fallen to the ground from Garfield tree orchards
Turn it backwards
Turn it backwards and spin the clouds,
Spin the clouds like crabs, trickling back into the ocean
Receding with the waves
Sunset exoskeleton bellies tickled by taupe sand and blood warm murmuring waves
Sky furling out like a tutu as earth pirouettes back through remembered time
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
Describe the kindness that you shared with me
Minty gum sticks on long, dull afternoons
Sweet powder dusting fingerprint arc,
Loop and whorl ridges as I unwrap square paper scraps
Fine confection, which I lick onto the tip of my tongue and savor
Sugar to power the notes and stanzas of my retrospective songs
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
I will describe the way you restarted the spin of my earth’s magma
How you recalled Fluid Dynamics 101, just in the nick of time, ala “The Core”
I will recount harrowing epics of how you figured out the cryptic manual
For the weapon to defeat ultimate evil and protect life
Just like on the “Fifth Element”
I will chronicle events leading up to the mouth to mouth resuscitation of Christmas
After you stopped the Grinch from stealing it
AND all the presents from under Whoville trees
I will remind the eternally forgetful cosmos how you shifted the equilibrium
And brought balance back to the force
Jedi like in your precision and skill
AND that you had no light saber OR Master Yoda to aid you
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
I will try to mentally capture
And paint Sistine frescoes of your laughter
I will be no more successful than if I tried to lip-sync the humming heartbeat of a mouse
No more successful than if I tried to bottle the white eastern skies bleached by the rising sun
No more successful than if I tried to slide down light quantum arcs, water drop prism split into rainbows
Despite these failures I will persist and I will aspire to paint murals inspired by the color of your eyes
Attempting to capture them in Palouse winter skies at dusk
Espy them in the fielded hills after the plow
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
And they will nod their head
Feign comprehension
Simulate understanding
But they will never comprehend
Remain utterly blind to your brilliance
Never truly understand
Exactly
Precisely
What you mean
To me
by t. zoey benally
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
Pull out the nanoid stainless steel cog on my Nixon watch
Daily life etched and scratched like happy smile wrinkles onto its face
Stop the second hand, painted sticky Washington ripe apple
Fallen to the ground from Garfield tree orchards
Turn it backwards
Turn it backwards and spin the clouds,
Spin the clouds like crabs, trickling back into the ocean
Receding with the waves
Sunset exoskeleton bellies tickled by taupe sand and blood warm murmuring waves
Sky furling out like a tutu as earth pirouettes back through remembered time
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
Describe the kindness that you shared with me
Minty gum sticks on long, dull afternoons
Sweet powder dusting fingerprint arc,
Loop and whorl ridges as I unwrap square paper scraps
Fine confection, which I lick onto the tip of my tongue and savor
Sugar to power the notes and stanzas of my retrospective songs
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
I will describe the way you restarted the spin of my earth’s magma
How you recalled Fluid Dynamics 101, just in the nick of time, ala “The Core”
I will recount harrowing epics of how you figured out the cryptic manual
For the weapon to defeat ultimate evil and protect life
Just like on the “Fifth Element”
I will chronicle events leading up to the mouth to mouth resuscitation of Christmas
After you stopped the Grinch from stealing it
AND all the presents from under Whoville trees
I will remind the eternally forgetful cosmos how you shifted the equilibrium
And brought balance back to the force
Jedi like in your precision and skill
AND that you had no light saber OR Master Yoda to aid you
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
I will try to mentally capture
And paint Sistine frescoes of your laughter
I will be no more successful than if I tried to lip-sync the humming heartbeat of a mouse
No more successful than if I tried to bottle the white eastern skies bleached by the rising sun
No more successful than if I tried to slide down light quantum arcs, water drop prism split into rainbows
Despite these failures I will persist and I will aspire to paint murals inspired by the color of your eyes
Attempting to capture them in Palouse winter skies at dusk
Espy them in the fielded hills after the plow
One of these days I will remember you to someone else
And they will nod their head
Feign comprehension
Simulate understanding
But they will never comprehend
Remain utterly blind to your brilliance
Never truly understand
Exactly
Precisely
What you mean
To me
10.17.2009
Liverature
by t. zoEy benally
Anger always heats up my optic nerve
--When a person buys into the drunken Indian myth
I imagine the nerve fibers turn red hot
--Authoritatively telling me that it’s a well known fact
Like an inoculation loop thrust and held in a Bunsen burner flame
--That Indians metabolize alcohol differently
Metal glowing magma red-orange-yellow
--Shame and blame righteously doled out like potato salad
That Indians are genetically predisposed to becoming alcoholics
--So where is your published peer reviewed article?
Several years after his death, Charlie was on local television
Filmed by a church group proselytizing and saving Indians,
In the parking lot of the Turquoise Bar, a dirt floor establishment
Constructed to resemble two kachina heads, two hogans, two cells almost done dividing
Placed conveniently on the road leading into our dry reservation,
By a non-native businessman “just trying to make an honest living.”
I imagine the day the film was shot, Charlie’s glucose,
albumin, and globulin were low, but his serum liver enzymes were normal,
Last remaining soldiers surrounded by fibrous tissue wastelands
Normal landscape disrupted and distorted by chronic warzone activities
Going through the motions, maybe sometimes not having enough resources
Or sometimes overwhelmed, and serum levels drop equivalent to a cockroach sigh.
Charlie spoke incoherently, blinking his already low eyelids at reptilian speed
Pendulum sway, non-plumb-bob at the end of some unseen pivot
Ammonia slipping past the liver into systemic circulation, making its way
Up, to the blood brain barrier, and bursting through
Unruly mob of women shopping at 5AM on Black Friday
Bile acid shots circulating in his blood--disregarded,
A mixed drink of conjugated and unconjugated bilirubin flowing in his blood--disregarded
By his fibrous shrunken liver, lumpy with numerous attempts at regeneration
Fresh starts, resolutions—with the standard half-life of the New Years variety,
Many years passed since acute toxic hepatocyte injury and initial enzyme leak
No one knows what the day was like when Charlie’s hepatocytes
were first damaged by cheap, fortified, swill packaged in bulk quantities
Maybe it was a fall afternoon bite, into a tree ripened apple—bright, cold, sweet and crisp
Alternating sunny and cloudy, ravens and magpies squawking quarter note triplets
Brisk winds roaring through obsequious dry leaves while hepatic necrosis ensued
Gradually Charlie’s blood flow ebbed to a slumberous pace as scars and attempts
at regenerative growth anastomosed and compressed sinusoids and central veins
Charlie’s belly, gibbous with ascites and most likely spenomegaly
Hindered his attempts at stealing fire for humans,
Prevented him from being hailed a champion
Yet Charlie was STILL chained to the Hogback, liver eaten out for eternity by Turquoise bar
And Hercules came too late for this would be Prometheus
Charlie died of hepatic insufficiency in 1985
The same year that the Turquoise Bar closed
by t. zoEy benally
Anger always heats up my optic nerve
--When a person buys into the drunken Indian myth
I imagine the nerve fibers turn red hot
--Authoritatively telling me that it’s a well known fact
Like an inoculation loop thrust and held in a Bunsen burner flame
--That Indians metabolize alcohol differently
Metal glowing magma red-orange-yellow
--Shame and blame righteously doled out like potato salad
That Indians are genetically predisposed to becoming alcoholics
--So where is your published peer reviewed article?
Several years after his death, Charlie was on local television
Filmed by a church group proselytizing and saving Indians,
In the parking lot of the Turquoise Bar, a dirt floor establishment
Constructed to resemble two kachina heads, two hogans, two cells almost done dividing
Placed conveniently on the road leading into our dry reservation,
By a non-native businessman “just trying to make an honest living.”
I imagine the day the film was shot, Charlie’s glucose,
albumin, and globulin were low, but his serum liver enzymes were normal,
Last remaining soldiers surrounded by fibrous tissue wastelands
Normal landscape disrupted and distorted by chronic warzone activities
Going through the motions, maybe sometimes not having enough resources
Or sometimes overwhelmed, and serum levels drop equivalent to a cockroach sigh.
Charlie spoke incoherently, blinking his already low eyelids at reptilian speed
Pendulum sway, non-plumb-bob at the end of some unseen pivot
Ammonia slipping past the liver into systemic circulation, making its way
Up, to the blood brain barrier, and bursting through
Unruly mob of women shopping at 5AM on Black Friday
Bile acid shots circulating in his blood--disregarded,
A mixed drink of conjugated and unconjugated bilirubin flowing in his blood--disregarded
By his fibrous shrunken liver, lumpy with numerous attempts at regeneration
Fresh starts, resolutions—with the standard half-life of the New Years variety,
Many years passed since acute toxic hepatocyte injury and initial enzyme leak
No one knows what the day was like when Charlie’s hepatocytes
were first damaged by cheap, fortified, swill packaged in bulk quantities
Maybe it was a fall afternoon bite, into a tree ripened apple—bright, cold, sweet and crisp
Alternating sunny and cloudy, ravens and magpies squawking quarter note triplets
Brisk winds roaring through obsequious dry leaves while hepatic necrosis ensued
Gradually Charlie’s blood flow ebbed to a slumberous pace as scars and attempts
at regenerative growth anastomosed and compressed sinusoids and central veins
Charlie’s belly, gibbous with ascites and most likely spenomegaly
Hindered his attempts at stealing fire for humans,
Prevented him from being hailed a champion
Yet Charlie was STILL chained to the Hogback, liver eaten out for eternity by Turquoise bar
And Hercules came too late for this would be Prometheus
Charlie died of hepatic insufficiency in 1985
The same year that the Turquoise Bar closed
10.15.2009
Mental Diverticulum
Pulsion or traction, it makes no difference
Because I’ve acquired a mental diverticulum
I functioned with my mental diverticulum
Subclinically for almost a decade
Existed on a bland diet of television,
chit-chat, and reading material set in
greater than 11 point serif font
Benign ingesta slipped quietly past,
Inaudible crowds streaming past, an undiscovered
dead end mall hallway that violates the Life Safety Code
Children laughing, women brooding
mildly distraught over
unmatched hand bags and alligator skin shoes
Clamorously unaware of the skulking horror
enthusiastically hovering in tumid crypts
Ptyalistic at the prospect of undetected ambush
unanticipated subterfuge
Frightened bodies crammed in,
The unfortunate
Seeking ingestion and digestion
Down an erroneous passageway
in a smoke choked labyrinth.
This lesion was fashioned by
Contracting fibrous tissue
Like small diameter child fingers
picking and pulling at diaphanous dry cleaning bags
Forming flimsy blister traumas,
Or perhaps incompressible fluids
transferring hydraulic forces,
liquid mechanics executed
along a section of pipe wrought
from the same brittle steel
that sank the Titanic.
Before this lesion existed
Information flowed faster and more efficiently
than hayate shinkansen
Axons myelenated
Unctous and 4X fast forwarding
stoic commuters leaping
from node to node, station to station
a flat stone hurled and skipped across water
Since this lesion matured
I am dyspneic
With daily Thanksgiving feasts of information bought on credit,
--15 pound bird, basted and baked
Sides of mashed potatoes, cranberries, and gravy--
All vanishing into a barren, leviathan, marsupium
Fermenting a monstrous concoction
of incoherent ideas and jumbled logic
I am dysphagic
Gavaged foie gras bird
Mental cachexia, and liver diseased
And all the while interest accumulates
Concurrent Guinea worm infection
Emerging and wound around a stick
Slowly, and painfully extracted by financial institutions
Development of this lesion
makes me anorexic and apprehensive
At the prospect of aspiration pneumonia
Carious, uncontemplated, regurgitated facts
Pahoehoe lava--Inhaled
Creating a fabulous environment
favoring bacterial proliferation
I’ve acquired a mental diverticulum
and no amount
of endoscopy or barium
Will divulge its location
Pulsion or traction, it makes no difference
Because I’ve acquired a mental diverticulum
I functioned with my mental diverticulum
Subclinically for almost a decade
Existed on a bland diet of television,
chit-chat, and reading material set in
greater than 11 point serif font
Benign ingesta slipped quietly past,
Inaudible crowds streaming past, an undiscovered
dead end mall hallway that violates the Life Safety Code
Children laughing, women brooding
mildly distraught over
unmatched hand bags and alligator skin shoes
Clamorously unaware of the skulking horror
enthusiastically hovering in tumid crypts
Ptyalistic at the prospect of undetected ambush
unanticipated subterfuge
Frightened bodies crammed in,
The unfortunate
Seeking ingestion and digestion
Down an erroneous passageway
in a smoke choked labyrinth.
This lesion was fashioned by
Contracting fibrous tissue
Like small diameter child fingers
picking and pulling at diaphanous dry cleaning bags
Forming flimsy blister traumas,
Or perhaps incompressible fluids
transferring hydraulic forces,
liquid mechanics executed
along a section of pipe wrought
from the same brittle steel
that sank the Titanic.
Before this lesion existed
Information flowed faster and more efficiently
than hayate shinkansen
Axons myelenated
Unctous and 4X fast forwarding
stoic commuters leaping
from node to node, station to station
a flat stone hurled and skipped across water
Since this lesion matured
I am dyspneic
With daily Thanksgiving feasts of information bought on credit,
--15 pound bird, basted and baked
Sides of mashed potatoes, cranberries, and gravy--
All vanishing into a barren, leviathan, marsupium
Fermenting a monstrous concoction
of incoherent ideas and jumbled logic
I am dysphagic
Gavaged foie gras bird
Mental cachexia, and liver diseased
And all the while interest accumulates
Concurrent Guinea worm infection
Emerging and wound around a stick
Slowly, and painfully extracted by financial institutions
Development of this lesion
makes me anorexic and apprehensive
At the prospect of aspiration pneumonia
Carious, uncontemplated, regurgitated facts
Pahoehoe lava--Inhaled
Creating a fabulous environment
favoring bacterial proliferation
I’ve acquired a mental diverticulum
and no amount
of endoscopy or barium
Will divulge its location
10.07.2009
Goose Filth & Bottlecaps
I'm not going to crawl in there.
Wet goose poop will soak through my jeans
and slime onto my knees
Cold, wet--rejected by goose cells
I'm not going to crawl in there.
Dry goose poop will stick onto the palm of my hands
Urea dust, seemingly more potent--toxic
Riddled with unknown bird bugs
I waddle in, only the rubber of my tattered Converses
are allowed to touch the filth
I feel myself tip and steady myself
Hand pushed against
Corrugated insulated walls
Bottle caps used in lieu of washers
Spread nail pressure
and keep cardboard in place
I grab goose eggs and cautiously back out
I'm not going to crawl in there.
Wet goose poop will soak through my jeans
and slime onto my knees
Cold, wet--rejected by goose cells
I'm not going to crawl in there.
Dry goose poop will stick onto the palm of my hands
Urea dust, seemingly more potent--toxic
Riddled with unknown bird bugs
I waddle in, only the rubber of my tattered Converses
are allowed to touch the filth
I feel myself tip and steady myself
Hand pushed against
Corrugated insulated walls
Bottle caps used in lieu of washers
Spread nail pressure
and keep cardboard in place
I grab goose eggs and cautiously back out
Bathroom Sink
Water swirls down the chrome plated drain
Canned laughter erupts, reminiscent of,
Laughter strategically inserted after
Limp noodle Brady Bunch punch lines
But Alice does not clean my dual sinks
Elsewhere she sits, sipping coffee
with her Sam
I squeeze SoftScrub with bleach
onto enamel and chrome coated metal
Never able to exorcise
Canned laughter swirls
Escaping down the drain
Water swirls down the chrome plated drain
Canned laughter erupts, reminiscent of,
Laughter strategically inserted after
Limp noodle Brady Bunch punch lines
But Alice does not clean my dual sinks
Elsewhere she sits, sipping coffee
with her Sam
I squeeze SoftScrub with bleach
onto enamel and chrome coated metal
Never able to exorcise
Canned laughter swirls
Escaping down the drain
10.06.2009
How are you doing Jack Mueller?
Some days I wonder how Jack Mueller’s doing
If he still slings that string of snake vertebrae around his neck
I wonder what he would say if he knew that I had lost my voice
Washed away by the rain, blown off into straw fields and buried
Turned under with spent gray topsoil by thick silver blades
Jack probably couldn’t see the smokey lisps
Whispered rumors of some poet, sometime back
Lost endurance, asthmatic lungs and mind
Only able to write single stanzas
That trail off…
Some days I wonder how Jack Mueller’s doing
If he still slings that string of snake vertebrae around his neck
I wonder what he would say if he knew that I had lost my voice
Washed away by the rain, blown off into straw fields and buried
Turned under with spent gray topsoil by thick silver blades
Jack probably couldn’t see the smokey lisps
Whispered rumors of some poet, sometime back
Lost endurance, asthmatic lungs and mind
Only able to write single stanzas
That trail off…
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