A Poem with Character

https://bnw-mag.blogspot.com/2018/10/jenne-kaivo-poem-with-character.html

The poem I wrote without any words has just been published in a special issue of Brave New Word magazine! I think I managed the rhymes pretty well, but it's not good for reading aloud.

A Poetic Assortment

The End of The Advent

“I am eating the days of the month,
all the days at one time”, says Rebecca.
Her patience has ended:
she flung wide the doors of the weeks still to come.
The suns go down hot.
She washes them down with the liquor of evening.

If I had known she was an eater of days
I’d have begged her to take all the rest of the year.
Eat all the seasons, the cicada spring,
the summer and fall when the world could not sleep
for the scratching of chicken-foot houses.
In the woods with the corpse-flowers blooming,
their talons dug deep in the dirt.
When they clawed up a snail,
they cackled, flapped open their windows with pride
and made sure that people came running.
They let the worms stay undisturbed.

In the spring is the hatching of insects.
(This year, I bit down on a chocolate
but my tongue touched the flesh
of a fat and white maggot instead, and I swear
I could taste its small hairs.)
One day in the spring there were bees
and they covered the city in coats of their black and gold fur.
The sounds of the traffic were drowned
by mellifluous drones of their wings.

In the hot days of summer,
the bees made Rebecca their queen of the dead.
To the yard, in her garden, they swarmed
just to spend their last hours.
The concrete was covered in the light crunching carpet
of their dead and dry bodies,
their black and gold fur.

As the sun beat my flesh, I could hear a great crack
echoing over the seas.
Like a chunk breaking off of an iceberg,
England left Europe to melt in the waves, and where
will the hungry bears live?
They swim and their fur clings down wetly to underfed bones
like moss growing on brittle twigs.

The fourth of July was the one day that we could tell
gunshots from fireworks for sure.
The bombs bursting in air were a solace.
The rockets’ red glare was less than the keen black-eyed gaze
of the chickenfoot houses.

The fall came.
Although it’s December,
I fear that the Fall’s here to stay.
If the doors of the summer had opened in spring
could Rebecca have eaten them all?

I now have a purpose. I’ll plan out the days
And the months and mornings and nights of a year,
and the next time a year’s going bad
we’ll open them all up together.
When she is not full of December we’ll sit by the dawn
and feast on the seasons and minutes so they do not come.

(first published in The Lake)

Eyes Unastounding

Who cried in the hall as I walked
On the rug that looped tight as a noose?
Who was it, and why
Could not I have stopped?

Long over, I’ve bypassed the door.
Long gone, though the brakes on the hill
Caterwaul and deprive me of sleep.

I demand that I sleep.
I demand as I still live, I do as I please.
I demand if you kill me,
You take me outside of the town.
Do it far as can be from the center of town.

Eyes overwhelming
Stare down through the cracks in the
Ceiling I’m under.
I hope most of all I may sleep.

Eyes unastounding
Are fastened on me in the
Street, I am freakish.
That now matters little to me.

Eyes in the mirror,
The worst of them all, remind
Me of eyes in the
Ceiling I’m under.
And these eyes deprive me of sleep.

(first published in Arsenic Lobster)

In The Junkyard Quando Sumus

We lived according to the last tenet of the children. Biting with their rays the crazy buildings that were formed in order. Collapsing thing and also while the heap grows. To walk the heap is the greatest struggle. Seagulls rain excreta down upon your limbs. To be modern lived according to emptiness.

Emptiness is my fine flower. Gnawed by grubby thoughts. Emptiness is my fine famine according to the last tenet of shattered glass. To fly over a heap in white feathers.

Necklaces are the plastic six-pack holder. Face pretty blue under white feathers. To make my mark upon the world with white excreta. To live according to the last tenet of an empty box.

(first published in Arsenic Lobster)

Give Thanks

Give thanks to the soft and insatiable fog
that hides us away and keeps our blood cold.
Give thanks to the mighty, unstoppable hag
called Hunger, who rides us until our knees fold.
She is steely of mind and lanky of leg
and humbles us all 'til we're gone to the mold.

Give thanks to the legends of guilt and of sin
that teach we were evil before being born.
Give thanks to salvation if you only can
since we are all damned; before death let us mourn.
There are reasons laws stand against any fun.
A puff of a pipe means Hell under the horn.

Give thanks to the dollar and thanks to the cent
because we are born free and we forge our own chains
and thanks to the madman's tyrannical rant
on which we vote yes and Democracy reigns.
Give thanks to us all, because we always hunt
ourselves down with arrows and cause our own pains.

(first published in The Electronic Pamphlet, under the title Benediction)

Grazing Dinosaurs. For Shame

See here. She moves
like something's missing, like in a dream
of things primordial, dun-plumed dinosaurs
that skulk around the bushes. Shame.

To wonder why the next who speaks
repeats the thing you said,
receives the gentle laugh. To think
to chit-chat.
Just be content
that no-one speaks and
swinging tails of horseshoe crabs
avoid your legs.


Out there the whales collide with ships, the kraken dance.
My love whose ears are just like shells,
I hear the ocean pressed against them, knows.
The fairies hate a liar and a thief.

My love whose eyes are alabaster knows.


You've plumped up like a dumpling, firm and ragged.
Look at me when you speak.
You asked if there were rules to being real.


She moves like in a nightmare of an England overrun by wolves.
So let the forest have her,
if it comes to that.
For shame.


The eight-foot terror-cranes once strode tall the savanna,
snatching horses. The name
that many races call themselves is "only people".

My love is this:
someone who lies about all day
in peace, on cushions, whose eyes
are alabaster, whose ears
hear only sea. My love
holds water. My love
can stare and stare as something
makes the noise of ten excited crowds
outside our door.


You are a walker.
Ragged shoes and hobnailed feet
and toes clawed like a raptor,
but arms
as far from graceful, noble wings
as steel
is far from cardboard in the road,
all tracked with mud-soaked treads.


Tired and with pupils spread like dull and rusty pans.
She stays awake that time
that could be any day.
Why can you not
be like the rest, who chit-chat?


It's just
like talking to a syphilitic.
No taste in clothes.
No sense of urgency.
(God gave that to a flea!)


The fairies in the corners glare
with all the hate they have for mortal folk.
Milk curdles in your place,
things move and letters
from your words go missing.


Be real and true or things go badly.

Shame.

(first published in Three Drops from a Cauldron)

Lunatic Mood

The moon howls to you
into your dreams
I hear it in your dying-rabbit screams.

The moon is pure tonight, so pure
strewing all over us its stolen light.
In the black-dust dunes and the empty seas
that old flag waves just right.

Down here a tide is surging strong.
In our darkened rooms we drown in dreams.
The spray erodes the stone that hides our inner minds.

Bloody red and rarely blue,
that old moon on our horizon stares
observes nightmares and sleeping-rabbit dreams.
Paints us so bright with silver light
we know this is a stolen night.

What do you see on the searing moon?
A little hare with silvered fur.
A fisherman feeling for distant stars.
A woman lost.
A face with a leering gaze.
A seal with huge dark eyes that writhes and swims away.

The moon is pure tonight, so pure
strewing all over us its stolen light.
In the black-dust dunes and the empty seas
that old flag waves just right.

The moon howls to you
into your dreams
I hear it in your dying-rabbit screams.

(first published in Synaeresis, and performed as a song on Oakland's Ozcat Radio)

End of the Advent read aloud

Here is my first recording of myself performing my poetry in a controlled environment. I hope to do more of these. I confess to having gotten frustrated after two hours, and just posting the first take I was able to make all the way through. What is with upstairs neighbors? How come they're always rolling bowling balls around and setting off small explosives?