"Them That Reap" read it here

Read "Them That Reap" in the winter issue of Strange Machines Poetry Journal.

Now on elimae !

a poem from black friday: Jen at Macy's

for the sake of continuity, this could count as PA--a poem called: The Student Union

The fountain in the Alumni Plaza is
shut off. Its faux-riverbed dry.
All the pennies have been scooped out,
wishes spent.

Six sickly trees have given their all to fall
& trampled
dusty remains
gather in the fountain’s base.

The only rumble now is passing traffic,
& the shuffle of students steps on
a mud line cut through dying grass,
always rushing five minutes before, or after class in

shields of iPod interference--sound tracked
bubbles--& cell phones stringing invisible
electric laundry lines for all to hear:
(insert cliché here)

The students stacked in trailers
behind Lytle Hall will soon move
to the academic forum; a giant glowing
17 million dollar fishbowl filled with

goldfish eyes in 200 seat amphitheaters,
the teachers
will never have to
learn my name again.

The dry recycled air echoes
recycled ideas pounded into
five paragraph containers
reused in the library, wasted computer printout

pages, all grades
the same--one
pen stroke pass
or fail--like
finding a parking space

five minutes before class.
We are (the new) Penn State
repackaged in another field, in
another ground broken ceremony

high-rise honeycombed dorms,
where a single room is now a triple
in a numbers game of how many students
can we jam in one place, for one price

& still get away with it. Better yet--
put a food court in the forum so
they can buy Freedom fries. Please just
keep the Republicans away from bake sales.

The turned up corn fields give again--
the illusion of space--like
the fairgrounds on a weekend,
& diversity is half the population

taking a bus back to the city,
taking a truck back to the country.
Monday thru Friday we walk in streams but
never pool into a student union,

it’s just myspace now, faux
facebooked friends & waiting
for the season to slide by,
a fountain filled again.

for the sake of continuity, this could count as NY

september snow globe

Greg likes snow globes.
The way the world encapsulated
in a bubble can slow,
& each plastic flake
falls, glides to the ground,
settled.

I have one of the city—
the Empire State, the Statue
of Liberty & the Twin Towers.
It’s his favorite.
He shakes it up--arms flailing
as a four year old who hasn’t
fully figured how his body works
does--& waits with breath held
for the ten seconds
of falling to be
over.

“The snow never sticks to the towers,”
Greg says. He tells me:
“It’s because they are so tall,
so tall they are part of the sky.”
They are Greg.
They are.

tea time two

This is what the poem tea time eventually became.




thanks again to cherylin.

tea time

back broken by the lifting of lumber, jack could
do nothing but rest & wait for the return of po-
sterity through a slumbering regiment; sticky p-
otato chip hands, hot dogs eaten raw from the f-
reezer, falling asleep in his brown arm chair,
jack, white wrapped in long john coveralls, dri-
ed in the heat of the electronic hearth glowing
three’s company & draining battery lives till no
remote could change the arid airwaves—like sand
through an hourglass so passed the days of jack’
s life—just watching the same channel over & ov-
er & over again till it all was rerun & he could
predict the future & control time in thirty min-
ute intervals & in a symphony of board, hammer,
nail, jack was foreman once more molding from m-
emory a true HOME for the next generation, the
next lonely lovers to live in peace & comfort c-
oming together in a room of brady bunch sinceri-
ty, making the world a tv land once more.

telephone 7

telephone 6 and 6.5

i can only handle one friend who was
just broken up with (over the phone)
at a time. voice mail: "joe and i had
another fight and i'm just calling to
talk." in person, the cell phone in
the grass, lying flat on our backs
in the park: "bryan said he didn't want
to be with me." i wait for my phone
to beep, telling me ian returned my
text message, which i told myself i
wasn't going to send, but did anyway.
i can't call her back; i can't make her
feel better in the grass (and the mos-
quitos are coming out); he doesn't text
me back.

let's only talk in person from now
on, because it's too hard not to see
your face and i already forgot how you
smile. i don't know you well enough
to be comfortable text messaging you
when i want to know how you're doing
and be able to see it come from your voice
without the static on the line and the
roommate in the other room with the tv
on, but i don't want to have the 'where
is this going?' conversation, because
i'm trying really hard to see if this
new thing could work, but you live too
far away for me to be okay with not
hearing from you until i see you on
the weekend and we aren't clear with
anything. let's just talk in person (and
have the 'where is this going?' con-
versation).

Intro to a paper for contemporary issues in professional writing

Please just let me shit out a paper for tues-morrow
because I cannot get on with my life or sleeping habits without a large dissertation on some element of the First Amendment in regards to Vanessa Leggett and whatever other fancy connection I may come up with in my quick searching of Ebscohost using only full-text scholarly journals perfectly cited MLA and never forget the AP stylebook that I purchased just for the class so I can pass and remember to maintain a 2.5QPA in the core required classes so if I were to just say fuck this paper fuck the first amendment and what it means and how it effects me and how I understand its power and implications but do not care to woo a teacher with formal writing about the subject my head would just explode
no.
I would rather write about robots fighting other robots and people who control them but are actually controlled by the robots because there really aren’t any robots it is just a loose metaphorical term for the people surrounding me connected to cell phones and keyboards going through motions regurgitating First Amendment rhetoric for A+’s across the boards that I don’t want to face that I don’t want to drag me down and I don’t want a simple paper accolade
no.
I want to slip a note under Dr Reed’s door with a poem about a spring afternoon lost in a labyrinth of academia piles of dead winter trees yellow autumn leaves burying me before I can break a red pen on the floor so everyone thinks I died but instead I escape through a portal and now only write in green ink in tiny notebooks in hammocks in the afternoon with cool drinks by my side and at night I retreat to my hut in the trees and make a symphony of typewriter sounds as I weed out the terrible words written about the sad times before the rebellion against the rules
and now I don’t wear shoes or cut my hair and even though I have a sunburn most of the time coconut juice always satisfies my hunger

A Choice

I am submitting smell of paper for an english award, but i can submit one other poem.
Which should it be & why.

Choice #1
Train set

We lived in a Plasticville
1950’s train-spotting suburbia,
carefully planned out transit lines
from church to train store
to
basement to attic—the town
mapped out in Dad’s mind while
working on the paper-maché Murray Hill,
no commute time or heart attacks here-
just,
the reassuring placement-
a Pullman-town all the same,
tiny green trim lawns, Francis
Lewis Boulevard stretching
through
kids playing ball, collecting
coins and stamps, Mother
calls for dinner at six
o’clock on the dot pot roast
a
dream watching difference
clack by—CNJ, PRR,
RDG, NYC—a road named birthplace
and design, each boxcar
a
colour coded conformity to
place and time,
streaking by,
the blinking gated crossing line,
a
protective measure
to keep children’s hands back—
held and guided—always
mathematical, sincere.

Choice #2
Columbus Day—phone call.

First, and always, the five
unanswered rings—Mom, Doc
Cherylin, Amy, Greg—all busy

in worlds of planned painting,
perfect To Do lists done, preschool leaf
collection and a single teenager

still and sitting—
avoidance techniques fully practiced—as
she hooks into the net downstairs

connecting her everywhere but there.
And the echo
ring of a missing son

picked up by recorded greetings—
a frozen moment of informed politeness—
This is the Schroeder and

Tiefel residence please leave
a message with your name and number
and we will get back to you—

I studder in the twenty
seconds given to me twenty seconds to
tell them my wants and needs

twenty seconds to properly greet
an empty house listening to mumbled
words cut off—

I call back. They
are there aware of the part—
the sixth unanswered ring—missing nothing about

the homefront normalcy preplanned
weekend spending sprees and family
meetings miles away.

They lay it on me thick.
Why don’t you visit? Why
don’t you come home

celebrate the day of discovery—
Columbus’s great journey—with
pumpkin picking and uneasy

dinnertime banter, where I only
eat side dishes, watching sister Cherylin
battle for identity and freedom

I have and take for granted.
I will stay.
I will toast Columbus and

his three ships of discovery.

ADVANCED composition.

this is a poem that i wrote which will appear in Kutztowns literary&arts magazine (once Shooflys rival) ESSENCE.

it is called ADVANCED composition.


transportable identity conducting middle-management disciplined bells timing response in regimented pieces to fill puzzles skillfully echoed in hollowed molded systems purpose (propaganda) make believe chocolate land constructed on microfilms UNPACKED projected flowers elapsed growing docile, nurtured, under halogen suns—edible--malleable steel skeletons pinned together in frozen January air to digibits binary
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa 01001111010010011
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa a .com
instant access opinionated blog spot lily pad melting Monet under acrylic bridges search engined reading counting 74 lily pads (making sense?) crane lifted twenty-foot-two-ton-comfort-zoned-commercial-cinder-blocked white painted square with smart classroomed (moveable Mahoney) desks inscribed graffited--Bob Marley the original Rasta-- cut both and off limits questioned brevity interviewed five year foreman recursively explaining the sinkhole sucking tons of concrete sucking ideas into ambiguous blackholed roommates unresponsive will the middle ground no man land entrenched All Quiet on the Western Front barbed wire blocking butterflight bells ring men run to basement bomb shelters (students in unpanicked lines leave the building as if life was a) drilled hole under Gaza Strips arms dealers rich with $32000 homes painted teal sipping tea frustrating failures in class spaces high school castes information deliver barriers broken understanding fired emailed seamless efficient transmitted extracted from tiny pictures of autonomous machines.