To You, again

after Walt Whitman

I want to use my books
to make paper mâchés of my friends.

I want it to say: I have read
the rituals of your honeycomb
the chords of your untweezed light rays
the hues of your hieroglyphic gait
the rhythms of your radiant heat
the frame rate of your masonry
the altitude of your laughs
the pathos of your sleep
most of all.

It’s a sorcery of likeness, of love bathed
in the rip and plaster of another day’s
hushnhum. I’ll be tomorrows
and evenings, bridgework
lashed solid as smoke
from the effigetic pitch
of dilatory, dumb hymns
wafted to the cold dash of waves.

-C.S. Henderson

Willis: A Poem

Do you believe in the myth of language?
   the heart makes a lousy saw
   the chairs do not exist, even arms open
     without us sitting in them
   a cavern hums something prodigious,
     alien, ominious, a darker infinity
   luring out the impurities of the sun.
   Interruptions bubble as rain on the street
   are feet keeping the ground from swelling
     above our heads?
  Thoughts sing in bloops and ask questions;
    how far can we drive away
    from tomorrow? What lonely silo
    echoes in your throat? How much
    caffeine can we feed to the stars?

I hope the grains of smoke accept my thumb
   gliding along its thigh. I hope the noon
   swells in the chime of cheered teeth.
   I hope the butterflies view each rainbow
   in ultraviolet and paint it like Monet.
   I hope we are welcomed as friends
   to each dwelling of the deep sea.

-C.S. Henderson

*this is a poem I wrote for and mailed to Willis Earl Beal. See why I did here

this word was put in a plastic bag in the fridge & rotted but will never rot completely
this word fell out of my pocket on the subway
this word dropped and broke
this word rapt the door an hour until I answered
this word made its way to the surface
this word laid eggs
this word sprang from a drop of water in a Snapple cap on the street
this word forgot that word and tried to redefine the world without it
this word loves that word, but that word is married to another word
this word sabotaged this sentence by refusing to cooperate
this word is on a time out
this word undervalued its stock and lost its investors a ton of money
this word likes the previous word’s status
this word occupies even when it isn’t around
this word got lost in the desert and ended up in Alexandria
this word has Parkinson’s and stumbled when it came to dinner
this word is drunk
this word is having a hell of a day and went over the Tappan Zee (twice)
this word is hung over
this word relapsed a few times but feels pretty good about its chances
this word is disgusted with my choice in women
this word hates my tattoos
this word just wants a burger when it gets down to desire
this word hasn’t desired anything at all in a few years
this word didn’t get off
this word cries in the shower sometimes for no reason at all
this word recites O’Hara to me when I’m most ironically joyous
this word despises joy in all its forms particularly in ice cream truck songs
this word isn’t trying at all at Twitter anymore
this word is Dutch but pretends to hide its accent
this word is calling me after a few years
this word wants to grab dinner
this word is a nice hug
this word told me to give up smoking again
this word would steal all the red pandas in the world
this word trips over just about every uneven surface
this word gave up on phantasms
this word wants to be Batman when it grows up or a dinosaur
this word believes in aliens but thinks the word its sleeping with will laugh
this word brings a sack lunch
this word hasn’t gotten a letter since the 90’s
this word remembers the last word of a dying relative
this word is dying without giving a shit about dignity
this word is a dog
this word is two hundred unchecked emails
this word is Spam

-C.S. Henderson

The Composition Scared Stiff (from Consequences)

If love is to perfect the image of life
in the stillest peach as a discourse of existence
laid bare upon its spit with flesh heavy
in marbled pain and fucking, then at least remember
to call after your date if you said you would.

I’m against making machines work as art,
the cognitive discord of things stomping
and whirling to the beat of ideas a reverberation
of history that shocks my hands as I try to break
it with a sledge. Consider taking turns

misrepresenting the details until we’ve found a new
route to contemporaneous expression; I’m so sick
of forcing down hand-fed grapes and telling you I love you
by saying exactly so — if I could smash apart

the genders of each apparati dancing from the mobile
of the heart I would, instead of mucking up the articulation.
If you find me balled up on the kitchen counter, it’s no reason
to evacuate an opinion of me that isn’t reverent —

it’s just that after all the considerations we’ve taken
into account for the future qua present, I’ve decided
I need to melt and reform a bit before
I’m ready to stand fully within your gaze.



Yup, still filling your dash with stuff from Consequences because I want to annoy you with my gratuitous self-promotion and make sure you download it. Sorrynotsorry…

Consequences -- A collaborative chapbook

thetargetbird:

David W. Pritchard and I spent a year writing Consequences, one seemingly innocuous poem that birthed 99 responses. We proudly present them to you for your enjoyment.

As an addendum, I’ve also updated my Rejected Consequences chapbook, which chronicles 44 poems from this project that never fully matured.

For those who missed it, here’s the chapbook David and I spent a year writing, which contains stuff like:

And so, we’ve become a conundrum
of tissue in the absence of timely
bill paying — soon, our electricity
will be cut off and we shall
only gaze at each other through the bottom

of beer bottles — how green
you’ve looked, how far away
you’ve been, how convex
you are to me — I’d just like to close
the world one last time,
like an oyster drifting
through the desert.

(from “To Be Saved in Tin Foil”)

All that and more inside!