National Poetry Month 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge, Poem #30

We Play the Desert Island Game on the Way Home from Her Mother's House, Christmas 2008

1. The Album
London Calling or Sgt. Pepper?
  with sanity's fine threads drawn tight
  beneath her answer.

2. The Game
Legend of Zelda, the first one
  looped by world shuffling rabbit holes
  fall in and forget
  the heat.
She contributes nothing, deferential.

3. The Book
Moby Dick? Really?
  Condom jokes. What better way
  to fight the loneliness of this interminable stretch
  the asphalt sea, rising in gray-white waves
  beneath the yellow sear of the high beams.
Before unassailable Proust, glibly dancing
  before intricate, weighted Joyce
  before Hemingway's sparse daring?
  Little things we learn.

4. The Friend
And whose hand will hold yours
  in salt stained sunsets
  cradle you fallen from palm trees in search of coconuts
  crouch together over ragged whifts of fire
  wake you as the storm blows in
  with rough persistent liquid pressure against your sun cracked spine?

National Poetry Month 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge, Poem #29

Perfect Day, Part 2
for my wife on a lazy Sunday in the backyard 

A sunsoaked day
with a thousand sturdy limbs of words and
  your deep, peaceful laughter
stretching like spokes,
A scent of skin over grass
  rolled against ourselves
  shoulders shining joyfully pink,
And you, the axis around which I resolve
  the sunstung expanse of my afternoon.

National Poetry Month 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge, Poem #28

I live amid a confluence of right angles-
the monitor rises from my desk
and I hold rigid in this hardbacked chair,
sheer as first love.

I flatten my palms against the counter top
barely aware of elbows, knuckles or wrists
for all the use I have for them,
all the limbs I do not wrap around
run trembling over no curves
softly study no stretch of self that bends when pressed against.

I stand my ground,
square over my shoes with laces tied impeccably together,
and I stare down the hands of the clock
as they measure quarter hours,
the firm limits of my life.

Excited to See David Phelps Added to the Yankees' Rotation

In nearly 600 minor league innings, Ivan Nova never posted impressive numbers until the 2010 season in Triple-A, and even then, he was strong but not eye-popping.

In just under 400 minor league games, Brett Gardner was a slap hitting fourth outfielder, right up until he posted a .345 OBP, helping the Yankees to a championship as part of the center-field platoon. After that, the Brian Cashman and Co were confident enough in Gardner to trade away Melky Cabrera.

Who's to say what David Phelps will bring to the team when the 25 year-old takes his first turn in the Yankees' rotation? His minor league numbers look better than Ivan Nova's (fewer BB/9, more K/9) over 500 innings of work. On the other hands, Phil Hughes' numbers look worlds better than Nova's, yet few Yankee fans would give Hughes the ball.

I've been thinking about prospects, hype, and the MLB learning curve a fair amount lately. Hughes seems to be pitching his way back to the bulpen; uber-prospects Mike Trout and Bryce Harper are back in the bigs; Delmon Young's attitude is making more headlines than his bat.

I could run through the numbers, but the generalities are fairly common knowledge: after the first 10-15 players in a draft in any given year, who's a superstar and who's average and who's a bust becomes a crap shoot.

So, don't be surprised if David Phelps becomes the latest underrated anchor in the Yankees' rotation.

National Poetry Month 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge, Poem #27

Abnominal

The poem must use only words that contain letters found in the name of the dedicatee. 
The poem should be 20 lines long.
It should be arranged in two-line stanzas, although other arrangements are permissible. 
Each stanza — or every two lines, if another arrangement is used — should contain each individual letter of the dedicatee’s name at least once. 
The opening and closing line should address or refer to the dedicatee in some form, with a strong preference for not using the name. 
However, the address in line 20 must not be a simple repetition of that in line 1; there must be some difference/transformation. 
There are no stipulations for line length or other metrical constraints. 
The title must be an anagaram of the dedicatee’s name.

Home Starts a Lion's Set

You did dare, wrestling with the big guns and the fog
willfully obstinate obtuse, I shall not demonstrate you find it yourself, you said.

We scoured the sour text, drove nails through its palms,
bled it for your bias and hate and genius.

Most of all for brilliance, honed ourselves on it,
come and go come and go, talking of you.

Blighted knight, arrange your merits.
Are they a consolation for your cigarette shortened dotage?

Because I do not understand, how such gifts and expansive scope infirm the glory of an hour,
because I find your air fetid, because I find myself whirling against the Word,

I strain to hear your mermaids singing lullabies,
drown myself, breathe in green sea and foam, exhale modernity.

Did you know the hates we'd glean pressed inside the ink
Did you believe you marred the verse?

Or did you know, taunt us dare us to find lies embedded within lines,
cast your long striding shadow across lands rimmed by disorder?

I've seen you running, long lengths of ankle joined to tibia and femur,
trailing streams of smoke and dissonance, grinding meaning to sparkling dust.

Now never grow old, minor prophet with your hair parted behind
little stuffed man of death's dream kingdom.

National Poetry Month 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge, Poem #26

Cento of James Joyce

Monsieur de la Palisse, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before his death
pious because no man would look twice.
Laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay.

It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast-
Melancholy, the dominant note of his temperament
tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation,
as mistakes are the portals of discovery.
 
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
His heart was going like mad,
that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience:
a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

National Poetry Month 30 Poems in 30 Days Challenge, Poem #25

Nocturne for My Pillow

When I fall, at last
drained of all my hopes for the day,
I drop my heart like ink
into a wicker basket beside the bed,
splattering oxygenated blood in long streaks.

When I crawl home, at last
stinking of half finished hopes
clinging to my hair like smoke,
I find my callouses cut by the whittling work,
dreams corked and stored,
the never finished always waiting
promise of tomorrow.