Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Cuffed To Your Own Muscle

In a way, the blood pressure cuff
is worse than handcuffs.

To know that you are prisoner
to a part within.

One with empty chambers
but that can explode anytime,

or send the blood so forcefully
through ribbon thin corridors

that they finally rupture,

leaving you like a fucking
dying geranium in a planter.

7 characters in non-pursuit of an entrance

i saw my birth
it had war-paint beneath
its leery eyes
& was sucking on the pin
of a grenade
at the lip of the womb

i saw my angel
its cigarette fallen from
its sleepy fingers
napping in a hammock
heavy lids facing up
at sweet cloudland

i saw my love
it was heroin-thin
its ribs visible
like the frets
on the warped neck
of some abandoned
pawn shop guitar

i saw my loneliness
it was grinning
ear to goddamn ear
sipping bum wine
& toasting itself
against an alley wall

i saw my faith
it was collapsed
in a shallow ditch
w/a rotten fruit skull
wearing a halo
of flies

i saw my ambition
it was in a morgue drawer
punching the keys
of the poetry machine
w/stiff bloodless digits

i saw my future
it was wearing a duster
made from a body bag
a toe tag
piercing its septum
like a bull
sipping whiskey on
a bar stool

Sunday, July 19, 2009

To Hell With All Of The So-Called Cities Of Love

To hell with all of the so-called cities of love...

Give me a tiny room inhabited by two bodies, seated femur to femur, ribcage to ribcage,
on an old thrift store couch, two bodies smoking cigarettes, sipping beer from bottles,
their bare heel-meat pressing down against a burned, ripped strip of carpet, and finding
in this small, smoky space what the rest of the world wouldn't ever find in their next thousand lives:
that the natural magnetism of the marrow always defeats the weak draw of the shallow chambers
of the heart...

Give me this instead and I'll happily go into the Void without so much as a sigh.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

As If It Wasn't Crowded Enough

sometimes it feels like loss
plants another skeleton
inside of you

as if it wasn't crowded
enough
with one set of bones

some nights you can
feel them slowly turning
in a tight embrace

this melancholy couple
dancing within

and it's almost kind of sweet
on those nights i drink away
and whistle a solemn tune
to this strange moving union

Unshaven In Thinned Out Black T-shirt and Greasy Jeans

The other day while reluctantly shaving,
after a few downward strokes,
I noticed a spot of blood.

Diverting my attention from surfaces,
was this bead of the interior.

Then I looked over,
in my false foam beard,
at the mesh laundry bag
hanging from the hook.

A week's worth of clothes
shoved in there like the innards
of a torso.

And I must say
I know nothing
of this existence
except the blood
ticking in my wrist,

and my yards of guts smirk
at History,
at Exteriors--

these things
the masses
kill for,
die for.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

year after year

a soldier riddled with enough lead
drops forever right there on the spot

but some of us are not that lucky

we carry slugs in our guts
we harbor the heat
year after year

inoperable wounds
we walk around with
while frying eggs or tying
our shoes

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Bone Poems and Blood Moonshine

Like inmates with life sentences,
we have to be resourceful
in order to survive in
this prison of a world.

Like captives sharpen
blades out of the handles
of toothbrushes to fight off
the deadly bullies,

like how behind bars, they make liquor
out of apple peels for some relief,

we lifers must whittle poems out
of our bones
for us all to shank Mr. Agony with,

and we lifers must extract our blood
and mix it with the alphabet
for us all to funnel
and drown our solitary confinement
and our sorrows.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

'A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY' BY ROB PLATH IS AVAILABLE .
EPIC RITES PRESS 2009
302 PAGES
$25 + SHIPPING

GO TO EPICRITES.ORG
This blog is updated irregularly and has nothing to do with the poet's output. The poet is actually disturbingly prolific. He writes about 5 poems per day. The pages are everywhere, even stacked in the bathtub.