The Future Is

The future is
sky blue and burnt sienna crayola
jagged and wild
on a piece of yellow construction paper,
a jetpack hero
strafing x’s into the eyes
of the past.

The future is
checking its watch again,
waiting on a lover
to come back home,
flipping the channels
on a thousand early morning dramas
as she sniffs the flowers
on the nightstand.

The future is
the next ragged breath
and the whispered prayer,
the next holy sound
on the hospital monitor
as he holds her hand
through the night
and waits for a smile.

--

That's what they gave me: "The Future Is". Carte blanche except for the title. This was another of our poems from the Red Chair Affair, and possibly one of the more interesting ones. We worked our booth at the pre-show mingle in the lobby, and looking back I wish we'd had more time. I think people were just getting drunk enough to approach us by the time they were calling them in to the theatre, so about a third of our poems were rushed out in the last 20 minutes. Ah well. I just want everybody to know that the downer atmosphere surrounding this poem can be attributed to the fact that I was missing a performance by the Blue Man Group in order to get it done. Could hear them from out in the lobby and everything.

Why We Adore Cindy

When it comes to beauty, sight only takes you so far
our eyes, though they can scan millions of wavelengths
perceive the slightest trace of a smile
see even in darkness
they still close when the light gets too bright
which is why they just don’t get her

The way angels strum a harp without moving
and tickle clouds with a heartbeat
flying through the heavens unaware of gravity

It’s harder for a fish to swim than this brown-eyed girl to move you
as though their gills are filled with jelly and every scale a broken rudder
her laugh, her grace, her genius tells a story
that none of the five senses can alone
cobble together to form the definition of beautiful

But even we don’t understand this
a puzzle of a woman that’s complete when left unsolved
like breathing the scent of a rose
and wondering what’s brushing our nose

--

Welcome back to another installation of the Poetry Vending Machine! This is Paul. Have a seat. A quick recap: earlier this month The Red Chair Project held their annual Red Chair Event, a sort of sampler platter of the arts things you can expect to see in the next year. As a treat to the hoity toity VIPs, some vending machiners were asked to come by and write poems for them, free of charge, during their drink and mingle session. And so we did. It was a surprisingly slow session, considering that the poems were free and that all someone had to do was fill out a slip of paper and they get a poem. Alas, the poems we did write turned out pretty well. Well, sort of.

This is the first one I wrote. Next year at Fringe I would like to put some sort of instruction on the slip saying something to the effect of "We do not know you or your family, your mistresses, your dogs, your unborn children, you mailmen - please talk to us about something universal that your loved one likes and have us write about that. Because if we try and write about them we could be dead wrong (and plain ol' boring)." So I tried to write about this wonderful woman named Cindy (and tried hard not to think of an ex by that name), given only the clues of angels, brown-eyed girl, and beautiful. Next time someone asks me to write about a loved one I'll describe how awesome it is to fuck the shit out of them and see what happens.

no title

Of all the things in the world
my one hope is this:
that we can say good-bye for a thousand years.
While the world curls in on itself
and ashes burst into vapor around us
we will be there
eye to eye
and lips to lips
the longing and tingling dread
of letting go
pulling us tighter together
like twin suns caught for a million moments in our diminishing gravities.
During the years you will not age
and we won’t sleep
because we only have a thousand years
and most people don’t get this lucky
so we have to make the most of it.
All around us there will be death –
you must prepare yourself for this –
but it will not touch us
tight in our cocoon,
fingers entwined in hair,
eyes shut,
breath caught
until each of the centuries,
like the ten digits in your hands,
have curled in, down to nothing.
And then I’ll say good-bye
only then.
Only when I am certain
that even the black holes in space
are aware
and envious
of our love.

--

Man would you look at the dust gathering on this place! It's like an archaeological dig all up in here! Because a broken laptop waits for no man, Paul is here to self-indulge some more with what is left of my copious Fringe booty.

So this one was requested by a guy who gave no title and four words instead of the customary three (unorthodox, but we at the Vending Machine, like Burger King, make everything to order): hope, longing, death, love. A little bleak, but I ran with it. Interesting side note to this - the dude showed up again with much the same instructions later on to another poet, and it turns out that he was gathering words for an art project. It's pretty damn cool of him to collaborate with local artists (even if they aren't aware). Kinda makes Orlando a little more artistically exciting, I say.

Live Laugh Love

Often the light plays tricks on your mind
especially when it’s gone.
Images form and rage,
your mind delighting in its revenge
for all the time you denied it today
left behind, like a pet, for more important things.
Even your ears join in the fight against you
tossing imaginary echoes off the wall
sounding the way mischievous elves would sound
if only they were there to help you.
But that’s the way it works,
gray matter against flesh
or the other way around.
Looking above fabric walls sporting thumbtacks,
outside windows pocked by dried dew
it’s obvious who started this fight,
Hatfields and McCoys
except less about pigs
but still about bringing home the bacon.
Fluorescence, neutral hues, keyboards that sound like dogs scratching.
Alone at night, when the sheets are relaxing
around you
and the silence consumes you
while memory plays a record that skips to the best part
an olive branch from an old friend
you smile
and know everything will be all right

--

Hey hey, it's Paul again! In the continuing saga of Tod's laptop of doom I am yet again pilfering my own treasure trove until I get some submissions from fellow 'machiners (and, as you may note, I'm down to the sand at the bottom of the trove). This one came from a surprising Vending Machine groupie. Surprising since she kind of appeared out of nowhere and that all the males in the booth fell in love (she was oh so generous with the beers). This poem represents one of the difficulties of custom-made art: when someone gives you the title "Live Laugh Love" and the words delight, mischievous, and consume, and you happen to be a cynical bastard of a poet, how exactly do you enter into their head and give them what they want? By being a better poet than me, it seems, since she came back and requested haikus from Tod and Butch using the same title.

Thanks, Seth!

The Poetry Vending Machine in the news today, courtesy of a nice little spotlight for J. Bradley's last Broken Speech face-off between myself and Curtis Meyer. Seth Kubersky makes mention of the "cherished" ode to cheese that was written for him and his girl last month in his Live Active Cultures column of the Orlando Weekly.

This would, uh ... this would really be a good time to post that poem up here, huh?

Yep.

I hate my laptop.

Haikus as packing peanuts

Beauteous

She’s walking softly
in the reeds, parting for her.
A beauteous dance.

-

The mirror, she lies.
You think it’s a compliment.
Nope. Just adjectives.

--

A two-fer on the same subject! This one came about while Tod and I, starved for attention, tackled the same haiku theme for the same price. Two for one! It's like happy hour at the Vending Machine! And it makes excellent filler here until Tod's lappy gets mended.

Senryus and Limericks

Popcorn Haiku

Buttery popcorn
Kernels stuck in my molars
Just like our lost love

Breakdancing Haiku

Poppin' and lockin'
B-Boy's legs spin in orbit
The crowd stares in awe

Gyro Haiku

Stomach in distress
I hunger for something Greek
I need a gyro

Flock

The vulture comes sooner than the dove
Longing in great circles high above
Its breath held for terms
Early birds get worms
Death arrives on wings faster than love


by Curtis

--

All Curtis all the time for awhile, as promised. I'd been meaning to start posting some of the many haikus and senryus we did anyway.

This was an option we'd give the cheapskates periodically: $1 for a haiku, full poem for $5. I don't know about anyone else, but I actually found them harder to do. With a full poem, the customer goes away and leaves you alone for awhile to write it. With these, they were usually sitting right there waiting for it because come on, it's only 17 syllables and they've got places to be and bathrobe boys to ogle. My haiku almost universally sucked.