Datasets:
luminolous
/
dapt-poems

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
Community
text
stringlengths
0
34.4k
The crude of earth.
They have lived here for as long as I
Remember. This moment,
I smell wild incense:
Heather, abducted by a desert wind.
Its growth hides
The rain-carved ribs of the foothills.
Evening swallows
The city fasting on late fall.
Years ago, after hearing the story
About a boy who lost
Both legs while playing on an oil pump,
I was dared to straddle one.
All my friends were there to watch
The Pacific behind me burning with dusk.
The brute lifted me to the sky,
Where I merged with the twilight,
A warm breeze embracing my back.
None of them noticed
The world stopped to breathe.
When I looked, they disappeared.
Nearby in pink-flowered bushes
Someone found
The girl who’d been missing for weeks.
They stood in awe, the body
Decomposing, while I rode
The slow bucking animal.
Two months later, off the same pump,
A man dove,
An imperfect swan into night.
He landed in the dirt gully
Breaking the soft, white wings
He never had.
Today, I catch in my hand
An insect charged with lightning.
It tickles
The obscure scoop of my palm
As I hold it to my mouth and explain
A wish so simple
By morning I will have forgotten it.
I release
The bug to a desert wind
That is racing toward the sea,
A brutal dryness in its wake.
Fire in the hills everywhere.
About the only thing I thought I knew
was that nothing I’d ever know would do
any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part
of the horse’s hoof that most resembles
a human palm is called the frog;
certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use;
the abstruse circuitry of an envelope
quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation.
Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made,
I took heart in the pointlessness of stars
and lay there until my teeth chattered.
I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge
building a birdhouse out of license plates
manufactured by felons in the big house.
No more paramilitary organizations for me,
I said, ten years before I was drafted.
I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick
fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook
a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend,
his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took
my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid
through the church service among the pipes
of the organ and still did not have faith,
although my ears rang until Monday.
I began to know that little worth knowing
was knowable and faith was delusion.
I began to believe I believed in believing
nothing I was supposed to believe in,
except the stars, which, like me,
were not significant, except for their light,
meaning I loved them for their pointlessness.
I believed I owned them somehow.
A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare.