Newspaper Blackout Poems

Look around here for a small selection, but check out the website for more newspaper blackout poetry and other stuff by this ‘writer who draws’.

2008 Virginia Festival of the Book

vabook.org

Ralph Angel, Committing Sideways

This might hurt a bit, stabbing away at conversation
when we could be quiet or snoring, I mean
waking up sick is tomorrow’s business; (we like to say
that it wears our clothes). But what’s substantial
is the soulful intersection of the needs and obligations
of good friends ridiculing each other. It’s a chance

we don’t hesitate to take, and we’re a shambles,
aren’t we? These arms don’t work anymore. Better stack
them
over here, where the suntans fell off our faces. And yes,
that’s the old philodendron walking out in your slippers,
but forget it, it’s nothing, the whole place and its aura
of lived-in azaleas are resting on tentative sands.

Funny little murmurs of free fall. Now we’re
getting somewhere, so close and, therefore, so disappointed,
like slap-happy derelicts leaning on parking meters
after the shoppers have thinned away, and yet from them
emanates an excited kind of trust that can also turn inside-
out
and make visible what has remained so secret.

And we each say, “Well, here’s to you, Bub,” as the last
jokes collide with the things we most
despise in ourselves, which march across the table like
crummy
peanut butter sandwiches in day-glo trenchcoats-whoops,
there they go-right through the breathy curtains,
right past the worry that we may be anything but
deadly serious when they return to us, as they always do,
when we’re alone, and that our having to think about them
will hold us too safe and too separate, our feet
squarely planted in dreaded plots of ground.

LOLCat Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, rewritten in LOLcat dialect.

Fall 2007 Seminar Drafts

Sunoco
for Keaton

*
sunlight
the big red arrow points
to the big white bird
the little red arrow aims
at the rainbow
stretches the length of each side
go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep you little baby

sunlight
glints off wings glares back
when you wake get some cake ride them pretty little horses
sunlight
blank stare without which hums
what is it over there
i look out without which hums
i go out since forever
why is it you have no eyes
maybe we see not so different

black an a bay sorrel an a gray oh a heap a little horses
little old horse little old cow amblin round the old hay mound

you live here though
i know you years ago shoot
over this land curves with my body
hums

now you noseless poised for release
stuck shiny unflying red ones round
stayed watch with me you
stilled
hums
little old horse he took the chew darned if i dont said the old cow too

sighs
sunlight

*

*

missing & gone
i’ve got half a mind to lay myself out
in this damn dusty desert
drink in the nothing & absence
dig myself into dirt
till my skin is cracking & parched
my sweat dry
& i am rattlesnake still

here & there i try
but your voice always comes
deep water moan
i walk blinded
on the erosion road
reluctantly risen
stumbling & spitting

shadowless i am still aiming for ground
unless

*

*

The Spending

it is a day of heart-hurting but
I woke up with the sun
to its greengold glow through the leaves
to bronze on the ground
and molten gold river
past the trees
our last morning
all warm
our last day

it is a day of gold-glowing but
I watch with the sun
as its stillgold pale light falls
into the river of the people
of the land
fading rays fall in us and we
are goldfolded

for moments only
for moments tomorrow and yesterday
as our titles and deeds
burn into the ground
as our fathers’ names
and the old courthouse
stand among the ghosts
and float among the blood
as we imagine our graves
separate from our bones
as skimming wings alight on the water
and the blood

already I see our cornstalk bodies wavering
but who believes that

*

*

i dont know it by a map
there are tiny points in me
BAMA
stone lions, brown leaves crunch,
old oaks, dirt roads,
inside the black dot.
daddy teaches me
how to steer the rusty red truck bucket
and a rock feels no pain
but still and all
poor lost car
no windshield and its people gone.
i am wastin my time
diggin up the dinosaurs
by the sparklin dust river

i come round, lauren sittin there
covered in dirt as she can be
laughin, a little too hard -
that dirt
that dirt is ants
and shes screamin.
i bet its Fire Ants too
rightly named.
the smallest things can kill you here.
put some cheerios in a bag for her
i do not know what cheerios will do
to fight Fire Ant bites
and if it was me i sure do not
think that i would be hungry.
girl you better learn to talk right
but it is not like momma has to make sense
like the tree through the roof
that lets the ants in.
my daddy built it all
except for the honeysuckle wall
and flushly fit our house of wood and glass

It breaks in lots of ways.

one: Me.
light bulbs are just sittin
and waitin
and me not knowin whats inside em.
but i learnt my lesson so i dont smash
the stained glass over the bathtub
specially cause it is my church.
aint aint a word so ya aint supposed to use it

two: Earthquakes.
when the sirens come
and the ground growls
i dont move not one inch from my chair.
not when the teacups and the wine glasses fall
momma sayin over and over
like its for me but it aint
daddys okay dont worry daddys okay
im more worried bout my nightmare -
every night
when i get into my bed and close my eyes,
a Great Chasm opens up beneath my bed
(i know what a chasm is and it is also an abyss)
and it goes straight down to the earths core
where there is lava.
i will die if i fall down there
and so every night i have to die before i dream.
god made dirt and dirt dont hurt
says daddy who does not believe in god

three: Them.
they rumble down the road
but aint like no earthquake
shoutin things i cant understand
specially when momma and daddy
tryinta cover my ears.
it might be worse than earthquakes.
they close all the blinds when we hear em
and it gets like it would be cozy
if it wasnt for the noise outside
and the way we crouch, like the tornado drill
and the way they lock the door
what is it daddy?
he pretends he aint hear me
what is it momma?
bad people
why are they bad?
theyre evil honey now hush
you know what? i bet if they march down them streets like that and
all,
i bet thats how come the car people done left that poor car on
the roadside.
my daddy blinks at me
he says
listen to me good
you never, never
let them find you
you run and you hide
you got me?
i say yessir and i figure it
some things are worse than earthquakes.
i know ants can get under doors
and ants are evil too

the dinosaurs all took one big crap
and it came out rogersville
with our abe lincoln log cabin house
that daddy built with his own two hands
where the fishwet boards bleed into the soil
where we hide from the mob with magma hands
like the Black Widow Spider
like the suckin tornado mouth
that picks surprise landings,
leavin the snakes and the moss swingin
the alligators out and open-mouthed
and our garden worse than squirrel-picked,
though the pine needles never seem troubled
though abe lincoln freed the slaves

*

*

Swallowing Hour

I know that it is useless
to ask why
why
there is no mercy
desert and death are hope and home
the universal birthday present
è cominciata
and why
why
there are so many things
I cannot touch.

a life passes
in the small spaces

Can we ever stop asking
or stop wanting to ask
when there are cut foreheads
bloodrunning
and dead lovers
skinbluing
and swallows
on the roof?

they could be filled
with love

If we are old in the world
the sun is big enough
we will still
be lynching our own
hating blind and deaf
who are only stray
to the toothy machine
not the swallows
stirring
on the tower.

but it is not
that time of day

Fear is only by the clock
and war
can undo minutes
but it is now unheimliche
except for the swallows
in the corners of our eyes.

*

è cominciata = it has begun
unheimliche = uncanny

Tom Chambers

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Prom Dress #3

Night Light

Tom Chambers Photography

The New Poetry

Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense

from The Believer