Bitter Employee Haiku #55

computer turns on
blue screen of death yeah! call IT
go for more coffee

The Death of Handwriting

I'll not miss cursive
untidy cat prints
on the windshield of my car

or block printing
that awkward formation
of idea to occurrence

killed off by the keyboard
and fingers indentured to
a s d f j k l ;

It can still happen for you

maybe I'll weed
ideas, lost chances
it all needs
rooted out.

dairy dreams...

sunday morning, spring
newspaper on front porch
real butter with eggs

Not What I Expected

The soybeans are coming up
A surprise that—
I thought them
Too long on the shelf
For a comeback
But no, there they are
Bright green as they push
Bulbous heads up through the soil
Looking faintly alien
Until leaves unfold
And the broccoli, bless them!
Still throwing out tender shoots
Topped with tiny flowerets
Still a serving for two
About once a week
I circle the yard
Bees thrum on onions and mustard
Gone to blossom, making
Wry-tasting honey, I imagine
It’s finally rained enough
For the jasmines to put out leaves
Fresh fodder for army worms
I make a mental note
To get out the Conserve
My hip aches
As I trip over the hose
My stomach slightly upset
From the evenings too much
Cheap whiskey and Coke
Last night I was thinking
About how cruel youth was
To spend itself
So unwisely
This morning
As I make neat coils of the hose
I think about
Keeping on.

Bottle Dreams

Dawn makes a rainbow of sorts.

Blue and green, amber and brown,

off the broken glass outside your window.

You smile at me, white teeth a shock

in this rainbow world.

The egg runs yellow and oval

in your black pan.

I watch your shoulders

square and round, t-shirt bright white

in the morning sun of another day

that I sit silent.

You fold your hands

and I see in their shape

my heart, lily-white, in your hands.

What the Weaverbird Knows

10,000 years in a prison
10,000 years to cry
10,000 years to remember
Endless time waiting to die

Love came with no promises
Love swept you up from the plain
Love in the end was a devil
And now you are caught in his game

So fly away, fly away, weaverbird
But first sing me a song of home
Sing me a song of the sunshine
While love picks me bare as a bone

For Nada
Who only loved
Too much

Escaping Flatland

There comes the realization

it’s all changing.

Spider veins become spider maps you could move

a horse and buggy around.

Wipe rust off

foggy mirrors

and peer uncertainly

at a face that’s no longer yours.

Time your messages.

Let egos break eggs, open cans.

It’s of no significance.

You can let sleeping dogs lie.

We’re baptized by unnecessary actions.

Take care of yourself, now.

Fine cracks start to appear

and you could fall between them.

You know who you are...

***

romance was her mantra
and each day
was a Betty Crocker cook-off kind of day
filled with spun-sugar confections
of imagination

Do you want fries with that?

I find your bracketing betraying.

Bitter Employee Haiku #89

bitter employee haiku #89

why depend on facts?
let's make all our decisions
based on what you like.

Bitter Employee Haiku # 117

bitter employee haiku #117

you ask your questions
I answer with long emails
seemingly unread

The White Knights

bitter fruit burnt my tongue
untasted by the meek
scorned by the strong
me
somewhere in the middle
spitting out the taste of something
I wish I hadn't bitten
into

5 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

I have brought you
green flowers
Orange seeds fall on your face
like hopeful tears

4 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

wine
held to
the light
turns my world
orange

Who is Frank O'Hara?

Frank O’Hara was an influential New York city poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who collaborated with many artists in his lifetime including Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline. My series, 12 Oranges for Frank O'Hara are also an homage to those literary-visual collaborations. Several of them are on this blog.

You can see the rest of the series here but I haven't converted them all yet to something that would work as a t-shirt or product design.

One of my favorite O'Hara poems.

    ANIMALS
    
    
 Have you forgotten what we were like then
 when we were still first rate
 and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

 it's no use worrying about Time
 but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
 and turned some sharp corners

 the whole pasture looked like our meal
 we didn't need speedometers
 we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

 I wouldn't want to be faster
 or greener than now if you were with me O you
 were the best of all my days

More about Frank O'Hara here.

City Poet, by Brad Gooch, is a really entertaining book about the life of Frank O'Hara. And by that, I mean the boy really dishes. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara

There's still hope for all of us

Change Is Good

This piece was an entry for Embracing Our Differences, an outdoor art exhibition here in Sarasota, Florida. As part of the event artists were asked to spend two Saturdays at the park answering questions about their work. A surprising number of people believe that the theory of evolution is a challenge to Christianity. Luckily I had just read I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Noveland I was able to comment on the difference between the origins of life and the origins of species through natural selection. Not the same thing at all.

[Liked I Am Charlotte Simmons but think that The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel is still my favorite but A Man in Full is a close second.]

Doll's House

for desire
the most difficult
of the endless

sleep paints you

like a child of atlantis
I watch you dream

too....long....meeting

If you speak again
blood will run out of my eyes
ruining your notes

there were a lot of meetings at [insert corporate name here].
and srsly, notes? why, did anything ever get done?

I mean _seriously_ people.

Preludes & Nocturnes

Some of the pieces from The Dream Suite directly reference characters and stories from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series--Desire, Dream, Despair and lesser characters like Lady Bast, Emperor Norton and Fiddler's Green. Others, like this one, riff off the title Preludes & Nocturnes, number one of the collections.

Sweet Ice

essence mixed with ice
could be granitas
could be city suit in snow

Bitter Employee Haiku Caveat

Bitter Employee Haiku # 72

that vodka bottle
really shouldn't be doing
your talking for you

aka danger at xmas parties

not really about hinduism

***
the streets are full
of sacred cattle

I've lived in two places--Key West and San Francisco--where there are lots of street people. It always made me think of how our culture can chew people up and spit them out. As well as the idea that perhaps the mad are closer to god.

3 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

ah, life...

Among other things sometimes more boxes just means more decisions...

Bitter Employee Haiku # 128

it's monday meeting
here cometh the time vampire
move quick, stake her heart

do you get the idea i really, really resent meeting and people who speak at them?

fearless

~~~
For Destruction, brave enough to change

baggage...

You can only leave so much behind.
Change is good, but not always so easy...

Bitter Employee Haiku # 177

it's an interview
i wait for the dumb question
where I blow all chances

oh dear. so many times this has happened. when the clueless HR person asks you "what gets you up in the morning?" don't answer "uh, coffee?" if you want a job. If the VP of some now-defunct division of an almost-defunct company who's current revenues were at about $4 million says "My boss gave me a rev figure of $40 million for next year. What would you do first?" don't answer "I'd go back and tell him he needed to pick a new figure" if you want a job.

It's perhaps better I didn't get any of these jobs :)

Scintillant Orange

~~~

Inspired in part by Rainbow Stories
, by William Vollmann
[Also by the many indignities that can be inflicted upon artists]

2 Oranges for Frank O'Hara

1 Orange for Frank O'Hara

While 12 Oranges For Frank O’Hara was inspired by the O’Hara poem "Why I am not a Painter," each painting itself references one of the poems from O’Hara’s "Oranges: 12 Pastoral"

O’Hara, an influential New York city poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, collaborated with many artists in his lifetime including Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline. These pieces are also an homage to those literary-visual collaborations.

The Poem:

Why I am not a Painter
by Frank O’Hara

I AM not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

For instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink’
he says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters. “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems. I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mikes’ painting, called SARDINES.

The Poems:

Oranges: 12 Pastorals by Frank O'Hara

More about Frank O'Hara

Modern American Poetry

empire

~~~
those who ignore history
doomed to repeat it
which is probably why
all empires come to an end

bearing towards oblivion

Another little ode to Desire
[Why forks? Aren't we a culture of consumption?]

lots of useful skills here...

~~~

marketing weasels
drink their martinis
and practice lying

oh c'mon, it's just a haiku.
besides, i'm one of the brethren ;)

wasted trees

I file blank reports
no one notices business
proceeds as always

actually, I filed the same report month after month.

my interview lunch...

included a long, long, discussion on lipstick.
~~~

I left Key West for San Francisco

and an artist became an executive for Women.com.

There is no way to keep your feet on both shores.

cultures of consumption...

i actually did this piece before that nut-job was let loose in the white house. i've been thinking about cultures of consumption for a long time.

and now for something completely different...

'nuff said.

Calling Mary Kay

it's always bothered me how many women's magazines and women's product companies are owned by men. not that i don't wear make up, or recognize the pressure to conform to 'normal.'