Shorts Published in Pink Elelphant Press

These were part of a collection
that included chocolates, for
a fund-raiser:



----------------------------------

Loft

A wink
crawled into the hay loft.

A smile
dove in after it.

----------------------------------

Fading Pass

You'll miss out
on all the ways
I can make you feel.

Look:
I just made you
laugh without trying.

------------------------------------

Candle

Please, stand
by the window,
bare.

Press hands together
above your head.
You are my candle.
I hold the match between my teeth.

----------------------------------------

Some Grace

You wish you could feel it,
could have the grace

of that single strand
of steam dancing,

disappearing above
your coffee cup.

------------------------------------------

Chex Mock Me

Here is this bowl,
full of windows.
No views of you.

You, part of this
incomplete breakfast.

"Found and Cut-Up" poetry

As seen in the Summer 2009 "From East to West":

http://www.geocities.com/pj_nights/summer09.html



----------------------------------

When it Finally


..hits hard like a winter drink
..faces demons with tomatoes
..sinks into the crying soup
..starts bucking in the garage
..reloads when it hurts
..launches a wad of film into the night
..sneezes back at a hog
..breaks the news like glass
..muckles a crush behind a shrub
..warms to the touch of a lighter
..selects disorders from an action pack
..grips a nation by the pontiac

-----------------------------------------------

With a Mallet


Play the nation mind.
Tap lightly on the fixator at first,
then a nose to the face for life,
hiding under a motor home,
or a splint across a finger
sets your protocol with bowing.

Puckered netal bumped back
shifting worlds on posters,
or chisel kissing stone
beneath a foghorn
in a silent cloud.

Seen From an Airplane

From my short poetry collection "Mere":


-------------------
On Flying Over

Cities burn
like coals at night
as though the world
were infinite.

W H E N I H A V E B E E N P R E S S E D

             WHEN I HAVE BEEN PRESSED


           Poems that have appeared various places.
           A blog book, in 'book order', with index.

           Remember:  the latest things appear at the end

         --copyright 2006-2009, Jim Knowles

page 2: I N D E X

                         I  N  D  E  X

           Burnt..................................... p.-1
           Parking Lot............................... p.4
           Marina.................................... p.5
           Memories.................................. p.6
           Giving.................................... p.7
           Where..................................... p.8
           Oracle or Ouija............................p.9
           No Reunion.................................p.10
           Dream Morning..............................p.11
           Friday Lunch...............................p.12
           A Bigger Song..............................p.13
           Stone......................................p.14
           Yolk.......................................p.15
           Amber Cup..................................p.16
           Gazer......................................p.17
           Relaxed Companions.........................p.18
           Galls......................................p.19
           Hold On....................................p.20

page 3: Intro

This is where people usually say something
important, but I don't think I will just yet.

Page 4: Parking Lot

Parking Lot


Trail gate.

Large parking lot,

this end unused,

except for leaf races.


(first appeared in my tiny chapbook "Some Shorts", 2008)

Page 5: Marina

Marina

Days are warm, nights cold.
Moon and Sun run clear and long.

Now as forever,
in little salvos,
the swallows come,
summer-homing here again.

I watch them and remember
that I wrote their spirit
down for you.

You watched them when
you were little too.
You sang, in a place
you will never return to.
You said you were flying.
Later you made up a fear
and turned on me.

I made you miss a piece
of what you're running from.
I cannot be forgiven.

I watch the swallows today,
and I wonder
whether you will ever land.



(first pressed in "From East to West", Fall 2008)

Page 6: Memories

           Memories

     Remember you tomorrow?
     I can barely remember 
         you tonight.



(in "From East to West", Summer 2008)

Page 7: Giving

            Giving

  I didn't mean to give you
     that impression, but 
         if you want
  I can give it to you again.


(in "From East to West", Summer 2008)

Page 8: Where

      Where

   Please tell me
   where it hurts.

        It hurts all over.
        All over the world.



(in "From East to West" Summer 2008)

Page 9: Oracle or Ouija

      Oracle or Ouija

Talk and ashes fall
from his lips and cigarillo
like a thin rain
under a waterfall, 
as smoke rises around his head.

The locals believe in his mutterings
as they believe in the morning sun.

He clinks his silver baby spoon
in the fresh tea incessantly,
even while drinking it, 
soul waving in some hidden wind.

Still they come to his tarpaper cabin, 
bodies freshly dressed in black and white,
each with a tea mug, some sundries,
a greeting card.

They try to ascend his stares,
climb the rope of his mumbling, 
applying the flesh of their own theories,
some way of germinating sense. 

They wish and act by hints 
from the old smoldering oracle,
because his mumbles speak
to each of their insides in turn,
in pet phrases they use.
Trust cannot be avoided.

True revelation,
or personality and wishful hearing?




(appeared in Mipoesias' "Best of Cafe-Cafe", 
  Summer 2007)

Page 10: No Reunion

No Reunion

Many disappeared. "For the good
of the institution". Their goodbye
was the hum of a midnight taxi,
discrete. Little holes in me.

Past feelings whisper to me,
from then. Bright coins
line the cave wall: good people.
Stray lights that held the gauntlet back,
birthed me.

I dream of forefingers on my chest.
Not for self, but not for world,
either: for us, they say. We are
the world that counts. The ants
of depression ask is my soul softening.
No, not me: I know the shapes of traps.
Was right not to trust the nice counselor,
to distrust big smiles and buckskins,
shoe-taps. Not to say things
to the kids who were too slick.

But there are the spring lambs turning over
the orthodox coals, forever. In their taxis.
And I a silvering ram now, singed.

I know the shadows there.
I know their strange ways, sussed them out.
My eyes are colder, clearer now. I am
night walking: the crunch of leaves, used litmus.
Time is shark's teeth; no reverse, no rescue.

But tomorrow waits.
A rope leads into darkness, by my side.
The plane of my footprints shines in the moonlight.
The whorls in the river tell on hidden stones.
They also tell me to move on.


(appeared in "Flamingo: Best of Cafe-Cafe", Sept.2007)
Didi Menendez just loaded up a sweet "Scribd" copy
of that publication, here.

Page 11: Dream Morning

Dream Morning


Some rare morning imagined,
in my private eyelid cinema.

Fingers weaving in the local sky,
limbs and twigs,
new green spraying up from tips.

A slow spiral climb,
to a bench by a tower window,
above the trees,
music and napping under newsprint,
following raptors over the faint canopy.

The Earth works its rotisserie,
finally the day rolls to dim,
and rings show miles above,
faint, around a pale moon,
crystal halo in the fabric of tomorrow's rain.

Beside easels and telescopes,
a pedestal, and a twisting, shining
bubble serpent in a champagne flute,
a chain like metal pearls
ascending in a golden sea, continuously.

As an orange ball submerges
in the pond in the distance,
bands of scent, of herbs and meats
and smoldered bark, call out for company,
far below,
for someone to come love supper.



(appeared in "Flamingo: Best of Cafe-Cafe", Sept.2007)
Didi Menedez has a quick-loading, sweet-paging Scribd
version of that Cafe-Cafe huzzah edition here.

Page12: Friday Lunch

Friday Lunch


I dressed in my finest stun-grenade,
I held a microphone to your feet,
which are known to talk in labor disputes.

Your cellulite phone was a ring-tone above
me then, and sang about replacement men.
But the Spandex stretched the voice out
long, so time ran up a tree, as an absorbent
monolith on fire with fear.

For a media event, I rescued you with a
magnet on the steel plate in your head.
Then we dined on deep-sea manganese nodules.
The chef humanely stunned them with a machete.

Following a few shots from a concealed
tanqueray-gun, I had to visit the
right-sizing room, where recent memories
are adopted by the surrogate bowels of
living buildings, becoming white noise
and memetic refugees, surrounded by
a liquid transparency no one sees.



(an audio recording of this poem first
appeared on Mipoesias' MipoRadio)

Page 13: A Bigger Song

A Bigger Song

A gloved hand grasps a stone,
and change is expected, given what we are.

Veils of sand-blast could carve
a face on it, as if nothing were coincidence.
An animal might see that: you and I know
human things have less grace.

There is this quiet time,
before you know what happens to the day,
but when you know what marching towards it you must do:
a time we fish the cloudy river of illusions for certainty.
What do we need to make our catch,
or is it always there, the challenge to find it?
Or both: chance and patience?
Best be open to it all.

I'd fret on what to say,
but sometimes it's just a yard-sale of thoughts.
Come, pawn a piece of your material
for a chance at
revelations, unexpected but known before.
Patterns of hesitation and oppostition wear down
to the same muck, things in the way
of the real way of things.

Still, such packed earth allows
mystery and shelter in its shadow,
like the way the Sun's power is stored
in living root tombs,
under the fading parchment of dead leaves,
until the next year's sun plants
the Spring kiss to conjure spending.

Back in human dimensions,
how is it that lips can slay the
distance between the me and the you so well,
make you so much more on me than I, for a moment?

There is a bigger song behind it all,
but I can never quite pronounce it,
when the notes fly by on Time's wind.

Would you mind whistling a bit of it?
Most little tunes are in it.
Send me any.
I hear you, across our pond.
I set on a Sun-warmed stone,
and listen.


(an audio version of this is at MipoRadio)

Page 14: Stone

Stone


Stone of sadness, let me throw you,
up past where jets bring people apart
and together.

Go where her family fled,
and skip up again. Fly
to where she went to settle down.
Strike the ground outside her window.
Wake her. Raise a curl of steam
to call her.

Cool to spare her fingers,
until you are exactly
the temperature of my body.

When she lifts you in her hand,
bring me the feeling of her touch.

When she feels a compulsion,
and washes you, split in two,
a geode sharp and blue
like my eyes.

As she stares into your facets
on the windowsill at night,

bring me the sight of her eyes,
light brown of a deer, the
patient warmth of new gardens
that sleep in early summer,
laying under the sky.

Let us meet again,
in thoughts that ring
inside your silent core,
so we will never be so far
apart as we have been,
all the canyons
of these years.



(10th place winner, 2008 Poetry Superhighway Contest)

page 15: Yolk

Yolk

Thoughts can
make a forest
and hide your soul.

I rise, fresh, like a promise.
I bed down like a fading hope.

An arcane canopy of buzz
blocks heavens' laughing silence.
The hypertweekedness of this era.

Things have gone otherwise often.
I have missed things I never had.
I am a tourist in my own life.

I doubt I am alone.


(first pressed in "From East to West", Fall 2008)

page 16: Amber Cup

Amber Cup

So much
depends on
a warm

amber cup

handed to
a nurse in a
starched
white suit

with cold
fingers.



(from my tiny Chapbook "Some Shorts", 2008)

page 17: Gazer

Gazer

He was on the bench,
staring into the past,
lost, out of season,
looking miles
and years away.

He didn't belong
anywhere, especially here.

Silence has no home,
yet births all things.

Why do we spend
so much time on
things we can
never change?


(first appeared on my tiny 2008 chapbook, "Some Shorts")

page 18: Relaxed Companions

From the winter 08/09 edition of "From East to West":


Relaxed Companions


They finish the cactus-juice
custard on the Beach of Souls,
and walk slowly up the slope
toward the street, ruby heat
of the setting sun penetrating
their backs.

Custard cups bonk into the barrel
with the buzzing flies. They hear
"mira!", and turn around to catch
the "Green Flash" just before the
sun's slip into the ocean.
It looks like the flaring of a
torch plunged in water, a dancing
twist of flame that dies out. They
wish upon it, per local custom.

Passing through the gate now, she
slumps against the stucco wall,
closing eyes, filling lungs with
a last draught of sea air.

Lips brush along above the collarbone
and for a moment, only the touch exists,
splashing across skin, bursting in the
brain, making ears ring.

He hums and helps her stand.
There is only the sound of small waves,
and the clicking of foam sandals
under the darkening sky.

page 19: Galls

Galls

She collects oak galls.

Each sphere's skin
has its own tapestry,
and a small hole
where the artist
fled.

page 20: Hold On

Hold on,
like a stray
winter leaf,
alone on a limb.

Hiss at the wind,
dead but remembered
still.

(from "Some Shorts")