John Cole: Poems

Poems

Prompts

for Taras

“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid, and they’ve already taken over the world.”

— Pedro Domingos

Write an extended free verse poem

of about 350 words in twelve stanzas

of roughly equal length,

in the manner of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem.

Embed, fuse, or decontextualize

unlikely liaisons.

Ransack uncertainties.

Resort to invective or vilification

at least once. Being careful to avoid stylish

self-righteousness and glamour,

concoct a catechism

that compels the reader to continue.

Suggest machine- or dreamlike conceits

involving the sixth sense. Then burrow into deceit,

or prowl around immorality’s dark alleys.

Plunder with impunity to help cobble together

a simulacrum of shamelessness (or humility)

that offends at least four middle-class sensibilities.

Allow some similes to ramble on.

Set a few words free, or nudge them

to incite a rebellion.

Mimic imitation’s false confidence.

Incorporate exotic mandates.

Hover over uncertainties here and there.

Offer a little merriment or flippancy

(if required).

Contrive a line

that calls to children hiding under leaves.

Let some words linger on the tongue, or lounge

in the larynx until a state of grace is reached,

bringing joy and goodwill

to all readers. Explore strange new words.

Seek out new lines

and new lineation—to boldly go

where no poet has gone before.

Near the end of the poem, convey solemnity,

or just cavort with delight and frivolity

for the fun of it.

Include allusions that ring, blink,

freeze, or forge through snow-swept hollows.

Leave five lines to fend for themselves,

or slither into shallows

to divulge or concede something secretly.

See into the future, to somehow involve the sad story

of a singer’s withholding of air, focusing on

her intransigence.

Permit a few transgressions,

or propose alternatives to secondary

suggestions involving slant rhymes

that lurk in dim-lit caves

or mosey up to the water’s edge

to summon spirits.

Numbers

(for Wendy)

Today a stranger sent me a video

of nine hundred grunge guitarists pogo jumping

to Smells Like Teen Spirit, and three hundred drones

dropped pigs’ feet and rice to students who will eat alone

in Shenzhen. Did you know that there are only

seven fluent speakers of Heiltsuk on the B.C. coast,

and thirty million yen worth of magnetic eyeliner

sold in Tokyo this year? Joshua counted three,

not four bees in the garden the other day and reminded me

there were over one hundred seventeen kids

that did worse than him on the math exam.

Tesla tumbled fifteen percent shedding twelve point five billion,

and nine hundred and thirty Chinstrap penguins

on Heard Island will soon feel the heat of Trump’s tariffs.

Jeremy says he has only six socks left

and according to this graph, if I live to eighty-five

I have seven hundred fifty-seven million, three hundred

eighty-two thousand, four hundred seconds to live

(using leap year average) of which I have devoted

five thousand thirty-two to write this poem

Pages

Silent for the most part

holding their breath between turns

then clearing their throats in soft

coughs, usually alone but sometimes

sounding with others, each turn

the same left-hand gesture: thumb scraping

curled edge, index finger pushing down

the page, a double sound

I didn’t notice until

I started attending to this paper music,

this delicate symphony of friction

whispering through the library.

Carpe Carnem

Today in my garden as I marvel at

the mid-air mating of two swallowtails

a scientist somewhere in Sumatra,

knee-deep in a rice field,

is seeking to reveal the Siamang’s

mammalian equivalents to our sweet nothings;

Tarsiers in Borneo are tilting their heads in silence,

sending and receiving ultrasonic signals

to potential progenitors; and a pair of soapberry bugs

have been clinging to each other for a week.

We humans in heat do weird things too

involving screens for release

ransacking satiation along the lips, tongues,

and earlobes of our neural networks.

Some like to rumba, tarantella, fandango

or tease each other in cheap hotels,

prancing and preening in love-lace and g-strings

graceless as the oily act of coitus

between poison dart frogs.

This Is Not an Arabesque

Not a song to someone.

Not a gift, a gargoyle or a gallant romp

in regal finery through Flanders Fields.

Not that single malt to be sipped and savored.

Nor a tonic, a tease, or my raison d’être.

Nor a bet

with the Devil, a bone for the dog, a prayer

for peace, or my Für Elise.

Not something to send in a bottle in the vain hope

that over the space of its journey through the ocean of oblivion

it might just manage to catch the eye

of the girl with the flaxen hair

who will roll it out under the soft light of her desk lamp

to savor this hymn to hush the night.

No.

It’s just a poem.

Tips For Budding Poets: No. 7

Don’t expect your readers to reach out to you.

Offer your poems as gifts to the world.

Release them to the wind or sea.

Tie them to the legs of storks, greasy barstools,

or vintage clawfoot lamps.

Wedge them under moss-swathed boulders

in Japanese gardens, or let the tides

slide your syntax over seaweed and sun-kissed sand.

Try singing them softly to sympathetic birds,

who will spread your message to distant lands.

Affix them to cold white walls in corporate

boardrooms, or to ceilings of cemetery columbaria.

Hang your tropes and strophes from disco balls

and chandeliers in has-been hotel halls.

If you can slide a sestina through the eye of a needle,

or into the hands of the poor, you are up to gifting

a ghazal to lodging-home-carpet-cleaning staff.

Softly, without pushing, offer your chapbook

to taxi drivers, clowns, and radiologists, or even—

if you are feeling sneaky—

slip a sonnet into the back pocket of a tourist

you have tailed in an airport terminal,

or a masquerade.

The Terrorist's Hair

For Renee Nicole Good (1988-2026)

Look for clues in the catchlight

of the cornea, and in the eyebrows’

angle of inclination. The shape of the nose

is a giveaway: concave, straight, aquiline,

snub, narrow, thin. Yea, in the shade

of her lipstick shall she be judged.

Forensic analysis of the bullets’ angles of inclination,

revealing defensive intent, must nudge

the jury right. Examine well the cheeks, the chin,

the wicked dimples, the malevolent earlobe

pierced with a gift from a same-sex loved one—

for all will be taken from her

into consideration. The terrorist’s hair

tends to fall to the radical left when it billows

over the bared shoulders of women wearing

blood-red strapless dresses.

Assay the violent, militant waves of unrest,

the way the stray strands flicker

in the wind.

Birds

for Nancy

When they hop over to us

to peck the breadcrumbs from our palms

cocking their heads in quicksilver flicks,

their poker-faced gaze seems to be hiding

something we can’t quite catch,

some secret message or apology—

that stolen fig perhaps?

Birds don’t mull over minutiae

but burst into life, full throttle, in crisp flutters

of compulsion. Inhabiting much thinner slivers of time

than us, they have a knack for the deft attack

and lunge at their prey in staccato

snaps our cameras are too slow to catch.

Like poets, birds are happiest

channeling signals from the wind and sea.

They peck our garden beds for seeds and grubs

as we mine our brains for similes.

Being culminations of a distant age,

birds hold their heads at a sage-like angle

when staring out at us

from mist-veiled copse and thicket.

Few birds are reliable.

They flit in and out of our lives like promises

made in the heat of the moment.

Some are soft-hearted.

Others seem like the ghosts of forgotten lovers

when they inch up our shoulders

to nip at our earlobes.

A Bouquet of Roses

for Ken Autrey

I started out in Iqaluit, a treeless, windswept,

icebound hamlet on Baffin Island,

two thousand miles from the nearest dancehall, unless

you were up for a frame drum, bone whistle,

seed rattle jig at the mission with the locals.

My earliest memory is braving the insertion of my hand

into the mouth of a splayed bear to graze

the edges of its two canine teeth against my wrist,

while returning the cold, hard stare from its black marble eyes.

Mom whispered the words of the overlords into the ears

of the Inuit children.

Dad sipped his scotch and blew smoke rings

into the lung-stinging chill.

Six years later there was laughter, hugs, broken dishes, and slaps,

and a bouquet of roses after two days and four knocks on the door.

He dragged us through three provinces,

ten house renovations, and a farm, before slipping off to Africa,

leaving his good wife in a field at four a.m. with her hand

crammed into a uterus, searching for a stubborn lamb leg.

I moved to Japan and taught nursery rhymes to children

in Kyoto and Western music to graduate students

in Hiroshima, focusing on the war

between Schoenberg and Stravinsky,

how they ended up living within shouting distance in L.A.,

without ever reconciling—enthralling nuggets of history

my room of sleeping students had no interest in.

I didn’t marry the woman of my dreams, thank God,

as we know how those fairy tales end.

My good wife is as happy in her lab hunting heparin bonds

as she is kneeling in this garden prodding the soil

with ten-inch chopsticks to break the will

of last year’s mint roots.

O Canada, I would hand you that bouquet of roses

if I knew you’d take me back.

I still love you—but not enough to leave

this legend-laced, Zen-drenched island

that has yet to set me down from the three and a half inches

I float over the ground.

Beyond Words

I think we think in words,

even if we’re trying not to think

of anything in particular.

Take the beauty of that sunset, for example.

It was not ineffable. It was dandelion-gold

at the center, and dying-ember red at the edges,

with a sticky aftertaste of the peppermint

humbugs your grandfather used to curl into your palm

with a wink in a waft of Cavendish.

Or just try to imagine that first Christmas wish,

the tippled edge of a toppled

mossy gravestone,

the payload a puttering towboat pulls into oblivion,

or even the fake-cream-clotted, sponge-torn

jagged edge of a half-eaten Twinkie

without the aid of words.

Even birds, I bet, have word-like chirps

to express the unflutterable.

When I try to imagine the world beyond words

(or chirps), all I can conjure is pablum

and water bears, those boneless creatures

inhabiting our ocean at impossible depths,

ever edging forward in pressures

that words could never fathom,

let alone withstand.

I Want This Poem to Sound Like Andy Warhol's Shoes

Cute as a pie crust.

Lazy as these pens I can’t throw away.

As light as this day

hiding from night

Quick as a bell.

Shy as a hallmark hug.

As supple and smug as this earlobe I tug.

I want this poem to sound like Andy’s Warhol’s shoes.

Soft as a star.

Quiet as a buttonhole.

Gay as her pink cloud of candy floss fluttering

in the breeze.

Burial

Thirty-six swipes

to turn off the alerts.

Thirteen minutes to delete the apps.

Forty-seven stabs at the ground

to dig the hole.

Twenty-three hefts and stomps

to pack and tamp the soil.

Five hours of battery life.

Three hundred and twenty-three

unanswered calls.

Ode to My Post-its

There must be over ten thousand of them now

jutting from the backs of my books,

each colored flag vying for reinspection.

The one hundred and four that adorn the fore-edge

of The Essential Neruda are performing magic today

like Seuret’s dots morphing into wisps of cloud cover

at Port-en-Bessin. I run my fingers over the prickly

plastic tufts to test their tenacity, each still stuck

to those words I have yet to revisit.

Left to the whims of others after my death

I worry you will wither and fall from your leaves,

your glue turned to dust, your colors faded.

Oh, that my grandchildren tasked with the job

of pulling you out might pause to ponder my obsessions,

perhaps even work together to lick the riddle

of the color coding – red for a slant rhyme, green

for spondees, yellow for anaphora, blue

for amphibrachs.

Ball

He knows what it is from watching others.

Knows it can be rolled, caught,

thrown into the sea.

But he hasn’t yet learned how to curl

his tongue behind his teeth to sound the long ls,

doesn’t yet know the feel of their soft buzzing in his throat

and ribcage. I want to teach him the word.

Watch his mouth mimic mine, and through repetition

lay his claim on it.

Or shall I let him live a little longer

in this precious period of namelessness?

Maybe it’s enough to let him run his hands over its wetness,

enough to toss it in the air to test its weight, the heft of its return.

The simple pleasure of that single act of faith.

A comfort in that losing and regaining.

A comfort in that only.

Trailblaziing

I slowly traced the great network of interlacing trails

You made with your hands through the sand

On your knees in the park

Your last kingdom

This raw play of imagination

Moving your body through endless space

Now that the screens have claimed your attention

I miss cleaning the dirt from your knees

Smelling the fresh grass stains

And wonder what is lost in this forging of new trails

Through vast electronic fields

With you, immobile, staring into flat space

I've heard the cyber prophets say

Bodily play is falling away

With ever more to explore far from where we are

I’ll remember your face, utterly absorbed

Fulfilling innate earthly desire

Trailblazing

My garden creatures

hobble

tipsy towards heat ripened fruit

to copulate.

Their limber legged couplings

at dusk

dazzle the children

who arrogate

dominion over this compost kingdom

like little Roman emperors,

decreeing to each and every bug

its pleasure,

its fate.

Watching Them Wander

Today I’ll write

for the pleasure of gazing

at the jagged shoreline

of my words

zigzag wanderings.

Just today I’ll silence the censor

and let them race through my stanzas

pulling their flimsy kites

of meaning.

Some will saunter round my commas.

Some will soften my full stops.

One might call a colon to task

or pull from her pocket

a Dickinson dash.

Today I’ll let my lovely adjectives

rouge their cheeks

and spot their breasts with L’Eau Sézane

to snag my stolid nouns.

Home

How nice of you to come today, anyways

You must be busy with the kids

Just put it over there

Next to the flowers from Jenny

You must be busy with the kids

Yes, I think I still have some

Next to the flowers from Jenny

No, I’ve no need of that anymore

Yes, I think I still have some

Oh look! you can see the little bird from here

No, I’ve no need of that anymore

Did the kids pass their exams?

Oh look! you can see the little bird from here

They raise the blinds at 8:00

Did the kids pass their exams?

It’s Jen and David, right?

They raise the blinds at 8:00

I can see the children playing in the park

It’s Dave and Jenny, right?

When can I go home?

I can see the children playing in the park

Cindy here takes good care of me