The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Wed 1/9/2008)

[RetroLounge]

Affliction

I'd love to disgorge it,
the way my cat simply coughs out its hairball
then slinks away, no problem.
When my friend (fearing dentists) had a toothache
he tried to dislodge the offender
with a squared off splinter of wood
inserted into a nail gun. It doesn't surprise me

how far we go.
Like sex, the tension mounts.
I'm usually too grateful, or relieved, afterwards,
to do much of anything,
nothing at all
passing before the plane of my vision
unless it's the sky
littered with various birds and a dry diurnal moon.

The wood, size of a matchstick,
was too soft to do much good.
Still, tears ran out of his eyes afterwards,
making him tremble
with the pleasure of even a failed effort.
I knew things would get worse before they got better.
It was the best I'd felt in months.

David Dodd Lee

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Author of the forthcoming Automatic Thank-You Kisses (Four Way Books, 2009),as well as four other books of poems--Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Wilderness (March Street Press, 2000), and Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 1997). Editor of the anthology SHADE, (versions 2004 & 2006), & poetry editor in the nineties at Third Coast & Passages North. My poems have appeared on Verse Daily, in Nerve, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Jacket, Verse, Conduit, Marlboro Review, Perihelion, POOL, Laurel Review, Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review, Barrow Street,Best of the Net 2006 (Sundress Publications), Caffeine Destiny, Massachusetts Review, Washington Square, Slope, Quarterly West, Many Mountains Moving, Natural Bridge, Sycamore Review, Cutbank, etc. Fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Crowd, Sou'wester, & Controlled Burn. I have completed a book of Ashbery Erasure poems, Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, & two other full-length poetry manuscripts--The Coldest Winter on Earth, & A Small Thing But My Own. Also I'm the publisher of Half Moon Bay chapbooks, including titles by Hugh Seidman & Franz Wright.



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:hi:

RL

[BlueIris]

1. Nice. Retro, you and I

are going to have the Loungers re-upping their anti-depressants by the end of winter, I tell ya.

[RetroLounge]

2. No doubt...

:spray:

:hi:

RL

[BlueIris]

3. You just...you have no idea what I have planned for February/March.

It's...dark.

[RetroLounge]

4. February is a good time for dark poems...

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

5. Ok. you guys.

Was he in fact "the friend"? That was my take on it.

[RetroLounge]

6. Could be whatever you want it to be...

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

7. what a cop out

:eyes:

I laughed like hell.:rofl: Because I took it to mean he had done it to himself.

Dark humor. Bring it on.

Rephrasing the question: What was YOUR take on it?

[RetroLounge]

8. I think he was using it as an example

but not himself...

Poets are never shy about first person confessionals...

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

9. trust me to break that rule.

:D

:hi:

[xchrom]

10. pain in search of pleasure.

[RetroLounge]

11. Yes, but how did you like the poem

:hi:

RL

[xchrom]

12. d'oh!

:hi: i deserved that.

[RetroLounge]

13. And I couldn't resist...

:hi:

RL