Sentence Pronounced Upon Trees

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

If trees had feet–being older on Earth than we; having been hewn for bows and arrows, ships and oars, kindling and matches, pulp and fiction, funeral pyres (the irony of which escapes everyone but them); having been whittled to axe handles to chop more trees; having been guarded by wooden fences and watched from wooden window sills; having thus far demonstrated more tolerance than any mammal yet designed and loosed upon the planet (explaining why old tortoises are never killed by falling branches)–if trees had feet–with rooty, knuckley toes and dirty nails (not like the nails that hold up wooden bird houses and Do Not Trespass signs)–if trees had feet, would they leave?

Dec 22, 2013

Your Head Is A Good Place For Your Eyes

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

Every time I write a crooked slice
of my funny sideways life,
I end up flopped on the couch
with all the pink
sucked out of my tender middle.
Maybe that’s how you feel
sometimes
after bouts with the reality
that blood remembers gravity
the more it flows.
We tire easily as we go.

So why should our heads
perch so far from our feet?
Though our brains ride astride
our mouths (on good days),
our respiration
must be fussed over by organs
that might as well be on the moon.
Through the lungs, the heart,
and down the line–
flushed through miles of old pipes–
the oxygen falls into our slippers,
only to bother our gout.

The birthday candles glow bright
as our heads grow light.
There’s barely blood to wake our noses
to smell the burning wicks and
decide the lilies in the vase are real.
That’s how some days seem to me,
though younger than you.
But I digress.
And you can still tell:

the lilies came from a friend’s garden.
You smell vanilla in the cake.
The milk is fresh;
the blanket soft.
More is right and young than wrong.
Your head is stuck where it is because
it’s a good place for your eyes,
which over the window sill
see beauty your slippered feet
might barely feel.

Birds do better than murmur
in the Oklahoma sun,
which rises old but warm.
All the senses can be painted
from your chair,
whether you lift a brush or not.
You do.
So, without regret shall I.

For my friend, Jo Ann Duck Teter

Oct. 28, 2013

Fair Illusions

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

Gavin W Sisk

Today’s trip to the Washington State Fair was fun but incomplete. Without machines from Caterpillar and Case, and nothing from John Deere bigger than a gentleman’s frontloader, the event seemed little more than a suburban thrill ride through a missremembered past. Most of the barbecue was branded by national corporations. Half the prize-winning chickens were provided by just a few 4-H families. Show horses pranced with graffiti and colored sparkles on their rumps. The blacksmith admitted he didn’t know what he was doing (we all had guessed).
It’s an illusion. I ate fish and chips for dinner and a Caesar salad for dessert.

Sept. 22, 2013

Work It

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

During the interview I claimed, “I can learn to do anything.” In a tough job market you don’t dare claim less. Somehow that got twisted into, “I can learn to do everything.” In a tough job market they don’t dare ask less. So now I pretend I move the Earth, and they pretend to believe it.

Gavin W Sisk
Sept. 7, 2013

A Rough Moon

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

I miscalculated the number of people a two person tent can sleep. Turns out it’s just one: that is, one teenaged daughter. A skinny teenaged boy could have fitted along one edge, but I parked close enough to ensure not even a picture of a skinny teenaged boy could sneak into that tent.
I also miscalculated how many halves of a tired dad can sleep comfortably on the bench seat of a compact pickup truck parked in the woods. Turns out it’s just one. Because the top and bottom halves of most dads sleep in one piece everywhere but very severe car accidents, and because bench seats in modern pickup trucks are not really bench-shaped, and because I had difficulty routing the air hose from my CPAP machine around my folded body, I slept badly last night.
But hey, that’s camping. It’s only supposed to be comfortable for the kids.

Aug. 25, 2013

The Game

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

Visiting Hours

Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since yesterday.
Trundled into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; She has an appetite.
Order up!
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to scoop her kibbles from the plastic bin.
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will.

Aug. 13, 2013

When I wrote the above first version of this poem I imitated my daughter’s writing process. I had an experience, recognized its potential, and immediately wrote it down. It should be simple.
This process works well for my daughter partly because I’ve taught her to always swing for the fence. Partly also because I’m careful to stay out of her way, and because there has been less crap in her life to pollute her perceptions. She mostly throws down the right words on her first try. If she makes small mistakes, they shouldn’t matter–proper punctuation is for adults.
I am an adult. Tenderized by middle age, I don’t often swing for the fence. Hell, my life experiences have made the fence all but invisible. Instead of exploring my thoughts, I tend to write what I believe I ought to be thinking, or what I hope will seem to others to be good thinking. So I must approach writing, especially poetry, incrementally. Instead of baseball, I play golf.
Every poem has a par. I tee off with a driver (usually hooked behind a handsome tree) and proceed toward a distant hole in fits and fights against my own mysterious nature. A hole-in-one is theoretically possible but highly improbable. For me, writing is a game of one damned thing after another–of seeing the light but listening for the tick of the bullshit meter. Writing is rewriting. Driver, six iron, wedge, putter—perception, delusion, epiphany, closure (that’s a good hole). What keeps me playing the game is knowing the woods are full of as many flowers as lost balls.
Here is what may be the finished version of the above poem. My daughter warned me against fiddling too much with the original. For me, though, such weightless subjects as cats are opportunities to disregard the bullshit meter. It’s not Eliot, and that’s fine.

Visiting Hour

Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since last night.
Trundle into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; Rosie has an appetite.
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to fumble through the cupboard, shuffling beans
and soup and sauce to finally find the fish flakes,
and bend to scoop her kibbles from the bin.
Order up!
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will.

Aug. 17, 2013

Sixteen Tons

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

I open my laptop.
“Enter PIN”
I type, ****
Apply display profile.
Apply custom mouse settings.
Connect to server.
“Updates available for your computer. Install now?”
I click, ‘Install now’ and wait.
(Install, install, install.)
“You will need to restart your computer to finish the installation process. Restart now?”
I click, ‘Restart now’ and wait.
(Install, install, restart.)
“Enter PIN”
I type, ****
Apply display profile.
Apply custom mouse settings.
Connect to server.
“Other updates available for your computer. Download and install now?”
I click, ‘Download and install’ and wait.
(Download, download, download, install, install, install.)
“You will need to restart your computer to finish the installation process. Restart now?”
I type, “Eat shit and die!”
(Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.)
I grumble and click, ‘Restart now’ and wait.
(Install, install, restart.)
“Enter PIN”
I type, ****
Apply display profile.
Apply custom mouse settings.
Connect to server.
I try to remember why I opened my laptop.
I close my laptop.
I turn on the TV.

Aug 5, 2013

Keep Scatting

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Gavin W Sisk

Keep is Google’s voice transcription app. I’ve been experimenting with it on my smart phone. Very interesting. It gets many things right, like, The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog, and, She sells seashells by the seashore. In general, simple sentences and good diction yield acceptable notes. But going off the beaten path can give unexpected results. When I recited the classic rhyme, Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you, I got the transcription, Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy to kill a baby too wouldn’t you. A little scary.
For fun I tried a short scat phrase, along the lines of, bee-bop ba-boop, which the app transcribed as, give a f*** up pop boob (including the asterisks). A longer scat with different vowels turned into, people in the middle of the police department. One came back as, Billy badly bubble f*** pop; another as, boo boo boo 5853 felt that. And one of my favorites was a short babble that converted to, f*** your fishing trip. The asterisks aren’t here because I’m bashful. They’re what the app actually provides.
Hidden in this nonsense I see a pattern. First, Google wants very much to translate difficult sounds into a certain curse word. Second, it simultaneously tries very hard to censor that word by substituting asterisks. That’s a little f***ed up.

July 29, 2013

Deviations Toward Normal