Benjamin L. Belcher's Poetry and Prose

wrong eyes

2011-02-12T00:34:00.002+09:00

she's looking at me upside down
the wrong eyes dancing on a fluttering scarf
follow the cotton skull-patch on your temple
to black shades paper thin and wonder

what lies beneath
what's yours is yours but
what are you hiding
making it seem so worthwhile
I want what I can't have until
it is mystery no more

green on reddish raddish face
slide shoes no snow boots in a smooth blue swoon,
sailing silently along the sniggering sidewalks
I like this, life like a tattered clipbook.

Come here.
your face is a cherry tomato
(give it)
Now I'd like to take you home with me.

Look at her go

2010-09-02T00:13:00.000+09:00

It must be nice
center of everything
catching eyes like never before

I should know
but I don't embrace them
you embrace them

what's that all about?
what drives you, and what do we mean
in a slowdrag lowride anti-gravity moment
I see beauty flourish, forests wither and planets supernova

the beauty in ambiguity
the craven attention
you're 25 years overdue and so am I.

So drink up, soak it all in
hang the reservations on a hook at home
that once was home
if you ever call home again

naa,
me neither.
Now do that special dance you do so well.

suburban snowglobe

2010-04-11T23:14:00.002+09:00

I crossed a barrier when I left home
the world looked so different from inside
that suburban snowglobe of a town

I won't try and say I'm from somewhere
cold or hard or mean or dirty
I lived in nice houses and knew little else

Now I've seen the homeless sleeping
on trains while I come home, nails
long as cockroaches and filthy rags
and cardboard house their lives.

I've seen the countless families
with daughters held on father's shoulders
mothers with babies in their bicycles
and children with dyed hair looking to rebel
the elderly gaping in curious terror

Mountainscapes and skyscrapers
landfall and rising tides
cheaper lives, rising fuel prices;
to live (or die) in this city is to be
stuck blindly in the eye of globalization's
viscous spinning writhing whirlpool

I think back to the 23.7 percent of myself
I was 10 years ago, and I realize that
To leave home's naïve, happy bubble
was to shatter the snowglobe indubitably

and like a futile play at reassembling
gummy glass and confetti water
it will never look the same again -
its best left tossed and half-forgotten
in ink-black oceans of memory
and the shouldering supports of my
identity
.
.
.
yet as always beneath the surface
the past creeps and broods
as if to tell me:
"there was a life before Tokyo"
though as the days go by
I feel less like I was
and more like I am.

An abridged list

2010-02-25T12:43:00.001+09:00

I know a girl who wears a baby doll's head on a necklace

I know a girl who is freaked out by the oil in organic peanut butter

I know a girl who loved star trek more than she loved me

I know a girl whose father committed suicide when she was still a child

I know a girl who is legitimately comparable to a Succubus (in how she treated all of us)

I know a girl who lies about everything but people seem to like her anyway

I know a girl who is smarmy and entertaining, but she always puts up a wall

I know a girl who is half my size with 10 times the business sense

I know a girl whose Mom got upset if she found her deck of Tarot cards

I know a girl who had her face next to a lover's phallus as her cellphone wallpaper

I know a girl who swims through books and dreams in essays

I know a girl who doesn't take shit from anyone (talking and dressing like a tomboy)

I know a girl who burps in public and considers macaroni and cheese her specialty

I know a few girls with children, they seem rather happy

I've known a lot of girls, but what I don't know about them is infinitely trumped
by the pieces of themselves they revealed to me. Thank you for those, they've been
insightful.

Someday you'll grow old

2010-02-25T12:34:00.003+09:00

I can see it in your eyes
your skin
the wrinkles waiting in the wings
hiding beneath the fallacy of eternal youth
waiting to burst
to spring forth
to rupture and meld
you anew

The way you talk and
the way I talk and
the way we all lose a little more each day
new cells every 7 years?
Does time really go by faster, the older you get?
How much do hemroids hurt, really?
And are all thoughts of retirement an exercise in futility?

I felt like I've been old my whole life
so it's all well and good for me
Poe wrote of conquering worms
I think he was onto something
"Live and let die"
as if we had a choice in the matter
I say try to stay live
because that I'm built to do.

a beautiful day

2010-02-03T00:22:00.002+09:00

the chunks of white snow melting on trees
never thought they could be so alluring this time of year
shining sun and ugly people
but the world keeps spinning
miracles keep happening and
babies keep popping out of holes every which way

an inch of white froth on the flowers
the grandiose and the dead
little notes written in disappearing cement trails
a 2-foot snowman complete with bottlecaps and a toothbrush

I'm only living
another beautiful day in paradise
reminding myself they aren't all out to get me
only most of them
or
only most of me

brooms used in lieu of proper plastic scrapers
I didn't even think these people owned shovels!
What a world
What a time to be alive
What a waste that comes of it all
What the hell guys
Did we really sign on for this?

But the spinning never stops
not until my posthumous 3 billionth birthday
when the sun turns into a red dwarf
Bitchin
I want to see that

but until then I'm living it up
watching it fall down from the branches
glimmer and splash
and I think to myself
what a serendipitiously existential yet mundane life

If money is like sex

2010-02-03T00:17:00.003+09:00

and it seems more important when you don't have it
then I want to know it just once
to have both
world at my fingertips

people said I have it going for me
everything my way
oysters and nirvana
I don't see through a miasma
a self-induced froth of miasma
a ripe ring of miasma
the sick pulsating miasma
following me since I was

I could become the president
cure cancer
save the whales
save the planet
invent perpetual motion
stop time
travel through it
fly
eat eggs and shit gold
create

and still I'd never be satisfied
the glowing miasma screen
my own goddamn humanity
there's no goal to achieve nothing but
dirt and all the time in the world
to decompose

"Human Accident"

2010-01-23T18:20:00.001+09:00

A human accident is what they
call it. 9 times out of 10,
a human tragedy. Secular martyrdom:
the 8th leading cause of death in the country.

Shedding skins, suitcase smashed to pulp,
orange blossom fissure;
something to scarlet to stained glass. A way
to move on while hampering
countless strangers and their plans.
Lunch dates unmet due to train tracks
fused together with cartilage,
muscle, leather and bone.

Return

2010-01-23T18:19:00.000+09:00

What I felt when I
stepped off that plane
was like a wave of cold water,
splashing sand-encrusted cement.

The first of many.

Booming voice, different colors, S'barros, open spaces, different money, bigger cars fatter hips baggy clothes doordiemeandI

Swarms of the other
enveloped my belly
seasickness of the mind
cold pang of recognition

welcome home.

I've taught

2010-01-19T13:08:00.002+09:00

teachers and businessmen and
children and old men and young men
and beautiful young ladies and rotten old cadavers
and young things still looking to crawl back into the womb.

I've taught
engineers and astrophysicists and
biotechnicians and professional runners
and singers and dancers and karaoke professionals
and artists and the artless and college students and the jobless.

I've taught
haughty geniuses and kind souls
part-time snowboarders and full-time drinkers
nervous cases and anorexics and obsessives and those
altogether disconnected with the outside world.

I've taught
the sleepless, the sleepy, and the dead asleep
the people bound for Brazil and Italy and Guam
Mothers and daughters and flower-shop owners
taxmen and saleswomen
deskclerks and flight attendants
housewives and gamblers
scientists and hostesses
winners and losers
kappa and cthulu,
and each one takes a chip, chip, chip.