Full Stop and Flower.

So, I wrote this book.

It's called Full Stop and Flower. If you read it you'll find out why. It's a bunch of poems, most of them pretty recent, that I collected and rearranged and drawed some drawings about, and the drawings are also in the book.

Copies are just over 30 pages, and I'm selling them for $5 each. If you want one please let me know! You can contact me at jessemburke@gmail.com. The release party is this Friday the 13th, and afterwards I will be sending out a bunch in the mail to whoever ordered them.

Thanks for your support!



Also, I'm pretty sure this blog is dead or dying. So you can consider this my last post.

fiddlehead

i slept among the ferns that night
my head growing heavy with
their sad healing wisdom.
there was a fat fly who followed me
all day making fat noises in the sun.
that morning i had eaten a small
handful of blueberries --- wild ones
from the side of the road,
growing out through the wooden
fence slats. my hair once got tangled
in a thorn bush and it took no small
amount of pain to free myself.
i thought of the fly and i wished
it would fall, wished it would be still.
i slept among the ferns that night.
the grass crept under my naked ankles.
i tried not to think of hobgoblins
and gleaming and dark dark wings.
i dug my fingers into the roots
and slept there. i was born in a hospital
not so long ago, grew up in rooms and cold streets
fell in love lying on concrete with a bloody mouth
woke up every day looking at the wall,
the wall, the cracks and dimples in my boneless wall,
and it took no small amount of pain
to free myself.

is it my birthday yet

your hands make bitter coffee taste on my face
drawing black spiral lines and i shake
you shake invisibly divisibles and
your mouth is an open grave.
hello what are you saying
i can’t hear you over all this noise,
please repeat yourself and stand on your head
we will all be very much amused yes please
your mouth is spilling coffee onto me
and i cry.
your hands are dripping motor oil
we’re all asleep and you’re screeching
to yourself in the corner like some strange owl
from Europe or Paris, aren’t those the same thing?
i spent a whole day looking for you
you were hiding in the hiding place
that’s where i slept last night
there in the hiding place
pulled the blanket over my head
and sang it sweet
like summer drinks
and summer love
and all the things you know how to forget
i forget how to forget
i remember everything
i remember
one day
i rode my bike
across the bridge
and up,
up,
and all these aliens were singing alien blues
in all my ears and i heard them
and again i cried, i cried again
and you were somewhere feeling sorry
and i felt sorry
your mouth is an open grave.

i have taken off my shoes
to relieve me of this infernal heat
emanating from my pores and my forehead
especially my forehead
glad something’s cooking up there at least.
my feet smell of cheese,
now my hands smell of cheese as well.
poetry is not worth a thing.
you can’t put a price on it,
poetry is a dead cat,
gotta be a no-one.
i apologize if you are reading
i apologize if you are writing
we regret to inform you
that the jive will not subside.
poetry is an old church and we’re walking
inside and looking around, not sure what’s
it all for but looks nice, yessir looks nice allright.

tomorrow i will see you and coffee will be on the walls
and you will see me and the whole sad sorry mess will
start over again like listening to the radio, start it up
again this is the only one we’ve got.
tinny and confused.
that’s summer for you. breathe it all in while you can,
breathe it all in before you breathe it all out.
nobody ever said this wouldn’t be easy.
was that some kind of joke?
no it wasn’t i’m serious now hey now

they wrapped him in a death shroud
and stood him over his grave
and he waited
and he waited
and then they let him go.
----tell me, how does one
adjust to society after such a quote
traumatic unquote experience, period.

Fyodor i don’t know much but i know you know
and that’s something. well? isn’t it? isn’t what? isn't that.
bohemian. kafkaesque. orwellian. subjective right
of individual schizophrenia societal dues pay 'em up
here come the dogs boy you best watch your back

this poem is too long
your nose is too long
trim it just a bit here n there
not important just cosmetic
get ya the ladies an whatnot
as if once you get em and have em
then that's it - it's all done forever and ever
no more words come out just having and having
and having and letting go.

let me say to you i have sat upon the cold bleachers
in the night and i know the signs of fire and i have seen
the birds dead and buried and i know what it is
to walk for five six seven hours without sleep and
without a clue and i know i know
and there's no need
to explain it all
it's just there
and you're just
there and
your mouth is an open grave.

Four Short Poems / The Same Poem Four Times

On the other hand it's the ghost that haunts you.

Dead things choose us and do not let go.

A man without a parcel is no enigma.

Best to have libraries, whole caravans of

catalogued bodies following you down the mountain.

"Baggage," they say, as if it can be neatly untucked

and sealed away in motel closets.

--

In the photograph your shoulder is whole, immaculate,

glacial as your eventual eyes, hidden as a smile.

My heart has a heart has a heart.

All things, unless anchored, that is to say

tied down, will drift away.

--

If a dead bird is enough to make me forget,

a live one is enough to bring it back.

--

I would have remembered you just before

opening my lungs to let the water in--remembered you

scattering my one-eyed visions. I would have compared

dying to dying while dying. Instead I stood up straight

and puked four times. For you, I thought as the river

pulled it all, swirling, away.

at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
i do not remember your voice any more.
i remember the sound of it, warm honeyed against
my eyes, the facts of its meaning. i hear pounding
in the basement and howling at the windows,
and i daily walk through lakes. clouds clamp down
over my head. i spend all my time pulling
hairs from the wall. i do not remember your
fingers, only their thickness, and the drumming
hallucinations they danced. i do not remember
anything but waking up this morning: dry-cracked
and empty, listening, curled around some new
ruby thought whose hands waste no memory.
all my notebooks are empty, all my pockets full.
i spend all my time writing harmonies on dollar
bills. i'd rather smell tea than do anything about it.
at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
a cloud crawls through me and i am happy.

apple for the carrot child

Ill; discomfortable. Waking up to aches and maladies. Eating like dirt, like hair and teeth. Force it down your throat: swallow quiver repeat.

The only music is like ice thrown to the ground. The only intimacy is distance. Paradox, mystery--call it what you will. The bell still rings. One day you will grow into your body and you will find it stuck to you and you will look around and say The world is here look at this How sane How beautiful and difficult and Therefore True. Sometimes what you imagine is not true and then you don't find it anywhere and Sometimes what you imagine is true and then it's as if We Are All Here. You can find your place.

Some days all you can want is the rain. Never forget, if you can help it. Memory is the key to the city, the apple for the carrot child. Sunrise is a kiss after twelve years in prison.

Never forget, if you can help it. You may climb a tree and call to the field. You may think of a thousand honeyed fingers. You may follow the vines to their dewy Maypole ends. You may stick and swear and bleed out into the soil to pass yourself along, tag you're it, retching truth like a crushed lung. You may; but if you forget you lose your photograph hands. If you forget you become a breathless carbon-chain leaf left loosely in blueberry fennel: empty flavor. Never meant to be tasted.

Remember bread: fingers spread. As though it could be solved.

unresolve (hung time)

Lord deliver us from the Unholy Self of mind
that plagues our waking with destruction distraction
pull us free from our mountains of fire where we dwell in misery pride
send us truly love and absorption and the light & fire
in everywhere that we may alight as candles
trip through life steadily burning.
how green is my eyes and all therein!
clean us! clean us! to be marvel creatures
who gape & cry at all insects blades of grass
fruit on the vine bones and cloudy days.
tear away the dead flesh the dead mind the wither spirit
and make us as water bleeding into all creation
joining in beads and pools to make Known.

full stop and flower at the glory and wonder of the dirty concrete city
which is allowed to stand in its time and does not burn.
the Lord is grace! love is do, and all strings must be cut.
words are not answers and not life. words are hunger,
a voice crying out in the street (in the desert) music in corners and
the foot-stomp on wood in sweaty rooms.
the world is a question mark and we blots of ink
may crawl and claw and never answer but with our hands.

night visions (sorry this is forever)

My stories never end. They ramble on, tangles of loose threads, half-faded transitions to subplots that lie under a main plotline that does not exist.

More than anything else I want to write stories about goldfish. There is something entirely beautiful and neverending in the worst pet you'll ever have, the most boring, bred in massive quantities and sold for quarters in dingy pet shops worldwide. Given away at carnivals, if you're lucky. A prize, not instead-of-a-dog. I wonder what they think. Their short-term memory span, says science, is three seconds. They live in homes with invisible walls that turn everything humans say into incomprehensible murmuring. Mmmmwmmwwm. Mwmmm mnwwnmmm.

You know you've got to treat it well. You can't just let things go to waste. You've got to find some purpose for them, a direction. Otherwise they lie still and grow stale and stagnant and stupid. Drugs. What about them.

Clean your room, you'll feel better. Make up code words with your friends and wink at them, especially if they're pretty. Who knows, maybe one of them will help you forget. Is that our purpose? To forget? Forgive and forget, or do neither. Your call. 9 p.m. on the telephone, parents at dinner. Your hands are notebooks until you wash them. If you wash them. Goblins.

I wonder if goldfish hear music. If the water sings them to sleep and to rise, sings them happy and sad and forgetting in three seconds, sings them they are special, they are mass-produced because they are so very precious, the universe would die without them. I wonder if the water sings them look at that shiny coin traded just for you. Look at your home but don't touch. You'll get it all wet. Oh, no.

When I put in my headphones I am a goldfish. Everyone can talk all they want, I'm not there. I'm twenty-five cents of pure gold scale and a tiny heart going bump bump bump all day giving blood to my tiny invisible fins. Look at my eyes. These are eyes. Day and night my heart goes. Do your shiny cars go that long? Do your shiny quarters? I am the moon! Watch me, look at my eyes. Blup. Blup.

Bring her around, talk to her some, watch her eyes, look at her eyes. Window to the soul, if you're a window shopper. If that's your thing. It happens to be my thing.

Bring her around. It's just a transition, just a half-faded movie frame. Pass the popcorn. Here's where the hero discovers heartbreak, or goldfish. I can't remember. It's the same old Hollywood formula, I can't remember. There's a car chase later.

Did you know I'm writing a novel? It starts like this: "My stories never end." I think it'll be a hit. I think it'll be America. I think it'll describe the human condition. Yes, hello Doctor I have the human condition. We have just the thing for that. Did you know I'm writing a screenplay?

Hey, it's easy. You don't have to have heartbreak, you don't have to regret. We are all writing our own stories. We are the authors here. We hold the mighty pen, the mighty keyboard, the mighty voice transcription program. I am writing a novel by talking out loud and hoping there's a biographer present. I am writing three novels. They are about the same things and have the same storyline, but I'm hoping to achieve something here. Watch it, buddy.

Just take it easy. Relax, have a couch, have a drink, have a crystal. Nobody's listening. You can tell me, buddy. You can tell me, I'm your biographer. Let's just have a smoke about it. Your brain's not important; turn it off. Just talk. Tell me everything, beginning with the part where you're a kid. Begin at the beginning, I always say in a soothing tone. Open up tell me everything let's just talk okay alright let's talk until you're satisfied then we can wake up and not do anything it would hurt to try and would take up your valuable time after all you're important.

Far far away goldfish. The one thing many writers discover about writing is that if you try to control your characters you end up with bad writing. It's almost as if the characters are real people. And yet the characters aren't in control of the story either. Who then? Goldfish have a remarkable amount of visual acuity, and can distinguish between different human beings. Some blind goldfish can identify specific humans by their voices. The actual memory span of a goldfish, contrary to the popular myth that it is only three seconds, is up to three months. Goldfish are very pretty and are good for stories.

I never want to stop writing. While writing Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard would sometimes lock herself in her room and write for fifteen hours of the day. There is sweat and blood in writing done well. I want that sweat, and I want that blood with all my blood.

The empty fields sing empty songs in the winter. The villagers tell tales of the corn and the wheat, of the cicadas and the Japanese beetles. The scarecrow croaks stories to Brother Crow, who is skeptical. His eye glitters. He takes to the wind and watches the emptiness of the earth. Lie fallow. Brother Crow lives in a copse. Brother Crow lives on sweat and blood. His is the claw, his is the cloak.

The scarecrow is haunted by ghosts. Ghosts of sweat and blood and love and tears and snowboots and hands shaking. The scarecrow's head is a goldfish bowl. He sings to the world: take it all away take it away take this take it all away.

Good luck in the dark, good luck good luck, find a golden penny, call it your own. North American Twentieth Century Ghost Story. Write your own. Let your own write itself. Happy endings never solved a thing. Happy endings never solved a mystery. Let the canaries perch on your head and never shake them away. Maybe they'll sing to you once in awhile. Maybe they'll sing some more after that.

now you see me...

there's a coin in your pocket that dances alone
ascending the staircase to fair Babel's throne
among the thistles and briar they've grown
to keep out the God Overthrown

there's a coin in your hand with the man in the moon
hunting the Whale with a lecture harpoon
while the Wolf licks his teeth and his eyes like balloons
the sun has gone down too soon

heads or tails till you lose your voice
heads or tails, there is no third choice

there's a coin in the air with bloodthirsty grin
waiting for Boy No. 12 to begin
a third-rate investor sheds his second skin
allows his facade to wear thin

there's a coin on the floor that whispers a tale
of a neverending Sleeper, her dreams to impale
upon the grey matchsticks of yesterday's mail
her windows all turning to shale

heads or tails till you murder your brother
heads or tails, it's one or the other

heads or tails, the stairs to descend
heads or tails, you win again.

we could have been beautiful nightbirds
biting deep into clouds.
we could have been a thousand lit torches
to celebrate The End.
we could have been porcupine quills,
a fragile forest, minor chords,
the shed out back, moon on the water,
every moment of clarity distilled
and bottled, rock rising from sand
dunes in the grim afternoon light,
a red door and a blue door,
silence after words, candles in hand,
breathing leaves and rain, shoe
polish under our eyes and the happy
ground beneath our feet.
we could have been children again.

in my dream you are where i remember you
and you are smiling and i wake up and the
morning is angry.

Advice

don't tell anyone.
not even yourself.
keep it locked up
like all that matters.
look away, always
always look away.

don't let it get to you
so much. think about
something else.
then, when it happens,
when time runs out,
you can slip away easily.

you can walk into a new life
like a cold empty room
and never notice that
she's not there.

reunion

I am thirsty. The trees wave against the wind
in protest. We wait by the river for the unknown.
If we sit in silence long enough, dropping twigs into
the moving thought of water, the final mystery of the
universe will unfold and calculate into us, invading our blood
like the green ghost of absinthe down your ear. Our skin
is pressed flat against the sun like a brother's hand
on a daughter's shoulder. We wait by the river
for sleep to take us into the quiet forest.

She does not come!
She will not come.
Not for us.

You catch a flickering secret and put it in my hand,
the gold-filament wings and blue-glass eyes.
I hold its weight in my palm, brush a finger against
the burnished red exoskeleton, and let it go.
It could not last away from the river.
The leaves crackle and I imagine a fire.

suburban bonfire blues

Milk-sweet regrets melting from your lips and
pooling quiet on the hardwood floor
form a window or a mirror, dark and honest,
a blemish we choose not to notice.
Your mind moves slow and burning
like a summer afternoon
with the easy harmony of windchimes
and the disquiet of a solitary cloud
on the horizon. You are written plainly
on a piece of paper and posted
for all to see. We look away.
We are on an island or in a tower
and far away from everything.
Your words are a flock of finches
and we watch cracks in the sidewalk.

Fingers climb the walls searching for corners
and brushing lightly over the titles of books.
Trees shoot up, growing roots around
your jaw or throat, your eyes
are a pond. We skip rocks.

When all of us gather, there is
talking and laughing and nobody
wants to leave. Sometime after dark,
you sit down and begin to play music.
It's all I can hear.
A tiny wooden boat with a red sail
floating over still grey waters.

overkill

The music punches into you like a blunt axe
swinging through the bite of winter. You buckle,
grasping quiet to find your flesh. [Am I here? Am I a ghost?]
Bodies floating and drifting in the dead blue chemical sea.
You want to go back to before you were born,
when there was nothing, no breathing, no fairy tales.
You can't go back. Nothing is a relative term.

The grass crawls in between your fingers. Stronger
and slower than your test-tube skin. Unwind
like rope down a well, dark forever. What time is it?
You know the answer, but it is not an answer.
It melts in candlelight, but is as solid as hunger.
If you can fall asleep, you can disappear into whatever
is holding you up, be it earth or blood or death.
What time is it? You swallow once,
and your eyes shift like a code.

Can you swallow them? The eyes?
The eyes, the eyes in a jar, swirling and
tumbling against something invisible,
can you swallow them? They slide
gently, you feel them, quivering bent orbs
and then dissolving dark blue, searching out the
corners and hiding-places of your body, until
your skin is bleeding cold cerulean eyeball music,
and you can do nothing but cough.

It is strange and wrong, coughing, like smashing
yourself on a plank of dark shining wood. Dirty
clouds hanging limp on your forehead, the blue
of your eyes is dull. It no longer pierces,
is no longer a weapon. You are not useful,
but at least you cannot be used.
At least you can lie down.

sy.zy.gy.

you open my front door,
enter through my teeth.
find yourself a soft corner of lung
to sleep in.
within the alveolus
you dream,
and dream.

you're building a
ribcage printing press,
my little gutenberg.
take the elevator spine to
brain my and scratch,
you scratch words.

thou art art, thinks me,
and oxygen flow.
i breathe, you stretch,
we all go shiver delight.
i steal water from
rain-puddles for
us to drink.
you ear
inner are.

spider-filaments
of luck like sun-
flight through my
(your) veins.
are we so much
one that we grow
into one
another?

three-fourteen

it is my first day
on the planet,
though i am
fully grown.
everything is
strange and wide-angle.
the finches spin nests
from my hair (stranded)
and my twining fingers.
how they grow!
like history!
melting in pockets!
chalk-light.

i fear i do not
understand the grasses
and their confessions
of thirst.
the morning dew
travels to the edges
of the atmosphere
and back
before my eyes.
(yet after my exclamations.)

the next-door is blue,
airy and free.
crisp like October morning.
gray like November mourning.
i perch on a nearby blooming stump
and absorb the rain:
electric-eel rain
that cracks my
prose-colored glasses.
i remove them,
and all blurs
accordingly.

a passing owl strikes
three-fourteen
and twelve assorted spices.
my focus shifts from none
to all, and the colors
crash through me
vivid
and
white.

you dislodge yourself
from my eye,
quietly.

excerpt: the manifesto

if there is one thing i should
never be allowed to do,
it is Speak.
for when i speak,
i enjoy it too much.
i let the words melt around my
tongue like caramel sweets and
i throw down the cellophane,
singing "take that, Mother Earth!"
i savor the words in my mouth
like love letters in my coat pocket,
dissolving into Sound and ocean.
the words crawl through me as worms,
creepy crawlies wiggling their little legs
all over my tongue and my teeth and up
the back of my throat they come, warriors
charging to their deaths, their last little
writhing deaths under the flaming Eye
of the magnifying glass.


the words spill out:

Forthright.

Audacious.

Curtains.




Elucidate.





Sweden.

Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)

We are hungry here, in our small dark village with the sun watching over us. It is a great fiery bird, soaring over the day.

Ibi, my husband, looks up and says the same bird flies over everybody in the world. All the strange villages far away are watched by the great bird.

I tell him that he is crazy and the pale villages have invented their own birds to fly above them, and poisons to stop the plants from growing. But when I talk about the pale villages, Ibi looks away like he is looking at mountains or clouds, and he smiles and talks crazy.

"Someday, Ibina," he says, "we will go to a big pale place and learn about pavement and we will not be hungry."

He calls me Ibina when he is like that. I think Ibi dreams of pavement.

I tell him he is a crazy little boy, and he talks too loud, and he should not waste all his time with the strange Dr. Johnson, building their cloud-metal bird.

But he smiles, and I am not so angry. I don't even mind that he calls me Ibina. I know he only wants a better day for us tomorrow.

looseleaf

my old coat is getting worn at the
elbows from thinking too hard, and
getting in one too many fights for
pride and all sorts of things you
forgive me for, because that's
what you do.

and you know when you're gone
i dream of hotels where you lie
surrounded by black and white
television and dream of a boy for whom
goodbye was too good a word and there
we sleep, eaten alive by napkins and
monsters under the bed but we don't
mind much for they have very comfortable
stomachs and really the daylight was
a hindrance anyways.

i love you paper airplanes, and
you love me a mermaid's silver nose
and really that's all that matters
to either of us, but i think you have
too many hearts in your collection
and we'd better make sure you're not
holding on too long.

so i'll meet you in the field at dawn,
we'll take color photographs and wish
we lived in a charming black and white
mansion that doubled as a hotel, and
i'll play the guitar and howl a bit,
saying "fare thee well" and writing
you postcards that are described by
the historians as surreal and esoteric,
but you know exactly what i'm saying
and wouldn't care if you didn't, because
postcards always remind you of back home
and the way poetry can be like a smell:
it sends you colors and stories and
shivers up your spine, but you don't
always know what it means; it's like
a dream where you meet strangers in hotels
and they help you out, just as if you were
in an old movie.

color of how

Sophia,

I will find you among the rushes and watercress; I will dig for you in the clay; I will paint you on brand-new canvas. I will not let go of myself.
I know you don't love me anymore; isn't that the way we all go? There's distance and then there's an empty mailbox and then we stop loving. Then one day we stop breathing and realize that life without loving is like water without wetness. What is that good for? So, I will not stop loving you, no matter how much my eyes crack.
I don't know what I'm saying. And it seems like all I can do is crack. Cracked cracking firecracker crack my eyes open. The color of how to bleed.
If you burn this before reading it, I think I will love you more than ever. Something is not right with me. I feel like a cloud dissolving into the great vast solvent of sky.
Sophia, your name rests in my teeth like so many leaves and I smell you in woodsmoke and you are the space between galaxies. But all my pretty phrases can't make me pretty.
Sophia, if you don't answer this I promise I will die of fulfilled expectations.
I love you, Sophia.

Thomas Street