(Thursday's) National Poetry Month: Counting Sheep

Counting Sheep by Glenn J. Freeman

How strange for me to sing of insomnia; I sleep
like wood or rusted nails in buried coffins. We believe
in free will but listen to astrologers, throw the tarot.
Name. Small events. Birthplace. Faded journals
or the lighter shade of wallpaper
where someone's picture used to hang, stained
with cigarette smoke & dust. There's the sound
of dice on the table next door, 2 AM, the point
I'm always trying to escape, to leave nothing:
no memory of moonlight on the river or breezes
through open windows, of trains squealing
on the tracks below; no weary patina
of ashtrays or sidewalks or
clocks chiming Now! no thunder
announcing its storm. Free of memory or desire,
the slate's blurred by erasures
like a northern evening that lingers far too long
and we sit watching twilight lose itself
to darkness, never knowing
exactly when it's lost.

(Friday's) National Poetry Month: The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

National Poetry Month - Vex Me

Vex Me by Barbara Hamby

Vex me, O Night, your stars stuttering like a stuck jukebox,
put a spell on me, my bones atremble at your tabernacle

of rhythm and blues. Call out your archers, chain me
to a wall, let the stone fortress of my body fall

like a rabid fox before an army of dogs. Rebuke me,
rip out my larynx like a lazy snake and feed it to the voiceless

throng. For I am midnight's girl, scouring unlit streets
like Persephone stalking her swarthy lord. Anoint me

with oil, make me greasy as a fast-food fry. Deliver me
like a pizza to the snapping crack-house hours between

one and four. Build me an ark, fill it with prairie moths,
split-winged fritillaries, blue-bottle flies. Stitch

me a gown of taffeta and quinine, starlight and nightsoil,
and when the clock tocks two, I'll be the belle of the malaria ball.