Poems Sully Makes Up

My Middle Name was to be Obadiah

2010-04-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

or On signing my name Daniel O. Sullivan

There is a part of my past
I have not absorbed.
The pride is instinctual

like learning a limb.
A part of my past exists
as a phantom behind my shoulders.

It breathes my air,
knows to spell itself
into invisible parts of my name.

It is the spelling out of.
The lack of integer.
An “O” stripped off

my grandfather’s ocean hands,
the rolling hillside of his genealogy.
An “O” ripped from the last part of him

catapulted into a rain cloud—
a maelstrom of industry
flooding the streets of boroughs

pouring into factories,
an Irish whiskey drying
the tongue of New York City.

O’Sullivan, My grandfather’s
name, a defiant lineage.
Ellis Island, a cannibal of vowels.

My name carries the weight
of generations in a middle silence
A huddled mass of promise

extended through my father
out of my open palms--
A Trojan horse hidden in my signature.

I've obviously fallen behind on posting

2010-04-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

but rest assured I am still writing. There will still be a few poems here this month! I promise!

NaPoWriMo Day 3

2010-04-06T10:15:00.000-07:00

NaPoWriMo Day 3 of 30

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
- Leslie Poles Hartley

There is a woman with a laugh like a viking.
She is on the phone. Outside her office,
the one with the windows, the others in their cubicles

can hear because after all, walls are only walls
when they are walls. They listen because she
is a bulldozer in the shape of a smile.

Between a signature and a satellite conference
she leaves the building,
walks ten steps, lights a cigarette,

each one her last. She’d quit if there were time.
Back in her office there is a blinking light,
three new voice mails, two calls on hold, thirteen e-mails.

She answers a question, writes a memo.
One floor down a crisis averted. She bangs her fist
on her desk. They fall silent.

At home she will open a window,
kiss her fiancé, feed the cat, play spider solitaire
and remember the days when it didn’t work.

Happy Birthday Sis.

POEM (after David Trinidad)

2010-04-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

I’m very, today, a radiator dance
Want the banzai covers curling upward
Or that of blow of windows as blanket
Existing in the shut or open lense of afternoon
Do you think I will meet her hands in my sleep? I asked
Days ago, my apartment walls, in the knotty dark
Maybe the upright will wobble as they breathe smoke
From a crack in ceiling paint, they answered who pays fair
To see his mother this preemptive Friday
She’s been working late hours, wants, she says, to stay as young
As when it was. She does.
I was single, I’d say, because mom is a lot to live up to.

The Buss Passes Me on Halsted St

2010-04-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

On a bridge I face Lake Michigan
water flat as vowels on the busy traffic
of tongues and standing between us
are buildings built like blips on a heart

monitor. In front of me a man carries groceries
into the green doors of a project building.
To my right condominiums build themselves
into an empty kind.

On my left factory smoke bellows in
then out like a big grey belly.
Behind my back
the embers settle into the stretch.

I have always been
of this city, understood when losing
my way I’d be carried back
here the air is bruised,

bares the mark of old industry and taxi
horns where once were rail cars-
the kind Sandburg took pencils to.

I am passed up like a shadow in the street lamp,
confused as to where the bus stops
at the corner of Halsted St and Chicago Ave.
There are always omens in the mundane.
I’m tired of looking for signs like these.

Hey Folks!

2010-04-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

It's National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) and I've decided to stab at the 30 poems in 30 days challenge. Learn more about it at http://readwritepoem.org. I'm not promising I'll make it through all 30 but I'm definitely gonna try pumping out some work this month. If you'd like to follow the writing I'm doing in April do it here. Feel free to leave a comment or two. I appreciate you taking the time to stop by! If you're interested in the blog I normally keep please check out http://thecureforyourales.com. Jeah!

-Dan Sully