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Best Poems Written by Matt Caliri

Below are the all-time best Matt Caliri poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Happy New Year From the Unicorns

So far I've done everything I could possibly do this year.
I've given thorough thought to cleaning up my act.
These early-day hours have been rough-house
The storm shudders inside me are all grimy, they need tending to,
I just need to find them first.
So tired from last night,
Riding unicorns through the stars.
(No one believes me.)
Trouble is we're all blinking too fast for our own good as it is.
I've done everything I've promised to do this year, so far,
And I haven't even made the promises yet.
That's how interesting I've been lately.
You have no idea how hard it is to be this interesting.
Riding Bellyglow through the thrushes of song birds...
I probably don't know, either.
What a bucket of letters this is.
Thanks for Peking, thanks for Hong Kong.
Happy New Year.

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I Have a Raccoon Dream

I dream that tonight I am a raccoon
And it is here in this body that I store the notion
That my sadness will last forever,
In the treasury of unclaimed awareness,
Where pits of the peaches could never re-sprout...
I dig deep into the indent of a Denver ravine,
Gnaw knee-high into the hollow ridges of hominids and their homelands,
Belly-wade in bottomless mud waters west of wherever they don’t go, though
Lurid in my languor now, I laminate my slick turf onto Continental limestone slabs
And, then, all-at-once, at noon, just like that,
I call it a day.
A tired little raccoon
Can’t bear without a rest 
Through the midday...
I arise as the coon falls under.
Reclaiming Human Sorrow, my Wrong-Headed Brother,
Waxing thunderously, now, in the mind’s cluttered cage
In this day of coffee and chit-chat and left-turns,
I’ll dream tonight I am a raccoon.
So that we may both get out and roam.

Details | Matt Caliri Poem

Not Entirely About Living In New York

I’m sorry for my flaws
I appreciate everything you do for me
I wish I could always smile at passing children
I wish I felt better about myself
I wish I saw the light you provide for me
The light I voluntarily turn my back from
The light I’m suppose to drink 
As if to keep hydrated.

I’m surrounded by quarters and unfinished books
I read because I’m searching for affirmation
Quarters for clothes to be kept clean.

I’m divulgent
I parade my flaws
I hide, trip, and reveal my flaws
I am in constant concern of my own being
And a stillness of thought for a mind to be kept clean.

The world is a messy place
Our mind the raking of leaves
The leaves of the world fall and we rake
The leaves of the world fall and we rake
We fall and awake and fall again.

Love is warm, harmless, and stamped
Inefficiently weak by the assemblies of faces
Swept up by the world’s business of cold linear time
Moving like a sad and brutal train.

I sit at the station
My fingers interlocked pressing against my face
Peering through the thicket of my spirit.

Hours later, maybe, I am looking up the hill
Pulling my elephant.
Children circle around my small progress
Skipping and laughing.

(They don’t care,
They just like elephants.)

Though, last night, I dreamt I rode a killer whale
And so here it dawns on the weakened spirit:

That I am the Whale Rider of the Phantom World
Wandering through 10th Avenue
My flaws in our wake
My fist pumped high in the air
In the name of a Life Authentic.

This all dreamy and wonderful
While in the world of machines and mass movement
The elephant keeps his slow, tugging gait behind me,
Ignorant of dreams.

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Anger

Anger is for sissies.
Does that make you angry?
Too bad.
Sissy.

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Hands

The trees are still there every morning
Angry or sad
The sun beats down through your pores
Day after day after day.
And the moon will never stop.
And the spirit to which God has granted you
Walks with you
Penniless or pocketless.
"Something was dropped along the way,"
You feel.
"Well it's true we shed ourselves over the years,
Pieces of ourselves everywhere," 
says the sliding Voice.
Identity is really only something 
We think other people need.

So we pretend like we're separate from each other.

The word "firelight," is evocative.
The bloom of spirit and desire and
The ever-crackling of wild entanglement

Our lives like firelight
On the darkened beach
from the young and warm light
to the blazing chaos and wonder
to the toking and smoting and dimming
And the burial, and the cold.

I am as sad as the bottom of a well.
I have left something along the way.
A small appendage, maybe, I had meant to use at some point.
The Right Hand of God I was too distracted to keep hold of.

I am all other centerless beings
Dropping things here and there
A pen. A thought. A conviction.

And to keep hold,
to press on staring redemptively
At the circling Hands 
To live in this way is to gain wisdom
And with wisdom there is always
the healing of sadness. 
Senseless though, I know, like all else
And the evering was and the here we sit

Our eyes blinking tears from the bottom of a well.
Tearing from our core for
The love and need for others 
And their hands.

Details | Matt Caliri Poem

The Unconquerer

You left glitter in my shadow
This treason was over apples, initially.
Don't give me that doleful look.
Stars are born with your every breathe.
Your sadness mocks the lilies.

No, I am not a conqueror.
I borrowed this armor.
It was a typical moonlit passage.
Hopping kingdoms for bronze weasels (you know the drill).

My sense of time is backwards.
My heart does not beat (it turns).
Rotating in the grass
I send you coded messages.

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Morning

Awake!
Your eyes
Are made of birds!

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High School

I don't care anymore. You are the most wonderful thing I've ever seen in my life. 
Everytime you look at me I want to explode.  You're doing some sort of yoga move in front 
of me which you claim not to be yoga with your 15-year-old autistic client, rubbing your feet 
into his hand, bending over him between a giant cushy yellow soft-leathered cylinder, your 
hair dangling over him, now up in a pony-tail as you resituate your thighs, steadied and 
jeaned in that young and smart physique, a show of craving futures for my sitting nature, 
not more than two feet away.

I will love you from afar with light beams if I must.  We'll be left to devour each other with 
our eyes.  In hot-quick glances.

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Imagine This Seattle

Grant me pancakes trolleys
Rocket-fueled swingsets
Marmalade mountains
with high-crusting cream.
Seattle strings its polite passers
Among misting choirs of clouds,
So begging I go for dixie cups of chili
Steaming block by block, as a harsh July
Has every fourth day blue.
I wish for weather with wiggling hues
of pinks, rouge, and mauve,
Landscaped with blazeberries, lazer lemons, and fudge.
Fudge, fudge, for all with small children,
Young puppies, and dwarfed camels,
So we can ride slow, strong, and merry
in bliss-hoofed patterns.
My final wish of this corrugated ten,
Is to speak of such long tales, once rested and spent
Along the shores of our Lord, at the edge of these dreams.

Details | Matt Caliri Poem

Into Morning

Crackle into morning.
Hasten your fear astray.
Outside blue doves are catching fire.
Bacon, make bacon, and live the normal light.
The strain and bob of countless decisions,
Turgid and taut along the fence
Of the girlfriend's backyard.
Fear the father call while,
Dear old mother is sprawled
Covering and smothering 
The floor of your conscience:
The monster bearing the unwanted gifts:
It has no name.
Relieve crying, shame, and torment of their duty.
Catch the lighted spirit
From the quiver of telephone poles,
The flutter of crows,
The boundaries of the bows
Bound to the presents that have no receiver.
Be the believer. Be our Redeemer.
Be the sound in the deepest night,
The glow of the darkest cave,
The fly of butter that flew off the frozen animal
of our sorry, sodden, and surrendered inner landscape.
Be our Redeemer,
melt grace from our cheers.
Pour it over the dead water
We bathe, drink, and splash in.
Give our wall a name.
Push it over, and walk across.
We will follow, crackling,
Into Morning.

03/05/11