Howie Good

7 Things You Should Know
About Sex Therapy

Water lilies that take root in newlyweds’ lungs!
A doorbell that scuttles around like a beetle!
I confess I find puppet cunnilingus disturbing.
This time out, Jesus, looking a little bloated, totes a shotgun.
A wide-eyed stranger accosts me with the question,
“Why does Madonna feed her baby Alpo brand dog food?”
It all begins and ends with men trapped in a submarine
furiously eating pancakes from the finest porcelain.

Howie Good, 2016

Remixed Works:
Weird Movies 2014
Weird Movies 2015

Spoiler Alert

Some collisions bring luck
what you waited for
meetings like hungry beaks
so many blood-lakes
the place for no story

We are those people
the world’s wonders
unlearning to not speak

Birds and fish watch the lights fade
Absence becomes fact
The deer lay down their bones
apology for bad dreams

Howie Good, 2015

Remixed Works:
Index titles of Selected Poems, by Robinson Jeffers
Index titles of To Be of Use, by Marge Piercy

Domestic Disturbance

I am a man at home
folding my wife’s delicates.
Well, why the hell not?

Most certainly stop in,
a city of red fire
growing from your head,
hooligans dressed
in red and white everywhere,
a magic thing.

Outside, there’s a ruckus, as usual.
It begins with the flies.
Noisy, black flies.
I do not know exactly when. . . .

My own mother is 98.
Mostly now she sleeps,
and when she does,
what she dreams
is small enough to fit
in the palm of your hand.

Howie Good, 2015

Remixed works:

Posts from submishmash, 6 November 2015

Rust Belt Americana

Searching for Pittsburgh
Going there
To see if something comes next
Finding something
How to love the dead

A year later
Explicating the twilight
What is there to say?
A ghost sings, a door opens

Music is the memory of what never happened
Older women
Carrying torches at noon
Tear it down

I imagine the gods
Guilty, haunted importantly
Scheming in the snow
Trying to have something left over

Howie Good, 2015

Remixed Work:
Index titles of The Great Fires, by Jack Gilbert

Separation in the Evening

Lament with me.
Shuttling through time,
I have forgotten the word,
a red cluster,
a stream of gold honey.

O fields, O sky,
when the light of day fades,
depriving me of sea,
place midnight in the care of my hands.

Howie Good, 2015

Remixed Work:
Index titles of Modern Russian Poetry,
edited and translated by Olga Andreyev Clark and Rose Styron

October

looms dimly in the background,
like a hammer and chisel in arthritic fingers,
Rodin, old, goatish, nearly blind,
wearing a white summer suit and dark glasses,
a cigarette dangling from his lips,
while a young Russian-born French lady
strolls into the same time frame
gathering apples and winter pears

Howie Good, 2015

Remixed work:

Rare 1915 Films Show Rodin, Monet, Renoir, and Degas in Their Twilight Years,
by Allison Meier (Hyperallergic)

Love vs. Death

Jesus, carrying what looks like a dead woman,
the exhausted body of Greta Garbo,
uses one hand to splay her sex,
small holes at the corners left by pins
from numerous previous exhibitions.
Love is not this burden of images.
It is about the skin of a surface,
the trace of the human touch.
Here there are stains, there you find
a shelf that starts with a folder
labeled “Heaven, Paradise,”
and ends with empty canvases.

Howie Good, 2015

Remixed Work:
Marlene Dumas Paints Ambiguity into a Black-and-White World, 
by Hyperallergic

Prayer Against War

A sturdy chapel
of adamant invalids
& insomniacs,
so photogenic,
only to have
danger follow,
though never easily,
that’s the art,
almost child-
simple flowers,
one standing,
one leaping,
against a dark blue ground,
as a small bird
evolves for hours,
days, weeks,
painted & scraped
to the point
of collapse,
pinned, unpinned,
repositioned
& pinned again,
whatever it takes,
slivers, puncture marks,
for fragile & rough
doves to fly up

Howie Good, 2014

Remixed works:
Wisps From an Old Man’s Dreams,
by Holland Cotter (NY Times, 9 Oct 2014)