This Poem

 

This poem squats in a desert place.

This poem perches upon your chamber door;

This poem sings, your face your face your face

This poem is merely this and nothing more.

This poem is a traveler from an antique land.

This poem is what you find in the windmills of your mind.

This poem is the lone and level sand. 

This poem is old anarchy to the horizon line.

This poem sees the best minds of your generation.

This poem says, let us go then, you and I.

This poem is tearful lamentations

This poem has a silent lifting mind.

I sing myself and celebrate myself

and that, dear lady, were no crime;

if life is over there--behind a shelf

there you'll find these poems--in one of mine.

________

A bit of doggerel for What's Going On? "Poetry Is..."

I have referenced:

Stephen Crane "In A Desert Place"

E.A. Poe "The Raven"

Ewan MacColl "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

Percy Bysshe Shelley "Ozymandias"

Alan and Marilyn Bergman "The Windmills of Your Mind" (English lyrics)

Sylvia Plath "The Colossus"

Allen Ginsberg "Howl" (altered)

t.s. eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Francesco Petrarch "The Triumph of Death"

John Gillespie Magee Jr. "High Flight"

Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress" (altered)

Emily Dickinson "I Cannot Live With You"

Your Heart

Now, after the fact, like a glitterbomb coroner,

I want to have another look at your heart.

My microscope went blind last time--

I squeezed it too hard, like a sponge when I'm angry-cleaning.

I was too fascinated, sappy,

needful as a driver in a wreck.

Bring me an ambulance in the shape of a spyglass.

I want to find my own ghost.

I thought your bones were made from hard cane,

your hair caramelized smoke.

I wore a white coat (as if I knew something),

glasses made from willow switches, and a half moon smile.

Relax, I told you, but it was me in the coma.

Now--please hold still for once. These worms aren't good,

like the plastic model I saw at the vet's. Your heart,

like the plastic kitchen I used to play with,

practicing to be a fly that would bite you one day.

Eat my attention, it's good for you.

Each worm burrowed there is something I said,

some of which I meant--the rest was practice for a role. 

Let me pull one out like a string, pull it and it speaks this poem,

a pretty wasp with a stinger where the truth pools. 

I am too harsh, I know. I am the laundress who bleaches everything,

a maniac for killing the invisible baddies, a hospital candy striper

performing unauthorized tests that do nothing, or at least,

don't cure or induce any useful fevers.

I have your results. I'll bring them down to the morgue where my

hand awaits its conclusions as if they were a ring or a nail.

Summation:

they weren't worms,

just paper streamers.

I infected you

but it made you better for a while.

the microscope cannot be repaired.

my report needs to be presented in a recognized language.

i'm sorry, truly, if i hurt you

that was never my intention.

this poem is not written in my true voice.

i was never your babe.

that was never your heart.

_______

Music: Igor Paspalj "The Thrill Is Gone"

for Desperate Poets "Illicit Encounters"

Cottage On The Shore

 

Perhaps we are emotional gypsies

though our bodies become a sailor's cottage on the shore.

The heart, like a child, gets lost in reveries

and though it beats in stationary stasis evermore

it remembers warm July, desire, petrichor.

Let me sleep that I might dream and feel again the wagon's motion,

a scarecrow slinging duffel over shoulder, on to ocean.

_____

This is a rhyme royal. 

for Word Garden Word List--Randy Newman and Sunday Muse #251.

Music: Judy Collins Farwell To Tarwathie

Poetry, Writing Itself

I am not a Tweet.
I am sequential and chaptered.
You can't scroll to the good part.

I am not a plastic flower.
I am a bag of seeds,
and the picture on the front is only a hired artist's notion.

I am a vine that's been winding for years.
I'm not what you're used to.
I am rare, and thorned.

I have a bed, but you're not invited.
Not yet.
Grapes aren't wine fresh off the vine.

I am poetry, writing itself.
I am gorgeous blooms.
I will be these things seen or unseen, by sun or by moon.
_______

art at top by Gustav Klimt. 

two for souffle

You think I am broken,
moon-damaged,
pepper on the pudding you've melted the world into,
thrust into little glass cups,
ruined by the seasoning of my inventive curses.

Won't you soften, just a bit,
and step out onto the precipice with me?
We can march to our own drumbeat, here,
high above the street.

I am tall enough that you could kiss or climb me;
bite the bullet, chew the notion.
Pretend that we have taken the water-carriage all the way to Trinidad
and that you actually like calypso music,
new things,
and my ways.

As we rapidly take on water,
I'll say something cryptic, yet suggestive,
and you will believe again.
Fancy the healing our colliding idiocies can fashion!
Can we just close our eyes,
forget about leverage and vengeance
long enough to be in the moment,
teetering,
one foot each in mid-air,
the other cramping
and the dumb greedy ground yawning below.

You can never master me, you know,
but we can affect a certain edgy hipness.
We shall wear exoskeletons like crickets,
and when night falls, we shall touch our index fingers together
in the divine joke that is us, and say,
"BANG," darling.
It is the only way we will ever fall.
______

for Get Listed at Real Toads, where Timoteo has given us a list of 20 words, and I have used every one because I am a good and obedient girl.

 

 

Lioness In The Grass

I have searched for my skin,

And for my face,

Every place the sun reaches or does not.



I have heard myself in the scrape of boots on stairs, leading up;

I have called myself from the shadows of corners,

Found traces in the pages of old books,

And seen myself in the round faces of raindrops on a nine-paned window.



I have refused faces handed me,

And have slipped out of skin that did not fit.

I have kissed women on the mouth and known they felt the ghost inside;

I have kissed different women, in the later afternoon, and known it to be exactly right,

Fitting like a cup and saucer,

Lovely,

Warm,

Full.



We begin wherever we find ourselves,

Like closed-eye cubs born to the lioness in the grass.

We are like the iris, purple and blue,

Recurring, beautiful, temporary.



I am not who I was.

I am a blue-eyed huntress balanced between bounty and starvation.

I bloom, though I know the sun will sink

And the unstoppable winter crouches just beyond the boundary of my heart beat.

_________

for One Shot Wednesday

the photograph of the irises is taken by and property of Hedgewitch

__________

Starling

Odd and sweet little creature that you are,

Who told you that you couldn't play?

Who dares to shush you, little spirit? It's criminal is what it is.

Nobody died and made them sheriff.



So bang away.

Even the vainest singers began by screeching for worms,

Bald and absurd,

Hardly birds at all, just bold little balls of noise;

But they knew, as you should too,

That there are only so many beats to a bar or to a heart,

And every one of them drips with the sacred.



Small and daring,

You have no idea how much I admire you.

Keys white and black are like stars in the night, and you can touch them all, even now,

Though you can hardly reach the peanut butter

Or the door knob.

Come, I'll share with you all that I have learned.

It is not much,

Only this:



Keep singing, and just as the days appear and then fade, over and over, year upon year,

Keep playing,

And damn the critics.

God will love you and you will love yourself,

As the cat does

And as I do,

Every time you start in with your irrepressible gorgeous noise.

__________