An Aloha And A Rogues' Gallery!

Lambs, listen to this! (oops...wrong blog!). The warm and wise Cloudia, authoress, blogger and friend to be treasured, has honored me with mention in a post today! After a stint with my head stuck firmly inside the freezer, to take the swelling down, I just had to share it with you, my readers.

In her post, Cloudia talks about 60s poet Rod McKuen. I came to his books just a little after the fact, in the 70s, and I loved them. Okay, I admit, I liked the glorious women in the photographs that went with the poems, too, with their long straight hair. There I was, furiously taking notes on what they were wearing, when I managed to read the poems as well. I can still recite some of them from memory. The thing is, Rod McKuen was not a "serious" poet. How many of you read serious poets? Show of hands? Anyone? Thought not. What he managed to do was speak to people, to their hearts. I thought, that's what I want to do. I want to write something people will read and say, ah, I have felt like that, too.

When I was young, long long ago, when great reptiles ruled the earth, I loved my music. I have recently posted all about my discovery of the amazing Laura Nyro. Around that same time, I heard a song called "Suzanne" that simply took me to another place, the way the best songs do.

"Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river,

You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her..."

These sensual lyrics were written by a Canadian named Leonard Cohen, who is also an award winning poet. Kind friends have compared me to Leonard Cohen, and also to Rod McKuen. Both comparisons please me immensely. Except for the man part. I do hope I look better in a skirt than they do. It's a close call. ;-)

In the 1980s, I reinvented myself, or perhaps more accurately, was given the divine grace to be reinvented, sober this time. My idol then, and evermore, was and is Joan Jett! Serious attitude, fem powa, you name it, she's got it.

"Ohhh....now I don't hardly know her...

But I think I could love her..."

Yes I know Tommy James wrote "Crimson & Clover." But Joan recreated it, better. I have always tried to keep Joan Jett in my heart, and not give a damn about my bad reputation! Amen.

But I'm a poet. So back to poetry. When I was 17, I walked over to the Little Professor Book Store in Birmingham, and dug up a softcover book of poems by a man named Grover Lewis, called "I'll Be There In The Morning If I Live." I sat outside on the library lawn and read it cover to cover and loved poetry from that moment, and "beat" poetry in particular, for years after that.

Fast forward to August, 2007. I visited the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. I had begun writing poetry again the year before, after twenty years of losing touch with it. Standing in the very room where she slept, composed, and dreamed, I felt her there. I mean that I felt that she was specifically aware of me being there and knew me. I can't explain any better than that. It was a transcendent experience, one of those things one is blessed with only a very few times in a lifetime. I have felt the spirit of Emily near me many times since then. It's undeniable and precious.

So there is some more about how this poet arrived at this place in this lifetime.

Once again, thank you Cloudia, for thinking of me with your post today. You are a gem and I love you.

Shay

Because

Dear one,

Nothing could make me stop loving you.

I may say, "you're perfect"

But my heart is most often moved to tenderness

Because you're not.

Love of mine,

It may be that the deepest joys have sorrow at their root.

I may say, "this is forever"

But I cherish you as fiercely as I do

Because it isn't.

_______

Winter Jasmine

If you sleep with the winter,

You will move slowly through deep blue dreams,

Filled with pale lovers whose eyes are the color of ancient glaciers.

If you have the soul of summer,

You will want to wrap the winter in rose blooms, jasmine, and mint;

You will love her for her stillness,

Her self-possession,

And her very remove,

All the while unable to stop yourself from trying to warm her

With your love

Your body

And your ridiculous hopes.

She will be drawn to you,

And you will think, "Ah! I am the one to save her."

Woman, she does not need saving from herself,

And she will naturally go on, as ever, being who she is.

But you,

Having failed to change her with your intoxicating night blooms,

May find that you have succeeded in altering yourself;

And may wander for some time

Through deep blue dreams of impenetrable ice.

______

The Winter Queen

The Winter Queen, cold majesty,

So austere and harsh--

Will scatter your bones where the cat tails grow,

Down by the summer marsh.

Ice in all its forms

Are her wolves arrayed in pack;

You cannot love her and live--

You cannot seek her and ever go back.

Her hair is made of crows,

And January or June, it's winter where she goes;

She hates fire, she loves night,

And keeps her heart well out of sight.

Do you remember,

Little fool,

When the fluttering cardinal was her lips?

Do you recall

Her naked skin,

Her throat, her breasts, her ribs?

The Winter Queen, cold majesty,

Her favor gone frost instead--

Has scattered your bones where the cat tails grow,

Now frozen hard and dead.

______

Violent Squirrel

Violent Squirrel is on the run--

"They should have just let me use the bird feeder," she reasons, still peeved.

Leaving the carnage behind, Violent Squirrel perches on a tree limb and takes a moment to examine her resentments.

"I am denied access to major department stores and salons;

They say to me, 'You can't come in here. You're a squirrel!' and they chase me out the door with brooms or try to catch me in painful traps.

It's true, I am a squirrel,

But now I am Violent Squirrel,

The ultimate outsider, a revolutionary rodent!"

Violent Squirrel's agenda:

• Disrupt traffic and commerce


• Bring down the patriarchy


• Tease that one dog

Violent Squirrel hears sirens in the distance.

Violent Squirrel says, "I'm in your yard, eating your bird seed. Try and stop me."

You go, squirrelfriend.

_______

Lipstick

The world's most beautiful woman writes an apocalyptic message on the mirror of the bus station restroom in Hell, Michigan.

Some say it is written in blood,

But it is only lipstick.

Because it is written by a woman, in lipstick, on a bus station restroom mirror in Hell, Michigan,

There is no buzz;

It does not go viral;

The world goes

tic

toc

Balanced precariously like an unwatched baby on a diving board.

The world's most beautiful woman goes on tv with the intention of delivering her message,

But some little fuckwad with a five-day beard and a ponytail wants her to endorse salon products instead.

He hands her a plastic bottle of shampoo and urges her to toss her head and smile.

When the most beautiful woman in the world gets angry,

Cars won't start,

Fountains run dry,

And everything is like herding cats.

Other women say,

I hope she falls.

Men say,

I want her to toss her head and smile.

Meanwhile, the world goes

tic

toc

Like a ball bearing balanced on a paper clip, balanced on a gyroscope balanced on a seal's nose.

The most beautiful woman in the world writes an apocalyptic message on a plate with lipstick at Nikos' Coney island in Hell, Michigan,

But because it is written by a woman, in lipstick, near a kitchen,

No one pays any attention;

And because she is

The world's most beautiful woman,

No one can see her at all,

And the world goes on as it always has--

tic

toc

Like a blind man reading the news to his deaf wife by cell phone in calm and authoritative tones.

______

Longing

After the game,

The Succubus is with Chloe,

And being with her, after so long,

Is like

Being suspended in honey, through which powerful tides are moving,

Slowly,

Slowly.

She has entered the dreams of so many women, and yet,

This time,

It is she who is consumed within a dream--

And in the way of dreams, she feels the loss of control, the sensation of being carried deliciously,

Perhaps dangerously,

Along,

Watching herself,

Helpless.

As for Chloe, she is the same Finite Universe she has always been--

Calm,

Untroubled,

At home in the skin of anything she has ever done

Or committed.

Her eyes are now, as ever, the undisturbed center

Around which everything else rushes,

Like the turbulent air around the perfection of a raven's wing.

The Succubus has entered so many dreams,

But now she is the dream,

Aching to enter Chloe

The way midnight rain joins the earth and seems to disappear.

The Succubus knows by now

That she is incapable of waking herself from her desire for Chloe once she is inside it,

And the never knowing

How Chloe feels

Or what Chloe is thinking,

Cannot stop her, any more than shouting at a falling stone would suspend it in mid-air,

Or magically return it to stillness, at the top of things, in the time before it began to fall.

The Succubus knows that Chloe will leave again, that she can't possess her as she does all the others.

Chloe claims that she never even dreams,

But,

That's just a trick of memory--

Because,

Chloe does dream, all the time, but when she dreams

It is the Succubus who remembers.

______

Photograph: Jordana Brewster