Bachelor Rat

 

There is a bachelor rat

living alone in my neighbor's garage

as I also live alone,

a single dog lady in my lighted box. 

I have begun to feed him

leaving a Tupperware of dog kibble,

french fries, a leaf of lettuce

or whatever, out for him last thing each night.

Watching from the window

I see him, five minutes later, skittering

across the yard like a pleasure

boat on choppy seas, to claim his plunder. 

I eat in the evenings

in front of tv, solving mysteries

as the bachelor rat

also does, always alert for killers.

Predators concern us both

(mine call me up, his lay low in the ground ivy.)

The neighbor behind tries

to poison him, as social media tries to poison me.

We just woke up in these skins,

he in his, me in mine, flesh costumes of the moment,

costumes that get hungry, cold,

ill, old, and any number of other similarities.

Why feed that bachelor rat?

some may ask, aghast. He's nothing but vermin.

I just feel like there are so many cats

set on doing harm to one little rat, or one old woman,

and so I set out his Tupperware

meal last thing while letting my dog out each night.

I wish him good fortune, my simpatico

bachelor rat, to make it through the winter all right.

_______________

Famous Contemporary Poet

 

I'm trying to finish this famous contemporary poet's

fourth collection, which groans under the weight of

all the glowing blurbs on the back cover.

The famous contemporary poet avoids rhyme as if

it was a downed wire--half grand mal seizure, half

pit bull off the chain and charging.

The famous contemporary poet writes a few poems,

carefully packed in vignettes, snapshots, and musings,

all the excelsior found in any packing crate.

In high school I had an acquaintance, this guy.

He'd toss out something cryptic and then wait

like he'd flipped you a Rubik's Cube.

Everything out of his mouth was a test and he'd give

you this bright smirk, like can you figure it out and

get to where I am, up here?

I would like to meet the famous contemporary poet

and show her one of mine, plain as the flat of my hand

when it breaks her nose and the blood comes.

I am trying to finish the famous contemporary poet's 

fourth collection even though it's like watching a movie 

with muddy sound, in dialect, no captions.

______________

The Saints of 1962

 

It was summer, 1962

and I was seven years old. 

I loved our screen porch where my mother never came

except for meals in the berry-bush cicada evenings.

It was my father's domain, and mine.

He read his newspaper or did crosswords

with a ballgame on the radio.

I loved the march music at the opening and in the beer ads. 

Sometimes the weatherproof rug was a dance floor

for my dolls when my brother wasn't there to make fun. 

My main thing that summer, though

was my cards spread out on the old

table, retired from the kitchen, now the grand dame of the porch.

I had prayer cards--

Saint Anthony, Saint John Bosco, Theresa of Avila,

colorful as comic books, bright as the light of Heaven.

I had baseball cards--

Rocky Colavito, Cuno Barragan, Orlando Cepeda

with dark woody borders

and early 60's dark caps

they looked as if they played in perpetual shadows.

There was incense

in the form of my father's Dutch Masters cigar.

There were the sacraments

and the sacrifice bunt.

The saints seemed backlit, blessed by Divine Hollywood.

The players cards were sometimes misprinted with a

green-tinted background as if they were undersea.

I liked to mix them, shuffled and fanned out.

Saint Sebastian, patron of athletes, his foot

resting on the top step of the dugout, gesturing

his fielders into position

with a wave of his scorecard,

or by messages brought by angels.

Jim Bunning striking out the devil with a wicked side-arm fastball,

making Old Scratch look foolish

as the vendors call and the fans

cheer. Jim walks off the field in the sunshine, no shadow in sight.

I have forgotten which cards I had, mostly.

Who was the beer sponsor? Schlitz? Blatz?

What had I done that spring?

What did I do that fall? In summer 1962

my father and President Kennedy were alive 

and so were the saints and ballplayers

On the table

on the screen porch

in summer, 1962.

_____________

for What's Going On? "Forgetfulness"

Music: Gale Garnett We'll Sing in The Sunshine

And Detroit Tigers march music radio intro

Kitty (a pantoum)

 

Your cat has killed my singing bird

she sunk her teeth into its throat

and now, its every song deferred

it wears a reddened funeral coat.

She sunk her teeth into its throat

and left its body on the mat

an ornament for Charon's boat

does kitty give a damn for that?

She left its body on the mat

and licks her paws without a care

does kitty give a damn for that

or anybody anywhere?

She licks her paws without a care

her tail she'll switch in plain disdain

for anybody anywhere

she casually causes pain.

Her tail she'll switch in plain disdain

for having killed my singing bird

or casually causing pain

by any bloody song deferred.

____________

The Word Garden Word List is very much active and can be found HERE. 

Wedding Song

 

Please buy me a rose of bridal white

placed in a vase of anthracite

Wear your suit of wool and flint

and on my tongue a peppermint.

Please buy me a rose of pleasing pink

placed in the pool to turn and sink

Bring the singer who loves the blues

and bury her bones beneath the pews.

Please buy me a rose of funeral black

buy me a dozen, all in a stack

Make the ring from a hangman's rope

Invite the judge, the devil, the Pope.

Please buy me a rose of brilliant red

and remind me you did until I'm dead

Bake the cake with sugar and tar

and preserve my heart in a Mason jar.

________

for Word Harden Word List--Ishmael Reed

Word Garden Word List--Ishmael Reed

 

Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues

Hello my little carolers! Every morning I get a "Poem-A-Day" via email from The Academy of American Poets. Honestly, a great many of them aren't very good in my opinion. Some of them are prosey. Some of them are badly written. Some of them are dull or overwritten. But once in a while there is a gem. I had never heard of Ishmael Reed until they sent me his poem A Black Genius. So good.

 ^{His mother responds to her “genius” son}

I’m familiar with your
Prestige, your honorary
Degrees your name
Mentioned on the news
Thousands eager to
Hear your views

An Avedon took your
Photo, a prime minister
Read your books
Your spouse admired for
Her depth and Intellect
Your children
For their good looks
Your poetry is known
From Judith’s library
In Maine to
Scholz Garten in the state
Of Texas
But two of your
Brothers own
Black Cadillacs and
And another brother
Owns a Lexus  

I immediately ordered his collection Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues, containing poems written between 2007 and 2020, as well as his longer tour de force The Jazz Martyrs. This volume deals with jazz music, the difficulties the famous jazz stars faced, racism, interpersonal relationships, the issues surrounding aging, as well as the odd humorous poem. Reed writes in an interesting style, sometimes using rhyme, sometimes not, sometimes sounding street, other times scholarly. He can do it all. 

Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed is a poet, a professor, an essayist, a novelist, and a jazz aficionado and a musician. I hope you'll check him out!

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of your own. Then simply link up, visit others, and then sit back and listen to some righteous jazz. 

And now, your List:

Belmont Stakes

blues

bully

claws

cold

combustible

cooking

guts

jazz

jewels

lemon

musical

peppermint

predicted

puny

rhymes

rope

seventies

sugar

toy

My Back

 

"I got to boogie-woogie like a knife in the back"

My back

was the one I never worried about.

Always cheerful

ready to work with me

believing that a rising tide

lifts all boats.

Oh,

I used Proper Lifting Technique

like it was delivered from the pulpit.

I'd say, back

keep straight

knees

help your sister now.

They complained but pitched in.

Now,

Just the mention of the 

lightest job

sends you running like you stole something.

Part Bartleby

the rest Jive Bombers

you like things easy and over

like an egg

too lazy to get up off the griddle.

Can I

get some help here?

"No ma'am, the couch's got me

caught in its clutches."

Friends smirk.

"That one yours?

The one you always talking up?"

Anymore,

you don't lift nothing heavier'n

a slice of pie.

How

can I be proud?

You can't lug,

but you sure can shrug.

You're as close as my next breath, child

but you broke my heart

like a dropped crystal bowl.

___________

quote with image is from "Sea Cruise"

sung by Frankie Ford

Music: The Jive Bombers Bad Boy

Super callous fragile mystic evangelistic hope chest

 

Today's sermon is up on its hind legs, begging.

Today's sermon is gonna cut you while you're singing.

Today's sermon is demanding, like an overdue bill.

Today's sermon wheedles through its nose--

today's sermon sleeps with your husband

giving him (and you) a raging dose. 

Today's sermon stands astride mighty mountains

and tunnels underneath your secret sins.

Today's sermon may be placed in a vase of water

or morph into a chia pet that ends as it begins.

Today's sermon don't care.

Today's sermon is always there,

watching you fuck up from thin air.

Today's sermon was born in a humble stable.

Today's sermon jacks the roast right off your table.

Today's sermon cracks wise and has glitter-ball eyes.

Today's sermon can bust a move and run a real dope enterprise.

Come close for the sermon I speak.

Come quickly--I ain't got all week.

Come in, douse the lights, go ahead and wet your beak.

Today's sermon can be delivered right to your door.

Use the easy autopayments that continue evermore.

Today's sermon comes on quick to raise the dead.

Today's sermon comes factory-sealed like I said.

Today's sermon can rhyme if it so choose.

Today's sermon says heads I win, tails you lose.

Eat today's sermon in big chunks until you're dead.

Today's sermon means nobody any harm--

is safe as milk, sweet as candy, warm as toast.

Today's sermon wraps itself around your heart

and leaves its mark on every motherfuckin' part.

Today's sermon is lit

Today's sermon is it.

Today's sermon isn't over--you'd damn well better sit.

__________________

for What's Going On? "Today's Sermon"

Music: Concrete Blonde Jonestown

Despite, and Still (for J.)

 

I said to the trees

                                                --the birch, the pear, the maple--

"How can my heart be anything but an empty cup

Now that your leaves have all fallen

   like the handsome musician from Heaven

   or funeral cards from the hands of old women?"

"Look at you," replied the trees. 

                                                                                     "We have spun you

from the loom of our beauty and the cruelty of our silence.

Just as you did in summer, you stand looking

   as Jason did in the grove, when our fleece was 

   golden in autumn and stolen away in November."

I stayed for a long time,

                                                               so long that the snow 

became hands on my shoulders like a mother's or a healer's.

The sky is as gray as cold water, the trees' bones

  stand right to left like verses across a page,

   antique, dignified, turned to benevolent mentors.

_____________________________

for Dverse Poetics "Despite & Still" where Dora is hosting.

Music: Fleetwood Mac Bare Trees

And Judith Durham All My Trials

American Pandora

 

Pandora admires her stack of new moving boxes from U-Haul.

After the debacle last time,

any problems should be small

like the railroad apartment she's leaving.

Pandora was a gifted kid, winning science projects and writing ribbons

tacked up on a bulletin board,

but like many to whom much is given,

she never expected the burn-out and the drifting.

Buck up, girl! she tells herself, and starts sorting gewgaws and hair bows.

I was set up to fail, she thinks,

loaded up with junk and mottoes

from all those uncles appearing from workbenches with scavenged parts.

She'll pack these boxes and mail them to herself out in Santa Fe

where the Land of Enchantment

waits with its southwestern way

of letting hope grow like junipers around the foothills and her heart.

____________

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List is good through Saturday. Come, on, peek inside!

Lebanese Dove Lost in A Mexican Market

 

I awake on a sidewalk as a bird

and in a moment of comic idiocy

I fly into a store

                         where a woman swings a broom at me,

shouting, "Un pájaro!"

She misses me by inches

as I have missed so many things

by inches or miles

                             and if she breaks my wings

her dustpan will be my grave.

Once, I knew--or dreamed

your skin by Tiffany lamp.

In those days,

                      the mornings were quiet and damp

like a woods at first light

where we could go walking

and not worry where we'd been.

I careen into packages of pasta

which fall like pilgrims to the floor.

The woman spits, 

                              "Ay! Diablo!" and has no more

pity for me than a loaded gun.

How did I become a bird

in this ridiculous situation?

I remember the day when you left

with your bags like a brood of chicks

gathered at your feet

                                   in their nest of sticks

like burning incense.

Now, I am a mourning dove without a sky

with a new woman now, who shouts, "Diablo! Ay!"

_______________

For Word Garden Word List--Light, Coming Back

Music: Gary BB Coleman The Sky Is Crying

Word Garden Word List--Light, Coming Back

 Hello my hungry hearts, and welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt! If you're a reader, then you know that every once in a while, you'll come across a book that tells your story, or tells your possibilities, or simply speaks to your heart in a way that is unique and profound. 

For me, one of those books is a novel by the late Ann Wadsworth, entitled Light, Coming Back. Her debut novel (and there isn't much else by her that I could find), it was short-listed for the Ferro-Grumley Prize, The Lambda Literary Award For Lesbian Fiction, and the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. Moreover, it was a Book of the Month Club selection back when BOMC was more serious than its reanimated version is today. That's where I found it. I read it in 2007 and it has kept its special place in my heart ever since. (And yes, I do have one!)

Elizabeth Stark, author of Shy Girl, had this to say about it: "Light, Coming Back is an exquisitely honest love story that reveals the delicate and steely threads that bind us to those few we connect with deeply. Unafraid of complexity and full of vitality, this is a tale that should have been told before now; Mrs. Dalloway finds her passionate young Sally not in her long ago past but in today's flower shop. This smart and beautifully written novel will stay with you a long time; indeed, it will teach you how to live." 

The love story of Mercedes and Lennie is one I am eager to read again now. It will make you believe that, yes, light can come back. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others, and let the light in. This prompt remains active through next Saturday. 

And now, your List:

bon mots

cello

comic

distracted

drama

fooled

gallows

inches

lamps

light

miracles

missed

packages

pleasure

roosters

saga

severe

shed

soften

together

Song of a Tarnished Eidolon

 

I asked the locust leaves if they were lonely.

They replied,

We are restless.

An owl on a branch of the locust tree

wept silently.

I have looked in all directions.

At home, I found my future in a spoon's face,

and my melancholy in the strings of an oud.

I haunt myself.

Indigo is the night sky.

Indigo is the sleepless sea.

Nun-white bird,

I will meet you beneath the locust tree

wearing a veil of Point d'Esprit

and holding a torn carnation.

_____________

The Death of November

 

November has died, of a fever, in bed

under gray blankets made of wind and dusk.

I had called out to it before, full of a strange joy,

saying, 

                   see how the maples and pear trees

                   send their red-haired daughters down

                   like roses from the pale hands of virgins

to lie at the feet of autumn's wounded matador.

November has died, and must be sewn into

 a snow-shroud to be carried by somber hearse

past the last of the violets by the garden wall,

still living

                        like children up past their bedtimes,

                        wearing brocade vests, leather shoes

                       and shirts with sleeves of brilliant green

waiting for the west to swallow their parents, and their pasts.

November has died, and the shade has been drawn.

A new lodger arrives, talking too loudly, eyes as bright

as polished coins, holding a glazed sweet in one hand

raised up

                         as if it were a goblet full of honey, taking no

                         notice of the widows with their black mantillas

                         wrapping the last cornbread cake in a cloth,

for the sad mongrel who lies down on November's chilly grave.

______________-

Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

 Hello my little adding machines, and welcome to this week's Word Garden Word List poetry prompt! 

This time, our source is Amy Wallace's fascinating biography of William James Sidis, entitled The Prodigy. I read it way back in 1988 (I have kept a book log since late1987)and have never forgotten it. 

Amy Wallace

Never heard of Willam James Sidis? Well, back in 1910, his name was synonymous with the phrase "child prodigy." His IQ was estimated to be 50-100 points higher than Einstein's. His father was a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology; he and his wife believed that they could create a genius in the cradle. They hung ABC blocks above his crib and within six months little Billy was speaking. At three, he was typing and had taught himself Latin! At five, he wrote a treatise on anatomy, and at six he spoke at least seven languages fluently. 

The youngster enrolled at Harvard at age eleven, stunned the nation with a lecture on four-dimensional bodies, and articles about him ran on the front pages of the nation's leading newspapers. Graduating at sixteen, he was desperate for privacy.

William had had enough, and staged a dramatic rebellion against his parents, academia, and the world's expectations. It began with jail and a scandalous trial. He then drifted from one menial job to another, concealing his genius but writing a number of books on various subjects using pseudonyms. One of these dealt with his favorite hobby--the collecting of streetcar transfers. 

Today, his name means one thing to a handful of educators--a burned out failure who died, ironically, of a cerebral hemorrhage.  But now, in an era of parents frantically trying to push their children into achievement at ever-earlier ages, William James Sidis's story is more relevant than ever. In his own way, Sidis's life was a success of living on his own terms, rather than everyone else's.

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of one's own. Then simply link up, visit others, and do the math, dahling. This prompt remains active through Saturday.

And now, your List:

books

cotton

cram

dishes

enormous

famous

fat

girls

hellish

instantly

legend

love letters

midnight

numbered

problems

rained

riot

sewing

Sunday

trance 

Ode to a Chrome Cradle

 

The Ford Rotunda burning down, 1962.

It was decided

by women who had lost their sons

that there should be no more Sundays

in Detroit.

It was decided

by girls with broken dishes for bones

that all sewing should be done with dope needles

and veinous thread.

It was traditional

for the underground tunnel to Canada

to be filled with shredded tires and bent hubcaps

from fatalities.

In Detroit, the mediums

predict things that have already happened,

going into trance states instantly upon hearing

old Motown. 

It was decided

that love letters be made mandatory

for bums and debutantes whose heads rot softly

like pumpkins.

It was considered good form

for fat golfers to dole out mulligan freeways

through Black Bottom but never the fresh greensward

of Oakland county.

It was decided

in the end, that all elms be destroyed by fungi

and burned every Christmas at Ford Rotunda, disappearing

in tandem, brightly.

_________

The Detroit riots 1967

For Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

Music: The Shangri-La's Leader of the Pack

Process notes: I grew up in well-off Oakland county, just a bop down Woodward Avenue from Detroit. I still remember being taken to the Ford Rotunda at Christmas when I was a small child. There were live reindeer, and my brother always got a toy version of a concept car. It burned down in 1962. I was seven years old.

In 1967, the city exploded in a riot after the police raided an after-hours "blind pig" nightclub. After decades of being hassled by Detroit police, the people there had finally had enough and fought back. I stood on the corner of Woodward Avenue up in my safe white suburb and watched the smoke rise over Detroit. I'll never forget it, and things would never be the same again.