They Always Get Jesus In Prison

 

I see where David Berkowitz got Jesus in prison

like they always do.

Now he runs a ministry, adept as he always was

at delivering

succinct

sermonettes

delivering people to God.

He was a postal clerk, always involved

with the Message.

Such converts always have a carnival of explanations--

the Devil

the neighbor's dog

and other invented booshwah.

Susan Atkins got Jesus in prison too

and wrote a memoir

about her redemption, her will turned over

from Charlie

to Christ

but it could have been Moonies or Ekankar.

There is a rat who lives in my garage.

He hasn't heard the Good News

but he never

hurts anyone.

He has published no book, leads no prayers.

He likes to hang out behind a shovel

that has never dug a grave.

The authorities let Leslie Van Houton, Caril Ann Fugate,

and Nathan Leopold out.

Karla Homolka changed her name and might be anywhere,

at services maybe,

holding a bible and smiling.

________

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"

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!

Pardon My Doggerel

 

I never met Gregory Corso

but his words were Gasoline

to the engine of my mind.

I did meet Allen Ginsberg once.

He signed the books

whose Howl had assuaged my loneliness. 

Here is a picture of the two of them,

another random human,

and a dog.

The tv is silent, cowed by the presence

of such vagabond intensity.

Corso shares a sandwich as if it were a chapbook.

Whitman said that not one animal is respectable.

Neither are poets, but they understand appetite

for food, for love, for being here now.

Come closer. I will shed a poem on you and make a mess,

then smile as if I had done something fine

to the engine of your mind

to assuage your loneliness.

I will do for you as these others have done for me,

off the leash and across the page

down through all the days of my life. 

_______

for What's Going On? "It's Raining cats & Dogs."

Music: Jennifer Warnes and Leonard Cohen Song of Bernadette

I Remember Coyoacan

"I remember Coyoacan," Jay told the interviewer,

sitting under mahogany-and-cane fan blades on the veranda.

Leaning back, legs crossed,

He smiled easily and added, 

"He didn't believe in me, Trotsky. Too bad.

"The palms were dripping that day, but the rain had let up.

Mercader set his raincoat on the table

with the ice axe under it.

Trotsky was reading.

When he looked down, Mercader withdrew his weapon,

swung and sculpted  a new Winter into Trotsky's mind."

Jay shrugged, as if to say what can you do?

"The guards rushed in of course, and beat that man like a pinata.

Each fist was an eloquent argument,

each kick a blow for the worker."

He waved His hand dismissively.

"It was too late of course. Mexico is devout, but unforgiving.

"Trotsky knew he was dying, and said so. 

An aide brought a basin for any final ideas,

and someone put on a phonograph record of Russian dances.

Across the room, Trotsky could see where Death had scrawled

Te veo pronto

on the mirror above the sink in red lipstick.

"He never asked for me, and died the next day."

The interviewer followed Jay's gaze to the flower garden--

dahlias, the Mexican national bloom. 

"The Aztecs used to eat them," he told the interviewer.

The scribe wrote this down on his pad from the hotel,

with "Bienvenida a Coyoacan" 

in bold script across the top like a leaflet or a prayer card.

________

for Dverse Poetics: In the light of other days.

Leon Trotsky, living in exile in Mexico, was assassinated in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, using an ice axe. Trostsky lingered for a day before passing. He was an avowed atheist.

Te veo pronto = see you soon

Bon Appetit

"Marlon Brando loves dark women, because he can't see them." --Jane, mental patient

"Children are the only ones who blush." --Lou Reed

The poissonier said to Marcel Proust,
"It isn't always about you.
I've got my own fish to fry."

Nemesis said to Narcissus,
"Get over yourself.
Eat those feewings, and stay out of the water.

Mott the Hoople met a frog and a local beauty for lunch,
and Pharaoh Menes came all the way from Memphis.
The menu was all-natural,
but none of them much liked being told to eat shit.
_______

70 words exactly (excepting the quotes at the top) for Words Count.

Bells

Quasimodo hefts himself onto the handicapped bench of the cross-town bus,
then takes the newspaper crossword puzzle out of his backpack.

"This metal object has a tongue." 4 letters.
Quasimodo smiles and squirms in his seat because he knows this.
Bell!

"A set of tuned metal bells or tubes." 6 letters.
Chimes!
Quasimodo looks around to see if anyone has noticed his success.
No one has.

"Alexander Graham ____." 4 letters.
He doesn't know this one,
but he's arrived at his stop anyway.

At the Office For Americans With Disabilities,
Quasimodo has a desk. 
On it is a telephone which converts voice into text.

His friend Guy, at the next desk, waves at him.
Pointing to his phone, he signs "drunk asshole again."
Quasimodo's laugh is surprisingly pleasant, though of course, Guy can't hear it.

Quasimodo's phone lights up, indicating a call.
Guy has transferred the drunk dialer to him,
and can be seen hurrying off toward the break room with a bag of Doritos.

Looking at his screen, Quasimodo reads what the caller is saying:

Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
                     How it swells!
                     How it dwells
                 On the Future! - how it tells
                 Of the rapture that impels
             To the swinging and the ringing
                 Of the bells, bells, bells -
      Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
                     Bells, bells, bells -
   To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

"May I have your name?" Quasimodo types in.
"Eddie," comes the reply. 

That evening, at O'Brien's Tavern, 
Quasimodo and Eddie sit mooning over a pretty Gypsy girl.
"Go say something to her!" urges Eddie,
but Quasimodo just grins and shakes his head sheepishly.

At nearly two in the morning, Quasimodo hoists Eddie onto his misshapen back
and carries him back to the apartment he had mentioned.
All the while, Eddie mumbles rapturous boozy verse about the Gyspy girl.

Catching the last bus to the group home,
Quasimodo thinks of the girl, and of Eddie's beautiful poems.
"So...lovely..." he says out loud, but no one hears, 
not even the driver perched like a raven in his high seat behind the wheel.
_______

for Fireblossom Friday: mash-ups.  The quoted poem is, of course, by Poe.

      
    
    

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was an intense guy.
We found him in some mom & pop Mexican place in San Antonio,
scribbling on a napkin, 
burning the place down wherever he parked his heart.

We paid for his breakfast.
Ginny let her shawl fall off one shoulder,
and the guy looked like he might slip right into her skin
and stay there, if he could have.

There is always something feminine about a man who can write;
something feminine, too, about a man who really adores women.
We sense it.
We're like birds who see our island and head for it without another thought.
I'm not saying he wasn't a man--
Ginny couldn't shut up about him, the rest of the trip,
like he had lit her, and she kept going off in spectacular colors.

The bluebonnets were out, in all the fields by the highway.
They only grow in Texas, and we stopped to stretch out in them,
drown in them
like a bunch of boho dolphins, sleek and weird,
gloriously out of our element.

When we got close to Dallas, we stopped in Waxahachie.
Ginny was asleep in the back, and Neruda stayed with her,
his arm around her like a mesquite branch across the early sun.
She was wearing red, and if you ask me,
he wanted to suck her like a strawberry, 
but was too protective of her Gypsy dreams to wake her.

At the washeteria, we scavenged empty soap jugs
and weaseled a last load out of them.
Federico Garcia Lorca was there, half sprawled across two plastic chairs,
high as a kite, his hair a mess, his mind a marvel of the age.
I kissed him as a sister would,
to get him to join us, and he did.
I kept close, whispering him my poems,
taking the wheel as we crossed north into Oklahoma.

You will find the right man, I told him,
even though he didn't speak English.
In Spanish, he told me I had already found the right woman,
but that she was hidden,
riding in the night-pocket of God's long sweater,
howling at the stars.

That was when I knew I liked Federico better,
though I was careful never to let Neruda see it.
Anyway, he had Ginny,
and we all had the white stripes going by beneath our wheels,
the warm southern air,
and our four heartbeats which came together for a while
in the unlikely, gorgeous perfection
of our uncommon common language.
__________
  
for Kerry's Pablo Neruda challenge at Real Toads. I don't like writing sonnets, so I hope that this will please, instead.

ομορφιά (Beauty)

It is a breach of etiquette to use another woman's cosmetics--
that is for young girls
painting each other's new, blank faces
until a woman they can be emerges.

One must never walk out of one's front door
without looking one's best.
Beauty shows respect for others as well as for one's self,
and lets lesser women know
to lower their eyes.
It invites men to blind themselves
on the unexpectedly keen edge
of genuine feminine power.

Having spent the night with Athena,
and with no time to go home,
I went to the SAV-RITE,
leaned my claymore against the glass display case,
and described the things I needed.

"Are you a winter or a summer?"
Well,
it said one thing that a sleety rain began turning to snow,
the flakes collecting in my horse's mane
as we stood tossing our heads and shifting from foot to foot
under a giant Revlon ad.
But that was contradicted by the lilies
blooming white as death,
white as a bride,
around our legs and up to our knees.

"I'm not sure," I told her.

I have come across Persia, Africa and France.
I have killed and I have enslaved
all who opposed me.
At times,
my red curls became damaged,
with no product to be had.
I wore a helmet
for six weeks on campaign
to hide my split, untrimmed ends
and my shame.

In Athena's arms last night,
I confessed what she already knew--
that my beauty is limited
by nature
and by the boundaries of artifice.
She kissed me,
wrapping herself around me like silken fog around an evergreen.
I wept to think
that she would do that;
that she would call me "baby",
and value me
as she does her owl and all those she loves the most.

My skin lacks a smooth, even tone.
I am blemished from sun, fire, injury, and fever.
I turned away from the SAV-RITE counter,
daunted,
and went back to Athena,
where I found her pressing my hand-written poems to her
into coherent volumes.

I raised my eyes.
I asked her if she would rather be with Aphrodite
or Artemis
or Phoebe.

She took my hands,
dark with blood under their blunt, unpolished nails.
She said,
"Come back to bed,"
and so I did,
naked
and trembling.
______

Custer

"It is a good day to die." --Sioux warrior, 1876

General George Armstrong Custer comes to the door,
looking dusty and dazed.
"Trick or treat," he says.

Life is full of awkward moments;
times when one wishes for the right words,
a bit of extra kindness,
and a sincere hope that one's face does not say too much.

This visitor is too tall to be a child,
and even a teenager would not appear at an adult's door this way,
bleeding from his arms, side and ears.
The visitor is too western to be Jesus,
having somehow located his cavalry boots and pulled them on;
he wears the boots, and nothing else but his golden curls.

What to do?
Invite him in?
Give him a seat on the davenport,
a nice mug of China black,
and the use of the telephone?

Who would George Armstrong Custer call, now?
His beloved Libby, dead since 1933?
She passed in the springtime, a widow for more than fifty years.
Theirs was a love match, and it was through her brave and tireless efforts
that his legend was created.
Custer! Hero!
And yet, now here he is, requesting candy like a five year old.

It would be easy to spout maxims.
It would be easy to regurgitate cheery bromides, such as "God never gives you more than you can handle."
What about Sioux?
What about Sans Arc?
What about all of Custer's brave men, scattered across a Montana prairie?
Perhaps it would be better just to sit with Custer for a while,
hold his hand,
even kiss him, if you can bear it, and say, tenderly, that the kiss was from Libby,
saved lo these many years.

In the end,
Custer will have to be turned out into the night.
Don't look at me like that, I don't like it either,
but he is dead
and was never meant to command again,
or love,
or even scratch the dog behind his ears...
King refuses to enter the parlor, and stands with his hackles up, growling,
no respecter of rank or reputation,
and knowing meat too old to be eaten when he smells it.

Goodbye, dear Custer,
"Autie",
American icon that you have become.
Please, take the porch flag to wrap yourself in.
Lie down in the garden with the mums,
and someone will play "Gary Owen" for you one last time.
Then, the lights must be turned out,
the candy put away,
and Halloween will be over,
leaving only a steady cold wind across what might be the Black Hills
or only Monroe, Michigan
on the chilly last night of October.
_____

for Ella's challenge at Real Toads