Archive for March 2012

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“Screened (Mid-Sixties)”

March 13, 2012

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Screened (Mid-Sixties)

It looked, from the peaceful pictures,
like the land of the hand-held scythe,
what with the impossibly green gatherings
of ankle-short stalk so gently bordered
by palm and vine,
till the choppers swept the frames
like combines, their great blades
threshing a beat that thwapped
to the other side of the world, even of our
TV screen, where we fought
over the only truly comfy chair, its
thick sag re-shaping to each
as required, the rest of us
stretching out on the living room rug
rather than take a straightback.

We watched, silent beneath that thwap,
the jewel shag of paddy turn
to a blurred-stained-brown, the sweating lens
become a windshield wiped
by blades of chopping/chopped, fogged
by non-monsoon cloud and
napalm drizzle, vibration only clipped
by shouts of Charlie, shots
of GI, the stretch of sagging legs,
boots notched at elbows–the air
seemed to be sucked from us too
by the rotary vacuum, though, of course,
that was not the case; we could change
the channel, turn off
the TV, pretend
that what we’d seen
had absolutely nothing
to do with us there, in our living room;
we could fight again
about our only truly comfy
chair.

I am posting the above poem for dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night.  (For dVerse devotees, it was the poem I wrote last weekend thinking that the poetics prompt would relate to going back anywhere in time, not specifically 1999!)   And if you are not a dVerse devotee, become one!  Check out the site.

And while you are at it, check out my comic novel,NOSE DIVE,  book of poetry, GOING ON SOMEWHERE, or children’s counting book 1 MISSISSIPPI. )  NOSE DIVE is a lot of fun and a great bargain on Kindle for 99 cents, only a bit more in print.  K.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 16 Comments

Love Among The Shadows (slightly skewed to the right)

March 12, 2012

Categories: Uncategorized, Vicissitudes of Life
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Comments: 4 Comments

“Villanelle to Glasses”

March 11, 2012

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Another week beginning, and here’s a new picture prompt from Tess Kincaid of Magpie Tales.  The real photograph by Uzengia Aleksander Nedic  is somewhat blurry;  my version (not blurry enough) is above, and my poem below.  I am also linking this poem to “Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads” for their Monday Open Link Day.

Villanelle to Glasses

Without glasses, the edges of my world are furred
like the ending of an echo, crush of shale.
Ideas are seen as if through water, blurred,

trooping muzzily through head, not shaped by word,
as if mind’s eye can’t make out thought’s detail
without glasses, the edges of my world so furred.

Then, too, I find my verbal memory’s slurred:
I’ll say this “peach” for onion, “kite” for sail;
ideas are seen as if through water, blurred,

and though I tell myself I’m quite absurd–
my mind’s still good, it’s only eyes that fail–
without glasses, the edges of my world are furred.

Even corrected vision’s not assured,
each type of lens its own peculiar jail,
where ideas are seen as if through water, blurred,

and I must make a choice between page or bird,
eternal grain of sand/horizon’s trail.
Without glasses, the edges of my world inferred, 
ideas are seen as if through water, blurred.

Have a nice (fully-lit and clear) Sunday.  And, if you get a chance, check out:  comic novel,NOSE DIVE,  book of poetry, GOING ON SOMEWHERE, or children’s counting book 1 MISSISSIPPI. )

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized, villanelle
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Comments: 21 Comments

First Day Daylight Saving’s Time – New Found Benefit (in Nightgown with Black Velour Skirt)

March 11, 2012

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New found advantage of daily savings time:  dawn’s early light.

Okay, maybe not dawn, but closer than midday.

I’m not normally someone who will get up and out at even at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, much less 6:30.

Oh, I’ll talk about how renewing it would be, but then I’ll pull my comforter over my shoulder and snuggle deeper into that little (big) depression I’ve formed in the good old memory foam.

But today–aha!–profiting from that extra (or rather subtracted) hour–I was up and out.

Sure, I wasn’t quite able to get dressed–pulled my only long skirt (velour) over my nightgown, hiking boots over sleep socks, down jacket over the whole assortment.

But I was up!  And out!

And the light was blue and pale and fresh and kindly promising in just those ways of a somewhat earlier morning, and the coming day seemed eminently possible.

Hope yours is too.

Categories: Uncategorized, Vicissitudes of Life
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Comments: 1 Comment

“Winter Break, 1999”

March 10, 2012

The wonderful Shawna is hosting a dVerse Poets Pub poetics prompt on “1999”.  (I have to confess to having spent the whole day writing about 1969, till I realized I’d missed a digit!)

But 1999 had its own ethos, so I slowly, awkwardly, switched gears/years.  (1969, in this case, will have to come later.)

Winter Break, 1999

I remember at the Christmas party edge
of Y2K, the DUI guy telling me
how he planned to sneak a new license
once the DMV went down.

And how so many worried that planes
would crash that prices for flights
leaving New York City New Year’s Eve
plummeted, even flights across
the world with free champagne.

What a pain it was back then to
get to Lower Broadway from the
West-–you had to either go through
the Towers or around, and it was
a long long way around–

Taking a break upstate, where the power did go out,
not because of the glitch of far computer, but
wires down nearby, a thick wet snow
webbing all in glassine sparkle–

Going through a long hike too,
the Towers’ lobbies maddeningly
grandiose, soaring glass bordered by the swish
of world flags, red carpet as
thick as a wad of wonga–

With no heat, we laid fires for
the others, finding our own in the
flicker of sculpted muscle against
smooth skin; how mad it felt,
that really and truly caring
what others thought, we
dared try for the real and true–

And yet, how glad–to be
in your close, warm arms
and not on one
of those cheap world flights, not because
I feared the planes would crash–no, that
just wasn’t one of the things I worried about
back then, planes crashing–

(PS – beautiful photo is candlelit snow igloo made by certain family members at the time of a later snow.)

Categories: poetry
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Comments: 16 Comments

Free Verse/Triolet – “Trapped Heart,” “After Lashing Out”

March 10, 2012

(Sorry- this heart in chains--"trapped" but perhaps not quite what the poem envisions.)

Here’s kind of an interesting exercise for those interested in the ways in which form shapes content.  The first is a draft poem in “free” verse;  the second is a triolet (a form recently highlighted by Gay Cannon and Samuel Peralta in dVerse Poets Pub “form for all”) which I wrote the next morning.   Oddly, I am also linking this post to “Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads”, for their prompt about love and affection, since the poems deal with their backwash.

 

Trapped Heart 

And then you come to a time
when you are willing to excise a limb.
You are consciously an animal,
caught; cutting–hand, foot,
arm–seems the only cut loose.
You gnaw, increasingly
panicked, you saw,
increasingly frantic, not
for freedom but survival,
for you know,
even as you slice, that it’s
your heart that’s trapped,
your heart that is beating you
so hard, so insistently. 

And here’s the triolet:

After Lashing Out 

Then comes a time when you’d cut off a limb–
when you’re an animal, entrapped and sore,
when, in the come of time, you’d cut off a limb,
if you believed your severed paw could trim
the clock hand’s spring; if you believed a whim
of excision could take you back before
that time, when what you became cut off a limb–
you were an animal, entrapped and sore.


(As always, all rights reserved.  And as always please please please check out my books Comic novel,NOSE DIVE,  book of poetry, GOING ON SOMEWHERE, or children’s counting book 1 MISSISSIPPI. )

Categories: poetry
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Comments: 10 Comments

Fish For Friday Flash 55 – “Used to Be” (The Secret Life of You Know What–)

March 9, 2012

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Used To Be

Fridays were permeated
by the smell of fish; fuzzy brown
limp sticks exuding stink
through the school in vengeance for
their not-so-sea
change, an odiferous insistence
that they had once been something actually
found in the natural world, subject
to the laws of birth, death, decay.  We
could only eat them
with ketchup.

As always, all rights reserved.  And, as always, have a great Friday.  And, since it’s Friday, tell it to the G-Man!

And finally, finally, if you are looking for some light-hearted escape over the week-end, check out NOSE DIVE, my comic novel about noses, New York, friendship, and fallen goudas.   Told too with a dab of fone sex. (But very innocently.)

PS – and I should really have made it 55 flavors instead of 57, but couldn’t do that to an old icon.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 12 Comments

Triolets (Waltzing Not-Mathilda)

March 8, 2012

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Here are two triolets!  A triolet is a medieval form that is the subject of a wonderful article by Samuel Peralta and Gay Reiser Cannon for dVerse Poets Pub Form For All.  It is a form involving repeating lines.  (I think of it as a short waltz of a villanelle, but I’m not sure where the 1-2-3 comes from except that the first line is repeated three times.)

Below are my two draft attempts;  they use some of the same lines.  I personally think the second is better (though maybe I can work them into a pair.)

Starting to Unwind (Beginning Yoga)

I found that I’d not breathed for many years
and that my heart was lodged in my right-hand back.

I’d recycled air from way back when and fears
I found that I’d not breathed for many years

to anyone–not sympathetic ears,
nor those stopped up against a hurting fact

I’d found.  I had not breathed for many years;
my heart was lodged in my right-hand back.


Who knows?

I found that I’d not breathed since who knows when–
a cherry blossom spring, I wore white gloves
whose seams ran up my hand,  then back again.

I found that I’d not breathed since–  Who knows when
the heart bursts seams when it finds a pen
to hold it, when it leashes its wild loves?    

I found that I’d not breathed since who knows when,
a cherry blossom spring–I wore white gloves. 

All rights reserved. 

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 17 Comments

A de Chirical Poem? -Tuning (As It Were) The Quivering Lyre

March 7, 2012
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Here’s a rather silly poem posted after reading a lot of good online poetry.

Tuning The Quivering Lyre

What I want is to write something lyrical,
with language that’s tonally spherical,
with similes deep and de Chirical–
what I want is to write something lyrical.

But instead I end up with prosaic–
a verse like a sulphuric egg–
with word usage much like the Hague–
(the Conventions–oh oh so prosaic.)

Which is why I am hoping this time
to at least find some music in rhyme–
the repeating of vowels the same kind
at the end of each hoppity line–

Sure, some may insist it’s no poem,
if it does not recall a Zen Koan,
or love story picked to the bone
(the meeting, the parting, the moan.)

But me, I still find that I write it–
caring not that its words are benighted,
chock full of old sentiments tritish
and rhymes that are really not quitish–

Hope you don’t mind.

Categories: poetry, Uncategorized
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Comments: 7 Comments

Politicking–Better than an Unpaid Internship

March 7, 2012

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Republican candidates, especially Rick Santorum, have been making a big effort to appeal to blue collar workers.  Apparently, one reason for Santorum’s perceived strength against Romney has come from discomfort with the fact that Romney is just so darn rich.

Gingrich has also been positing himself as the Republican candidate against Wall Street.  (Simultaneously claiming credit for the prosperity and deficit reduction of the Clinton years and policies.)

I’m not a supporter of Romney, but it somehow seems ironic for Santorum and Gingrich to tout their street cred.  Santorum reported income of approximately $1 million per year for 2009 and 2010; Gingrich and Callista together reported earnings of over $3 million for 2010.

A million a year is small potatoes compared to the $21 million earned by Romney.  Still, I can’t help thinking that at least Romney’s earnings come from an actual business (even if one is critical of its practices), while Gingrich and Santorum are career politicians.

A million a year to Santorum as a “corporate media consultant”?

Really?

(To be fair to Santorum–a lot of ex-pols have done very well in kind of creepy ways on the post-office circuit==I think of the millions made by Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton among others. Also, I don’t know how someone runs for president at all if they don’t get some kind of nest egg behind them.  Still, I don’t think any of that makes the practice more palatable.)

Categories: news, Uncategorized
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Comments: 4 Comments

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