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Finding Shade by the Lake in July
Saturday, July 14, 2007 II.7.2 It's the middle of the summer and it's to hot to go out and play, so let's read some poetry.  We start this week with a little something in defense of my style which, for better or worse, is what I do. I like foreplay some say my lines are too short and s k i n n y and my poems to long and it takes too forever to get past the foreplay and into the good stuff and I say hey foreplay's not so bad and how can you have a third act if you don't have an act I and an act II I mean after all consider shakespeare (and I don't compare myself to him though we do face similar problems at our own respective levels) what if he wrote like they say I ought to write with long lines and got to the point just right away without the all the messy stuff up front and all those silly rhymes that slow things down and that really weird english and so many characters with all those strange names and long speeches like who cares about benvolio anyway I don't well maybe like this romeo and juliet.... ....no too long just.... maybe just this... roy and julie boy thinks girl is dead kills self girl finds boy dead kills self too curtain applause that wouldn't be any good at all  Here's a poem by New York poet Brian Blanchfield from his book Not Even Then. String Theory Readymade Number one, draw on your paper your paper on fire. Get this down. Use this red. Any line you start is a hose in half, and from third dimension a fourth is siphoned, but that suggests as far as it goes. By no power higher can you raise yourself and document. Make fire, page one of one. With fire or with red or with rise begin. International operator, come on with patience. Once I have you I think that once I was imaginative and more than once imaginary, closely an ant at the date line climbing over. I answered Susan Mensch's cell phone because it rang and, from Four Seasons Chicago, Susan said she'd cancel usage, so, darling say hello in English remember I miss you. If Duchamp made quite the New York snowshovel and from scratch the vial of Paris air, such is art more material to love. Once Mrs. Stephen Jay Gould makes a name for herself, rest assured everyone's units are like assholes, and there is one theory of everything: One's attention is divided between following that car and stepping on it. To have come by pursuit is fait accompli, the skin and trail and look of getting out but not the serpent self.  Next we have web-poet Dale McLain. Although I've been reading Dale on-line for at least a couple of years, this is her first time in "Here and Now." Dale describes herself as a suburban wife and mother who lives just north of Dallas, Texas. She says she considers art her first language and works in many mediums with collage being her current passion. Her poetry has been published online and in print. We are pleased to have her here. You can see more of her work at her site http://seadreamstudio.net/ Here's her poem. past solstice We breathe in blind syncopation on this bed of banked ashes. Side by side we watch the sky, the pinwheeling stars, Venus rises to the west like a beacon or an unblinking eye. Between us lies an ocean and a wall of years. Unbreached, it takes the wind like a lover's kiss, sways and sighs, but stands, impenetrable. My hand traces the lower stones for hints of warmth or the memory of what I imagine we shared. Surely some tenderness lodges in these grey clefts. Only one pure place remains. I find you always in this sky of myths.  From the book Across State Lines we have this poem by Kathryn Stripling Byer which ws selected by the book's editors to represent North Carolina. fromMountain Time Up here in the mountains we know what extinct means. We've seen how our breath on a bitter night fades like a ghost from the window glass. We know the wolf's gone. The panther. We've heard the old stories run down, stutter out into silence. Who knows where we're heading? All roads seem to lead to Millennium, dark roads with drop-offs we can't plumb. It's time to be brought up short now with the tale-tellers' Listen: There once lived a woman named Delphia who walked through the hills teaching children to read. She was known as a quilter whose hand never wearied, a mother who raised up two daughters to pass on her words like a strong chain of stitches. Imagine her sitting among us, her quick thimble moving along these lines as if to hear every word striking true as the stab of her needle through calico. While prophets discourse about endings, don't you think she'd tell us the world as we know it keeps calling us back to beginnings? This labor to make our words matter is what any good quilter teaches. A stitch in time, let's say. A blind stitch that clings to the edges of what's left, the ripped scraps and remnants, whatever won't stop taking shape even though the whole crazy quilt's falling to pieces.  And now another first-timer for "Here and Now," Dan Tomsett. As with our other first-timers this week, I read Dan's poem on the Wild Poetry Forum and invited him to join us here. He is from Seattle, a beautiful city we visited in May as part of a wonderful drive up the Pacific coast. I'm thinking it might be helpful to explain to readers who might not be card players the meaning of the word Dan uses in his title, "mucked." In poker, the pile of discarded cards is called the muck. When you discard your cards, as when you fold your hand, you have mucked. Here's Dan's poem. Eden Mucked So the apples fell, and Adam bruised easily as the first leaves cracked. Eve gathered there'd be grumbling. The damn kids heave stones towards the river, the birds, each other, and she knew there'd be days like this: "But at least there's seasons!" she screams, as a once monotonous, green idea of paradise rots around her feet.  The next poem is from the book Forbidden Words, a selection of poems by Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade. The poem originally appeared in his book Dark Domain published in 1971. Music Poplars. This music of morning's whitewashed walls. Sweet vowels of shadow and water in a summer of tawny lazing animals. Morning lark in the happy air of June. Tart music of thistles. Music of fire around the lips. Unbuttoned round the waist. Between the legs gathering. Music of the first rains upon the hay. Fragrance only. Bee of water. A lap where the brief flame of a pomegranate shines. Music, take me. Where are the boats? Where are the islands? (Translated by Alexis Levitin)  Now we're back with an old friend of "Here and Now," Jane Roken. Welcome back, Jane. Lonely attic manga blues ... sometimes I'm a manga bird and nothing is impossible I know it all and when the moon rises it rises for me I have that power ... sometimes I'm content to let anything happen in its own unit of time I watch starry-eyed shameless translucent ... sometimes I'm a skewed nail in a lonely attic wall in an abandoned house windows broken I can't get out only feel the draught  A couple of weeks ago, we used an essay by Victor Hernandez Cruz on poet Juan Felipe Herrera. After reading the essay I resolved to go find one of Herrera's books. Well, I did and now here's a poem from that book Giraffe On Fire. I like it. You'll see more of Herrera here on "Here and Now." This piece is from the poem which gave name to the book. It is a long poem of 28 parts. This is part 12. 12 First of all: cinnamon, then turquoise. First of all crimson powders, then fire. First of all, scars in braids across the back, then colony, then origin, then you begotten in power. You begotten in tranquility. You in megalomania, American new furniture. You in blues and man in blue, in nails, in Madrid, with Juan Gris drawing your nose and multiple eyes. You, first of all in Diego Rivera's rogue trousers and boots. First of all, you in thigh mambos. You in Erzuli's light captives off the shores of Trinidad. You marooned in Dutch ships. First Zulu, first in Sudan, then Dinka. First, the drum in the Sea of Cortez, across Janitzio, in Veracruz. Tumbao, Chekere in octagons, crushed pubis and clenched bellies. First, the feline stone in the portrait, the one where you reach for me, without language, you say. Without the sludge and cottage industry of apparitions for English trinkets. First of all, Cha-Cha-Cha, then waves. First, then second Rumba, Queen of Cosmic Sweat, the night. Do not believe this gutter guitar. This Velazauez, this time. Do not believe it. Take the easel down. See through, for once. See through Coptic, see through the Orange Free State, the diamonds enlarged as penis and vulva. I am in a half stance. One half goes into darkness with a rag of light on my leg. The other half goes into you as you come to me, as you march with your instruments and your continent, blood soaked against your jacket, tarnished by minstrel water.  Some days, the poetry business can just get plain discouraging, as I explain here. I do not want to write tonight I do not want to write tonight I read a new poet and it was like flying inside a skyrocket crashing into the sky exploding over an ocean a thousand sparkles multiplied in briny reflection above and below and all around and I am struck dumb by the green fire above and below and all around and do not want to write tonight  Our next poem is the second section from the poem The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, the anti-Vietnam War poem by Robert Bly. We did the first section last week. II Excellent Roman knives slip along the ribs. A stronger man starts to jerk up the strips of flesh. "Let's hear it again: you believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost?" A long scream unrolls. More. "From the political point of view, democratic institutions are being built in Vietnam, wouldn't you agree?" A green parrot shudders under the fingernails. Blood jumps in the pocket A scream lashes like a tail "Let us not be de-terred from our task by the voices of dis-sent...." The whine of the jets pierce like a long needle. As soon as the President finishes his press conference, black wings carry off the words, bits of flesh still clinging to them. The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television reporters lie, the priests lie, What are these lies? They mean that the country wants to die. Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass, like mile-long caravans of Conestoga wagons crossing the Platte. And a long desire for death goes with them, guiding it all from beneath: "a death longing if all longing else be vain," stringing together the vague and foolish words. It is a desire to eat death, to gobble it down, to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open. It is a desire to take death inside, to feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs, like a clothes brush in the intestines - That is the thrill that leads the President to lie. Now the Chief Executive enters, and the press conference begins. First the President lies about the date the Appalachian Mountains rose. Then he lies about the population of Chicago, the the weight of the adult eagle, and the acreage of the Everglades. Now he lies about the number of fish taken every year in the Arctic. He has private information about which city is the capital of Wyoming. He lies next about the birthplace of Attila the Hun, The about the composition of the amniotic fluid. He insists Luther was never a German, and only the Protestants sold indulgences. He declares that Pope Leo X wanted to reform the Church, but the liberal elements prevented him. He declares the Peasants' War was fomented by Italians from the North. And the Attorney General lies about the time the sun sets. These lies mean that something in the nation wants to die. What is there now to hold us to earth? We long to go. It is the longing for someone to come and take us by the hand to where they all are sleeping: where the Egyptian pharaohs are asleep, and our own mothers, and all those disappeared children, who went around with us on the rings at grade school. Do not be angry at the President - He is longing to take in his hands the locks of death-hair: to meet his own children, dead, or never born.... He is drifting sideways toward the dusty places.  This is an old poem, written a couple of years ago and included in my book Seven Beats a Second. I think I've used it here before, but it seem to be appropriate to use it right here again. Sometimes, when we are most passionate about something, most committed and most certain of our own intelligence and virtue, it is time to ask, with humility, whether we are all really asking the right questions. That's what this poem is about. antiwar poems are easy the heart of the matter is that the heart of the matter sometimes doesn't matter much antiwar poems are easy since, in our hearts, we all know that the logic of war that says I will kill strangers until a stranger kills me is insane and who can deny that in our hearts we all know a human fetus no matter how small and misshapen and incomplete is a human-in-waiting holding within its tiny bounds all the capacity for love and laughter as any of us and who, even among the most aggrieved of us could, without a tremor of hand and heart, push the button that drops the cyanid pellet ending the life of even the bloodiest of our murdering kind yet we kill strangers who might someday have been our friend and we erase from the future the love and laughter of those we decide will never be and we murder the murderers with appropriate writ and ceremony all these terrible things we do because our heart cannot guide us in choosing the lesser of evils it is our lizard brain we must turn to when the heart of the matter doesn't matter enough  Here's a short piece by Carl Sandburg. Most would say his time has come and gone but I think he'll be back, valued at some point in the future. if not for his artistic merit, at least for his acute eye and sharp pen, just as we value many of the ancient poets for the glimpses of real life in times long before our own. Cumulatives Storms have beaten on this point of land And ships gone to wreck here and the passers-by remember it with talk on the deck at night as they near it. Fists have beaten on the face of this old prizefighter And his battles have held the sporting pages and on the street they indicate him with their right forefinger as one who once wore a championship belt. A hundred stories have been published and a thousand rumored About why this tall dark man has divorced two beautiful young women And married a third who resembles the first two and the shake their heads and say, "There he goes," when he passes by in sunny weather or in rain along the city streets.  Carl Sandburg was the working man's poet. I'm ok with doing that, as long as I don't get confused with a working man. My days of that are over. Like it's said, I love work and could watch it all day. That's me. working man blues did some gainful employment today I try to keep such antisocial behavior to a minimum but do stumble into it now and again though I much prefer pecking away at this key board ungainful though it may be there is a certain soul satisfaction to it when the stars are aligned and it feels like just the thing that ought to be done right now right here with you  I think this must be the darkest poem I've ever read, with an ending that sucks the breath right out of you. It's by Wendy Rose and it's from the collection Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. The Day They Cleaned Up the Border El Salvador, February, 1981 "(Government Soldiers) killed my children. I saw it. I saw the head of a baby float- ing in the water." Surviving village woman as quoted in the news How comforting the clarity of water, flute music in a rush or startling hush, crackle of grass like seeds in a gourd and the soothing whisper of the reeds. I prayed the whole night to be taken to my past, for the pounding of rifles comes again and again morning by morning till my two babies lay, names stolen away, in their beds and in the yard where they had played. so many gone and I pray to be taken, for the lizards to notice and begin eating at my feet, work their way up till even my heart is nibbled away. I have come so many mornings to the stream, so many times prayed in the glistening mist and now drink oceans to drown myself from the mountains of memory. But look - that little melon rind or round gourd, brown and white in the water where I could pluck it out and use it dry, slipping past me in the ripples and turning till its tiny mouth, still suckling, points at me.  Now, another vision of hell on earth, this one from Laura Ring, another "Here and Now" first-timer. I think this was the first of Laura's poems that I read, just a couple of days ago, on the Wild Poetry Forum. Here it is for you to read. Dis-articulated "Body parts were scattered over streets and buildings today after an explosion in Karachi's busiest marketplace." At high detonation velocity, bomb beats body every time. I imagine a headscarf of white chiffon, snagged on the splintered beam of a tea stall; Bata sandal thrown atop canvas awning. You tell me I must picture the phalange of a young man coiled in a dust-strewn skein of Chinese silk, or a child's distal metacarpal as it tears through toppled aluminum pans but the mind does not work this way. The physical laws of the universe are unbending. In the blast perimeter, there is little for the eye to linger on. Bangle Market is gone, redacted like the anatomical terms in Modi's Medical Jurisprudence I picked up on a lark at Urdu Bazaar. The dark-eyed vendors who slide bracelets of colored glass onto newlywed wrists. Beggar children with infected nose rings and tiny-beak fingers who peck the memsahib's forearm. Donkey carts, hagglers, merchants, all removed from the knowable world. Not removed, you say, just blown to bits: zippers, snaps, belt buckles soldered to pavement; nubuck falling like confetti - the fanfare of a second slaughter. Skull nestled in gray matter, flesh painted on stone and I hate you, staff reporter, for your pitiless turn of phrase.  Our next poet, Shawn Nacona Stroud, is another first-timer here at "Here and Now." He is a native of Florida and now resides in Charlotte, NC where he paints and writes poetry. He also works in graphic arts. His poetry has appeared in Mississippi Crow Magazine and the Loch Raven Review. Here's Shawn's poem. Becoming Virginia Woolf Everything wavers, iridescent glass moils above me as a chilled gush-gust continually flaps me along the riverbed. I sway like seaweed. Carp, Pike, and Barbel regard me with interested eyes while awaiting dinner. My fingers glide across anchors of stone that pack each pocket, stroke the smooth surfaces which weigh me down with unquestionable intent. I watch trapped oxygen escape from each waterlogged nostril - air balloons rise towards the heavens. They tick time like a doomsday clock constantly counts down seconds. Soon the mouth dam will fail - aquatic air will flood in and fish will clench and gnaw with cannibal jaws while they eat me as their own.  Over past weeks we've read a number of the short travel poems of French poet Blaise Cendrars, taken from his book Complete Poems. Last week, he was in the eastern United States. Now we have several short poems from a section he called Far West I. Cucumingo The San Bernadino hacienda I ws built in the middle of a lush valley fed by a multitude of small streams that run down from the surrounding mountains The roofs are tile red in the shade of sycamores and laurels Trout thrive in the streams Immense flocks graze untended in the lush meadows The orchards are thick with fruit pears apples grapes pineapples figs oranges And in the truck gardens Old World vegetables grow beside those of the tropics Plenty of game here The California quail The rabbit known as the cottontail The long-eared hare known as the jackass The prairie hen the turtle dove the partridge The wild duck and wild goose The antelope It's true you still see wildcats and rattlesnakes But there aren't any pumas anymore II Dorypha On holidays When the Indians and vaqueros get drunk on whiskey and pulque Dorypha dances To the sound of the Mexican guitar Such exciting habaneras That people come from miles around to admire her No woman knows as well as she How to drape the silk mantilla And to fix her blond hair With a ribbon A comb A flower III. The Mockingbird The heat is staggering Balcony shaded with trumpet vines and purplish honeysuckle In the big silence of the dozing countryside You can hear The gurgling of little rills The distant mooing of big herds of grazing cattle The song of the nightingale The crystal-clear hissing of big bullfrogs The hooting of the owl And the call of the mockingbird in the cactus IV. Mushroom Town Toward the end of the year 1911 a group of Yankee financiers decide to build a town way out west at the foot of the Rocky Mountains Not even a month goes by and there are three Union railroads although still no houses Workers pour in from everywhere As early as the second month three churches are built and five theaters are going full blast Around a square that still has a few nice trees a forest of metal girders rings day and night with pounding hammers Winches Machines huffing and puffing The steel skeletons of houses thirty stories high start lining up Brick walls ar often plain aluminum sheets fill in the interstices of the framework In a few hours reinforced concrete is poured using the Edison method Because of a sort of superstition no one wants to christen the town and a contest is announced with a raffle and prizes given by the town's biggest newspaper which is also looking for a name V. Club Although it's on the official map of the town this street still consists only of plank fences and piles of rubbish The only way to get across the street is by hopping in zigzags over the mud and puddles At the end of this unfinished boulevard lit by powerful arc lights is the Black Bean Club which is also a matrimonial agency Wearing cowboy hats or wool caps with earflaps Faces hard as nails Men get out of the 60-horsepower cars they're breaking in and put their names on the list look through the photograph album Choose their fiancees who are cabled to embark at Cherbourg on the Keiser Wilhelm and who sail full steam ahead Mostly German girls A stable-boy in black wearing swansdown shoes opens he door with a glacial propriety and gives the newcomer a suspicious once-over I drink a whiskey cocktail then another then another Then a mint julep a mother's milk a prairie oyster a nightcap (Translated by Ron Padgett)  Next, here's a little travel poem of my own. prelude to the afternoon of the froot loop the clouds were hanging low black as the joke that made the hang- man laugh but the rain had been sporadic and light so we took a drive out to Medina Lake for a late lunch at Oasis Bar and Grill right on the lake in little Mico so small they didn't even bother to widen the road (thick boneless pork chops with razzberry chipotle sauce - the best ever) then scouted out some of the little one and a half lane county roads that run patched and bumpy over rocky hills through little stone canyons not sure usually where we were or where we were going and all around green trees green hills green meadows green valleys green green green in the hill country in July, what a marvelous believe-it-or-not thing it is to see finally found our way to County Road 471 where we started then to Culebra to Grissom Bandera Rolling Ridge and finally home for a bowl of Froot Loops and Law & Order reruns  Next, a little fun with e.e. cummings from his book is 5. This poem is the eleventh poem from the second section of the book, titled in true cummings fashion, Two XI my sweet old etcetera aunt lucy during the recent war could and what is more did tell you just what everybody was fighting for, my sister isabel created hundreds (and hundreds)of socks not to mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers etcetera wristers etcetera,my mother hoped that I would die etcetera bravely of course my father used to become hoarse talking about how it was a privilege and if only he could meanwhile my self etcetera lay quietly in the deep mud et cetera (dreaming, et ecetera,of Your smile eyes knees and of your Etcetera)  Sometimes it's fun to just let the old brain ramble off on its own. it's about the syrup just riffing in my head with no particular place to go poem wise and I'm reminded it's friday night so it was dinner at cha cha's a family friday tradition the san antonio branch of the family getting together on friday night usually at cha cha's since they have a botana grande platter that'll feed four or five and my favorites pollo en mole chili rellano and texas style enchiladas which is a kind of a gringo enchilada smothered in american cheese velvetta for authenticity and chile sauce with onions on the side and crackers yep crackers like I said a gringo enchilada and since I'm the only gringo in the bunch I'm given a pass especially if I show proper respect by alternating with the rellano and the mole I'm telling you this diversity stuff works out if you give it a try I'm even allowed my tennessee hillbilly beans and cornbread at home if I don't make a fuss about the beans and rice and we don't have company to see what I do with the syrup  Now, two short poems from Guillaume Apollinaire, another French poet from the same milieu as Cendrars, contemporaries in both time and style. (Also like Cendrars, a traveler, including visits to the United States at about the same time as Cendrars.) The Wind by Night Oh! the pine tops grind as they collide The wind is moaning from the southern places From the river nearby triumphal voices Of pixies laugh into the gusts Attis Attis Attis bare breasted sexy It is you the pixies ridicule Your trees are falling in the gothic wind Your forest panics like a primitive army Whose lances o pine trees tremble in retreat And now and now extincted villages muse Like virgin girls or poets or old men They will never respond no matter what happens Not even when vultures pounce on their pigeons Autumn In the fog the knock-kneed peasant and his ox Go slowly through the autumn fog That hides the villages and all their ugliness The peasant keeps on walking humming A song about love and deception A song about a ring and a heart on fire Oh autumn the autumn ambushed the summer In the fog I saw two shadows going (Poems translated by Donald Revell)  Here's a new poem from a web-friend we haven't seen in a while, Alan Addotto. Subdivisions Zeno, an ancient Greek philosopher thought that no journey could be undertaken because there was an infinity of subdivided distances, an uncountable sum of fractional parts to traverse between the origin and the destination. Halfway there broke down to quarters which broke down to eighths......ad infinitum and worse. This morning as you left for work walking toward your car after your goodbye kiss for the day I thought of this. How long is a second again? a minute? an hour? a day? While you are away I wait Caught between anticipation and fear  I visited my favorite Half-Priced Books on Broadway this morning and found I, In The Membership Of My Days, a book of poetry by the now-deceased British actor Richard Harris. I think the last thing I saw him in (maybe the last thing he was in) was Eastwood's Unforgiven. He played the gunfighter English Bob, almost a comic character until Gene Hackman beat the crap out of him. Here's a poem from the book. On The One-Day-Dead Face Of My Father May 1968 Can you touch me now With your marble lips and increase your love? Can you now touch me with your dead hand and direct me in my path? Now can you see me in your dea' and say 'What is right” Though you know the answer now Now in your stillness Pave the way of my doing Cold thoughts in your give creep away and say in your marble walk and cold tombstone of you stare Rise now above your mound and wound and see you son in your eye Touch again the fond fountain of his flow; Grow in the dead and deadly of your going Can the paint and corrupt of your image colour the size of my want? Can your star in its mighty walk balk my evolution in its stride? Guide me now in your silence Cough up one silent prayer and stare at me again and see the woven fabric of your doing bend his knee and plea in the tired optic of your stare a prayer of acceptance Father in your mound and farther away I stay at marble length and cry Hoping that by and by in your height I might grow in your marble sight  Memory is a little thing we take out of the drawer sometimes to play with. Sometimes we get more than we bargain for. memories are like roses memories are like roses the more you pick the more they bloom and lately I've been trying to pick some of my earliest like I remember when I was four sitting on the floor by my parents' bed with my father and my older brother learning that I had a new baby brother born that day and a year or two before that in another city playing in the sunshine with a little blond girl just a moment I remember as light bright sunlight and the brilliant light of the little girl's hair like that nano-moment when a flash camera flashes and all is bright then gone before you can blink and between those two found pieces of my life waking up at midnight when my dad came home from work with a present for me a little metal airplane with wooden wings he made for me and it's only many years later I think of that and of the time it took to make that little airplane by hand and the love that went into it's creation and recognition that it was the best present I ever received and a better present than I ever gave my son better than the nintendo and the ninja turtles and the transformers and all those other like things that came and went before one year's birthday could be overtaken by the next and I am saddened by my failure and even more by my too-late recognition that time to do better is past  I also found this morning a night without armor, a book of poetry by singer/songwriter Jewel. Here's the poem. Underage I hung out once in the bathroom of Trade Winds Harley bar in Anchorage with several biker chicks for company until the cops left. They had pale skin and thick black eye makeup and they asked me to sing at their weddings. I said I'd ask my dad. We all sat on the counter and waited for the pigs to leave. Some guy O.D's and was outside foaming at the mouth. I remember looking in the mirror and seeing this white face, my shirt all buttoned up. The women were nice to me and looked like dark angels beside me. I like them, and together we waited patiently for the cops to leave, so I could go back out and join my dad up on stage.  I made a new poetry friend at the Casa Chiapas Poetry Table, Lori L. E. Simpson. Lori is a short story writer, novelist and performance poet. Here are three short poems she read for us Thursday night. Pantoum of Saldana Street I grew up on a mostly quiet street, There's not much more I can say. I grew up listening to a heavy beat, And I still hear it today. There's not much more I can say... Except the song my heart sang was not always sweet, And I still hear it today. It still moves my soul and feet. I wish there was something more I could say. I grew up listening to a heavy beat, Though I'm learning to listen to myself any way, I grew up on a (mostly) quiet street. For Finding Your Poetry Again Take your pen in hand, There's no need to rush, No need to understand What your heart won't hush. Write down the first thing That comes to mind. If it makes your heart to sing, That's just fine. If it makes you heart to weep. That's fine, too.. Simply wake from your sleep Poetry...will come to you. If Shakespeare Were Alive Today Would He Write? All the world's a stage, And all the men and women Are merely TV addicts. They leave their sets To enter the kitchen, Only to exit with junk food, And lie around on the sofa, Waiting to be entertained, As reality show players, Instead of true actors.  Well, have to leave now. The situation has gotten dire and if I don't leave quick I may be put in charge of fixing it. Here's the problem, as I see it. the threat grows worse by the hour I avert my eyes as I walk from the front door to my car, trying not to see the grass grown to savannah heights as I pass it was the rain miracle grow falling from the sky and falling and falling and falling more, more more until the rivers are high and lakes are full and the aquifer levels are risen to restart natural springs dormant for fifty years and all of that's nice but the grass the thick high grass growing still higher even as I sit here typing this desperate missive to you, growing even as I sip my latte in this pleasant air-conditioned enclave of books and studious people type type typing on their laptops, taking no notice of the threat gathering in yards across this city as the grass grows and the temperature rises and the humidity turns the yards in which the grasses grow into open air steam rooms and sooner or later someone will have to go out into that hell to cut this grass as it grows grows grows even more and I'm afraid afraid afraid it's going to be me  Well, that's all for this time out. We'll be back next week with more of our jams and jellies for your consideration. I'll be watching for you. |
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