August 22, 2016
How do I make it through this election season without losing friends, lovers and hope? I have never been particularly political in the sense that I cared not overly for the outcomes of elections. In my 40 plus years of voting, I may have voted FOR someone on the ballot twice. And only one presidential tenure had me gritting my teeth and angry too often.
But for the most part, my life is lived locally and interiorly. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the results. I do. But I am fortunate enough to live a charmed life where I can choose to live in a cocoon. Going about my daily chores, cares and doings, I burrow down deeply and ignore the rest of the world, or participate to the degree that I wish.
Perhaps that’s called first world or birth privilege. I don’t take for granted my genetic demographic winnings to be born where and to whom I was. I vote. I discuss. I inform hundreds of students a year about the world, locally and globally. I am not nihilistic. I hope. I care. I do my civic and personal duties.
But this election is different, to belabor the obvious. And not just because of who is running and how. I think I’m different. My eyes and sensors seek the world more, and so am more susceptible to it. My practice leads me to confront this headache nation, this raucous populace, with equanimity. I’m finding it difficult, prone to suddenly remembering books that need urgent reading.
Looney Pantoum or I Suck at Rhymes: Poem 6
To cup a hand to an upturned ear
To hear what all there is to hear
Echo down the hall and up the stair
And keep my mind from turning fear.
To hear what all there is to hear
And keep my mind from turning fear
I’ll muster up ol’ brave good cheer
And fight the crowd’s scowly sneer.
To keep my mind from turning fear
And fight the crowd’s scowly sneers
I’ll hold my loves to me ever nearer
And never let them harm my dears.
I’ll fight the crowd’s awful sneers
And never let them harm my dears
Lest their hateful lies most insincere
Sway the surging tide to lesser cares.
I’ll never let them harm my dears
Nor sway the tide to lesser cares
Like hate and names no one dares.
Framing targets in trigger hairs
Sway no tide to lesser cares!
Frame no targets in trigger hairs!
Come clean in consciences bared
For hate’s glare dies in love shared.
Angst: Poem 8
We’re leaving the Great Park.
It’s a scorcher out there.
Her team just lost six to one.
She’s quiet on the tortuous zag from the fields.
I don’t think she feels responsible.
At 17, she’s philosophical, albeit a touch cynical and weary.
She carries her angst in her pocket.
“What is nihilism?” she asks the road ahead after a while.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about how minuscule
we are, especially in light of the cosmos and
the improbable non-existence of other life, somewhere.”
I haven’t hydrated enough.
My head hurts slightly.
“Well, it’s sort of like nothing matters,
an extreme sort of skepticism,” I immediately regret saying.
Her eyes widen and the depths of velvet brown
endlessly recede, raw terror swallowed–stored in a gap.
“But it’s not just the life’s a bitch then you die philosophy.
There’s something freeing about understanding our
insignificance in the larger scheme of things and our utter
significance at the local level, where we live.
It doesn’t have to be about uselessness.
The randomness and chaos of our births and deaths–
some take comfort in the just-is-ness of it.”
She still stares out at the road ahead of us, but I hear
her thinking it over, this great question of being and nothing,
all tied in knots to her senior year of high school,
turning 18, the possibility, potential, and unknown…
she who has always tightroped the anxiety fine line.
At 65 mph, those last 5 minutes take us no closer to home.
Room of my own to clean: Ten for Today
August 21, 2016
Late summer cleaning: Decluttering my room brings me to well-traveled roads. Everything I touch feels or smells like time: last week, month, year or decade. My room aggregates time.
But not just this room. I’ve inhabited rooms all my life, fortunate as I am to have had roofs over my head. Only by choice have I slept outside a room–from camping under the stars, backpacking across the country or passed out drunk on a stranger’s couch.
My first room–one of my own–had tan shorn short carpet covered in down feathers slowly de-fluffed from my down comforter through small growing holes. I shared an apartment with my older sister after I left the home I shared with my husband for nearly 9 years. We were on hiatus. Six years of separation. And this room was the first I called my own, having shared all my other rooms from birth to age 29.
Though the circumstances of my landing in this room in an apartment complex settled below the hump of a freeway on ramp dampened the excitement of this first time experience, still I marveled at the possibilities: stamp my own identify into the fabric. Finally, I could fill a space with me, pieces of me in art, furnishings, bed sheets and comforters, knick knacks–all my choices.
As it turned out, however, I’d only half live in that space and the only addition to the bland, bare tan room, bed and dresser I unloaded moving in was the escaped goose down feather floor covering. Between obsessive work hours and mad dash dating, I hardly spent time in that room I slept in for two years before I bought a house, where I lived for another three or four years before moving back into my marital home, where now, 21 years later, I have my own room–sort of, mostly–to clean.
Heart of Hearts: poem 7
My father’s heart fell victim to heredity…
Here you will find the rest of poem 9 of the poetry marathon.
Heart of Hearts
Posted on August 14, 2016 12:02am EST by pgerber
My father’s heart fell victim to heredity four years ago.
The surgeon placed a stent in his aortic valve to brace
the walls and keep the blood flowing.
I imagine the stent shaped like a bridge to strings,
like the one that bolsters the cello
in the corner of my room collecting dust.
But even before that, he couldn’t pass the physical
to join the Korean War–his heart murmured
something the doctors did not like.
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My father’s father died of a heart attack, or
maybe complications of diabetes that betrayed his heart.
He was a musician and a piano tuner,
who sometimes imposed a cello lesson on me,
firmly pressing my fingers to the finger board
nearly 45 years ago on that corner resting cello.
All of his 8 sons played musical instruments.
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The 21 year old I work with at the sweet shop,
whose name may be Rob or Mike or John,
is someone I would say has a heart of gold,
but for his laziness, though still an amiable sort.
He has a pair of friends, twin brothers, who
come to pick him up from work and take him home.
One told me that Rob-Mike-John had five heart attacks
when he was only a sophomore in high school.
His doctor said he was lucky to be alive.
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My mother’s heart is strong, always has been.
Her mind and body are ravaged by demented
disease, forgetting to allow her to live, but her
heart beats resoundingly under her ribs, her doctor says.
And though the cuffs don’t hurt her any more,
too little flesh on her arms, her blood pressure rocks.
Sans word, thought or flesh, she is pure pulsing heart now.
The short-sweet life of a teenage carnie (Ten For Today)
I’ve never joined or worked for the circus. Can’t even remember going to one as a kid but must have as an adult with small children. I just don’t remember one. Maybe I’ve blocked it out. I know zoos are a drag. I get bummed seeing the animal prison cells, even the ones that try to look like “natural” habitats. I know–and the animals do too–that they are NOT free. It’s unnatural.
But I did work in a carnival on Long Island for a couple weeks when it was in town. I don’t recall where it was, some place for it to spread out over a good square half mile or so. I want to say at the Islip Speedway or maybe at the Farmer’s Market grounds, but those don’t seem to jog my memory. Yet I can see that carnival in my mind’s “movie” reels.
The booth panels were coarsely painted royal blue, where the tickets were sold and pay checks were picked up. The rest of it was a winding affair: serpentine rows of small squar-ish booths, tents, food stands and rides. I worked a game booth. The floors strewn with straw partially hid the dusty dirt floor beneath.
Actually, I worked a few games: the balls thrown at wobbly flat wooden clowns with painted white faces that only took three balls to knock down three clowns. They defied the laws of gravity and never seemed to fall all the way down. I also worked the ping pong ball toss in the ceramic cups that alchemically caused ceramic and lightweight plastic to create super bounce. And then there were water pistol shooters to knock down ducks or rabbits passing back and forth. Hardly anyone won, so I mostly collected quarters.
I remember smelling popcorn around me and on my clothes for two weeks solid. I was 13. I just learned to drink coffee, creamed blonde and sugared sweet. That summer, I also found a boy who liked me. I don’t remember his name though I’m sure it started with an R or an M. He was cute, brown short hair with a bit of curl in the tresses. He kissed me and put his arm around me a lot, claiming his own. I was thrilled to have attention paid me–my company desired.
He would visit me at the carnival. We’d get coffee on my breaks, and he’d walk me to and from the carnival. We’d go on rides sometimes after my shift, though for the life of me I must not have had much of a will to survive, having seen how those rides were assembled and by whom. No one looked to me as if they were long into their parole, even with my young, naive eyes.
And when the carnival started packing it up, I looked for the guy who asked me if I wanted to earn a few dollars manning the booths, to no avail. I checked the blue wood paneled booth with the door sign “administration” or something official like that, but I was told to come back. I did. Twice. And then I brought my mother, who I watched stomp up the two stairs to the booth window, her arms flailing in threatening gestures and her shoulders pulled back. I couldn’t hear the exchange, but she came back with cash.
Ah, the short, sweet life of a teenage carnie.
When Darkness Comes (Daylight): Poem 3
Daylight friezes trim heights,
Stony edifices still standing
Ancient decaying battles,
Fading listless gray above
Technicolor tile mosaics.
When darkness comes daylight
Photoshopped to his taste,
Scrumptiously thin-thin waifs
Adorn full fashion billboards,
Eye-catching corners round
Apartment ledge jumpers.
When darkness comes daylight
Poised for the leap, these
Downers decorate the city
Like gargoyle guardians,
Villains to pop protagonists
Puffing smokey smile rings.
When darkness comes daylight
When sirens slice vulnerable
Sleep like death opened out,
Who can hear the whispers,
Tunneled mice scampering,
Twisting babies suffocating?
When darkness comes daylight
In frozen wincing skies hidden
Behind baby blue blinds drawn
The day’s delusional dreaming,
But when the darkness comes
Noble neon lights us illuminate:
When darkness seizes day’s night.
A Man: Poem 2
A man seeks to keep his love
under an arm’s distance
a gun shot’s trajectory
invisible line
across an isolating barren sea–
beauty–
as a man is wont to do
protect his own
by killing the barriers out there–
outside
without opening, closed bloom.
And the man that would capture me so,
would eat me bleeding
as he shot the waves away,
reaching our limits only he sees out there,
across the divide,
but I see between us,
passing over like summer
between us—
not knowing we’re gone
til the sun set.
Acrophobia–poem 14
When FDR declared the nation had only fear to fear,
he never had a gun to his head,
Ballistaphobia
never had a cobra hood opened at his bare legs
Ophidiaphobia
or strolled past the body of a jumper from a Manhattan 32 story high rise,
Necrophobia
the thump of the fall nearly lifting my feet off the ground.
But it wasn’t then that acrophobia hit.
No, it was the carefree days of carnivals and Ferris wheels,
free from regulations and safety straps, not even for seats
that turned upside down with the slow-turning wheel.
I was five and my car mates were nine and ten, measurably
larger, taller than I so that the metal bar kept them in as
the wheel spun us upside down and then right side up,
me clutching with all my strength to keep myself inside.
Thanatophobia. I had never heard the word in my five years,
but I lived my way through it many times since, perched on a ledge
peering down thirty floors into a postage stamp courtyard,
pondering the weighty sum of a life’s body at its impact against the immovable.
Have a Nice Day: Poem 21
When I came to California, a gruff New Yorker,
well nigh 38 years plus change ago,
the first time I heard, “Have a nice day!” from
a super market clerk after I had purchased
a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and milk,
I thought to myself, “What the actual fuck?!”
I had no idea what she was up to or what she meant.
And then I heard it everywhere, “Have a nice day,”
said the ice cream store clerk and the sandwich shop
cashier and even the gas station attendant.
I thought I had landed on some spooky, sticky planet
of gooey good cheer, totally fake and reflexive.
So now, much more accustomed to the saying,
as common as “Where should we go to eat? Or
“Did you finish your homework?”, I jokingly reply,
“Don’t tell me what to do! I have authority issues,” and
I wink, the closest I can come to a smiley faced emoticon.
In the gaze of the other 