Category: Poetry

Posted on

Says the Jester to the Fool to the Clown

 

 
Hard to get up sometimes, pick myself up from a fall

when every day’s battle is a sword fight with gravity.

“Don’t ever trip,” she told me, “because you’re done.”

That unicycle riding the edge of a fence, well, it’s hard.

Teetering masquerade as shakey equilibrium traces lies.

And circles make hopeful promises but terrible homes.

One word awry, one awful image, and all turns lopsided,

my brains screaming out my ears while my gut collapses,

and I simply can not recover steps, a broken frail rhythm.

“Who are you to punch me in the waking dreams I made

to stay the course, mime the normal, and be-fool myself?”

What a mindless, insensitive sot to remind me who I am!

 
credit: wikipedia/jester

Posted on

Social Anxiety

  

At the people’s fair, the poets and priests applauded,

amid moon beams, day flowers and drifting bubbles,

they chanted om-ish dreams in wiling away the hours.

For days on days, the fleet of foot and spare of change

smoked sense into surreal, eating praise and crackers

like Jamesian daisies and a Dapper dangling a cheroot.

There were criers, circus barkers among lap dogs afoot

staring down cookie crumbs, brie chunks on sooty floor.

Festive and feast-ive, the colors and chaos crept edgily,

spun the words from the loudspeaker on love, language,

power, God, emptiness, blunting, alienation and forgive

me if I recollect badly for such forceful good cheer stung

my fear-filled hidden face, feted, feeling the drafty ales

culled by court jesters and juggling clowns reciting lines,

preached poetry and rhyming prayers to a cloying crowd.

And the arms reached me, slung their shawl-like shroud

over me who did not remember how she came here to be

fair of people, puppets, poets, perfume, priests and pot

when then I recalled a choice collected as entry gate fee:

Lithely spin inside the tales of others’ telling or turn tail.  

So, in a booted click-thud pivot, I chanced the lone trail

beyond fenced cloudy star-lit trees blinking cheer-ishly

and down the hill atop which the cacaphony decrescendo

subsided wide for miles stretched into the nomadic night. 

Posted on

You Want Fruit?

  
“You want fruit? I’ve got all kinds of fruit. I’ve got apples, pears, watermelon, grapes and bananas.”

It’s the same every day. R and I smirk at each other and silently mouth the words as they are spoken with our eyes rolled up. 

R says quietly to me, “It will be his epitaph.”

The old man talks banana, fish, ice cream, Snickers bars, BK hamburgers, pizza and spaghetti and meatballs, the gustatory language of care: communing in eating words.

On any given day, each member of the family undergoes the same interrogation upon first notice or first entering the house:

“You hungry? I’ll get you something to eat. What do you want?

“No thanks, I just ate.”

“No, really, it’s no problem. It won’t take me long. I can go right now. What do you want?”

“No thanks, I just ate.”

“Are you sure? You’ll be hungry later. You want me to get you something for later?”

“No thanks.”

“You’re going to be hungry later, you know.”

“No thanks.”

Like a song on repeat, he echoes an unstoppable refrain, worse than an ear worm. The first words of the litany dull my brain and my mood instantly. Even if I am hungry, I reactively reject the offer out of sheer negation, the will to make it stop, and discourage the behavior.

But I breathe, blink and behave: he only knows this way. He means well, and even if he doesn’t, he just does this, utters these syllables like a tic, an eye twitch or knee jerk when the rubber mallet hits the reflexive sweet spot. 

Because we will laugh at his eulogy reciting a thousand and one inanities, even as we cry the quiet of the house into our eyes, awaiting the ticking off the names of fallen fruit.

Posted on

Post Matris Vitae

 

 
And I thought to myself, “Where shall we bury her?”

Startled by the sheer absence of an idea, I winced.
Those who never come to see her haven’t a notion

or they would have asked at Thanksgiving dinner.
We buried her so long ago somehow yet there it is,

the question of her final resting place looming large.
A few weeks will bring another birthday celebration

that she passes unaware of her previous 77 years.
And she, stuffed in a back room while we all feasted,

the family she grew and fostered, living as if we know.
Did anyone see her in the shadows of her own wake?

Will anyone mourn the body’s cease post matris vitae?

Posted on

Capital Mist

  

 

Strafing the boulevard, the store lit signs obscenely shout their names

as if no one could hear them, remember their wares and goods, so well,

I can tell which aisle to find band aids for this wound that refuses to heal

scabbed and picked and bled and smoothed and scabbed over and over

or salve for the rims of my heels dried and cracked in winter’s brutal beat.
 

Restaurants, all sizes, shapes and price ranges scaling a rainbow’s fare

for appetites unending, cresting at habitual hunger hours’ gurgling songs.

How a child longs for happiness in a meal and a toy, romping a petri dish

soaked in saliva and snot and piss and crap laced red plastic pinged balls

or cushioned blows to bodies flung down chutes and ladders’ padded iron.
 

CVS Pharmacy and McDonalds and Chase bank and Pizza Hut/Taco Bell,

the art of commerce accompanies the blank of night the wreckage left me

twisted in elbowed chin to slump, knee over knee gaze reflected glass cut

through another plane of recognition, climate shift, and chance transformer

where a mind observes facts like neon signs wailing wisdom’s mist, capital.

 

credit: mattperfectblog.blogspot.com

Posted on

A Stranger Shook my Hand

image

From the sky, like rain on a sunny day,

blazing like arson, a stranger walked in,

shook my hand and asked how I fared.

His hand melted goo through my fingers.

Jumped back in warped skill, he took me,

fled with my expression still open wide,

shut tight in frightened delighted airspace.

And we toured the streaming veins of time,

spinning til the G’s popped open our eyes.

By then his smile lingered Cheshire drawn

while the faint stain painted a rose dying

in my hand’s palm he clasped as life lines.

Posted on

Knock Knock

  
Knock, knock, knocking

They constantly want inside

takers disguised as networkers

giving me something I don’t need

just so they can. I don’t want them.

I crave holing, gathering up my wits

acute, incisive, slipping out my ears.

Who can write with so much chatter?

so much irrelevant noise, never ending

polluting the pristine powder of ideations

pure and unsullied, untouched and virginal?

There, freshness whisks, tucked away, shiny

bright and ready to reflect the sun of its making.

Posted on

Adrift

  
I call him a drifter, 

but who remains static?

No thought ever nailed itself

down, tacked to airless walls.

No body stops unceasingly,

all that pumping and throbbing,

ever moving cogs and wheels

the sentient and incognizant alike.

Even in death and decay, there

movement devolves-transforming.

Stillness breathes a steady notion

but no such evidence exists.

Ever in motion, roving nomads,

we, the universe compels it.

Posted on

Buzz

  

Twirling silence spun in whirring generators

refrigeration unit hums and frozen hours,

pumps and siphons, pins and drums all agog

thrumming fullness into empty space. 

The music paused, would-be customers pass,

glancing, penetrating a vitrine store front,

peering into promise of some other time.

I witness the throng of pulsing gravity, 

cocooned in chewy, thick combinatory air–

warmed, tossed, settled, clinging to steel.

A noisy silence bathes my skin, electric

charged, solitary, trapped and buzz coated.

Time is irreverant, caring little for the sacred–

breath, love, chance, and tones inaudibly clear.

Posted on

Exactly Ten Raindrops Fell Today

  

Delaying the inevitable chore,

distasteful, disagreeably utile,

cracking open a creative divide,

writing mercenary words to eat.

Powerful procrastination widens

my eyes smoldering laser-see

the clouds churning charged,

ready to release and pour rain.

The storyline unfolds just then:

He had a girlfriend at the time.

Saigon had fallen two years prior.

So, his coming trailed calamity.

She walked the color of caress,

peaked fem-enigmatic effusion,

lithe boned and delicate fleshly.

Her name, a chilly winter song,

juxtaposing a bronzed-fire will,

she led him to the sun wingless.

And I watched behind a column

I constructed far too narrowly

to hide the heavy haunting me,

the girth of stony mind sleights.

I, velveted brown-eyed insecure, 

peered around an Ionic pillar thin,

to gaze on a gazer, distant-drawn

drinking her gauzy gray-blue sea.

His eyes pierced her silken skin

hollowed her safe harbor’s vapor.

And there he knelt, nose in the air

sensing the suck of the sea’s loss

ebbing tides of futile passage…

and so it begins, drops descending,

disrupting imagery as I trace them,

all ten of them mustered in distress

great blustery burst of all but naught.

Like sitting by the window waiting

for inspiration and steely wit to spin

commercial cogs of nil to the world.

Blog at WordPress.com.