Category: Poetry

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Fær

 

 
The hordes arrive, in families of twos and threes, all nationalities,

as I sip tepid tap water coffee, thirsty for succor in this jailhouse sweet shop.

Regulars, strangers, all alike, from the gym, retail store and pet trainer next door, 

all drop by at an appointed day of the week coinciding with their weekly habits and chores. 

And they ask the same questions, and look around with the same concentrated effort of choice.

The anesthetics of the daily hum through a storefront window surpass surreality–mere abstraction.

 
“They have too many choices,” one Yelp reviewer complained. 

A desperate failure for sure, this absence of the given, circumscribed, delimited and allotted. 

Failure abounds, thrives in the cracks and on roof tops, announced, derided, ridiculed and feared.

Professional success is a teflon mask of muscular smile, amused at fun house mirrors while

a stranger looks inside herself and winces at the truth: faking bemused stares.

Not a single one, no one is good enough, not since Caesarian born fær thundered alive.

 
A curious beacon, this failure, negative space, vertical inversion, binary split, 

a vacancy, trip, stumble, snafu and inferno too–blazing bailiwick’s forest funeral.

Fiery mourning howl weeps losses unfathomable but not forlorn forever.

No one stumbles on a pavement crack unscathed, eternal-glimpsed of false stability:

reinstating an upright illusion, death defying gravity-riven, absolved, re-calibrated,

restored but bludgeoned awake by the faltering blow, newly armed in science or religion.    

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Back to School

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I cannot recall the last time I sharpened pencils, yet I smell them.

Crayons disappeared from the house five years ago when the kids stopped using them, schools dumping color-in-the-lines after fifth grade. But I can almost feel their waxy paraffin between my thumb and forefinger, leaving that oily residue that stays way long.

Like a return to the new, the school year starts in the season of dying.

The dissonance, I sense it like spasmodic leg quaking that tremulates chairs while calming nerves.

“It’s show time!” I mimic the movie star’s manic Joker’s smile as I fly out the door. No chorus line.

Yet not the performance but the insistence that erodes: “Wake up!!” I want to jolt them in stentorian holler as my head spins and spits pea soup—in a virtual world they recognize.

In real time, I merely cajole, advise, admonish and filibuster, all for their awakening to themselves, their process and their world, adrift in someone else’s expectation.

 

credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0OwImLxeoFI/maxresdefault.jpg

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The Joy Girl

  

A petulant smile, upper lip quiver, 

never-ending streams of jubilant free

pours the honeyed golden, emerald eyes

smoked in calm to hide the sparkle speaks,

“I want…take me…so much to give…but I fear,”

all in fragility, fresh and tainted only at the fringes,

circling the crystal center yet to form whole, complete,

she deftly ball-toes the river logs spinning a strange land.

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Pratyahara

  
Cogs turn, whistles blow

feet shuffle, flee apace as

riders jump, arms akimbo;

leaves tremble, windswept 

ciliated born sussuration 

summersaulting walkways

of pavements steam, misty 

chlorophyl wafts green

lungful chunky clumps; 

engines hiss, track clacks

spine smacking clamor,

light beams rip clouds,

shredding skyward eyes,

tossing the bustle by

yard by yard, square on,

as chorus-ful chaos blooms

in the stillness of notice,

as I thread a hurricane’s eye.

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Jazz in a Silent Movie

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Feet moving inside my heart, knees a jostle,

Jazzin’ up my earbuds in java land amidst

Caffeinated denizens sporting mute stares,

A secret brain wrinkle, wet and colonized,

Winking the orbital pulse, steady sockets,

Jitters at the base of the spine, so nearly

A sign, trembling imperceptibly, in a race

Frantic fingers tap, tap, tap, heads nodding

As screen-lit faces wait, lapsed and relapsed;

Barristas squat, twist, shake, pour and squirt

A macchiato merengue whipping up smiles

While Chet Baker croons “C’est Si Bon”

To a rolling silent movie, my morning perch.

 

 

credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jvXywhJpOKs/hqdefault.jpg

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Autophony

  
Clicking, no ringing, not quite a ring but a hum.

My breath, I hear my breath…and my heartbeat, 

flooding my ears with pulsing thrum, alarming yet calming.

Am I dying, an aneurism around the corner, pressure cooked?

Cyber facts point to clogged ears given my health history.

Simple fix, but something stops me from stopping the sound.

A comfort in hearing life, my life, in its rawest base components:

a heart beat and breath reminds me that I walk as mechanical wonder,

a miracle of meat and synchronized pumps and electric pulleys, 

anima’s dusty coat of confectioner’s powder smothering the shine.  

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Is Sylvia Plath a cultural appropriator?

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Daddy

BY SYLVIA PLATH

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial matter copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Irving Howe charged that “there is something monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about one’s father are deliberately compared with the historical fate of the European Jews.” Susan Gubar wrote similarly that using the Holocaust as metaphor diminishes the Jewish experience,  the real of it, personalizing and fictionalizing it.

Is that a form of cultural appropriation?

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Train of Thought

  

Mayhem in the morning, it felt like
a kind of dismemberment of the mind from the neck down.
Nothing a silent session of steep stretching would not cure.
 
Sometimes sleep affects the whole day that way,
with a whisper of promise, something more like
a train ride through a New Mexico sweep of pronghorn elk.
 
That trip through the beltways and tracts of the country,
the clacking wheels syncing the spin of my mad days,
in orange rinds left on the porch swing as evidence of hollow thirst.

 
credit: dougwebbart.com

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A Single Thread

  

A small thread, a half inch or so, little more, plays peek-a-boo on my sleeve,
one minute spied from an eye corner, the next invisible to squint-study sight.
 
Poking up among the finely woven linen threads formed to panels, collars,
buttons and tails, a renegade refusing submission, seeks its tenant’s notice.
 
Like a bee, child, snake or lover, it tentatively positions itself seen and unseen,
always at vision’s edge, reminding, teetering, like all teeming imperfections.
 
And when I spy its frayed head atop my wrist swathed in tapestried symmetry,
like chance, options, luck, sleep, hope, and calm, I reach to pluck it, and it’s gone. 

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