Tag: poetry

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Ten Years Ago I Wanted to Pierce My Nose: Poem 14

Ten years ago I wanted to pierce my nose
 
but I joined a firm instead.
 
My partners thought it wild,
 
clashing with the cobalt blue seriousness
 
of our office walls and wisdom.
 
So I waited til I left the firm to pierce my nose.
 
My daughters had theirs pierced by then.
 
Yet I caved to pressure in the last minute:
 
it will jeopardize your reputation, and
 
the outcome of your case
 
may be prejudiced, prejudged, predetermined
 
by another’s preconceived notions
 
about piercings and morals and drugs,
 
noise like that, which I know is just bull shit.
 
But I chickened out, and now my nose
 
has grown long with age, and the piercing
 
would not look right wedged between wrinkled
 
doubt and oily regrets oozing from gaping pores.
 
I’ve made a mess of this decision.
 
Has it been ten years since I wanted to pierce my nose?

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Moody Tree: Poem 12


Your name means mountain ebony,
a certain Bauhinia,
common to coastal California,
but I call you moody.
You own my front yard,
dominate passages and pathways,
burgeoning weight of verdure or
leafy reaches for spider’s webby catch to
neighboring anchors–rose bush branch or
car parked side mirrors.
How you please my wispy-boned mother braked still,
the dog leashed to the wheel chair,
under a relenting shade,
cooling an afternoon zephyr.
In spring or autumn, sometimes winter too,
you boom-blossom burbling orchids,
delicate pink and purple hazy bells
that sometimes ring in summer too.
That’s when your leaves burst butterfly hearts
of hunter green fringed in lemon-lime edges, a
hovering, healthy, verdant vibrancy.
But on any given week without reason,
your leaves brown at the edges,
then all the way through,
baring skeletal bramble
like bones of the cancerous,
exposed,
radiated,
burnt
for the winter–or summer complaint,
marring the yard, baring the hidden wreckage behind you.
That’s when the pods hang dry in rusts and reds, seeds
to bake or burst, sturdy uterine drip packets,
like dry, pea pod icicle tears crying,
yet unyielding to the grip.
And the next week,
they’re gone,
replaced by the brilliant buds as
poking penile plants peek through tightly tubed petals,
orchid splendor,
the softer side on a misty Monday.
Until Tuesday.
When the mood strikes.
Which outfit to wear for today?

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On the Heath: Poem 13

Alone on the Heath, a purple flower
where there once was dry reedy sand,
you, friend, rode the train to dusty plains
with me–and slept through shifting tides
along California beaches, we two, strangers
to this land, and no less to each other.

I watched your sleeping breast rise and settle,
like the rhythm of our first freedom days, lazed
into adulthood, we seekers of flame, depths
of our soulful hearts, walking poetry, youth
alluring to each other–comrades–and evil too.

I saw you leave that day, through cloudy eyes,
music, sand and weed drifting us alongside
our own nature, me, cautious and calculating,
ready to loosen within my comfortable shoes, and
you, riddle’s answer to: What is freer than free?

Air.

Who has stolen your breath, my flower?

Sleep.

Your forever frozen face stills time in its place.

 

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In Praise of Praise: Poem 9

Not a participation trophy fan, still, I believe in praise–fair props.

Praise the days, praise the nights, praise the accident that is us,

Our planet, our time, our space, our separate solitary worlds,

together and apart, unable to perceive reality let alone truth,

less a word than a gurgling gut full of sense and the sensible.

 

We commend, we lionize, we sing songs to the laudable, those

who earn their accolades in tributes, panegyrics and eulogies.

But who among us have not suffered the humiliating red ribbon 

Or the diagnosis despite healthy choices, good living, and grace?

Bits of luck, shame, misfortune, health and love–praise chaos.

 

Through the singeing piss soaked stain of soiled panties, sobbing,

Sitting beside the third grade boy crush and plum of my notice,

Shame burns indelibly, but the blush of recognition, heart-pump pride

in mastering a job well done, earned in doubt and fear, curtained hope,

A+, raise, high 5, and fist bump, all winking nod to gratitude’s birthright.

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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.

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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.

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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.

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

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.

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

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.

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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. 

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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.

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Room Mosaic–Ten for Today

Fan 

A fan blows rhythm into wood;

Across the room stirs fluttered paper;

Vibrations travel far into distant jungles.
 
Poster

Sylvia Plath said it; trapped inside the mind

Nothing you can say or do to get out of that fertile futility forest

Except to lose it.
 
Picasso

The politics of a line fascinates the artist,

Astonishes the viewer with simplicity, 

Of message, method and mood–peace face.
 
Photo

Three folded into one chair–Mamie, flanked by two little granddaughters–summer in France,

My two girls embraced in awkward submission, forced smiles,

Posing for another camera off center.


Air Plant

A floating glass bubble filled with silver and brown sand,

Hemp roped from the ceiling,

Inside crowd rocks, pebbles, earth, shells and one dead succulent.
 
Clay Pot

An art fair in Santa Monica, a day before many moons ago,

When time belonged to browse and easy chatter,

Not like now 20 years later when sparse, efficient words work us through the hours. 

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