Poetry: As larks and rooks

As larks and rooks

Who would not prefer

to be as larks and rooks:

to fear no wind nor revelation?

I don’t have to have wings.                                                

This isn’t about the freedom of flight.

I move for need of satisfaction,
wrapped in thick celled-sheets,

guided by blood-shod eye-wells,

The electric heap of brain                                            

encased in skull and flesh,

stalls and sidesteps pain.

I am much more than myself in debate.
I move with these words in mind.

Poetry: As I lay still

I remember the man dying on the platform in the Gare d'Austerlitz train sttation in Paris, first time I can ever say I saw life leave a man.  It was truly disturbing and then his wife, in the throes of a great despair in watching the ambulance attendants try and try and try, all for naught.  He was in my train car, he would have slept in the room next to mine.  He collapsed and had a heart attack right in front of the door to my room and I didn't know at the moment why everyone was gathering, I was 6 people behind the collapsed man on the floor in the middle of the train car and I started to get annoyed at the delay--typical new yorker I thought.  Eventually we all left the train car and they brought his body out to the platform to have more space to work on him.  Another man, a Frenchman, complained that now that the train was delayed he'd miss his connection and insisted to the conductor he be refunded.  A crowd gathering around heard his complaints and turned on him.  A small mob almost assaulted him, he needed to be escorted off the platform by police because everyone was so infuriated by the man's insensitivity to the fact that this man was now dead and all he cared about was his refund.  Quite a scene I must say.

As I lay still

Long gone travels return.

They come to me as I lay still in bed,

drifting, head propped up on cool pillows.
 

They come down through the sky;

lightening, thrust fiercely through

the heavy envelope of darkness,
interfering with the night's caress

of a far off Castilian hillside.
 

They come to remind me of the unexpected,

of the easy travel from life into death,

the last breath of Parisian air taken by that man

who lay dying on the train station platform.

The Gare d’ Austerlitz was just the beginning for me

and his wife, as she stood over his body,

convulsing with despair, she had begun

her sudden long travel into loneliness.

Poetry: Toledo

Another one that was sort of a challenge by Sangirardi.  Again, he challenged me to write sonnets because I told him I wasn't very much into any traditional form of poetry and that quite honestly, I never truly explored that avenue of poetry.  So, 'Toledo', along with 'Tangle' were two sonnet 'experiments'.  Toledo having been originally written in Spain, in Toledo infact in 2003, was reworked for this format but in truth, the original wasn't too far off  the sonnet style already, it was an easy leap to make.

--adjusted from the actual sonnet on 3/14/2012--original saved in files
    

Toledo

The sound was that of black

and wings, stuck to stone spires.

Toledo,

frozen in ascension,

saturated in sunshine.

The crows

they laze about

on fountain ledges

and telephone wires

while the headless

mass of mossing santos

pray for the divine.

We up and spiral,

en calles ocultados,

todo ocultado.

Toledo, the study of a stillness y el cielo.

En la plaza, the scent

fue la historia y café.

In the calm

and in the heat,

the statues grow

tired and weak.

The crows,

they jump, they break

for the sky and shatter the day,

staining the blue with feathered

specks and clacking beaks.

They squeal and yammer, they rise up like martyrs roaring.

From her heights, Santa Leocadia is still soaring.

By the Tagus, Toledo holds its sword upright, 
                                                                                         
as the afternoon sweats the crowds into the night.
                                                                                         

Poetry:A Delicate Emergency

A Delicate Emergency

The tiny bacteria feed

on tiny bacteria feeding.

The teardrops hide in slivered ducts,

ready at a moment’s notice.

Everyday, the back and forth,

the swing of arms and legs

and testicles choked in clothing.

Above these wooden floorboards,                                                 

where the back aches are caused by over comfort,

                                        

I have the choice of music,

books, sleep and heating.

I still cannot bear the

unkempt lilting of my dreams
while Moving goes untangling

a future in the sky.

Flesh is not a tireless

shelter and I don’t know                           

for sure that all my sounds

will one day be rewarded

with the meaning's delicate emergency:
all the clippings, all the little

light-bent things and falling seeds,

all that goes growing out

beneath the bright gray sphere of Heaven
with Its’ quiet bends of sky

forever arcing free of empathy!

Poetry: Hustle

-->This poem was published with the 'Suisin Valley Review' based out of Southern California, in their Spring 2011, 28th Edition:<--

Hustle

The movement is divinity hustling,
in the sky, on the tele, in the shrapnel burdened flesh;
in the broken eyes that were pointless for the seeing
and the hemoglobin tinting endless battlefields.

The pockets are for picking
And the smiles are for fixing;
Blindness is expected.

“Self-interest, self-interest” is the chant,
as the old calloused feet
of God goes shuffling by,
dancing atop the heads of
the faithless and the faithful alike.

All the millions camp
beneath their torn canvases
on the ever changing sidelines,
battered with the sound
of the war drums beating.

This skin grows
thinner and thinner every year,
pierced by the smirking of the deities
and the demi-gods of
the hustling world;

All those that know better than thou.

Poetry: Tree

Published in 'THE COPPERFIELD REVIEW: Volume 10 Number 4 AUTUMN 2011 Edition' 

Tree

They are
Always there,
Those unyielding
Flags of the Earth,

Living out all
the horror of the seasons
while the faces grow red
in Vermeer blotches,

while Fear, the painter,
as old as breath and stone,
is well alive, among the rotting
out of tooth and gum.

It’s hard to think about;
the ancient sadness.

We are, in the end, 
an extension of the tree
and together we must suffer
the distance of the Sun.

But they know better
than to leave themselves
bare all the year round

lest their bark
be scorched and scarred
by the infinite rays
of foolishness.

Poetry: Fresh

I have been trying to put this into a separate category labeled 'poetry', but I can't seem to find out how to do that.  Any bloggers want to show me the way.  I'm sure it is right in front of me.  Ofcourse, the obvious whats with all the wicked 'waaaaaaaa' sounds.  It just worked.

Fresh

I have longed to be

as strong as water.

to praise the honeycomb.

I consort with insects and alcoholics.

I am intent on walloping language.

The fresh wood gets whittled

till the skin of outrageous description

Falls to the floor and withers.

 Yesterday’s notebooks shed their twaddle,

They sigh and the clap-trap wings itself away.

the title

A ballast for planets is a line from a poem I wrote.  Sorry again Wally, lets have less about you and more about me, which fits in perfectly with this attempt to  explain the title 'A ballast for planets'...it is based on egocentricity, me, as everyone who knows me, am a very selfish person.  Its true, I know, you know and if you don't well, I know it and thats the most important part of the equation.

'Ballast;, that thing which gives stability to an object, as in a ship or a submarine etc.  I think myself that important that I am the ballast for planets.  I'm not cocky about my egocentricism too often so Im letting it be at the moment.  The poem goes as:

A Tangle

I was born

from a dream of dogwoods,

adrift in a murmur between salt and sin.

I was bruised

by the aging of brotherhood,

While breathing in old flecks of insect skin.

My eyes were

wide as the Always,

thick as the Ever, stronger than whalebone.

The body built me,

A ballast for planets;

my heart the sheen of God’s birthstone.

The Word and Its children

went sifting through my wild foam hair.

I ball my fists up to fight off all the shapes of despair.

The sky in her flat blue glory

Will not reward me for the tears I cry.

The Moon, he hung himself to calm my worry, but still I ask her why.

I take now to

the pulling out of tangled things.

I split my chest open, I accept what the seasons bring.

I stand dreaming

At the viscous edge of evening.

I offer up what lay between my hat and boots.

The water, she will hear me and transform my body.

              She will give me back to the relief of dying roots.


--So I wrote this in a few stages,  within a few day after dreaming about dogwoods while falling to sleep and humming the song 'The Mountain' by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer.   I have been thinking about dogwoods alot because of another song, 'Wagon Wheel' by Old Crow Medicine Show.  In that song the narrator talks about making good time hitching down through Noerth Caroline where he picks his sweetheart a 'bouquet of doooowg-wood flowers'.  I am extremely influenced by the music i listen too, especially folk, indie folk, modern americana/folky country and modern stringband-bluegrassy types.  I'm not professing to be a connoisseur in any of these genres, I've encountered some of their musics and have been pleasantly astounded.

So, I had in mind as I drifted away 'The Mountain' and I had just seen Tracy Grammer perform the song live in a little Arts Center down in Watchung, NJ  for my birthday just a few days earlier.   The song begins "I was born in a fork-tongued story, raised up by merchants and drugstore liars..." 

So I awoke, thinking about dogwoods, myself, and where amid the ether we have come from.  What was the blueprint for this 'being' I'm becoming?  It just sort of came together.  I purposely crafted it into a sonnet-esque form because I had been challenged by a former High School English teacher, Stephen Sangirardi to write some sonnets.  This was originally in a standard sonnet form,  but after the challenge was met, with moderate approval, I reshaped it to its present state.   I forgot what grade Mr. Sangirardi gave me for the 'assignment', an A perhaps.  Surely he wouldn't give me much less, lets say perhaps, a C-; besides, I had just purchased his first novel 'Monday Afternoon', as promised.  We were being honest with our literary opinions, I suspect he was holding back. 

But I am the ballast for planets, I am kept stable(sane) by my planetlike ego, the downside of this flippant selfishness is that in my keeping my self from shipwrecking, I don't work well with others.  I have been apologizing alot as of late for past wrongs and continued errors and I suspect it won't end anytime too soon.  So, a ballast for planets, keep me on the straight and narrow and wipe the self-interest and easily agitated dust from God's birthstone and show the real sheen beneath that I think myself to be truly made of.

So soon?

This will be brief; re you neglecting the blog, so soon after its inception?  Funny you should ask.  No, work actually kept me busy for more than 75% of the day, that is unusual, but this time of year expected.  Suffice to say I have not spent the time I need to give to Wally Stevens his due.  I won't let you down Wally, I promise.  Maybe tonight, maybe.

There are students in my office that are hysterical, tears running down their faces...not because I refuse to put them in the class they need for next semester so that they can graduate and all their life goals will be perfectly aligned with the planets and the stars, but because they are reading some woman's blog.  How does one get that way? Funny, that is.  It is a skill to be so funny, with words alone, a truly impressive skill.  I need practice and lots of it.  Although its not really my intention, its keeps the reading fresh and comfortable to be able to infuse humor into the equation.  I can't say I've ever been too funny.  When i think back to my childhood and my teenage years and my twenties, I'm usually the one doing the laughing at other peoples jokes.  I orbit funny people, I'm not usually being orbited myself.  I forget jokes all the time, even ones I've heard a milluion times.  I screw up punchlines; either I forget the story halfway or right at that very end, or i tell the joke incorrectly, speeding my way through it as I train wreck the delivery and the listener seems to lose focus, eyes glazed over.  Badda-bing!  take  my wife, PLEASE.

Begin the begin...

I'm starting fresh with this blog-shite.  My last attempt, although fun, fizzled out because of my usual tendencies toward losing focus. 

I'm working on that. Have been for years. 

Now where was I? Oh yeah. Regardless, I have wanted to get back to daily writing for quite some time, so here's to new beginnings, again and again.  

I read in a blog recently by poet Brooklyn Copeland that she can not read Wallace Stevens.  She has read him, many many times but she just can't seem to get the substance out of him.  She keep trying the stubborn girl. I'm convinced she needs to like him, to get him, to say I too, my fellow poets, like Wally Stevens.   Its not a flaw or a childish thing, its exactly how I feel, when I read poets who just make me go 'ack' or 'why am I reading this?' We need to know, what is going on here.  What is this person's experience, be it wally Stevens or Jimmy Crackcorn.  

She reads Stevens every so often, she admits, to see if there is something there the next time that she can swallow, that won't make her drowsy.  Perhaps she hopes that he has transformed a bit from the mannequin in a 3 piece suit she sees him as to a half a man, a c entaur perhaps, in less corporate attire; a roll neck sweater, corduroy pants and flip-flops that clip-clop.  My father does something similar with beets every year.  He can't stands them, but every year he has a healthy helping of the junk, just to say he kept trying, how valiant of him.  I mock him, I've said to him, you don't evver have to eat beets again if you don't want to and I laugh when he does it anyway.  Ofcourse, I secretly admire the gesture; that proud post WW2 Italian mentality.  Sometimes I want to deflate it, sometimes I praise it to myself.

So, Wallace Stevens.  The first poem I ever read by Wally is 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' and i wasn't impressed, mainly because I didn't know much about poetry.  Poet Richard Frost, my American Lit. professor from SUNY Oneonta, taught us some of my favorites to this day in that semester, Stevens was lower on the list of poets I admired that winter.  He opened me up to the world of Whitman and Dickinson and Stephen Crane who profoundly changed my view of life and poetry as a medium for truly expressing myself.
Back to Stevens, That was Winter of 1999 and I've since only read him a half a dozen times; in comparison, I have read the hell out of Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass', but, that probably isn't much of an oddity amongst blossoming poets.  Whitman has a tendency to overshadow many poets, no better than many, just special is all. 

Okay, a poem by Stevens:

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM
by: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

ALL the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

 

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I'll need some time on this one, although it isn't difficult and it doesn't make ME  drowsy, I will, as this blog is titled, begin the begin, start again where I began with Mr. Stevens and take a gander at this poem for the next day or so.  I'll give him his due becausze I hope that someday, some one give me mine.  In the immortal words of Fred Flintstone, yabba-dabba-doo:  5pm on Monday the 29th of November 2010 and I'm signing out.