A SHIPWRECKED PERSON
By James Tate

When I woke from my afternoon nap, I wanted
to hold onto my dream, but in a matter of seconds
it had drifted away like a fine mist. Nothing
remained; oh, perhaps a green corner of cloth
pinched between my fingers, signifying what?
Everything about the house seemed alien to me.
The scissors yawned. The plants glowed. The
mirror was full of pain and stories that made no
sense to me. I moved like a ghost through the rooms.
Stacks of books with secret formulas and ancient
hieroglyphic predictions. And lamps, like stern
remonstrances. The silverware is surely more
guilty than I. The doorknobs don’t even believe
in tomorrow. The green cloth is burning-up. I
toss it into the freezer with a sigh of relief.

—from Rattle #17, Summer 2002
https://www.rattle.com/a-shipwrecked-person-by-james-tate/

#poem #poetry #literature

Trained in Self-betrayal
#poem #yearofprophecies

It’s not that sex is sin, bad for moral purity,
or euphoric nature’s gifts an affront on
All That Is Holy.
(Biblical disposition adapted to
Providential vision, a biased capitalism
based on self abnegation
rather than a healthful view of wealth.)
A powerful profit model built upon
slavery of responsibility to dependents —
sex for such purpose must issue descendants.
Hopelessly hooked on corporate licensed medicine,
treadmilled to produce high-cost enriching energy.
See our computer graphic charts:
“A work of Art!” too valued to despoil with your
(I’m sure)
busy little lives. Education must
align with labor needs projections —
hiding useful information behind well
developed lies.
(So be assured, these words will fade as you awaken.)
Virulent slime fed in work stations and schools,
popular entertainment snacks,
our patented brew,
captivating memes
blow through airwaves, as your lives hurry through.
It can’t possibly be slavery if we make you believe:
You own you.

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS

Bravery?
What if they gave a war
and nobody came?
What if our ethos gave up
on targets to blame?
March of disorders;
unstable bonds break down,
crush frightened innocents
to dust.
We meant to serve our nation.
We meant to save rights, defend
threatened treasure, stalwart
bulwarks against disaster.
We meant to honor sacrifice, work of
our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers
for the good life:
family, God, country
and a wholesome recompense of pleasure.
Not executors of horror so intense
as to reverberate through our
remaining consciousness.
Who is advanced?
Who left in pieces that never heal?
God is on the battle field
not as commanding general or inspiring
mascot,
as witness
and gentle minister
of last rites
to shattered soldiers.

#poem #antiwar

Essences

We are as rivers,
pouring into ocean's depths,
indivisible.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2023

#haiku #poem #Poetry

“I Left My Couch in Tatamagouche”: A Poem by James Tate

https://lithub.com/i-left-my-couch-in-tatamagouche-a-poem-by-james-tate/

#poem #poetry #literature

“I Left My Couch in Tatamagouche”: A Poem by James Tate

I desired lemonade— It was hot and I had been walking for hours— but after much wrestling, pushing and shoving, I simply could not get my couch through the restaurant door. Several customers and th…

Where the Wild Things Fade
#poem #yearofprophecies

Lost
my ability
to survive outside
captivity
Yet at my core
impenetrably wild.

Day after day unattended
Night after night, no Moon defends
my right to howl.
I’m a city girl now —
held in dimensions
socially styled.

troubadour
#poem #yearofprophecies

Words, the challenge of song
to carry along in sound the meaning of
tiffs in lush trees, rambling bees, the power of
peeping dawn high in colors of awe.
Here, in a world of fog and fury,
dirty eyes strained and blurry,
hard-edged streets sparking with pain
and dreary drone.
Not a nourishing home,
not a place to find peace,
not a fit way to learn.
Clouds, not of rain,
but waving
transmissions expand
swift awareness
that this place
is but a tragic scene we can believe away,
ennoble, enable, sway.
The challenge taken,
the task engaged,
a world in play.

BOHEMIAN WAIF
#poem #memorytrain

Inner cinema montage
deep echoing adventures,
strikes of color, light, paralysis
held in violent emotion.
A mere babe runs away across
a busy street, hiding beneath bushes,
because she could, demanding
independence.
Dark city nights, hugged to
myself, alone
Walking through brick and mortar
shadows,
past trashcan fires, street community.
Thumb out, shivering icy roads,
or flooded highways, bare foot
scorching desolate insomniac
miles.
Haunted explorations, led by that
fantasy aura obfuscating rational view.
Mini romances that cut through,
ashy
Across smoking stone overpass,
high to high school AP exam where
the words floated from rakish eye to
#2 pencil, an array of imprinted
history.
Lying in the garden on cotton,
tasting boysenberry yogurt,
hoping the world disappears,
ends here where the bullied
anxiety won’t follow.
Quiet now …
I’ll tell you more on morrow

Mere Speech

See how harsh words cause
scars more difficult to heal
than the deepest cut.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2023

#haiku #poem #Poetry

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
by Diane Seuss

She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.
One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool
of its own blood. The girl is burdened with curly bangs. A too-small cap.
She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple
from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.
She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.
Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.
Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy crowns.
She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?
Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?
The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.
Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.
Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.
She’d hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.

#poem #poetry #writing #creativity #literature

The story: https://lithub.com/how-diane-seuss-wrote-the-poem-that-matters-most-to-her/

How Diane Seuss Wrote The Poem That Matters Most to Her

It will surprise few to hear poets have a reputation for hoarding their discontents. Call it an occupational hazard for the “unacknowledged legislators,” those who devote their lives to making an u…

https://www.rattle.com/this-again-by-bob-hicok/
#poem #political #byBobHicok

November 5, 2023
“This Again” by Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok

THIS AGAIN

The recommendation from some website quoted on the news
is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews
off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca
from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing
is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car,
are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body
to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off?
And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address
the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing
to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews
without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone
when loving everyone is an option. A difficult one, I admit,
impossible even, but in a process sense, it requires no knives
or cars or evil and can be conveyed in a simple phrase:
See someone, love someone. Or, Love thy neighbor
as thou loves apple pie. Or, love thy stranger
as thou loves starlight for touching us
without knowing our names. Have you ever felt
as brittle as kindling shattering to pieces
just under the shower curtain of your skin?
It’s a rhetorical question because I know you have
and will, as I have and do right now.
So screw every cult of hate. Every bullet and knife
and bomb and shitty thing said under the breath
or with the full conviction of the lungs. If you see a Jew,
be a Jew. If you see a Muslim, be a Muslim. If you see a human,
be a human. The lend-an-ear or a hand kind.
The “how’s it going” kind. The kind kind. No one chooses who
or where or when to be. We just sort of collectively are.
So hating you for being you makes no more sense
than you hating me for being me. And I don’t want to be raped
or have my throat slashed or get thrown off a cliff,
hard as that is to believe. I want to see the cliffs of Ithaca
in moonlight. The Kaaba in Mecca circled by a crowd
pulsing with faith. The Ice Hotel in a snow storm.
I want a really good pizza with an egg on it.
To kiss my wife on top of the Eiffel Tower.
All the parts of her that are Jewish
and all the parts that are human
and all the parts that make her sigh and moan.
Being human means understanding that being human
is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
That we’re all partisans in this struggle,
fellow teamsters in not knowing
what the hell is going on, brothers and sisters
stuffing our befuddlement every morning
into pants and dresses we hope
don’t make us look fat and stupid and lost.
Everyone I know feels lost. The trick is
to feel lost together. Maybe you have a map
and I have a canteen. Certainly someone
has a pogo stick or cyclotron. We need food
and light and harmonicas and theremins
and stories about monsters
who decide not to eat the child
or stomp the village or fly over the night
with death on their wings. Lost together,
our nowhere becomes our somewhere. Lost together,
the dream of home never dies.

—from Poets Respond
November 5, 2023

Sea Sons

#poem #yearofprophecies

The Sea is changing.
Aging beauty, seething with rage
of the forgotten.

Once your tempestuous lover,
violently seductive, wild mystery.
Legends of monsters and gods
poured from her essence
into your sleeping ear.
Challenge of fear and glory brought you
to her shores, pleading for
acceptance, romance, adventure
and all its chaotic promise.

The Sea swimming with life,
unbound to expectations,
inspiring song and trepidations,
immortal as her sister, Earth.

We are all changing, aging,
wearing down.
Less arrogant hero than
teller of tales,
what will we teach
our grandchildren
of the Sea?

Lock & Key

The mind hides secrets
safe, in night's locked vault, until
the keybearer comes.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2023

#haiku #poem #Poetry

RIGHT ON

#poem #political

Put down with disdain
for proclaiming the gratuitous pain
of folks crushed under power games.
Evil glowers trained from
corrupt social warriors who
exult in what’s destroying us,
lead their loyal to perdition,
disassembled, reconditioned
to hate by their plan.
Forcibly taught not to understand
our own best hope to emend,
not depend on slavers’ dope.
Roped up in wasted fantasies,
divorced from truth and sanity.
Required rallies ’round a flag.
Watch those who fail that tail wag.
Pledge, hand on heart: working people’s
job is to feed voracious markets
while tossed out on the street,
eating tainted meat,
breathing poisoned air.
Shills may shout like they care
to fool the weak, to lead us
into profit wars to bleed, exhort us to
all ways support mammon expanding.
Where are the banding
together, sisters, brothers, who
discover how to trust and honor each other?
Where is the call and answer rail to
remind us Dickensian pauper’s jail
can only bind us
when we allow twisted power to blind
and define us?

NEW WORLD ORDER
#poem #political

Post-feudal society
obsessed with security and place
lock-step shuffle of obeisance
counting corners, counting on
science and leaders of order
counting on gospel served cold,
filleted, and layered just so.
Fashionably secured, tied and
corseted, made up for easy recognition.
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Buy me
the pretty fire.” So mesmerizing, so
certain to tell me who I am, how to be.
Casting savage spells, they are,
far and wide, telecommunication.
Tying up and tidying with vast
imaginary whips and wheels,
spinning like a Pied Piper’s tales.
No wonder.
We get it wrong and twisted.
Throwing out the wheat to eat
the chaff. Poisoning the well
that no enemy may drink our bounty.
Burning our bridges and tunnels
to save them.
Embarrassment of riches.
Gorging on fine cakes and
sugar water champagne.
No wonder.
Eerie daylight marching
timed by mechanistic masters
armed with decisions directing
torture, incarceration.
Power derived from the people
constrained of memory
mistaking some paranoid parody
for a promise of life.

Etherized

#poem #yearofprophecies

(from a fool’s journey)

Will o’ the wisp wending a land of dreams
Daisies, bright blooming weeds,
mellifluous, grand.
Whoosh! Genie arms wide into flight
above foam and sea.
Beyond fear,
absorbed by awareness — sheer horizon
confined by no mind, eyes
or reason.
Who imagines,
and in that magic space settles
to reside?
Women in velvet and fur, swan necks,
arrogant tresses,
sip marvelous narcotic, sweet as fire.
Upheld mirror portraits, glowing strands
of wire and prismic hues,
vibrant perfumes call to wander,
to stray.
Will-less, free, each step,
each feather fall
a gift of mystery, of mystics’ play,
caress of bliss.

TALKING POLITICS
#poem

Talking of politics past.
We are so unsure of the future,
so enmeshed in the now.
The territoriality of time is fading.
Like Janis said: “It’s all one fucking day.”
But the morning was so long in coming.
So Bloody Long.
I saw the first faint rays of dawn emerge
beyond night’s horizon through my shelter window.
I try to tell you this as apocalyptic afternoon
drones on and on.
But you, caught, lost in the cawing crowd, will not hear me.
So I invoke orphic lyrics to rouse other ears.

CONDENSATION
#poem

The world bleeds.
Life consumes encircled life.
Energy turns lethal,
the sum paid.
Slipping away, helpless recession, mirage of wealth
heaped on salted desert.
Riffs animate resilient form, Queenly grace.
She carries many faces.
Grandeur adorns Her.
Deadly nano minions
slip, slink through
kinky crevices.
“Pinch me!”
“Beat me!”
“Devour my impure flesh.”
Salivate outrage, all the ill
humours, masques of gleeful
execution!
This is no delusion;
no sinful memory
blurred in twilight vengeance.
Crows, ravens, portents in
black flight gather above.
Crown of shrieks, feather
cascade, rain like pestilence.
No blame in blindness.
“I could not see through feathered fog;
could not save you.”
I clasp my guilt like well-earned scars,
treat myself to belt bound arm,
sweet bitter sting,
ecstasy of retreat.
“Empty dreams, my love, my world,
my semblance of real.” Lull angry
seas with chemical castration.
Blow a kiss to uplift brief vacation.
The dance of End Times ready to
embrace, accept my plea.
Better to breathe secret fantasies, embroider
internal rhythm.
Feed on ambient schism. Better to scamper
inside, let chance arise.
Shhh.
The latest lullaby sets the code.
Don’t listen to me.
The world is bleeding.
Taste it.

Scryed from my mind, upon this cyber page

#poem #yearofprophecies

It’s not that everything old is new again;
or that nothing unique arises under the Sun.
Creative thinkers derive and develop ideas
already in their psychic maze.
Meanwhile, unfazed, unasked reality evolves
along its merry way.
New maps for old appear each day.
Most of us just follow the crowd,
caught up in focus on our current task,
using what tools come to hand,
what we’ve been taught.

(Badmouth the disorderly man — the message lost,
never usefully discussed.)
We want to believe in stability,
in natural laws that are fair and make sense.
Convinced, we are happier to float in a bubble
outside of duration,
insured against consequence
of change.

NOVEMBER
#poem #november

Ah, November, time of wonder!
How now shall you cast my trust asunder?
Deftly weave your captive hypnotic spell
that I have learned to love so well.
You shatter my defenses, unbalance my soul.
And leave me feeling purely whole.
Dear November, so like love and lust
entwined.
Drug maddened dove,
I’ve clasped you dearly through falls past.
Why does your magic never last?
So weary, wandering in my mind.
I tend to hide behind a blind,
entranced in fantasy, wondrous free,
while building barricade imagery.
If thought be trap, then where’s the spring
of Autumn that migrations bring?
When dreams of leaving soak the brain,
to concede, proclaim all faith insane.
Mad revel in the loss of rules.
‘Til fearing that I look the fool,
I scurry down ‘neath winter’s frost.
And count the moments that I’ve lost.