AQUARIAN RANT #poem

Ok,
we all split into our
supposed safe places, self-affirming
speak against fears of alienation,

attack — valid fears.
Yet, here, we find not safety

but ever more alienation, attacking,
sniping and escalating out from
each supposed safe zone
into the cold, dark THEM.
When will it truly, deeply,
existentially, occur to us
it’s time to release these bindings,
to become a people bound together
by our common, human needs, hopes,
curiosities, joys?
Trends are saying more and more
of us are dying of loneliness
within this great ocean of possible
companions, friends, loves
we have become too encapsulated
to see.

To the Air
by Myronn Hardy

His fisherman’s cap
is gray as is the sea
where he stares. He once
saw a mermaid

there near
the shore tangled
in kelp. She wanted him
to not see her. She wasn’t

a gift. He wasn’t. Yet
he stared. Keeps returning
to stare at the now
nothing he sees. Nothing

as in not her.
He once said he loved
her sea life.
He’s captured capturer.

Blame agony.

Blame perpetual
return to the kelp
stuck to his feet for

the wind over
ears in canals.
She’s singing
a water hymn

not to him
but to the air.

This is where
he dissolves.

About this Poem

“This poem is thinking through the notion of loneliness, its capaciousness. On several morning runs along the Atlantic, I’d often notice an old man, always in the same spot on the beach, staring vacuously at the sea. And I imagined he was there lonely and longing for a sea-being who’d saved or refused to save him from a deep absence, a grayness around and within him.”
—Myronn Hardy

#poem #poetry #literature
https://poets.org/poem/air-1?mc_cid=188a27e20c

(this brings to mind Deacon King Kong by James McBride which I just finished reading)

CONFLUENCE OF RIVERS AND MOUTHS
Laren McClung

Today I saw a woman on Spring Street
with two black spaniels. She was crouching
and whispering to them. The dogs
took turns licking the woman on the mouth.
This woman’s mouth was its own world.
There are many worlds. We can enter them.
I read that Frydek-Mistek is a natural gate
into the mountains. One river empties
into the mouth of another. I imagine you
singing your nightingale song back
in D.C. I forget little things. This is a way
of surviving. I make imprints in the snow
in my dreams aggressively, practice
my blues-scales, collapse bridges,
converse with my grandmother, walk
into the water and keep walking.
I don’t know how surviving things can
better me, but I have many secrets.
And secrets, I’m learning, are like sheets,
or a shroud wrapped so tight it seems
impossible to find the opening to get out.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

---

Laren McClung: “Lately I’ve been reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. She was part of a movement called Acmeism, which formed as a reaction against symbolism. The movement was concerned with poetry that moves through the use of association. Association opens ways between worlds, like the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness, how one sound or image or thought conjures another entirely unrelated, like montage, like dreaming.”

#poem #poetry #literature
https://www.rattle.com/confluence-of-rivers-and-mouths-by-laren-mcclung/

Elixir
Lewis Warsh

What matters most my friends are gone

See their faces, hear them speak

"I have so many regrets," he said

Ice cream, he wanted ice cream

The nurse brings me a cup of cold orange sherbet

The first thing I've eaten in days

Shklovsky's Third Factory and Alice's For the Ride

On my bedside table

I woke up thinking I was in my own bed

Shelley, the night nurse, brings me a pitcher of ice water

Everyone has a pathology—I was angry for a long time

And I didn't know why

In the middle of a fight

She put her hand through a French window

We had to take a taxi to the ER at St. Vincent's

It takes years to figure out who you are

When the surgery is over you open your eyes

You must sign a consent form, you must sign your life away

Soon I will leave the hospital and walk down the street like any stranger

Once I arrived without asking at her house in the middle of night and she let me in

There's no one around to witness these moments

There's no one here except Shelley the night nurse

The last time I was in the hospital my roommate was Lee Konitz

He died soon after—I read it in the newspaper

I listened to him sing to himself in his sleep

My roommate was discharged earlier in the day, so I'm alone

Visiting hours 3-7, we'll talk on the phone

I see all the faces of my friends every day

I met Larry Fagin in the back of Gino & Carlo, a bar in San Francisco, 1963

I played chess and drank beer with Lee Harwood in my apartment in Cambridge

"You can go home on Friday," the doctor says, "no reason to stay here any longer"

He called Katt after the surgery to assure her everything went well

Bill Corbett was the best man at my wedding in the country, 1975

You can begin a sentence with a capital letter and end with a period, or not

Bill Berkson and I embraced one last time outside EJ's, May 2016

I told Ted Greenwald I would "See him soon" and he said "You better come back tomorrow"

The last time I saw Joanne Kyger was after her reading at DIA, "Oh Lewis!

I ate lunch with Bill Kushner at Le Grainne and I knew something was wrong

I'm writing from Lenox Hill, my bed near the window

Soon the light will come up over the city

The night nurse, Shelley, will bring me a Percocet, maybe two

And no doubt Dr. Newman and his team will visit and the day nurses will arrive

"Think of the most beautiful place," the anesthesiologist says as he puts me under

And my mind goes blank

Katt's face as I step from the shower and she dries my back and shoulders

My scrawny shoulders

                                                                   Thursday 4 A.M.
                                                                    June 11, 2020

from the book ELIXIR / Ugly Duckling Presse

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-elixir-lewis-warsh-6078452?e=6ec42bce63

#poem #poetry #literature

#AQUARIAN DREAMS #poem

Open your third eye
And your fourth
And your fifth
Make a wish
And wrap it up in bubblegum
Stick it to your bedpost
To dream itself alive
Into your dream
That is your world.

There are wishes made of water
Waving out to sea
Caught in grief or glee
Cetacea, marine flora
Weaving eerie reverie
Into the evening
Into the night
Stream through heightened,
unaware of hours days.

There are prophetic dreams.
They haunt or
Creep upon conscious walls.
Tell all is not
As simple as it seems.
There are reasons, portents, allies.

There are dreams
That wishes would simply die for.
They take us out of bounds
Into faery realms and more.
Sprinkling gold spun out of
sparkling love and merriment.
Yes! Revered imprint
That stamps us sold,
That fulfills our greatest hopes,
Carries us above
The most beneficent of clouds,
Cheers our spirits free.

There are dreams
That bind
Define identities
Expose deformities
Deny extremities
Create barriers and rifts
Look to differences
As definitions
Defend what they define.

There are dreams,
There are dramas,
There are visions.
Tell me yours;
I’ll tell you mine.

Well, Let’s Go!
by Kenny A. Chaffin
All Rights Reserved © 2024 Kenny A. Chaffin

I woke up in a different place
as if I tripped the light fantastic
while sleeping. Diverted
to a different time line.

One where Donald Trump
is no longer relevant,
where my creativity lay
in wait for my return.

Kenny A. Chaffin – 1/20/2024

#poem #poetry #mywork

OLD BLUE
by Devon Miller-Duggan

for my father

A thing that’s named “Old Blue” should be a dog,
some flop-eared, lazy hound. Your Blue was
just a car. Okay, not just a car—an Oldsmobile
from back before we believed fuel was scarce,
from back when men made cars for men with lots of kids
and fathers piled their kids into their cars and
spent their Sundays on back roads, going
nowhere other than to see what could be seen from roads.

Your Blue drove like a frigate cut the waves,
and you loved Blue enough, and roads enough,
and seeing what was out along the roads
enough that you and Blue took trips alone—
you’d head out west or north, just you and Blue,
and stop to read the paragraphs on signs—
“PITTSBURGH: Gateway to the West,”
“HENRY M. LELAND: Designer of Cadillac and Lincoln cars …”
“The Haven peach varieties were developed here by …”
“Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota …”

You’d rise at dawn and drive to dark
and eat the buffalo or chowder in the diners
by the secondary roads. Gone for
weeks, alone except for strangers you’d
charm into friends-along-the-way,
pocketing their stories and then sharing
one or two with us when you came home.

They took your body out, the hearse parked
right behind Old Blue. It’d been months
since you could drive—the cancer in your skin
turned inward toward your brain. I haven’t asked
who gets Old Blue. Your wife would think
I wanted it. You’d think my not asking meant
I didn’t know how much it meant, or didn’t care.

Here’s my wish: you at Blue’s wheel,
your elbow on the open window frame,
unpoliced and doing 80 on a rolling road toward mountains.
The sky’s almost as blue and shining as Old Blue, and
up ahead a marker by the road retells a story you will
laugh at, and a diner waits. The locals love your stories—
you tell the one about how many ways you invented
to peel potatoes when you had KP as a private—and
the waitress flirts and looks like Mitzi Gaynor,
and the peaches in the pie you have with breakfast
hit your tongue with all the buttered sweetness you can bear,
and Blue runs like a mythic athlete, and
every state you cross takes you away from me.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

---

Devon Miller-Duggan: “After 25 years of teaching everything from a class on Fisher King mythology to comparative lit. surveys, I am finally (having at last gotten a book out) teaching creative writing, and for all the debates about whether it’s good for writers to teach writing and whether it can be taught at all, I just plain love it. That being said, my most recent ‘accomplishment’ is probably having gotten up in time to start the monastic day at 4:00 a.m. at Christ in the Desert, and having done the whole cycle, including singing antiphonally in Latin and weeding the hops field—all of which only added a layer of certainty to my conviction that I am about as unfit for a monastic life as it’s possible to be.”

#poem #poetry #literature

https://www.rattle.com/old-blue-by-devon-miller-duggan/

All my Alexas
by Kenny A. Chaffin

All my Alexas
want to stab
your steely heart
with Moon rockets
and tridental
preconsciousness

Kenny A. Chaffin – 1/20/2024

#poem #poetry #mypoetry

[all the time I pray to Buddha]
By Kobayashi Issa
Translated by Robert Hass

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

A Note from the Editor:

Today is Bodhi Day in celebration of the Buddha's enlightenment.

[All the time I pray to Buddha] by Issa from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited and with an introduction by Robert Hass. Copyright 1994 by Robert Hass. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho Buson and Issa ( The Ecco Press, 1994 )

#poem #poetry #literature

ON LEARNING THAT WOODPECKERS DON’T HAVE SHOCK-ABSORBING SKULLS
by Matthew King

Of course they don’t. Of course they optimize
the force that they apply with every blow.
They’d have to hammer harder otherwise,
to do the same amount of work. You’d know
this if you used your head for just a bit.
You don’t because you’d rather let them stand
as models of a headspace that you’d fit
yourself in gladly—wouldn’t it be grand
to bang and bang your brains and never mind?
You’ve seen how many jagged shards they spray,
you’ve seen how deep the holes they leave behind,
and thought, of course, they’ve got to have a way
not to feel all the force they must exert.
You wanted to believe it doesn’t hurt.

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

---

Matthew King: “Like Stephen Dunn, I started writing poems to get girls to like me. (He says ‘that’s the glib answer,’ but it doesn’t sound glib to me.) All these years later, I’m still trying to write love poems, though where love is not of the kind that I’ve come to think of as a ‘narcissism of two,’ with lovers gazing upon themselves reflected in each other, but where it’s a shared, responsive reception of the being of things, from different perspectives, in which speaking and hearing lovers—whether together or apart—reciprocally, deepeningly, open themselves and the world to each other.” 

#poem #poetry #literature

And even though your church is grieved
And papal excommunication will embrace and destroy us,
The analysis is as fierce as a pointed spear
And the truth as cruel as a naked sword.
.
Cults, religions, bibles, dogmas, hauntings,
They are like the vain ash that buried Pompeii.
Let's exhume faith from this pile of rubble,
Let us unclutter God from that flood of sand.

This is a little #excerpt of a #translation I was asked to do of a long #satiric #poem (a #book) originally written in #1885... And for now this is all I'm allowed to say.

#winter #poem #cold

I am You -- Poem by Refaat Alareer

…Look in the mirror:
The horror, the horror!
The butt of your M-16 on my cheekbone
The yellow patch it left
The bullet-shaped scar expanding
Like a swastika,
Snaking across my face,
The heartache flowing
Out of my eyes dripping
Out of my nostrils piercing
My ears flooding
The place.
Like it did to you
70 years ago
Or so.

I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
And for a moment,
I’d take your tenacity
As a model,
Were you not holding
The barrel of the gun
Between my bleeding
Eyes.

…The very same gun
The very same bullet
That had killed your Mom
And killed your Dad
Is being used,
Against me,
By you.

Mark this bullet and mark in your gun.
If you sniff it, it has your and my blood.
It has my present and your past.
It has my present.
It has your future.
That’s why we are twins,
Same life track
Same weapon
Same suffering
Same facial expressions drawn
On the face of the killer,
Same everything
Except that in your case
The victim has evolved, backward,
Into a victimizer.
I tell you.
I am you.
Except that I am not the you of now.

I do not hate you.
I want to help you stop hating
And killing me.
I tell you:
The noise of your machine gun
Renders you deaf
The smell of the powder
Beats that of my blood.
The sparks disfigure
My facial expressions.
Would you stop shooting?
For a moment?
Would you?

All you have to do
Is close your eyes
(Seeing these days
Blinds our hearts.)
Close your eyes, tightly
So that you can see
In your mind’s eye.
Then look into the mirror.
One. Two.
I am you.
I am your past.
And killing me,
You kill you.

#RefaatAlareer #Gaza #genocide #poem #poetry

WHAT NEXT, WHAT NEXT?
by Christine Potter

We are all the children of what
our former lives have been. Our

parents were powerful but they are
gone somewhere we cannot know.

Winter won’t stay winter for long
enough to get a good night’s sleep

before it ends up there, too. I don’t
mean spring. Maybe the hour after

a storm when the sky clears, when
the temperature plummets. When

even the jays at the feeder cry out
What next, what next? See their

police-blue tail feathers pointing
back to where they’ve been? Life’s

not what we expected—certainly
not fair—and much of it stops me

as I strain to understand it: pale,
floodlit national monuments, God-

knows-what echoing inside their
stone columns and domes, wind

swirling something fierce outside.
Planes aloft with emergency exits

blowing out for no reason except
someone having forgotten it could

really happen. The little patches of
shelter below, where we try to live.

—from Poets Respond
January 14, 2024

---

Christine Potter: “The story about the plane with the emergency escape window that blew out stayed in the news a long time, probably because we have all flown on airplanes and worried about something like that happening—and also, of course, because the pilots of that flight landed it with nobody killed or badly injured. I hate flying worse than almost anything else, but I do it when I have to, so of course I read the news articles, horrified and fascinated. The whole thing also felt like a metaphor for something much bigger.”

#poem #poetry #literature #news

In the book Peace Begins Here - Palestinians and Israelis Listening to Each Other a Jewish Israeli grandmother shares a story about her grandson, who came back from the army recruitment center. He had told them he would do anything but he would not carry a gun. He came back home feeling humiliated. His younger sister wrote this poem:

My brother is coming back from the army and he is silent.
You ask him a question and he is silent,
You give him a hug and he is silent,
You give him a kiss and he is silent,
You give him silence and he cries.

#Israel #army #war #killing #humiliation #poem #poetry

AIN’T MY PENNY NO MORE
by Haley Jameson

In a small town
somewhere South
somewhere East
where there were more corn
and more green beans
than people,
I asked my brother
about his dreams.
He told me,
“You gotta get out soon,
start planning now
or you’ll be stuck here.”
“Like you?”
“Like me,” and he
plodded along with his back
hunched low
and his hoe cutting deep.
From a distance,
he looked no different
than a workhorse.
I started working odd jobs,
delivery here
grocery clerk there,
and I started putting
everything into my porcelain
piggy.
But Daddy got sick,
so I gave Mama
half my savings.
So I gave Mama
all my savings.
I had to pick up the slack
help lift the burden
’cause Daddy couldn’t work
no more.
But I could.
Daddy had something
growing inside him
something bad
something big
and it was hungry,
just like we were.
And it ate Daddy,
took all the meat
off his bones
until he was just a skeleton
and then it ate his bones, too.
“That’s one less mouth to
feed,” Mama said
and I agreed.
So I started saving up again.
My brother’s hunched back
got permanent,
and he didn’t talk to me no
more about leaving.
He started showing me how
to farm
just like Daddy showed him.
But I knew if I picked up that
hoe,
I ain’t gonna be getting out of
here no more.
I saved every penny I could
said I gotta keep saving
while the savings were mine.
But then Mama got sick.
So I gave my brother
half my savings.
So I gave him
all my savings.
I had to pick up the slack
carry the burden on both
shoulders now.
Mama had swallowed the
whole ocean
and it filled up her lungs
and no matter how much she
coughed
she just couldn’t get that
water back out.
It swallowed her,
too.
“That’s one less mouth to
feed,” my brother said
and I agreed
and he handed me that hoe
and I took it.

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

---

Haley Jameson: “I journal through poetry. I’ll write about a mundane event or follow a train of thought to the end. It’s healing to get it out of my head and see it written down in front of me, whether it makes sense or not.”

#poem #poetry #literature #life

Clarity
by Vievee Francis

Sorrow, O sorrow, moves like a loose flock
of blackbirds sweeping over the metal roofs, over the birches,
and the miles.
One wave after another, then another, then the sudden

                                                        opening

where the feathered swirl, illumined by dusk, parts to reveal
the weeping
heart of all things.

About this poem:
“Clarity is hard to come by. I believe in paths, and I have set myself upon mine. I believe in openings, like signals toward extraordinary possibilities. I hear it in a susurration of birds, a large flock I cannot identify moving overhead at sunset. Their calls billowing over this valley. As I listen, intently, I lose the sound and find myself enrapt by a thought. A new thought. The sound takes me somewhere then brings me back. Aren’t we all feeling some dread sorrow? It seems to me the birds echo the restless ache that I am only free of when I am sleeping, and even then—but, as I watch those birds in stark silhouette against the sky I never fail to see a brief opening. A sudden lustrous disclosure. Others are listening and watching the winged creatures with the same awe. Together we watch the dark-swung canopy open and we, because we feel lifted, we know, you and I, the weight of our lives.”
—Vievee Francis

https://mailchi.mp/poets/january-12-2024-poemaday-12138304-331miebijr-12138888?e=2706955217

#poem #poetry #literature #life

THEY ARRIVE
by Richard Krawiec

The paper opens at the pressure of the pen and the ink sinks into the fiber.
I almost wrote ‘welcomes’ but the paper doesn’t make that decision. It doesn’t ‘allow’ the ink to enter it, either. Paper exists in its absorbent state and whatever presses upon its surface, whatever arrives, it is powerless against.
Just as the pen is powerless, once the tip is pressed down, to prevent the ink from flowing out.
I almost wrote ‘escaping” but that seems to imply capability, more choice in action, the ability to avoid, than what is held by pen and ink.
Welcomes. Allow. Escaping.
It’s like Gaza. The people in their homes do not welcome or allow the explosions. Like the paper, their homes simply sit, open to, powerless against, the incursions of missiles and bombs and bullets. Targeted or not, the explosives don’t escape to Palestinian homes.

in the corner
a hunter spider
wraps bodies

—from Poets Respond
 

Richard Krawiec: “The continuing tragedy of Palestine brings daily video of destroyed homes, people defenseless to the ordinances inflicted on them. To the point where the UN just a day ago, Friday January 5, called Gaza ‘uninhabitable.’ Yet, people are powerless to stop the flow of attacks.”

https://www.rattle.com/they-arrive-by-richard-krawiec/

#poem #poetry #literature #war #poetryofwitness

Melting

Cold, clear, starlit night;
crystal ice holds sky borne fire,
to rouse Winter's heart.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #Poetry

Where the Flowers Blaze

Let our dreams unite
in places wild as love, safe
as flower meadows.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #Poetry