I have posted one or two screeds in the past few weeks about poetry that I read online. By way of explanation, I will do something I have so far (to the best of my knowledge) refrained from doing. I recommend reading this blog: Ephemeral Elegies. Tiffany Renee Harmon re-publishes the poets who are being published online and in physical print. At least 80% of it is good (my opinion only), and all of it is better than anything I can write. The times I’ve written this and this, I’ve been speaking to poems read on her blog. This is what decent, modern poetry looks and reads like. This is the standard to which I hold myself and everyone I read.
Category: poetry
why I poetry
"You know why I poetry?" [Excuse me?] "I poetry because only there unclamps my scheming, planning, anal-fixated Self. It can't get Here, this Here where I poetry. It doesn't like it though, when I'm Here. Can you hear the screaming?"
an optimist’s view
Universe beneath my feet surreal: optimistically colored.
When we lost Lokisson
We watched, sadly horrified when little human-things took down Lokisson--one fine oak with humors unusual. "I lean over their rock-paths, put down by these silly human-things: they look up fearful, ignorant of my deep-rooted stability." He would laugh at his humor. If only he were stable as his roots! No. Humor's ultimate end: fearful, weak-full, they attack first. Angry, snarling chainsaws bit from all sides, ganged up, velociraptors hunting arboreal prey. We knew their type from so long ago. Elephant-bellows issued from metal contraptions which looked vaguely tree-like, screaming their masters' fears skyward, their cries sometimes oddly resembling bugling elks we heard in times before. Lokisson's beautiful limbs disappeared first, fed into hungry maws, exiting pulverized to bits. Metal sheets rang thunder to our sky. Then...section by section...his segments fell, crashing, loudly cutting off his jokes forever. We cannot laugh through our hurt, perhaps won't for many seasons. For two days afterward our living sky cried and grumbled.
Trains, hunger, and ghosts
Today trains run down Thurmond's rails laid with promises we thought included us, made us integral to those trains, controlling them. Those trains controlled us. Today, trains still run through Thurmond, still sound horns at crossings where tourists gape their tourist-gapes, where grass reclaims what we wrested from this steep slope. Us? We melted into America: most to nearby towns, some to Cincy or places far-flung like bits of coal escaping from tenders serving locomotives. Stocks dove mortally, banks failed. Ours held on: two years, five years... then closed or left. Our hotels burned, fell down. Yet tightly we clung to traditions learned. Progress ushered steam engines into history. Their coal waited uselessly beside steel tracks. It heated our homes, true, but offered nothing more: we couldn't eat coal. We sought regular meals elsewhere, hungry. Federals bought up what we never owned anyway. Thurmond's landed stayed, profited, found new cows from which to milk money.
(All photographs were taken in Thurmond, WV, July 2023. Though Thurmond dried up after steam engines ceased to ply the lines–the last one in the early 1950’s–a few persons hung on. In 2020, the population was five.)
We are not called
or, “To all who run toward the open field”
Not all are called to priesthood; ...to teach, ...to heal, ...to defend, ...to right wrongs, ...to lead, ...to agitate, ...to write The Great American Novel. Some of us pursue not purpose but meaning in being, in "job well done", in talents exercised, in immediate gratification for problems solved, purposes fulfilled, in greasing wheels for others, serving those we do not know to accomplish what we also do not know. To add one rock to the pyramid being built by us all.
i sing the keyboard Selectric
(a first draft with apologies to Whitman lovers everywhere)
I sing the keyboard Selectric, The keyboards which I loved and those few which loved me, They will not keep up with my fingers nor respond to them, But IBM corrupted me, charged me full of longing for the charge of the ball. Who could doubt that once corrupted, we would conceal ourselves? If once defiled, we would not attempt to defile others? If the up-and-back could not salve our soul? If the jittering ball were not our soul itself? The love of its inky black nothingness of a ribbon, we scarcely balk to account, That of the ball is perfect, and that of the ribbon is perfect. The expression of its typeface balks account, But the expression of a well-made page appears not only on the paper, It is in the slight indentations felt on the paper's reverse, it is curiously in the non-smearing type left by supple wrists, It is in the ball's walk, the absence of carriage, respondent to flex of wrists and fingers; cover does not hide it. The strong black strokes jump from the rag cotton carrier, To see it conveys the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see what life it might bring back to dead prose. Bridge from Underwood to cathode ray tube, to green dots pointillistically imbuing meaning in blackness, The thin dark lines of letters stringing meaning, the meaning within you and me, The exquisite realization of print; O I say these are not the parts of prose only, but of the writer's soul, O I say now these black lines are that soul, meaning.
sucked dry
Did I say, "nailed by meaning?" Sometimes your lines suck my lungs dry, replacing my oxygen with amniotic, fluidic meaning, sustaining me more than I knew I needed.
blue sunsets
What if sunsets were blue? What if they resembled my recollections: how I broke upon your hardness, how you ran from my insensitive cutting remarks, lasers which severed whatever tied us together those few years? Would I ever have experienced solar reds, oranges, pink-tinged magic? Known this reality? Turned from unreal shadows dancing on Plato's cave wall, pushed into dwelling among well-lit shadow-makers, my memories hold only blue shadows watching blue sunsets.
collecting
Some comb beaches pocketing striking shells, attempting time's arrest. I, rather, snatch sun's rays from morning and evening skies, saving moments too fleeting for memory--tweaking my specimens to resemble what my minds-eye says actually occurred.
all the voices in my head 