"You're not the same as you were before," he said. You were much more... muchier... you've lost your muchness,"

The Mad Hatter - Alice in Wonderland

Abyss

If a good love poem requires a little darkness,
how far down can I go? Thousands of feet?
The coelacanth is near, but it's too easy—
the metaphor nettable and clear, the lost
link found, the beginnings of our own bones
in its pelvic fins—and I want to write about love
with depth to hold the unverifiable, the oarfish
that survives with half its body gone.
I want it to hold the giant squid no one has seen
alive, strong enough to scar sperm whales;
sailors have claimed its tentacles unfurl
from the night's water, taking down their mates.
But can such poems survive these confused witnesses?
Can they handle the scanty evidence that surfaces:
the mottled sick and dead, the night-feeding
viperfish impaling victims with fangs
at high speed, its first vertebra designed
to absorb the shock? And how much horror
can this poem sustain before you forbid me to say
some call this love, the hagfish that bores
into the unsuspecting body, rasping
its flesh from inside out? Am I making you
uncomfortable? The pressure at these depths
could crush a golf ball. Are you cold?
Or is it enough to be awed by the blue-
green photophores of the lantern fish, the brief
and brilliant light displays? What the lights say:
I want you. Not so close. I am moonlight;
I am not here. I would eat you raw—
tell me if you want me to stop.


Katrina Vandenberg

Bad Girl Singing - Mark Jarman

Bad Girl Singing

She took her roommate's cash,
walked out of a supermarché
without paying, lost her passport,
lifted another girl's and stole her boyfriend,
ditched class to see a boules tournament,
persuaded others to ditch with her,
so they could buy her lunch,
got sick drunk on Sundays,
arrested, threatened with deportation,
and finally, finally after her parents
were contacted in the States
and arrangements made to fly her home,
she went on our little tour
of historic sites and even there
pulled a typical stunt, distracting
everyone from the guide's good English.
Separated from our group, she stood
in the apse of the ancient church behind the altar,
singing with a voice that glowed
and brightened in the candlelit space.
She sang through her trouble and our trouble,
her lies and laziness, license and dishonesty,
our disapproval and distaste.
Unearthly at first but transmuting
the stoniness of the air, the flints
of stained-glass light, the chill,
her singing, like a lover's warmth,
entered our bodies and made us
recognize our desire was being offered back.
She sang her rejection of our rejection.
And we stood miracle-stricken, shame-blinded,
renewed by failure more than triumph.
No one excused her. She would have to leave.
But we yielded to her song.

MARK JARMAN

Flower

for my Grandmother - Irene Salay - 1917-2012

The garden gate is open - she halfway

across a ploughed field.
A man approaches, felt hat in hand
in his other, a brim of colour.

Movement slow, each step a memory
ageless, familiar.  Afloat
her voice, first bird of morning -

her smile wide
blue September sky;
dusk settles, pilgrim to land.

57 Shades of Orange

The Archer

Her eyes two slits, precise as arrow loops, turned parallel to earth and sky. The plain wide, horizon stretched elastic as the linen string pulled taut against her chest, her limbs as narrow as the precious longbow made of yew back to belly, sapwood to heart chin cupped as soft as Cupid’s iron adorned with Quail fletch bound with sinew as if to bone, ivory thumb-ring wrapped against pain of draw. She stands erect, width of foot to width of shoulder, left side to his, three fingers poised as if to pluck a delicate harp. She stands unconscious, blind to sight– there is no noise, save for sudden movement of their hidden song, warm tongue of fleshy pull whoosh of flight, an earthly thud. Her form collapsed around itself recoiled in the torment of her mark. Two bodies fall together,  soft as purple clovers  swathed black fields.

Sit down, says generous life, and stay awhile!
although it's irony that sets the table
and puts the meager food on broken dishes,
pours out the rancid wine, and walks away.

  - Robert Creeley
-excerpt from A Generous Life

Frightening Stuff

http://nplusonemag.com/leave-your-cellphone-at-home

Yum!

Oh oh... I've found a use for my plethora of garden tomatoes.....

Makes 1 drink

• 4 cherry tomatoes
• 3-4 fresh basil leaves, torn
• 1 lemon wedge
• 1 pinch sea salt
• ice
• 1 1/2 ounce gin
• basil sprig, for garnish

1. Muddle the whole cherry tomatoes, basil leaves, lemon juice from the lemon wedge, and pinch of sea salt in a shaker. (If you don't have a muddler, the handle of a wooden spoon works just fine.) Muddle until you get a good amount of juice from the tomatoes.
2. Add ice, and shake well. Strain through a fine sieve into a lowball cocktail glass.
3. Add gin, a little ice, and stir. Garnish with basil sprig, and enjoy!

The Bird Tree

In Spain, the birds arrived before dusk
to densify the solitary cedar
with their pre-coniferous apartment chatter.

Worlds and years away birds arrive 
before dusk, to fill the boughs
of my neighbor’s twin pines.

I wonder why they gather?
What is it they have to say?
They must know more than I.

They have taught me well to not heed
the selfish drone of men or women
to spend my time poeticizing

about the chatter of birds 
as they arrive one at a time
to let us know they’re home.

Autumn Lament

Every September I begin a poem this way:

The tree-tops are liquid gold

the sun is flying high, 

but not here, it is setting  long over 

stubbly fields.  The geese are calling

to the sky again.

I am caught in the perpetual motion

of life, seasons and words.   But who 

out there cares?  What significance 

do tree-tops hold, no matter the colour?

What does the sun care that it rises, sets

navigates a path? 

My cat’s claws are stuck 

in the screen door again - 

a clear sign the season is changing.  

Her claws don’t appear

anywhere near the screen door

between May and now.

And again, here am I

.

Princess Kiki

step forward

The Meantime

It's easy to overjoy a window with brilliant flowers 

but what if long-longed-for time suddenly bubbled
over the lip of the clock, as if each day doubled
due to a lost job or loved one slaughtered, leaving hours
to fill—how would you do it? Could you whittle
the Founding Fathers faces out of wood, or fold little
origami models of the same famous building?
With time, couldn't you master the craft of anything?
Maybe write precious verse or, worse, illuminate
the best of Aesop in needlepoint—someone ought to,
or maybe someone really oughtn't, so why, or why not you?
If time's a parking spot, life's what you do while you wait
for Mr. Whoever to get back in the car—a good hobby
to make this minute count like a droplet in the sea.

Craig Morgan Teicher

To Keep Love Blurry

Missing Cause - Paul Killebrew

Paul Killebrew

I was pulled

out of myself

through a leisurely

upheaval into

a dome of worry

so comprehensive

that every

splash of blue

in the air

was overlaid

with punctuation

and causality.

Facts on the floor,

an impossible less,

no answers for what

and all these

promises, these

door-knockers of rain,

this news

that gets less

symmetrical

all the time,

news about

living and falling

living, sweeps

of flavorful meaning

in the tournament

of night, or today

when I heard

bells outside,

a boat on the river,

some cars crocheting

the perilous

one-way streets

that rattle

the frame.

You founder

on permanence,

on necessary spaces,

empty months

cascading

through the year,

mood, eyesight, and

that which

comes into

the possession

of the mind.

You saw me—

you did—

across a crisp plane

in my decisions.

Then a hand

shot through

the grates

of your

terrifying disfigurement.

Gorillaz

Blue is Bluer

in August - everything green greener. If we could see the wind it would shimmer like the tulle of Yvette Chauviré's tutu as she pirouettes through paper summer leaves.

Happy Summer!

Route 231

He was once her worm-
hole to life below tulips
the cool moist mud
clarity of black-

her portal to fresh jams
tea-biscuits and summer
blankets spread on grass
next to a hill of ants

antennae brandished
to overtake what was left
of their green transparent light.
That's when she ran, floored it

rare in her yellow 1983 Porsche
top down toward Route 231-
thoughts of Indiana growing
ever smaller.

Needle in the breast-bone

draws an epiphany

- not of them had ever deserved her -

Descent

Monarch butterflies descend on the field
like summer tourists.
Their wings overwhelm the rustle
of an un-tilled crop as the rain begins.

In the field at dusk, a plough rusts -
a red-winged blackbird
perched on its handle, lost in song.

The Extinct

Imagine I'm the last woman on earth,
the snowiest plover, the loneliest
deep-sea-swimming whale. It's not my fault, but
it might be. Should I keep changing until
I become something that has an other?
I've tried that. What else can I do for love?
Now not even the gray wolves listen to my
long litany of failures. They know I'm just
putting this self-sadness in my mouth—
a polar bear crunching seal bones between
her teeth—to get what little I can from it.
They still won't let me blame myself:
When I tell them my name isn't a song
to sing, they call it back to me again and again.



Keetjie Kuipers
jubilatt 

Number 21

Toward An Impure Poetry

by Pablo Neruda

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things---all lend a curious attactiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding---willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetraion of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooh-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment---moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.

MARCH 17, 2005 IN ESSAYS

Winter Leaf

                                                        How does one kiss 

become a traumatic tattoo-

marcescent as a winter leaf?

Friend, lost

She's rung the world's doorbell
knocked on trees in every hemisphere
climbed through earth's wormholes
sprung leaks in artesian wells


collapsed in cold deserts
after following dwindling tracks
hot from trying to conjure up mirages
his face in the spun sun.


She's joined humanity's marathons
to find  his number in a sea of digits
pinned to heaving chests, the air thick
with anonymous sweat.


empty
When someone you love goes missing
the whole world feels unpopulated.


Friend, where have you gone?
Have you curled Into another?
Do the fires there burn brighter?
Are the easy chairs softer?


The clock reads 3:26 pm.  
It is Sunday afternoon.

Splashdown

She struggled to remember why she chose
to walk the plank.
It was easier to recall the splashdown
as her body smacked the surface.

Everything blue, top to bottom
particularly his eyes fixed full of sea 
with the steady resolve of a sailor.

They Must Be Giants (thanks to E-man for this one!)

Starla and the Moon

Starla's bones resume the same position as yesterday
as she sinks into the outdoor lounge chair .
The wind on the other hand, has shifted east
more or less.


The sun plays between the trees reminds her 
of bubbles in their last glass of champagne, 
a perfect summer that rose and fell, 
disappearing into golden.


In a vast sky, the moon waxes gibbous

Who I hyperventilated at

Trevi, a handsome fountain at the end of an aqueduct. Now too many men with roses or too many women throwing pennies over their shoulders sloped with hope. Ancient statues looking blindly on one almost with a foot in the water all the closed up windows too much overspray- I made a run for it down the cobblestones chest heaving anything for dry land

It's Not Love

like it was before. It’s an animal that waits haunches tensed in the forest in the night eyes listening for that deep rustle a gleam of something eluding the catch crack of branch anticipation of a meal something to devour a quick spill of blood

There is a Library of Strangers in Dublin - Phil Hall

Phil Hall

  there is a library of strangers in Dublin
Phil Hall

  there is a library of strangers in Dublin
Kraków Iqaluit Constantinople Petticoat Junction
  I have borrowed two silences from — the best sleep of my life
& light moving in a Stan Brakhage film

  far away at home at last
I could not be reached breached or dissuaded
  I slept forever & took forever to wake up & when I did
there goes your mime teacher all in white

  light was archeologizing a patchwork quilt on a bed
dusting each snag as if there were no budget constraints
  the approach of the children & the long-eared goat
was a Latin declension enacted

  there is a library of strangers in Dublin
the Troy-warrens of its archives boustrophedonic
  silence stoops to eyeball each shard & tag it
light tests its white hands against walls in the air

  (distracted indifference from the old goat & the children) 

Some Emily Dickinson

THEY say that “time assuages”,—
  Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
  As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble,
  But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it prove too
  There was no malady.— Emily Dickinson

The Prisoner - Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca
b. June 5, 1898 Translated by A. S. Kline

The Prisoner

Through the indecisive
branches
went a girl
who was life.
Through the indecisive
branches.
She reflected daylight,
with a tiny mirror,
which was the splendour,
of her unclouded forehead.
Through the indecisive
branches.
In the dark of night,
lost, she wandered,
weeping the dew,
of this imprisoned time.
Through the indecisive
branches.

Crutches - Nikki Giovanni

Crutches
Nikki Giovanni
b. June 7, 1943

it's not the crutches we decry
it’s the need to move forward
though we haven’t the strength
women aren’t allowed to need
so they develop rituals
since we all know working hands idle

the devil
women aren’t supposed to be strong
so they develop social smiles
and secret drinking problems
and female lovers whom they never touch
except in dreams

men are supposed to be strong
so they have heart attacks
and develop other women
who don’t know their weaknesses
and hide their fears
behind male lovers
whom they religiously touch
each saturday morning on the basketball court
it’s considered a sign of health doncha know
that they take such good care
of their bodies

i'm trying to say something about the human condition
maybe i should try again

if you broke an arm or leg
a crutch would be a sign of courage
people would sign your cast
and you could bravely explain
no it doesn’t hurt—it just itches
but if you develop an itch
there are no salves to cover the area
in need of attention
and for whatever guilt may mean
we would feel guilty for trying
to assuage the discomfort
and even worse for needing the aid

i really want to say something about all of us
am i shouting           i want you to hear me

emotional falls always are
the worst
and there are no crutches
to swing back on

Up and Over It

Peter's Song

There’s an ocean between

our two springs

between the roses

one red one white

between a sound in the shell

and an ear that listens

to rhythms repeated

through a chorus of time

somehow we’ve floated

through the tide's rip

over divisions of land

together apart

at last we have learned

to navigate this swim

A Request

Bury me in a shallow grave
so the orange of my dress
creeps up into the rain
towards an empty headstone 
ode to a  poet
who may one day write.

Mango

He devoured the fleshy orange mango of her heart with gluttony a wild beast half crazy from drought. He didn’t care that he ripped her thin skin to get to the fruit. No- he sucked out her juice and spit out what no longer pleased him; left her remains to rot in the sun.

Poem by Jack Spicer

“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
Jack Spicer

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me:
The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

Please read - this is sick

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/man-beheaded-bus-passenger-wins-escorted-trips-community-211857168.html

Poetry Ku

what good is poetry
blood drops bloom
on a pure white page

What I Do

Leave books out in the rain until pages swell like water on the knee hard to move or bend Dust infrequently until all I can see of the cat are her paw prints ghosting across the table top Forget the house-keys in the door latch and the poem that wakes me in the middle of the night to discuss the notion of ‘sticky not sweet’ something about a gull’s wings the sudden tack of mid-flight I hug everyone but you

Friends are the bestest