April 23, 2009

Dear Everybody,

I'm trimming this journal a bit, taking out dead pieces of my writing, and leaving ones that may still have a pulse.  I'm also going to be removing (1) pieces that have become full-fledged poems, and (2) most past commentary by others, especially if the pieces the comments relate to have been deleted or have flown the nest.  I hope this will make what remains easier to navigate through.

Rick

"We'll treat you like human beings
when you start acting like human beings!"
they said.

"We'll act like human beings
when you start treating us like human beings!"
they said.

No wonder the madman
thought the Beatles were singing just to him.
They were.
“Let’s write anuther one fa Chahlie,
see what he duz this time.”

To keep us all sane,
God invented the but.

 “I’m a Christian,” he said,
“but not the beat-up-on-gays,
George-Bush-is-the-anointed-one-of-God
kind of Christian.”

He was the only kid in town with an office.
In the middle drawer of his desk he kept
his pheasant feather, squirrel tail, horse shoe
and a couple of champion buckeyes.

The little boy didn’t want the cookie
so he threw it in the trash.

“Some day you’ll wish you
had that cookie!” Said the nun.

For fifty years after that,
what the nun said to him remained

the weirdest thing.

When the nun
picked him up by the front of his shirt
and tore a button off,
he expected his mom to go insane
but her nonreaction was even worse.

Because he had eaten lamb
he didn’t take being one of the Father's flock
the way the Father probably meant it.
Or maybe he did.

The First Law of Weirdodynamics:

There exists a Maximum Relative Weirdness,
beyond which a thing is either obliterated by its
less-weird surroundings, or imparts an Equalizing
Percentage of Weirdness to those surroundings.

“You think you’re so smart,”
the kids used to say to him.
But he never thought he was smart enough.

The basement was his laboratory
the porch roof his observatory.
Had his parents known the thought that way,
they’d have put a stop to it, you bet!
 

It was a narrow door
and it kept blinking on and off.
He never knew how he got through it
but he always did.
And when he got there
they took his old memory coat
and gave him a new one
so that the only thing he ever remembered
was that he had gone through
the blinking door many times.

They made a bomb
and left it in an old grey sweatshirt.
In the paper, the cops said
it would have worked had they lit the fuse.
That’s what they wanted to find out.

For generations the school
was surrounded by barbed wire.
Now it needed to be.

“There are some places,” said the little boy,
“that if you want to be there, you already are.”

 

He realized how long it had been
since he’d seen a hopscotch on a sidewalk
and became sad.

The two ladies walked down the street
blaming Wal-Mart.

He hated the little white room,
so clean, so orderly. 
He messed it up and hated that too.

People are walking around all the time
wondering why no one notices
how bent in the head they are.

“There’s no God,” he said,
“because I’m not dead.”

His sense of smell started coming back
but not evenly.  He could smell urine,
for instance, but not jasmine.
 

Mists swirling into mists!
This must mean something.

The pit bulls needed a god
but they didn’t really care
which is why they needed one.

This was his summer
for sitting on the porch
and drawing a glass of milk
in perspective.

They ended up raising the type of kid
they hated when they were in school.

In the end
his flesh
was eating itself.

 “I don’t put a surprise in every box,”
he said.  “I want them to be surprised.”

We’re all making it up as we go.

 How sad to think there are people who
once they’ve given a thing a name
think they’ve actually done something.

The agent asked her if her voice
was old, ordinary, and banal.
She laughed.  “Do you know anyone
who would answer yes?”

The poster looked better
when the trees were smeared and lightened
so writing could be put over them,
but still he was sad.  He missed the days
when reality didn’t give up so easily.

The manager in charge of the raffles
the balloons and the contests
to push us all to sell more stuff
is dead at twenty-seven.
I don’t think he knew this was coming
when he was leaping around the production floor
yelling out bingo numbers.

There’s a poem in the next room.
It's making little waiting sounds.

The guy from West Virginia
played the trombone in his undershirt
on his front porch on Saturday mornings.
I grew up thinking
that’s how everybody started the weekend.
Oh I forgot to tell you
he always wore his grey fedora.

The town
smelled like rubber.

What need keeps
Mr. Dithers from firing Dagwood?

The stone chipper
in the Green River Canyon
Said “centipede.”

Thirteen hundred years later
I said, “wow.”

You never know
what’s going to come out of the fog
except that it will be following
your scent.

Some people just insist on becoming
invisible.

When the sky is grayest
the grass is greenest.

Rule one:
don’t meddle in what’s seeking to take form.
Rule one a:
you may assist, but that’s different.

Rule two:
don’t meddle in what’s seeking to dissolve.
Rule two a:
assisting will give you a bad reputation.

Father never believed in words.
Mother believed only in words.
Both were correct.
 

Here comes the
test-your-buzz gang.

She must have been successful
hiding her revulsion
because he told everyone
she had a crush on him.

August 1959

Boy.

And dog.

In the shade
of the one
back-yard tree.

Dog Days.
Magnificent boredom
sends you
to chemistry set
even after the sulfur's all burnt.
Sends you to magnifying glass
even after the backyard has been explored,
catalogued and claimed for the King of Spain.
Sends you to the pillars and big bronze doors
of Public Library
and a deep brown chair
where they have cold air
and Lovecraft
and Poe
and poor Dog can't go.

“You never knocked.”

“You never invited me in.”

“You could have knocked.”

You could have invited me in.”

That night on the Titanic
the officers behaved impeccably.
Had one of them been a fuckup,
the ship might have lived.

“Which would you like to hear first,
the what or the why?”

“I’d really rather near neither.”

Jimmy Carter was ridiculed
for appearing in a sweater
and telling us to turn down theheat.

Public relations is understanding
that he simply wore a dorky sweater.

And people forget how adventurous
John Kennedy’s haircut was for the times.

She was upset
that people could be so trivial,
and stamped her foot
through three
incarnations.

“She hates being from America so much
she can only blurt out
her strongest feelings in Italian.”

“How American
to re-make yourself that way.”

They had never been lovers
but because she had
criticized him so viciously
there was a whole zone in his mind
dedicated to her.

How You Work The Room


If you have a difference, kid, throw it at ‘em --
like mystic forebears from White Russia,
like a line of starched Bostonians
stretching back before the age of steam.

Makes you worth your hire.  Keeps the contagion off ‘em,
dontcha see.  The really slick among us make
their difference from being the same.  Humble -- don’t let
the universities put ‘em up in style -- stay
in profs’ houses and do the ever-loving dishes.

Almost all the rubes want to hear
the muse’s voice through your throat alone.
Then put the fourth piece on the frame
and hang you on the wall.

They want everything about you
but the one real thing you know:
that inspiration comes to anyone who asks.

How many unfinished conversations
littered his life!  He picked them up
like bottles and built them into a house.
We could see him moving inside it
when the sun was strong.

If I were responsible for
choosing the location
of the Stargate
and the entrance to Hell
I would put them
in Cincinnati where
no one would think to look.
And if they did look there
ridicule from the locals
would make them stop.

People pulling weeds
in front of a church
before the service
gave him the idea
for his next book.

At first it felt good
to have a routine for his days.

That achievement
is disappointment
he learned very young.
To see why this is so
took the rest of the century.

Some people are lucky enough
to know a Master.
Some are unlucky enough
to know two.

Who’d have thought
you could get the rabble rouser
off his anger
by discussing consciousness?

That baby in the grocery cart --
when he’s my age now
I’ll be 116.

“Pure gold is too soft to use,”she said.
“It loses its shape.”

“Ah,” he said,
“but it keeps its nature.”

Somewhere around the Great Depression
the State of Ohio lost its connection to Strange.
The last seven decades have not been pretty there
but at least they’ve been predictable.

Right, Larry.  Time is money and this enlightenment shit better not cost too much!

Rick

Wooster, Ohio

He put on his boots
and went out in the snow.
We didn’t find him in the thaw
so he must notta froze.

The men of Massillon are silent
except when they scream at football games.
They let the women have the ideas.
Everyone’s safer that way.

The women of Massillon know what’s what.
If only the men would listen to them.
Oh well, men are good
for the heavy lifting part of things.

The cat noticed
that people made
noises all the time.
So she started
making noises too,
and people fed her more.

They called him Mooney
and laughed because
all he wanted to do was whittle. 
When one of his whittlings
was bought by a museum in New York,
they said How about that.
New Yorkers must have more
bucks than brains.

Ham and cheddar
was once a surprising concept.

He wanted to get an idea
about the Civil War
and forty years later
he had too many ideas,
all those compelling voices
hollering at once.

I'm not a bad guy,
he said.
But I have ideas
that would get me
kicked out of
any group I know.
Different ideas
for different groups, of course.

I don't quite
fit anywhere,
he laughed,
which means
I'm equally at
home everywhere.

"I only date
military strategists,"
she said.  "They're so
clear about things."

"You're always doing things at the last minute,"
she said.

"But that's what each minute is,"
he replied.

I could spend my life
thinking about time,
he thought.  But then
that would be
really ironic. 

"The people who run this place
must be combing their hair
with jackhammers," he said.
"It just can't get more stupid."

And then it did.

Those branches
have been bare all summer.

Now it's autumn.

They're a different
kind of bare.

A garbage truck
full of acorns.
A kid picks it up
and runs home.

The Zen is in the stitches,
he said, pointing to his robe.
Then he said it again
blowing his credential.

Blood, shit, and screaming obscure the patterns of strategy, but if you don't see them, the blood, shit and screaming are likely to be yours.  To sit a horse with quivering flanks and nervous feet trying to read the device on a flag in smoke and compute its meaning while your chest leather stops another shaft, yes, they did that, when they weren't howling red and streaming gore from their blades' edges.  Over tea and jasmine incense, the play of forces could be discussed if you lived.  But while you lived in smoke, it still needed to be understood.

The Idea Was

The idea was
to remain balanced
at all times

and so he learned
to predict
a swordsman's next move

and so created
drunken Buddha fighting
where the next move
was imbalance
on the way to new balance

and he so baffled them
he killed his last opponents
with a wooden sword.

My, you have a lot of unfinished business,
she said to him.

True, he replied.  I’m going to
have to live to be 200.  I can’t imagine
dying with unfinished business.

But, she said, aren’t you glad it
happened to guys like Hitler?

Mine isn’t that kind of business, he said.

Are you sure? 

Just one mountain
outside your bedroom window
can make all the difference.
 

He put the sum total of his wisdom
into each poem -- which is why
they were so short  -- and could
have been shorter yet
had he more skill.

The yard sale for Tibetan refugees
drew a swarm of people
but nobody from Tibet.
 

She escaped her children’s wrath
by having a stroke.
How could they hate her
when she couldn’t remember
the things she did?

It's not that I'm avoiding him
because he's under surveillance,
she said.  I just don’t know
what to wear for the camera.
 

Complexity:
the mother of
convention.

He bought her an emerald
and she did shut up
but her sister in law
still had that damn diamond.

The dean thought it useful
to begin each meeting
by quietly inspiring terror.

He only felt safe on campus
after all his faculty
had gone home.

The setting sun
shone through the empty bell tower.
He kept hoping it didn't mean
what he thought it meant.

He teetered between
humor and horror
when the first thing
his father said on the phone
was I AM NOT SENILE!

The check flew out the door.
Was that a gnome chuckling
as he ran away?

Borges luminesced
when he shrugged without shrugging
and replied to a nasty challenge:
I write what I'm given.

That woman eats saints and shits devils
she said when I asked her to translate
her mumbling as she walked by my desk.

He swept his hand in an arc.
You'll go crazy
trying to talk to these mountains.
They say the same thing over and over
or nothing at all.  I can never tell which.
I told him I didn't understand. He said
See!  It's happening to you already!

It's dark
in here.

I'm living in a damn postcard
she said.  No one ever believes
the pictures I send.

Everyone thought he was normal
till he dropped his pants
at PTA.

Then everyone remembered
all the little clues he gave away.

He hated phone wires
called them
fences in the sky.

Had to see a mountain
out of every window
of his house.

Watched the ravens'
weather forecast,
checked the dogs
for news
the roosters
for commentary
and the mules
for humor.

Quizzed each
new insect
and sun dog
and breeze.

Shook his head
at the teeners
on the corners bored.

They'll get it
or they won't
he thought.

She's thirty
nursing her baby under a blanket
and wonders what to do with her life
while her two-year-old
tugs on her sleeve to ask her something
in language only they understand.

She has something
she has wanted to tell me
for six months, and she
leaves her sister in the car
to come to the picnic table
where I sit.  It's a joyous something
and we smile.  Something like this
happens every Saturday
when I sit reading
between the ice cream parlor
and the coffee shop downtown.
Office hours, I guess.

Thanks, you two. 

Rick

Large Hadron Collider


His head is heavy.
It rests upon his fists
as he aims those beams
at you. 

Used to being lectured
but not questioned,
your glaze shatters
when the expected sermon
never comes.

You sputter into birth,
rain and thunder
and flowers opening new mouths
to the sky.

Crazy as a snake in strawberry jam
she said.

Which caught my attention.

She then went on to disparage her degree
Doctor of Arts, gotten when the world was young.

They all had degrees at that table.

Needless to say I was hooked.
Not by her but by the quiet one
who seemed to know more,
knew it, and didn't care.

She had everything right
but the emotional part,
thought our silence
meant agreement
when in fact it was reluctance
to have her bite us
and never let go.
She left every confrontation
looking triumphant, was shocked
when we didn't vote her in.

There's a hierarchy:
those who saw the towers on tape,
those who saw it live,
those who were there,
those who lost,
those who died.

And the president
buzzing between
undisclosed locations
protected
while airports shut tight.

Without the wig I look like Robert Benchley.
No I don't.  I look like the lawyer from
the band called Chicken Lunch.  That's with
the nose still on.  Without the rubber nose
I look like the guy everyone thinks
is the lawyer from Chicken Lunch.
(Actually, the other guy everyone thinks
is the lawyer from Chicken Lunch.
The other other one of them is me.)

Another Fourth of July

Leaning back on park bench
kicking my legs out straight
wiggling toes in shoes
nodding to "Think I'm Psycho, Doncha, Mama?"
by Chicken Lunch on the museum
back porch at the ice cream social
remembering the FBI saying
to report any strange people,
looking around at my fellow Silver Citizens
and wondering where the hell I would start.

Bump of Chicken
Rude Cootie
rock knows weird
and weird no hemisphere.
So rock on,
brave bumps of chicken
and mannerless body lice!
Everybody's wristwatch
says it's time to boogie.
Nice is funky,
funky ain't nice.

The cafeteria empties,
but everyone at the President's table
remains.  Because they can? Yes. 
Who would throw out the President?

Because they must?  Well yes, too.
The President's in mid-story.
Who would dare get up?

Weepy McGill


What he did
was what he was told.
The powers liked him
and promoted him
till he outlived them
and found himself
in charge of the school.
His breakdown was
spectacular.
The kids told stories for years.

When the Bishop
was going to fire the Principal
for being afraid of "the parents"
and thus not collecting back tuition
and thus bankrupting the school,

the Principal said Okay,
fire me and appoint me President
of the school instead.

The bishop, who was Polish,
laughed so hard at lunch
the Auxiliary Bishop
almost administered the Heimlich Maneuver.

That idiot Mick!
gasped the Bishop when he caught his breath,
and they tell jokes about Poles!

Up North

I like peanut butter and mustard
said my cousin with the greased back hair
when we were kids
and Look at the fuckin' deer!
which my parents translated
Look at the funny dear
because I hadn't heard him
over the car noise.

He came from Milwaukee
where his father died
in a drunk tank.  Or he
came from Michigan where
his father fell into some machinery
and got permanent disability
or he came from Canada where
his father ran off on his mother
with a chippie from the motel.

He became a mechanic
or he was killed in Viet Nam
or he died of an overdose
or he took over the motel.
I don't remember which.
I had a lot of family Up North
my mom came South to get away from.

The twig
on my windowscreen
began to walk.
There was no
breeze
but the twig
swayed in it.
I was jealous
wishing I
could blend so well.

It's That Kind of a Place

where they say howya doing
& you talk about your last
I Ching (feeling damn lucky
cause you thought at this
age you'd be talking bowel movements).

Everybody's got a pen and paper
on them somewhere for scribbling
book titles and web sites.

You can write in the john
Heisenberg was here
(or somewhere near here)
and somebody going in later
will tell it to a table
and they'll laugh.

Damn place doesn't make
good coffee.
But everybody
drinks more than they should
just to keep it open.

Our house had no books
and no pictures on the walls.
All books had to
come from the library
and when I could go there,
my room, at least, had books.
And when I could afford it,
I bought a print
made by a friend, but
Mom said no, and so
we had books (at least I did)
but still no pictures.

Jerry Seinfeld
played a bee
in a cartoon movie.

I didn't see
the movie
and I didn't see
his TV show

so for a lot
of people that
means I pretty much
missed the nineties.

I'm okay with that.

Scatterwife

With rootlike hands she scatters seeds
as the wind blows

and clouds tumble over each other
above her.

She's worn black all her life, a widow born.
the seeds she spreads

lock themselves to winter in the
cooling ground.

She said
There is no Dan
when I asked
about the man
who used to beat her
and once shot her parakeet.

Since she wasn’t in jail
I assumed the is no
metaphorical

unless Dan himself
or a family friend
did him in.

When they panic they steal.
I find it through google,
copy down the URL
below the F.  They of course
deny.  Most keep denying,
even when it's one of my
favorite poems they've stolen.

To the Language Arts Goddess
(for EB)

Not the Deity of Epic
or Diva of Lyric,
you're put on potty patrol
to make sure the kids
don't smoke in the johns,
and you check hall passes
and stroll the cafeteria
to quell with your dignity
any approaching ruckus.

When you go back to Mount Olympus,
they expect you to empty the ashtrays
and keep the nectar tanks filled.
When they’re all too blasted to care,
You catch a quick bite of ambrosia
behind a potted fig,
and peer down
into the schoolrooms of the world
to see who just
klept a paper off of google.

THE KID

I thought of a cool way
to kill Shakespeare (he said):

You switch Hamlet and MacBeth.

Hamlet dithers around
until Duncan leaves the castle

and Big Mac,
as soon as his old man's ghost says Boo!
stomps in and swipes off his uncle's head.

Okay, so that's like
six hours of theater reduced to
about twenty minutes.
Now on to the other plays! (he said).

He was the essence of guru,
leading us all around
with the word "Ah!"

Then he was the best
of leather-jacket wearers,
hip in man purses and short hair.

Then he was in the first rank
of non-pipe PH. D.s
as Borkum Riff
was banished from the halls.

Now he's a voice,
coming on in the afternoons
from the non-commercial stations
only the best of music
for professional ears.

When did the sky become a sapphire
And the leaves beaten copper?

When I wasn’t paying mind.

The trees are still woood
but now the light’s golden.

I’ll have to drift off more often.

The one who likes to put me on the spot in class
has asked for see some of my poems
and so I gave her a couple of web addresses
and I wish I hadn't done so
because I really don't want it in campus folklore
that one of my names is Sleeps With Bear
or why.  I will try to be philosophical
about this thrown-away privacy.
It's a damn good story, and true,
but still I like pretending that what I type on screen
isn't open like some plundered ruin to the world.

Office Window

Fallen leaves are just leaves
when they don't have
toddlers to throw them around,
watch them twist down,
grab handsfull and
flap them like wings.

Come away from there
says the teacher (a German)
to the little ones
That is a professor
as if naming a caged predator
or a piece of road machinery.

No, they're beautiful!
I walk to the glass and say,
at a loss to tell her
how they've transformed the day.

October Surprise


You get used to daily crash,
and the six hours of nothing
roaring over spiked horizon
slams against all the rubber
buffers you've set up and nearly
bounces away before you grab.

To say it becomes a winged horse,
you hanging onto Poetry's tail,
denies your basement office
and the copper leaves that skate blue October
over eye level. But still.

But still.

The first poem of the day is not
the surprise, nor the second,
nor the bout of computer assisted
experimentation (Let's make us
an Ashbery), no, it's the
to-do list still doing like gnats
in a sunbeam and you are able to say
to the sunbeam let it be.

This could get dangerous.

You always thought
you could disappear into poetry
leaving behind a pile of words
and now you don't care?

You don't care.

If they want you so bad,
Let them follow you there.

Basement Window

If I stand up
it looks like I'm planted
up to my shoulders in the lawn.
Dogs walking by
have eyed me curiously.
"Oh no you don't,"
I've said to them.

Celebration

My father
tried to sell
my eyes
as he'd sold
his own,
but no one
wanted them --
they were no
good for marching.

That used
to make me sad
but then I
opened the doors
of my lungs
to let in
the light that
remains, and
this is
a joyous thing.

To a Young Poet

Cat's wail,
thump in the kitchen,
temporary stoppage
of breath: anything
that wakes you
in the dark
is a poem.

I didn't write a poem today.
It was too beautiful
not beautiful enough
and besides the wind was
blowing or not blowing,
taking away the news
I needed or letting it just
sit there.  I realize
these are not excuses
but they're presently
what I have in stock.

Thanks, Brian, Sue, & Milner!  Your comments are why I risk these things here.

Academic Poetry

1.
The prisoner notices
fine distinctions:
the square of light
that moved
since yesterday.

2.
Out in the yard
they play rough.

3.
Hang with your
own.

4.
Don't expect
to be understood.

This guy ain't loaded with bling.
He's not a penis with a man attached.
Can we trust him to run our great nation?

A new precedent

Everybody wants to hump the vice presidential candidate
even my friend Shawna's pen-pal, who's a lesbian in Sweden.

"Fem butch," Shawna says, referring to the vice presidential candidate
and her habit of gunning down moose.

There were no whiners
like Viking whiners,
no beaters
like Christian beaters.
The Buddha rotated his cigar
over the flame
and tried yet again
to blow a perfect ring.
It’s the age, the age.

Standing where you belong
puts you at the center
of the Void.

Twist your wrist
and dragons
leap,

lunimous spirals
subside to
sparks.

That low
powerful hum . . . .
that's everything
added all together.

The wooden duck
my father carved
and my mother painted
is dreaming
atop my computer. 
It thinks maybe
it will fly someday
or maybe not.
A thousand years
is time enough
to make up your mind
if you're a wooden duck.

Massillon Zen

When the town was careless,
all rolled into one big Hunkie
who spat on the ground
and turned over steel bars
in the scarfing pits

they rolled their opponents in football
year after year.

Then they looked back at the string of wins. 
Twenty-three times state champs!

And started losing and kept losing --
fifty years of history too heavy
for even the biggest Hunkie to carry.

A bamboo cross
showed up in my dream
against a white background
no other context.

The Way Things Go
   (for an old professor who called me a Romantic)

Every wheel rolls by surprise.
It’s delight the hub
holds on by. 

If we could read
the butterfly trails
as they leave the bush
all at once,
well, who would need
to footnote themselves?

Sometimes we can, John
and then we don’t.

#612

Glorious. Especailly in November.

Sue

Recollected in Anxiety

There's the worry of pockets
with minds of their own
letting coins burrow
out of sight in the mud.

Everyone's old
and arthritic and
it's winter and
there hasn't been a hearth fire
in fifty years.

Eat! Eat!
The picture frame gets fatter
while the canvas develops holes.

I could never
satisfy my father's hunger --
it was his alone
and now he's just too old.

Bear,  I love the way your shorts have begun to expand again into longer verses and they are all delightful to read over and over.....miss you!  My muse must be hiding in a cave somewhere by firelight, tired of the sun - I'm hoping to coax her outside with your verses....lol

xo Cronk

What a lovely thing to say, Cronk!  You will need to protect your muse.  Academia is not an easy place for them. 

Bear

A Way I Know That Works


You spend years getting there,
folding in your wings
to fit through crevices
the snapping them taut
when you come to a ledge
and must jump.

I wish I could tell you
the universe will reward your skill.
It will, of course, but

Two months after she graduated,
with no one to rail at six hours a day
she drove her car (no skid marks)
into the wall of a furnace factory.
"Who says we don't perform a service,"
said one of the teachers
raising an eyebrow over his bowl of chili.

Dear Rick

ah .....the skills of incarnating are luscious.

Your quill seems to be so happy coming in and out
of the inkwell.

Keep sharing !!

a warm smile
silent lotus

Dear Rick

My professor wife found this enchanting
and i thought of those who will choose
to run right through a wall
to get cremated.

Sunday smiles
silent lotus

Thanks, SL!

Rick

Rick, fabulous poem, so taut now.
"cat on the porch roof
so scared" amazing
Why not "when she's gone" at end rather than repeat "cat"?
Tom

Good question.  I don't like assuming the cat is female.  Male cats can be scared of coyotes, too.  I would be.  But is that a consideration that belongs in a poem?  I don't know.  Does the "cat" repetition bother you?

Rick

Don't think the cat repition bothers me, if you had when she's gone I'd think your lass had gone.  You could nix "the" from the coyotes.

lovely read liked Moon presents her smallest curve...wish I could do that!

Dream #625

My father wasn't my father
and the light globes on the ceiling
were filling with water. 

The people who said they knew me
were people I'd never seen

but it stopped raining
it was beautiful outside

and that was enough for me.

exquisite, rick
surreal, yet fixed
just like me!

 :)





.

I like #617 - but how about cutting down the middle stanza?

You spend years getting there,
folding in your wings
to fit through crevices
the snapping them taut
when you come to a ledge
and must jump.

You repeat this infinitely.

I wish I could tell you
the universe will reward your skill.
It will, of course, but




Just a thought.

B.

Cut made, Brian.  I think you're right.

Rick

Outside Ritch Hall

Before the sky goes slate
it goes purple

kings marching in state
to their tombs.

Revision of #8

March 14,2008

He's anxious because he can't sleep can't sleep because he's anxious is aware of this damn aware and laughs and a couple of his hallucinations laugh too but not all of them.

Liked the one about the student who wrecked hs/hr car.  Really, like all your stuff, there is a straightforwardness that is refreshing and diffficult to maintain in this line of work, even with the damn page lines helping us.

Though not in this case. 

d

smashing, Rick
— keep them coming

I see them as strides of dialogue
a guy on his own trapped in the projects
mean city streets, an army of one

a few would make a scene, a great scene!

t

D, sometimes I feel trapped in being straightforward.  All that time trying to make myself clear to the other mill honkies in my family.  T, sometimes I found that the best way to communicate was to give them their own words.  Jill, thanks for giving me a way to describe the tone.

Rick

Women are perverse.


It's a way of maintaining
autonomy.

Poets are perverse, too,
risking words like
autonomy

parking a silver Rolls
in a warp-boarded shed.

But there you are.

Eventually

for Steven King

something
will happen--
a poem
will come,
the color
orange
will mean
fear or a
hardware
store --
and then
it will
mean
something
else.  No
life
without
meaning. 
No
meaning
without
change.

— Women Are Warped
too, my mean momma ain't
gonna park that thing dér
anymore — profile, blues dude!

&

fear and truth —  wot a gift
inspiration, grist, tás been said
subject dictates wot words
— our innards do the rest!


Very killed, yo-jo — Very cool
nice, e-x-a-c-t-l-y
 :-*


dr





.

Aversive Conditioning

to DCA, Ph.D.

In the cages
the rats not yet
experimentally engaged
twitch noses as you sit
with your cigarette,
calculating voltages.

Leaves fall in the quad
and sprout and fall
forty more times
and you're under
a flat stone outside town
without your curriculum vitae.

I'm assuming that's all right,
the way you asserted in class
there was no soul, mind,
or anything that couldn't be
operationally defined.

Look at the fool
up there on the bank
with his hook
and line and
dissolving worm.
He thinks he's
going to catch me.
Not me!
I'm going after that
tiny delicate
fly that just
touched down
in circles of light.

Like this, Rick...made me chuckle an evil chuckle...no emoticom for that, hey ho.

The Horses of Ambition


Now she's a college
president, fit and looking
one way at a time.

She knows the dictionary
difference between entitled
and deserving, and only

excels at what she tries.
Those few who saw her once
high and dancing on a coffee table

learned about the inauguration
via yahoo.

She better watch out for Youtube.

Good one, Rick.

lol
this was b4 digital, alas -- right at the beginning of videotape

One of the Reasons I Taught High School


"As a poet, you're not uhm, known," she said.
"Are you working to be famous after you're dead?"

Who are
these people

partying
in my head?

Hey!
Outa here!

(I can't
stand them,

can't even
stand

party as a
goddamn verb.

It's a noun!
A noun!)

Beat it!
Shoo!

Go on!
Git!

Oh.
They're me.

. . .

Hey! 
Who is

that angry
man,

trying to
chase us

out of our
head?

November 28

Either end of winter
rains

starting in the skin
draining down the bones
pooling in the feet

where spring
sprouts miles

Her words
are clean and sharp.

She throws 'em
that way, too.

Nourish the roots
she said
and the plant
will take care of itself--

With the help of bees of course
to walk the flowers's hallways
and birds of course
to pick the little pests
he said.

What a fantastic poem!  xo Cronk

? Typo in flowers'

wondered it the second half could be an answer to her statement changing the first "of course" to "I thought" or "he said"

good poem though I enjoyed it.

Sue

Sue, I think you're right.

Rick

Begin
at square one
but don't
follow
the red arrow
this time.

Cut across
the empty center
of the board.

When you get
to the middle
and the game
is distant lights
on all sides,

stop

for as long as you want.

There it is
my left hand
clutching the side of the desk
to keep me from
falling off into poetry.

Lefty,
you're supposed to
be doing the other thing --

pushing.

Faces
look out at me
from the little
boxes I put them in:
A, B, C, D, F,
Incomplete.

We're all sad
even the A's --
there should be
more to it than this.

This is the end
I forget
so I can do it again
next term.

I seal the boxes lightly,
leaving room to breathe.

No books in the house
and then the domed
library.  They made us
sit on little chairs
in the basement.
But then I was twelve
and cound push against
the heavy doors
of the adult room
and all the rest of it.

Curb feelers
scratcheed stone
that still held
its hitching ring.

Driving lessons
still tense along my arms,
I parked
the big multichrome
getting it just right

and then I walked
the long steps
and pushed the
tall heavy doors

and then I walked
the silent stacks
for as long as it took

to find just the right
book

and Friday night
and Saturday
opened like a rose.

Nine Years

He was only
a baby doc
when he sat
across the desk
in his windowless
office in the basement
of the library
and held my poems.

But he seemed both
ancient
and totally hip
with his British accent
(He was born in Ohio)
and his long beard
(Eat your heart out,
DH Lawrence).

He was a Poundian
via Ivor Winters      
and he footnoted
all his own poems.

He called me a romantic,
told me to read
The ABC of Reading
and then sat
until I got the hint
to go.

I would find
other mentors
and learn
to read their poems
before letting them hold my own.

Today my Math Professor (Math for Elementary School Teachers) decided to introduce us to one last concept that he thought might be helpful to us to practice our number sense.  After 45 min. he said "oh, and this won't be on the final".  I was glad to know that but also glad to know the material and plan to spend some time on it after finals.

The girl behind me grumbled about the wasted time of learning something that will not on the final next week.  It made me a bit sad that she couldn't see beyond next week....you know what I mean?

My professor gets that there is something more....the girl?  I don't think so......lol

Hope all is well with you Bear...

xo Cronk

I'm doing fine, Cronk, sitting here in my basement officekilling time.  Exam to give and grade tomorrow plus some sets of essays, then final grade calculations.  Then jump in and run with online course design.  How are you?  Able to stay in the po zone?

Rick

Beautifully captured Rick. Sentiments I share too.

B.

Cento Mourning American Poetry (Review)


Simulacra of culture:  waste ¹
I've been avoiding my illness ²
I had just seen James Dean ³
The biographical is boring tho ⁴
Informally I believe in God's powers ⁴
And I dreamed I was my brother, again <sup>1


1</sup> Cynthia Cruz
² Jason Shinter
³ Jack  DeWitt
⁴ David Rinard

In this dream
my teachers
the poets that is

in this dream
they leave me
in charge of the house

my godmother's house
on the Smoketown Road
saying

handle things
with visitors
till they come back.

But they're
not coming back,
and they slip into

undergrowth
across the road
among ancient ruins.

I go back
to the house --
what would

you do?
and I tend
the rusty pipes

and worn
stairs, telling
visitors

they'll be back
knowing
they won't.

My poems
do exactly what
I want them to
he said.

I'm sorry
to hear that
she said.

Thanks Brian!

After Hearing Him Play

He was so precise
the keys of his harpsichord
had fingernail grooves
where he hit them
same place every time.

This was insane
and it damaged his students
and someone should have complained
but how could they?

He was Japanese
and he played so well.

I am a language
written on stone
with burnt sticks
for a purpose
no one remembers.

He Do the Police in Different Voices

was the original title of
T.S. Eliot's Wasteland
before Ezra Pound
slashed his pencil through it
and Eliot became
the towering giant of the early
twentieth century.

The younger poets
know Eliot not at all.
Would it have made
all that much difference

if Pound had left
the title alone?

Major Figure

He's been dead
thirty-six years,
the Easter Island head
against which
we measured our ears.

It's not like
there's another idol
casting shadow in sunrise.

The island
was turned to a shopping mall
which failed
half-completed
when they ran out of money.

The Moms
were the enforcers
where I grew up:

slaps in the mouth
pokes in the chest
bonks with wooden spoons
merry chases around the house
with a flyswatter
till you squirted out the back door
to the safety of public view.

They would also kick us
throw shoes
and damn us to hell
screaming Wait till your father gets home!

But nobody was afraid
of their dad.
Except the Orbachecks.
But they were weird.

HOW yOUR mIND wORKS

Lots of tests available
to tell you that
but somehow
there's a but-somehow
and though
the white coats
may be satisfied they caught your essence,
your essence is still out there
spinning with the stars.

It's verbal and numerical,
the problem is.
They seek to describe you
in one dimension
less that what you are --
and what you get is
either a flat map where the poles are huge
or a cut-up map where the sizes are right
but the things that belong together aren't.

It's language and number.
The mind invented them,
the mind contains them,
they are less than the mind
and so how can they
describe the mind?

Mind is known to mind.

Her big secret
was the black hole
inside her

and she danced
frantically around the rim
to distract us.

But if all she was
was void,
who the hell
was dancing on the rim?

Decoy

The old man carved decoys
till the second time
he sliced his hand

then one by one
blowgut old boys
bought them for dirt
or a little less

boys with wives who sneered in church
and only the really big churches

with engraved shotguns
and housing tracts
named after daughters

who when they saw the old man
told him they'd paid too much
for those damn decoys

until the old man
naming the same price
offered to buy them back

Impulsive

I've now become a body of words.
Two:
the ones I write
and the ones I tell my students.

Luckily the ones I write
remain around me

and the ones I speak
disappear.

Prince Chi


The powerful prince
is honored with horses in large numbers.
In a single day he is granted audience three times.

                                        --I Ching


Dad wants to see me again.
He likes giving horses.
The chat is all significant, of course.
Ministers write it down.
It's getting a little difficult to move.
Horses crowd the yard.
A couple are wandering around inside.
They're well behaved, of course,
all Dad's horses are, but
feeding them is getting to be
a chore -- and some of them are getting thin.
Not a thing to do to the Emperor's gifts.
It's a hint from Dad:
build an army
be a major player.
But I've yet to find
how to compose poetry
on horseback.

Road Out of Town

The house
back of the steel mill
had a tin roof
a waist-high lawn
that had never known a blade
and walls covered
in hubcaps.

Riding my bike
out to my uncle's farm,
I knew exactly
what it would be like
to live there

though I'd never been inside.

Oh to be permanently ten --
to know that
and not to care.

Sign in the Admin Building

What makes a poem
a poem?
Is it image
is it sound
found wound around
the DNA?
What is a poem
anyway?

Dude said
I should write children's books
because they're short
and pay better per word.

He runs a chemical company
so I keep feeling like
I should listen to him.

For Jess

She doesn't know
whether to be
a crack head
a whore who laughs at God
or a poet.

One of the few things
age cures, my dear  --

not knowing what you'll be
when you grown up

Oldies Station

thinking of the kids
conceived to those tunes
kids I taught
in high school and college

still teach a few,
ones who woke up
from booze fog
into middle age

what kind of promise
did Little Stevie Wonder
and The Jackson Five
The BeeGees
Jefferson Airplane
Jimi, Janice, Kiss
and Queen
make to those
kids?

Whatever it was,
I don't think
it came through.

Last Ridge Over

Mountains
pulling themselves
across the window.

Don't tell me otherwise.
Anything that big
has got to move.

Getting Better

OK, six days with pneumonia
&
now I'm sad.

Lungs rule sadness
the Chinese doctor says

so I must be getting better.

A quick
and deadly thing
a wasp is

or at least
that's how it
looks

and surely
violent death
must look
like that
right before
it hits.

The girl
who once
danced on
my coffee table
now hands out
awards
at a prestigious
university back east

and the girl
who started college late
because of her
four-year-old
now has lifetime
employment
at a not quite so
prestigious
university
in the Midwest

and the girl
who stripped her way
through undergrad
now professes women's studies
and writes books
at a huge state school
on the west coast

and the girl
I married
never had ambition
admits it
and doesn't care.
She has to go in the back door
at the vitamin store
because customers
who need her help
will mob her
before she can clock in.

Thanks, SL,

Very kind of you to say so.

Rick

Inspiration

The raven squawks
for other ravens
and for itself.

I am not
its intended audience

nor is the snow
it shakes off its wings

but we
are here, as well.

Three-Minute Poet

It took three minutes
to draft that poem.
What's the worth
of three minutes?  People
let whole years
drop from their pockets
like pennies to the asphalt.
But no one
can pick such a penny up.

Staying There

It takes  about three minutes
to open the red door
to my courtyard
in the sounds of birds
and of the fountain.

There I have tea
with the poem
who always has a cup ready.

And it takes
less than a second
for exile

and I'm walking
streets and halls
in jackhammer
in fluorescent buzz

the tea
in my belly
cooling fast.

The start
of a poem
occurs in
darkness
like the start
of a year
or any child.

Development
goes through
gills, talons,
feathers, snouts,
and no sonogram
will say what's
normal

for each poem
like each child
each year
has its own
road to go
its own pack
to carry there.

I like this latest bunch of grapes Bear - xo M

Thank you, Randomfeet!  I enjoy it when you drop by.

Bear

We're all in the same room now
typing away
typing over each other
thousands of miles apart
looking at the number counter
surprised so many visit
our personal heavens and hells
and are silent.

Last Lizard, First Snake

Saying goodbye to stump stump stump
you became liquid, tongue to tail.
Embracing the weird,
you became legend.
Was it an easy thing to do,
slimming down to the essentials
of brain and spine?
Or were you already there,
and legs just an encumbrance?
What were you adapting to,
what was the bow
that made you such an arrow?
Or was there just a place among life
and you filled it
the way you flowed out of sight
in that hole in the ground?

they need a cheering section
those ideas that
would not so much raise an eyebrow
as raise nothing
the barked laugh
is a sign
they struck a bullseye
in the dart board in the basement
and there's no beer in the fridge
to wash down defeat
but the silent turning away
that's dangerous
the ideas go looking
for some other home
among the campfires
among the tents
of the foe.

"He plays
with ideas,
albeit in a
deadly serious
manner,"

said the professor
believing he
was finding
fault.

Will Someone Please Explain to Me


In graduate
school we
used to worry
about being
poets in
the world, about
protecting our
writing from
our mundane
jobs.  My second
mundane job
ate my writing
for twelve years
and I landed
in a town
a thousand miles
away with no
job at all
and that
also devoured my writing
and then a new job
took bites of it
and I thought my writing
was dead
and I had a public
funeral for it.
But it wasn't.
And I still write
though some wonderful
writers from
grad school days
have given it up.

Emilia is doing her best

baila baila baila
from the Spanish
language station

and my heavy schweitzer
bod has finally noticed.

No, it didn't baila baila baila.
but it thought about it.