Mudcat Poetry Corner

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 18 Apr 12 - 06:33 PM

The Important Thing

How many things
Are important?
And in what order?
In a rage of broken glass
and bleeding hearts
A single dish,
Put away clean,
Can be the only answer.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 18 Apr 12 - 06:44 PM

A Number of Bells

Is there a bell for every sailor cold on black water,
And dull, middle-aged paper twat ashore in sports shoes?

For every heart in the fog, a single
Far-fetching bouy-note
For finding some sort of shore?

One bell for each
Innermost ear?

Tell me that.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 18 Apr 12 - 06:53 PM

The Uncollected


Your attention may stop at the wall,
At any small object,
At a space too far, or at anything you name.
It may be arrested by evasion, a lie,
Or the hunger of not-knowing.

A lizard decides for himself
When to flee and how
To avoid the roots of roses
And dodge the broccoli.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 18 Apr 12 - 07:02 PM

The Big Continue


Stopped by the mere word,
Hand on the door
And insanity knocking,
He understood, just then,
Why men build things slowly.

So he turned and picked up the
Things she had thrownÑ
The ashtray, the sturdy shot-glass
And the childÕs bearÑ
And apologized.
He told her she
Had always been right.
Took nothing back,
But started everything forward.

A.H. Jessup
San Diego

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Micca
Date: 19 Apr 12 - 07:23 AM

Posted this on another thread but thought it might belong here too

Every day in my head
I hear Music,
Folk and Blues
Classical,
Like a sub-text,
The Soundtrack
Of my life,
So that I put
On the radio
To streamline it
into one tone
or style, otherwise
it is a mix of Gaughan,
Mozart, Judy Collins
Azanavour, Haydn
Django and Handel
Walton, Trenet, Ives,
Ketty and Copland
But sometimes
When the dark
Creeps up to the window
And the Peace descends
I'd settle for endless repeats
Of Four thirty three of
John Cage
©Micca Patterson

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 19 Apr 12 - 02:33 PM

Made me curious about John Cage's 433, micca

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 19 Apr 12 - 03:12 PM

Micca, I hadn't realized I have been subconsciously performing this piece in my sleep for years.

4'33"

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 12 - 03:33 PM

Counting As Well


Not results, only.
We will count as well
Heart beats;
Cycles of hoping wildly;
Imagination in majestic flares;
And every swift, dark silence,
As also one.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 12 - 03:40 PM

Who Fired Up?


Who fired up the Black Ball Line? Who
Bought the canvas by miles,
Called for the timber cut and the pitch and brass?
Who told men to report for sea in the smell
Of new planks and tar?

Who named the ports, drew up
The frightening courses, worried
The storm-cloud horizon?

Ten thousand names are gone,
Fallen along with his own,
Out where the wild cascades tumble off
The map, at the edge of the world.

But all the sailors remember
The kind of man he was.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 21 Apr 12 - 05:44 PM

YES! We did know him, A! Well done.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 23 Apr 12 - 07:34 PM

The Border Lands


In dreamscapes the motion is better
than even the moviesâ€"
sensory, surrounding, scented, haptic
and felt to the quick. It’s breathy, with all the chemicals.

Continuity, though, is poor. Now becomes then, twice.
In the part of the dream you hadn’t
Dreamed yet you
Are in a field of teacups
Asking where the pumpkins came from.

Someone who could answer does not
And you remember this with frustration
That is somehow familiar.

We must talk to the script writer.
But the motion, in dreams
Is wonderful.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 23 Apr 12 - 07:35 PM

Automotion


Long trucks carry cars
All shiny to their
New places. Once set free,

Cars carry warm bodies
To and fro
Hither and also thither.

The cars go in and the cars go out
And go away and sometimes
The cars stop.

The bodies they carry climb
In and the bodies climb out.
They go off and sometimes the bodies stop.

Bodies carry being and
The beings too go in, go out,
They fade off, return, appear anew without stopping.

Carried by beings, thoughts
Run on, run out, dry up and spring up.
And sometimes the thoughts stop.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 01 May 12 - 06:23 PM

On Parts of Speech


I should not be such a friend to adjectives, as though
Listening to a bad poet all day.
They fooled me back when into cutting up time
And the world
Believing the pieces were salvation.

But I had once learned that nouns were the enemy,
All lies, and secretly hostile.
So the adjectives found me
Easy prey.

Dancing with verbs, delightfully
Distancing myself from the solids
Would be a wilder way
To God things up, shake,
Rip and rock the loitering moments.
Rocketing laughs more than
Strolling with nouns,
Knocking the tocks off their pins,
Salvus sum.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 18 May 12 - 05:18 PM

Three poems from a "cycle" I'm currently working on; I expect the finished cycle to have five pieces, akin to acts in a play. These are the three I've written so far:

The Monster Challenges

I. THE MAP-MAKER

You stand there, with my file in your hand:
A long white coat beneath fluorescent light.
Your voice is measured, your expression, bland
To thinly veil the arrogance of Might.
With scientific words, you speak your part;
Your glance betrays a superstitious heart.

As though I were not even in the room
(And near enough to catch stale coffee breath),
You lay out (for my mother) all the doom
Of raising such a daughter so bereft.
For I will never walk as humans can:
Upon two legs, and tall, across the Earth.
With crutch tips as my hooves, I'll cross each span
In trotting gait, because of star-crossed birth.
With practiced stroke and swiftly moving pen
(Just as you've done with other children's lives),
You mark me down as something less than "Man."
To fit me to a list that you've contrived.
You circumscribe my life in dark blue ink.
My flesh and mind are mapped (or so you think).


II. THE ORDER OF THINGS

The day is warm, the playful breeze is light;
The sun (just like a lover at the gate)
Has called the flowers out -- and you, as well --
So even mundane tasks are pleasant things.
And then, you see the shadow in the crowd:
A monster in the corner of your eye.

An insult made of flesh and bone -- obscene!
Far worse than any word or gesture, this:
Audacity in daring to exist
Denying everything you've learned is true.
And you are Good. You've learned what elders taught.
About what makes a Man, and makes a Beast,
And how to tell an Adult from a Child,
And how to keep your own place in the world.
The monster in the crowd is gone, although
The shadow that it cast? It lingers, still --
It's lodged there, in the corner of your thoughts:
A seed that's far too dangerous to sprout.
But you are Good, accept this as a Test,
Enclose what's wrong in pity, and move on.

III. ANXIETY


Protected from the mainstream's quickened pace,
We're gathered here like flotsom in the weeds
United just by coming to this place:
"The Campus Registry for Special Needs"
As different from each other as from those
Who tell us where to sign, and where to go.

We know that we are lucky to be here,
And neither locked away, nor even dead.
And yet, in spite of Love, we still have Fear:
The knowledge: "I'm a monster" in our heads.
We're set apart, like coins in some machine --
Been counted, sorted, "valued," all our lives.
We've felt the stares of pity: cold and keen,
And yet, the pity rises in our eyes.
For we, as well, have learned what elders taught
On how to know an Adult from a Child,
So our identities are fragile -- caught
Between what's in our dreams and what's been filed.
We wait together in this quiet hall;
We glance. But do we see the Truth... at all?

---
I'm also making a series of videos of me reading them aloud (with text-on-screen). Here's Map-Maker and The Order of Things.

...I've yet to decide on an illustrative image for the third piece... a hallway just seems too vague.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: GUEST
Date: 18 May 12 - 06:21 PM

Capri Uni, your body may need crutches, but your creative mind soars up there somewhere.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 18 May 12 - 06:53 PM

Capri...all I can say is WOW. Nicely done!

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: frogprince
Date: 18 May 12 - 07:03 PM

Last Guest was me; thought I was logged in

          Dean

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 18 May 12 - 09:32 PM

Dean -- I thought maybe it was someone who had dropped their cookie (as long as you follow the five-second rule, though, it's all good!).

Um... "Your body may need crutches, but your imagination..."

Are you sure you didn't mean to type 'and' instead of 'but'? ;-)

EJ -- Thanks! These poems were actually inspired by four section-titles in a student's Masters thesis on Medieval literature that a friend of mine found online*:

The Monster Challenges Boundaries
Monster Questions Man-Made Classifications of Order
The Monster Creates Anxiety
The Monster's Role in Identity Formations

So the next one up is "Identity." And the one after that will be a wild-card, simply because something tells me this sequence need five for symmetry's sake (maybe to get to the quintessence?).

*The entire thesis is titled: When a Knight meets a Dragon Maiden: Human Identity and the Monstrous Animal Other; and it's in that paper I learned that there's an entire literary school of thought called "monster theory," which intrigues me... but not enough to go back to school...

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 29 May 12 - 12:53 AM

The Monster Challenges

IV: IDENTITY

Just as a rowboat scrapes the pebbled beach
I drift back from my sleep to feel the bed.
Receding like the tide, just out of reach,
The dream slips, half-remembered, from my head.
A nightly riddle posed, always the same:
It asks me who I am, beyond my name.

The question's asked again out in the crowd
Reflected in a stranger's troubled glance,
As though I were an insult spat out loud,
Or warning 'gainst the fickle whims of Chance.
Philosophers in centuries long past
Wrote cunning answers all about God's plan:
Which creatures He made first, and made the last,
The proper rank and order meant for Man.
But creatures like myself did not belong
{We were the curly brackets of their set}.
To illustrate, by living, all that's Wrong,
So people learn God's Truth, and not forget.
A doctrine set in stone (or so it seems);
It cracks, a little, nightly, in my dreams.

---
Also, I've got a video for each poem, now. They're all in a playlist on YouTube, here: The Monster Challenges: A poem cycle

Ideas are starting to coalesce around #5...

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: GUEST,Guest Charles Macfarlane Harrison
Date: 29 May 12 - 10:11 AM

As I have published my poetry already on my own website, rather than regurgitating it here, perhaps I may be forgiven for linking to it instead:
Charles Macfarlane's and others' poetry

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 30 May 12 - 09:02 PM

Some very strong talent in there,Charles!


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 30 May 12 - 09:06 PM

The Naming of All Things

The naming of all things
Is the law that
Has no name --
Required for the right
To own a mind,
And to be seen as sane.
Otherwise the cold night
Can make you blind
On the nameless raw light
Consume you like
Huge blues dining on brine,
Deep in a sleepless sea.

Then there are the times
Without names,
The heartÕs fall, star-crossed;
The moment when harm is denied;
The radium archetypes
That make the species mad.
The moment of being almost known,
The knowing of hawks
In the brave brain of a lizard. Things
That deserve a name do not
Always earn one,
And the art is lost, and
Some songs are never sung.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 01 Jun 12 - 04:29 PM

Plurals Alone

It is the plurals that will lie to you—
"And" is the prime deception.
The joinery of minds is uncaring,
A reckless cohesion.
Be not beguiled.

Neither is the one alone
Quite true.
The pulse and fire do not seek correction.
Unconscionable sharing
Lies behind the arrant lesion
To fail the whole soul
Singing in the wild.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 07 Jun 12 - 07:44 PM

Better Lying

Oh, if I were a better
Liar, I would be rich,
And weak as a slug
In sunlight.

Never mind that--I
Would spin you tales and you
Would come under my spell.

I would at least conquer
The world before I melted
In my puddle of fictions.

Could I fool everyone?
Even myself?
You bet!! I'd yell out
My magic.

I'd dance the liar's boogaloo
And create flurries of power
Until I melted.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 08 Jun 12 - 05:07 PM

City

May Christ, from his battered and forgotten yew
Look down (or over, up, across, or through)
Upon these harried, hurried shells
Who strive, with overcrowded minds, to make themselves
Some modicum of honor, peace, or truer time.
Or, and he can not do, may some other mind
Able to master such a point of view
(Surely not me. And probably, not you.)
Offer them only a moment to confess
That they, being so much more than this,
Agreed, step by small step, on so much less.

A.H. Jessup
San Diego
6/8/2012

---

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 10:16 AM

I.E.D.

Half a boot, old sock
And hand grenade
Eat the sand and
Drink the sun-hot blood.

A virgin's tissues
Crumpled in tears
Move to a landfill from a bedroom
In a town in Oregon.

Some say it was the mother's fault,
The boy never good enough
The girl endlessly made wrong.
But in the end,
One improvised explosion
Is as good as another.
A.H. Jessup
San Diego
6/24/2012

---

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 25 Jun 12 - 01:02 PM

Grammarian

Across the magic sandbox crawl
The wordly beasts,
Playing at tongues.
They offer phrases, commas, connotations—
The tutors of us all. Born never-young
They herd the restless living eye
Into the thin corrals of line and stop,
Ignoring what they do, and why.
They do not often laugh,
Nor ken, nor sense, nor know within, nor wot.
And this shall be their epitaph –
"They thought."

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 27 Jun 12 - 04:15 PM

Waking Bodies

The wildest dances break out
In the stillest hours.
As the bodies are all resting,
Something leaks in from without;
Explosions!

Flying fine flesh, on fire,
Flails in the moon,
And all the tides reverse!
The still lagoon stages a chaos
Of dancing!

Alarms—vile, clangorous and cruel—
Dismay the dancers, dispel the dream,
Disperse the dreamers
In a deadly beautiful morning call
To arms, legs,
And the broken rest.

A.H. Jessup
San Diego
6/27/2012

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 03:43 AM

Write no epitaph for me
Warm words carved on cold stone
In a local cemetery
Slowly getting overgrown

If in, say, one hundred years
People read the lines you'd leave
The words would fall upon deaf ears
For no-one would be left to grieve

If things I've done improve the lot
Of people I will never see
Then it matters not a jot
That they are unaware of me

My legacy is in my deeds,
The ones that help the world along,
The only epitaph I need
Is that other sing my songs


© Doug Chadwick, April 2012

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 28 Jun 12 - 06:13 PM

I like the steadfast, understated rhythm of those lines, DC.

Frostian. :D

A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 12:15 AM

The Monster Challenges

CHALLENGE V: THE VOICE OF REASON


There are no monsters underneath the bed
(Or so they say). They say there never were.
And when a baby's born with half an arm,
No chanting priest foretells the death of kings.
Today, we know the scientifc truth
And we've outgrown those silly, antique tales

(Or so they say). And yet, we're all afraid.
There's something churning underneath our feet.
This modern world is bursting at the seams,
And All agree that Order must be Kept.
We've turned to science, and learned ten thousand ways
To know just who is normal and who is not.
We raise our funds, we look for cures, invent,
And teach the child to wear a plastic hand.
And though we know it's fiction, we still cheer
The knight's triumphent ride, returning home;
At last, the dragon's dead, and now hear heart
Is safely bundled in his handkerchief.
The monsters must not ever win the fight.
We only let them try, to prove who's right.

CHALLENGE V1: THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

In looking down upon my naked self:
My lap, my scars, my hands, and crooked feet,
My posture's slant, my elbow's inner bend,
I sometimes wonder what it means to see.
This "looking at myself from where I am"
Is not at all like looking at a stone.

The words that echo through my memory
From all the languages I've heard -- or seen,
Like forest leaves that shift in every wind,
Their shadows hide -- disguise -- the things I see.
It's through this tangled forest I must go
To find my truth, and know just what I am.
There is one word-- it catches like a thorn.
And though it stings, I trace its twisted growth.
I find a path, and there I find the root:
That "monster," once, meant "Creature Born Deformed,"
(Something like me?), "a Warning From the Gods--"
One shadow pierced. This light can answer fear.
And here's the fruit: it's heavy -- rich with seed.
I'll plant one for myself, and start anew.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 09:25 AM

Thank you, Capri!!


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 11:23 AM

You're welcome, A! I think my "Challenge #6" and your "Naming of all things" play well together. :-)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: ranger1
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 12:00 PM

On hard benches within grey walls
The women sit like broken dolls
And I wonder in this dingy room
At the the fates spun from this loom

    If I catch their eyes, they look away
    Their dreams were stolen yesterday

There is so much sorrow here
The price they've paid is oh-so-dear
Their dreams and hopes gone from their eyes
Nothing left but moonless skies

    And if I catch their eyes, they look away
    Their hopes all stolen yesterday

For all that fear, he's just a man
And I'm not afraid to take a stand
We're all given grace at birth
It's time to remember your forgotten worth

    Catch my eye, don't look away
    I'll return your dreams someday

Tami Bill
November 2007

I wrote this at the Getaway, after sitting with my mother at the courthouse with a lot of other women all waiting on a judge to sign their protection orders. They needed a voice, I needed to give them one.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 29 Jun 12 - 01:33 PM

Tami:

What a rough row to hoe!!

I like your defiant song.


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 08 Jul 12 - 08:19 PM

To cheer myself up in today's heat:

A Fable (of sorts)


A Tortoise once said to a Hare:
"I challenge you, Friend, to a dare.
Let's run a foot race
And see who claims first place
(I believe 'twill be me)," he declared.

Now, the Hare thought this was a great joke,
For, in running, he never once choked.
The race day was set,
And the animals met,
And the bettors, they all went for broke.

In a vineyard just over the hill,
A Fox wanted grapes, for his fill.
But, try as he might,
Could not reach their height,
So decided they're nasty as pills.

Just that moment, the hare sauntered by
(A confident gleam in his eye)
"Ah! Now there goes my lunch
(Not some sour grape bunch)!"
And so after the Hare, he did fly.

Two entered the race on that day;
Two finished. And here's how it played:
The Hare won the deal,
With the Fox at his heels.
And the Tortoise? He met with delay.

And that is where this story ends.
I'm afraid there's no moral, My Friend.
But if you insist --
It's as simple as this:
"Carrots are straight, and Bananas have bends."

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: frogprince
Date: 08 Jul 12 - 10:41 PM

Doug, Capri, and Tami: Wonderful stuff, all. Two by Capri that cut right to the core, and that last that is just so much fun.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: katlaughing
Date: 08 Jul 12 - 10:53 PM

LOL...thanks for that, CU, made me laugh. The others are your usual uncompromising honesty which is one reason I love reading your stuff...not that there is anything usual about them anyway.

Tami, beautiful voice. Good for you.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 09 Jul 12 - 12:09 AM

Tami -- I've read your piece a couple times through, and what strikes me most is the bitter irony of it all: That the women who've been hurt by placing their trust in someone who claimed authority over their lives must rely on the authority of a stranger to save them. How resilient their spirits must be!

Kat and Frogprince -- Thanks! After the three months of writing All Serious Sonnet(-like) poems, I needed to Let Loose with some Limerick Lunacy! ;-)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 09 Jul 12 - 04:24 AM

A bit of poetic art crticism

{Here is a link to the painting concerned

http://www.wallraf.museum/index.php?id=226&L=1

                  Thoughts inspired by François Boucher's
                   Mademoiselle Louise O'Murphy c 1750

                      Now some are heterosexual
                     And others they are gay
                     And some just need thoughts
                     Of amorous sports
                     To get their rocks away

                     But can there be a man of any sort
                     In all male humankind
                     Who wouldn't long to land
                     A walloping hand
                     On that sublime behind?

                              Michael Grosvenor Myer
                                11 June 2008

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 04:03 AM

I'm not posting mine anymore...at least not in written form. This is a recent one of mine.


The Paradise Rose

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: GUEST,amergin
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 11:18 AM

Annie's In Astoria, Oregon

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: CapriUni
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 11:45 AM

Amergin --

Ooh, I like that!

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amergin
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 05:47 AM

Thank you! I took a class, and learned some valuable tips. In fact, it fired my ambitions...look for something in the future.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: GUEST,amergin
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 01:12 PM

Here is another one of mine: An Ordinary Woman

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Peter Stockport
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 07:17 PM

This came to me in a garden....
I recited it at the Midway last week in a Pam Ayres voice..#
hope you like it

I wooed an Australian slut,
An plied her with beer and tequila,
I asked her for sex in a hut,
I wanted a shed shag Sheila.

Don't we all.
Peter

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 25 Aug 12 - 12:30 PM

Where is the universe located?
Where, your own intuition?
Is the knowing of the known
The container. or contained?
Dragonflies insist the questions
Are meaningless.
The carp persist in quiet
Singing among the lilies.


A

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 12 - 01:50 PM

How far can you reach toward the
Brightest light?
How deep can you see, before your heart
Begins pounding too hard?
How far can you reach when your hands
Are always tied back?

How softly can you sing to cut
Through the sound?
And can your voice
Bring down tall walls
Alone?

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 12 - 02:27 PM

Market Pages

Sales fall on the news of broken hearts.
Volumes drop like dinosaurs sinking,
Thrashing and crying loudly, helpless lizard-rage.

In the market, hammers break, and eyeballs
Evaporate. Minds, and hands,
Shower fire on the souls
Who trample the sidewalks
In a city of walls.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Poetry Corner
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 12 - 02:41 PM

Finding the Higgs

The boson of mass is
Everywhere and has no place.
It kindles the best and worst of times, and spaces.
Offers congealment, contraction, to the mind
And drags weary souls through muddy time.

Finding an enemy in normal places
Is sufficiently hard;
Following into the far caverns where the bosons tunnel
Is far worse.
Thus, when the Devil walks into your yard
You will not recognize his book and verse.
Use the azaleas as a shield, or know something smart.
But his mass will carry the field,
and draw down the brightest heart.