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Everyone On the Corner

2011-11-30T19:55:00.000-08:00

- By William S. Tribel (Repressionist Poet)

In the digest form
Language of conspiracy
Association
Of or with, as opposed to
A tangible act in kind

In the digest form
Language in complicity
Destabilization
For and to the meek and massed
Sub minor majorities

In the digest form
Language inconsistency
Obama-nation
By as from those that say so
All and every in union

With grace and good form
All given propensity
Right until the end
Ever in the digest form
With no good reason for war

Into Dust

2011-11-30T19:42:00.000-08:00

A Villanelle
- By Repressionist poet Tina Twito

These temporal things will crumble into dust.
These fickle moments skewered across the years.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

You do not notice love disguising lust.
You seek the kiss you crave beneath the leers.
These temporal things will crumble into dust.

These shining wonders all begin to rust,
This new Pandora's box of subtler fears.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

You'll find there is no bread beneath the crust.
You'll find that when you scream, nobody hears.
These temporal things will crumble into dust.

There's no true beauty where there's no disgust.
There's no true joy without the cleanse of tears.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

You think my words decrepit and unjust.
You will not fear the heat until it sears.
These temporal things will crumble into dust.
Be wary, child, of where you put your trust.

A Vast Confusion

2011-10-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Long long I lay in the sands

Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean's speakers
world's voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all life's voices lost in night
And the tape of it
somehow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light

Sweet Will

2011-01-07T05:02:00.000-08:00

by Philip Levine

The man who stood beside me
34 years ago this night fell
on to the concrete, oily floor
of Detroit Transmission, and we
stepped carefully over him until
he wakened and went back to his press.

It was Friday night, and the others
told me that every Friday he drank
more than he could hold and fell
and he wasn’t any dumber for it
so just let him get up at his
own sweet will or he’ll hit you.

“At his own sweet will,” was just
what the old black man said to me,
and he smiled the smile of one
who is still surprised that dawn
graying the cracked and broken windows
could start us all to singing in the cold.

Stash rose and wiped the back of his head
with a crumpled handkerchief and looked
at his own blood as though it were
dirt and puzzled as to how
it got there and then wiped the ends
of his fingers carefully one at a time

the way the mother wipes the fingers
of a sleeping child, and climbed back
on his wooden soda-pop case to
his punch press and hollered at all
of us over the oceanic roar of work,
addressing us by our names and nations—

“Nigger, Kike, Hunky, River Rat,”
but he gave it a tune, an old tune,
like “America the Beautiful.” And he danced
a little two-step and smiled showing
the four stained teeth left in the front
and took another suck of cherry brandy.

In truth it was no longer Friday,
for night had turned to day as it
often does for those who are patient,
so it was Saturday in the year of ’48
in the very heart of the city of man
where your Cadillac cars get manufactured.

In truth all those people are dead,
they have gone up to heaven singing
“Time on My Hands” or “Begin the Beguine,”
and the Cadillacs have all gone back
to earth, and nothing that we made
that night is worth more than me.

And in truth I’m not worth a thing
what with my feet and my two bad eyes
and my one long nose and my breath
of old lies and my sad tales of men
who let the earth break them back,
each one, to dirty blood or bloody dirt.

Not worth a thing! Just like it was said
at my magic birth when the stars
collided and fire fell from great space
into great space, and people rose one
by one from cold beds to tend a world
that runs on and on at its own sweet will.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

2008-11-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By: Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Dreams

2008-09-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

"DREAMS"
by Langston Hughes

Hold onto dreams
For if dreams die
Life is like a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Three-With the Moon and His Shadow

2008-06-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

Three-With the Moon and His Shadow
By: Li Po

With a jar of wine I sit by the flowering trees.
I drink alone, and where are my friends?
Ah, the moon above looks down on me;
I call and lift my cup to his brightness.
And see, there goes my shadow before me.
Ho! We're a party of three, I say,-
Though the poor moon can't drink,
And my shadow but dances around me,
We're all friends tonight,
The drinker, the moon and the shadow.
Let our revelry be meet for the spring time!

I sing, the wild moon wanders the sky.
I dance, my shadow goes tumbling about.
While we're awake, let us join in carousal;
Only sweet drunkenness shall ever part us.
Let us pledge a friendship no mortals know,
And often hail each other at evening
Far across the vast and vaporous space.

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart

2008-06-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial. - But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart...

By: Rainer Maria Rilke

When I Am With You

2008-06-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

When I Am With You
By Robert Bly

When I am with you, two notes of the sarod
Carry me into a place where I am not.
All the farms have disappeared into air.

Those wooden fence posts I loved as a boy-
I can see my father's face through their wood,
And through his face the sky as threshing ends.

It is such a blessing to hear that we will die.
Ten thousand barks become a hundred thousand;
I knew this friendship with myself couldn't last forever.

Touch the sarod's string once more, so that the finger
That touched my skin a moment ago
Can become a lightning bolt that closes the door.

Now I know why I keep hinting at the word you-
The sound of you carries me over the border.
We disappear the same way a baby is born.

Some foolish boy with my name has been trying
To peer all afternoon between the thick boards
Of the fence. Tell that boy it isn't time.

Porch Swing in September

2008-05-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

Porch Swing in September
by Ted Kooser

The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.

The Trial of a Man

2008-05-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Trial of a Man
By: Sylvia Plath

The ordinary milkman brought that dawn
Of destiny, delivered to the door
In square hermetic bottles, while the sun
Ruled decree of doomsday on the floor.

The morning paper clocked the headline hour
You drank your coffee lke original sin,
And at the jet-plane anger of God's roar
Got up to let the suave blue policeman in.

Impaled upon a stern angelic stare
You were condemned to serve the legal limit
And burn to death within your neon hell.

Now, disciplined in the strict ancestral chair,
You sit, solemn-eyed, about to vomit,
The future an electrode in your skull.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

2008-05-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

A Noiseless Patient Spider
By: Walt Whitman
From: Leaves of Grass

A Noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Personal Helicon

2008-04-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

Personal Helicon
By Seamus Heaney

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Listen to Personal Helicon:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/audio/heaney/personal_helicon.mp3

Passer Mortuus Est

2008-04-24T10:01:00.001-07:00

As it is April, which is poetry month and the month in which I was born, I thought it fitting to start a blog dedicated to my favorite poems and poets. I thought it would be interesting to get others perspectives on these works too. I have recently been reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was introduced to me by my oldest daughter and who I have now found quite interesting to read and so to dedicate the site I share Passer Mortuus Est.

Passer Mortuus Est

Death devours all lovely things:
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness - presently
Every bed is narrow.

Unremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation;
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?

-Edna St. Vincent Millay