I’m writing less these days.
Figuring out the reason
I lose the frame of mind
That has till now
Heated my coffee,
Whose depth you compared
With my navel.
The times you gifted me with
Awaits at my threshold
Not to enter into my domicile
But to resurrect in me
The ancient tradition
Of coating love with courtly songs
Where I’m Petrarch
And you my Laurel,
Coronating the chase with
A second’s glance of the Human-god.
Woe seems me.
My graphic poems used to embarrass me
Yet I couldn’t stop writing them
Did I want attention ?
Praise?
Or a gentle rebuke?
No matter
Studying Bukowski
He probably never deleted anything
He has freed me
The writing stands
Sometimes the poem lives,
pouring out of its own accord.
Sometimes it lays sleeping,
it loses shape when resting
and cannot be awoken
until it lays flat on the page.
So, you have to pull it out slowly,
It’s extremely flexible
like imaginary plasticine.
You give back to it shape,
stare at it briefly,
a wonderful polished pebble of thought.
Then close the book,
open up the mind
and set off in search
of the next tiny treasure.
More at http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/.
I had to invent
a voice, a new face
last night
Judge me if you please
There was no more
interest in full old
me, old friends
Leaving me by myself
to compose in empty rooms.
From watching too much Nat Geo.
That’s the National Geographic channel.
Rhinos, giraffes, warthogs and springboks
have their ecological niches. I just have
to keep them there.
As much as I love the wilds of Africa and
everywhere, I must realize that rhinos,
giraffes, warthogs, and springboks have
yet to read a poem.
Yes, as everyone knows, mediation
and water are wedded forever.
-Herman Melville.
Come, you soft-shelled poets filled with sea-water.
Come and leak your speech on thirsty beaches!
Come and christen this hour the necessary source.
Come and sing the ocean’s primal power.
Come and listen to the seas—the rivers—the lakes.
Come and bring tribute to the tributary.
Yes, come and find your calling; your true vocation:
The marriage of mind to cherished hydration.
We are thoughtful. We shoe horses
so that they leave traces
along a shimmering collage
of fractured shells.
In hard-packed sand
their footprints are comma deep.
We are helpful. We shoe horses
and their feet
etch alphabets
in looser sand,
almost literate to a depth
of three inches.
We are engrossed, infer stories
as they enter water,
seaweed shackling
their hooves,
aquatic censorship,
though we see no traces,
and when they run free,
hock-high in foamy waves,
the garrulous surge of sea
added to theirs
make sagas,
scholarly tomes.
Observing them, we long
to scribble narratives
in lost planets,
galactic clusters,
probing deep space
with the point of our pen.
More at http://mariemacsweeney.com.