| Poets A to J |
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Gary Beck - Three Poems from Dawn in Cities Recurrence It is the twilight hour of silence. The slumberous streets are empty save for the walkers until sunrise, who haunt the paved lanes awaiting the dawn of tomorrow, which comes in opaque, orange gleams, revealing filth abandoned by the resentful death of yesterday. Search We walk the lonely streets of cities lost to warmth and human roots, peering in the storefront windows at the excess of luxury, staring at people bound for somewhere, trapped in the anguish of the outcast, shrinking from the judging eyes of strangers. We shall walk the empty streets of cities searching for the refuge of the moment, the too-brief pause from crazed wandering through the promise-world, yet undelivered, hoping some tiny place upon the earth will give us comfort and shelter, before we are erased by dawn Survival Strain Hastening birth to death dream city of dangerous dawns, corpse of ceremonies dropped from sooty womb, nourished on cracked streets and crumbling subways, nurtured by sirens and unanswered pleas for help. Your sons and daughters are citizens of suspicion, whose midnights have no more enchantment, whose faces are birds of apprehension singing no more songs of morning.
SAWING THE WOMAN IN HALF Although you’ve left me to myself You’re still pulling dahlias From a top hat, Still sawing the woman in half. Must I walk through these rooms Of the dead I have so far Only heard rumors of. Tell me, magician, How is it that I am haunted By the things we never did, And why I see your face Across the bonfire Where it should’ve been. EXPOSURES In dry drawing rooms, In neutral colored executive suites, I’m still meeting you For kisses pulled from blue vineyards. A succession of cigarettes While I tell you how, as a child, I spent summer afternoons In a sweaty waiting room For a crooked doctor To fill out prescriptions In chicken scratch. The room silent and stifling Except for a polluted fan whirring And the voice of my mother Cursing the heat in Italian. I watched people disappear Behind a nameless door, And emerge smiling, Slips of white paper in their hands. Dr. K. Drinking green wine from Portugal, Remembering the nests Over our garage Where baby birds would fall from Onto the driveway, Bald, slack and wiry Like little old men. How my Grandfather looked In his coffin After months of chemo. I still meet you Beside October.s bloody lakes, Let you take my hand And tell me the future, Knowing that in a year you.d marry A woman who pretends photography But is really, as the Native American legend claims, Capturing souls. The one dimensional woman Whose dreams are underexposed. I listen to you tell me how I make your palms sweat. I let you play with the fire in my hair. I accept your pretend smile When I ask if you know What foxglove is for? It.s used to put the heart on an even keel, Or simply just to kill. I tell you it grows Beside my front steps. I still meet you on moony golf courses, Send you love letters on gum wrappers I.ve written in strange rooms near dawn. I still question if you can crawl Through Steinbeck.s dusty worlds, Or Salinger.s desperations. Can you be the desperadoes James Dean made flesh? Can you get your hands dirty From the truth. I tell you about the dogwood.s Crucifixion stains, The sunflower.s inflorescence. Tell you how, if the timing is right, I could fall in love with anyone. One was wayward and hungry as a crow. One was named Hartman With a voice like somber violin. And another, Saint John, Like Christ.s best friend. I tell you the Virgin is beautiful With her powder blue robe And a crown of 13 glittering stars. In every vision she is flawless and sad As a porcelain doll, Sends silent messages Like small implosions. And the world.s going to hell. All except for you. I tell you, how once upon a time, In the midst of a church sermon I watched a very tall boy fall backwards Like great redwood tree. On the crimson carpet People crowded around him, Tried to lift him Like ants moving a piece of food. 15 years ago I.d dream Of dead rock stars resurrecting, Turning up in the west, in disguise. They.d work in the fields, Their long hair smelling of rain And sycamores. Alongside them I would wear Cotton frocks, Gather vegetables and fruits To store in Mason jars. We.d make occasional trips to Spain. 15 years ago I.d dream of dead rock stars. At the Café Amsterdam Inside Kennedy Airport There.s a bartender whose worked there 33 years, all day watching People fly away and land. All day pouring liquid topaz Against their wounds. And everyone.s going to hell. All except for you. I tell you You can devote your whole life To one thing, one person, And only come away With a little spare change. UNFINISHED SONG So far the day unwinds Like a hearse cutting through February snow. The stand up bass lays askew, An abandoned body. A nuclear feel Of alcohol and cigarettes Twinkles in my throat. Music has followed us here, Penetrating the hollows, Remembering the details. Music, always confronting you From out of nowhere With its French kiss. It flows in the bloodstream, Wild and evergreen. Music has followed us here, Smooth as glass Weathered by the sea. It does not forget its own optics, Leaving the impression Of an unfinished song Like Veronica.s cloth. It flows in the bloodstream, Wild and evergreen. Jeanpaul Ferro - Three Poems October in Providence by Jéanpaul Ferro This love that I wish to acquire is an in between, both a joy and a sadness. I think a true soul is someone I haven't met, a rapport that is not real, a person that does not exist, —an autumn with no one in it. If nothing changes by Jéanpaul Ferro nothing changes the gray and crystalline mop top of the outcrop will crumble, rock will become soil, and air will become poison, forests will become deserts, and the sea will overflow over land, the red forest floor will burn like ash, beneath the surface of the earth crystal blue flowers will stay dormant for a thousand years, gold elements will stay dark like coins hidden in a closed fist, airplanes will crash, and wars will be perfected, the pink flash of gunfire will light up every night, and you will be able to see this from outer space. Oh, please, oh, please change, please change, because I want to change too, don’t want to lose you; I don’t want to go through every day like this: as though I am a living dead; I don’t want to awake in darkness the whole world over, I want to find the green light that glows across the headland, I want to drink from the dried up lake that’s been missing, I want to dig up the coffins and talk to the dead, I don’t ever want to find myself writing these words— Waterplace Park
the Freud in me, his father in him, and we can’t change the past. Maybe if we all turn inward, fool ourselves ‘it’ll be alright,’ North Korea and Sudan and Iraq just television after all, not another holocaust; I mean: it’s not real ... right? Nothing is real, and what do we know anyway? Satan and Jesus in us both at once.
Captured Beauty Her shape transforms into an instrument as the blood drips into a clay-fired bowl, that lies in a salt cracked hand; a drop trickles on to his leather sole. The brush of hair imprints the wedded grain across the stain mixed with humor of her life, given up in midst of the final scream of birth; he wipes the residue off the sharpened knife. He stares at the completed shrine, with wine easing the loss of wife and son, the shattered trinity he could never carve; his torn tunic buttons become undone. The pall lifts to shine the new day through curtains drawn to conceal from the perigee glare, and the wasteland that demolished inspiration's strings; this song of anguish he cannot live to bare. Hunger I can only hear the rumbles and whines of my stomach when I happen to stop and listen for that brief moment when work takes a pause and machines hum monotonously and voices grind to silence between incoming expectations of a hidden hierarchy dispensing the jumble of tasks that we must solve quickly before a queue piles high and the final sweep of completion elicits a slight drawn smile from faces beaten down by these now uncountable wasted years that disperse into the wake's eddies, a clear acidic liquid burning when neglected with the accompaniment of a rumble only heard when I find myself in being at a pleasant stare forward. Mushrooms Among fairy-rings we hide from visions eaten under toad stool caps, beneath our morals. A Fall Observation Yet the rain fell, I could see in a stalwart streetlight, parachuting from the telephone wire, the spray of a celestial river most students ignored as they hid their hands in denim pockets along with constrained smiles not permitting the other side to read their anxious contentions as beads raced down the cheek bone, collecting in the basin of the gutter. Unaltered dead leaves prevented the swell from finishing its course where instead it pooled, a lake extending into the street; yet some high heeled girls didn't care because they walked without umbrellas, not piercing the surface and gliding between the fabric wires that strangle those who dwell in the work day reality.
he removed the things that offered aid during the last months of my mother's life. The wheelchair where she sat numb, watching my brothers marry, after I lost her twice maneuvering her through cobblestone paths on our way to the ceremony. Her drinking glass with the bendable straw. The one she used daily infused with powder to thicken fluids so she wouldn't choke except on her own saliva. And the oxygen tank with its vacuuming sound that droned on so, even the dog knew an intruder had entered like an uninvited guest when you haven't an extra chair. Yes, I would have asked for the water-bench. The one we balanced on every morning while I became soaked from the two of us cleansing, the way she'd giggle about my t-shirt completely see-through, both exhausted from the scrubbing and shaving of limp legs in awkward positions. I remember how soft she looked - like a young girl with her translucent skin the color of white asters, and how she cried when we'd brace against the wall, twisting our course back to the bedroom, holes punched through plaster finding our footing, clumsy oafs as we'd fall on each other like drunks. I would have kept that bench, maybe sat there again on a peaceful day, when I missed her needing me before she was evacuated with everything else that was a part of her as if it never was. That Beautiful Girl Just once I wanted to be that girl, the one who everyone scorned. She wore miniskirts and go-go boots, danced to her pulse on table-tops while all the boys chugged shots round the horn. She whispered with an accent, changed her name to Candy, smoked long cigarettes between classes, leaving a stain on every filter the color of rhododendrons, her lips forever crimson-dewed. Oh to be that girl, the girl who sang Summertime. She played piano in a red nightgown and opened her door on blustery nights so the rain would tip-toe in her bedroom. She pranced like a deer barefoot in the meadow, carried her shoes in a sequined bag and laughed when she broke her toe on the sprinkler to the sound of Dream Weaver. She exchanged virginity for the art of Kama sutra and wrapped mink coats over peachy nudeness; stolen furs from her mother's collection. That girl laughed like a purring cat, head tipped back for her murmuring throat, then sauntered around with her slinky step like a sultry Odalisque. She'd bask naked at the bedroom window the sun rolling between her breasts the light casting a pink glow as if one ray might boomerang, like a curved missile, sending some lost boy to vaporize through glass, an offering, a lamb willing for the sacrifice, the onetime experience of this eccentric love-goddess-maiden. Oh, such a life took a toll on that girl, that best-friend girl whose heart was made of birds, winged with full-flight. They say she died last year, but no one told me. I would have loved to tell her story, reciting her eulogy to a crowd of stiffs, jaws open, eyes bugged-out of their arrogant minds. I hope they buried her, nude, in a brown sable coat cherry-lipped and barefoot with a book of songs spilling from her open hands. The Broken Stem When she spoke in her pocket-sized voice she felt like a leaf in bendable green tones. Circumventing hazel eyes she stared at his chin, and the sharp angled bones that formed a cleft; the soft fissure that let his gentleness spill onto the crispness of a starched white shirt. She imagined him walking through a field of tulips barefoot and rolled cuffs, his face haloed with kindness unable to step on a single flower.
Mindful, Mindless, October Date Mindful of my lover running late, as common as tying your shoestrings; I'm battered as an armadillos shell; I put my bands around my emotional body armor native to myself and walk like a stud in darkness. Everything in October has a shade of orange you know-- a hint of witch and goblin. In the leaves between my naked feet and toes, as I pace my walk in the parking lot, I count them-- I count them color chart fragments and bites: oranges, reds, still mostly greens. Barefooted the time of the tear, the year-fragmented. I am male battered in a relationship tested without my testosterone no sexual rectification or recharging of my batteries needed. I lie limp. Native to myself-- mindless of my lover running late. Then she arrives. -2007 Forked in Itasca I am so frustrated I want to chew the dandruff out of the internet hair implant and dislodge it, for a lost love affair I never cared about and hardly knew. Don't tell me about my sentence structure, I am human in these simple words. I swear to you I curse. Then the ram of my affair falls short frustrating my approach to the world at my fingertips. No Yellow Pages here my love. The dial up of my local connection is wretched, stuck unincorporated in the land I approved to live in, monopolized by Comcast the robbers of the poor and the humbled. All I hear is the rambling of the railroad tracks. I grow numb in my deafness faint with my hearing. Did I ask for your opinion? I am a frustrated foreign camper in my own community. Of a village I don't live in, but I love this local village I lie about. I am estranged. I tie knots in contradictions when I travel light and far, visit home I long for a journey past where I have never been. Is this the reason I am lost forked in between the poet I think I am and the working man my bills dictate? -2007- Jesus Walks Jesus lives in a tent not a temple coated with blue velvet sugar He dances in freedom of His salvation with the night and all days bearing down with sun. He has billions of ears hanging from His head dangling by seashores listening to incoming prayers. Sometimes busy hours drive Him near crazy with buzzing sounds. He walks near desert bushes and hears wind tunnels pushed by pine stinging nettles. Here in His sacred voice a whisper and Pentecostal mind- confused by hints of Catholicism and prayers to Mary- He heals himself in sacred ponds tossing holy water over himself-- touching nothing but humanity He recoils and finishes his desert walk somewhat alone. Contemplative. -2007- I'm a Riverboat Boy: Poem on Halsted Street As sure as church bells Sunday morning, ringing on Halsted and State Street, Chicago, these memories will be soon forgotten. I stumble in my life with these words like broken sentences. I hear and denounce myself in the distance, mumbling chatter off my lips. Fragments and chips. Swearing at the parts of me I can't see; walking away rapidly from the spiritual thoughts of you. I am disjointed, separated from my Christian belief. I feel like I'm at the bottom of sinner's hill playing with my fiddle, flat fisted and busted. So you sing in the gospel choir; sang in Holland, sang in Belgium, from top to bottom, the maps, continents, atlas are all yours. I detach myself from these love affairs drive straight, swiftly, to Hollywood Casino Aurora. Fragments and chips. I guess we gamble in different casinos, in different corners of God's world, you with church bingo; and I'm a riverboat boy. No matter how spiritual I'm once a week, I can't take you where my poems don't follow me. Church poems don't cry. -2007- Hanging Together in Minnesota Two thousand men on death row in the state of Texas. I've never been here, still I'm worrying myself to death. Webs of worry travel fast, scan over my memory bank back and forth like a copy machine. I refuse to get out of my bed I'm covered with burnt dream ashes held in custody my cobwebbed anxiety sheets waiting for the on looking armed system of justice to take me away. Their loud speakers keep screaming channeled commands through vibrating my eardrums; their messages keep cross-firing against my own desires. There must be a warrant out for my arrest. I will not listen period. I will shut out the sounds period. Insanity echoes with stressed sounds. It's Sunday morning, prayer time, I swear I will block out the church bells ringing on Franklin Avenue, ringing at St. Paul's Baptist Church. Religion confuses me like poetry or prose. I curse I will hang where Christ used to dangle; wooden cross-post in a Roman Catholic hole, or was it protestant reformation? I'm the thief, not the Savior. I don't want to die in my worry, my words, stranger in this world alone. I want to resurrect the dream before the wounds came, and placed me in exile. Long before the sounds of cell phones came ringing. There must be a warrant out for my arrest. Mixed in war, thunder, and sentence fragment. -2007- |
"a hint of witch and goblin"
| POETS A to J |