God's Death

Nietzsche said "God is Dead".
I could never take him seriously.
God was too much always on his mind.
The letter he wrote
just before his last irrevocable slide
was signed:The Crucified One.
If God had died for him
He died the way Ricardo did in Ballo
when his lover's husband shot him from behind
and he slowly sank to the ground singing,
sinking and singing,
singing at the top of his lungs half a dying hour.

Charlie Otero had a different experience
of the death of God
when he came home from school one day
and found his father on the floor
strangled with a belt
and his mother naked and strangled with a cord.
As a man stabbed through the heart falls,
God fell in a heap that afternoon
instantly,
completely.
There was no singing at all.

A WOMAN UNCONSCIOUS

Russia and America circle each other;
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root.

The quick of the earth burned out:
The toil of all our ages a loss
With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought
(Not to be thought ridiculous)

Shies from the world-cancelling black
Of its playing shadow: it has learned
That there's no trusting (trusting to luck)
Dates when the world's due to be burned;

That the future's no calamitous change
But a malingering of now,
Histories, towns, faces that no
Malice or accident much derange.

And though bomb be matched against bomb,
Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure --
Earth gone in an instant flare --
Did a lesser death come

Onto the white hospital bed
Where one, numb beyond her last of sense,
Closed her eyes on the world's evidence
And into pillows sunk her head?

Ted Hughes

SISTER

The river is over it's banks.
The streets are flooded.
The room where you used to sleep
has water at the threshold.
We took some of the ashes
to your place in Savannah.
Some of them we dropped
from the middle of Golden Gate.
The rest we buried in the garden
at Mike's place in Laguna
where we saw you last
looking like your bones had almost won
their long battle with the lovely flesh
of your body.
And poor Mike,
that everyone always thought
was just an asshole,
standing there near you
suddenly seeing you
through our strange eyes
burst out crying.
Marianne,
you should see the river
you should see the water
how it's taking over everything.

SELF PORTRAIT

My friend, you who claim to know me,
look round my room: nothing of its decoration
was my own choosing; open my wardrobe:
it has nothing to show you that is specially me.
My lover and my dog know how I caress them,
but I remain unknown to them. My old instrument
is well aware of my hand’s contours;
it too cannot sing about me.

Yet I am not in hiding - simply, I do not exist.
I act, I suffer, as all men do,
but my essential core is non-existence itself.

My friend, you must not regard me as having
secrets.I am as transparent as glass - how then
do you imagine you can really see me?

Sandor Weores June 21, 2008
June 21, 2008 2:11 AM

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 11

Embrace

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight.

Billy Collins

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 8 2008

In maybe 4 seconds
you can take yourself out
and your whole family
and somebody else's
just by losing track
of which side of the white line
you are hurtling down
the road on.
4 seconds? Hell, 1.5 would do it
with time to spare
for a cut off scream.

Time is money and then some.
Why waste it
reading somebody's
assinine
tossed off
half-baked
and on top of it all
arrogantly obscure
and crammed with
non-sequiturs
shitty poem?

If a poem
doesn't do something for you
it is stealing from you.

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 3 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (POLISH IT LIKE A PIECE OF SILVER)

I am standing in the cemetery at Byrds, Texas.
What did Judy say? "God-forsaken is beautiful, too.
"A very old man who has cancer on his face and takes
care of the cemetery, is raking a grave in such a
manner as to almost (polish it like a piece of silver.

Richard Brautigan

POEM OF THE DAY JUNE 2, 2008

A Crazed Girl

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

William Butler Yeats

POEM FOR MAY 30 2008

At Joan's

It is almost three
I sit at the marble top
sorting poems, miserable
the little lamp glows feebly
I don't glow at all

I have another cognaca
nd stare at two little paintings
of Jean-Paul's, so great
I must do so much
or did they just happen

the breeze is cool
barely a sound filters up
through my confused eyes
I am lonely for myself
I can't find a real poem

if it won't happen to me
what shall I do

Frank O'Hara

Attack

AT dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Siegfried Sassoon

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 28 2008

Black Cat

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 27 2008

A Dead Boche

To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

Robert Graves

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 26 2008

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

Robert Lowell

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 25 2008

My Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer
Pablo Neruda

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 24 2008

Mission Tire Factory, 1969

All through lunch Peter pinched at his crotch,
And Jesús talked about his tattoos,
And I let the flies crawl my arm, undisturbed,
Thinking it was wrong, a dollar sixty five,
The wash of rubber in our lungs,
The oven we would enter, squinting---
because earlier in the day Manny fell
From his machine, and when we carried him
To the workshed (blood from
Under his shirt, in his pants)
All he could manage, in an ignorance
Outdone only by pain, was to take three bucks
From his wallet, and say:
"Buy some sandwiches.You guys saved my life."

Gary Soto

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 23 2008

A Meeting With Despair

AS evening shaped I found me on a moor
Which sight could scarce sustain:
The black lean land, of featureless contour,
Was like a tract in pain.

"This scene, like my own life," I said, "is one
Where many glooms abide;
Toned by its fortune to a deadly dun--
Lightless on every side.

I glanced aloft and halted, pleasure-caught
To see the contrast there:
The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory; and I thought,
"There's solace everywhere!"

Then bitter self-reproaches as I stood
I dealt me silently
As one perverse--misrepresenting Good
In graceless mutiny.

Against the horizon's dim-descernèd wheel
A form rose, strange of mould:
That he was hideous, hopeless, I could feel
Rather than could behold."

'Tis a dead spot, where even the light lies spent
To darkness!" croaked the Thing.
"Not if you look aloft!" said I, intent
On my new reasoning.

"Yea--but await awhile!" he cried. "Ho-ho!--
Look now aloft and see!"I
looked. There, too, sat night: Heaven's radiant show
Had gone. Then chuckled he.

Thomas Hardy

POEM OF THE DAY MAY 22 2008

Again and Again

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

POEM OF THE DAY--MAY 21 2008

November Rain

November rain
washed away my guilt
November rain
washed away my pain

November rain -
so tired I felt
November rain
was not just any rain

Long I longed
with deep torment
For so long
my body waited

November rain, , , ,
Oh, sweet friend
November rain-
slowly I faded.

November rain-
I cried within
Steady and slowly,
it kept on pouring

November rain,
watered my skin
And deep inside,
I heard my roaring.

November rain,
it refused to quit
November rain
kept on pouring

And alone outside,
in the streets
I wept-dripping...
dripping and falling.

Amy Phillip

POEM OF THE DAY-- MAY 20 2008

8 Count

from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.one flies off.then
another.one is left,then
it too
Is gone.
my typewriter is
tombstone still.
and I am
reduced to birdwatching.
just thought I'd
let you
know, fucker.

Charles Bukowski

POEM OF THE DAY:

Epitaph On A Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter.
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

WH Auden

Courtship

The Courtship

At first I thouight it was a coyote
for being so tall.
I rode closer on the mower.
Rusty hair, long stick legs
Ruinously skinny--like a derelict.
I sat and watched him for a while
poking at something in the grass
then looking up in my direction
and poking the grass again.
I opened the throttle and rushed him.
Useless.
He almost leasurely--I want to say disgustedly--
poked again and ran off toward the park
with something hanging from his mouth.

What struck me
was how he carried the what? chipmunk?
Baby rabbit?
Carried it like a mother cat
carries a newborn kitten
and yes, I remember now
how, when he ran across the sun,
the thing suddenly glistened...

sparkled!

like a new wife's hand.

Fox

I want to write a poem this morning.
Need a subject--
you know, something to blame it on.
Only thing comes to mind is the fox.
At first I thouight it was a coyote
for being so big.
I rode closer on the mower.
Rusty hair, long stick legs
Ruinously skinny--like a derelict.
I sat and watched him for a while
poking at something in the grass
then looking up in my direction
and poking the grass again.
I opened the throttle and rushed him.
Useless.
He almost leasurely--I want to say disgustedly--
poked again
and ran off toward the park
with something hanging from his mouth.

Doesn't satisfy.
Needs something.

The only other thing I remember
was how he carried the what? chipmunk?
Baby rabbit?
Carried it like a mother cat
carries a newborn kitten
and I recall how when he ran across the sun
the prey suddenly glistened...

sparkled!

like it was wet.

Visiting Famous Photos

Been reading lots of poets
three, four years now
most of them
don't have anything to say
just want to prove
they're hot stuff
how they're hell on wheels
with women
how sick they are
of having so many men
or they start jacking off their feelings
making a three ring tradgedy
of a dead cat
a memory of granny
how they lost their faith
(which they never had anyway)
how they're so fucking sensitive
they can't cut the lawn
for crying over the wounded grass
how holy their guru is
or how horney (for them, of course)
how Paris ain't nothing
after what they saw in Cairo

You know:
memememe

Hey, Marilyn
just because your skirt
is blown up
over your freshly laundered pink panties
doesn't mean your're
falling
falling among the pieces
of a collapsed fire escape
with a six year old girl above you
falling too
with her arms spread
like a crucifix
like hopeless wings

Saudade

Our language hasn't a word
for what I felt standing on shore
day after day
waiting for your little boat
to climb over the edge of the world

When it came at last
(O, language!)
it had three decks
and a loud party going on

Fado

you say love

and I see

one on one

for you

that sound

is a holiday



you say friend

and I see

certain restrictions

you see

different rooms

sudden swervings



your words

have been like sunny streets

full of ambushes



My dear

I've been so stupid

listening only for notes

from an instrument

whose overtones

are so weird

Karma

I shot the squirrels
as they jumped from the patio walls
jumped from the potting table
from the hose reel
onto my three-decked birdfeeder--
shot them like skeet.

And so
a tiny squirrel--
a squirrel that could pass
through a needle's eye--
leapt onto the tail
of my spine,
began to climb
vertebra by vertebra
up my skinny back.

Now and then I can feel
the scratching of its careful feet
now and then it shyly nips me
just to test its teeth.

I slap at it
and cannot hit it
I roll on my back
like a dog
and cannot crush it
I dance and carry on
and cannot shake it off.

It is climbing
to the place where
the feeder of the heart
hangs in the ribtree--
hangs very still
and wonders what this one
fathered by Ten Loud Bangs
whose mother's name is
Bloody Holes
has in store
for it.

Read The News Today, Oh Boy

A guy in Austria
raped his 19 year old daughter
and thereafter
locked her in a basement
and had 7 kids with her
and locked the kids
in the basement too--
this went on
for 24 years.

They have been asking him
why why why?
As though the poor shitface
knows any better
than anybody else
what slammed into him
and kept slamming.

It reminds me of what
Paramahansa yogananda once said:
"If I didn't know
that God had made the world
I would think
it had been made
by a mad man."


Me, it just scares me.
What if the god
who made the world
is a mad man
too?

The Godfather

Michaelangelo painted God
wearing a forked white beard
and wrapped with a pink sheet
in whose voluminous folds
babies, winged and naked
hover and smile.
They are wonderfully plump
with wavy blond hair.

Angelo's God is built
like a stevedore
and though his hair is white
you get the feeling
that when he was young
it was black
and nothing
could plaster it down

Wesley Willows

At the home for rich old people today
I looked into the common room--2 pm--
there was a huge TV, six feet across,
with a sixty year old movie glowing out:
Judy Garland was singing "Easter Bonnet"
to a sunshiney Fred Astaire.
five or six old women were watching,
their aluminum walkers waiting by their chairs.
They sat completely quiet, absorbed
before that big burning block,
that city of colored noise
to which all their commandeered faculties
were busy feeding life

A Peek

You know that bit about
"You never know the world aright..."
Well, it's true--
Please, Please..
I know whereof I speak.
Take trees...
One summer
maybe 30 years ago
trees got very good to me
especially when I drove
the eight or ten miles to town
on clear lit up mornings.

So well I remember this:
I would wait for my favorite trees.
Really! I would hold my breath
and wait for them
and as I approached them
and as I passed...
well, it was like you feel
when the music you love best
reaches the part you love best
I mean bliss...
People, I mean a kind of ecstasy!

After that summer it was gone.
Trees were just...trees again.
Never once since
have they been anything but just trees.
It was as though one day
the most beautiful woman
in the world
is walking down the street
in a big fat heavy burlap skirt--
covered from head to foot
in this shapeless burlap burqa
which suddenly
as she walks over a sidewalk grate
gets all blown up above her waist
and you find out
that is ALL she is wearing!
She passes
the skirt falls
it is over.

And you spend
the rest of your life
hanging around that grate
and the woman
doesn't come .

New Neighbors

They were not here two weeks
and the tree company
was out there
cutting down the oak
the huge huge oak
that made you feel
little and proud both
when you got close
that had been here
longer than anyone
longer than 90 year old Jerry Hart
who was born in the house
on the corner
it was probably here
before there were any houses
any street at all
maybe it was here
when the indians were
or before that even

So old man Hart
stood watching by his fence
and some others came out
and stood around long faced
finally the guy comes out
"Took up half the yard"
he says neighborly
and starts talking
about what they plan to do
with the space where it grew
and you could tell
why that tree never had a chance--
the man didn't even know enough
to shut up
to lie low
to get the idiotic smile
out of his voice.

Proposals

If you have any plans
for your life
please forget them
completely.
Your life
doesn't recgnize you
as its owner
and every part of it
no matter how tiny
is vastly beyond your sway
and will happen
without your help
and in fact
you will be part
of that happening.
For this much
many thanks !

After walking all morning

what I remember best
is the raccoon
lying on its side in the gutter
full grown, but lean
like a rangy teenager
with the ugliest grimace
I have ever seen
on its smashed muzzle
as though it had whirled
to face the death
rushing down on it
and had died
trying to scare it off.

Old Life Magazine Photo

I've never seen anything deader
than this little dog
smacked by a car
smacked unmistakeably
completely dead
held up now
embraced
by a boy kneeling in the street
a boy with a black hole
in his face so huge
all the green acres
of God's first garden
are getting lost in it.

Watching Boris

Matti Salminen
looks like a crumpling tower
swaying and staggering around the stage
while a hundred faces
of little Dimitri
loom behind

looks like a giant fetus
when he falls down
curls up
and begs the child ghost
to go away to go away

He's got Boris down cold
poor little big man
who wanted to be king so bad
he had a ten year old
stabbed to death

It didn't seem so awful at the time--
that little delegated murder--
after all, he'd seen his master Ivan
roast his enemies
over a slow fire
reciting psalms
as he turned the spit.

Poor Boris
thought he could play Tzar Ivan
hahahaha
not pop-eyed enough
not dead-meat cold enough
not lost enough

Just a little second hand murderer
who still had a little piece of heart left
a flaming little piece of heart
like a match in cupped hands
that would not be quenched
even as he stumbled around
in the windy boots
of a monster

East and West

You see things
like east and west
and other people
other countries
and communities?
How wonderful!

Me, I got fucked up
from before the getgo
what with my ma
getting scared,
eight months on,
by a huge
inescapable
mirror.

April 17 --Trees

Trees


Friends:
trees are something else

Yesterday
driving past the park
I saw a band
of big naked oaks
walking in a ring
around the pavillion
waving all their arms

Scientists:
Please don't tell me
what trees are
you're too goddam silly

Lumberjacks:
Please don't fall on me
like a ton of dead logs
if I say trees are not wood

Friends,
Dear Ones:
Driving past those trees
is dangerous--
they jump
all over you

April 15 2008

What do you do when love comes to town? --BB King

Chicago's First Mountain Lion



Photo in the paper:
Policemen standing around
pointing cameras
talking to reporters
drinking coffee
and one great big tan cat
lying on his side
and even though
there's not a drop of blood
not a mark on him
you get the feeling
this ain't the kind of cat
just plops himself down
in a crowd of cops
becasue he can't think
of anything else to do


They followed him into an alley
and when he turned on them
they started shooting

Even the conservatonists agreed:
nothing else for it --
kids in that neighborhood
walking to school--
nothing else at all

One guy said
he was sitting on his porch
when this big cat
jumped an eight foot fence
into the yard
and jumped back out
over another fence
that was higher
"He did it
like it was nothing
he wasn't even trying
I couldn't believe it
I couldn't believe it
it was like
you know
like all of a sudden
you see an angel
or something

April 14, Reading the Paper

Somebody in Louisiana
raped a child
now they are debating
should he be executed
I looked at his picture
he doesn't necessarily look like somebody
who'd rape a child
but he doesn't necessarily look
like he wouldn't
what he looks like
is cold
gathered in
a look that might be considering
a baby rape
but maybe he is just thinking about
another five thousand contracts
of winter wheat

April 13 2008

What ?

Another goddam poem yet?
haven't you learned
poems aren't going to do it?

all these turkey poems
between two pieces of stale bread
wouldn't equal one sad chicken sandwich