Extreme Lovesong # 4

I'd like to be really beautiful
only because then
your teeth would probably shine
5 or 6 shades whiter
whenever I came around
too.

If I were superrich
I'd give you anything you wanted
including the famous elephant
whose inseparable best friend
is either a large blowfish
or looks exactly like one.

I am trying to get my plumber
to join all your pipes to mine.
He says," It's not code
but what you gonna do
when love comes to town?".

I don't feel much
like making a another sob song
but the holes in my face
want to bleed,
want to keep bleeding for you.

Why don't I pour out my heart then?
It would go Bang!
as soon as it touched your hands.

Why don't I go away then?
Every inch of my skin
would never stop crawling back.

How did I ever get into this awful fix?
I don't know.I don't know.I don't know.
The doctor says its the worst case
he's ever seen but not to worry:
It is not the dry heaves anymore--
he's found around my lips--at last!--
a ring of light green foam.
_________________

Reconciliation

She painted her toenails, she said,
to trick the bed monster
into thinking they'd already
been bitten off.
He bit them off anyway.
Every time.

Her mom didn't wonder:
I told you the smoke
in his pockets smelled
like it had come
from his mouth.
I told you bristles
can be rendered soft
with chemicals
and bleached wonderfully blond.
And yet you made earrings
of the padlocks I gave you
for your purse.
And the derringer I gave you
for when all else failed--
you loaded it with gum drops,
goddammit, and juju beans,
and he never dropped dead from it
like he needed to
but got crazier with every shot.

She loved him anyway--
and yet she got so
she booby trapped his wallet
on Friday nights.
She did it for love, she said,
and to rid the world
of at least one whore
and one half-dressed
huge bug with markings
on his back that looked like:
lady's man.

She was a woman's woman
but finally,
when things got really bad,
she started eating dog biscuits
to darken her voice
for her audition:
She wanted the lead
in any opera
where the diva got stomped on
got raped from the wrong end
got kicked over a cliff
and only by catching
a bush growing out of the rocks
and hanging there
with agonized fingers for hours
that seemed like years
got saved at last
and wound up in a clean bed
with bandaged feet
and a fair little man
who only scared her
when he smiled.


Tom Allen________________

The Poet Reviews Famous Photos

Yes, most of the time
I am...being pretty.
I mean, I want
to say something too,
but not if it means...
well, suppose I'm standing there
on a sidewalk grate someplace,
beautiful rich outfit,
nice pair of white heels,
the whole act,
and suddenly my skirt gets blown up
over my pants
and it looks like a parachute
and looks like I'm falling
maybe like from a roof
like I've just jumped
because my boyfriend
threw me over...
I like this sort of thing...
hell, I love it,
I'd do it every day for a year--
but not if my pants,
which I always want to be showing,
should have piss stains
on them or something worse...
I'd rather do birthday cards
than that...

But once in a while
something happens to me,
I don't know, somebody dies
or I nearly drive off a cliff,
and I start talking
and I don't care about shit
like dirty pants..
I don't care if I'm got up
in a halter and shorts
and look like I'm tumbling
barefoot and headfirst
off a tenement fire escape
that has just collapsed under me
and is falling beside me
in big rusty pieces
while just above me
also falling,
irredeemably hopelessly lost and falling,
is a little six year old girl,
maybe my sister
maybe my daughter
with her dirty shirt blown up
over her skinny ribs
and her arms held out
like useless wings.

(The photos referred to are 1) http://www.marilyncollector.com/legend/syi.html --scroll to bottom photo and 2) http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/fire-on-marlborough-street-1975.html This is saying too much?)

Christmas Mroning Drive

Christmas Morning Drive

Nothing on the radio
except Come all ye
and silent night.
Scanned every station.
Preachers and carols
sitting all over the waves.
Got me edgy.
What? It's Christmas,
so everybody's got to wear
sugar pants?
Finally snagged onto Reba:
"You're a Liiiaaarrr!"
and my achy breaky heart
got eased.
_________________

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry : Poetry Foundation

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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