2013 Challenge: One Poem a Week

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[Angeline]

17 5/20/13

Fire Island Fiction

I'll never occupy your space
because I can't imagine it
without me.

12:00 am Tuesday Memorial
Day reaching back, strawberries,
fireworks, the ravaged beach

I'll visit years from now
searching for you
walking by glass in hand
hidden eyes flip-flops
folded paper, Coppertone,
listening for the echoes
of a century lagging on
rails, in the sky the pre-
historic rasp and whine
of them and the ceaseless

surf. A car door slams.
Neon. The night lights up.
You disappear into a cab
and hum away.

 

[hmmnmm]

vibe


concrete needs no storm
permission to rain
and some chunks just wait
as slabs tend to not care
about racked up decades

and just yawn when Richter
cuts loose a sneeze; a six
or maybe a seven
is bound to take a cue
from the underground rails
and true it would be one way
if a bloody, bony, way, to deal
with the walls of concrete clouds

yet when the bony, bloody, dusty,
shitty, messes are all mopped
and priests sing overtime
and the incense dealers
really make a killing
maybe jet off to retire in Naples
or Barcelona, enough dogs
will survive and that and the air

through which a sunflower
husk-cracking wave will flap
things will strangely feel
about the same as when
the tongues began to Latinize.

 

[bogusagain]

Eros takes a dive in Slumberland

if I was a corpse, I’d be lying here waiting for forensics
obliging in my submission to the pathologist's brutal scalpel
let’s be honest, I would have little choice
my blemishes would be a totalling of accounts
passively recorded and weighed against me
like a heart that beats too often it's merely an accusation
but the evidence require this as fact
before passing quickly onto the liver

a mosquito circles its irritation (within my head)
I'm too cold for its attraction, meat without the blood
the brain without the heart, all meaning and little purpose
while my bladder swells like a bag of insults I refuse to empty
I indolently endure my discomfort and consider my plight
my slothful preponderance due to reading too much Buk
self fulfilling the multiplication of my insignificance
this mortuary is quiet and there have been no visitors

but I console myself with this flight of fancy
of you laid upon your belly with shoulders propped
your languid neck, a vulnerable exposure, a strained and delicate isthmus
on which your head is hung as if too weighty
your posture is such that it is to my convenience
as I squint to focus upon your anatomy
my addled brain fumbling like clumsy hands
to perceive what only light to the eye can satisfy

the dark mouthed kiss of the deep swallow
it's at this point I'm usually shocked by the sunrise
catching me bolting along on the dawn stallion
Dracula retreating to his tomb and I resuming my hum-drum life
but on this occasion lucid daylight stubbornly resists
like Actionman, the will outguns the ways
a conjuror's confusion of mirrors, couldn’t raise my state in this condition
not even you, wandering naked about my brain

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[bogusagain]

the face of evil

in another life, another time and place
he would have been an evil dwarf
condemned, cleansed and exorcised
maybe even disposed of on a pyre
in this life he’s just a child

surely, no such child could be begat
through normal sexual intercourse
this diminutive monster must have been created
crawling out of some underworld morass
his eyes, fluorescent cauldrons
focused on brewing up malign spells
if it was not for these wells of poison
his round and polished face, could almost be angelic

I’m impotent in the face of childhood
his cynical smirk at knowing he’s top dog
foments a paranoia which has me planning murder
for all his lack of years, not for him dumb insolence
nor defiant indolence, nothing so passive
he simply radiates, like a deadly isotope
a fiendish character out of a fifties matinee movie
you can sense his death ray vision
his ambition to rule the world

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

week 22 - Illumination

She is content to pose
in his varied light,
sometimes coolly critical
moonlight or urgently, electrically
erotic. He seldom touches her,
his hands restless among his
clothing although his eyes
draw every curve and angle.
To test him she will open
thighs, arms, lips. If he
is tempted he looks away
only to return to her closed
body languidly naked, a Da Vinci
smile curving his way. He cannot
fathom if it is desire or wantonness,
if she is nymph to his satyr
and he hides his desire from her
but she knows her power
and reaches out to touch it
as he flinches away. Tomorrow,
tomorrow he may allow
her hand to settle but, for now he
tortures them both.

 

[greenmountaineer]

22

Considerations

Harv considers the pipe cleaner cat
he made for his mother one summer
at Camp Shomria in the Catskills
he discovered up in a bedroom

ornate silver jewelry box
Harv remembers after another
dry martini during his second
red-eye flight in forty-eight hours

as quiet as if Kaddish were said
in a Lower East Side apartment
with a pushcart full of photographs
next to a pipe cleaner cat.

 

[Angeline]

18 5/27/13

7th Story 2nd Avenue*

Railroad flat three rooms
back to back, airshaft
thin space bricks bog
in the hall. Cousins borders
everywhere is yelling
rag and pickle selling, argue
then negotiate, shrill melodic
hubbub of the schtetl sing
song cry arriving brave
and frightened exodus
come westward come the new
world for these wandering
pioneers.

The goldeneh medina
smells like cabbage,
news a day late, fishy,
mercy strained, justice ill
and how is that different?
Sew type clack buzz beep
the century forward. Get
a foot in the door. Move
to Passaic, the Bronx. Get
a parlor, a piano, keep
the prayer shawl, candle
sticks, pushke for the poor
children in Palestine. It's
America. Make new names,
wear the velvet kippah,
the other customary
masks.


*(Thank you, GM for inspiration from your fine poem)

 

[bogusagain]

farmer didactic and his somnambulants

the modern state created property
to facilitate capitalism
fence in the people
and daily milk them like cattle
throwing in a turnip or two
with a little hay in winter
keep them healthy and strong
keep them producing a harvest

now the farmer blames the state
for all the cattle he has to feed
the surplus and the unproductive
his new milk machines cost enough
without the added expense
of domesticated people
let them run feral, provide for themselves
but keep an army just in case
not for animals in foreign fields
but the beasts left to run wild at home

daily the dumb herd makes for the field
daily it returns to be milked
daily the unproductive and the surplus
are economically and socially culled
while the spared smugly chew the cud
mistaken in their belief, they’re more productive
necessary and wanted, as though assigned
a status of prized beast, their milk
being creamier (they think) than all the rest

unaware fate is their temporary protector
while in the abattoir the bullet is loaded
and the knives are being sharpened
and the farmer is thinking
domesticated people are too troublesome
very costly and luckily disposable
the state can pick up the pieces
for interfering in capitalism

now the state is the farmer too
but the state doesn’t know it, doesn’t want to know it
being schizophrenic and having made promises
to the farmer and domesticated people too
and where does the state get the money
to keep this human zoo
from the farmer of course
the reason the state created property
to facilitate capitalism and fence in the people
to daily milk them like cattle

 

[Angeline]

19 5/28/13

Sally's Infinity

She kneels serene
by the shore, water lays
still behind her, pines stand
aside like guards, sun rises
in a buttery arc: it's dawn
in the land that never was.

She lifts a totem offers
a box sunny, clear as she,
maiden of land, lake all
bright undertaking
all continuing recursively
if not beyond the bounds
of her geometry.

 

[hmmnmm]

(a few days early but the mood came along) 3

that shivery oh nuts
that aster was but a blind
grab that erred and a daisy

on the pinkish side,
the hope though quiet,
still hopes; shouldering
in back; chin suggestive
of no chip, though denial
plays the aster because of
the chrysanthemum.

But a quick check and turns
up no err in using aster;
and petals pinkish, daisy

has a yellowish eye
and was born to abide
in the fields of kindness
but slow the recompense
must go. Apology
can only be in sprinkles

but patience and the sniffles
of daisy dam and whiter
comes the countenance beam.

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[greenmountaineer]

23

Yo No Hablo Inglés

"I am I said"
Neil Diamond

Lupe sweeps the white powdered donut
crumbs near the slapdash coffee machine
each mournful Monday through Friday
and unbeknownst to her manager
Lupe sneezes at random
patrons who fill their coffee cups up.

No one knows that Lupe's a green card
member of Mensa working her way
nights through CalTech at Pasadena
who for her latest hypothesis
tallies whenever a customer
raises the probability rate

of "Salud" said a week ago Friday
after she heard the same person say
"Los AN-hay-lease, Chaz, now is stylish
because AN-ja-liss sounds like gee whiz
Heather joked last night at my party
straight faced in front of the maid."

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

23 - Nabokov

Before things had names,
before reason and rationale,
when the world had a tinier frame,
his mother's voice was lavender
and his father's laughter a warm sienna.

Growing up he saw traffic noise
through shades of leaden grey,
children's cries a sympathetic blue.
Back then the reverse was true,
colours had sounds too, the new
green of spring growth sang in a
tingle of strings and snow was a
muffled minor chord but no longer.

Silence gives him peace from
his overloaded senses but his only wealth,
words, written long-hand in an unavoidable
scratchy, red-rimmed itch are the price he pays for fame.

 

[bogusagain]

eugenics if you want to

crush his balls in a vice
squash the future generation
if he can’t afford children
he isn’t having them for free
as for her, stick a spoon in her womb
scrap it out like an avocado​

save civilization from idiot replicators, screams the headline
between the lines, the untermensch, smoke, drink and fuck
animal lust responding to animal stimuli, she can’t get enough
he’s just a fuck bull, passively ramming home her future
a litter of howling mouths and years of some bitch social guru
he’s wanking to pass the time at Her Majesty’s pleasure
the pieces snugly fit, it’s an obvious conclusion, assumption

Saturday night at the pub
a little bit of dancing
a little bit of fumbling
round the back in the car park
a girl who didn't understand
love could be more than groping hands
he told her he loved her, if only for the day
life was like that, a discount store
you took what was in stock
pleased to leave with change
the lonely walk home through empty streets
through the bleak barren psychology
of cold post coital depression​

the future is the past, is the present, déjà vu days
the biggest indicator of where you’ll die in society
is where you’re born in society, she sees this
life stretched before her like a prison sentence
she chalks off the hours with cigarettes, TV soap
and the occasional lover, she clings to like hope
but like hope, he always has other plans and leaves

 

[Tzara]

21

Was posted here.

 

[Tzara]

22

In the cool quiet of morning,
our blanket holds just enough heat
for me to lie submerged in sleep,
just beneath its surface, finning
myself against the warm bend
of your body, that slow drift
of current that draws our limbs
together in this lazy, eddied pool.

 

[Angeline]

20 6/6/13

She Stoops, Conquered

She stands before him
eyes cast down wholly
his landscape hillock
tussock pliable cool
steady of limb palms
open fingers curved.

She will hold what
ever he gives her.
When she holds him
she thinks of treasure.

There is a river
in her flowing and a lake
brims quietly a tear
tracks the path his hands
have known slick on scars
that words cannot express.

 

[Tzara]

23

Greece

The courtyard is cool
in the low sun of morning,
and a breeze, damp with sea,
has scattered sand beneath
my bare feet, fine grit on stone.
I spread tahini and honey
on thick chunks of bread—
sesame and sweet blend
with the rich and dark coffee
old Lydia has placed on the tray.
Then you appear, gowned
in sheerest silk through which
your breasts and hips beckon
for us to return to bed
and the lazy tangle of love.
In a blink you are again gone.
The smell of phosphorous and ash
remind me you flew home
full five days before.

The gurgle of the fountain
muffles the distant surf.

 

[hmmnmm]

bit late 4

those who could see, saw
that the sky - in this case
we will stick with
a singular style
of sky though skies
wears the garb that is more
temptingly revealing,

well the sky’s sudden darkness
would be hard to miss unless
a mind happened to be so lost
in something like family drama

but if anyone noticed
the four tunas
playing five card stud
behind the veil, dark it
may have been but a gauzy
dark, no one said so, or

if someone said something, what
ever anyone said got said
casual, under breath,
speaking of bread, not odd, at all.

 

[Micahb2]

It's raining
(already this poem is too long).

The garnish is what's left.
The grease pools.
The amber light out of my spent drink

Is a colonnade.

From a city buried so long ago
it's white hills are passed over
by those who trill.

No matter, you and I walk.
Gather. In Baguio City a tailor cuts
A line, draws a bead.

 

[greenmountaineer]

24

To Everything There Is a Season

“14312,” she read
the tattoo on his arm again
while sitting on her uncle's lap
before Sol with an etch-a-sketch
from Sara's kindergarten class
drew in Hebrew left to right
what Sara said reminded her
of pick up sticks and Cheerios

and when she asked her uncle what
the funny looking number was
he said it was another one
that only he and YHWH knew,
which was the better half of truth
before he hugged her half to death.