Poetry from unexpected sources.

[Guest]

The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.

Ray Bradbury


The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.
The boys are only seventeen,
My daughter one year less,
And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky
and
beautifully
finesse
a basket ball into a hoop; but take forever coming down,
Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air
As if it were a rare warm summer water.
The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.
And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,
Ashout with insults, trading lumps,
Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals
Churning Time with long tan legs
And easing upthrust seat with downthrust orchard rumps;
Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;
The boys across the street toss back their hair and
Heedless
Drive my daughter mad.
They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.
Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating on the green
All groans,
Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath her shower,
So her own cries are all she hears,
And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.
Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my mad daughter.

Great God, what must I do?
Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?
Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,
Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?
Than, wall up all windows?
To what use?
The boys would still laugh wild awrestle
On the lawn.
Our shower would run all night into the dawn.
How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,
When some small, part of me grows faint
Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour
Jumped rope
Jumed rope
Jumped rope
And sent me weeping to the shower.

 

[Remec]

Wow....<sniff> I can remember being such a boy, and being just as maddened by girls like that...pardon me while I find a kleenex...

 

[Angeline]

The poet is not unexpected

it's the great Langston Hughes, but the presentation is him reading his works to music played by bands featuring Charles Mingus and the jazz critic Leonard Feather. You, my dear PoeTess, will love it.

And it's here.

Fool mentioned Weary Blues in the illustrated poem thread the other day--I've had this site on my mind ever since.

 

[Guest]

it's the great Langston Hughes, but the presentation is him reading his works to music played by bands featuring Charles Mingus and the jazz critic Leonard Feather. You, my dear PoeTess, will love it.

And it's here.

Fool mentioned Weary Blues in the illustrated poem thread the other day--I've had this site on my mind ever since.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - you find the best sites, Ange. Thanks.

 

[eagleyez]

The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.

Ray Bradbury


The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.
The boys are only seventeen,
My daughter one year less,
And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky
and
beautifully
finesse
a basket ball into a hoop; but take forever coming down,
Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air
As if it were a rare warm summer water.
The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.
And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,
Ashout with insults, trading lumps,
Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals
Churning Time with long tan legs
And easing upthrust seat with downthrust orchard rumps;
Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;
The boys across the street toss back their hair and
Heedless
Drive my daughter mad.
They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.
Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating on the green
All groans,
Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath her shower,
So her own cries are all she hears,
And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.
Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my mad daughter.

Great God, what must I do?
Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?
Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,
Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?
Than, wall up all windows?
To what use?
The boys would still laugh wild awrestle
On the lawn.
Our shower would run all night into the dawn.
How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,
When some small, part of me grows faint
Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour
Jumped rope
Jumed rope
Jumped rope
And sent me weeping to the shower.

I just spent 4 days and nights with my sister, who is a single mom, and her 14 year old daughter, my dear niece, who has grown and blossomed and wisened so naturally and so beautifully.

My opinion??? The young knuckleheads are forever at the mercy of the "otherness" of the fair sex. Ovid recognized it,(The Metmorphoses), Dante as well, along with scores of poets, artists and fellow knuckleheads.

The tender age, when males seem to dominate, appears to me to be like a faux finish glazed briefly on an edifice completely built and fortified for life by women. And Im just fine with that!!!



And the Langston Hughes reading is spellbinding. Me thinks he recognizes the sentiment uttered above. Shake it baby.

 

[Guest]

I just spent 4 days and nights with my sister, who is a single mom, and her 14 year old daughter, my dear niece, who has grown and blossomed and wisened so naturally and so beautifully.

My opinion??? The young knuckleheads are forever at the mercy of the "otherness" of the fair sex. Ovid recognized it,(The Metmorphoses), Dante as well, along with scores of poets, artists and fellow knuckleheads.

The tender age, when males seem to dominate, appears to me to be like a faux finish glazed briefly on an edifice completely built and fortified for life by women. And Im just fine with that!!!



And the Langston Hughes reading is spellbinding. Me thinks he recognizes the sentiment uttered above. Shake it baby.

Wise [not so old] eagle.

Unto us.....

Somewhere at some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I WAS!
Tiny, in shape
Lusting to live
I hung in my pulsing cave.
Soon they knew of me
My mother --my father.
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust
And love
Tho' I couldn't think
Each part of me was saying
A silent 'Wait for me
I will bring you love!'
I was taken
Blind, naked, defenseless
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a brass plate
in Wimpole Street,
and dropped on the sterile floor
of a foot operated plastic waste bucket.
There was no Queens Counsel
To take my brief.
The cot I might have warmed
Stood in Harrod's shop window.
When my passing was told
My father smiled.
No grief filled my empty space.
My death was celebrated
With tickets to see Danny la Rue
Who was pretending to be a woman
Like my mother was.

Spike Milligan

 

[Zanzibar]

Wise [not so old] eagle.

Unto us.....

Somewhere at some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I WAS!
Tiny, in shape
Lusting to live
I hung in my pulsing cave.
Soon they knew of me
My mother --my father.
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust
And love
Tho' I couldn't think
Each part of me was saying
A silent 'Wait for me
I will bring you love!'
I was taken
Blind, naked, defenseless
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a brass plate
in Wimpole Street,
and dropped on the sterile floor
of a foot operated plastic waste bucket.
There was no Queens Counsel
To take my brief.
The cot I might have warmed
Stood in Harrod's shop window.
When my passing was told
My father smiled.
No grief filled my empty space.
My death was celebrated
With tickets to see Danny la Rue
Who was pretending to be a woman
Like my mother was.

Spike Milligan

This poem really moved me. Thank you for bringing it here and sharing it.


~Z

 

[Guest]

This poem really moved me. Thank you for bringing it here and sharing it.


~Z

Spike Milligan was an amazing man who fought his demons all his life. Like you, Zan, when I found this among his poem, many of them funny and silly, I was very moved.

 

[eagleyez]

take a look at
the blue side
hanging around

didnt think it would happen
just force of habit

not even the cool
winds whippin
thru this town would be enough
tear the will down

with this time
to spare
on a spare
idea.

~jay farrar

 

[Guest]

Autumn Perspective


Now, moving in, cartons on the floor,
the radio playing to bare walls,
picture hooks left stranded
in the unsoiled squares where paintings were,
and something reminding us
this is like all other moving days;
finding the dirty ends of someone else's life,
hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit,
and burned-out matches in the corner;
things not preserved, yet never swept away
like fragments of disturbing dreams
we stumble on all day. . .
in ordering our lives, we will discard them,
scrub clean the floorboards of this our home
lest refuse from the lives we did not lead
become, in some strange, frightening way, our own.
And we have plans that will not tolerate
our fears-- a year laid out like rooms
in a new house--the dusty wine glasses
rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves
sagging with heavy winter books.
Seeing the room always as it will be,
we are content to dust and wait.
We will return here from the dark and silent
streets, arms full of books and food,
anxious as we always are in winter,
and looking for the Good Life we have made.

I see myself then: tense, solemn,
in high-heeled shoes that pinch,
not basking in the light of goals fulfilled,
but looking back to now and seeing
a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl
in a bare room, full of promise
and feeling envious.

Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives forward
into the future--as if, when the room
contains us and all our treasured junk
we will have filled whatever gap it is
that makes us wander, discontented
from ourselves.

The room will not change:
a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint
won't make much difference;
our eyes are fickle
but we remain the same beneath our suntans,
pale, frightened,
dreaming ourselves backward and forward in time,
dreaming our dreaming selves.

I look forward and see myself looking back.

Erica Jong

 

[Guest]

The second movement of Ravel's string quartet is a musical pantoum.

 

[ishtat]

English Churchyards

In the 17th & 18th centuries many graves in English Churchyards were engraved with poems usually rather rustic and sometimes pretty crude. Berkeley in Gloucestershire has several including a couple of interesting ones I recorded on a flying visit a couple of weeks ago :-

Here lies the Earl of Suffolk's fool,
Men called him Dicky Pearce.
His Folly served to make men laugh
When wit and mirth were scarce.
Poor Dick alas is dead and gone
What signifies to cry
Dickies enough are still behind
to laugh at by and by.

He died 18th June 1725

This epitaph was written by Jonathan Swift, perhaps due to the conscience of his employer as Dickie, reputably Englands last private Jester was kicked to death during a drunken party at Berkeley Castle.

In the more rustic tradition:-

Here lieth Thomas Peirce whom no man taught
Yet he in Iron Brasse and silver wrought
He jacks, and clocks, and watches with art made
and mended too when others work did fade
Of Berkeley five times mayor, this artist was,
and yet this mayor this artist was of grasse,
When his own watch was downe on the last day
He that made watches, had not made a key
To winde it up, but useless it must be
Unless he rise again no more to die.

he died 25 February 1625 - Franklin Rooseveldt apparently acquired one of his clocks for the White House.

Jacks are the small clockwork devices used to rotate meat on a spit.

There are several more poems like this. Berkeley is a very small town of only about 1500 people but has had an extra ordinary historical impact. One King Edward II was murdered there. The murder of another, Richard II was planned there (at a meeting in the church)

The Town also has an interesting American connection in that the 'Margaret' which landed at Jamestown Virginia on 4th December 1619 (about a year before the Mayflower) was financed by the Berkeley Company and most of the settlers and investors were local to the town. This group also held the first American Thanks giving though I have not been able to confirm exactly when.

 

[The Mutt]

I've been reading a novel called Night Dogs, by Kent Anderson. Every few pages I have to stop and read a passage over again because it grabs me hard.

"That was the week there were so many moths, millions of them. Word at the precinct was that they swarmed that way only once every seven years, though someone said it was because of the new nuclear plant up north. A long stretch of black road was lined with a monotonous, evenly spaced row of new streetlights, those big brushed aluminum poles that rise, then bend over the road like a hand on a wrist. The moths covered those lights like bee swarms, throwing themselves at the yellow bulbs again and again until they crippled a wing and fell to the street so that the puddles of light on the asphalt below the streetlights were heaped with the dead and dying.
Each time the patrol car passed beneath one of the lights that night the tires made a fragile ripping sound, as though the street was wet with rain. The sweet stink of the old man's corpse hung in Hanson's uniform the way cigarette smoke hangs in the hair of the woman you're sleeping with. Dana kept their speed steady, and the ripping sound continued as regularly and softly as breathing."

 

[The Mutt]

The greatest comic book of all time is Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. A vigilante named Rorschach describes to the prison psychiatrist the night he was 'born'. He had chained a murderous pedophile to a radiator and set the building on fire.


"Stood in the firelight, sweltering bloodstain on my chest like the map of a new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in the night. Looked at the sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do, devise reason later. Born from oblivion. Bear children hellbound as ourselves. Go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphisical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. It's only us.
Street stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them.
Was reborn then. Free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.
Was Rorschach."

http://www.uruloki.org/imagenes/comics/thmb_watchmen.jpg


Okay, somebody please post something light-hearted now.

 

[Guest]

thanks for contributing Mutt - and everyone.

It's not very light hearted...................

A DOG NAMED BEAU

by Jimmy Stewart

He never came to me when I would call
Unless I had a tennis ball.
Or he felt like it.
But mostly he didn't come at all.

When he was young
He never learned to heel
Or sit or stay
He did things his way.

Discipline was not his bag
But when you were with him things sure didn't drag.
He'd dig up a rosebush just to spite me,
And when I'd grab him, he'd turn and bite me.

He bit lots of folks from day to day,
The delivery boy was his favorite prey,
The gas man wouldn't read our meter,
He said we owned a real man-eater.

He set the house on fire
But the story's long to tell,
Suffice it to say that he survived
And the house survived as well.

On the evening walks, and Gloria took him,
He was always first out the door.
The Old One and I brought up the rear
Because our bones were sore.

He would charge up the street with Mom hanging on,
What a beautiful pair they were!
And if it was still light and the tourists were out,
They created a bit of a stir.

But every once in a while, he would stop in his tracks
And with a frown on his face look around
It was just to make sure that the Old One was there
And would follow him where he was bound.

We are early-to-bedders at our house --
I guess I'm the first to retire.
And as I'd leave the room he'd look at me
And get up from his place by the fire.

He knew where the tennis balls were upstairs,
And I'd give him one for a while,
He would push it under the bed with his nose
And I'd fish it out with a smile.

And before very long
He'd tire of the ball
And be asleep in his corner
In no time at all.

And there were nights when I'd feel him
Climb upon our bed
And lie between us,
And I'd pat his head.

And there were nights when I'd feel this stare
And I'd wake up and he'd be sitting there
And I'd reach out my hand and stroke his hair.
And sometimes I'd feel him sigh
And I think I know the reason why.

He would wake up at night
And he would have this fear
Of the dark, of life, of lots of things,
And he'd be glad to have me near.

And now he's dead,
And there are nights when I think I feel him
Climb upon our bed and lie between us,
And I pat his head.

And there are nights when I think
I feel that stare
And I reach out my hand to stroke his hair,
But he's not there.

Oh, how I wish that wasn't so,
I'll always love a dog named Beau.

 

[Guest]

Chet Baker's Face

by Michael La Barbera



Chet Baker's face is a montage of slides in my mind,
a kaleidoscope of his life and our shared time on earth.

It's the same face you see on the "Let's Get Lost" album,
that you see in Carole Reiff's famous 1955 photo
of a young man with a horn blowing it into the smoky air
of a jazz club, but the first has the deep etchings
of a worn-out life, one lived lurching beyond limits, getting
lost and loving it, finding in the barrel of the gun pointed at him
nothing but the fascination of a world unexplored and beckoning.

Then there's another photo of a young man in a cap
and overcoat against a backdrop of Times Square, face smooth as
a bubble, eyes dazzled by the New York lights - - all those
etched lines yet to come, only the hopes of boyhood behind him,
and everything, absolutely everything, waiting to be done.

 

[Guest]

It's the subject that's unexpected here.

In Response To A Rumor That The Oldest Whorehouse In Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned

James Wright

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

 

[Tathagata]

horse cums on nun

email
brings the minutia of the fetish world
to everyone
and suddenly you realize
there's a lot shit
you've never thought about

and it scares you
that some one else has