not sure how many words

[JCSTREET]

Brilliant

first
came merlot and it
was good but carrots
are for smoking then
tilting sideways
through the funhouse

great room for anything
football, foots, balls,
tootsie the mums fell over
again so did I but damn
the coffee is strong and we
awaken warranting the day
calls

this is quite lovely, Angeline

 

[butters]

My love for you
has not decreased.
You inhabit all the spaces
that are empty, even those
within me carry your expressions,
the way your legs looked
when you walked, your sighs
and sad moments, your face
struck with love or fear or pain.

Even your voice, deep and well
modulated is talking, talking
in my head and our conversation,
like our love, is neverending.

How can that be? I don't
feel like I'm trying
to recreate you, but here
you are in a place of your creation,
your cap says Celtics, you wear
that dark green mock turtleneck,
navy basketball shorts
and your 40-year old Birkies
still on your big flat feet. You,
my dear boy who lives
so loud in these empty spaces.

 

[Angeline]

this is quite lovely, Angeline

Thank you. There are a lot of good memories in that poem for me.

And it's still true, Mrs. Buttery Hill

 

[cherries_on_snow]

He was a kind man. You two were beautiful together.

 

[Tzara]

Silly Example of Accentual Verse

Clip, cut, prune, mow.
Beauty is a pain, you know.
Vegetation wants to grow,
So snip and trim it just quite so.


I was mowing the lawn today, thinking (really!) about how accentual verse works.
And, yes, I know how dorky that sounds. My wife loves me, though.

I think.

 

[Angeline]

Silly Example of Accentual Verse

Clip, cut, prune, mow.
Beauty is a pain, you know.
Vegetation wants to grow,
So snip and trim it just quite so.


I was mowing the lawn today, thinking (really!) about how accentual verse works.
And, yes, I know how dorky that sounds. My wife loves me, though.

I think.

I don't think you're dorky at all. Well maybe if I were your neighbor and saw you mowing and reciting. But you weren't reciting aloud...or were you?

And of course your wife loves you. You're pretty lovable, weird but eminently lovable! I understand these things. If you'd met me and EE, you'd be hard pressed to choose if we were a more weird or more lovable couple.

(Forgive my musings. I'm still giddy from the Royal Wedding!).

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Are you sure she can cater for us all? I said,
because counting Shorty there's nine of us.
Sure the more the merrier, he replied with a grin,
but alas as I thought it was not to be
and I left a rueful and wiser man.

But Shorty? Ah Shorty, he had the time of his life
and still talked about it for years to come.

 

[chris2c4u]

I don't think you're dorky at all. Well maybe if I were your neighbor and saw you mowing and reciting. But you weren't reciting aloud...or were you?

And of course your wife loves you. You're pretty lovable, weird but eminently lovable! I understand these things. If you'd met me and EE, you'd be hard pressed to choose if we were a more weird or more lovable couple.

(Forgive my musings. I'm still giddy from the Royal Wedding!).

I heard a story recently of how Wordsworth and De Quincey were out walking. Wordsworth (as was his wont) was composing as he walked and wrapped up in his own thoughts and he didn't notice he had accidentally managed to push DQ off the road into a ditch

 

[Tzara]

Flood

I sometimes feel that love
swells up in me
the way a rain, ninety miles away
in some unimportant mountains,
can suddenly overflow
long respected banks and run,
wild and destructive,
over my otherwise placid existence.



It's as if I keep needing freshly laid silt
to continue growing
these tenuous crops that are my life.

 

[Tzara]

Tritina for Trinità

Comune set toward the north and west,
named for the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
It's easily mistaken for a poem

for all Italian villages are poems,
at least to us, romantics of the West,
who see in country life a kind of ghost—

our European roots. A spectral ghost,
one formed by Marx into an lyric poem
whose logic dooms the systems of the West,

a West where poems themselves are merely ghosts.

.

 

[Angeline]

Tritina for Seal Harbor

What do you hear in the distance?
Loons call from an inlet and oars splash
a rhythm with soughing wind in the pines.

Perhaps they're leaning, swaying pines
in love with the wind and not my distant
progress to the shore, the song of my splash.

Perhaps it's enough that the oars splash,
shivering moonlight and long-shadowed pines
in the quietude of the lake and distance

flows, ruffles the water like sails, the wind splash.

 

[champagne1982]

Summer Wedding Tritina

Now gather close a family's heart and soul
songs sung and nestled in. Merry
thoughts at the hearth of life and love

So where do families begin if not in love?
Two hearts wed with happiness now one soul
singing a melody to all that join and marry

It's this quiet thing that makes marriage merry,
that even muted the singers are joyous and loved
and together they make lyrics of the soul.

Why do we marry if not to bind two souls in love?

 

[Tzara]

Doubt Tritina

I wonder sometimes as I sit and write
at poems or more fruitless things, who reads
anything of mine? Do I ever touch

anyone other than my wife, whose touch,
however welcome, isn't about writing?
Can one be a writer if no one reads

one's work? Writing seems to be about reading,
I would think. Words on paper try to touch
something real, try to get that something written

down, written for readers we cannot touch.

 

[KatieJones]

Between the red and green
pedestrians pause
outside my passenger window.

I see you.

In a crowd of brief cases, shopping bags and purses
you wander empty-handed, intersecting
the commuter crowd’s straight lines with circles.

While everyone on the corner pretends
they don’t instead of admitting they won’t

I see you
search the garbage bin, eating
discarded crumbs and shame settles
on the leather seats of my car.
Why do we see a stranger,
assume it’s self-inflicted
and fail our neighbours every day?

If you were my brother
I would not drive away
but when the light turns green
I leave you to struggle
because I don’t know your name.

Later I circle back
but only in mind.

 

[todski28]

Between the red and green
pedestrians pause
outside my passenger window.

I see you.

In a crowd of brief cases, shopping bags and purses
you wander empty-handed, intersecting
the commuter crowd’s straight lines with circles.

While everyone on the corner pretends
they don’t instead of admitting they won’t

I see you
search the garbage bin, eating
discarded crumbs and shame settles
on the leather seats of my car.
Why do we see a stranger,
assume it’s self-inflicted
and fail our neighbours every day?

If you were my brother
I would not drive away
but when the light turns green
I leave you to struggle
because I don’t know your name.

Later I circle back
but only in mind.

We assume it's their fault because for the most part peoples choices affect where they end up, isn't always their fault entirely but some portion of blame has to lay with the individual, utopias only exist in peoples imagination, because life is hard it's easy to think that a little bit of money, a little bit of compassion, a little bit of something will help everybody but in some instances it only makes things worse. Trying to help a person that doesn't want to be helped or is so dismally low that they believe they need to be punished is always harder than it appears in our own imagination.

And so these images haunt us with soul crushing clarity and at the same time, besides sacrificing your life to their needs until they either suck you dry or wake up and try to do better in life, it's the comic tragedy of life all spelled out in a few short paragraphs,

Inequality is nature's rule of law and we are all stuck despite our best efforts consumed by our own inadequacies, and standing on top of the inadequacies of others..... hierarchies dispossess but they also maintain.

Dichotomies for rumination, as I drive to work safe, clothed and fed based on competency and my own efforts and a little bit of luck.

Looking in the rearview mirror at what I was and what I am, donating to three charities into the hope that someone I will never meet gets the chance to start climbing even if it's only as far as the lowest rungs of middle class it's better than the cold concrete of the gutter.

I circle back in my mind too and rub at the itching scars

 

[Angeline]

I Remember Clifford

Late at night
I'd lay in your arms.
The radio playing
our awakening tender
as a dream, a trumpet
pouring golden sweet
on our silken skin and so
close, almost like our breath
or limbs pulsing together
while the willow swayed
at the window, scent of bread
arose from the heat register.

Daybreak comes early
to the eastern shore
just as Brownie falls
to Satie and we fall
finally alsleep.

 

[cherries_on_snow]

I Remember Clifford

Late at night
I'd lay in your arms.
The radio playing
our awakening tender
as a dream, a trumpet
pouring golden sweet
on our silken skin and so
close, almost like our breath
or limbs pulsing together
while the willow swayed
at the window, scent of bread
arose from the heat register.

Daybreak comes early
to the eastern shore
just as Brownie falls
to Satie and we fall
finally alsleep.

This rare warmth. Thank you.

 

[Angeline]

This rare warmth. Thank you.

Merci.

 

[Piscator]

Observations from the aft window of the port side of Port aux Basques to Sydney Ferry

• young couple, fit male brown hair and glasses with toned blond female taking multiple selfies as ferry leaves Newfoundland
• middle aged blond woman- multiple selfies - all angles
• young tattooed dude chatting to unseen companions while smoking cigarettes
• older balding male looks longingly at vanishing shore
• young blond woman takes a quick selfie and is gone
• family, father red/blond hair and beard holdling young child too short to be seen over railing, wife and daughter appear only briefly
• background conversation, "It's not for me. You have to go through a lot of dirt to find a bit of gold"
• middle aged male, green T-shirt and sunglasses looks only into ferry's vehicles deck

I depart to join my wife and watch dolphins and porpoises from starboard aft of ferry.

 

[Tzara]

Writing Poems

My hand sticking out,
trying to clasp
Depth as it floats past

my composition window.
My fingers never strong enough
to capture real Art,

even as it sails closely by.

 

[Piscator]

Why Frank’s Hot Sauce isn't

Why Frank’s Hot Sauce isn’t
Daylight Savings Time doesn’t
times they ain’t changing
in a land where all white men
are created equal.

Between 1500 and 1800
to this New World came
2.5 million Europeans
12.5 million purloined Africans
55 million Indigenes succumbed
to disease and systematic genocide

And the land of the free ain’t.

 

[Minervous]

Hiwatt

I never did quite know
how you tuned the two of us:
Drop D, Open G, C6,

or whatever
fit your fingers right
on the frets of my body

because we were amplified, baby,
and that overdrive channel—
well. . . You were always pure sustain.

 

[Angeline]

Flashback

When the Sun turned warm
we opened windows
to invite in the warm
breath of lilac and honeysuckle
voices on the breeze, Nashville
Skyline and Abbey Road.
That was a season of promise,

it was before the miracle
and the great disaster.

The first time I met Frank
you were airplane spinning
him In party decorations.
Crepe paper was flying
around his legs and he
was hollering but without
rancor.

Just another Saturday,
spinning with the turntable.

 

[todski28]

Lovely to read you again stranger typical of your bluesy dreamy brilliance

 

[Angeline]

Lovely to read you again stranger typical of your bluesy dreamy brilliance

Thank you Tods. I you, too. Glad to see you all writing away here. I can't promise to be more present, but I am wanting to write poems again, so we'll see.

Hope you are keeping well, Papa.