Posts for June 28, 2018 (page 2)

Let me come back one day as a bug
perch on bergamot’s purple throne
twist my six legs around fuchsia fringe  

catch breeze of bees’ wings
be needled by hummingbirds
searching for pearls of nectar  

Let me trace my name in dawn’s dew
watch it rise as steam, be borne
in gusty wind to my next incarnation

Ineffectual
a political poison
contained in the grain

Blossoming ideas
of natures socialism
democratic truth

Forward thinking, a
violets vision foretold
a revolution

Blinded with greed, they
couldn’t see the forest for
the trees made of $Green

Incompetent klan
inefficient liberals and
conservative clowns

Propaganda is,
not knowing the difference
between socialist

and democratic
socialist, these are tools of
corporate swine

Ineffectual
a political poison
strangled out the pain

Blossoming ideas
of natures ecosystem
democracy now

Forward thinking, a
Violets vision foretold
capitalist fall

Forgone friends
don’t leave nothing,
the remains of a bitter taste
hatred stewing in their absence

Left with vacant memories
distorted characters
a yearning of what once was

Sipping on the well of the past
ever critical of what’s to come,
you use your void to
fill your future.

at the north end
of dusk

city traffic begins
to quiet

and he takes his place
in the familiar chair

slowly names the day’s
goodness

for the weary world 
to hear

LETTERS TO THE DEAD: TWENTY – EIGHT  

6/28/2018
Dear Mark Morgan (1950 – 2017)           

         I began thinking about this project called
“Letters to the Dead” at your memorial service
which you and Irene planned during the Fall
as you discontinued treatment and that terrible
form of lymphoma (Sezary) enveloped your body.
You wanted a Spring-Time gathering of friends  
to celebrate your life with art, music, and poetry.
When that day arrived your friend (& poet), James
Pope, spoke of a lifelong correspondence between
the two of you and what it meant to him to have
your letters to reflect upon. I considered the idea of
writing these letters every day for a month and posting
them on the Lexpomo blog, using the classical form
of Apostrophe: an addressing of a dead friend as if he
were alive, present, and capable of understanding.
As my 1965 edition of “Poetry And Poetics” points out,
“Apostrophe gives life and immediacy to language,
but is also subject to abuse and open to parody. (Yikes!)         
         Mark, I approach an end of this self- imposed
exile from the living. (Everyone on the farm wonders
when I’m going to get back to work.) Not since high
school, when I had to translate Book 6 of Virgil’s
Aeneid, have I spent so much time in the Underworld.
I’ve begun to feel the presence of all those I’ve addressed
in these letters but my desire to keep these accounts brief
have left them as flat as pancakes. I’m afraid the task was
too steep for one as out of shape as myself. Perhaps they’re
merely a start, but more than likely an end.           
         Mark, you were born mid-century on New Year’s Eve.
To me you always seemed to hold to the center line until,
at the last minute, you would make a wild veer into the  
joyous fear of uncertainty. This dichotomy appears
everywhere in your art and life…In closing, here’s a poem
I found this morning stuck between pages 166 & 167
of Hart Crane’s “Complete Poems.”
 
I wrote it on your birthday, Jim  

Echo Above Cuzick Ridge
(For Mark Morgan)
 
Unseen rustlings drift coolly
amid the moonlight’s rejected
appetites…my heart off-beat
in this inkling of fog lift

Fluted sound over the veiled ridge
ceases
like hot love blown with the breath
to put out sixty-seven candles.
Now some voice rekindles the echo

The sky’s blood red
sunset
mocks my life.
Why not? I do
Or don’t, as it pleases,
but before the sky turns blue:
fast, faster, think,
do! It’s old, this time,
so old it bores me,
but damn that sky.
I look up, still there,
down here, there’s nothing.

Thick, bloody blanket–
give me back my life.

The creek ran beside the yard
next door then under the road
into a wooded ravine we didn’t know 
belonged to the Mathews.

We were frontiersmen, brigands, the Swiss
Family Robinson – fending for ourselves
with pocket knives and wits and the odd
piece of string, up and down the creek bed
every day until the mosquitoes
rose at dusk and drove us home.

She told me her plan is to wait
a couple week’s before confronting her devil
in a personal fight promising emotions and explosions.
I thought about saying to her,
you know that is only going to hurt you worse, right?
before choosing silence over foregone conclusions.

Was this not the same kind of plan
that I have repeatedly used in my own battles
to put my whole self, body and soul, into the action?
I’ve poured my heart out in great purgings
at the feet of people given power over me,
getting nothing but answers of the sorry, can’t help ya variety.

Such moments are paragons of devastation,
your most precious treasures shattered on the floor
like every belief you thought would see you through.
All the blood draining from the wounds you make
so that another can see the deepest, truest you,
and all they bring is salt.

But then comes the slow march of blessings,
the kind that may stay invisible for some time
while you pick the pieces of yourself off the floor.
If you’re committed to your happiness,
each piece will snap back into place with a you’re better than them sound
because you know how you would love if roles were reversed.

So I hold my tongue until I understand my words
enough to only use them as a warning,
leaving her to make her choice about what move is best for her.
Because my own experiences with my greatest adversaries
has taught me what terrible price comes from healing these wounds,
that freedom from devils means killing the part of yourself that’s trapped. 

93 degrees outside
Bright sun beating down
Asphalt melting ‘neath the tires
Tempers worn with frowns

In the middle of the street
Was something trying to cross
A tiny creature so confused
And completely at a loss

It made it to the other side
Some cars had barely missed
And when I finally caught it
It scratched and clawed and hissed

A tiny baby kitten
Maybe 6 weeks old
I placed it way inside my car
And on to home we rode

I washed her twice to find out
The color of her fur
She’s long haired, black and white
and thinks I belong to her

It has been 12 days now
She’s been staying at my house
Ran up quiet a vet bill
And not yet caught a mouse

The other cats just hate her
And watch with much disdain
As she hops and twirls and jumps
Attempting love to gain

Don’t want another kitty
Already have the three
What am I suppose to do?
She said she belongs to me…