here I am...

drunk again at 3 a.m. at the end of my 2nd bottle
of wine, I have typed from a dozen to 15 pages of
poesy
an old man
maddened for the flesh of young girls in this
dwindling twilight
liver gone
kidneys going
pancrea pooped
top-floor blood pressure

while all the fear of the wasted years
laughs between my toes
no woman will live with me
no Florence Nightingale to watch the
Johnny Carson show with

if I have a stroke I will lay here for six
days, my three cats hungrily ripping the flesh
from my elbows, wrists, head

the radio playing classical music ...

I promised myself never to write old man poems
but this one's funny, you see, excusable, be-
cause I've long gone past using myself and there's
still more left
here at 3 a.m. I am going to take this sheet from
the typer
pour another glass and
insert
make love to the fresh new whiteness

maybe get lucky
again

first for
me

later
for you.

- charles bukowski

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred   

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   

without saying hello. In the restaurant   

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,

I know she’s used up all her words,   

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line   

and listen to each other breathe.

- Jeffrey McDaniel

 

Love In The Plural

neither this sobbing ocean
in the moon of your swelling voice
nor the milky vapor
on the window of my waking
nor this flood of men
in the margin of my shadow
which yearns for a safe shelter
not the slipstreams on camelback
in the desert of my solitude
nor the spindrift nor the seaweeds
pillows for my storm-filled head
are able to decipher
where I inspect myself in vain
the reverse side of mirrors.

-Mukala Kadima-Nzuji

Portrait

I have my gri-gri
gri-gri
gri-grimy calm bounding awake
clings to the wavy limbs of the Congo
never a stormy passage for my heart
bombarded with glowing oriflammes
I think of my silver necklace
become a hundred isles of silence
I admire the obstinate patience
of the okapi
bluebird battered in the open sky
what shipwreck
plunges it to the gulf of nothingness
nothingess empty of nightly entreaties

Ah! the broken resolutions
ah! the screaming follies
let my fate fall upon its guardians
they are three villians

I say three in counting 1 2 3
who dim the ancestral mirror
but you fugitive image
I will see you on the height of dizzy anger
wait while I put on my brow my mask of blood
and soon you will see
my tongue flutter like a banner.

- Antoine-Roger Bolamba

And Then It Was Less Bleak Because We Said So

Today there has been so much talk of things exploding

into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we

all run outside into the hot streets

and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones

anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth

you can always see. With more sparkle and pop

is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes

into acid jazz. Small typewriters

that other people keep in their eyes

click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard

to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always

eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later

to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong

if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving

their broken little hands.

 

- Wendy Xu

To the Angelbeast

Once, hidden in tall grass,

I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:

doe after doe of leaping.

You said it was nothing

but a trick of the light. Gold

curves. Gold scarves.

Am I not your animal?

You’d wait in the orchard for hours

to watch a deer

break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello

out of its black case. 


-Eduardo C. Corral

I'm In Love

she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it's her again,
every time she phones you go crazy,
you told me it was over
you told me it was finished,
listen, I've lived long enough to become a
good woman,
why do you need a bad woman?
you need to be tortured, don't you?
you think life is rotten if somebody treats you
rotten it all fits,
doesn't it?
tell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a
piece of shit?
and my son, my son was going to meet you.
I told my son
and I dropped all my lovers.
I stood up in a cafe and screamed
I'M IN LOVE,
and now you've made a fool of me. . .
I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry.
hold me, she said, will you please hold me?
I've never been in one of these things before, I said,
these triangles. . .
she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all
over.she paced up and down,wild and crazy.she had
a small body.her arms were thin,very thin and when
she screamed and started beating me I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes:hatred,
centuries deep and true.I was wrong and graceless and
sick.all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false.

charles bukowski

-Shel Siverstein

Love and Harmony

Love and harmony combine,
And round our souls entwine
While thy branches mix with mine,
And our roots together join.

Joys upon our branches sit,
Chirping loud and singing sweet;
Like gentle streams beneath our feet
Innocence and virtue meet.

Thou the golden fruit dost bear,
I am clad in flowers fair;
Thy sweet boughs perfume the air,
And the turtle buildeth there.

There she sits and feeds her young,
Sweet I hear her mournful song;
And thy lovely leaves among,
There is love, I hear his tongue.

There his charming nest doth lay,
There he sleeps the night away;
There he sports along the day,
And doth among our branches play.

- William Blake

Overhead, the sky is burning
A raging wind is blowing free
And I fear the blazing sun
Is that why you're holding me?


-ShaktiChattopadhyay

Love Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.


I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.


I love you with knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way


than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

- Pablo Neruda

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

-Pablo Neruda

Leaning Into The Afternoons

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

-Pablo Neruda

Implications of One Plus One

Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging,
continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten
veins of fire deep in the earth and raising
tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra.

Sometimes your hands drift on me, milkweed's
airy silk, wingtip's feathery caresses,
our lips grazing, a drift of desires gathering
like fog over warm water, thickening to rain.

Sometimes we go to it heartily, digging,
burrowing, grunting, tossing up covers
like loose earth, nosing into the other's
flesh with hot nozzles and wallowing there.

Sometimes we are kids making out, silly
in the quilt, tickling the xylophone spine,
blowing wet jokes, loud as a whole
slumber party bouncing till the bed breaks.

I go round and round you sometimes, scouting,
blundering, seeking a way in, the high boxwood
maze I penetrate running lungs bursting
toward the fountain of green fire at the heart.

Sometimes you open wide as cathedral doors
and yank me inside. Sometimes you slither
into me like a snake into its burrow.
Sometimes you march in with a brass band.

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.
It is more and less than love: timing,
chemistry, magic and will and luck.

One plus one equal one, unknowable except
in the moment, not convertible into words,
not explicable or philosophically interesting.
But it is. And it is. And it is. Amen.

-Marge Piercy

A moment of happiness, 
you and I sitting on the verandah, 
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I. 
We feel the flowing water of life here, 
you and I, with the garden's beauty 
and the birds singing. 
The stars will be watching us, 
and we will show them 
what it is to be a thin crescent moon. 
You and I unselfed, will be together, 
indifferent to idle speculation, you and I. 
The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar 
as we laugh together, you and I. 
In one form upon this earth,
and in another form in a timeless sweet land.

-Rumi

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition       of these faces       in the crowd   :

Petals      on a wet, black    bough   .

 

 

-Ezra Pound

Red Moon Eclogues

By Mark Tredinnick 

 

I

Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out

to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end

of the well-tempered and recursive wildness

                                                             that conceived and suffered us,

and that will be the end of us. We have just two

billion years to thank her for our time here. Eternity has a use-by date

 

II

But it’ll be up long before that, and in the meantime,

I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow

on the moon like a horseblanket;

                                                             in the meantime the moon reddens

in the refraction of all our dawns and sunsets, in a kind of transfigured cosmic

smog. An apocalypse that lasts three hours until it’s time to go to bed.

 

III

And in the meantime on the floor of my shed, blue planets sing in the hands

of children as they once sang in war. Two small worlds forged to cry terribly down

like creation unravelling upon one’s foes now

                                                               make a peaceful clangour on my secular desk.

One spins from its orbit and quakes and chips its cerulean shell on the floor

of heaven. The tectonics of play. We are loved like this, and this is how it ends.

 

IV

I’m arguing a lot with death these days. And last night I found myself

in court poised to clinch the case against the absurdity of life.

Certainly, this was sleeping and certainly

                                                            I was dreaming and I’d been losing the thread,

but all at once I saw where my argument must run, and I was running it there

when my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I’ll never know.

 

V

Spring now, and the river has drawn back her bow. The lark ascends

from the cd-player, and black ducks sip brown ditchwater in the yard.

Everything’s in bud or leaf, last of all

                                                              the silver poplars and the Osage Orange,

trees flaring even now in the backyard of the childhood of my friend, the poet,

the poet’s son. The world happens twice. Draw the linen string taut and shoot.

 

VI

One lives in paradox. Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods

who’ve lost control of their machines. In between one makes one’s life up.

The sound is the price you pay for the sight

                                                             that meets you every morning and half

of what you paid for the house. The shed puts the perfect sky in her pocket,

and possums rut in the roof. Eternity is in rehearsal, and this is its soundtrack.

 

VII

Brad mows an acre an hour. A general at ease on his machine, a banker

in overalls, he’s rationalised our small republic on one tank of gas. And this now—

cutgrass at four o’clock—is how

                                                              hope smells. Some days I can see no way out:

the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins

of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever.

 

VIII

Meantime the moon has made herself new again, and there has been rain.

The Marulan hills, which had almost forgotten the taste of the word,

are spelling green again this afternoon,

                                                             and there’s water in a lake that’s been a paddock

for a decade. Three black cockatoos, and then three more, fly over as I take

the southwest road. And into all this panoply of hope, the new moon falls.

To Los

Don't love me, my sweet,
like your shadow
for shadows fade at evening
and I want to keep you
right up at cockcrow;
nor like pepper
which makes the belly hot
for then I couldn't take you
when I'm hungry;
nor like a pillow
for we'd be together in the hours of sleep
but scarcely meet by day;
nor like rice
for once swallowed you think no more of it;
nor like soft speeches
for they quickly vanish;
nor like honey,
sweet indeed but too common.
Love me like a beautiful dream,
your life in the night,my hope in the day;
like a piece of money,
ever with me on earth,
and for the great journey
a grateful comrade;
like a calabash,
intact, for drawing water;
in pieces, bridges for my guitar.


- Flavien Ranaivo, Song of a Common Lover