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| | BarefootPage 4 of 115 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41) | | That last poem is screwed up. Way too chunky in the end. I like what I was trying to say but I don't like how I said it. I should have spent more time editing it. I rushed it and so that's what I get. Not the end of the world. | |
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| American Poem
Posted: 1/26/2006 3:32:42 PM | American Poem
(1/26/06)
In Germany, in the forties, in the towns near
The concentration camps
Human ashes would fall during the burning days
It would be winter and the townspeople would say
Look at the falling snow so dark like ash
America it is winter
The snow is burning in your hair | |
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| American Poem
Posted: 1/26/2006 4:18:43 PM | I love your thread:)I just popped in to post a poem I wrote in memory of my grandmother
Spending time alone in the attic
I try to touch my feelings
They shrink away like paper tigers
Trapped under water
Black and white photographs
Of someone elses memories
Black and white eyes
Cant quite capture the essence of the way
Im told her she really sparkled
Faint and distant memories of mine
Fill in all her wonderful colors
She had a Mona Lisa smile,and dark almond eyes like my mothers
Posing in her light blue silk sunday dress
The breakfast table where she sipped her tea
With quiet ladylike confidence
Her sincerity strength and love
Somehow escaped the lens of the camera
Technology missed her colors
My imagination reaches out a timeless artists brush
To fill them in where her life left off
Someone will remember she sparkled that way
She used to spend hours alone in the attic
Looking through her hope chest
The place her sacred memories rest
Surrounding me in warmth
Like a blue silk sunday dress
As I reach to sip my tea
With ladylike elegance
Such tenderness,strength,and love I feel
Yet it somehow seems to have escaped the lens of the world
Technology has replaced so many of its colors
I will fill them in with love as I go along
I will remember
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| Alis Kat's Grandmother Poem
Posted: 1/26/2006 7:53:58 PM | | To me, what I got from the poem-on an emotional level-is that the essence of who the woman was cannot be retrieved from snapshots or the childhood memories of the writer and so there is a sadness from this. On one level it seems that the writer feels (and I'm going out on a limb here) that both technology and her own writing can at best only give us a glimpse of who this woman was. On a secondary level there seems to be an implicit realization that this person's life (like everyone's life) is a vast world, rich and complex, beyond verbal understanding. I get this feeling when I see deserted buildings along highways. I wonder who were the people that built this deserted house? What was it like when the structure was new, what were the circumstances of the "worlds" involved? I even feel this when I find a small old object like a rusty soup can. I think, I picture the person who discarded it, what were they like, what were the circumstances of that day? Like I said I'm going out on a limb here. | |
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| My Father's Thoughts On Jesus
Posted: 1/26/2006 8:13:11 PM | My Father’s Thoughts On Jesus
It was Christmas 1998
Dad was laid out dad-like
On the horseshoe couch
While Mom sat in her chair
A diminutive Buddha
Working crossword puzzles
We were watching a biography
Of Jesus on the A&E channel
When after a little while
I mentioned
That Jesus had a brother named James
In a voice
Dry with mischief
My father issued
A correction:
Half-Brother
A little later
I wondered out loud
How come?
So many miracles back then?
But not much now?
The little Buddha answered first:
Well dear, it was a new religion back then
They had to get the people’s attention
And on the heels of that
From the couch
Another point of view:
Hell! He’s fed up with us!
He’s busy on another planet! | |
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| Impulse
Posted: 1/28/2006 7:42:43 PM | Impulse
Sometimes I have to reach
Down inside myself
And pull my madness
Out by the roots
I take it out into the night
And watch it writhe and dance
It's hot tongue licking
The flames of each and every star | |
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| How do I make spaces?
Posted: 1/29/2006 2:13:01 PM | I'm practicing spaces...
...trying to practice...
...in space...
...just an experiment...
..in space.. | |
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| Still at practice
Posted: 1/29/2006 6:39:39 PM | Hello. I need to stagger from left to right.
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| Still at practice
Posted: 1/31/2006 1:03:44 PM | This is ......
......another test...
Test | |
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| Help
Posted: 1/31/2006 1:13:57 PM | | Just can't space the lines right. | |
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| Entries From The Journal Of A Discontinuous Man
Posted: 1/31/2006 1:44:11 PM | Entries from The Journal Of A Discontinuous Man
(Copyright © Black Mary poems, 1998-2006)
I. AUGUST
There is a power….
…… Around me now
II. SEPTEMBER
…greater than myself…
……the ghost of flowers
III. OCTOBER
…that has restored me …
……A rose tortured
IV. NOVEMBER
…to insanity
……to a skeleton of thorns
V. DECEMBER
Yes. I am fully restored now. Transmogrified. The sweet magnolia has passed to chimera once again.
Nashville.
Memphis.
Louisville.
It didn’t take long. The last five years evaporated - in this - the first season of my return. The first season of my forgetting and my fugue state has settled in nicely. How well the old coat still fits me. A cold weather tramp bundled up deep in my spiritual poverty. I wear it tight around me, the familiar uniform of the discontinuous man, sick in heart and bone.
VI. JANUARY
On a daily run into the city I jet into…
Yellow…the color Tintoretto used for the skies above Golgotha.
Not to symbolize anguish but to give life to anguish itself.
That’s what Sarte said.
What else?
The sun…gone so long it might as well be Christ…
What else?
There is this:
I-65 North, a pit-stop, and a field adjacent
Over the field, the spirit hand of Seurat paints the sky a living sea of black specks.
An acreage of small black birds, Kentucky winter birds, determined, moving South in sheets, a common sight.
For just a moment the image moves through the image of a dream that I can’t seem to remember.
And then…I find myself…knowing…
These are not seagulls and I cannot make them into seagulls and no matter how I wish to go with them, to cast myself upwards into their numbers, I cannot go with them.
And…this is hard on me.
And then I am hurling myself north headlong into the sirens’ song, counting the miles, as required by superstition. I see the suburbs, and I feel them as they fall away to the city before me. I crest the last series of hills and jettison myself down the Mohammed Ali exit. At last … I fall…into the arms of West End Louisville, her savage roses at my feet. At 4AM her streets are alive with dead people, and she rides with me, telling me their stories and telling me the stories of the ones dead within her from other places and times. She is everywhere here, everywhere within my infected country. She caresses me in her houses, once so majestic, now every third one blown out. As I lie inside a gutted castle on 26th street, She covers me with the poisonous kisses of the dark science and suddenly I know…in the alchemy of blood I know…that this is the place where Heaven and Hell make love.
The last thing…She whispers…
….Is this not living and dying all in one shot?
VII. MARCH
Sister comes.
Sister saves.
Friends, the sacred kiss on their brows
Everyone is laughing and I love them.
Still I am
Seized in waves
In air thick as grief
Mountains
My face
Granite to glass to granite again
VIII. MAY
The morning of your funeral
I sat on the dock with coffee
And five small long dogs
I waited for you
At least six or seven worlds came my way
And there was a boat…one sail untethered
I waited for you
But you didn’t come that day
It’s OK
I guess you were busy
Being dead
There must be a lot of adjusting
I had questions
You probably heard
You know, somehow, I figured
That with you there now
On the other side
I would have a connection
To the inside track
I wasn’t going to ask about
The hummingbirds
I knew they weren’t really
The same birds every year
Not all the time
But I wanted to know what dreams meant
About the new city you lived in
I wanted to know about prayers
Because some one once told me
How the prayers of the world travel
Through the angelic hierarchies
Moving up the ladder according to their weight
And the prayers that ask for wealth, for material gain
No one listens to those
Everyone in Heaven laughs at those
They are the lowest prayers
They are not even prayers
And the highest prayers?
Those are the prayers the mothers say
For their lost children
The prayers that go
Straight to the top
To Jesus Himself
Mother, next to your grave
Is the grave of a small child
It’s a shrine of his parents’ grief
He was a boy, there are
Small trucks and cars and planes
At the base of his headstone
And you know this don’t you
Because you are his mother now
His mother under the grass
Singing him lullabies under the grass
IX. JUNE
Florida. Fourteen miles west
Of our old home
I have come here
To stand in the cathedral of crows
To gaze fourteen miles east
Through stretch of wonder past
Coyote, deer, and snake
To ask you
Wife
Why?
You say I am guilty
I have always been guilty
But you have never been innocent
You have the pilgrim soul it is true
But you have never had a pioneer heart
Still – I was… so often proud of you
Of how you could love the world
You were always better at that than me
I accepted that
I know I have fallen far from where I once loved you
But I kept my honor
I only threw it away after you left
I was worn out and couldn’t carry everything
You know, in the end
I only wanted you to try to help
Like you would for a friend
And speaking honestly
Your inability to instinctively know these things
Reveals the flaw
In your genius
Of love
Do you want to know?
Stare into the sun
Close your eyes
Look away
Now do it again
That’s how it was
When you went away
The way
You went away
You took…
…You…
…You took my breath away
Do you want to know?
Then…
I have a stone for you
And it is not diamond
Nor emerald or jade
It is the caress of a statue
The stone I feel inside
When you go away
So easily
Like dreams I can’t remember
Vishnu no longer dreams us
That’s what you say
But one day
When I’m done
Forgetting you
I will remember you
On a horse
In the limestone road
With azaleas
Singing purple songs
X. JULY
Kentucky summers beat
Florida summers hands down
Bowling Green, I have no complaints
For was this afternoon not given to me, laced in beaded rain?
Did I not see it in the world, feel it within me too?
Unfold so generously,
Into twilight of owls and yellow moon,
Into jubilee?
But alas, no friend wants to jubilee
So-I sit on my back porch, my small cat upon me, purring her own jubilee
Together we drink the stars out of the Kentucky night
Together we conjure a vision; we bring it forth.
The night air opens and shines
Swirling before us
In borders of yellow-white
Into the portal
Through layered time we gaze
Deep through the years
All the way to 1927 to Rangoon
City of sapphire
Ruby and jade
City of cobras and
Women of silk-brown skin
Women with the
Eyes of children
There…on a porch, it is Neruda that sits
The poet not yet famous
Not yet known or loved by the Children of Spain
Not yet the brother of Lorca
It is Neruda the diplomat (though poet still)
In the foreign service of his country
We see him peer out to the street
Into a procession of female monks
Head-shorn teen-age girls
Chanting their way to the golden
Cone of Shwedagon
My cat pants a little, she leans into a sniff as
Neruda stares out stroking his pet mongoose
His beloved Kiria, his little love amidst
His world of broken big loves
It continues
The Burmese night sweats and
Rises in our faces
We listen to braided sounds of Kentucky crickets
Trilling in the Buddha chants of Rangoon
Neruda nods a smile
And something
Moves forward
From then to now
Through the decades
These are the words that ripple up:
You once knew. You must remember again - The secret of surviving broken things
XI. SEPTEMBER
But …I…am…too sick… to remember …too sick in heart…stretched out…exile…sick deep…sick deep in forgetting…can’t remember…can’t see…my hands…can’t see myself…
XII. OCTOBER
The second fugue state grew hard on me strong like a twisted shell. A dark nautilus.
The Fibonacci sequence of discontinuity curving around me …
…1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, …
There were footsteps in my soul. My hands dissolved (except for my middle finger) and I couldn’t write. Eventually, all that was left of me was my torso and my left foot. I was walking down the street, just a torso dragging a disembodied foot. People became alarmed. I thought a lot about curing myself in the Barren River. Often I was gone for days on my missions and my cats were worried about me. I began to really miss them. I began to miss my Father and my Sister and my Brother and my Friends and I decided…I wanted to try…to really try. To be continuous…to be whole again. I drew a hard line across the cold concrete. I am getting better but I am not free yet. Freedom requires redemption. But I have the next best thing. I have a second job. I’m just writing down the facts here.
XIII. DECEMBER
Mathematics is returning to me. But I want my poetry back too. And one more thing - the pink science of love…I want that back some day too.
O how it lifts us up and throws us down,
never pure, often purely driven down…
Hah!
I am sitting in the coffee shop getting ready to conduct another experiment.
The telepathic messages I sent to the girl who makes the coffee seem to have failed.
She is showing no sign of wanting me, absolutely no sign.
Evidently there is some flaw of design here.
A disappointing development to be sure, but not completely unexpected.
From time to time-well, you’re just going to have this.
The coffee shop girl seems to have run off with her boyfriend.
Well fine- that’s of no concern of mine.
Let him have her love but he’ll have to take her hate too.
It’s time for-
Another experiment. Different subject.
To the woman who owns the thrift shop I write a message in the border of a two - dollar bill. I make the words as big as I can.
Rilke’s epithet:
Rose, oh pure contradiction, what joy to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.
I select for purchase - a small picture of winking owls. I needed a new one anyway.
I go to the counter and pay with my Rilke bill. At first she doesn’t notice and then she looks up. It seems like she wants to say something like:
“Hey, did you see this weird writing on this bill ?”
But she doesn’t know me.
And it’s hard for me to tell her that receiving a hand-made Rilke bill is one of the all-time highest compliments a woman can get. It’s a special kind of love, an honoring love.
So I don’t.
Instead, as I am leaving, I look around her store for a black coat perhaps, slightly long with lace cuffs. Then I step outside, smile
Step up into…
……the pure blue spark…
……of a Kentucky sky
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| Pulp Fiction?
Posted: 2/7/2006 6:03:32 PM | Pulp Fiction?
Today, I ate the persimmon
The one you gave me
Seventeen days ago
I waited patiently for the pulp to soften
Just like you told me to
I remembered your words and warnings
And realized later
That I was glad I listened to you
But today, the fruit seemed ripe
So I opened it
In the way that is my way
Slowly and delicately and ever so gently
Savoring the miracle of its form
Finding myself wanting
To regard in my heart
This process
A sacred little affair
And I remembered
You telling me
The pulp of this fruit is different
As indeed it was, refreshingly so
But you never told me
It would taste like
Scrambled eggs and tomatoes
In the morning
You never told me
It would feel like
Your fingers in my hair | |
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| Pulp Fiction?
Posted: 2/7/2006 9:21:26 PM | | OHHH it was like eating the fruit and then THAT LAST LINE..AWESOME!!! You should have entered the poetry contest Black Mary!!! | |
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| Monkey Poem
Posted: 2/7/2006 9:46:54 PM | Monkey Poem
I've got two monkeys
One on my back
One in my pants
Such bad monkeys | |
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| For Her
Posted: 2/8/2006 9:31:59 PM | For You
I am writing to you, these lines
From some future place
Looking back into
Tomorrow
There are those who would
Perhaps proclaim a heart
A shrine for you
But this is common
And you can live that life
But…
You have another life
Waking in the dark rivers
Of dolorous birds
You can sing out
A death to live
Beneath skies
Of dreaming cobalt seas
It’s not easy to live like this
But …I’m used to it now
… did you know
Yesterday, which is
Tomorrow to you
In a room of mirrors
The sun went blind
The week before that
There was anthropology
I studied a tribe
Of slow-walking women
They crushed whole cities
between their thighs
Don’t you want to see that? | |
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| For Her
Posted: 2/9/2006 9:36:30 AM | | Wow, simply awesome poetry! Wish I could write like that! | |
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| Mallarme Said
Posted: 2/9/2006 11:54:13 AM | | Those words are TOO true regrettably! | |
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