Favourite Poems....

[17th Angel]

(Smashing Pumpkins - The World Is A Vampire..)

The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
And what do I get for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game

Even though I know - I suppose Ill show
All my cool and cold-like old job
Despite all my rage Im still just a rat in a cage
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved
Despite all my rage Im still just a rat in a cage

Now Im naked, nothing but an animal
But can you fake it, for just one more show?
And what do you want, I want to change
And what have you got when you feel the same

Tell me Im the only one
Tell me theres no other one
Jesus was an only son
Tell me Im the chosen one
Jesus was an only son for you

Despite all my rage Im still just a rat in a cage
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved
Despite all my rage Im still just a rat in a cage
And I still believe that I cannot be saved

[Snoopy]

Ode to a Dead Goldfish.

O wet pet.






s.

[Pathless]

I have the following taped to the wall in my workspace:

Thanks
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As well as this untitle poem by James Bertolino, which I found printed on a postcard at a local bookshop:

To survive
Our minds must taste redwood
and agate, octopi,
bat, and in the bat's mouth,
insect. It's hard
to think like a planet.
We've got to try.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Both poems are of course copyrighted to their respective writers. The Merwin, it's weird, there seem to be different versions of it that I am running into. I suppose it's been revised at different times.

[InLove]

Thank you, Pathless!

(So good to see you around again--I have missed you.)

InPeace,
InLove

[-James-]

"Sweet Embrace"

Life can be a miracle
Open your heart and see.
Virtue a path of beauty
Existing in you and me.

Straight is this passage,
Always open, it is grace.
Vice is but the darkness
Existing in its place.

Sit a bit and think it over.
Absent until one can see.
Love is Gods guiding hand,
Living Spirit, and heavens key.

[Pathless]

I Hold the Lion's Paw
Hafiz
translation: Daniel Landinsky

I hold the Lion's Paw
Whenever I dance.

I know the ecstasy of the falcon's wings
When they make love against the sky,

And the sun and the moon
Sometimes argue over
Who will tuck me in at night.

If you think I am having more fun
Than anyone on this planet
You are absolutely correct.

But Hafiz
Is willing to share all his secrets
About how to befriend God.

Indeed, dear ones,
Hafiz is so very willing
To share all his secrets
About how to know the
Beautiful
One.

I hold the Lion's Paw whenever I dance.

[Pathless]

From Of a Poet
by William Harger

Occasionally
Your mind is consumed
With a new beginning.
All the thoughts and fancies
Of our yesterdays
Are expurged
In a brilliant cystalline flashing
That thrills your head
And only those thoughts remain
That would feel comfortable
In the new thing to happen to you.
And,
At once,
With excruciating
And lonely joy,
You are born again,
Without a host,
Without a conceiver,
Without a nurse,
And without sin
And
God, but it's fine.

[Pathless]

Here are a couple of mine that need to see the light of your eyes:

Mind-Expansion of the Rhetorical Peace Chorus


Corridors lose walls before you. Amazing Grace plays at all hours.
Open hallway full of people with tickets to eternity.
This speaking engagement has us all transfixed across fields blooming
with persimmons and possibility. Apples fell a moment ago
and now winter ferments an insistent heat. A solar system heaves.

Evening broke free and now we are steeped in 2 AM,
its silence and smell, its charismatic stature that stares in oblong shadows
through windows. Tomorrow, we'll sleep in, extend our harvests
in fields of late breakfast while words burn language with new ink.
Tin cans of thin paint invite patient recreation. An alive kindness sinks in.

And in the delivery room, where clusters of midwives evolve instruments and bloom,
cradles of magnolias mark a return to symbolism. Negotiations resume.
Gale force winds yell threats to return us to violence, punctuated by kicks and curses
from the military. And no one is listening to that, having more constructive employment.




Populations at the Theme Park


Androgynous sketches crept up in front of me,
reversed some doors and such, rolled dice.
I heard someone somewhere thinking about limitlessness,
but wasn't sure if my head was on the ground
where they told me it should be
or if it rather was billowing around again
in shallows, clouds, prisms, and vacations.
I met my reflections in a crowded theme park:

The celebrants blew across the hill board
and unwrapped cloth souveneirs to soundtracks
of crisp hillbilly heavy metal. You must be this high
to ride the twister. Jokes about smoking marijuana.
To your left, a landscape of tin can animals.
Log Flume. More silly string, elephant ears,
souveineirs from the Rat Shack. A goofy costume.
Goofy himself (a woman in a Goofy costume).
Prize tickets you won at the ring toss, darts.
An expensive ray gun and plastic swords, a cheap crown
for an eight year-old kid fascinated with all things medieval.
Ride the Whirly-Gig! Now open! Concerts at ten pm,
cotton candy, vanity license plate holders. Trash cans
crammed with paper and plastic. Majestic banners
and a dozen colored ribbons marking the entrance
to King Arther's Castle, where knights in armor
are made of plastic. Where's the wax museum?
It's too hot outside, smells like hot dogs,
let's go inside, ride the Rapids, grab a sno-cone,
Good Lord, anything but this heat! Costumes
sell balloons. This park never closes. Whoa.

[Pathless]

Not sure about the formatting on this one. I found it online, need to find a hard copy.

AN AMERICAN PRAYER

Jim Morrison

Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist? filled with green death
(I touched her thigh & death smiled)
We have assembled inside this ancient & insane theatre

To propagate our lust for life & flee the swarming wisdom of the streets
The barns are stormed
The windows kept & only one of all the rest
To dance & save us

With the divine mockery of words
Music inflames temperament
(When the true King's murderers are allowed to roam free and 1000 Magicians arise in the land)
Where are the feasts we are promised

Where is the wine
The New Wine
dying on the vine
resident mockery give us an hour for magic
We of the purple glove We of the starling flight & velvet hour
We of arabic pleasures's breed
We of sundome & the night
Give us a creed
To believe
A night of lust
Give us trust in The Night
Give of color hundred hues a rich mandala

[InLove]

TO CELEBRATE NOT EXPLAIN THE MYSTERY

And I heard a voice
a silvery voice wrapped
in secrets of red and purple
telling me to go deep, deep inside myself
deep to the deepest part where the light lay
in the center of the darkness
that it would be here
I would find the celebration
of who I am, why I exist,
where I come from and where I am going
and in this celebration I would find

the explanation that requires no explaining
the knowledge that requires no knowing
the answer that requires no questioning

and then I would understand
and then I would not understand
and then it would not matter.

(Marijo Moore)

[Pathless]

Nice One, InLove! Celebrate not explain--indeed!

Here's one I wrote on May 5th--Cinco de Mayo! It has nothing to do with Mexico though--at least not ostensibly. Hmmmm...

Awakened Cores

Thrilled currents circulate widely. Here we are in the white-washed capital building, surrounded by its picket fence and destroyed lives. Weeds are outside, being sprayed with pesticides. Gotta get outta here, someone whispers.

Poof, we're gone, back in the alleys that sustain us. Much psychological pain is gone but now money is scarce and we are hungry. Funny. It's still a great trade, though, wouldn't want to sell this soul nourishment for another thousand stock shares. Here's a tip: the market's about to blink out of existence, replaced by common everyday economies of beauty.

Heavy holograms have kept us pinned, cracked and skeletal, too fat without any muscle. Listen to the wires reconnect in the deep earth. Those wires are not electric, but roots organic. Twisting in spirals, this rich communion of blessed being takes no effort. Hawks, magpies, robins, red-winged blackbirds, eagles, condors, vultures, pigeons all take flight and know their purpose. Do you?

Come on again into the emptiness that made you. Ain't no use building without knowing. Once you taste the cycles of your own becoming, you cannot stop the foundations from supporting you. Didn't expect this space to be so aware, did you or didn't you? And who are you? Who am I?

Today we must look at each other closer, see the dust and the thick paint over our eyes, wipe all of that out of the shared vision. Brother, sister, open your inclinations towards the amazed sun. She shares in being. We are trees as much as planets, space as much as time. To deny reality is to dwell in this concrete box, to hurt, to cling and revisit death.

But we don't die, ever alive in the currents that sustain us. We are the currents. Currently and presently, slowly coming to an understanding of our situations, we seek nourishment in infinite modes. Ah, the words.

[Tariki]

I have always loved the poems of Philip Larkin. His is often a "bleak" vision, yet many of his poems carry deep undertones of compassion. Here is "Faith Healing"

Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice -

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them - that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

[Tariki]

And here is a little one of my own.......... Written well over twenty years ago now. There was a little mentally and physically handicapped boy called Georgie living next door, who seemed to spend his life in his wheelchair in a world of his own. One day as I came out he was in his chair and a lady was speaking to his mother. The lady was patting and carressing his hair and saying....."Oh he's a little angel, a little angel"......and for some reason this angered me, and I wrote the following......

see no wings on georgie
else he would be bound
set no seal upon him
place no fences round

see him not as what he could be
what he should or what he would be
see him as he is before you
see the living truth, see georgie

hope for guidance, hold no answers
in the morning when you wake him
as he casts his eyes upon you
your response can make or break him

[Pathless]

Very nice, Tariki. Not what I was expecting after reading that it was to be an "angry" poem. Quite insightful. How old were you when you wrote this?

Originally Posted by Tariki

Anand for some reason this angered me, and I wrote the following......

see no wings on georgie
else he would be bound
set no seal upon him
place no fences round

see him not as what he could be
what he should or what he would be
see him as he is before you
see the living truth, see georgie

hope for guidance, hold no answers
in the morning when you wake him
as he casts his eyes upon you
your response can make or break him

[Tariki]

Originally Posted by Pathless

Very nice, Tariki. Not what I was expecting after reading that it was to be an "angry" poem. Quite insightful. How old were you when you wrote this?

Hi Pathless,

I was in my early thirties even then!

I think my anger was just about what I saw as untruthfulness...............why should the little lad "be an angel" merely because he was handicapped? My daughter now works with special needs children, and I remember once asking her what was "wrong" with one particular child and she answered......."You don't need to know what's wrong with them, you just treat them as the child that they are". What a wonderful answer!! (I wonder where she gets it from?..... )