poems only (no captions, no words)

[mentalgongfu2]

I bring these few rags
back home this evening
& lay them at your feet
Miserable witness
to a day of tragic
sadness and disbelief
Hope you'll find me wanting
Take me to bed
Get me drunk (lay me out)

-James Douglas Morrison
from The American Night

[mentalgongfu2]

Talk

You're a brave man they tell me.
I'm not.
Courage has never been my quality.
Only I thought it disproportionate
so to degrade myself as others did.
No foundations trembled. My voice
no more than laughed at pompous falsity;
I did no more than write, never denounced,
I left out nothing I had thought about,
defended who deserved it, put a brand
on the untalented, the ersatz writers
(doing what anyhow had to be done).
And now they press to tell me that I'm brave.
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.

-Yevtushenko

[vanlose kid]

deleted

[Jeff]

I shout love in a blizzard's
scarf of curling cold,
for my heart's a furred sharp-toothed thing
that rushes out whimpering
when pain cries the sign writ on it.

I shout love into your pain
when skies crack and fall
like slivers of mirrors,
and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake,
pluck the balled yarn of your brain.

I shout love at petals peeled open
by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun,
terribly like an adhesive bandage,
for love and pain, love and pain
are companions in this age.

- Milton Acorn

[vanlose kid]

deleted

[Jeff]

Naughty Protestants
have governments
to make them miserable
- Leonard Cohen

[mentalgongfu2]

.

I've been playing with a form of cut-up using text generated by website verification systems - the ones where they ask you to copy disfigured letters from a box to confirm you're not some sort of webcrawler bot:

worcester invite show bettors
proverbs intended strums castelike
boos beloved shooing president
informed reported ramrod per
steeply but has pardons
bonnet Bronx you dogmatic
of Leslie saltiest cluster
to milked miss elates
nuptial Big drivers hennas
wholesale brain year dropped
beet them to exhume
you manholes marina Mrs.
national hearties dawn reform
destiny the surplus and
Catherine's trinket today's Dionysus
primped corporation tankers colonize

[MacCruiskeen]

The Cat Who was Shot for Treason

By Heathcote Williams


British soldier ‘shakes hands’ with a kitten on a snowy bank, Neulette, 1917

A cat was shot for treason
In World War One.
It had acted as an intermediary
Between Allied and Axis lines:
English and German soldiers
Could send messages
To each other
By tying scraps of paper
To the cat's collar.
The cat then ran across No Man's Land,
From one trench to the other.

When the War Office found out,
Allied superior officers
Ordered that the cat, nicknamed Felix,
Should be shot for its being a go-between,
And thus enabling fraternization
Between the warring troops
On the Western Front.

For, after a Christmas truce
When enmity miraculously faded
And one German dug-out sang 'Heilige Nacht'
As its English opposite number joined in
With 'Silent Night';
And when deadly enemies
Shyly scrambled out
Into the open air
Clutching presents
Of rum and schnapps, and lebkochen
And Huntley and Palmer's digestive biscuits;
And when they swapped them with broad smiles,
And when impromptu football matches
Broke out up and down the battle lines...
These popular displays of comradeship;
These congenial armistices;
These undeclared cease-fires
Were outlawed by the government
Who declared that all such happenings
Were high treason,
And subject to the same condign punishment
As cowardice, namely the firing squad.

Felix the cat, however,
(Called Nestor by the Germans)
Was a law unto itself.
It would wait patiently
Whilst cheery little scrawls
In English and in German
Were being attached to its collar
By trembling fingers, raw with cold:
"Hello Fritz."
"Gutentag Tommy."
"Fröhliche Weihnachten, Tommy."
"Happy Christmas, Fritz."

Back and forth the cat skipped across the snow,
Across the hard, unforgiving soil
Of No Man's Land; first appearing at Mons
And later at Passchendaele.

Then Felix – just like the animals
In the Middle Ages who, notoriously,
Were tried for being suspected
Of being in league with the devil –
Was judged by the top military brass
To constitute a threat
Through its enabling treasonous acts,
Through its being an accessory
To the undermining of the serial hate-crime
That was World War One;
A war crime that left fifteen million dead
Including a peace cat,
Who's barely ever mentioned
But whose bloodstained paw-prints
Are a lone, feline testament
To war's absurdity.

http://noglory.org/index.php/the-cat-wh ... l8J1T2SG41

[Elvis]

Listen to the birds sing!
All the little birds will die!


Kerouac

[Project Willow]

[MacCruiskeen]

Seamus Heaney's last poem:

In a Field


And there I was in the middle of a field,

The furrows once called "scores' still with their gloss,

The tractor with its hoisted plough just gone

Snarling at an unexpected speed

Out on the road. Last of the jobs,

The windings had been ploughed, furrows turned

Three ply or four round each of the four sides

Of the breathing land, to mark it off

And out. Within that boundary now

Step the fleshy earth and follow

The long healed footprints of one who arrived

From nowhere, unfamiliar and de-mobbed,

In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots,

Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field

To stumble from the windings' magic ring

And take me by a hand to lead me back

Through the same old gate into the yard

Where everyone has suddenly appeared,

All standing waiting.




http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/o ... -published

[conniption]

Probably Possible: A Simple Poem for a Big Problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVHWHraFulo

[MacCruiskeen]

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

by Derek Mahon

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among
the asphodels
– Seferis, 'Mythistorema'

For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped forever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door growing strong –
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!.

[conniption]

Bad Attitudes

January 29, 2014

Doin’ the Gop Hop

Our 13-year-old granddaughter Georgia sings with a youth band in New Haven. The kids had worked out the music for a number they wanted to perform at a concert last Sunday, but no words. How about we make it about the government shutdown, somebody suggested. (Kids these days, huh?) So anyway Georgia volunteered to write some lyrics, and here is what she sang:

V1: house of men act like children, they’ll never be forgiven
sweaty hands and crossed fingers, the taste of lies lingers
our fathers are frowning, while our people are drowning
spilt blood on the playground, will we ever be found?

Chorus: Sitting on our imaginary throne,
preach to the choir,
and we drone and we drone

V2: unbending, never broken, change is never open
stuck in one single mindset, many blinded advocates
we pledge allegiance to the flag, to the republic for which it stands
but the real question is, what are we standing for?

V3: we’re sinking not swimming, our eyes are brimming
an eye for an eye, unless it’s mine
weak minds think alike, all bark and no bite
spilt blood on the playground, will we ever be found?

Posted by Jerome Doolittle

[dada]

Poem on a stone that I made today. (stone weighs 52lbs. 16 in x 1 ft x 6 in)

PIC_0704.JPG