Black Bird Crazy

Inebriation


Old Crow                  
can show         
how Poe
's
Black knack
snatched      
back              
his rap,
Tap, tap, tapping
evermore
on
your floor

The Wey of the Dog Star

13.0.0.0.0

When the Milky Way bisects the sunrise

And it's the first day of winter,

The Holocene ends with a shudder,
A great precessional age begins afresh.

Geologists named it an era for catastrophe---
A scientific upstage of Olmec lore
That looked up instead of down.


The Mesoamerican saints proclaimed
What only modern science can figure
Based on the stars and earthly wobbles;
Human beginnings of Gaean demise,
From secrets written in the galactic spiral.

Modern seers say, “it's the heat.” Nay,
Another Anthropocene layer, Brother,
Can you dig this stratigraphic rap
Conjured up by some forensic don
Tassel askew and mind so cool
Even global warming can't stop that!
Who knew? It could be a sign,
Of a time we won't remember.

I would advise reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann for a start.

About seven thousand years elapsed between the dawn of th Middle Eastern Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. The Indians navigated the same path in somewhat less time. ... Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere.

They invented dozens of systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the obits of the planets, created a 365 calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded books of fig tree bark paper.

Couple notes on the numbers. Stanza is Fibonacci Series and total number of lines =20 which is reflective of the vigesimal number system , i.e. base 20, used by the Mayans.

Stop, Look & Listen

Changlish

Linguistic inertia bends
Knewton’s law with e-motion,
Puts the em-PHA-sis on the wong

syl-LAH-bull when
Mandarin music makes more money.

Write the China syndrome
Whole planet language orbituaray.

Fate dictates sound discoveries,
New East mates dictionate

Online. Translation speak,
Where the rubber meets the toad
Pwincing the kisser.

Fourth of July Sound

The first giraffe In France arrived In Paris on June 30, 1827. Gosh, I wonder what that was like. And, I wonder what is like that. (sic.)

diminished fifth

broken
sounds foreign as
giraffes in Paris haunt
dead syllables mouthed in muted
voices

from wikipedia, "The tritone (tri- or three and tone) is a musical interval that spans three whole tones. The tritone is the same as an augmented fourth, which in 12-tone equal temperament is enharmonic to a diminished fifth. It is often used as the main interval of dissonance in Western harmony,..."


and, in my other voice on New Verse News

Advante Guarde Times, June 2008

One of my poems, Road Sign Redux, appears in the Poetry & Literary Works section of the June 2008 issue of Avant Guarde Times. In true blog logic, Go to the bottom of the page and read it first. After reading the other works, click on the title of this post to see a great "sign" graphic.

This poem originally appear on this blog on December 19, 2007 in response to a prompt on Totally Optional Prompts.

Dr. Charles Fredrickson had seen the poem on my blog after a dialog between fellow New Verse News Poets and asked to include it in the June Issue of AVT. Thanks Charles, now I see what you mean about having just the right graphic.

NWWC - Poetry Guest Book

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Poetry Workshop Participants and friends, please sign our guestbook, leave your email, a short bio would be nice, and a link to some of your poems.

btw, any other information you would like to share would be great.
Don't worry I will protect your privacy.

Thanks, ab

Meditation

Desensitized

Below the harsh mower rumble
I strain to hear the grass answer the blue bird song
Before me,
Boats pass over a deeper source of life
One I can only analyze.
A gnat attack jerks my eyes to a blur
As if the taste of grass numbed me
For a moment I am deaf
I touch myself just to make certain.

[The following section is
optional if you prefer a dramatic ending.]

This immediately set off a cranium war
The cerebellum said no way, not my fault
Hey I been thinking, said the left frontal lobe
“Don’t blame me,” the right frontal lobe mused.
The hippocampus faked memory loss
Finally the amygdala got the blame, for

Nothing left to fear.

The propmpt: Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright

and don't forget " A Moment" by Ruth Stone

Pittsburgh Poet Terrance Hayes

is the Northwoods Poetry Workshop leader where I will be next week.

Stop in and Listen Online NewsHour: Report | Pittsburgh Poet Terrance Hayes | April 24, 2008 | PBS

and some links that will make sense to someone
Bothell Poets et al.: A poem by Dean Young


My Father's Love Letters by Yusef Komunyakaa

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Banking on By Golly

Click on the poem and see the big picture.

Somewhere, Somehow

On the Far Side of a Dakota Sunset

" ... why oh why can't I?" Judy Garland

In the upside down world Hillary won,
General Custer smokes peyote root with warriors,
Politicians draw pundit cartoons.
Being last is heroic.
Refineries make cars disappear
& buffalos lie down with their greedy enemies.

The souls in that world vote for fools, who
Descend to earth & turn into public servants,
Saviors who tell the truth,
Walk to the sky and back each morning
Making love all the day long
Just as proclaimed in their holy books.

When they say war it means peace.
When they say peace it means compassion.
When they say shop it means rebuilding
& reparation for creation.
In the upside down world Hillary is naked
& Children feel her beauty,

Termosapiens cower in wind cooled mounds
Hiding from the Ecitoninaen hordes.
Hope is the dream of a place, where
Monica is a bonobos name for friends
Who couple with you in joy
& Praise the mythical goddess of virtue.

This poem was linked to Totally Optional Prompts, hence the comments. I really like that community of poets - it is interactive and supportive.

Latest poem published on New Verse News

Dateline: Intelaken, Switzerland

The latest poem published on New Verse News


Saturday, April 19, 2008
CHEER ON OUR NATIONAL GUARDERS

by HL


Those brave
Boys with the Stars
Marched up to the shrine of demonocracy.
While they did the lying,
We did the crying.

You leaders,
Tell our boys, “No more death!”
the other 30 lines on NVN

More than meets the eye or ear

It takes an interactive partner to animate this scene.

Click Away !

When bad maps point the direction

Common Roots

As cool as the morning calm
Cold vowels drifted onto the steppe
Seeking soft romantic companions

Met with a Cyrillic harshness
Old political divisions multiplied
Turning mere symbols to enmity

Touched by a silent sentience
Sweet pheromones of amour
Changed the semiotic of warming

Maybe the hokey pokey is what it's all about

"It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms."
or maybe it was something else Friedrich Nietzsche said.

Click to enlarge the images of the real thing

btw, here a link to the poem I wrote for last Sunday.

and this one still applies to the Super Bowl Game this coming Sunday.


[^j^]

Thinking Inside the Box

“Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present." Friedrich Nietzsche or maybe it was something else he said.



Chance encounter

btw, here a link to the other poem I wrote today.


[^j^]

When Poets take on Precedents

In memory of the protest sonnets of Claude McKay
on Martin Luther King's Day

... by observing the ideological paradoxes manifest in America's treatment of minorities and by adopting Western literary traditions, and thus he gains a voice among those whose project of subjugation has been to efface the native cultural heritage of African-Americans and to silence the discourse of dissent. McKay challenges the American power structure.

from African American Review, Fall, 1994 by James R. Keller

Waltzing over a Cyberian Sunset


Are you sure there is no good reason
Why a people would live in a fog?
If it’s not about fear or cov’rin
Your behind, then buying a watch dog

That is way out of touch and knows it,
Is like living with clowns that wear shit
Eating grins on their face, a disgrace
That American’s had to embrace—

Eight long years with a stupid oil fake
Because Clinton’s hard penis goon child
Was the symbol of freedom gone wild,

Made hypocrisy the country's namesake,
A torment that will outlast the grief
For a war that bestowed no relief?

In the a world of supervillians and cyber comics,

Doctor Cyber was the commanding presence behind a global criminal network around the same time when Wonder Woman had relinquished her powers and her fellow Amazons retreated into another dimension.

I continued the experimental aesthetic by composing the Pushkin sonnet in bluesy 3-beat trimeter instead of conforming to the iambic dogmatism of the traditional sonnet,

for more on this sad debacle in American governance that won't go away...click here.

Playing the bottom card too soon

The Untold Story


It was an average morning
Sometime in February
Unremarkable sunrise
Certainly not the kind of thing that would call out amateur photographers
The poets were still hung over
So only the factory workers were missing it
A body floating above the horizon
Purple and slowly desiccating

Was it only a mirage
A reflection of a life just ending
A curiously well formed cloud
Whose alligator skin flaked into the contrail of a fast moving exhaust from the future
He couldn’t quite tell
Every time he raised the glasses
Thoughts got in the way
His oatmeal was burning

The phone rang
It was his mother
Nothing interesting
Then the sun broke through pierced his retina with a concentrated photon blast
Knocked him to the floor
So this was what it was like
He was between breaths
The next never came

He was the only eye witness
No one to tell it to
Unreported news
It took only 27 lines in a the C section of a newspaper he never read
God’s beta son gone
His underwear still in the washer
Ready to be put on
A modest world

Unspeakable Word

As it happens, today was the day I had my annual checkup at the VA. For me, it is the hardest thing about being a DAV.

24/7, 24/7, 24/7, 24...

An out of balance hammer
pounds in the middle kingdom of auditorium yammer
Tinnitus tingling without a single sound anywhere
No winning combination here or there

It rings like a diabolical plot against humanity
a Conspiracy Theory of insanity
Punishment in the here and now of my ear
For sins committed long before this new year

For being among the limerick readers who cheered
when the boy from Nantucket appeared
gave us a grin
Raised his “toast” to the great somethin’

(In a modern sense of an old fashioned word
Frozen on lips that cannot be heard)
A stern librarian from out of the guilt of our youth
Screams quiet! But it is only an unobtainable truth

“It’s all in your head
or under your bed,” she said,
calling back that first turn of the phrase
The euphemism that said no in so many ways,

figuratively portrayed as a sonic
wave that vibrates until it became a near chronic
hum that will ever remain unseen
to serve as a surrogate for the in-between

New Years 2008

One of my favorite places to publish: Relevant and many excellent poets contribute-- My poem was the New Years 2008 Day choice

The New Verse News: Not Too Late for Commutation

...
regenerates the beat of life
Children who have not watched the news
breathe deeply to propel the perpetual wind of change

The editior, James Penha,

Under statement