Friday, May 6, 2022
Heather Sager ________________ poem
Saturday, January 22, 2022
Poem _______________ Koon Woon
When
you, when I …
When
you catch me writing,
when
you catch the wind,
a
warm breath is blowing, &
birds
flock over the land.
Though
the political is absurd
and
men often pitch dirt,
a
raindrop of the good
portends
a brotherhood.
Take
this feather, my friend,
it’s
preserved from childhood.
Recall
fondly the days and nights
in
this undertaking we call life.
When
you, when I are far awake,
an
opulent music we shall make.
And
we will laugh and dance, as
Providence
bestows another chance.
Koon
Woon
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Poem ________________ Deanna Scott
Changing Seasons
Trampling on shining sumac
Sitting at the edge of the meadow
The trees hummed a soft melody at the end of fall
Winter responded by grabbing the baton
I didn’t know I was ready
The last of the shrubs forming a colony with shiny leaves Resembling the birds flying
Stop worrying
I will always protect your gentle footsteps
A cluster of red berries fell on my head
Silly girl
This is the easiest transition
Fall leaves turn scarlet red
Allow things to come
Accept the universe’s treasure
As nature rotates
The gift of seasons.
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
John Grey _____________________ three poems
I HAVE BUT ONE TRUE HOME
Here is the house in which I lived.
There is the quiet
spot
where I could
inhabit the darkness,
a womb where I was
moved into
after my mother’s could
no longer hold me.
Other people live
there now.
A woman waters the
garden.
Kids play in the
yard.
A small dog barks at
me,
like I’m some
burglar casing the joint.
I’m really casing
the past,
a different dog,
different woman,
and one of those
kids,
the smallest one, is
me.
The eyes have done
their job.
Now memory takes
over.
THE TRUCKS AT NIGHT
I'm going home to sleep
but who knows where they're headed.
Sleep could be
and maybe there's no sleep,
just uppers and the monotony
of route 95.
Maybe there's a truck stop or two
along the way
where they can park these roaring behemoths
and pass the dead of night
with fellow creatures,
taste the coffee,
see the trips they've made,
have still to make,
in the red of other trucker's eyes.
I think I've got it bad
until I read of miners stuck in hell-holes,
chemical workers breathing cancer
on the job,
or see these weary road knights
rattling down the highway,
full tank of diesel,
head almost on empty.
WHY TRY TO CHANGE ME
I share an apartment with a gelded dog.
I was in a long-term relationship.
It broke up a year ago.
Her mother was a harridan of the old school.
I did the best I could for her.
Not enough of course.
And I do see her now and then
at the local hangouts,
We refer to ourselves as friends.
(We’re not really but there is
no personal noun to go with indifferent.)
My dog looks on me
as everything there is
and more besides.
And I was the one who had him fixed.
I was once shacked up with
a series of misunderstandings.
Now I live with an irony.
Once I was on my own.
With no nouns to speak of.
David Gilmour _________________ two poems
DREAM-DOG
Say, it
was vivid! -- akin to something --
Someone
alive and kicking.
I know I
should have caught that 4:11 am
Dream
lingering at the empty platform,
When I sat
bolt upright, I saw myself
As if
myself saw me in the high-
Density reflective
mirror of that world.
A crisis
whether to arise,
Dress,
eat, and climb aboard the blank page;
Whether to
drop back down the rabbit's hole to sleep.
Had it,
fed it, bled it, died!
Alas, that
frisky puppy of a dream-dog
Up and
abandoned me. Carried on a carriage,
Taken on
the brain-train,
Chuffing
on down those serpentine tracks
Until the
rails went skew,
Now's
blowing smoke in distant fields
Where
poetic frogs used to croak.
Through
channels reamed by rumination,
The barge
hangs by some mooring post,
Along by
now a narrow ditch, a psychic lair
Where
something more than frog was spawned,
Where it's
at home,
Like
simple souls a while ago,
Who
chattered, smoked, and sipped green tea
Over
yellow formica breakfast tables,
Morning
sun in streams of gold,
Through
the hazy kitchen windows.
TRANCE FORMATION
The cosmic
picture or the uncosmetic chaos
Is pressed
by the spirit of Life
Upon the
walls of its own awareness.
Rainbow
arcs, moon above the pyramids,
Cliff faces,
glassy mountain ribs.
The listener
might see a spectral fragment,
The large
red,
A lamp
glowing upon a triangular plane,
A rough
stone, tragic ledges,
A dead drop
into blue chasms.
Nature’s
mass can be reordered:
Coherent
line, measure, form, and word.
The singer’s
synesthetic eye,
A wild iris,
savage thought.
A maelstrom
of meanings:
Pristine is
white,
Black is
pure, men are wheat,
Women
violets with a deep, deep core.
Raven, a
nightjar,
And a sign
of spring—cuckoo!
All
concocted transformations,
Laden
galleons sailing across classifications
To an
unknown shore,
The blades
from bristling pines
Palming the
foaming eddies,
Skimming
across orders
To an
ineffable shore,
Down to
earth experience,
Amber and
frankincense.
Out they fly
from the cave of dreams,
Carlsbad-like
gusts of plumage,
Beauties
once worn by cargo cultists
Now extinct
in paradise
In faraway
Sarawak.
Soaring,
Focusing on
all divine planes,
Swift
squadrons,
Drawing
evening in,
Sunday, January 9, 2022
koon woon
The Warsaw Pact
There are losers from Eastern Europe living in this apartment building, as well as Asians, and Blacks and a couple of indigenous people. We are sometimes a conflicting community. But the Whites, albeit poor, rule. The Russian is seldom home for this reason? I am China-born Chinese and my age should command respect, but it doesn’t. Things are not like they are in the old country.
In some ways, this is a Jean-Paul Sartre story. There are a few viable exits and so we wait for Godot. Sometimes one can smell death coming on and sometimes one can narrow it down to which of the nine floors. And when an occupant is not seen for a prolonged period of time, their worried relatives will find a putrefying mess in that room. And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It seems though that the formula 3% Chinese living here is both admired and resented. According to Emily the Black lady with one functioning eye, the Whites and the Chinese got all the money. It could be so, but the Chinese who don’t play along with the white agenda remain in Chinatown, where massage parlors mushroom in recent times when smuggled aliens are well hidden in the Chinatown conclave where the police seldom assess unless it is horrendous enough of a crime such as Wah Mee.
There are all kinds of misconceptions here, of course. Approximately half of the people here are disabled and of those, half are mentally ill, and the other half are seniors enough they either don’t care or unable to care. But it is like Roethke’s “Root Cellar,” the Congress of stink here struggles to survive.
(To be continued…)
- Koon Woon
January 7, 2022
John Gorski ______________ three poems
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2022
John Gorski -------------- three poems
Questioning Poets
Queries for Keats
Why did you walk through twenty-five
miles of November rain
in a flimsy springtime waistcoat,
immune to thoughts insane?
Did you think death was no more
than a laudanum dream –
an apparition murmuring
of that not fully seen?
But you knew it had arrived
like the Italian sun
in your fevered rooms in Rome
of breathless consumption.
Did you ever hear portents
in the nightingale’s song
that you wouldn’t live to Wordsworth’s age
or even half as long?
A Query for Clare
Why did bird song stay in your head
from Emmingsale’s heath
where Night Jars called and the hawk
whistled like a thief?
You didn’t heed the cold-eyed
men of science in London
who peered through the sterile glass
at the corpses of robins.
Ignorant henchmen of commerce
lived in that city,
their black thorn hearts icy toward
avian poetry.
How could they hear other bird tunes
as nightingale music
which you still heard within the walls
that housed lunatics?
2021 John Gorski
Childhood Idles
Teddy Bricks, my one-time ursine companion,
slouches in a corner chair – his faded green
vest and feathered Robin Hood cap askew.
His metal limbs are old and twisted.
When I wind him up, he can no longer
execute his mechanical somersaults.
Sad in disrepair, he commiserates
with my sister’s bear, Teddy Bebe,
who’s grown pudgy and moth eaten.
Now they rest in the spent morning’s
shadows, as I reach for my shoe box
of baseball cards. I shuffle the smiles
and stances of Walt Dropo, Elroy Face,
Ted Kluzewski and Yogi Berra through my hands.
After lunch, I go out to our back yard
with my bat and rubber ball and pretend
to be Gene Woodling – the only Baltimore
Oriole hitting over 2.60. I’m swinging
for the fences (sixty feet away) and
trying to hit that red orb all the way
to Glen Burnie (a half mile away).
Through the kitchen window, the Coasters
harmonizing “Young Blood” draws me out
of that August Maryland swelter to drop
a lemon-lime Fizzie in a glass of ice water.
Then, I look through my collection
of Rhythm and Blues trading cards
to see if I can find one of The Coasters
among Laverne Baker, Little Richard and Elvis.
At twelve years, I finally learn
to ride a bicycle and pedal out
with my friends to beaches on the Severn River.
There, I watch sails billow over glittering
liquid blue towards Chesapeake Bay.
2021 John Gorski
Hamilton County Purgatory
“He would have convicted Jesus Christ too,” the thirtyish
Corrections official exclaimed when he saw me enter
the third floor of the Hamilton County jail. I had just come
from the Common Pleas court of Donald White where I was
found guilty of possession of marijuana – still a felony in 1970.
I guess I looked innocent in my suit and tie and Ivy League
short hair. I said, “ I think I’ll get probation because I’m
going to college.” “So, you’re smarter than the average bear,”
he shot back, using the culturally dated TV lingo typical of the
Ohio River valley.
Then a guard escorted me to my cell and I met the other
occupant, who was waiting to be remanded to a hospital
for the criminally insane. Other detainees drifted into my cell
over the next twelve days. Some would be going to the Ohio pen.
Some asked if I had brought any weed with me. Of course, I hadn’t
since “I was smarter than the average bear.”
During that time, I met an assortment of interesting people. One
of them was in for smuggling. He was from my high school and a first
string member of the basketball team. He told me about my senior
class president who got busted with two others for smashing a plastic
statue of a llama in a city park. The llama was stuffed with
packets of hashish. Another was a member of a motorcycle gang
who discussed the merits of eating grasshoppers. One got drunk
and forged a check.
One day, the warden let us watch an old black and white B movie
from the forties. In it, a gang of convicts were on a train chugging
over an elevated railroad bridge when one of them was thrown
from the train. Everyone cheered.
On Sundays, Top 40 radio was piped in over the public address
system. Melanie wailed “Candles in the Rain” while someone said:
“That white girl sounds kind of weak; why can’t they play Aretha.”
Then Norman Greenbaum was singing “Spirit in the Sky.” I closed
my eyes and saw myself in a dark earthen cellar, looking up at
a door flooding with white light. It reminded me of reading
Pilgrim’s Progress where the pen and ink sketched sun seemed
to expand at the end of every chapter.
Then one day the guard said I was getting out tomorrow. The next
morning, the “key” arrived in the form of a probation officer. It seemed
“The Curse of Harry Anslinger” was beginning to lift and the 1930’s era
marijuana laws were receding.
Then my father arrived and we rode into a pulsing March morning of
of rainy light. After two weeks in windowless halls, it lifted me in a rhapsody.
That night the purgatory of jailed voices vanished from my sleep.
2021 John Gorski