Poetry Readings by the authors!

If you like Avant Garde and contemporary poetry, here is the address for Pennsound: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound you'll want to load your MP3 up with some fine readings. This is a Wow!

war

there a dark corner spread
and became persuasive
a quiet history
nobody could deny

over it the muscle
of day flexed
and marched around proudly
an army celebrating
while the enemy sneaked up
hiding under bushes
beneath trees around corners
taking victims little by little
till so diminished
the day begins to flee
with darkness sprinting after
shouting coward

ambition

my mattress only moans and sighs
it is not the proper place
for a man like me
lying on thoughtful nails
rather than rest

a question rather than answer
if i were to write the story of a life
could i say how
i climbed a tower of hours
to the room at the top

how i could have counted tedious steps
how many of my graves are spread below

how i light the dark window again
with my moon encrusted sleepless face

teacher learns

the days in spring start to sing
they find me always busy
spider web work is their logic
the evenings are often just the same

summer shines relentlessly
an air conditioner in my office
grinds me to a gooey mass
nights test a solitary sweaty wrestler

winter in caps of sheep’s curls
fur lined waterproof boots
home and tired - how to spend the evening
cold covers and pillow are dark whispers waiting

you swam through waves of solitary tea cups
you showed me what the night was all about

rock star

the light was hiding behind
dark espresso
adjective clouds

it was the rougher form
of tag we were playing –
evening exercises
for overactive thoughts

confident doubts
of a calm mirage
floating nervously –
hovering over couches and chairs
knowing the electric moment was coming

cat tail
under the rocker

spring

green grow the tree tops
parts and spaces away
from killing shadow
smelling good is
dead or alive

dreams are the darkness you don’t see
when you close your eyes
smelling is good
whether fresh leaf
or broken branch

green is a color with a hole in it
that’s filled when light
is eaten
with delicate bud like teeth

music for katy

that the sky was light
was an illusion
bent armed and bedraggled
behind the veil
where there are only confidants
and just a few of them
after all

secrets are told there
but secrets are hard to keep
he wears a smile
to hide his passion
it trickles through
disguised as a good natured jest
he wears a frown
hard as a soda can
rattling empty

the sky looms
an invisible spider web
in which we are trapped
it is the disfigurement of day
built of secret tons
of crumble and rust
the grand skyscraper of our civilization
over which the wet dark
giant wave of night
pours like a flood
and introspection starts too late

huge cup of night

I am the husband of the dusk
I am the pimp of Peter Pan illusions
(because they remain childish forever)
forty days and forty nights
we sailed the dark ocean
we drank the huge cup of night
and only the dregs were bitter
sometimes you just must
drink deeply the blackness
the hours are like stars
shining on the surface
of the huge cup of night
you see what you cannot
when you stare into your drink
of the huge cup of night
you smell and feel
like a blind gardener
when you drink deeply -
I feel you as if you were a breath of mine

prison

I can’t see my prison
of a young atom bomb child
but I am looking for the bars
and walls that float around me –
flowers and trees that strangle
to hide the things that bind me
grabbing poems like bars to shake with rage
I must slip free of the balls without chains
and learn how to take them apart –
find a tunnel under solitary confinement
peek through a peephole in the glass wall
that floats around me
to the door that also floats
that opens onto a dream of freedom

SORRY I'VE BEEN SO BUSY!

I have missed you all very much. I got so busy I didn't have time to blog or write poetry. It was really terrible. As pennance I post a new poem which experienced a rather emotional birth this afternoon. I can't wait to see everybodies blogs. I can't wait to get caught up on all of your doings!

oui

starving on the apricot cross
I believe in the mysteries
starving in your gaze
fondly returned
I also believe in the obvious
you play like a kitten in my lap
yet you are trying to kill me
you need no absolution
it is your act of grace
that like a serial killer
you stalk salvation

come to me trembling with
the rage that is love
bend back the limbs
that gave you no freedom
there is only one moment left
between the future and the past
and it is ours

scholarship

quietly in the morning
the silence is ownable
your eyes watching me
your laughter
the way your attention
stalked my hours
were not
still there is not a moment
I would change

so I sit
pretending life
marches like a tea cup
that there never really was
any color to sunlight
and that one day
is just as the next
at the office

working late

darkness is a story I tell to myself
it keeps me from being lonely
desires burn in this darkness
as if it were some volcanic world
desires erupt in the dark
glowing creation
something new
at the expense of the old
what was there
is forever changed
what was
is no more
what will be
will destroy all that I know
in the end
in darkness
only I remain
the story I have told
has put me by myself
the last warrior
making peace
with nature’s anarchy

looking for the larger view

please help me write this down
there is a disaster that claims all life
I see it in pony tails
and friendly get-togethers
I need to celebrate the life that was
before we sang yesterday
and sniffed a little
I need to know it as if
I didn’t live here
in the disaster
discovered as a child
the brutal love I recall
that became a habit
and sticks like glue
in the span between
God’s earrings
and forever

Impermanence

This is the worry, you see,
that in the end
the air will disappear;
there will be nothing
and nothing will not sing any song.
Butterflies will tremble
in some new air
somewhere
wings healing from
smallness will never
swim through the passion
that our lungs felt
(with that air
knocked rock hard
and hammered into
wordless headstones).

Do say I loved you –
that we knew eternity
before we wore out
and sank into
that rugged, wooden night.

Tell someone we
were a something
that mattered.

fluid mood mystery

Liquid music
moonlight
floating on the
surface of a
puddle
makes us
calm
a tonic
we drink
or
memories
rippling in and out
of workweek
days in
vacation moments
that settle in
the sun quietly sinking
down the ocean a trillion lives deep

paradox

the song that sang
of the little else
beside what we felt
will not endure
because there
is no place for it
in the bedlam cosmos
of our passion
no matter how
long ago
it made today
and tomorrow real

Outside the disco

Harmed by the view
like a moth,
she stays in the
chilled light of evening.
While winter stretched its arms,
she withdrew all offers –
steaming, sucking teardrops
in gulps
from the ice air
of a winter’s night.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY!

Woman

There is the darkness
and the light -
you are gracious.

There is time –
in your presence
it has flesh, length.

Sound becomes melody,
poetry.
Poetry becomes
intoxicated words
that are our escape,
our hope -

the mythology of our hearts
is the whisper of your name.

driven all the way

looking for the right words
need is hard
like a big nail
hit so hard
it is countersunk
in a living tree

its like an illness
the only illness
the final illness
the one that cures me

I’m dying of something worse


This poem was originally published in Autumn Leaves

Black Ice

The flared match has an old face in it. The pair of hands moves and the glow does a young face. Then only two tiny sunsets are sucking wind in shadow’s cosmos. In the night the black ice rules, the dome of dark is endless and the dawn is after eternity. Drink the black water; ride the black wagon; laugh loud and full to drink the darkness. Do not look. You cannot see. Do not wait, the night is endless. Do not wish, this is the time of dreams and later is only the now you can’t avoid. It has already arrived against your wish. No matter where we go it is dark, no matter how many lights we turn on. We are naked and it is dark.

Katy did it to me again!

A list of my 20 favorite movies (in no particular order):

1. Groundhog Day
2. Star Wars – The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Third Man
4. The Shining
5. A Touch of Evil
6. Psycho (the original)
7. Vertigo
8. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
9. Men in Black
10. Back to the Future 1
11. Matrix
12. Amadeus
13. Blade Runner (Director’s Cut)
14. The Rear Window
15. Throw Momma from the Train
16. Good Will Hunting
17. Dead Poets Society
18. Rainman
19. Finding Forrester
20. Once Upon a Time in the West
21. Raiders of the Lost Ark
22. Romancing the Stone
23. The Piano Movers
24. The Silence of the Lambs
25. The Bank Dick
26. The Maltese Falcon
27. You Can't Cheat an Honest Man
28. Casablanca
29. Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome
30. Road Warrior

And that is not all, I probably need to do my favorite 50 to really cover my all time favs.

This is an interesting exercise! I tag Gulnaz, Sue Hardy Dawson, Gautami S. Tripathy, Ozy, Schadenfraulines, and Cecilia

Sad half sonnet

could’ve been your major
a question asked by scholars

could have been
the day you missed class

could have been
your Mona Lisa smile

loved not is half a couplet

My Bio for Plus Ultra

He was born in California, grew up in West Los Angeles, and moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1964. He attended the University of Arizona where he was a student poet. After the university he entered the food industry, first working as a retail meat cutter and later as a chef. He moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan in 1992 to work as an executive chef for a hotel. He started teaching English in 2003. He opened his blog Yuckelbel’s Canon in 2004. He has published his poetry in numerous magazines, bi-annuals, quarterly’s and journals. He has acted in theater, movies, commercials, on television, and sung in musicals. Currently he is a full time Lecturer in the Language Center of the Kazakhstan Institute of Economics, Management and Strategic Research.

Dance

It was a mess
I didn’t make
sounds on the stair –
dog barking

it was a day
beyond lies
but less, far less
than truth

name me an ugly
dance, naked with
the heart-shot
falling bear

I am the anguish
that answers the door