banal ultimatums

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM                                                                              












Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale' of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. 






                                     Wallace Stevens








...
                      

the incessant tinge of honesty

APOLOGY TO MY UNBORN




                     by






           Alison Apotheker










of my making and unmaking -

my little stowaway,
my shipwreck,
my unmooring -

my seedpod, my tadpole,
my apostrophe -

my come again some other day,
my unnameable unnamed one -

my beloved
unwelcome visitor,
my could have been
chickadee,
my what if...what have you -

my lost forever palimpsest,
my anonymous love-letter,
my cracked egg, my empty basket of weeds -
my secret,
my sorrow, my undoing.


































....

the shortest poem in the english language- reputably

One Question                          

I —

Why?

  Eli Siegel

untitled

birds
color the sky
beyond the door

the stone
lions

the museum
parkinglot

                   David Gitin








..

tomtomtomtomtomtomtom

  




  White Girl Powwow Love, 1978                                                                      






She was skinny and buttermilk-pale.
She wore her hair with a rattail.
And I knew I'd two-step to jail


For her love, which was the no-fail
Pick-up line that year. "Me in jail,"
I said. "Only you got the bail


To rescue me." She smelled like stale
Everything, and though I was frail,
I talked her into chucking the bale


And "later"-ing her Dad, a whale
Who thought everything was for sale,
Especially the sacred. So we sailed,


Her and me, on the powwow trail,
Until my dirty joke splat-failed—-
The porno punchline was "Snails."


White Girl Angry, she dug her nails
Into my skin and said, "Why males
Have to heave and hove and dog wail


Such awful shit?" She was a gale—-
A storm through a trailer park vale—-
An F-5 on the tornado scale—-


And I wanted to aside her veil
And touch and memorize her pale
Skin like a blind man touches Braille,


And so I did. Damn, I went flail
On her breasts, and that tough rail
Of a girl went all weakness and quail.


I thought I was all rez-prevail,
But then she put on her chainmail
Armor and golf-ball-sized hailed


Me with this confessional tale:
"My Daddy is a goddamn Whale
Killer," she said. "Ain't no scale


To weigh his evil. His devil pail
Is filled to the brim." She wailed
Tears like anvils and then bailed


On me. She ran back down the trail,
And I ran after her, but I failed
To catch her. Her pain gave her sails.


And though I never saw her pale
Self again, I pray, without fail,
When I think of her stuck in jail,


Or maybe still walking powwow trail—-
A white girl, skinny, hard, and frail—-
And likely wed to a killer of whales.




                    Sherman Alexie


















.......

Soldiers Bathing

 










The sea at evening moves across the sand.

  Under a reddening sky I watch the freedom of a band

  Of soldiers who belong to me. Stripped bare

  For bathing in the sea, they shout and run in the warm air;

  Their flesh worn by the trade of war, revives

  And my mind towards the meaning of it strives.

  All's pathos now. The body that was gross,

  Rank, ravenous, disgusting in the act or in repose,

  All fever, filth and sweat, its bestial strength

  And bestial decay, by pain and labour grows at length

  Fragile and luminous. 'Poor bare forked animal,'

  Conscious of his desires and needs and flesh that rise and fall,

  Stands in the soft air, tasting after toil

  The sweetness of his nakedness: letting the sea-waves coil

  Their frothy tongues about his feet, forgets

  His hatred of the war, its terrible pressure that begets

  A machinery of death and slavery,

  Each being a slave and making slaves of others: finds that he

  Remembers his old freedom in a game

  Mocking himself, and comically mimics fear and shame.

  He plays with death and animality;

  And reading in the shadows of his pallid flesh, I see

  The idea of Michelangelo's cartoon

  Of soldiers bathing, breaking off before they were half done

  At some sortie of the enemy, an episode

  Of the Pisan wars with Florence. I remember how he showed

  Their muscular limbs that clamber from the water,

  And heads that turn across the shoulder, eager for the slaughter,

  Forgetful of their bodies that are bare,

  And hot to buckle on and use the weapons lying there.

  –- And I think too of the theme another found

  When, shadowing men's bodies on a sinister red ground

  Another Florentine, Pollaiuolo,

  Painted a naked battle: warriors, straddled, hacked the foe,

  Dug their bare toes into the ground and slew

  The brother-naked man who lay between their feet and drew

  His lips back from his teeth in a grimace.

  They were Italians who knew war's sorrow and disgrace

  And showed the thing suspended, stripped: a theme

  Born out of the experience of war's horrible extreme

  Beneath a sky where even the air flows

  With lacrimae Christi. For that rage, that bitterness, those blows,

  That hatred of the slain, what could they be

  But indirectly or directly a commentary

  On the Crucifixion? And the picture burns

  With indignation and pity and despair by turns,

  Because it is the obverse of the scene

  Where Christ hangs murdered, stripped, upon the Cross. I mean,

  That is the explanation of its rage.

  And we too have our bitterness and pity that engage

  Blood, spirit, in this war. But night begins,

  Night of the mind: who nowadays is conscious of our sins?

  Though every human deed concerns our blood,

  And even we must know, what nobody has understood,

  That some great love is over all we do,

  And that is what has driven us to this fury, for so few

  Can suffer all the terror of that love:

  The terror of that love has set us spinning in this groove

  Greased with our blood.

  ................................These dry themselves and dress,

  Combing their hair, forget the fear and shame of nakedness.

  Because to love is frightening we prefer

  The freedom of our crimes. Yet, as I drink the dusky air,

  I feel a strange delight that fills me full,

  Strange gratitude, as if evil itself were beautiful,

  And kiss the wound in thought, while in the west

  I watch a streak of red that might have issued from Christ's breast.






                                                               F.T. Prince














.....

I Love Your Crazy Bones

Even your odds and ends.
I love your teeth, crazy bones,
Madcap knees and elbows.
Forearm and backhand
Hair makes you animal.
Rare among things.
The small of your back could pool rain
Into water a man might drink. Perfect,
From the whirlpools your fingers print
On everything you touch
To the moons on the nails of all ten toes
Rising and setting inside your shoes
Wherever you go.    








                                 Barton Sutter      












....           

THE INSTANTS                                                 

After last night’s rain, the world begun again—

                                                    you know what I mean, you have been here often—

I go to the window. For a moment the world

                                                    is my only backyard, such gold as I have seen

enclosing saints’ heads in medieval paintings,

                                                    illumination surrounding every flower.

 

This summer I woke too as a child

                                        after my long fall into sleep, black rain

which never ceased until my eyes could open

                                        first light an expectation without words.

 

You remember this. You knew the same morning.

                                                    I’m four years old for both of us right now.

The window runs with gold. There was a time

                                                    when morning was enough for everything.

                                                              Peter Cooley

it's beautiful and sweet to taste

The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve                  






Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous staggering its way

across those blue flowers, the ones I can never
remember the name of.  Do you know the old engineer’s

joke:  that, theoretically, bees can’t fly?  But they look so

perfect together, like Absolute Purpose incarnate: one bee
plus one blue flower equals about a billion

years of symbiosis.  Which leads me to wonder what it is

I’m doing here, peering through a lens at the thigh-pouches
stuffed with pollen and the baffling intricacies

of stamen and pistil.  Am I supposed to say something, add
a soundtrack and voiceover?   My life’s spent

running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation

until every goddamned thing’s reduced to botched captions
and dabs of misinformation in fractured,

not-quite-right English:  Here sir, that’s the very place Jesus

wept.  The Coliseum sprouts and blooms with leftover seeds
pooped by ancient tigers.    Poseidon diddled

Philomel in the warm slap of this ankle-deep surf to the dying
stings of a thousand jellyfish.   There, probably,

atop yonder scraggly hillock, Adam should’ve said no to Eve.








                                                      Michael Hudson
                                                           aka :   Yi-fen Chou












.....

The quality of your thoughts

 






With every stroke of the alphabet,
I search through cyberspace,
Looking for someone,
Whose face I do not know,
Whose complexion I do not care,
Whose money don't phase me,
Whose culture I don't mind learning,


But whose thoughts complement all my senses,
Even the ones that make me feel good from time to time,
Leaving me mesmerized,
Thinking about the feelings of yesterday,
To relieve the moments of tomorrow.


////




As far as I search through cyberspace,
It never ceases to amaze me,   Each time I look around,
And scroll up or down,  I get nothing but psychological script,
Parading in style like madigra on a mockery band.
Yet as I continue to navigate the cyberspace of thought,
Where the temple of great minds just might flourish,
It brings hope knowing that I can find someone,
Whose thoughts intrigue me,
And whose wisdom illuminates me.






I try to entertain the thoughts that fulfill me,
And see what I can get from it as it moves me,
Like the stories  the horseman tells,
The flying balloons of the sky where married couples kiss,
--Scattered like pigeons,
Blending  the blues like the rainbow,
Waving the wind goodbye,
As they disappear in a cloud.




I search through your thoughts,
  Looking for comforting words,
(You colored me with nice prose,)
I then realized that kind words can bring joy at everyone's end,
So I control my words in respect to those at my end,
So that they experience the same joy like everyone else.


//////




As hard as I try, I can't convince myself that time is of the essence,
There is no time,   But there is movement,
Like two end points on a map,
The distance traveled is the time I'v spent looking for you.

Trying to reach you on a higher level was of course my first mistake,
You live your life like a bird without a niche,
Looking to make a home with a branch that ain't yours to house,
Hoping that a strong wind helps you out along the way.



The tree leaves falls, Forming a path to follow,
And as they turn into rich soil,
The environment becomes the habitat,
Ah, But not all relationships can flourish there.




/////


Then I realize --maybe I'm not aiming high enough,
So again, I bring my sentiment one step closer for your love to be felt,
And there you were waiting to welcome me,
You knew it all along,
  Had I tried hard enough,
I would one day elevate myself,
To a place where great thoughts are once again valued,
And that we would finally meet,
And be able to communicate,
Beyond the cognizance of any visionary sense,
On a lower level,
Where association of culture  thrives in relationships.


Mold us, bond us into the one we were meant to be.




......   the poetry thief lifted this from a comment stream
           while researching the song  Autumn Leaves
             and lost the thread and thus the name of the poet








]
.....

aligned we are to corporeal reality

THE INTRUDER                                                    ACROSS my book your hand augustly reaches—
Thrusts it away.
I turn impatient to the window, watching
The tossed trees’ play,
March sunshine glinting on a chilly rain-pool
That snow-banks frame.
A lusty wind comes gusting on its errand
And names your name.
Captive, defeated, having striven I yield me
To thought awhile;
Letting the sunlight on the roughened waters
Bear me your smile;
Hearing the mischief-making wind that named you
Question afresh
If spirit find in spirit full contentment
Only through flesh.                              Grace Stone Coates                               ( eloquent voice from Montana circa 1921 ) ....

something sort of personal

haiku                                    




hear cicadas hum
sitting on a bench with you
laughter fills my heart










   from a geologian poet