ALL RESPONSES |
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A young man is machinery,
calibrated joints, friction,
not flesh till he’s old, not old
till technology seems fiction. |
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There are things about you
I can't quite understand,
as how you keep all that hurts
hidden behind your eyelashes
where I see the glimmer
of what salty tears are made of.
Still, you won't say what hurts.
Feelings are held under your tongue
as if a pill you are not ready to swallow.
Talking isn't enough when you hide
what's digging a hole inside your heart.
Yet, you will not say what you feel.
No problem showing your joy
when your favorite team wins
or anger for the new scratch on your car
but to show your tender heart
isn't your forte.
You cry when someone dies
when the national hymn plays,
laugh at a joke and smile
at the sight of your child.
Kiss who you love, yet,
from them you hold back.
I don't understand
how a man can fight a war
but can't find the courage
to show to a woman
who he is inside.
Is this what a real man is about? |
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She sits in the park on a bench
lost to the darkness, with her best friend
after bar closing time smoking a cigarette
wondering where all the other women are
where all the other mothers are
for certainly it isn’t just the two of them
up at two a.m. on this summer night,
nearly one of the last nights of summer.
The moon is full and the air sweet on her skin,
surely they aren’t the only ones
who find themselves here, find themselves
up and unwilling to go home now--
not when she can light a match
watch the tip of her cigarette glow,
not when she can laugh in the dark
with her best friend, both of them
praying the police don’t come & harass
them—how would they explain this
to their husbands, to their children,
Surely they aren’t the only ones
who see the freedom night offers,
the elasticity of time
how some nights your have to
pull it, let it stretch and give,
some nights you can let the music
pulse and the darkness swallow
everything about you. Some nights
you just have to be a voice, a shape in the dark
with your best friend at your side, laughing,
as the match bursts and flares, trades gold
for blue.
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man wrote this poem
to find himself
writing
himself.
he is that space between
words
the silence before birth
when all he hears is
his mother's wind
and the lapse in his beating
heart
that would not beat if
not for rest.
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so many actors
on the same stage
suddenly heroes
to a young boy
why did we believe in you?
you cannot even
tear aside
the veil of time—
your parables are old
your toes are grey and
withered away
and that guy on the right
(appropriately so
I guess) does not know
why he’s there
and neither do I. I
questioned how he ever
survived; and the rest
of you were never
alive
just members of
the tele-box club
Technicolor jesus’
whom I once loved.
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Ancient Romans wore their robes and tunics,
Gaels their woolen yards, open, free, and airy,
unconstrained as urgency required.
So now we're imprisoned in trousers,
in haute couture, but stiffly attired
against needs of proper ventilation,
leaving all to your imagination.
For what crimes have men been so confined?
It would be relief to cast these leggings
aside for pleated freedom and allow
my thoughts to swing unimpeded beneath
the mental fabric. I'll welcome winter
as a pleasant reminder, a cleansing
draft to chase my wayward urges away. |
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Just today I heard a story on the radio,
a man’s pipedream: To go hunting,
get his limit, bring it home to a cabin
where his woman fixes it for him and
watches as he eats it. His gun lies
ready to go off between his knees.
She’s happy, girly. Girly is in again.
Two newspaper reports have told me so.
Girly grins. Girly goals, toes, ribbons.
Girly is fun again. Men like girly girls.
My lips feel dour as I tell my husband,
“We’ve lost the battle. We’re going back
to the 50’s, slipping back into hell,
poodle skirts and whatever those
damn slips were we wore to make them
stand out. The skirts stand out. Not the girl.
God help a woman with a grain of ambition.
Men will rule the world again.” I’m close
to crying. My heart is breaking. I hear
strains of ”Hound Dog.” “Heartbreak Hotel.”
My husband looks at me with sympathy,
the sympathy we all share with losers. “Sharon,”
he says, “men have always ruled the world.”
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What mythic imperative quest
this thing called Manhood
that you seek with desperate ferocity
in gridded worlds of time-space-motion
a never-ending tail-chase,
this press for proof
of manliness amassed.
Enough! No further proof required.
Just be.
I have pleasured many times over
in the fullness of your naked heart
and gladly will give testimony.
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i’m long past
believing
in white knights
my only hero
is my father
because
he’s the one man
who loved me
for the right reasons
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i pay my bills
i smile when signing
checks
i’m looking better and better
in rest stop bathroom mirrors
my facial skin and cool
eyes translate to the cool
intelligence of an actor
in a B-grade movie
i’m the kind of man who spies
five dollar bills when lowering
my glance in shyness
my wife is so kind
i do not deserve her,
though she swears i do |
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Men don’t labor,
Women labor,
And birth is a result.
And any new life should have a better goal
Than meeting stereotypes.
Am I missing something?
I can’t speak for the opposite sex,
But as a man I am offended by
This week’s stimulus. Sorry,
But there is precious little latitude
In this hideous joke of a collage
For fathers, husbands, or poets
To emulate.
Ok, I feel better now. Thanks.
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All right, all right...
Places, everyone.
Ties and shirts to the right,
Gladiators and tank tops to the left,
All lethal weapons up front.
The rest of you spread out against the backdrop.
Give Hitler plenty of room.
Don't ruffle the mountie.
Ready, celestial choir? Take it!
CURTAINS. |
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Myra Breckinridge gazed upon the host of characters
invading her world and remembered
being a displaced Blue Bird among
the cacophony of girls in green dresses
who called themselves scouts.
With the exception of one diminutive
face amongst the manly many
wo-e to those who call themselves -men.
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Lust
What would it be like to kiss
a Palestinian? My mouth hungers to
be pressed against his while my mind
screams impossible!
Not to mention the look of shock
on my ex-husband’s face. Israeli soldier.
Jewish patriot. Lying in bed next to him, dying
to be touched while he reads the Hebrew
newspaper, homesick. Wanting
Jerusalem more than me.
Raging while I separate the dishes of meat
and milk into their categories because
no one else cares except the invisible
rabbi who has x-ray vision
into my kitchen as well as my
crypto-christian soul.
What would it be like to run away to
his room in the Arab quarter, climb the trellis of
bougainvillea so his mama can’t see me,
can’t shout her disapproval when she
brings him his tea?
“That brazen hussy! Jewish woman!
Crypto-christian divorcee with photographs
of her children clinging to her pockets!
What do you want with her?”
What would it be like to embrace
the dark-eyed other in a place
of naked truth,
strip off all pretense of golden
goodness and lick his ears,
ignore the mind in-between that concocts schemes
of revenge or sweetly bargains with fate.
Today directs the theater company.
Tomorrow blasted into bits by my
ex-husband’s compatriot,
the Jewish one I fell in love with
the day I landed in Haifa harbor,
the one I drank mint tea with
beside the Lion’s gate.
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He has mislaid his glasses
therefore his underwear and tie
the plane ticket, two socks.
Pushing my buttons as if I were
an echo-locator, heedless that
I have no homing device
that could magic them whole
in his hands.
He has missed
six items, wasted
fifteen precious minutes
of a day also belonging
to billions of other working souls—
Stuns me that he never loses
his absolute sense of entitlement. |
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Estranged animals
Wielding
Firm phallus
Artificial and real,
Solar, piercing by eye and steel
Forged to forget the mundane,
Imperial, incorporated and frail
Dust, foot, peer to salt and soil
He will die for oil and faith,
Family, seals, fools
Even cosmic bodies,
Women
And the strange self
Where the heavens rest a thousand secret words. |
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At one time
(or another)
I might have wanted
to be one of them.
Famous!
Fortunately,
my lucky stars
(or were they unlucky?)
did not take me there.
Thus,
I have escaped
the joys of being
one of the dictators
of parting a sea
the possibilty of becoming
a notable
though make-believe
lover
a kung-fu fighter
a governor
even stupid. |
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The fog is growing thicker
by the second
silence gathering like time
in the spaces
between giant sequoia trees
erasing those soft
broad trunks until all is smudge
and shadow
borders unstitch themselves
fray into a grey sea
If we pressed our ears
to the ground
we would hear only our own
hearts pounding
not those giant ones who stand
for hundreds of years
as empires crumble into bits
of grey stone
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Jesus, Buddha, Dalai Llama
Georgie Bush, Barack Obama
We're all men but different kinds
Though mostly men are of like minds
We like to smoke and drink and swear
And save the world to show we care
Ice Cube, Babe Ruth, Al Capone,
Kiss the chicks and take them home.
If momma's watching, watch your tongue
If Bubba's angry get your gun
Arnold, Elvis, Kerouac
Poets, princes, priests in black
Men are sinners, studs or saints
And wish they was the one they ain't
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At Arlington
This boy was my child:
with the armor of war he sleeps
this boy was the one who nursed at my breast
soft and sweet
how he sleeps how the dark blood
has purpled down
he was the boy who loved the sky
wanted to be a cloud, a moon child
how he fell on the muddy ground
how they brought me his body
how I screamed when they told me
this is the boy who swallowed the grapes
drank the honey followed the snake
this is the child who wears the armor
of war, this is the boy
lowered to lie under the plain white cross
as if that could comfort him or me,
when everything has been lost
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who are these people, glossy images of pecs
all stacked up, looking ready for sex
I don’t know you and I never will
That might be why you stand so still
cut out in relief against a hollywood sky
I stare at you and I don’t wonder why
my father never held a sword
or oiled his chest,
or slicked back his hair
to try his sunday best
he went to work and saved every day
to sit on the porch with an icy beer,
and listen patiently for the deer. |
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| she called it work, what I am doing now, and it surprised me to think of it that way, sitting here as I am, looking into the distance, empty windows onto a crowded street glisten, and I don’t get paid to do it, but it costs me time, time sitting, drinking, thinking, pondering, choosing, deliberating, more like labor, sometimes there are results, always results, often not sharable with the world, the toil it takes to open that window, let the noise out, grab attention, be ego, be vulgar, be decadent, be operatic, be whimsy, be free, be crazy, be tree, be trumpets and horns, be many voices, be chorus, be honest, be porous, be obstacle, be wheelchair, be child, be obdurate, be self serving, be bassline, be metaphorical, metaphysical, foul ball, free range, ink-stain, embers, kindling, smoke in the trees, grains in the hand, piles of sand sifting, sweat on the lip dripping, shoes on the court skiffing, finding new words call it riffing, stumble not to trip while drifting, like a cloud though the sky, turning, listing, on a page, on a boat, such heavy lifting, steer the car through the fog, chase light into black ever witching. |
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COFFEE AND AFTER SHAVE
I'm sitting by the window
of this quiet Café sipping my latte
soaking-in this January sun
watching people walk outside when
I place the palm of my hand on the table
And very lightly caress the wooden surface
as to retrace the touch of skin,
someone else's finger prints
I now make mine.
I inhale the scent left behind by a stranger,
a mixture of after shave and starched shirt.
I can imagine the jacket he wore while sitting here
Reading or watching the fast walk of the passersby
in the chilly morning air.
How long has it been
Since such scents,
such feeling of belonging,
have reached my nostrils, my fingertips
when opening my front door?
I inhale the scents left behind by a stranger,
a mixture of musk and starched white,
and ask myself if that someone will ever be you.
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The men
closed in from the edge of the forest
to gaze at her.
They were simply
the men—
warriors, poets, secret agents
holy men (floating) and a pair of fools
who claimed they’d started a war.
They said they just wanted
to talk to her.
Open the gate, they said.
I said, Not this time. |
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-Penso che una vita per la musica sia una vita
spesa bene ed è a questo che mi sono dedicato.-
(I think life in music is a life beautifully spent
and this is what I have devoted my life to.)
Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007)
The world is a little quieter
and a little less beautiful
than it was Tuesday.
To be born with such a voice
is a good thing.
To cultivate, perfect and share it
with the world, is a blessing
to us all.
So many seek to do the same,
yet, there will always be more listeners
than singers.
And that's a good thing, too.
Ciao, Luciano. |
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owls, all of them
lacing the lumber
of my night dreams
hoots, blinkless
some floating,
a few perverting,
some quoting,
a few subverting
out of the dark
they come
insubstantial,
at night’s end
they all fly away
into light as if
out an old barn door |
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