Good…
Better!!!
Okay here’s to the poetry I’ll be reading @ the Poet’s Loft at 8pm on Wednesday -
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Today I went to the Mountain’s Summit,
Just to see endless hills and ridgetops
and the water spills that till those hills,
And this is what I gathered from it.
I saw civilization and blotted it from mind.
Cleared the land of all mankind.
Pondered the distance that this existance
Would perservere – Not long I fear!
A perfection seen through failing eyes
Fades away and then slowly dies.
A funeral – white shirts, black ties
Pallbearers made from Greed and Lies.
And this is where its story ends.
Severed Dirt incapable to mend
The Mighty Oak submits
and then does bend.
(No…
…it breaks)
All falls away
Just as it began
And THIS will be the plight of MAN !
******************************
This Is A Poem
About crying for people
you’ve never met,
because sometimes when
you look at someone,
their eyes are vacant,
and their bodies are almost
invisible. That is how ordinary
they are.
For example,
the older guy at Jiffy Lube,
the one who always scowls
at me while he looks up my
information on his computer,
mispronounces my name, tries
to talk me into some super oil
I don’t want. I’m sorry mister,
that you’re hands are always greasy
and you hate your life. Just because
I don’t like to pull my car over that gaping
service hole in the floor does not give
you the right to glass up your eyes and motion
with your fingers, the international sign
for roll it forward sometime today lady.
And what about the woman who plucks chickens
all day long? The boy in the keyhole?
The drowsy shopkeeper? The barstool warmers?
Ditch diggers? Prison guards? The wicked witch of the West?
Alice in Wonderland? What about her?
What have they been that they might never be
again?
An abstract branch, too thin for children
to swing from, too high for them to reach?
A spotted leaf, dangling by their feet,
sleeping peacefully until the wind wakes them?
I have been writing their obituaries.
A bunch of statistics about chance and fate,
failure and successful suicides.
I get my practice by witnessing lesser deaths.
This is a poem about a plea.
That of a beetle trapped in the web
of a black widow.
See how he struggles to no avail.
And she just sits there
with her red belly glaring
as if she’s got all the time
in the world.
This chaotic scene
isn’t noticeable to everyone.
Just to those who’s eyes
draw thin, hypnotic lines through the air.
Nobody will pay attention, of course,
as she makes her slow way over,
as she punctures his shell
and sucks out his liquid contents.
He’ll die and not one of us will lift a finger
to save him.
This is a poem for the beetle.
-Lisa_Zaran
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To me,
Take all the minutes
of an eternity
and their worth would never compare
to one single moment with you
standing next to me.
It would take
– the moon to crack
– the sky to part
– the heaven’s diamonds fall, all the stars,
for you to ever realize
the love contained in this fragile box
(The love
for you
inside of this heart.)
Just as that
brilliant
– yet,
backwards speaking
poet once wrote:
“…and its you
are whatever a moon
has always meant
and whatever a sun
will always sing
is you…”
Why, it’s true.
It IS you!
Ask me the ways that I love you
and my answer
would be simply:
“Baby…
…I haven’t yet learned to count that far.”
I know it’s cliche
– a poem about love
But what can I say?
A poem is not meant to be read.
It is meant to be felt
– and I feel you.
Deep inside my soul
Amoungst these cold, dying ashes
You are red hot
– a fiery coal,
dancing in those unforgiving flames.
My pride is a small ember
that I just keep swallowing for you
– But I picked you
And despite everything
That I have ever been taught or told
about this fiery cinder
– It is you…
…that I just want to hold.
*****************************
Females,
They come in all shapes and sizes.
All forms and all names.
They don’t know what they want.
Plain and simple.
Like my boxers, which are striped with plaid stars.
Plain and fucking simple.
Most have seemingly idolled the figures of
Mabaline and Covergirl practically all of their lives
– brainwashed by that sick distant relative of “The Man”.
…they paint their faces on
with all the pretty colors that hide their true beauty…
Because above hips, chest, thighs, or butt,
the most real ass shit is the ladies who don’t give a fuck.
I can’t believe us men still allow it,
they and we still-let-toes become mangled and bunched,
crippled and crunched in Stilletos.
Do you realize what Stilleto means?!?
KNIFE!!!
We have our women walking on knives for us “Men”!
And you wonder why at old age
they become so crippled they can’t harldly move.
It’s all that pain and strife they go through.
They’re living in a world of male expectations
…they’re clawing
…and crawling
…and kicking and screaming
…and biting
…tooth to brick
…to gain some form of liberation from these male expectations
– They’re the reason why 14 year old girls’ wrists are slit,
the reason why 10 year old girls think that skinny is a compliment.
They settle with style and class, deserting individuality in the process.
You women need to realize that…
Maybe its just the Mabaline that most men are looking for but,
CoverGirl, cover for yourself because you are poetry in the making,
just a flower in bloom,
baby,
and You’re Worth It.
No, your value isn’t judged by the Bens you spend
on eye-shadow and lip gloss.
No, you’re worth more than just that.
Realize ladies that you are beautiful in your own
and you don’t need our second opinions to feel good about that.
Ladies, realize this
…because you are.
**************
Two tears fall from
blued eyes simultaneously.
I look to God
but do you still see me?
Maybe a cloud has blocked your view,
but lately I’ve become quite blue.
Oh God! Oh God! Where are you?
Lately morals have become shriveled and dry,
Left on sunbaked patios
Left to die.
So for this world: I cry! I cry!
Where have all the ideals gone?
Poisoning us all–
The “Self-Love Drug” passes on.
*************************
Liberty Needs Glasses
excuse me but Lady Liberty needs glasses
And so does Mrs. Justice by her side
Both the broads R blind as bats
Stumbling thru the system
Justice bumped into Mutulu and
Trippin’ on Geronimo Pratt
But stepped right over Oliver
And his crooked partner Ronnie
Justice stubbed her Big Toe on Mandela
And liberty was misquoted by the Indians
slavery was a learning phase
Forgotten without a verdict
while Justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving Black males
I mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
They’d take ‘em both 2 Pen Optical
and get 2 pairs of glasses
~Tupac Amaru Shakur (The Rose That Grew From Concrete)
*****************************************************
When the world becomes
too much to bear
and I close these windows
To escape from reality,
You become my eyelids.
Every single time,
eyes closed,
I breathe
…breathe you into me,
the silence in serenity
in the darkness,
it is you I see.
Like still photo slides
I blink and see
a new face of you,
just as beautiful as the last.
You haunt me.
But I don’t see you anymore.
You’ve disappeared from this place.
Gone to somewhere that I can’t reach.
…Somewhere I can’t see.
And I keep telling myself
to stop dreaming of you
and start dreaming for me.
********************
nobody loses all the time
nobody loses all the time
i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added
my Uncle Sol’s farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when
my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who’d given my Unde Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scrumptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)
~ (ee) cummings
********************
So farewell,
this is it.
I mean it this time.
Thats all she wrote,
one word –
– goodbye.
So farewell,
it’s over.
A lost cause
I guess –
– My life
I confess.
Winter will pass again–
– once more.
Distant clouds float
on a distant shore.
I am the last leaf fallen
before snow.
But now I ask God
before I let go:
Love,
don’t brush my branches
anymore.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’ll say it a thousand times more.
Love,
don’t brush my branches
anymore.
I’m so tired
of being
the last leaf
on this
forsaken tree.
***********
When we hold hands,
Time stops
clocks drop
And in an instant I realize
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
He said:
“When you put your hand
on a hot stove,
it feels like an just an instant.
But when you sit next to
the love of your life,
it feels like an eternity.”
And I just find myself
thinking –
– Man, this guy is a GENIUS!
Of course, no simple equation
compares to the
biological,
chemical,
physical,
and psychological
mechanics behind love.
But when you hold my hand,
the Earth stops spinning
in a moment of eternity,
and the whole world
Stops
When you hold my hand.
*******************
You are
My dark lion
Resting in a warm cradle
Of flesh
extended from shoulder to index
My ominous stalker
You follow behind
When the sun
Glares off
of the windows
to my soul.
You are
the mute child
that plays his part silently
yet listens
to my every
word.
You are
warm pocket lint
in my worn denim.
We are one.
You.
Me.
We.
****
The follow through
of what you said
went something like
me driving off in my car
pondering how blind
I could have been
to not see it coming.
That word
It hit me
like a Mac truck
against my cranium.
The car was totaled.
That word.
Goodbye.
I was cut out of the wreckage
Only to find
a crippling sense of paralysis
below my neck.
My head was spinning.
Unlike the rest
Of my body
from this feeling.
Then my name was called.
Waking up
a lapse into reality.
Then I looked over at her.
And realized everything.
It was just a dream.
Or a nightmare.
************
I tried to tell her:
This way the twig is bent.
Born of my trunk and strengthened by my roots,
you must stretch newgrown branches
closer to the sun
than I can reach.
I wanted to say:
Extend my self to that far atmosphere
only my dreams allow.
But the twig broke,
and yesterday I saw her
walking down an unfamiliar street,
feet confident
face slanted upward toward a threatening sky,
and
she was smiling
and she was
her very free,
her very individual
unpliable
own.
********************
I am silver and exact, I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
But I don’t judge, for I am merely a reflection too.
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Well thats it kiddos…have a great day and tell me which three I should read up there. Leave me comments baby!
