Moth

Standing at the crosswalk, I wait a sign to step out,

a bus passes in speed,  instinctively, I look.

I see a moth in the wake of the vehicle,

spiraling down, spiraling up,

spinning, caught.

The light of the morning sun,

the energy of the flight, the work for stabilization 

seems .fansatical. The moth

dips, dives, flips, flutters, raises skyward

My eyes follow the flight into a nearby tree. 

I step into the road.

Third Party

In a fancy clothing outlet, which is placed in a big store. The old women gather to buy fancy old people’s clothes. I wander around also wanting to buy fancy old people’s clothes thinking of my mother. Trying to be like her, trying to think like her.

I looked around the pillar and the woman was seated in an armchair telling her story (third party) to the shop assistant, who was reasonably astonished that this grave event was not in the evening news.

She talked of a garbage bin outside her apartment, and how there was a smell and how she had encouraged her husband to look in the bin. When he looked inside, he found body parts. This confirmed the women’s sense of smell. The police were called. Nothing, nothing of the woman’s account of body parts in bins was on the evening news.

I never buy anything but later a third party tells me, that I look like my mother and that the incident of body parts was on the news.

Love

Where to put these feelings of badness?
In the naloxone kit abandoned on a wall?
A gift for the woman licking ice cream outside the shop or
for the man looking straight up at sky.
Maybe put it in the low hum of the air conditioning exhaust,
but then it would surface again, undead.
How about in the dog being carried in the
sling, or in the man so gently stroking its face.

Love me in a grotesque way.
All over the place, undefined, a love that has no shape.
This love, hates me.
but I fought to be a recipient of this love.

Noise

Silence,
the sound of speaking simultaneously in the Sistine Chapel.
Silenzio – Silence.
Voices subdued
slowly, the speech acts mount and the babel begins.
Silence – Silenzio.
‘In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.’
Chit-chat in the chapel, monitored by guards, we gawk at genius,
Silenzio – Silence.

Joy

In the winter afternoon under a pink blue sky,
We walk the dog to a baseball field.
A mellow sun shines on the soggy grass
and snow melts into the warming earth.

The people before us had left a certain joy 
gathering up snow to make snowmen.
Even before the snow, people would have been here
to see a game or toss a ball.

Our dog runs around the baseball diamond pissing
in the  melting mounds of  forgotten snowmen.
The sun seems to be resting on a distant ledge
and sunbeams reflect off his  brown eyes.

Making gigantic figure of eight patterns he 
is herding us with a far away animal knowledge.
We love our dog, scolding him to come to us,
our love is strung together in pale yellow ribbons.

A soft energy surrounds us, stays with us.
Swirling in and around us, lifting us, being us.
We catch him and leash him, his name is Mikey and
he will run with the sun till his day ends.

 

Book- List Poem

What are the poets doing?
Baking with the cake boss?
Looking at photographs?
Writing the Modern?
Going to pieces without falling apart,

definitely maybe.

On the Ganga Ghat,
all that is solid melts into air
signifying nothing.
Gauguin by himself.
Manet by himself.
Vincent by himself.

Coming through slaughter,
longing for darkness.
Saved by a poem  the rest is noise.

 

Book List Poem

 

Champagne

A bask of crocodiles moving up the library steps,
black bunnies bathing in a clear blue pool.
None of this is sensible it’s memory dialing in collect,
the energy of youth, a dream of childhood regret.

I stand in a pretty pink dress a navy tie in my hair,
sparkles splash about in my head.
The feather light weight of my racing heart,
my imagination was drunk and playing the part.

Sour milk on Frosties tastes disgusting,
My sweet breakfast cereal is so untrusting.
I refuse, enough of curled white shit,
no need to scream, I bite my lip.

I bubble up a deep pit stomach freedom,
viscous vomit flows into the House of Eden.
I see my sick seeping down the stairs,
gleaming gold nuggets mix up with despair.

My uncorked smell stinks the house out,
I skip away with a hop, bop, pop, popping.
Savoring release so radiant I run and run,
effervescent escape, evanescent today.

The Whale

This morning walking, 

the whale slipped into my head.

A great lozenge moving the wrong way,

up the rivers open mouth,  hitting the rivers narrow throat.

We watched from the dark grey bridge,

the man-made, palatopharyngeal arch.

The great capsule going in instead of out, the rivers mouth,

Like nature, stuck in nature’s flow, unyielding movement.

The mighty mammal pushes forward,

not wanting to turn it swims in nature’s line.

Momentous movement against perpetual flow.

We walk off the bridge, choking back our desires,

to have the beast flushed out to freedom,

a reflux, of natural distress, silently shared.

 

This Gray Whale incident happened in 2011
peterthomasoutdoorsl
dailymail 45ft-grey-whale-dies-California-river

 

response poem

Hope by Edith Sodergran

I want to let go –
so I don’t give a damn about fine writing,
I’m rolling my sleeves up.
The dough’s rising…
Oh what a shame
I can’t bake cathedrals…
that sublimity of style
I’ve always yearned for…
Child of our time –
haven’t you found the right shell for your soul?

Before I die I
shall

bake a cathedral.

“Before I die I
shall

bake a cathedral.”

I believe I raised a cathedral with mental blocks,

covered in a complex of wooden scaffold.

My ant like workers banging and building,

 

I imagined an artist in the rafters lying on her back,

painting dappling stars onto the blue black ceiling.

She wipes her brush and we praise the night sky.

 

It turned out that in my mind I baked a bomb.

The explosion blew the cathedral inside out,

whoosh went the scaffold and the blocks  tumbled down.

 

Was I the baker of the bomb or the maker of my fate?

I was blown to bits in the blast and now I lie beneath,

the cathedral rubble in a firmament of sparkling stars.

Villanelle Ajuda

Living as a creatively cursed person,
I seek out a park bench and sit in solitude.
In the Jardim da Ajuda palm trees whisper.

Frontline worker, working shift by shift,
the impossibility of changing routine.
Living as a creatively cursed person.

Alone I make a note in my notebook,
splayed palm leaves do not grasp in and out,
in the Jardim da Ajuda palm trees whisper.

My hands clench up tight in fisti cuffs.
The unseeable stirs me and I open my fists,
Living as a creatively cursed person.

White noise catches my white sheet of paper,
my upturned palm lets through the impossible.
In the Jardim da Ajuda palm trees whisper.

The Cedar-Dara is worshiped as a true tree,
I feel the impalpable breath of ancient sages.
Living as a creatively cursed person.
In the Jardim da Ajuda palm trees whisper.