stock phrase

if you recall

our stock

phrase

such as it was

three ancient words

wrapped around

our twisted veins

mad crazy

seared

 into a Tuesday

moon

bright blood

bloomed in the cut

one too many moorings

ripped from our secret heart

a black pearl

labeled

‘love’

between the brackets [closed captions]

indistinct radio chatter

footsteps approaching

crowd jeering 

inaudible

engine running

clears throat

plate clattering

chuckles softly

elevator dings

voices murmuring

birds chirping

explosion

applause

overlapping conversation

footsteps receding

clock chimes

whimpers

sighs

gunshot

Angela cooing

crowd cheering

door opens

gasps

sirens wailing

Serena crying out in pain

clamoring

airhorn blaring

grunts

breathes heavily

door closes

Handmaids laugh

horse whinnies

helicopter whirring

belt rustling

exhales

sobbing

all chuckle

scoffs

crows cawing

sniffling

paper rustling

cattle prod buzzes

rapid ticking

buckle clanking

Aunt Lydia laughs

pigeons cooing

knocking on door

belting continues

Janine humming

Angela gurgling

Angela gurgling throughout

Janine laughing

church bells ring

'Rain Sometimes' playing

water flowing

laughs
 
 

Vaticanated Mystery

You know how colors in the modern world are adorned with evocative, picturesque, poetic names? I wish I had that job, naming colors. Take yellow. Bumblebee lemon banana peach corn cream Tuscan sun butterscotch canary gold daffodil mustard dandelion pineapple blond(e) trombone eggnog flaxen. And so on. Hold that thought. I exited my building from the side door by the stairway between the first and second floors. I walked up a small set of stairs to ground level, to traverse a snow-covered sidewalk. The snow had both melted and been packed down. I turned left, the roadway to my right, and spied yellow somethings littering the snowscape. I had seen these a day or two earlier and did not pay them much mind. This time I stopped and picked up one of these adornments. Who put them there. What are they, these yellow dispatches from elsewhere. How did they get to their seemingly random positions in the snow. They looked like peelings, of paper or plastic. Picking one up, I concluded it was a paint chip. A morsel of yellow paint, separated from the object it had adhered to. I stopped. Turned around. From whence I just walked, near the building, I saw half a dozen yellow bollards that surrounded and protected a utilities box. The yellow bollards alert drivers and prevent an accidental crash into the electrical utilities, causing danger and mayhem. However, the bollards were not quite yellow, not uniformly. Bits of yellow paint had flaked off, exposing steel-gray. Hence, the paint chips in the snow. Or so it seems, lacking more or better evidence. A mystery lingers: how did the yellow paint chips become airborne and land on the snowy sidewalk and adjoining landscape. Wind. Hard to believe. Even a fierce wind. Wouldn't other damage be evident. Placed by human hands. Doubtful. Who would go through the trouble. Ever see the flag of the city-state called Vatican City. Yellow and white bands. This sheds absolutely no light on answers to the aforementioned questions about the paint chips. (I could be wrong. Maybe plastic shavings, not paint. Perhaps enamel or some sort of coating, clearly not weather-resistant, or the bollards would not exhibit exposed portions as if zoo lions or tigers were using the bollards as scratching posts.) New colors: bollard vaticanate sneeze pee popcorn kernel caramelite bunion callous fartish strawstrewn toothstained maltanned sweated toasted oolong dentured custard flame sunsplashed parchment nicotined diapered lamped earwax caution amberesque . . . 
 

Iceland poem 1

I have heard it said Iceland's people are among the world's most literate. They are bards. Therefore, to honor that, here is my inaugural attempt at Icelandic poetry, in advance of my journey there.

Escarpments of escape

Humming under the wind

Springs eternal

Borealis sky

Aurora antiphons

Surging in my skin

81 (True) North

ribboned white line pines aspens grassland farmland cumulus azure sunset crenellated treeline contours shoulders yellow stripe winding road cooler balmy homeward beckoning tires humming thrumping windshield framed maples beech diesel vista valley hillock verdant sienna hunter emerald lime lemon stratus striated shadow visor oak arching yawning yearning coasting hardscape cattle curvilinear hamlet village crossroads straightaway hum highway northward hawk raven sparrow deer scimitar moon speed song

twenty interrogastories

1. How would you like to die?
2. What is it like to be alive?
3. Where would you want to sing?
4. Why do you want to know?
5. Whom will you embrace as the sky is rent?
6. Has the burnt sienna cooled yet?
7. Do the words echo in your veins?
8. Have you questioned having?
9. Am I blue (a muted cobalt just south of Antwerp)?
10. Would you if you could without getting caught or punished?
11. With whom will you dive, sail, skim, [note serial comma] or float?
12. Against what odds or flesh will you melt?
13. Who remembers that nameless electric thrill?
14. If not here and now, where and when?
15. Should there be a law, any law?
16. That being said, what is silence?
17. Could the waves just stop?
18. Which inaugural color will you wear, and what language will ban it?
19. Is keeping score against the rules?
20. In the end, can you call it a day or something else, i.e., some unit of time or space or imagination or pendulum-swinging suggestion or somnambulism?
    

Nowhereland, just north of Somewhere

Steps in Syracuse snowswept

Say it slower now

(Why the freezing weeping?)

Twin tracks tundra

Bridged rusted aborted

West Fayette Street spanned spun spawned

To what end

Nowhere

Somewhere

Over there by Fowler

No trains a-comin'

No whistle blowin'

In the wind or sun or rain

Unless you listen

Have you seen it lived it

Off the map off the grid

Derailed

well regarded walking

Walked today from Tipp Hill to Carousel.

And back.

The angry cars snowbanks slush melted snow sidewalkless paths.

Footprints of the poor and young and old (me).

Not so much the human stain as cats and their piss making a mess of the once-pristine.

The army of cars zooms at you, if you're on the left, facing your threats head-on.

Drivers driven and grim. Some even seem to angle toward you, just for spite.

I got a loud "FUCK YOU!" angrily hurled at me from an open car window on Hiawatha Boulevard.

Now why is that?

What did I do?

"I'm walkin' heah" as Ratso Rizzo put it.

I concluded it's all perspective such as when you're in a car you come upon the pedestrian so fast then gone bang bang no time for reflection while the walker sees it in slow motion as it were.

Still.

A matter of regard, regard as in the French version or the America too, meaning:

LOOK.

So a walker is literally disregarded.

Not seen.

You are pretty much invisible.

And there's no time anyway.

Auto-mobile-ly speaking.

"He didn't notice that the lights had changed"

To sunset step by step regarding self

And Syracuse.

(I even played Sisyphus scurrying up an incline near Lord & Taylor like the claws of a scraggling crab.)

City Lights Illuminati

The pure pleasure of City Lights Books, at Columbus (near Cafe Vesuvio and across from the patina of Zoetrope, reminiscent of the Flatiron Building), Lawrence Ferlinghetti's literary mecca in San Francisco, is encapsulated in this incident from last evening.

Browsing upstairs, in the poetry rack, I spy a vineyard of tasty selections of poetic treats. I page through them. One of them entrances me. Its spare, few words magnetize me. "Christ,/a mirror/in each hand./He multiplies/his shadow./He projects his heart/through his black/visions./I believe!" This from Symbol of the "Mirror Suite" from "Suites," by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg. It is Green Integer 31 from Green Integer, Kobenhavn & Los Angeles. 2001.

So, Lorca is born to me, in San Francisco. Lorca is baptized to me here and now, introduced not by water and fire but by sidewalk and stairs on an August Saturday evening in the city of Saint Francis.

The priest of this sacrament is Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his City Lights Books, whose iconic gray on black bags beckon beauty, whose store is a conclave of revelation, one not found on the Internet or World Wide Web electronically but in the tactile tent of this nomad's journey, in the silence of the Kierkegaard leaping heart.

Facebook Security Word Poetry

condon hirth

roth 20

kookje Ali5

medan fourth

scofield netted

5 pxp sanely

since stiller

vagabond 39-77

Center Field Fantasy

an early birthday present for Willie Mays:

Center Field Fantasy

I could do that
Tap my glove gallop hat’s off
Horizon bound
Basket catch twirl homeward

I could do that
I all but said to the stranger
In the park
All shiny youth
On my sunset stroll

I could do that
If you only knew
In my dreams
Of Technicolor yesterday
Long gone
Rounding third

cold enough for ya?

oh were not the coldest in syracuse its colder in places like thief river falls minnesota but its so cold the keyboard crinkles and sticks and freezes and punctuates poorly missing a beat on commas semicolons apostrophes colons and gets caught on enter
enter
enter
enter
enter sometimes called return
return
return
return
return return even cold enough to have cities villages towns hamlets mandate coats and hats and gloves for public statues cold enough to make one wonder hey do we need all those commas serial commas or otherwise or question marks or exclamation marks hyphens all that redaction kind of thing question mark and as for its with the apostrophe versus its without it no one except an elite few seems to care anyway giving a cold shoulder to redaction rules and regulations regs some call em cold enough to cause people cold to sleep closer snuggling even when smoldering mad at each other cold nough to reconsider hot heat of temper and intemperate tantrums tending to tantric tangos now were really frozen all the rulesslippingintoonelandlockedwordlockedfrozenriverofletters
that cold
period

Young / And / Lost

On the cobblestoned sidewalk at the corner of graffiti-saturated Berlin's Boxhagener Strasse and Warschauer Strasse, stenciled or painted in white are these words separated by virgules, or slashes (punctuation marks meant to join, not separate, according to purists):

YOUNG  /  AND  /  LOST

I saw these words in the midst of doing laundry (very confusing machines!), while also attempting to engage in some entrepreneurial commerce. Small world.

They gave me pause.

Do these words describe a band?

An anarchic political manifesto?

Satiric irony?

A cry for help?

A simple declaration of fact (for individuals, or en masse)?

A Good Friday sermon (pithy and pointed)?

Concrete poetry (hahahahahaha)?

In any event, I mused, what makes the young think they have a lock on being lost?

I'm myself am wandering, sometimes feeling lost.

But, to borrow a phrase I recall from the Book of Common Prayer:

May I find -- and be found.

You too.

Re Post Riposte

I also notice the poem works well if read from the bottom up, taking on a whole new flavor and tone.

Bottoms up!

It's Da Bomb

Hmmm.

Totally unintended, but I see now that my poem below, on the preceding post, takes the shape of a bomb, or other piece of artillery.

I mean, yeah, words can be weapons, even poetry, but . . .

Herr Dr. Freud, what was I thinking?