betaphilings

4/19/2010

You are inside my daughter,

trying to make your way out.

This is the week of your birth.

I am sending you love and spirit and

strength to do what you have to do,

what all of us must do.

Life is yours already.

Breath is now yours to find.

Breathe not what you find around you right now.

Seek the light at the end of the tunnel.

There you will find the sweet breath of life.

I will be here to guide you, as will others.

I will teach you that suffering is illusion.

4/20/2010

It is the day of your birth, my dearest.

I am here pulling for you, pushing and

pulling all my thought toward you.

You are the perfect, angelic, fully formed

being of light, the pulse of energy, the star

from that other domain where life catches

hold and holds tightly, moving always

toward earthly delights so unfathomable

that it makes you gasp in awe.

Gasp, my child, and grasp at last the

breadth of delight that is your right.

I am here waiting for you, my darling.

I will teach you that suffering is illusion.

Who would think
a little black boy
raised by whites
on one island
then another
would go to Harvard
then the White House

But he did and now
all people of all
races can see
America as a
country wiser
kinder

humbler

Oh how I hope this
boy’s brilliance and
audacity will
make
America

better

A Poem by Claude McKay

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

by betaphi

My baby’s gone outside to start his day

He is the most amazing little boy

At three he’s full of life and loves to play

He heads out down the path bouncing with joy

He stops to pick up something from the ground

Perhaps a rock or stick or once-prized toy

I watch and wonder what it is he’s found

A ball, he throws it far for Mac the dog

Young Mac returns with just a curl of bark

He’s taken from the nearest Birchwood log

Now Joey’s squatting down, he’s found a frog

He’s showing it to Mac who starts to bark

They play like this each day from dawn to dark

Poets try to help one another when we can;

however competitive we are, and we are,

the life’s so chancy, we feel so beleaguered,

we need all the good will we can get.

Whether you’re up from a slum

or down from a carriage,

how be sure you’re a poet?

How know if your work has enduring worth, or any?

Self-doubt is almost our definition.

Someone once said that to make a poem,

you first have to invent the poet to make it.

—from “The Poet” by C. K. Williams

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

— from this lovely site

“Let me light my lamp,” says the star, “and never debate if it will help to remove the darkness.” — M. Tagore, 1928

We’d sold the house and shipped all our furnishings to the new place. We’d spent our last day together at the marina. In the morning, Tom would drive “Miss Gigi” east along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline toward Port Arthur. The kids and I would drive the car and meet him there. It was our last night in Port Aransas.

Jill was almost two and Jay was almost three. I had just turned forty. It was late July and the fireflies were out. One flew into my hair and got caught as I was walking toward the door with the children. Good thing, because the electricity was turned off in the house. Without the lightening bug, I would have had a hard time opening the door with a baby in my arms.

Inside the darkness, as the lightening bug flashed, the entire room filled with the most beautiful ambient light I’d ever seen. A sense of peace and wonder and gratitude settled over me. A blissfulness.

Thank you, I thought. Thank you, firefly.

The children were tired from a day in the sun and water. The drive to the house had made them groggy. I put them on the air mattress and they went right to sleep, wearily aware that a wondrous thing was taking place.

I lay down beside them, marveling at the truth. On a night when I had no electricity, a firefly flew into my life.

It was a magical moment, the kind that makes you certain there is magic in the world. This is the memory I go to when I want to feel supremely loved.

Here is a supremely lovely poem by Tagore titled “The Unnamed Light.”

1
I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.

2
“Let me light my lamp,” says the star,
“and never debate
if it will help to remove the darkness.”

3
The flame met the earthen lamp in me,
and what a great marvel of light!

4
Between the shores of Me and Thee
there is the loud ocean, my own surging self,
which I long to cross.

5
Life sends up in blades of grass
its silent hymn of praise
to the unnamed Light.

6
The butterfly counts not months
but moments,
and has time enough.

7
Let my love, like sunlight,
surround you
and yet give you illumined freedom.

8
Birth is from
the mystery of night
into the greater mystery of day.

9
Faith is the bird that feels the light
and sings when the dawn is still dark.

10
My life’s empty flute waits for its final music
like the primal darkness before the stars came out.

11
The world is the ever-changing foam
that floats on the surface of a sea of silence.

12
I leave no trace of wings in the air,
but I am glad I have had my flight.

13
Before the end of my journey
may I reach within myself
the one which is the all,
leaving the outer shell
to float away with the drifting multitude
upon the current of chance and change.

14
When death comes and whispers to me,
“Thy days are ended,”
let me say to him, “I have lived in love
and not in mere time.”
He will ask, “Will thy songs remain?”
I shall say, “I know not, but this I know
that often when I sang I found my eternity.” 

————

SOURCE: Fireflies, by Rabindranath Tagore,
The Macmillan Co, 1928 / Rupa & Co., 2002

“To change, you must face the dragon of your appetites with another dragon: the life-energy of the soul.” —Rumi

Recently, Oprah interviewed Stephanie Meyer, the gazillionaire author of the Twilight series. Meyer said that she got the idea for her book from a dream. She awoke one morning with a memory of a boy and a girl in a clearing. The image was crystal clear and lingered with her through the day, so she wrote it down and that scene became Chapter 13 of her first book.

A similar thing happened to me a few years ago. Right in the middle of May scoring, I awoke one morning with the vaguest memory of twin baby dragons. How my brain came up with a dream about dragons I do not know. I have never been the least bit interested in dragons. There is Puff from the song and Elliott from the movie and that is all I know.

The twin baby dragon memory lingered through the day as a sort of smear rather than a clear image. My fascination multiplied; I felt I was on the brink of some awareness that would link meaning to the dream.

I gave myself over to it fully, meaning I became emotionally hushed and mentally silent, which I cannot do easily and readily but I can do occasionally. Sometimes the trance-like quality of mindless scoring induces this quiet state.

The words “twin baby dragons” lazed around in my brain as I continued working. Later that day I began to become aware of another strange phenomenon as I got up for breaks and this and that. Six words began repeating themselves clearly: It is a sarry story mine. What’s interesting about this is the repetition, for one — the same six words over and over. We tend to notice repetition.

More noticeable, however, was the accent on the word “sorry.” The voice in my head was not saying sorry. It was saying sarry with a distinct Scottish brogue. Great, I thought. I have a Scottish voice in my head repeating, It is a sarry story mine. What am I to make of this?

Then the baby dragons would come to mind and I would find myself in a whale of a quandary trying to make meaning of baby dragons and a Scottish lyricist and score essays at the same time. Soon I came to realize that a poem wanted out.

My inner poet often prefers the stricture and structure of rhymed verse. There is a limiting aspect to rhyme that keeps me off the slippery slopes of free, unrestrained, anything-goes verse where I am vulnerable to a mild form of madness. My “Pinball Nation” poem is a good example of that. It’s a long, rollicking, free-verse poem set within the confines of a pinball machine but just a tad bit wicked crazy. I blame it on the pressures of grad school.

I logged off my work program, picked up a pen and paper and wrote, It is a sarry story mine. The next three lines appeared instantly. About a beast what eats her kind/And how I borne to be a twin/Kept me from meeting my sure end

There it was. A Scottish female dragon about to tell her tale. Such excitement! Droplets squeezed from a dream were appearing on a page. The first half of the poem fell out of me in about five minutes. I remember looking at my watch aghast. I diddled with the second half over the course of several hours.

I love this poem and the way it happened. “Why the Dragons Went Away” attempts to link the demise of the dragons to an ice age. Because dragons are allegorical, this becomes my first allegorical poem, significant because allegory is the highest form of make-believe. Aristotle claimed that allegorical thinking is the hallmark of genius.

No, I don’t think I’m a genius. I think we all have glimmers of genius that are somehow connected to imagination, dreams, and states of consciousness. Albert Einstein claimed that every major discovery he made came through a dream.

What follows is my little ballad about a baby dragon born in a dream, explaining why the dragons went away.

It is a sarry story mine

About a beast what eats her kind

And how I borne to be a twin

Kept me from meeting my sure end

It was a time they ate they younger

So’s to quelch they burnin hunger

Every season another born’d

Every birth a death not mourn’d

Tiny tidbits tease delight

The palette of a thing of fright

A monster mother she for sure

And for her appetite no cure

Except the tiny morsels flung

From twixt her loins onto her tongue

The times they were all full of frost

And little babes they could get lost

But lost to me I’d rather be

Than chomped upon and et by she

So slid I down the frosty slope

Onto the teat of an antelope

Who lay beside me night and day

And succored me till early May

When then my wings began to sprout

And I began to flit about

Unawares that a dragon mum

Was what I’d someday too become

And when the antelope told me this

I yelled aloud Such heinousness!

Yee gads ye gods! I’d rather tromp

With antelope than ever chomp

The babes I bear upon the high

No no! Not there — ye gods come nigh!

Let me Persillia Dragoness

Upon the ground to build my nest

And lie beneath a wingless beast

And on me babes refuse to feast

So days they come and finally

The dragon mums no more they be

Now babes have ground on which to play

And that’s why dragons went away

Lo on this ground are men what feast

Just like me mum on babes of beasts

They think they are the highest thing

When all they are is ground b’ings

They cannot fly like dragons soar

Nor ope they mouths and like us roar

They cannot run like antelope

Nor see in dark like cats do nope

They cannot speak without the word

As beasties do in every herde

They are a kind of lesser beast

For in this world counting us least

They has it wrong of course we know

We beasties do still run the show

While men and wem walks to and fro

Familiars flit, fly and flow

Ay taste for flesh is naught but ill

But men and wem they eat us still

Like dragon mums of long ago

When all there was was snow and snow

And so dragons no more they be

Alas our kind is safe and free

A Poem by Rumi

God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

God has put into the form of hashish a power
to deliver the taster from self-consciousness. 

God has made sleep so
that it erases every thought. 

God made Majnun love Layla so much that
just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.

Don’t think all ecstasies
are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley. 

Drink from the presence of saints,
not from those other jars. 

Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight. 

Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution. 

Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest, 

the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about “what’s needed.” 

Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it’s been untied,

and is just ambling about.

“Why, Courage Then! What Cannot Be Avoided ‘Twere Childish Weakness To Lament or Fear.” — Suzanne Foxton

Here I am, and here I stay
I am everything today.
I am time, and I am space,
Every deed, and every place

Every when is when I am
I am lion, I am lamb
I am anger, I am peace
I will never ever cease.

I, the only thing that’s real,
That can harm, and that can heal,
I, the only thing that lasts,
No more futures, no more pasts.

I am what has always been.
I am sainthood, I am sin.
I am everything I see.
I am what it is to be.

All that happens, that is me
All love and antipathy.
I cannot reject myself;
Take me from the dusty shelf.

Everything - yes, that is me.
I am all, totality
I am me, and I am you.
This, no matter what I do.

A Poem by Paul Maurice Martin

“Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.”  — PMM

What is, is. Let me be a piece of that,
Amid the horror, explosions, shatteredness,
The strands of sense and beauty, the irresolvable whole.
WHAT IS is, and I shall be myself.
Contradictions are not resolved, yet I begin to resolve
The contradictions. I do not feel the tension any more.
The Whole is doing what it does, and I
Am wholly doing what I do.
In the crosshairs now, I see WHAT IS.
I cannot miss!
Desiring nothing for my splintered self,
I am being every inch something.
I care, but do not care.
I let go of my stake in all former aspirations;
Aspiring to nothing, I am occupied, every inch, with being something.
The worst cannot undo the act of what I am doing, and the best
Cannot change it. I am here. I am desperate, wise, strong
And live now beyond the land of my own dreams.
None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.
Become as ignorant of the parts and the frictions between them
As you were once so conscious of them in relation to yourself.
Be aware of being who you are in the arms or in the teeth of what is.
Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.

A Poem by Drew Hunter

For the longest time

I believed I could figure it out

comprehend what this life was all about

but it was a sane religion that saved me

One that purported things just happen

and reasons are false idols

and God’s logic is as unintelligible

and sacred a mystery as there is.

It’s true. . . 

I was losing my mind

at that other house of worship

(from Pretending to be Two, Longing to be One)

A Poem by unasleep

Magnificent blooms

In the garden

Establish their roots

And become a rose

A violet

A daffodil

A sunflower

Of striking beauty

But none alone is

The Flower of Perfection.

Give thanks for their fragrance

That drew you

Down this little-traveled path.

Fear not the intimacy.

Hesitate not to collect their pollen

Swollen and heavy,

Begging recapitulation

Into the honey of the purest gold.

But be warned:

Do not become enchanted with any flower.

Assign not to one position

Or one form.

It is a deceitful death

Of senseless limitations.

For there you shall stop.

Transformation ceases.

Vanity freezes you to that spot

Forevermore.

Never imagine you have defined

The indefinable

And ever unfolding

For the revelation never ends.

The door you are knocking upon

Opens slowly.

Instead

Be the enlightened bumblebee

Who ignores classical physics

That tells him he cannot fly.

He hears nothing but

The voice of God

Defiantly evident in the hum of his wings

As he eagerly delves deeply

Into the soul of each flower

Collecting only the best,

The Essence of Life,

And takes it into his home

And feasts upon it.

A Poem by Thich Nhat Hanh 

The first fruition of the practice is
the attainment of froglessness.

When a frog is put on the center of a plate,
she will jump out of the plate
after just a few seconds.

If you put the frog back again
on the center of the plate,
she will again jump out.

You have so many plans.
There is something you want to become.
Therefore you always want to make a leap,
a leap forward.

It is difficult to keep the frog still
on the center of the plate.
You and I both have Buddha Nature in us.
This is encouraging, but you and I
both have Frog Nature in us.

That is why
the first attainment of the practice –
froglessness is its name.

A Song and Photo by Suzanne Foxton 

Suzanne Foxton is a self-proclaimed oracle (as in don’t they know I’m a great oracle) and balance equaliser residing in London. Her blog, Nothing Exists, Despite Appearances, devotes itself to an examination of nonduality, or third-eye consciousness. As Suzanne states in this song, acceptance and love are all that is. Everything else is illusion.

What I thought was lost
What I was searching for
What I yearned for, just had, just had to find
I see it so clearly
It was never, never gone
The incompleteness was only in my mind

It’s this. Just this, oh this is all there is
And oh, it was ever so.
I’m home, I’m home, I have always been home
Despite the confusion and the woe.

For life is its own sweet purpose.
Just life, just exactly as it is.
Whatever arises, it always surprises
Always new, always whole, not amiss

And I, I was never really here.
I was just an idea of my own.
What I see, I see clear
There is no veil of fear
Not lonely, not ever alone

It’s beyond right and wrong
It’s not written in any tome
And the dream of my precious self is gone.
I’m home, sweet home
I have always been home
I can’t tell you, not in words, not in song

You can see or not see, through that wall
Can you see you are one with it all.
And what all this is
Is acceptance and love.
Everything happens as it must.
All we see, all the struggle, the joy and the strife,
Is in balance, there is no need to trust.

Just see, can you see,
It’s beyond family,
It’s a mystery, it can never be known.
And none of it’s wrong
It is just what it is
There is nothing, oh nothing to own.

I am home, sweet home, I have always been home.
What I’ve searched for has always been here.
Closer than silence, nearer than near
No longer in pain do I roam
I am gone, and that freedom, that is home.

You can see or not see, through that wall
Can you see you are one with it all.

a sea green pebble

worn smooth by the restless tides

a gift from the sea

—Janice Hunter at Sharing the Journey

The horror of it all. To lose our way amid the chaos
of false paths, broken lanes, and old byways
that is the internet. Is there no hope?
Can we find one beacon in
the gloom to point
us back toward
the familiar?
Are we
lost?
No,
look!
What’s that
in the distance?
There amidst the dark
and the sinister that surrounds me:
Could it be the glow of a welcoming doorway?
Yes! There is the prospect of warmth and solace near.
Who would have expected to find a bastion of light and cheer
here in the depths of this endless, boundless sea of webs and nets?

                                                 —- author unknown

[revised, rewritten, edited, altered by me]

My brother took this picture on his deer lease in October.

He put corn on the ground and trail cams in the trees.

That’s a raccoon eating corn in the moonlight.

I cropped it to remove the date stamp.

This writing looks like a poem.

This photo looks surreal.

A blessed raccoon.

Thanks, bro.

Love it.

I hear myself think

about getting in sync

with a bold and wondrous

mountain.

You are that mountain,

solid and stable.

You change less when

winds of change blow.

When the Sidhe ride near,

your skies remain clear.

Fierce winds barely

ripple your snow.

Mountain, my dear,

I am the river below,

restless and inconstant.

When the Sidhe ride near,

their horses drink here.

My fluid edge restores them.

Sweet grass abounds

on these plentiful grounds.

The Sidhe rest here beside me.

Lord of the mountain,

high and remote,

your vigilance commands us.

A Poem by Mario Milosevic

Some say you guide Santa’s sled

across the dark expanse.

But you are the true shamans

of the north, pulling our spirits

behind you across the frigid plains.

We follow your clicking heels,

your hot breath clouding

the sky and leading the way.

We see your antlers sprout

and fall each season,

like the northern sun,

every rising and setting

marking half a year.

Reindeer, you are keepers of time,

your souls always moving.

You eat lichen and moss,

swallowing the magic of the Earth.

You know nothing of us

but we see your other-worldly ways,

and we know your wild heart

is the only gift we ever need.

Powerful men are well advised not to use violence,
For violence has a habit of returning;
Thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes,
And lean years follow a great war.

A general is well advised
To achieve nothing more than his orders:
Not to take advantage of his victory.
Nor to glory, boast or pride himself;
To do what is dictated by necessity,
Not by choice.

For even the strongest force will weaken with time,
And then its violence will return, and kill it.

— Tao te Ching

Fearless though I am
I now fear
all of you who claim
to love me so

you, her, him, them 

are killing me
requiring me
to stand
in acrid outdoor air
overheated
Augustine air that is too hot
and not for my benefit
but for your own
olfactory pleasure

these twelve days
and this repeated care
for your welfare
have left me feeling
parched and pained
while I sit here
and complain
that your concern
not smoke
will be the death of me
it’s always
love that kills us
always bad love kills us
just like mad love
gives us life
so I pledge to do
what the white swirls
say and lie here alone
in the cool fragrant
air of my own making
where the truth of my being
speaks clearly
and your concerns
for myself and yourself
are extinguished
like fire in a butt

He puts every sentence on a line by itself
and it ends up looking like a poem
an undeliberate, unintentional verse
conveying something

He double spaces and stanzas emerge
like crevasses between peaks
or clearings in the sand

In those deep crevasses
where words echo among peaks
I have heard the oratory
of a desert that can speak

In those shelless clearings
where stanzas break in sand
I have read the long beach poem
written by a foreign hand

I have heard the silence too
and marveled at those places

clearings

spaces

where I pause and breathe
in seeming destination
before continuing on

words everywhere

Recently, Oprah interviewed Stephanie Meyer, the gazillionaire author of the Twilight series. Stephanie said that she got the idea for the book from a dream. She awoke one morning with a memory of a boy and a girl in a clearing. The image was crystal clear and it lingered with her through the day, so she wrote it down and that scene later became Chapter 13 of her first book.

A similar thing happened to me some time ago. Right slap dab in the middle of May scoring, I woke one morning with the vaguest memory of twin baby dragons. Where in the world, how in the world would my brain come up with a dream about dragons? I have never been the least bit interested in dragons. There is Puff from the song and Elliott from the movie and that is all I know.

The twin baby dragon memory lingered through the day as a sort of smear rather than a clear image. My fascination multiplied, for dragons are symbols of acute imagination bordering on the allegoric. I felt I was on the brink of some forthcoming awareness, some bit of understanding that would link meaning to the dream.

I gave myself over to it fully. I became emotionally hushed and mentally silent and empty as a blank page, which I cannot do easily and readily but I can do occasionally. Sometimes the trance-like quality of mindless scoring helps induce this state.

The words “twin baby dragons” lazed around in my brain as I continued scoring. Later that day I began to become aware of another strange phenomenon. As I got up for breaks and this and that, six words began to repeat themselves clearly: It is a sarry story mine. Now what’s interesting about that is the repetition, for one — the same six words over and over. “It is a sarry story mine.” We tend to notice repetition.

More noticeable, however, was the accent on the word “sorry.” The voice in my head was not saying “sorry.” It was saying “sarry” with a distinct Scottish brogue. Great, I thought. I have a Scottish voice in my head repeating, It is a sarry story mine. What am I supposed to make of this?

Then the baby dragons would come to mind, and I would find myself in a whale of a quandary trying to make meaning of baby dragons and a Scottish lyricist and score essays at the same time. Soon I came to realize that a poem wanted out.

My inner poet often prefers the stricture and structure of rhymed verse. There is a limiting aspect of rhyme that keeps me off the slippery slopes of free, unrestrained, anything-goes verse where one is vulnerable to a mild form of madness. My “Pinball Nation” poem is a good example of this. It’s a great, rollicking, free-verse poem set within the confines of a pinball machine but just a tad bit wicked crazy. I blame it on graduate school. But back to the story, a poem wanting out.

I logged off my work program, picked up a pen and paper and wrote, It is a sarry story mine. The next three lines appeared instantly. About a beast what eats her kind/And how I borne to be a twin/Kept me from meeting my sure end.

There it was. A Scottish female dragon about to tell her tale. Such excitement, such delight! Droplets squeezed from a dream were appearing on a page. The rest of the poem fell out of me in about five minutes. I remember looking at my watch aghast.

I love this poem and the way it happened. “Why the Dragons Went Away” does just what the title suggests — it explains the demise of the dragons. Because dragons are allegorical, this becomes my first and only allegorical poem, significant because allegory is the highest form of make-believe. Aristotle claimed that allegorical thinking is the hallmark of genius.

No, I don’t think I’m a genius. But I do believe we all have glimmers of genius that are somehow connected to imagination, dreams, and states of consciousness. What follows is my little ballad about a baby dragon born in a dream.

It is a sorry story mine

About a beast what eats her kind

And how I borne to be a twin

Kept me from meeting my sure end

It was a time they ate they younger

So’s to quelch they burnin hunger

Every season another born’d

Every birth a death not mourn’d

Tiny tidbits tease delight

The palette of a thing of fright

A monster mother she for sure

And for her appetite no cure

Except the tiny morsels flung

From twixt her loins onto her tongue

The times they were awful of frost

And little babes they could get lost

But lost to me I’d rather be

Than chomped upon and et by she

So slid I down the frosty slope

Onto the teat of an antelope

Who lay beside me night and day

And succored me till early May

When then my wings began to sprout

And I began to flit about

Unawares that a dragon mum

Was what I’d someday too become

And when the antelope told me this

I yelled aloud, “Such heinousness!

Yee gads, ye gods! I’d rather tromp

With antelope than ever chomp

The babes I bear upon the high

No, no, not there — ye gods, come nigh!

Let me, Persillia Dragoness

Upon the ground to build my nest

And lie beneath a wingless beast

And on me babes refuse to feast.”

So days they come and finally

The dragon mums no more they be

Now babes have ground on which to play

And that’s why dragons went away

What it is that in days of old

Led men and wem to be so bold

To think they wuz the highest thing

When all they wuz wuz lesser beings

They could na fly like dragons soar

Nor ope they mouths and like us roar

They could na run like antelope

Nor see in dark like cats do, nope

They could na speak without the word

As beasties do in every herde

They was and are a lesser beast

Who in this world counts us the least

They has it wrong of course we know

We beasties do still run the show

While men and wem walks to and fro

Familiars fly and shift and go

To magic fields and magic worlds

And bring the magic to this world

It is a sorry story mine

About a beast what eats her kind

And how I borne to be a twin

Kept me from meeting my sure end

It was a time they ate they younger

So’s to quelch they burnin hunger

Every season another born’d

Every birth a death not mourn’d

Tiny tidbits tease delight

The palette of a thing of fright

A monster mother she for sure

And for her appetite no cure

Except the tiny morsels flung

From twixt her loins onto her tongue

The times they were awful of frost

And little babes they could get lost

But lost to me I’d rather be

Than chomped upon and et by she

So slid I down the frosty slope

Onto the teat of an antelope

Who lay beside me night and day

And succored me till early May

When then my wings began to sprout

And I began to flit about

Unawares that a dragon mum

Was what I’d someday too become

And when the antelope told me this

I yelled aloud, “Such heinousness!

Yee gads, ye gods! I’d rather tromp

With antelope than ever chomp

The babes I bear upon the high

No, no, not there — ye gods, come nigh!

Let me, Persillia Dragoness

Upon the ground to build my nest

And lie beneath a wingless beast

And on me babes refuse to feast.”

So days they come and finally

The dragon mums no more they be

Now babes have ground on which to play

And that’s why dragons went away

A Tribute to Anna Nicole Smith

Anna Nicole Smith, November 28, 1967 - February 8, 2007

Four days it’s been since the bed’s been made

Four days on those sateen sheets she’s laid

Says she don’t feel like plying no trade

Well, I’ll tell you, I’m a little afraid

That girl’s just not making the grade

Like today I woke her up at half past seven

She’s laying there like she’s in seventh heaven

Next thing you know it’s a quarter till eleven

And I’m yelling Dammit get up Devon!

She says No

Mutters something about a promise to keep

Then rolls over and goes back to sleep

I swear she’s turned into a living heap

I shake her and say What you sow you reap

She says So

I say Devon, you have such a good mind

And everyone says how you’re so kind

Sweetheart, please get off your behind

And go see what kind of job you can find

She says No

I’ll get up tomorrow but not today

I’m not going to sleep my life away

I just need to lay here for one more day

I need to see someone again, okay

I say Oh

Dear God not again

I don’t say what I’m saying herein

That I’m in a battle I can’t win

Flesh of my flesh chasing after dead men

Never going to have any next of kin

Going to her grave as Devon McGwyn

Girl who died on the bed she lived in

Like Anna Nicole after she had Dannielynn

What a dadgum waste

A Poem by Philip Levine

The punch-press operator from Flint

met the assembler from West Virginia

in a bar near the stadium. Neither

had anything in mind, so they conversed

about the upcoming baseball season

about which neither cared. We could

be a couple, he thought, but she was

all wrong, way too skinny. For years

he’d had an image of the way a woman

should look, and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t

anyone he’d ever known, certainly not

his ex-wife, who’d moved back south

to live with her high-school sweetheart.

About killed him. I don’t need that shit,

he almost said aloud, and then realized

she’d been talking to someone, maybe

to him, about how she couldn’t get

her hands right, how the grease ate

so deeply into her skin it became

a part of her, and she put her hand,

palm up, on the bar and pointed

with her cigarette at the deep lines

the work had carved. “The life line,”

he said, “which one is that?” “None,”

she said, and he noticed that her eyes

were hazel flecked with tiny spots

of gold, and then — embarrassed — looked

back at her hand, which seemed tiny

and delicate, the fingers yellowed

with calluses but slender and fine.

She took a paper napkin off the bar,

spit on it and told him to hold still

while she carefully lifted his glasses

up on his forehead, leaving him half

blind, and wiped something off

above his left cheekbone. “There,”

she said, lowering his glasses, “I

got it,” and even with his glasses on

what she showed him was nothing

he could see. He thought, better

get out of here before it’s too late, but

knew too late was what he wanted.

—from The New Yorker, February 5, 2007

“It’s turning into a real zoo in there.”

I came to teaching late in life after the birth of my children. Prior to that, every dime I ever earned came from dealing with written language in some way. I worked as a copy writer, copy editor, proofreader, typesetter, and as production manager for a large publishing company. After my children were born, I got a teaching job so I could have more time with them.

I taught 11th grade English—American Lit—for nine years and loved every minute of it. In my tenth year I was transferred to a middle school where “difficult” children were sent. Despite the fact that I was NOT the right person for that job, I held on for three more years before throwing in the towel. This poem below explains my difficulties in the classroom those last three years.

Jason’s dad is in the penitentiary

Sharonda’s all alone since Grandma died

Manuel can barely speak the language

We don’t know what it is that makes Dee cry

Sherell found out she’s going to have a baby

The daddy, James, can barely read a word

Cleon’s at my desk again now asking

If I can help him find the action verb

Greg lays down his head and goes to sleep

At his house people stay up all night long

Carmen shreiks and bolts for the doorway

Apparently there’s something very wrong

Sixteen other students sit and wait now

For me to tell them who’ll be next to read

Aloud from our book Angela’s Ashes

About a boy who longs for a ten-speed

Kim has started reading on without us

She’ll need another book in a few days

I’ll need at least another lifetime to

Convince these kids that everything’s okay

Mark forgot to take his medication

He’s pacing all around the room again

Bridgette asks if we can read the book now

Cleon sits down beside me, we begin

Okay, I say, it’s time to read

John, please start at the top of forty-one

He reads well, we all exhale, and for a while

The sound of story soothes my anxious ones

I didn’t choose to be blue

I woke this way

Choice is conscious effort

Isn’t it?

Besides

You were blue too

Remember?

You lashed out at me

You did

You lashed out

I lay down

You puffed up

I turned off

You moved on

I slept in

Almost any action will do

When blue blocks your way

Make me a straw that floats on the surface

If love is but drawn from the depths

Let me be different from all those fish

That end up with painful regrets

Gather me up in your fisherman’s gauze

Let love drain back to the deep

Tie me together with other straws

Make me a broom to sweep

Attach me with string to an upright wood

Use me your floors to keep

Allow me to serve only surfaces

If love is but drawn from the deep

Those three buttons on my Manage Posts page—View, Edit, Delete—constantly entice me. I press View to see how it looks, then invariably end up back at Edit to delete a comma, add a word, change a phrase. Even now I am dinkering with caps vs quotes in the previous sentence. What is with this compulsion to edit?

In graduate school I had my hand slapped for over-editing. Frederick Barthelme wrung his hands together to demonstrate the tendency I have toward overly wrought, fussed over writing. “A good story is like a pinball,” he said. “Yours is like a statue.”

I loved the compliment hidden in his complaint. If my writing was excessively stylized and tended toward a finely honed work of art, that was a good thing, right?

No, it’s not a good thing. A statue carved in stone begs for one more tweak—one more edit. A steel pinball, on the other hand, is complete, finished. It is harder, simpler, smoother than a statue, and because it has the capacity for movement and function, it is ultimately more interesting. A statue merely stands there. Pinballs are modern, products of the industrial revolution. Statues date back to antiquity. In a modern pinball nation, you don’t want to be a statue. You want bells and whistles and lights and action and speed and tension and color and movement. So I wrote this poem about a pinball and turned it for my final exam.

I am whole, not half, I got grease on my roll
and a cowboy with a sack of quarters backing me
tracking me, betting on me to score big
run up the numbers, yelling
don’t stop! take it to the top!
and I land in Heart, hit pay dirt, red alert
and the lights go mad and I’m so
glad my momma made me steel
got iron in my gut, I’m heating up
cutting right, left, guy in boots yelling
go, baby! go!

 

whops me from the right, yells
out of sight, sweet thing!
now get down! get the Balls!
and I get the Balls and he calls it
all right! and I slide into Big Toe
hit ten thousand two, he says
love it! love it! and shoves me to the top

 

 

 

whops me from the left and I go for the Head
no lead in me, Fe with C
then I wham into Brain like a barge full of wheat
pretty neat, guy says
sweet! sweeeet!
numbers rumbling, fumbling, guy having a fit,
my fuse is lit and I’m charging around
like a forty-dollar firecracker
higher! higher! he yells and I do Right Eye
then Left Eye too, guy’s laughing out loud yelling
go, baby! go!
now we’re twenty thousand two, not blue
Bellybutton almost gets me, guy says niiiice

whops me from the right, making me roll

I roll and roll, showing my whole

guy loves playing, says
get the Knee! the Kneee!

thirty thousand lights
now the other Knee!

I’m spinning, spinning, starting to see

this guy’s good-looking and he’s looking at me

 

whops me from the left, I’m rolling fast
I slide past Mouth and two Nipples flash
Top Lip lights and then Nose glows
guy says do it! and there I go
we got fifty thousand points
guy’s swinging his hips and I make it
past Mouth without taking a dip
rolling, rolling, two holes to go
lights make me dizzy, oops,
Bellybutton hole

 

whops me from the left, I’m flying alright
it’s daylight at night, carnival of sights
bends, curves, move it! man yells
I hit higher ground, Throat
Cheek, cowboy says yeeee!
sees I’m riding a tilted panel, back lights
frontal attack, high hopes on a slippery slope
Ear! man yells, Ear Nose!

 

whops me from the right, but he misses his lick
and I’m heading for Asshole lickety-split
slow down, veer left, I’m coming through
jukebox playing song about dreams come true
guy swears he loves it but he’s run out of coin
and I’m on my own now heading back to Groin
guy curses, swears, tries one last flip
my nerves are steel and I land in Hip

what a trip!

The bug man is coming to spray today.
Since Rita wrecked our city
critters have come out in throngs.
Last night I won a duel with
a three-inch black-winged
beast from hell sent to dwell too near my sheets.

The air is too still and
the sky is still stuck
in a gray morning reverie.

Sometimes I’m like that too–
can’t shake awake the gray
sky in my head
which nightly conspires
against me with dramas
not of my making.

I wish they made spray
to make bad dreams go away.

Whew!
I’m through.
Now I’m talking to you.
Your name is Ridaroo
And you’re a rhyming poet too.

“He could do anything
make anything, fix anything.
He had spatial intelligence
like Jill has,
and he looked a little like you.”

That girl moved out,
then moved back in,
now Grandma’s bringing furniture
Thursday, and Friday
we’re going to Jay’s graduation,
a big ole wang-bollom, ye-hi, way to go Jay day!

I so love my life.