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cicada dreams

Once in awhile I’ll meet and interact with some small creature, and this will inspire a poem or three. I’ve attempted to interact with cicadas in the past, but they’re always so skittish, making it difficult even to get near one, never mind give one a ride. Maybe this one was a bit shocked by its downtown surroundings, making it more willing to try its luck with climbing on board. Which I think worked out well for it, since I was able to leave it someplace far more green.

cicada dreams

i

stained glass wings rest
light against the dull gray
tinge of stainless steel

    compound eyes study a world
    more strange and alien
    than their wide and varied view

  giant beetles rush colors past
  sometimes disgorging unwieldy
  young from beneath heavy wings

      great square hives rise up
      full of eyes that glint back bits
      of amber pearl and turquoise

    creatures half concealed by
    remains of cocoon rush about
    scratching out bits of song

        small metal trees grow barely
        a few flat leaves which never
        bend to the touch of wind

there is no need for thought
for there is nothing to understand
here of this dim new dreaming
 

ii

curious eyes reach out and
touch ever so slightly front-
most legs with invitation

        one rises up to ponder-feel
        the alien appendage almost
        lost in reflections of meaning

    then all at once tear-drop
    wings climb up light tan skin
    and over thin brown hairs

      one walks the other rides
      before the floating scrutiny of
      a large peculiar gaze

  overhead floats a sidewalk
  canopy of maples deep green
  firs and old black oaks

    sign posts and street lamps fade
    behind a backyard gate that leads
    into a garden where the sound

      of city streets is hardly heard
      among the many hues of spring
      that climb and blossom toward the sun

and here against a beechwood branch
living wings are gently placed
returned to sapwood realms of dream

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fallen

One of the old growth redwoods in Montgomery Woods has recently fallen. This state reserve is about a 30 minutes drive from the northwest side of Ukiah. I walk here with some regularity, including full moon walks, and I’ve come to know these trees in a way that’s difficult to express.

fallen

take what light i have to give
  my gentle friend

you are fallen splintered shattered
  scattered all upon the hill

take what hope i have to share
  for your rebirth

roots and limbs born out again
  as skyward green

your absence will be remembered long
  sung among the highest boughs
    from whence you fell

the ancient order of the wood
  will chant your transmigration through
    realms of rain and fog

take what light i have to give
  my heartwood friend

you are returned from whence you came
  drying slowly in the gloom

feel what hope i strive to spread
  throughout your broken form

find a place against the loam
  to spread your leaves again

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puzzles

I have been thinking of trying out another dialect poem. They’re really tough to write, requiring a lot of editing and reediting and thinking and rethinking about word and syntax usage, and how to graphologically represent a highly modified, accentual use of English.

This poem is inspired by a young teenager at a residential home where I used to work. He was someone who grew up in urban poverty and who ended up where he did because he—like many who grow up in such environs—made some poor choices. He was an angry kid, and a fighter. But during the time I knew him he demonstrated himself to be capable of totally random acts of compassion toward younger residents. For all his anger, it was clear that he didn’t like to see others bullied, demeaned, or taken advantage of.

He really liked putting together jigsaw puzzles, and would spend considerable time on them.

puzzles

so much gone wrong what
goes through ma mind as i
slide them pieces up
ova one anotha

th’ edges iz easiest to find
easies’ ta fit inta place
man what was that why’d
i beat that man down

then there’s them pieces
they look like they go
tagetha somehow cuz
they got the same cullas

they look like they match yet
a lotta times they don’t
i don’ know why i get so angry
maybe cuz my own pieces

they nevva seem ta fit
these if i look at ’em long
enough i find where they go
but no matta how long i look

at all th’ liddle pieces of ma
life i don’t see how they go
damn man i can’t ev’n find
the edges fo’ the frame

i used to force them pieces in
cuz it seem like they go like
that but then when i think ahm
close ta done it look all wrong

wrong like my damn life like
my damn future all jigsawed
but with pieces missin’ an’
forced all crazy ’till they’z all

bent up an’ don’ seem ta fit
nowhere no mo’ an’ i didn’t even
realize they wuz gettin’ bent
when i put them in but i learned

learned if i gotta push hard they
ain’t in the right place an’ when
they do fit they just slip down
all easy an’ it look right

maybe that’s what i did tried
to make pieces fit that didn’ go
where i’ look like they did
maybe that’s what my mamma

did when she had me when
she got high when she slept
wi’ daddey when she got mad
and took it all out on us

took it all out on us till we didn’
know how our own pieces went
no mo’ and now ahm here
here wi’ failure starin’ each day

hard in the face of a broken
tomorra wonderin’ wonderin’
what ahm gonna live fo’
wonderin’ how ahm goin’na live

but i got these puzzles an’ i
learnin’ how to find what pieces
go where an’ ta take the time
take the time to fit ’em right

i learnin’ how ta think about what
goes where how evrethang fits
tagetha an’ ta pick up the pieces
an’ maybe fit ma life tagetha

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allnighters

Since I began this wild and wastrel wend down the wandering ways of poetry, I’ve been sure to write or finish at least one poem each year on my birthday.

Most people think of their birthday as beginning at the stroke of midnight on the day they were born. But I’ve never processed it this way. For me my birthday begins at the actual time I was born, and carries on for the next 24 hours. This is when I took my first snatch of oxygen from the airs of earth. This is when the harsh sterile light of our world first tapped on the veils of my vision. For me the clock started then, and it wasn’t the stroke of midnight.

This is the only way it makes sense to me, the only to make it work wherever you happen to be. For instance, if I celebrated my birthday in the Philippines on the ‘day’ of my birth, I’d be a full day early. To celebrate my birthday there, I’d want to wait until 8am on the 24th, which is when I was born in Riverside, California, at 5pm on the 25th.

So, I’ve been pecking at this, amongst others, over the past few days. And here’s what I got for now, a handful of all-nighter senryu (haiku not seasonally focused), inspired by a handful of observations had while hanging out at the local truck stop various nights across the past couple years.

        allnighters

                      lumination

                saturn lights hang chained
                swung from a ceiling grid ex-
                tending toward the dark

              meditation

        coffee drop by drip
        wakes at the edge of midnight
        small black pools of thought

      contemplation

picture panes reflect
trays floating amid the void
headlamps in the night

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tease

Some people… Just have a way about them. And thank god for that!

tease

her tongue swirls out
a wisp of smoke curled
round the edge of taste
where at the rim of flavor
chocolate drumstick ice cream
dances nimble courtship
and periodically slides in
through lush brown seals that
close round the shivering tip
of double dark suggestion

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A word

Was just reading a bunch of poem blogs hoping to get a moment’s inspiration. And… That seems to be what has happened, though not quite in the sense hoped for.

A word

Do you crack the old
dry twig of language
just to feel a moment’s
shock streak through hands
along bones membranes and
small raised hairs

Do you bend old yellow
rules of syntax until it frays
just to see paint crackle as
splinters rise against mind
revealing plywood layers of
a moment’s understanding

Do you have one idea
what you’re doing as you
play with words saying all
the same old things but
with broken verbs that
hang from splintered nouns

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from here

Most Tuesday nights I meet with some people to play go at a Perko’s cafe in Willits, 25 minutes north of where I live in Ukiah. Last Tuesday, as I finished my last game for the evening, I overheard one of the waitresses talking with some customers—people she clearly knew—about problems with her daughter. As I left I got curious and asked her about it, and she laid out the story for me.

Years ago, when her daughter was very young, she was addicted to drugs. Her judgment impaired, she sometimes left her daughter with baby sitters of questionable character. Something happened during this time that she to this day has no knowledge of, because her daughter won’t open up about it to anyone. But there’s enough behavioral evidence to suggest she was molested, or worse.

In recovery now from the drug abuse, she strives to make up for her past neglect. But the damage is done, and she struggles to raise an extremely intelligent, angry, resentful nine year old who seems to be developing sociopathic tendencies. As I drove home, potential lines began to manifest to mind in relation, which later built upon themselves to metamorphose into this poem.

from here

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.
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what is haiku

Though I don’t write many haiku, I do think I understand them. Quite well in fact, along with the tanka. Haiku and tanka represent a universal crowning point within the realm of poetry. And I firmly believe that he who takes the time to master haiku and/or tanka—not just “write” them en masse, anyone can do that—masters much of poetry itself.

In February 2005 someone asked me to write up an explanation of the haiku for her so she could write one. It seemed somehow counterproductive—wrong even—to explain the haiku using expository prose, so I offered the following.

what is haiku

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.
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The Poet Obscure

I used to prepare and send as many as sixteen submissions a month. But after a few years worth of rejection slips, save for the acceptance of two or three poems in chapbook journals, I now rarely submit my work. If I saw poetry of some quality getting published, I might strive to improve upon it and continue submitting. But most published poetry could have been written by pretty much anyone. There’s nothing to set it apart. And the few poems that stand out above these aren’t much above. Still, for my own sake, I strive to improve my craft. This is what a student, a devotee, a child, a creature of poetry must do.

My guess is you have to know the editors personally, or at least know someone they know, to get your poetry published. And if not this, then at the very least I imagine you must have to overtly buy into whatever politics and agendas they’re selling—and your submissions must demonstrate as much. Whatever the case, the quality of work doesn’t seem matter, so long as it fits snugly within a predetermined socio-political paradigm.

Knowing this, I still go my own way. Either I go my own way, alone and unknown, yet scaling heights of beauty and insight, or I trample along through the plains as just another brown hump in the stampede.

The Poet Obscure

He may not have the gift of high allusion,
quotes and references to texts obscure
recorded with compulsory profusion.

Perhaps he’d rather find a natural scheme
where words and metaphors come more sincerely,
requiring no exegetic scrawl.

He may not use strong images so nearly
as often as the modernists demand
is vital for a poem to be clearly

more than just a monologue of mind,
for he’ll make use of other strong devices
that let him deftly transmit all he means.

He may not ramble on of sacrifices
he’s made throughout the years, and what he feels
the world should know of all his strengths and vices.

He might instead decide he’d rather fold
his tales and meditations in the hearses
of dead and dying tenors to the fields.

He may not give his all enjambing verses
haphazardly across each random page,
every line chopped as he disperses

strong opinion, malcontent and pain,
for he may see the line bearing notions
beyond the norms imposed by donnish pride.

He may not feel romanced by Greek devotions
nor feel inclined to scatter Roman lore
throughout the lexicon of his emotions.

A broader range of histories may lure
his thought to ponder cultural connections
rooted in the loam of distant lives.

He may not share the common predilections
of using poetry as but a means
to push his politics in all directions

and further what agendas rule his mind,
for he may have no motive but to travel
through landscapes green with self-development.

He may not heed the rap of fashion’s gavel
and follow every statute set by fad,
accepting precedents as laid in gravel.

He might be more inclined to stray afar
from sooty highways, trampled by convention,
on subtle paths that lead to mystic finds.

He may not raise his hackles at the mention
of making use of meter, maybe rhyme,
filled with indignation, rage and tension

to think on prosody, semantic rules,
for he may sense mysterious potential
swelling deep beneath that censured realm,

waiting to be seen as quintessential
to evolutions ever influential.

This is my third terza rima. I’ve used disyllabic rhyme for one weave of the scheme, and end-line alliteration for the other. Each line is a pentameter. Seems to work.

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strobe

Reflecting on the nature of existence again. It’s not like I try to solve the great mystery of being when I reflect on just what our experience of existence is and where it comes from. Nothing like that. When I reflect, it’s usually because I suddenly had an insight, and I find myself meditating upon it. For me, such insights tend to revolve around the coalescence of being rather than on the nature of being itself. Perhaps in time these insights will lead somewhere, so long as I’m careful not to over-think them and just let them be what they are—insights, pure and simple.

strobe

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

As for the coalescence of being. It seems to me that the process would be a cycle of coalescence and disintegration (birth and death) with no real beginning and no real ending.

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rainsong

It’s been raining a lot lately. She tucks in the day with a giant gray comforter and lulls me to rest with persistent song. Since I work nights, this is welcome music.

rainsong

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.