Prose Poems: #4

(This prose poem is one of a series titled, "Tone Poems of the Cowboy", which tries to capture the tone and attitude of the American archteypal cowboy.) This is the spoken word version of the poem.

The Cowboy Speaks of Solitude

I want to thank you all for taking time from your busy schedules to listen to these poems. Not too many people will read a poem and fewer still come out of their way to sit and listen to poems being spoken, especially the poems of a lonesome cowboy. I say that because you might think it’s lonely out on the trail working the herd or mending a fence line. But that is not the case. My life offers the great advantage of plentiful solitude. A solitary life establishes independence. As independence grows loneliness goes. You might have to think about that to see its truth. I will point out that a solitary person has time to think. Loneliness comes from missing things that seem dear. Think about it. What’s to miss? The squeal of the urban pigs? The gobbets of excrement let fly in the air as the pundits of propaganda strive to fill your ear? The ubiquitous stench of the foul stew of egotism emanating from the pot of every person? The perpetual program hammering your brain? The program that teaches you to be programmed, to expect it and accept it as necessary? I don’t miss that a bit. The entire world is arranged to highjack your mind – whereas a poem is designed to offer you the opportunity to think. It’s only an offer; you can take it or leave it. My life will remain worthwhile whether or not you pay attention to the words in this poem. Can you make the same claim? The next poem you hear won’t be as sensible as this one. You might have to think more than you’re normally inclined.

Prose Poem #3

Ten Dollars a Gallon

Oh, gigantic, hideous thing, long and aluminum, rectangular, with pleated sides and flat top, tinted windows, shiny black tires, and numb passengers nodding at the dumb shows inside, why do you exist? Oh, box of stuff, rolling along, in command of four hundred horses, the cost of your travel from mountain to sea matches the yearly income of two campesinos. ¿Es usted la bestia del apocalipsis? When the fat, wealthy man at the helm high in your padded cabin, the back of his leather chair sweaty, hemorrhoids athrob, drinking gin to wash down two Excedrin, tired from his days at the bank, has a heart attack and crashes, will anyone care? Probably not. Even his children won’t weep. I see your future -- your round legs ground up, your tin skin punctured, little wood-burners installed for cooking, smoke stacks jutting out like broken arms. Shelter for the homeless! After all, we are a practical people.

Playing with Prose Poems #2

Here’s a little machine, its gears precise, turning teeth, whirring wheels: steel drum just so, like a torturer’s instrument, tiny nipples arranged in variegated rows to trip the steel tangs, tensile, tempered, slim as a bird’s tongue – a mechanical sorcery, teasing tempos somehow musical, lilting, lovely, from springs wound tight – all beneath a complicated tableau, a girl turning, perpetually gazing at a chariot tracing a circular track, its horses’ forelegs prancing, noble heads up and down, a grassy park, a tree, a glass sky, a globe to be concise. And I, with wily hands inside the workings, agile fool, thinking, tinkering, never satisfied.

Music Box

Playing with Prose Poetry #1

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Tiny Universe

A star exploded in a tiny universe sending an immense expanding sphere of light outward. On a tiny planet at the farthest reaches at the edge of nothing, an old man stood in his garden next to his tomato plants. He had been kneeling to turn some manure into the dirt with a trowel, but stood up to stretch and rest. He felt the wave of light, the initial intensity of which had been multiply reduced by the vast distances it had traveled in the tiny universe. Still, it was terribly hot. The hot wave washed over him. His face flushed and he felt dizzy. His face flushed redder yet as something burst like an infinitely small star in his brain, discharging a tumbler of energy from his body. the old man fell to his knees then toppled forward. By the time his face hit the soft dirt of his cultivation he was dead.

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No title

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I stand
at your grave
waiting for words to come,
but no words rise from my depths, only
peacefulness: acceptance
that you have
expired.

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Magician

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Inside
the top hat,
a rabbit nibbled greens:
the man tipped his hat away to show
the rabbit, still, with long-toothed
grin, as mean
as hell.

..

Birds Flew from His Mouth

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Birds
flew from
his mouth – larks,
sparrows, swallows and black –
they fluttered forth in strange formations
scribing wild story-land
adventures:
his great
love.

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Poem for an Autumn Day

Everyone Knows

On an Autumn day,
the path open,
and the leaves orange
like a whirling orb,
he said,
“I’m going to walk a way
down the trail.”
Shoulders bent, back bent,
just to clear his mind,
he went.
She watched him go
and put soup in a pot
for his return.
“I’ll be back,”
she heard him say
before he closed the door.

He went that way
of his own design
with a stick for a third leg
and a brown scarf he liked.
She loved to see
the trees sway
in the Autumn sky,
their leaves in flight
and scattered on the ground,
sometimes swirling in circles,
a golden tunnel down the trail
inside the trees,
a spear of sunlight
through the middle
with a tip of hurt
that traveled to her heart.

Reading Poetry

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Late
at night,
past midnight,
the fan’s hum sporadic
overhead: red wine tastes of wood: thoughts
fade into emptiness
as I read
one last
poem.

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Going to the Tenth Continent

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Air –
mountain
peaks cut through
thick fog banks: black clouds shaped
like mountain peaks drift above: a glimpse
of fabled continents:
Immortals go there:
home.
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Sea:
the other
shore: a hidden island:
the rippling wind breaks off the quiet
sand: wave after wave: they
roll away:
now.

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Response to Rilke

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The following poem responds to Rainer Maria Rilke's poem from A Book for the Hours of Prayer titled "I have many brothers."

Response to Rilke

I, too, have brothers in the South –
they pray inside a frame, these men
from the high hills, with leather skin,
who set themselves against the world
and are a world unto themselves,

and I have brothers in the West
with stone cold churches
built for the ages to communicate
the ageless truth of their belief,
which they believe more than they know,

and I have brothers in the East
with wisdom held in books
for the common person’s good,
but the words can’t be understood
unless one can stand without words.

Yet, no matter how far I go
on my inward journey, my power
is neither light nor dark,
but clear and cold as a winter
night, as broad and deep as space,

and though my soul does drink as roots
of trees with need, it doesn’t claim much,
but joins as drops do to water -
with affinity - so I come to return
to that early hour, clear and clean as dew.
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Commemorating Columbus Day

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Christopher Columbus

came in the Santana Maria – the Pinto and the Nono
not far behind. He stepped ashore the island, Lucayos,
and immediately announced, “I have taken possession
of this land for the King and Queen, (Queen Isabella of
the big hips and weird collar): they hid a financial under-
standing, the two of them, under the cloak of adventure
and discovery. Next thing he knew, Columbus was torturing
the natives for knowledge of the whereabouts of the gold.
“But we have no gold,” the naked men protested while
their fingers were twisted and broken, their lying faces
beaten. A goodly sum of the Guanahani was slaughtered.
Later, the native chief was discovered hiding in a pit.
No gold at hand, Columbus put them to work exploitatively
and thus the “Day of Discovery” brought us the new world
and established the first principles of foreign relations.

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Kreativ Blogging Award

Award winning painter, Rosemary Sexton, awarded me the Kreativ Blogging Award. It's nice to have someone let you know that you have inspired them or brought a little art into their life. Thanks, Rosemary.

A Poem for John

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188th Street

I remember well
the kid with polio
who hid in the bushes
and flung rocks
with his good arm, his body skeletal,
covered with pale flesh:
who, in his rage and loneliness,
with his corpse-like visage,
scared me to a hollow gut.
You came with me
the next Sunday morning:
I could tell that you were scared, too,
but took up the older brother’s
duty to be brave
and charged in blindly
then punched him away.
When you saw and turned,
and I saw, too, what was done
in the name of fear,
we were ashamed
to be so dumb
and never spoke of it again.

By the Tuckaseegee River

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The
mountains
look on fire
this morning: mist drifts up
high in rough ranges of smokiness:
my old friend, gone away,
would have loved
this grand

view.

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Morning
glories twirl
up around the corn stalks:
pink and purple flared horns: the yellow
corn leaves curl down edges
turning brown:
damp ground.

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Blue Dusk Poem

This painting by Sylvia Williams is one of my favorites ...here's the poem.



Hot Sky

Blood runs in the wood.
Sweet beauty
doesn't want to tell the world about that feeling
for which there are no words,
sweet beauty that draws tremor and pain
like a wire through the body’s arches,
through the brain,
up and down the spine.
I see your picture, your time.
Winter black branches
draw geographical designs in space,
delta networks
bleeding with the hot bay
of twilight blues -- a chorus behind,
waiting for the wintry moon:
a chanting silence --
beauty and sadness,
sadness and beauty.

Observing Nature

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Deplete,

trident leaves,

yellow edges, borders brown,

passion flower failed to bloom this year,

no fruit to seed anew,

fading life

complete.

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Praying

mantis wife -

self-determination

lacking, taken within by instinct,

does eat her spouse's head:

would she not,

he would.

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Yow! My Chapbook For Sale

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Yow!
You can now purchase your very own copy of "Deep Fried Do What and the Jesus Fish."
Only $3.00 plus postage. Contact me here or at the4winds@verizon.net.
Here's a sample:
(from "Three Days of Winter on the Tallapoosa."
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We have lost the church to the liars
and the pastor rolls in the briars
like a cat in summer
scratching its back:
and God has gone to the moon,
where he lives in an Airstream trailer,
the shiny tin shines
on the craters around
creating a skyline of diamonds,
and the moon makes a home for his failure,
a home for his brooding days,
a night for his sky
pinned with tin badges.
He sits on a chair and looks out
on a ridge of tin like a jagged blade --
a mountain scape,
a crater scape,
around the neighborhood of God’s trailer.

Here's at cha' Appalachia

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Footage
of Muslim
extremists exhorted
by their leader made me realize
that Jihad, when shouted,
sounds much like
Yeeehaahh!
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Twang
twang twang,

dress up nice,
twangey twang twang, yeeehahh!:
Well, stomp my feet and bow my fiddle
Give me a girl that likes
To diddle,
Yeeehahh.
Dang!
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Yeehahh,
hee hah hah
yeehah, yeehah
hee hah, yeehah, yeehah, oh, do what?
Do what? Do what? Do what?
Ahhh, yeeeehahh!
I heard
that!

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Green and White

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Cool
morning:
everything
damp from an early rain:
the sky like a white dome: a good day
to simmer the string beans:
no time left
to look
back.
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On
the way
to Asheville
we stopped for a picnic.
At wood’s edge, I noticed a flower
I’d never seen before:
Fly Poison –
flowers
spiked.
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