Poetry is Dangerous (Jim)

Live poetry is Dangerous!
Prob’ly should be banned.

Why, next thing y’know,
you let this stuff go –
free speech to the extreme
in the public ring –
all kinds’a things
start to get outta hand!

Still, tonight’s not about who wins
some philosophical battle or other –
and s’not about where I stand –
So no debates about candidates –
or heapin’ grief
on any belief

S’not that I don’t have enough “positions”
to fill a Kama Sutra of the mind,
I do, I do, I DO!
But my mission here’s more subtle –
to engage, not enrage.

Don’t I have to confront you to move you, tho’ –
grab you,
shake you down
to your roots?

Nawwww.
Don’t think so.
If I arch your back
you’ll just deflect my attack –
You’re used to propaganda
You won’t be moved by spin.
A head on assault?
It’ll fail by default!
For it’s not some poem – or poet you face
when you gaze into yer soul’s deepest mirror.
It’s you.

So tonight while I exposit
and you’ve lent me your ears –
if in some fairly uncommon ways –
this’s really about –
our common hopes and fears.

I mean, I figure if I help you rejigger
just one’ve yer notions–
you know,
move a little of your most stagnant
mental furniture ‘round –
Well, once that step’s taken –
Once you’re ready
for a little life upshakin’ –
Once there’s a breach in yer comforting wall –
Then an open mind’s absolutely
the most dangerous state –
of all.

–Jim Keller
Oct 5, 2004
Draft © 2004 J. Keller All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.

The Vanity Table (Susan)

I take my place before the antique table.
Carved grape leaves inlaid with gentian flower
Curl slyly round the edge.

Wood panel lifts revealing the mirror
Of mother’s precious Vanity,
Tilted to receive my waiting face,
Fairest of them all.

I bare my breasts only in dreams,
In the public room, the place of prying eyes,
I cover them again
With white cloth smooth as open palms.

I am years swollen
With pretense and smiles
To please the Prince.
Evenings of Loretta Young

Swirling through an open door,
Standing on the dining room buffet
In spike heels
To give the full effect.

I’ve served my term,
A thousand tubes of lipstick past,
Powder puffs, cold cream,
Eyeliners ground away on half closed lids.

Give back my life.
This time, I’ll make it real.

–Susan Schefflein
© Susan Schefflein
Published in Each In Her Own Way, 1994

Delusions of whiteness (Kim)

Delusions of whiteness

Try liking the worst
taste in your mouth.
This is not my world.
Every body
takes a number.

My frosted skin
crawls backward
down to a belly
ache. More numb
than dumb. I grew
up thinking every
one loved me.

Heart throbbing
vain. Is this what
it takes to inherit
the earth. We
journey through
our made up hell.

Break my neck.
Another head
start. You don't
know me as human.
White hurts
the pleasure
of being sane.

–Kim Irwin
Draft © 2005 K. Irwin All Rights Reserved

Why We Bob For Apples (Brad)

Because oranges don’t float high enough
Capers and olives are simply too small
Bobbing for cactus might be a bit rough
And redwoods are perniciously tall.

Because popcorn might hit you in the eye
Eggs always break and stones sink
Bobbing for onions would make you cry
And garlic would make your breath stink.

Bobbing for mountains takes way too much space
Fish are decidedly hyperactive
Bobbing for French fries would burn your face
Then you would be less attractive.

I’d gladly try bobbing for cheesecake you know
In a tub full of beans and molasses
But molasses would make the bob terribly slow
And the beans might make me pass gasses.

Try as you might, you cannot bob for light
And darkness would be equally vexing
You will find light quite difficult to bite
And just to see darkness is perplexing.

On a trampoline in Vaseline
Bobbing for pizza would be delicious
But the mess it would make would be simply obscene
And the Vaseline would be too lubricious.

The government said you can’t bob for your head
Nor for croutons, futons or tomatoes
Not for kittens, mittens, goldfish named Fred
Apples okay, but no mashed potatoes.

-B.R. Moroni
Draft © 2005 B.R. Moroni All Rights Reserved

Smiling at black people (Kim)

Smiling at black people

When I’m walking
down the street
I like to smile
at black people
don’t you? That
warm cuddly
puppies and babies
smile. To let them
know I’m friendly.
Guilty. Sorry.
It’s all been a
really bad joke
huh? I’m nervous.
I’m angry. Not at
you but me but you
remind me that I
hurt you and now
I hurt too and that
you will never be
sorry for me.

-Kim Irwin
Draft © 2005 K. Irwin All Rights Reserved

Influence (Susan)

On New Year’s Eve you tell me
There’s no hope
But I come anyway
Bringing a package of balloons.

You stand at the sink stirring
A bowl of guacamole dip.
I tell you things will be better,
Blowing so hard into a balloon
I see stars.

One by one red and yellow suns
Sprout in the dark kitchen.
We hang them
All around the house.

Months later when I return
They are still there,
Still holding
My breath.

–Susan Schefflein
Draft © 2005 S. Schefflein All Rights Reserved

They may just be shards but they’re my shards (Jim)

I can’t keep it straight anymore
I’ve lost my symbol thimble
and half my double entendre’s spilled out
leaving in my enfeebled pate
not a single rhyme for Nantucket

Instead of being too clever by half
I can barely manage clev
And where I once cut rugs
it’s now hard enuff to plug in a Hoover
Get down, get down, get down ok
Only now it’s gettin’ up that’s harder

And speaking of cutting, mes ami,
I also used to cut a dashing figure
but now my figure’s just dashed
my panache now polenta con brie.

And hey, while I’m decrying the fates,
is circumcision a cut above –
or merely the unkindest cut of all?
I mean, I know I can never know
exactly what I’ve been missing
but no complaints –
after all I’m still coming and pissing.

No listen, I need to restate that –
I mean, I know I can’t really know what I’ve missed
but whatever it is,
damn dude,
they never asked my permission,
and ‘natch, I’m still pissed!

– Jim Keller
September 4, 2002 (rev. '03, '04, '05)
Draft © 2005 J. Keller All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.

When you look at me (Kim)

When you look at me
Am I always a black woman.
They tell me to pick the roses.
I smell roses. I eat them, suck them,
ruffle them on my face
letting the taste be
Taken with my tongue.

My mother used to tell me that
there was nothing more sweet smelling
than me. She called me rose from the beginning.
I thought I was a flower before I knew I was a person.
Then one day your sister hit me hard.
I didn’t look right to her. How my hair was.

I have the seeds in my pocket.
Now don’t go calling me if you have nothing to say.
Time is more precious than my loving you.
It’s time to plant the roses. The muster of sawing
the sun in two. One for each side of my dark face.
I can turn the heads on candy wrappers.
It’s my freedom.

-Kim Irwin
Draft © 2005 K. Irwin All Rights Reserved

Sibling Rivalry, the Hard Way (Jim)

I know why you have disinterred my soul,
why at your behest
I know all you know
of all the times
since I felt death
creeping into me.

When my father died,
as eldest son, I was king.

Leaving the matter of my brothers (mostly half)
and sisters with ambitious husbands.
I liked most well enough,
and some I loved.
But some already coveted my position
and others soon enough.

So yes, my course
was weighed with necessary care.

Should I make them Village Chiefs, Ambassadors
(to keep them occupied and far away)?
Court Advisors
(under my watchful eye)?
Military Commanders
(where my spies would know
their every move before they made it)?
And would any or all of these keep them mollified?
Neutralized?
And more to the point, under my control?

Perhaps a few examples –
putting out some eyes –
to leave some princes begging on the street.
Would that not suffice to teach the folly
of incurring my distrust –
or only make the still sighted
more desperate to depose me??

I could not be sure.

There was
no real choice
except eliminating most
jealous, carping potential rivals,
and where a threat,
mothers, wives and children too.

And for this – this –
you 21st Century
constitution besotted maggots
surrounded by your courts, laws, rights
and civil service soldiers
found me a monster.
and now come to personally point
your finger of guilt.

Pfaghhh!
At most, in your terms,
I am but the innocent evolutionary victim
of competing biological imperatives!

Come stand on my turf and times.
You would have done the same
(unless done to first).

How dare you question me?
You have no standing here.
Nor will I assuage
your soft time’s collective guilt
over being one with such a man as me –
for what truly eats at you, interloper,
is that we both are only human.

Do you really think
I have no feelings?
That I enjoyed
this aspect of my rule?

You have taught more than you intended.
So though I never saw one, I know
a lion capturing a pride
to extend his line
adopts no step-children
and simply kills them all.
But does your PETA
picket this king of beasts?

Leave me to history.
To stand or burn
on who and when and where I was.

I ruled, made civic works,
enlarged our lands and left an heir –
kept the Law and the Way
ever in the hearts of the people,
encouraged the giving of alms
and led armies against invaders.

How you “advanced beings” rule yourselves
is no affair of mine.
And, though I personally filled graves
with those I knew –
anyone can see
you’ve spent a century
filling graveyards
all around your world.

I might have done better or more
but died with few illusions or regrets.
And being kinder and fairer than you think –
I wish you the same.

–Jim Keller
August 17, 2005
Draft © 2005 J. Keller All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.

Grazing (Susan)

Long afternoons our bodies
Cleave to his back
Part work, part riding
Mixed horse, our pinto
Brown-white spotted hide
Soft, smooth as couches
We drift with the regular
Chewing rhythm of his jaws
Grazing across the pasture
Flick of tail
Or tremulous skin jilting
Flies we miss
Intent on clouds
The sky above our heads

His pulsing warmth
Horse smell merged with our
Skin, salt sweat and sweet
The last musky scent we know
Before we fall asleep
The bright moon drifting through
Our dreams
Outside he sleeps
Beneath the pear tree, hooves
Round and gleaming in the grass
Among the fallen fruit

-Susan Schefflein
Draft © 2005 S. Schefflein All rights reserved.

It's Been Said (Kim)

It’s been said
writing is the tension
between black and white
on the page. An intention disturbing the void.
I have nothing more than a head
swiveling which makes me certain
about sculpture. Unsure about everything else.

Survivors recall the original nosedive. When we
turned people into animals and then said that’s
what you are. Then they survived.
And we couldn’t stop crying.

The space between our legs and arms
muscles our memories. The stories
we won’t remember.
Our trust of nothing
pounds pancakes
into paperweights.

-Kim Irwin
© 2005 K. Irwin All Rights Reserved

Sister Spider (Susan)

I put away the pots
From the evening meal.
The pan cupboard rattled.
Dust balls trembled out
Onto the floor
And with them
A spindly-legged spider.
Fleet with fear,
She rushed across
Red spaces on the tile
And wobbled to my net – a paper towel.
I shushed her
Out the door.
Forsythia blooming
In the yard
Beckoned with ghostly
Yellow-waving arms.
I whispered to her,
“Live to spin
A filament from my soul.”

-Susan Schefflein
Published in Pandora: A Literary Magazine
Fall 1982 © S. Schefflin

Four Short Poems on Writing and Performing (Jim)

Executive Decision

Pressing Delete
I called it a night.

Better to face a morning screen,
clean and blank
than a poem
that truly stank.

On Memorizing Poetry for Performance

Usedta’ have a mind
like a steel trap,
now a mind
that won’t hold crap

So ‘steada free up on the stage,
tethered to this stinking page,
hopin’ somethin’s left to give
even if my head’s a sieve.

Verbal Alchemy

Midnight oil
coming to a boil.

Mixing and blending
leaden memories transmuted
into metered gold.

Ode to the Ever Versatile Jimmy Breslin

Writers write,
fighters fight
and drunks get tight.

With him you got
a tripleheader.

–Jim Keller
July 6, 2005
All poems Draft © 2005 J. Keller All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.

Anne Sexton's "Cinderella"

Have liked this poem a lot for a few years. And since we're waiting for new poems to arrive from members, thought I'd post it. Haven't been able to pin down the date written, but 1959-65 would be an educated guess.

Do you think putting up other poet's work (famous, obscure or infamous) on this blog is a good idea? If so send me yours. If you don't have it, but it's classic, send me the author and title and I may be able to find it on the web for you.

--Jim

Cinderella

by Anne Sexton

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

Lake Lillinonah (Susan)

The big bass I saw last summer
waits now beneath the ice.
A lazy liquid silence
seals her from the sky.

Has she tried to leap for flies
and found her leap curtailed?
Has she tried to break from the water jail?
Has she smashed against that barrier?

I wait on the beach and watch the gleaming white,
the shining cold crust that holds her in.
It, too, has a beauty that exhilarates
and makes me want to shout for joy.

Come back with the spring thaw.
Make your mighty presence known
in this other precarious universe.
Tell me that you still live.

–Susan Schefflein
3/19/05
Draft © 2005 S. Schefflein All Rights Reserved

Flash Animates Hatred (Deborah)

Somewhere, several somewheres
In a back room of a storefront mosque
On an indifferent street of an overfed city
Young men sit at the feet of an elder.

At a sign from him one of the young men jumps up
hunches over a keyboard, beckons others, “come close”.
They move up, knees and buttocks, jockey for view,
curly-bearded, mouths fixed, gaze lifted to a screen.

Two characters perch, blue-beaked in black
Heckel and Jeckel cartoon-like, crow-like
lumpen and large between telephone poles
In a burnt-out third worldish urbanscape.

The young men watch, some eyes narrowing
Others puzzling over the motionless shapes.
They have no point of reference perhaps
for such ugliness in an innocent medium.

One or two of the men--mere boys, fine and lean
look at the elder or at a fellow
As a baby seeks mother’s eye when a stranger smiles.
The elder gruffly brings them back: “Watch!”
And they glom onto the small screen again.

There one angry eye opens above a blue beak
Glares at the pole as if noting an affront.
then a brighter blue flashes, jagged and cruel
hurtling from a fistlike knot at the pole.

Now the flash is a bolt and it bisects the screen
and the fist--clearer now--is a nexus of wire
One more flash and the droll conceit of the scene
is undone in a maelstrom of fabric and flesh


They were fabricked, not feathered,
the ungainly black crow shapes
and the bolt has unveiled them for all eyes to see
the flesh of the mothers, multiparas, bloated white
hanging breasts, paps and stomachs
done with comfort and succor

Done with pleasure and pleasing, no heat given nor taken,
No more vanity and pride, generous, menopausal flesh.
Now they writhe and back-tumble, their cunts nearly split,
nose-beaks flying, mouths agaping, eyes bulging, torn tits.

Without prompting, the cartoon will cut and restart,
cycling through degradation of the hapless veiled women.
Without ceasing or altering, beaks, bolts and black chadors
mix it up in choreography of ruthless pornography.

The elder watches as puzzlement gives way to fury
in the young men he has gathered to mentor and mold.
dead silence on the first, second, half of third viewing
yields to quickening of breath, hot rage then cedes to cold.

Need we wonder, he asks, what the Infidel wishes
For our mothers and daughters, for our sisters and wives?
You see yourselves how they will strip and will ravish
All the flowers of our Islam, all the beauties of our lives


‘’We thought this would ‘’shock you’’, the subject line said,
In the email that bore this so venal amusement.
It came from the Heartlessland,where values are clearer:

men are men, women women, as long as they’re ‘ours’


–Deborah Maier
© 2005 D. Maier All Rights Reserved

On Love and Loving (Jim)

Four Poems of Love and Loving
(From Youth to Long in the Tooth)

First loves, are well... ...they’re first loves....
....and you never get a second one....

Lying there
she must have bones
yet conforms
against me
as if melted.

We should be two –
yet in ths moment
so clearly
and purely one –
there is no me, no she
no moon no sun.

That was the apex.
And then came some of the troughs,
and you begin to cynically realize that....

Love’s too often like a
cheap steak house.
Big sizzle --
big fizzle.

Just another heapin’ helpin’
of emotional cholesterol.

But I have had enough of heart attacks –
and high calorie sweet empty nothings chow.
Oh yes, I’m on the love diet.
And so for me, it’s life’s salad bar for now.

Still, time passes,
and we try to move beyond love’s bipolar highs and lows,
and beyond cynicism to an...
...acceptance of some of life’s harder facts.....

My love o’ long ago
Sure, I love her still
(the guy she left me for
I’d still like ta’ kill).
I’ve been in love since then
I will be again –
‘n now sometimes I leave them
(I’ve learned it’s no sin)

So grizzled realism. yes.
But we NEVER grow immune,
and somewhere between mythical places
called “maturity” and “C’mon, those days are over,”
it happens again, with someone new
or someone you’ve been up and down with forever,
and you fall again...

....And you couldn’t get fooled again, right??

.....But, hey, even armed with hard-won experience,
you still better “Watch out for that first step!”...
I didn’t and.....

Love.
I fell in –
yes, still again –
and it was great –
but then – too late
I fell.

Fell into pits of
scalding steam
and from thence
to icy caldrons –

I fell
and fell
I screamed
and I fell
and burned and froze
and burned and fell
and fell and fell and fell –

‘til, well,

‘til –

I fell out.

Love.
Oh yeah.

Love.
You gotta... ...love love.

–Jim Keller
December 19, 2002
© 2005 J. Keller
All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.

What is Poetry?

Excerpt from an interview with the poet Li-Young Lee. Lee was a child of Chinese refugees raised in Indonesia who now lives and writes in Chicago. Follow the link below for much more about him.

“...I feel the real medium for poets is silence, so I could be writing in any language. To reflect the inner silence, to give it body: that’s all we’re doing.

“We use the voice to make the silence more present. It’s like architecture, where the medium is not really stone or metal, but the space they enclose. We use materials – brick, glass, words – to inflect space, both outer and inner.

“So I would say the real medium of poetry is inner space, the silence of our deepest interior.”

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/us_poetry/Li/

Buffalo Part I (Deborah)

by Deborah Maier

I

I had a waking nightmare.
I thought all children did.
Perceptual mysteries
History-fed
My personal waking nightmare

Mine visited me in moments
When teachers’ mindfulness flagged
When pacing and strategies came unmoored
On waves of droning complacency
Mine visited me at such moments.

I could tell when it was coming
When the teacher glid slowly away
Wrong-end-of-a-telescope further away
Shrinking and talking, mouth flapping and shrinking
I knew then my nightmare was coming.

I’d focus my eyes first to stop it then not
For sometimes I thought I would never come back
But would pull through a membrane and be someone else
And to do so would please me beyond any knowing.
Then I’d not focus my eyes to stop it.

My brain was a camera trained on a house
A pristinely picket-fenced white bungalow
A blindingly white fence behind which no eyes
Would look forward or back, shuttered silence was all.
My brain was a camera panning the house.

I would move toward it yearningly, lonely and brave
To discover my family, the true ones I came from
All would be well there, my stratagems would thrive
My powers unthwarted, my familiars all named.
I would move toward it yearningly, hopeful and brave.


My powers, nearly unloosed from their bonds
My familiars all but named, my eyes
Like shavings to a magnet left the house’s green patch
Slid to the side yard and a plummeting doom
With my powers so nearly unloosed from their bonds!


For the ground rose up there to a mountain of slag.
Malign and unyielding and glitteringly dark
That dwarfed into nothing that dream of a house
and emptied my eyes of their yearning and hope
Where the ground rose up to a mountain of slag.


Its darkness spread over the glistening world
It tilted and menaced, its mode was denial
My body shrank in on itself and wept air
for all buildings and creatures beleaguered by slag.
For all houses under mountains of slag.

–Deborah Maier
© 2005 D. Maier All Rights Reserved.

In the Silence (Susan)

On the trail
I listen to the bird song
I sit on a rock here for centuries
Solid, indestructible
Waiting for travelers who reach this height.

I think of writers’ groups where words were imposed.
Tess told me to say “apple” tree instead of “pear”.
I changed it to get her approval.
But it was a pear tree.
I changed it back.
Those days are gone.
I do not want critics to tell me what to say.
Now I use my words.

This is the way I will live,
Seeing my vision,
Using my words.
I can lead myself through the desert.
I don’t need a guru
Or a spiritual leader to do it for me.
What value if someone else told me where to go?
I want my own vision – I want my own words.
I will not be dictated to.

The very air I breathe is free.
I am free.
“She who knows and knows that she knows is wise.”
I know.
And if I don’t know
I can find out.

Let me trust to my own intuition.
Let me trust to my own instinct.
Let me follow my voice
To its own true goal.


–Susan Schefflein
6/25/05
© 2005 S. Schefflein All Rights Reserved