A poetry journal of everyday clippings |
"The astonished muse finds thousands at her side." R. W. Emerson I made this poetry journal because I like to play with words and lines and I wanted to put somewhere some of my practice work (or first draft) in verse, written--within a very short time, probably daily on the spur of the moment, with the idea to work on the entries later--with or without the help of the astonished (should I say shocked?) muse. Some of the haiku I have mixed with senryu, not only because I am not a purist, but also because I like to do what I like to do given what I feel at the moment. |
He stands at the podium and lectures: “Follow the poem; let the poem lead. Love it so, with awe, so it becomes you.” Then, he asks: “Are you all strangers or ghosts that you don’t know who murdered poetry?" And he points with his index finger: "Was it you? You? Or you?" His gaze rests on me and I cringe. |
Summer mountains, wild flowers circling their necks like glittering gems, conjure up splendor and my aspirations. While sunbeams ripple in clear light strains, I sense a mountain's soft breath surrounding me, for I never lost the wonder for the mountain winds' songs chiming against the blue patches of sky when the peaks, with rhythm, whisper revelations to something deep inside me: “Take nothing with you; come to me as you are, uncluttered and complete in your aloneness.” |
You were there with me when we started, so strong and insistent, but, now, you are nowhere in sight. I search for you under rocks, wear bones and feathers, and do the dance so you come down again like the rains or like the light that shines through the clouds. Yet, you have the shape of the wind and the grit to run away and leave me stranded, locking my fingers on the keys. There is nothing I can do now, but let you go for I don’t know how to trap speed. So I collapse and inflate with distaste as if I am hanging from my feet, unseen against the pages. Prompt from "Poets' Practice Pad" : Write a poem about a good idea getting away from you. |
Two beasts allege my dreams are their territory. One howls, the other horrifies. One runs after me with its revolting pleas, the other whines with unrelenting complaints. They darken my nights with their neediness, one with inexplicable desires, the other with rowdy demands. One beast is my ego, the other my expectations, both stark and sturdy with no justification. |
"The streets of heaven are far too crowded with angels" Angels left, clicking their bones, their smiles dancing in the memory, angels ignored far too long like the disease with no mercy, like an oily turpentine spill, instead of the cheer they attempted to paint. Angels tall and thin, angels with yellowed skin angels of patience, looking for the moon, but finding heaven in music's colors, angels sculpting a strange art of sparks that coalesce into stars with long hyacinth wings. Angels gave me magic ears, so I can still hear them singing. Prompt 48 from "Poets' Practice Pad" |
Roaming What is it that makes us leap into adventures when our legs refuse to move and our bodies have long given up? Is it because we still like to duel with life and deal with eerie, elusive things like getting lost in countless upstate highways when the setting sun blurs the highway sign and we miss the only exit? What is it in us that makes the heart follow the feet and then clamor with the tongue of gypsies? |
Down below From just under the clouds, the scenery on the ground is full of tiny playthings: toy roads, toy houses, toy cars, toy trees, like Lionel train-towns. Everything is so small you don't see the people the weeds, the garbage, the apathy, the foolishness. Looking from the top, from your window seat in US Air, flight 1868, you wonder who plays with all those toys down below. |
Synchronization Today, spring intones in a soft soprano voice. There's singing inside the new grass, in sprouting happy green, and in the rhythm of rivulets meandering on the window pane. The tune of the first rose, so perfect, one can hardly believe it was hiding inside the bud, and I am too afraid to move away from the window, lest I lose the song. |
The Pain of Packing To conjure up happy unions between unmatched pieces, I go through my closet my eyes like searchlights. Will it rain, will it shine? Darn this season of changes! I cannot be hot; I cannot be cold. You'd think I'm getting ready for the end of the earth or a trip to Neptune. Folding this, wrapping that, my body twitches in anticipation, and I'm a sniveling worm, which cannot conceive there's a life out of its cocoon. Disgusted with indecision, just anything I dump in the bag as if fingering amulets that strip my fingers. Finally! I am a woman, and this is not death. |
When Old Friends Call Their voices rearrange me, invasive with long arms but not counterfeit, so I open my shutters to drag in their freshness. They spoon me up like honey like the tonic they thought I was, galaxies away, but now I hide me. I hide how dried up, how spread-too-thin I am, and I hope, beating around the inflections, my tone will go unnoticed. My palm sweats with the taste of the receiver, and chitchat fills empty spaces, trickling in juicy morsels, healing what eyes don't see, following me into good-byes. A temporary merger, yet what's derailed is back on track. |
Watching the Current The riverbank has swollen to drown the wayward vine, creeping into its territory, as the end of spring renovates the skin of the earth. A brown scaly branch bounces downstream to meet its insignificant decay, taking with it a memory of the mother tree, and I, with a book on my lap, watch the water pour over the boulders, savoring the flow without an attitude or a yearning. If there could be a moment in life in which I could stay forever, this would be it. . |
Snapshots Bedazzled, I took a few snapshots of a dignified queen palm today, thinking, come late fall, it may not be here, for lack of roots causes tall things to fall when hurricanes arrive, leaving only shadows to tuck away grief for what is lost, inside the eyes. So, in this accidental world, a well-tended tree waving its arms to the golden sun deserved my faint awareness and lukewarm clicks of the camera, even if a storm is a wind in vain like an ephemeral madness and one may assume some things can be replaced afterwards. |
In the Office For no sentimental reason, clichés hang on tongues' clothesline, and deals begin with a phone call for "moneys to be made." The boss, a walking talking gunner with a blind bat's shot in the dark. Still, his romance with greed and rhythm--cool as lemonade on a hot day, he calls it-- is feeding on a small scale, while the steno, cracking her knuckles, wonders who started the jam sessions for the management or if the experience of the tar-dipped character was ever tested. A message obscure: "Don't allude to what‘s there; play your hand right." Familiar faces stacked behind computer screens wish to unravel duplicity's skein, but they can only shift, drift, and dream of five o'clock, hoping the ogre does not short their wiring as the steno grieves the waste of her thirty-sixth summer. |
In the Kitchen In the kitchen, Mira --my friend from India-- soaks tamarind, balancing homesickness with cooking and poetry. Hard working, efficient, she rises and falls again like the dough or the pain of searching for the best paprika in the market, beating the eggs and simmering her opinions. Her cravings widen the dance of my thoughts and send them spiraling to other people like my grandmother, aunts, women from all over the globe who distill memories in cups, spoons, torte pans, gadgets, Pyrex pans, non-stick roasters that stick to recall as they are towed to the island in the middle of the kitchen. They interpret recipes and trying moments they've allowed to marinate, and I fluff up to take in all their aches and memories, tasting, trusting the soft, wise voices gifted with metaphor. |
Jensen Beach, April 21 Crowded at the beach today, --on a Monday, no less-- sun building webs of light for pieces of dreams jobs in the offing, world's untreated scars, and ripples of sea like butter knives spreading salt on the sand and on the wounds of people who try to connect with the birds overlapping the sky as if in a drifting trance, studiously ignoring the sad face of the economy. ================ Revised version: Jensen Beach Crowded at the beach today... The sun's building webs of light to add to the drama of sloth, jobs in the offing, and world's untreated scars as ripples like butter knives spread salt on the sand, the wounds of people, and pelicans in a drifting trance, ignoring the sad face of the economy. |
The People before Us In the summer of the World's Fair, 1939, when the "compass rose pointing in all directions," the people before us danced the rumba, extending the conga line from the docks to Manhattan for the unknown to be discovered; the sea of people, in wide parades, reached the pavilions that promised world peace for the umpteenth time, like the end of a long, miserable drought. Useless! Now, the rain spits down our shame, tasting of ashes. The splitting ice, the ebbing earth the missing sky bind us to guilt of shortened time. This vile display from the brink of yesterday, can it hit upon a spiral to uncoil again from the "Futurama Ride"? |
His Handwriting Not on tablets or in charcoal, but with ink on paper, unleashed I thought his attention to detail through patchiness. In the way his letters curved faithful to high loops on top of the lines like hands clapping and the deep dark ink -a symbol of strength- could be hooking for someone to hold, but then, I got the whole thing wrong, not noticing the distribution of empty spaces or the flair of smudges and streaks. Maybe because I am a speed reader, and I never could read in between the lines. |
Sunset Beach The surf comes in like a train with soft choo choo sounds, swelling first, far over the ocean, where sunset begins. The sun burns its spinning wheel, to sweep later the ashes into gliding clouds as its light pulls up anchor, and sea foam fizzles down to dampness on sand. Then comes my refusal to walk barefoot on this beach, for particles of far-away sands are already glued under my toes. |
Ye Olde Yarn Shoppe (prose-poem) Fixation, Merino, Worsted, Alpaca, hand-dyed Sierra. I could sing the poetry of yarns on Open-Mic Night at Bulls and Frogs. That might have been before Debbie Macomber's passionate books and you bought me a set of crochet hooks. Then they burned down Grace's Ye Olde Yarn Shoppe on Revelation Avenue, and you sent her red roses for comfort. Her consolation, you said. Her consolation, my demise; for I was never worldly wise. So I named all the savage weeds in my yard after the two of you, and yanked them out of the soil one by one: Poison ivy, Knotweed, Crabgrass, Sodom's Apples, Carrot Wood, Buckthorn, Fire Tree, Goosefoot, all tangled up together, held down by the crochet hooks in a thrash bag. Now, I buy all knitted things, ready-made, from Macy's. |
Art For a painting a friend sent me. Old friend, you paint, so sad and sweet... Why, those colors say everything, like silent reminders on canvas, engraving my life, brushstroke by brushstroke, to hint at what is lost, what no one sees. If only your colors had a body I could dwell in... one you could touch with your eyes as if our skins could touch, like the day when I told you I woke up from untamed dreams of childhood. Yet, what came out of my lips has vanished in the murky rush of years, and now, I find my way with half-blinded eyes through your art, and you hold my hand in remembrance. When the real you reaches through in understanding, I detect, in this icy life, some instrumentalist drove us together to huddle around the only flame left, not to chant nonsense but to pray for deeper perception. |