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. |
This Dark Thing "I am terrified by this dark thing" Sylvia Plath Dark weaves its web at the center of the earth, celebrating a black light of a certain glow, not so kind, changing plain stones to stars --all mystery and splendor-- then to black holes, like a fierce ascetic sending vibes, drilling holes in your life to turn all your words into shrieks, for you lived worshiping shadows with future diminishing and a steel wind in a haste; still unfinished, you hold up a lamp with the flame of your oracle eyes. |
Missing What is it I am searching for who-knows-what confused reason and cannot find? Hitchhiking on poetry's freeway without missing a beat in doodle time, I've seen houses on wheels, but I cannot turn my knotted wood into planks for my stationary hut. Does some other material exist? So I search for more. Maybe I know the answer, but it eludes me and no one can tell me it, because the question is mine. What is it that is missing like a door from a wall or a sock from the pair? |
Selling Knives to whom it may concern I don't mean to change the subject from your fun activities like hunting deer or candidates or Italian villa rentals to dramatic dismay, and I know it hurts too much to talk about the war, homelessness, dead children, where we are headed, bloodletting, and suffering. Instead, I pick on the knife industry that advertises its wares with words like, "Lifetime supply of incredibly sharp edges." I pick on the phrase lifetime supply, I pick on the sharpness virus, the cutting, the preemptive anything, the rubble we lost ourselves in, while not letting seeds regenerate under the ground to feed the entire planet. I pick on this one ad, because trifles veil reality; trifles console me. |
Beggar Girl People change their paths to avoid you as if granting you a favor, making you recall the blood inside your worn-out shoes and the purple veins creep up your forehead. Your footpads like tropical fruit -akin to papaya, mango- were not made for panhandling in Port Authority. Still, you wade through the passengers with your own pliant style, and purring, prowling, prancing, adrift on tiptoe, you bend your voice to this cranky climate. I watch you bounce about like a child playing with flashes of sunlight, and I question myself with a tone I do not recognize. Then, as you whisper some meaningless words, I slip a dollar in your hand, only because my ego needs the grace of your smile. |
At Lunch When we enter the cave of Duffy's Sport Grill, waitresses in green confess their powers of devotion, commissioned to our orders, as the din of thousand TV screens meddle with our conversation. This deal-- supposedly business--will take a strange zigzag, for with mirth and abandon, beer flows, the holy water of whooping laughter. In the opposite booth, the woman with the navy paisley shirt and moxie pinches sugar packets like hunted Easter eggs into her bag. Our looks cross; she smiles, so self-assured her gray eyes that I feel like offering her my job. |
Emulation haibun I still don't know all the answers this late, and it is April once more. The earth heaves with life. White ibises, imitating catwalk models, stroll on their thin stilts, to feed on languid salamanders. Circling round and round, cannot come up dry for lunch tall birds poised, intent. Returning from the grocery store, I wave at my elderly neighbor outside, who stands still with the newspaper in his hand. He stares at the bushes, fascinated. Something in his stare makes me shudder. I walk up to him. Brain, the dimming bulb, threading on a string of years, refuses amends. Gesturing toward the bird, my neighbor whispers: "Hush! My wife is out to get them. Smart lizards are in hiding." His wife died last year. I withdraw, walking backwards into the house, to hide from the dread of my own years lying in wait. Hello and good-bye. Can you leave anything here? Just sweep up the dust. |
In the Clouds I'll be a cloud diviner like the aloof man from China I once met at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. He sat on a rock, facing the clouds at dusk with reverence, "For mortality; yet, for immortality," he said. But, I'll be a seer unlike him. Unlike him, I'll breathe fire, I'll fatten up the clouds to slide on for dancing the tango, my tango nuevo, for kicking the air with my shapely legs, and I'll wear my red bolero and red stilettos with ankle straps; then I'll take my brushes up to paint the clouds in dazzling colors. Next, the show-off that I am, with my ceremonial hands, I'll put bee-hives in my clouds for the bees to pollinate life again, for I'll plant flowers on all continents that no one can trample. But first, I'll ask the clouds this, about me. This yearning for another realm, will it ever go away? |
Pettiness I am sabotaged by memory. An internal tantrum is about to descend to cut big in shark bites. To reciprocate the betrayal, I breathe in, breathe out, in deep, long mantra-puffs, and my recall returns like the ivory inlay on a box after a good scrub. What if I find what I tried to remember is of no consequence! |
What is not said… Auntie Em, at eighty-two, with damp white hair and pale face, talks of her life in ceaseless thirst: the bliss of her childhood when she rode in the rumble seat of Model A Ford; the hands of a pianist, her first love; how she fell into marriage like a meek doppelganger with icy eyes; how she gathered sea shells and kelp from the sea foam on sand on her wedding day; the child that never was; her immigrant neighbor’s swearing like an anarchist in rage; her husband’s ashes in the urn one day she’ll throw in the sea as she promised him, just not yet. Auntie Em talks of the town council, Orchard Drive’s traffic, old fashions, pinwheels, her barmaid sister-in-law, her cane, bean soup and prophecies, crabapple trees, caraway seeds, pineapple upside-down cakes, tarts, éclairs, weather vanes, night sweats, rheumatoid arthritis, backaches, but she never talks of the cancer, gnawing her within, gruesome, aslant, and in between her voice and my nodding, what is not said encrypts itself into how similar we are, in holding back our shivering inside word clouds, as if paying homage to life. |
Hmmmm… What was it like when I saw the first light… the first light coming in from the afternoon sun on faces, smiles, tears, beds, chairs, sky, cats, cigarettes, puddles, my own hands and toes, a crack on the wall, an ant hanging on to the curtain that boogied with the wind? Then, when the hush of the evening dropped in, did I think the darkness blew away the sights and the sounds? Was it then when I fell in love with words and fiction people uttered, ignoring what I could hear? After all the years, after my majestic performance when I take a bow and the real darkness tumbles down, will it be the words I’ll miss the most, all because I was never too fond of reason? |
Watch Where You’re Going “Watch where you’re going!” Don’t spill the brew with a dark espresso gurgle, swirling like a black hole. How quickly we forgot the warning! We darted, climbed, plunged, as years whirled-- the same, anew--into caffeine-filled avenues, and we despaired the same oracular S.O.S. “Watch where you’re going!” on slippery roads in solitary nights with stinging thorns. Two little girls in dark rooms, we bounced on coiled mattresses like coffee jiggling in a cup. “Watch where you are going!” Who’d know someday we’d run into doors we could not open? |
Soft Soap Soft Soap with soothing Aloe Vera, the strip club of genuine dirt. I dig up my grime from the ditches of memorabilia while rummaging the junk drawer when I handle trinkets of no value from my once-upon-a-time wars. So I lather and rinse, vowing to keep my sticky hands off that rough stuff. -------------------------------- *Lady Macbeth comes to mind.* |
Morning Stroll My lungs wave the red flag. I stop and wheeze near an Areca palm and inside gray matter’s cavern, as I replenish the recall of walking distance and glance at passers-by with faces like vigil candles burning long and slow; then the sudden rain etches on the momentary wind your name. |
Bugs Sometimes the bugs are too loud, fantasizing your swat in their twisted minds and torsos, as if an acknowledgment. Maybe they need you to applause and call out their name, shrieking in high c’s in your maniacal style. The lowdown is their torn up endings you cannot help, as they wait for the campfire to cook their wings or for their life to coil around your fingers while your skin, bitten blue inside your bedroll, smells of their innards, because like a special treat, either you or they have to exit the premises. |
Graffiti Writers Outside the window, the graffiti slows, as the train pulls up to the platform. The loudspeaker grants a parasitic explanation of in and out destinations, and your work boasts fattened, multihued letters like fresh croissants and the crafty hands that baked them. Such quizzical shifts in our styles... but still in the same leisurely way, you throw yours on the streets like discarded postcards; I write my graffiti inside spiral notebooks with crazy-legged letters, dressed in suits, and we both lack that cutting edge voice of the big man on the mic who sings his tender words in tough-in-your-face format, vividly presenting our extinction. |
For miles we followed the big old truck on Route 66 with a cargo that hinted at tears. Once towering and beneficent the mighty had fallen pinned to the barrenness of mercy without the tangle of boughs and empty bird’s nests. Still mighty those true knight-errants who once touched the clouds with their powerful heads glowing brightly under the sun, but naked now; creatures with no limbs those large tree trunks thrust on a flat-bed and chained like common criminals. They say, “Big trees grow back too; they just take longer,” but who can say we’ll be able to unload the cargo we carry? |
Well beyond being spring chickens, my friend and I reinvent ourselves in a Chinese Restaurant, opening up secrets, as we talk of torn away, defamed loves. I fear the grey plate, and united like sisters playing the fool, the chopsticks are out to get me. Then, the fortune cookie clenched in my hand crumbles like an obscene gesture. “Make someone else happy.” The words shake like dice, as I pause to sip diet Coke, mulling over the speech of our food. |
I. All those I loved didn't really exist, for their existence was only a hope like the ghost of a cloud that didn't rain but scattered to evaporate. Such love no one ever witnessed with a love poem and a song that weren't there. II. When the wheel of fate disperses its colors into the black-hole night, all my roads lead to your ocean whoever I love, he becomes you, and I call him with your name for I was made for impossible loves for I neither learned how to embrace you nor to forget you. for I am stuck at the spot where the sun sets. III. Autumn, with warm palms and arrowlike gaze, smokes off the evenings on purple hills, as I hear your voice from far away. Pity, I lack the passport and the roadmap to come to you, but separation, too, belongs inside my loving. If dawn pulsed in colors with large child eyes and if I could only hold your hands, I could die lacking nothing. IV. When the guitar sings time gets torn away and coral-centered cigarettes tell many a tale to make you wonder "Where did youth go?" V. With the moaning of the song inside the disc, with the poetry spilling from your memory, I blend with the dark If you would stop blocking my view, I could see the world and I would know where I am. VI. You have changed too much. I couldn't recognize who you are and I cannot remember if you preferred tea or coffee. white bread or rye, or if you had brown hair or white like right now. When you laughed the moon used to rise on my nights, but now I am used to the dark. Is it you who changed or could it be me? VII. Out of nothing, your eyelashes carry dew drops. Is it the wind or the dust attacking like the enemy abruptly after an entrapment when forgiving quiets the din inside my throat? VIII. To leap away from grief's chasm, you fall from one abyss into another. All because you loved in a different way than other lovers. IX. Who is he who rings my bell I open the door and he is not there He is never there. Surely, I heard the ring Maybe it is I who is at my door. X. Your heart in thousand shards, you go as you came. The roads are vagrant; you are vagrant. On the roadside, people trade love and hassle, poverty on the right, death on the left. This city, the king of all vagabonds, can find no balm for wounds. XI. I am a wall; I never saw the sun. My wounds do not display glory but pain for I embrace all that was abandoned, and in front of me, they shot the condemned as I stood standing when the dead fell. But then, the clouds spit on my face, although I was dead tired and turned red in bloody shame. X. Mother earth, a child with giant fists, frees from chains, to leave my lap like an overused bed, crumpled, dirty, but now, I can fold myself up and soar to the skies. |
I cringe for today but wish for other tomorrows, other than what seems to be etched on the walls and fallen towers; other than when the moon shows its dark side, other than when ancient fish reek and ripple with naked scent, other than when each child joins the circus to run away from home, but I am too hapless to build a moat of wishes around anywhere to ward off the sting of bloodthirsty things. |
useless tears sighing words torn dreams stale grievances silent fury indefinable worship creaking like a harness on bad roads “some things do not emit or reflect enough” -an Astrophysics fact- --------- Prompt:Write a poem taking off from a scientific fact. For "Poets' Practice Pad" |