vixengrl
vixengrl's JournalIrritation (You might recognize the source)
His name in my mouth like an ulcer,
spoiling my appetite,
dull and metallic.
It brushes the sharpness of my
teeth with
dazzling pain
when I have to say his
name again
(and somehow I always have to).
The center of attention
he is, like sand in an oyster
making a pearl of
no price.
Am I being too harsh?
No.
This is me,
being nice.
A corpse at every wedding
and a bride at every funeral,
a dull blade at a beheading
and a cover price for a free for all--
a menace to country
and an offense to God
with a bad-fitting suit
and hair so odd
it folds about his skull like a nest
for departed origami cranes.
He could stain a black hole.
If the world were to devour him whole,
I think he would make the crater sick
him up like ipecac
and look none the worse,
and I wish his hearse would be
a fly-ridden sanitation truck.
Fuck! He should greet death
on a prison toilet and be captured
on a million cameras
for the tabloids to devour--
and that's the mildest thing I'd shower him with;
the acid of my words--
not literal vitriol.
And why do I assault him thus?
I must admit.
It calms my soul.
(Kindly disclaimer: this is a flight of poesy for posterity, but between you and me exempting he, you and me agree that he deserves a recognition of the annoyance and disruption he serves. Apocalyptic possibilities emerge whenever his chances surge. Also he gets on my nerves.)
Imperfect Sacrifice
I'm sorry to tell your tale
because you were human,
and if I am honest,
no human is good enough
that someone would not see
the perfectly decent reason
you "had" to be dispatched.
Even if it was part your humanity
and part their invention.
Even if you spoke untruths sprung from
the lies that murdered those around you.
Even if your anger was
altogether understandable if, and only if
they could stand where you did.
They don't and say:
You should have forgiven like a saint.
You should have pierced through
the fog and foghorn of war.
You should have written purely
of beautiful and doomed things,
never the ire of nationalism or
the pride of seeing oppressors
(or so supposed)
brought down.
They will deny it was wrong because.
Because.
Because.
The cause.
I don't believe in angels.
I've never flown a kite.
I believe in freedom and
the imperfect power of poetry
in the Celtic tradition of some of my ancestors
to lay a curse in verse that
circumvents the power structure
to create a new channel and do
almighty things. Not because poets are perfect people.
(Fuck no.)
Because we are fucked up enough to be recognized
as very human and make, therefore,
the perfect imperfect sacrifice--
we do get gone,
but the words live on.
And you saw the arrow aimed for you
and named it. And I am not
going to name it anything else.
A slaughtered goat
that purifies no gate
imperfectly made
in a world of hate.
Without Resignation
If I had a platform, like a great
blank canvas I think I would
paint the true and the good, and the
not-so-good, and still true--
this is what the artist is meant to do.
I don't know what else the medium
is for, and it doesn't stop
in time of war: the canvas only now shows
the death of horses, the murder of musicians,
the destruction of a shop.
Poetry has been written in foxholes,
poetry has been written in internment camps
and while following dead bodies piled high
in a cart. There is no renunciation possible
from the human business of art.
We pick up a pen to change the world,
and though we might not change it,
to put it down is like saying we'd rather
watch it all drown.
The poet doesn't acclimatize but is
the barometer. The poet does not sanitize but tells
what has been needing--we are not here
to whitewash the blood but to
give voice to the bleeding.
To shine a light in the fog of war
or cast the landscape in a brutal highlight
like the flashing of shells exploding--to find
the lyricists who bring the music of the
horror to mind--those you could do
without resignation.
An example: I could tell you the oil fields
of this war are orchards and that blue gray smoke
had risen above green-gray leaves like a pillar
of warning by day and the horror of
losing one's heritage at night, or explain
war sometimes has profits that never
find their way into a bank: not money or blood.
The fallen dancers bleeding at the legs,
the born-to-soon and too-soon-to-die,
the poet trapped in the crumbling of a city,
the false meteor shower of a war-drenched sky.
The beliefs like excuses, the expressions of cause:
I could unwind the layers of gauze
where a limb was splintered and now a red
line of careful stitches replaces that part.
And you can fill in the rest.
No resignation, only art.
Only still trying one's best.
(A response to this story.)
I did a sketch for my mother-in-law that she won't ever see
I guess the backstory is that my husband's parents were old when they had him--his dad already had grandchildren, and his mom was nearly forty. His memory of his parents was always of them as older people, and they always had memories of a time that seemed remote to him. His father was older-almost 100 years old when he passed, and I drew him a donkey drawing a cart to a fence showing a road to a farm--a very pastoral southern Italian sketch. He got to see the picture while he lived, and was buried with it. I knew he liked it.
My mother in law is just a bit younger--81. She never got to see the picture that I drew for her today--a weeping Madonna on the rocks, under a fig tree in April just beginning to sprout leaves and early fruit. I think she would have understood why I chose to sketch that scene, and how I wished I could have spoken with her more (she spoke Italian and a little English-- we had love for her son more in common than a language--he husband spoke English even less). She will be buried with this picture she never saw, a gift I give as awkwardly as I ever gave her anything, as much from my heart as from my hand. I loved her as mother and a friend and respected her as the woman who made my husband the sensitive man he is even though we shared so few words.
Which seems absurd after all this time--why didn't the two of you overcome the gulf of language? But, we didn't need to. She loved her sons, as did I. And her other daughter-in-law, and her grandsons. All I ever needed to do was be there, and love and be loved.
And I am wrecked with the anticipation of her passing, and preparing myself to support my spouse. And I don't even know yet the shape of our grief, or understand the size of the hole her loss will leave in our lives. My husband called her twice a day, once, and has sat by her overnight often in a hospice vigil these past several weeks.
She won't know, perhaps, the enormity of her passing. We are just beginning to know.
April (Llewd sing goddamn!) is Poetry Month!
Here's a little column from Garrison Keillor to get you thinking:
If you were very ambitious, you could take off from Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” and rewrite that. The first eight lines are about how dreary and hopeless you feel, the last six about how you feel exalted by her love. Simple. Keep the rhymes — “eyes, cries, state, fate, hope, scope, possessed, the great Midwest” — and replace the rest.
Write the poem in black ink on a sheet of white paper — poems should never be sent by e-mail and never never never text a poem — hand it to her and as she reads it, put one hand on her shoulder so that you’re right there when she turns with tears in her eyes to embrace you and forgive you for every way you’ve messed up her life. This is the power of poetry. Poets get the girl.
Football heroes get concussions or need hip replacements. My classmates who played football are walking with canes and moaning when they sit down and they find it hard to figure out the 10 percent tip at lunch. We poets go sashaying along, perpetually 17, lost in wonder at the ordinary, astonished by streetlights, in awe at lawn ornaments, bedazzled by baristas releasing steam into milk for the lattes.
This is what you learn during Poetry Month. You may lose the vote, fall into debt, suffer illness and remorse, feel lost in the crowd, and yet there is in language, everyday language, a source of such sweet delight that when you turn it to a good purpose, two gentle arms may reach around your neck, just as is happening to me right now, and a familiar voice speaks the words I long to hear and my heart is going like mad and yes, I say, yes I will Yes.
Well, some of all that isn't entirely so. I have emailed poems myself and sometimes got the girl--and sometimes the guy--although some guys never quite get girls that write poetry, and I have never quite understood why (I married a man who appreciates poetry and Whee! The difference to me!) I'm also not perpetually 17, but was born at about 45 and am forever finding newer layers to scrape down in palimpsest of our cultural archaeology, while adapting my discoveries to the Nova Terre we currently enjoy. But poetry, not philosophy or religion, is my refuge, as rock and roll is the religion and the law of Ozzy Osbourne. And poetry, like rock and roll, will never die.
All that being unnecessarily said, for this Poetry month I am dedicating myself to writing more poetry as, by my count, I have shamefully tapered off from my twenties when I was writing it on the reg. (Not all of it was especially good--of course.) I'd like to see a little renaissance here on DU. Talk about the Mean Tangerine who juiceless plays at leading with his truthless ways. Adopt women's rights, or animals, or racial justice. Find your itch--scratch it onto paper or digitalize it. Make art and weaponize it. Graffito it on TP to make people uncomfortable wiping their asses. Stick it under windshield wipers. Tuck love notes under coffee cups of people you know, or don't. Don't be creepy--but let words be your words and be the words that are you.
Send a strongly written poem to the editor of the paper of record. Let your congress critter know the situation is for better or for verse. Poets in Celtic mythology were wizards. They could satirize a hero with a geas that left him (mostly him) gasping and socially constrained. Satirize your enemies. Leave them entranced and amazed. Poet them. Po them. Po et them. Pother.
This is the cruelest month--maybe. So let the beautiful snowflakes of middling spring put a delightful frost on everything, and make a lay of the land under the crystals we sing. Hatch reality from our supposing. Drive up the green flow burgeoning that breaks into a new imagining. Protest in verse. Rhyme a complaint. Couplet a minute. Metaphor an eternity. Celebrate your strange brain. Full fathom five politicians' lies with the dollar signs in their eyes. Work them over with respected works of ages past. Cut and pasta' them into oblivion.
Rainbow
She was not appropriated,
but had left when, tired of the fights
over who deserved love, and who
deserved rights,
her surest hope was to just
take flight.
But I recall that one day
when her nose piercing meant
she could not stay
under your roof,
and those times you said
she should pray
those magnificent colors of hers
away.
So she went to Pride
with us
and was baptized by
mustachioed nuns
and cried with us
when we remembered
sad times and walked
among
imposing healing angels
and tried--
to find words to explain
what to her was second nature--
where hope was needed,
why! There her banner flew! And her
arc leaned towards justice
for all of us--
but her last thought
on leaving was of you--
did you not need hope and promise, too?
Because what she knew of love
and empathy
she learned
(better than you knew)
from things she'd read
where rainbow windows
and glorious choirs
were where beauty touched
hearts--like yours,
and ours.
But there comes a time
when for safety's sake,
and sanity, she made a break,
and wrote to you
of her wife, years on,
and her children, too--
all to be disregarded by you.
Your rainbow stolen?
Your hope bereft?
No, no. Not so.
She left.
(After this nonsense from Bryan Fischer.)
Expecting
The day's long past that I've expected less--
I think it's time I expected more.
It may be what my expecting is for--
And I will learn by love to strengthen it.
I am pissed by my expect-less days,
smitten by an expect-less craze,
compromising my loves and hates to fit.
"Procrustian" is what I make of it--
but you could call it cutting my heart out
to spite my place.
I want something better.
I want something made right.
I want change, and more of it, and faster,
and still, I want everyone to feel the change until--
a lot of words get unsaid
and wounds unwound. And hope that was fallen
gets refound. I want starbursts of passionate
adoration for the different and careful
listening for the silenced and the hope
that their voices find a gain,
a verb, a reverb--a DOING!
And that the inscrutable gets a good unscrewing.
I want that thing-a safer place,
a human kindness informed by grace,
A human face enchanted with the beauty
of, say a great, comfortable pair of boots,
and not, for example, a boot stepping on a human face.
I want accountability and respect!
I want personhood, selfhood, privacy, and how!
And still openness, the end to shame, the knowledge
that understanding people will somehow
understand. And not judge until they've walked
not one mile but two--
or three,
or a dozen!
I expect more! I have to, I'm broken for it--
all in, passionately hoping we find Eden again--
and if there's an angel with a sword, guarding the gate--
well, I have a teaspoon.
An angel? A sword?
Whevs. I expected MORE!
Falling Time
There the falling out of time with
nature's rhythm
disrupts: so
colder than early blossoms
deserve, or
wetter than man-made streets
need
we find changes
on a scale out of tempo
with our chorus,
singing the seasons too
early and too late.
The shake in the shale-bones
of bottom land
where mother's blood licked
the roots of grain
are an alarm
we ignore at our peril while
we ruffle
late-winter snow
from our hair.
Is it not cold?
What warmth warns us here?
While rivers run in the streets,
where droughts last
broke the branches of
careworn planning,
and fires suddenly know no season?
We are falling out of time,
soon to be out of time,
while shore-lands teem with
incidental floods and
unseemly days of shin-bearing warmth
are treated with smiles
not concern. A vacation from the
real--an abdication
from our stewardship.
A falling and a failing.
We deny even while
we know.
We teem with hand-waving denials.
No planting made by our hands yet
lies prepared in its germ
for the future our lack
of best-laid plans have made.
Where the pursers of politics boast of
the health of radiation,
and the growth of fruits made large
in the greenhouse
of our carbonate fetish,
how even do we speak
truth to dead-president-green power?
Can our artisanal megaphone
eclipse the
digitalized PA?
And despite knowing the
things we know,
would our hearers care to hear
the things we say?
And believe them with their hands and feet--
where the science
meets the paycheck,
and the ballot
meets the menu?
I can not say I know--
but catastrophe is written in frosty
feathers of ice on the peach blossoms, and
and in glyphosate and the paths of bees
and the cries of birds and
the ways of fishes in the northern seas.
And the ice shelf and the fault lines,
and the electorate
and your house and home.
You either hear nature
bloody red in denture and manicure,
or ignore.
But do that, and you've forgot
what our world was for
and all that came before,
and have signed off on
what you get from it
now at first--not so bad.
Then, evermore.
Swimming in Their Blood
In the beginning was the first blow,
and the first blow begat vengeance,
and the next blow begat vengeance,
and vengeance begat vengeance,
like a family tree of misery.
The never-ending tit for tat
wrenched babes from tit and
tattered the world.
The vision of She Who Ever Fights
wades in the blood of the fallen
and her sword arm never fails.
And with each generation the lie
of who did what to whom and how
blood answering blood
will cancel the stain,
and ever do we see an
increasingly blood-stained history.
And microscopically I see
the everfighting bacilli
invisible to the naked eye
wading in the blood of those who
ever fight, infecting them
with bloody dreams.
For my steel, a needle
I might prefer, to subtly inject
an antidote to this bloody strain
that so poisonously infects,
inoculating with common good
against whatever this is
swimming in their blood.
The Ghosts of Fallen Women
My head is always beset
with the visions of fallen women
bloody in hotel rooms,
murdered at home,
lying in ditches,
traduced and betrayed,
in Magdalene Laundries,
on coroner's gurneys,
throwing themselves downstairs,
taking pennyroyal oil
and bleeding,
bleeding,
dying for days.
These living women
haunt my conscience,
these girls who shrieked
their labor songs in chains,
or were jailed for dropping
their gifts like stones,
who threaded the path between
their addictions
and the health of two,
who took beatings knowing they
did not
take those beatings alone.
My mind is haunted
with the knowledge of gifted women
happy in motherhood
blessed with strength
privileged in many ways--
and they remind me also
of these so many ways
the freedom to bear
means everything.
And that the freedom to choose
one's life, and
the freedom over one's body,
and the triumph
of the once-"fallen"
is the only redemption I give a damn about.
For the sake of the dead and gone,
for the sake of the here and now,
and for the sake of those
to be.
Only choices
let my
women be free.
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