(crossposted at DocuDharma)
I felt like posting something here, and no stories came to mind, so I'll retrench into poetry. Why not?
Religion
I can't get near the poem I want to write
It's too terrible, and so far away
It lives in my fingernails
So I bite it off
It waits for me in the gutters
So I kick it down storm drains
It lives in the steam in my shower
and I put my towel to it
It laces itself all around my days
like a serpent, it knows which fruit to tempt me with.
Order
The absolute symmetry of decay
The linear gladness of abuse
The gallantry of oblivion
annihilation and death
Lean towards a perfection
that cannot be thought of.
God reaches out
for something that will not offend
His willingness.
Old poem for an ill young man
Murdering split
No heaven for these short-lived little leaves
The ground growls menacing and crowds
Its depths overwhelm with happiness
At last all succeeds, down at rest where it won't get in the way
or even in trouble.
Do we write theses about these dreams of flowers and inchoate glimmerings?
Do we throw ourselves off roofs of fortunate comeliness?
No way. We last among the names of our mothers
and strive to perceive ourselves
as they fly off to join the circus
and be freak and eat the heads off passersby.
Where are the flails of yesteryear?
If a dream fell from a tree, would anyone hear?
Is there life after dreaming?
Is there life after questions?
Who abrogates the beaten man's smile?
What concludes the harpie's blues?
So what's so clear about vision?
The magician
announces
questions
contemplates
declares
proclaims
castigates
glorifies
annuls
& celebrates
the dreaming of the end
of life as we know if.
Dwarf Tale
I think of you, tonight
Up there in your rafters
Spinning the fleece into gold
And speaking the secret names.
I was told once
I had an abnormal grasp
Of Rumplestiltskin, another spinner.
He did not get the child, either.
But at least he got the last word,
before falling through the trap-door
poor punished weaver
guilty only of loving children
and secrecy.
What a lightweight.
And what of that tearing in two?
That is sort of trap-door-like,
such piecing of one's self into parts.
And never pretty. The afterimages are really pretty gross.
No one wants to watch, and yet they do
And yet they do.
And what of the child?
That is always the question, isn't it?
There he is, all squalling and prescient.
That trap door stuff is pretty rough
It's kind of hard to keep secret
There will be repercussions.
The princess who faked her way in will have a lot of stories to tell,
She will be kept quite busy with all this.
The kid will grow up wondering just what all that was about
The bit about the dwarf and the gold
that he hears about from servants, rarely
just before they grow old.
It will never be clear, he'll never quite get the straight story
dig under floorboards though he may.
That dwarf must be down here somewhere,
he’ll think.
He’ll know he didn’t just make this all up.
Sooner or later, he’ll get around to it
He’ll look for a revelation of names
Layered in strata,
All the way to China.
Fault Line
Because you have been so kind,
you have ruined me.
You have left me sitting, with a fool's smile,
In the detritus of our delightful disappointments
Diligently assembling the latest set
of minor miracles
Trying to persevere
on the other side of the terrible mirror.
Lately it has been raining for a long time.
It is like crying. You get your feet wet.
And then there is all this mud.
Heavy duty.
But, the sun comes out at times,
The rain falls off my shoes,
the wind blows it away,
and you are not gone, only missing.
All of this later, all over,
Breaking things to bits, right and left.
It must be spring!
or at least some sort of cracking.
It must mean something, all of this disarray.
I should be able to find it handy.
Broken pieces, more spare parts.
Clastic debris
Grist to the mill.
Useful stuff.
stalkers
(with apologies to Malvina Reynolds)
Little stalkers on the roadsides
Little stalkers made of tickytacky
Little stalkers, little stalkers, little stalkers, all the same
There’s a tall one, and a short one, and a smart one, and a stupid one
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.
And the stalkers on the roadsides
All fell for misogyny
And they all turned into stalkers and they all came out the same
And there’s artists, and there’s poets, and environmental activists
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same
And they all show up at parties and pretend that they’re sweetiepies
And they all have little routines and and the routines go in spiels
And then later in the evening, the moves start to escalate
And it all turns into stalking and it all comes out the same.
And the stalkers haunt their victims at every opportunity
And the victims grow more anxious and more anxious every day
Until one day, they go postal, when the stalkers take it just too far
And the victims have the ticky-tacky stalkers all just blown away.
Dumpster Diaries; haiku for trashpickers
Early, vegetables
Broken, dented, disheveled
Soon, fading flowers.
He is tall, she short
From inside, she passes him
Lower fruit strata.
Rumbling, squealing doors
Harbingers of hopefulness
Make our ears perk up.
There are protocols
At dumpster intersections
It’s first come, first served.
Baseball cap lady
Ubiquitous, obnoxious
Hardened retiree.
Often, twelve roses
Sometimes, several dozen
Once, even hundreds.
One day the meat truck
Came to get the viscera
They left a shrimp trail.
Steel hooks are useful
A clever one, well hidden
Serves for so many.
SUV’s arrive
Inside, folks with picking tools
No one is immune.
His cigarette hangs
From his left hand, while reaching
Chicken on the right.
Every day he comes
Coughing and bellowing comes
To get his chicken.
Cats festoon the wall
Watch with curiosity
Waiting for handouts.
Looking late for meat
He rages, clatters, berserk
He lights the Dumpster.
He lit the matches
He dropped them in the Dumpster
Howling in the night.
A pyre of flame shot
From the top of the dumpster
The police came soon.
The cop car wailing
A three a.m. hot pursuit
Under my window.
Today, signs went up
"Go away, diggers," they said
But soon, they were gone.
Baseball cap woman
Calls herself a trashdigger
Yelling at no one.
Box of little birds
Discarded doves, late of signs
No children allowed.
Dead cat, in a box
Plastic-wrapped, to be buried
In a kind of sea.
This week, a carton
Of orchids, in water slips
Prom disappointments.
Bees get lost in bags
Emerging, sticky, humbled
Flee to my garden.
I trashpick scraps of
Produce for my compost pile
What must people think?
Broken-toothed, he gapes
When I say "Hello" to him
And tell him my name.
Slumped over, he waits
One more rock falls from the wall
The chicken’s way late.
Peppermint ice cream
Barely melting, just left there
How mysterious.
cheese as lunch
The cheese stands alone
One thing about being the cheese,
Is that there is a lot of room,
And also, you get to be in the middle.
It has been said
That when your ass is on the line
You are well situated.
It has also been said, that he who hesitates is lunch.
But, what else is the cheese to do?
All there alone in the middle
Dodging relentlessly.
It is a sort of structured hesitation, all of this getting out of the way.
Backed off; everybody else is in the picture.
The cheese is the camera.
The cheese is the lunch. The cheese gets it in the gut.
Lessons:
Don't be in the middle.
Run, don't dodge.
Play with your own ball.
painted bird
Up into the zillion skies, you fly
All this paint tends to wear off.
What improvidence.
The fires of soul don't provide enough coal
And hence you sink, you sink.
Like a freighter planted underneath an iceberg
Bad planning.
Ill fortune washed up with detritus
Iceberg lettuce. Always too pale.
Up to the beach, with the rubble. Dead hymens and broken seals
Up with the bones of death, and the bones of love.
Litter. Do not forget
about twigs planted in fairytales, that bore fruit
Or the metal gardens none dared report
There is more than one way to skin a cat
Or even plant a garden.
Things fruit out, it is so often a surprise
That one must suspect this instinct towards fruition
It can't possibly be holy. It must be a ruse.
winter nadir poem
I have not been much, though it has been easy to be a lot,
flowing through the loopholes, seeing what ain't
Being an ersatz saint, as if that was complicated.
I liked your eyes. I thought it was neat, how you stared
as through wooden legs.
Your vision was precise, and imbued with fibres.
And you laughed; how you would laugh!
As if the very centipedes of eternity, winding their legs over you, over and over again
could not sustain you, could not impede your progress into fire. One thought of ashes.
And there you were.
(all poetry written by Miep Rowan O'Brien, except for "Dumpster Diaries," co-written by Miep Rowan O'Brien and Gary Nickelson. All photos by Miep Rowan O'Brien. All rights reserved.)