new cafe' cafe'

The new location for cafe' cafe is here.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2224667413

Thank you,
Didi Menendez

On the beach at Midnight

Breath out.
All that was Diego is breathed out,
as if he were beheaded
and his blood was spilled on
the universe and merged with its flow.
I enter the horizon nameless
like an eagle released to the sky.

Breath in.
Over the skyline, stars
propel towards him and
enter his mouth in cascades of
white liquid fire.
He inhales me back, joined
with the sound of god’s whisper.

DQ 12/15/06

pocket of loose change
after release from darkness
a child sees glitter

Words to You

No words can gain
back that moment just
before I spoke dumbly
hurting you. Things
bearing hard on you—

And me, suddenly
completely useless in
ability, can not turn
the back walking away
back to me.

Lorna Dee's New Viet Nam War Poem - Audio/ Odeo/ Podcast

... despite the flu, and between the sniffles and the coughs -- I think Sylvia Plath was the first to discover how fever feeds the Muse, but I don't recommend it. See if this works; you may need to crank up the volume. You can also podcast it if you have iTunes, just do a search under my name until the link appears. Stay well. Here's the poem:


powered by ODEO

What George Harrison Saw
When He First Got To Heaven

I met John wandering around in heaven,
all the dead children in the decaying halls
made him sad and angry, the barbed wire fences

seemed to stretch forever
like that Microsoft background on your desktop.
Cows were guarding the fences,

cows with rifles in tall towers.
John had been looking for the warden
since day one,

but the warden wouldn’t see him.
John wrote protest songs,
they took away his guitar,

John wrote protest songs,
they took away his piano.
I met John wandering around in heaven.

Caution: I'm not a real poet I just pretend
to be one on the Internets!

symptom as a silence

there were two events to mark inertia's end the first a spiraldic spit bead ungluing itself from a spider-leg's-breadth chest hair although what the moisture was doing there or how it came to be no one cared to question the second a holy replication of this the first and this the second which no one commented upon because the bead grew from pearl to circle-like and dropped we knew not where

and there were other observances that went, well not with the history but with the slowed slough of skin by teeth more used to ripping meat it was the eating of it she longed to do and pursed her cheeks to stop saliva from drooling out out of her her mouth and looking like an old person old and were young in our grabbing of each other and the gasps filled up the otherwise silence he the

crawling seeps went everywhere there were no stalwart strengths to share, only ineptitudes at this point their fingerprints left whorls upon stains so the stains were by then dried they had been lax in their cleaning and we were there when they were reminded rules and each dust a rule and each speck and each careening into the microbe heart of it all

lush pansies and red satin and rooshed fancies no words for above all a daring above that a canopy of sorts above that the hope of bleeding until empty this would become part of their history the shared part but of that later and only later would dare think it seepage too the order for this something so unmechanical it raised hope to otherness

and was not discussed as the first two were the almost absence sentimentality shorted to a dull pull the throb the glassy drop as sweat would if effortful as if after all a carnivorous desire more to sink the teeth the chalkiness into more bruise to get at true the soft lightness of flesh more to screw need into to

steer by stairs as all goodness goes up as if prayers so nails bartered their seconds away and then that first thin thin warning of it at the sides of the mouth all a belonging some a throated gesture some a barely half-disguised swallow one step backwards then the hungry float a pit for a stomach

as if sepsid caved the deep ganglia the deep the craving part sensuous part animal fled from sense to mystery to fetid to mere human choice where no maker rules where all dared unholy replication no one cared how over soon how this will be (gesso-flat) over

soon barely breathe and sick and I must stop the whole room from spinning hold a small corner of it tack the ceiling down tie the corners by ribbon-shreds tally how many too numerous to strand make some tiny plithy ropes from this sallow the cheek once flare now so hollow lamina filaments to conduct the whisper-spirits

hush he will say rest now so the ruached arch tendencies are laid gentle as dying gentle as folding stars displaying far reached membrances lady-lace strokes to calm the beating throbbing all nothing left and then there was a finality as if the parting had to be a bog-fevered why or

or why or how it came to be we knew not in our grabbing of the lesser time so the stains remained an absence of sentimentality so sunken the cheeks could not glean of it sunken and hollow as only dying can to bruise to mitigate the repetition by tied corners to settle the world sweated beaded mouthed not nor dared to question

but easy easy

Seychelles

With the lisp of water over sand
her voice awakens the sleeper
to a gull-blue day.

Gold and kohl lines the creases
around her eyes and her toes
carry the russet dust
of Africa's trails.

Her fingers linger
over shallow hollows
of inner elbow,

her voice makes patterns
in the mind of the sleeper
like waves upon sand,

today's paper awaits.

And the winner is

Everyone that posted a poem below this thread in the Aubade challenge. Email me your address. These were beautiful and I think I enjoyed reading these the most of any challenge I have ever done.

Goodnight.
Didi

Request

Please don't use this blog anymore to announce your contests, new publications, etc. It is really become annoying to read the poems. Use one of the other places I have invited you to join instead. I will aslo avoid placing news here. Okay I WILL stop placing news here -- and I will delete all other news.


Didi

Aubade for Laurel and Ascending

Ascending

Fragile wrists jeweled by stars
thin arms raised above the wind
hold the horned owl wings.
Both free and soothing gray,
like a drybrushed autumn
in a Helga painting.

Dance now. Dance while your
bones are hollow, dance and let

the red leaves scatter with your swirls.
And you, Ascending, show her
the face to become print
in the loose flap of a book.

Dawn. It rises like a mountain
and the star dance must end.
Desdend. Its slope is
treacherous and cold like
a poem not written, like a
book thrown in the river.

Give your anger to the sun.
It stole the gentle voice who
told how pigeons congregate
under ripples of the sea.
The voice that showed you
a small mirror in the shape of a book.

Today is the deadline for the Aubade challenge

I mean it. I am announcing a winner before I go to bed tonight.

In other news, I am looking for a PJ. Stop by here for further information.

Didi

Aubade for Pris & Baylus

Baylus turns and says
look! Sky is separating
from land, you can see
the line of the mountains.

Pris says, have some tea,
have a cookie, comfort
Teddy. That line is still
hazy and dim, don't go.

Baylus drinks the air.
Baylus rocks a bear.
Baylus pulls his boy-
sword, and vows

to stay the grownups.
Pris makes a nest
of blankets, pillows
and plush elephants.

Baylus says, it's time
now, it's time for you
to fly. I fade now. I
fade.

IOWA

IOWA
muse aubade for mine – this was

when you laughed – hysterically
that night – it was the perfect place

to end – the muse of mine
you were – where I am left

now – I must piss which
escapes my mind – since

worn – walkways
line one – milk box

from the next – heavy route
towards becoming – believably

barely believable – even polished
to bare – minimums

under articles – your loin
cloth – barely covers

your covering – warm
hands – warming still

your golden disc – really flares up
iowa's highest tide – your expectant

voice – tears
as it turns – everything

purple – even blue
was purple – it was really

weird – every minute
of our eighty hour day – a finch

on a branch – being subjective
in two minutes – of heaven

instead – what sucked
is history – your song

on the subject – blew minds
while nailing men down – just keep on nailing

all those nails – then go chew
your own nails – down

in the corner – to the quick
history you have – looking only

on numbers – caring less how
long lived – longing living

is what is – never enough
assurances – but consider

this right now – may be
you – given your goodbye

but first – let me nurse
your overstressed – hermaphroditic bud

blooming in late summer – the caw calls
for a fall fast – they built a subway

exactly where – our tent was
last minute – in Iowa

I had assumed – it was dawn
several times – it became obvious

it was dusk – time to push
hard manly – "ya well bite me"

before a feminized – "ya your insensitive
prick...hmpfff" – crosses arms

legs lips shift – slightest evidence
forming – a long line

of circles – in unison
repeating some – from former selves

before the crust of earth – became some
dime store dinner ware – your blood spills

at the slightest twitch – of one follicle
your pupils flutter – even without light

much less gravity – in the front seat
could you please – be more

interesting – you ask
regarding – other points

of interest – which was but fortune
sweet lass...hmm – how touching

you wearing – on your bare skin
these patterns – even imperfection

can yield – fortunes
upon fortunes – of agelessness

your laugh – a river of gold
however early – it was

~lds06

Aubade, tal vez

Con gracias a la musa de Didi --


será rojo

rojo el alba
rojo lo que cante la mañana
roja la isla rojo el día
que llegamos a la orilla poblada
de todos los vivientes y insurgentes
rojas las flores del mundo nuevo
rojas las hojas del libro que ya te di
rojas las palabras que ahora me hablas
roja la ezperanza de nuestros niños
aquí nos toca el viento de las colinas azules
el crepuscular ardiente de las rosas estrelladas
roja la calle rojo el polvo
por donde venimos llevando en el aire
limpio y duro las banderas de color de la mañana
rojo el limón y rojo el arroz
rojo el trabajo de mano rojo el descanso de corazón
roja la madre caminando en el río
rojo el padre sentado junto a la cuna
la clarinada del gallo bufón
la serenata plateada del ruiseñor soñador
el heraldo que grita a los amantes que se despierten
roja la isla roja la ciudad
de salir y volver de nos encontramos
y nos conoceremos
rojo el este el este de todos nuestros albas
rojo que te queremos rojo

Isle of Jura Writer Retreat program

The writer will receive:

* A bursary of £3000, plus return travel costs from the USA to the Isle of Jura [in bonnie Scotland! -- Ivy]
* Accommodation in the Isle of Jura distillery lodge for the month of August 2007
* The option to bring family/partner (N.B. travel costs will only be covered for the writer)
* A hire car

Scottish Book Trust will also seek to negotiate the writer's agreement to:

* Produce one short story (or other piece of creative work) inspired by the retreat to be broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in May 2008 (subject to acceptance of work by BBC) and reproduced in a publication and/or online and/or via a podcast
* Acknowledge the Isle of Jura retreat and bursary in next published book/work
* Participate (potentially with other authors who carry out retreats) in an Isle of Jura event at Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2007 (subject to EIBF agreement, all costs to the writer will be covered)
* Participate in a Tartan Week literary programme in New York (April 2007/April 2008, all costs to the writer will be covered)
* Collaborate with artist/printmaker from Glasgow Print Studios to make limited edition print inspired by the Isle of Jura


Criteria
Applications are open to writers of poetry and fiction resident in or from the USA, whose work has been published in English in both the USA and the UK.

Deadline: 2 February 2007.

Good luck!

forest hill aubade

seems any old abattoir foghorn makes you scurry your
shadow aping some testing rodent the plastic coffee-
cup & the platonic engagement you seek just myth
all convenient thoroughfares will disappear or whisper
hints of gasoline you know you can’t escape i like to
grow hard of a workday & worry the caress of mosquitos
away with my own hand a simple command to the dog
this says living like no other minor-farce courting
publication courting your teasing closetoyouness
it smells of ruin sometimes & if you're saying that
to hurt me i like it seriously & do it again
slaughter the animals we flambé with jazz
all the while thinking of our terms of engagement
everyone leaves emotional shit hanging over doors
& little alleys you clomp down them a mess of heat
it’s the flipside of love descending in a way i
always paint in those inconsequential puzzles
but then people etch out money too so for now
just show me what later sounds like in the nude

sphinx

eyes lost traipsing over her revolving skin
a pane of glass a slice of mirror hunger
in psychophysical pastels funneling slow spiral
a sweat hearted flow following she field
a train of thought rolling small of back
navel a monocle done gone more clearly see
that elsewhere is everything else but us
welcome to here we are under the influence
of stars drill bits burrowed through
to the soul pinned down arm thermometers
too much red bursting velvety so good
so fine sweetly and this is mystery region flat
on back body above going going down going gone

Verde Fue (for Diego's Muse)

Verde Fue


Verde fue la manana
Verde fue la isla cuando te fuistes
Verde fue la esperanza de tus padres
Verde fueron los olivos enredados
Que te esperanon en espana
Un nino solo sin patria
Verde fue la inocencia
Verde fue cuando te encontrastes
Verde fue cuando te desenredaste
Verde fue el arte
entre dedos verdes y aceitoso
y por primera vez vistes el verde
que te accompanara siempre.

Aubade December Poetry Challenge

Aubade
(for Finch’s disappeared muse)

Before the real light of day,
the snow’s fluorescence, illuminated
by the moon’s blade, the sharpest,
thinnest crescent, awakens and fools
me into believing you have left
already. The sheets are chilly, the bed,
empty; you are always leaving.
Standing in the window’s frame—
call me woman in pane, call me mourning—
I can see the craters your soles
will make, that your soul made,
where you will punch through the crust,
leaving a trail, a path of hollows
for me to follow through the cold,
the whiteness. But when I reawake in the real
light of day, the snow has melted,
and your prints that resembled a deer’s path,
or a coyote’s are erased. You are always
calling to me like the owl that knows
my name, the owl that questions the sky
and the trees, the owl that can’t tolerate
the night’s silence. You call me winter
morning; you call me thaw. I’d call you
everything; I’d call you leaving.
But you’ve never had a name,
so when you leave, I have no way
to beseech you to stay, to call you back;
I have no way to say goodbye.

David Crosby’s Old/New Liver

pale
swallows flight
throat down if

light
breaking tongue
lifts lip there

rising
ambitious(tion) held
chins ‘speptic was

dawn
twists turn(s)
back away testicles


harry k stammer

facebook

Facebook me!

muse

I'm not sure whether I have a muse or not, the idea has always seemed a bit hokey to me.
If I did have one I imagine she would have a silver disc face framed by a dark shawl. Her eyes are misty green hollows, soft with having seen too much and dreamt too long. She has slender pointed nails and a slipper lip (rounded and slightly fuzzy).
She dwells in a forest among the roots of a Boab tree and she gathers wild flowers and lives on nuts and berries. Her hair is long, soft, wild, and white. She is part dryad.
She is very vague and communicates in half formed words and snatches of dreams.
Most of the time she seems very far away, but sometimes she is very clear and forceful.
Sometimes she has the voice of the wind sighing through the leaves. Sometimes she has the voice of branches snapping and crackling in flames.

To Oaro M

Heading north by north east
into the nor'west,
all my ghosts
horde behind me.

The dusk is pink dust
rolled over the ocean,
the sun is a torch flame
licking the hill crest.

Everything seems serene
in the hot wind huff
along the shoreline,

but the black rainbow
bleeding down from the clouds
cannot be ignored.

My dead mother's voice whispers
from the brown plastic bowl,
the blue and white tin bread bin,
every fibre of carpet and curtain,
every glisten of paua
and curve of driftwood
in our old batch on the coast.

The moon peeps a blind white eye
through a chinked lid of sky -
and like memory
refuses to die.

I'm late -- can I still play Muse?

The Muse
4:00 a.m.

choose -- green
lime or shamrock?

paper money
in a shoebox

yellow -- quick!

sunlight on
polished oak

daffodils

trite trite trite

yellow --

that dead fox stole
on the woman's shoulders
in the Topper movie

wait


wasn't that in black&white?

yellow --

the fox stole the egg
with its yellow yolk

the muse works in mysterious ways

brrrinnng brrrinng brrrinnng click
SPEAK! !beep! _____________
_______________________. click


red --

the naked
human heart

The Second Part to the December Poetry Challenge

Everyone may participate in this part even though the majority of the bloggers here did not want to show us theirs. We are going to write an AUBADE for the second part of this challenge. Please pick one of the muses below and you as the observer, write an AUBADE between the muse and the mused. Stop by the WIKIPEDIA page to find out what an AUBADE is.

Deadline is December 5th.

The winner will receive this set of greeting cards -- ho ho ho.

my muse - december challenge -

My muse is stinky and awfully cute. Not too stinky that you can not tickle her. She doesn’t have a name, or it keeps changing. Once she was a guy sitting on a bench at the roller rink. I did not think she was very sexy that time. My muse is very sexy most the time. Either she is sexy or incredibly something else. But if it’s not sexy, then it must be incredible.

I try to ignore her sometimes, because she gets on my nerves and has a propensity to “keep me in check” which is bullshit. I mean, who (exactly) died and made her a muse?

I used to be more inclined towards her bits and pieces, but lately she has bored me. I have been bored with my muse for awhile. Sometimes she will hide away and then eventually come out, usually from a closet, with some weird messed up shit and then eventually, after scourging me properly, for no apparent reason, seeks short term reconciliation, at least long enough to build my trust and let me kick the shit out of her - she'll say - "that's bullshit you stupid bitch!" is the same as a kicking if you scream it loud enough

My muse likes things just so and is kind of like a fairy. She is bigger than a fairy, but that just might be illusion. I am never sure of such things. My muse is stupid, because she is caught up in ideals and thus is pleasured by mechanics of service. The physical favors of machines. The printing of money and the waking of dead things sometimes.

In the winter, she is really annoying. In the winter her one-tracked mind really kicks in. I am led to believe that she truly believes that what she gives to me is for my benefit, but I tend to assert that it is in fact for her benefit. “Shall I argue or be scourged?” I asked one day as I pled. She has never responded. It must be nice.

dear

amidst delicious shadows gone outward after you whisp'ring body the moon joined through appearance crossing you daydreamed haply voice of monday

regards distances swaying together sweeping stranger two-syllabled let's lay each like wanting to light between november and december that desire drunk down we'll remember pleasing given having joy delighted fortune so telling the features flying magnetic silhouettes into excitement widening shaking commotion recombined

fluid upon fluid waves conspire sweet beauty rode nude prescription wildly over tomorrow evening

My Muse --December Poetry Challenge (Pris)

My Muse is Baylus. He first appeared when I was four. Since I was an only child, he walked into my life to become my friend. Even though he was a boy muse, he tolerated my mud pies, treasured my air tea, and played joyfully with my paperdolls. When summer arrived, he wandered with me to the edge of the woods behind our house, held my hand, and whispered stories about Indians and boogiemen who ate little girls who didn't have muses to protect them.

Mother, a first grade teacher with muses of her own, later told me she was advised by the small town nose-pokers that imaginary playmates were a sign of mental illness. She was to ignore Baylus, to tell me that what glowed only in my inner eyes was not real. Fortunately, she didn't listen. She held the back door open long enough for Baylus to come through with me if I told her he was lagging and set a place at the table for him if I said he was hungry.

Through Baylus, I saw stories rise out of the woods, fall from the sky on angel wings, swim in the mudpuddles after a hard rain. As I grew older, Baylus no longer followed me around, but he has never left. I still hear him on the edge of a cello note and see him in a tear's reflection. He has never wavered in his determination to remind me to listen with a child's ears and see with a child's eyes, then have the courage to write it.

My Muse - for December Challenge

My Muse doesn't show her face and I'm only referring to her as "her" because it's the common custom. When I go walking in the evening and I hear the wind high in the tree leaves, when I get home on a mild evening (like tonight) and I see a hazy crescent moon through the tree branches, when I'm lying awake at night and the sounds of the night streets are whispering through the window, when I hear an owl fluting in the pine trees of the cemetery or when I hear the long fading horn of a freight train from the tracks a mile away at some nameless hour before dawn, when I'm standing by the edge of a frozen lake in the pit of winter on the longest night of the year and the sky is clear and cold and the stars are sharp and bright and the air is so cold it's a million tiny mouths biting all over, at those times and many others like them I can hear the voice of my muse.

My Muse (or muse -- she's not one to stand on ceremony) sometimes comes and finds me and starts jabbing me in the ribs subtly. After several days of increasing irritable mood I begin to realize I need to write something. After another three or four days of this I can start writing. I've learned over the years to endure long dry periods alternated with periods of frenzied constant writing. It's one fanatical biorhythm we've worked out together.

Sometimes I have to go seeking after the muse. Sometimes I can find her if I look at the last evening light above the treetops, or if I listen to the crows calling at earliest morning light. Sometimes I can find her if I sit up late reading Lorca or Transtromer or Rexroth or Yosano Akiko or Miroslav Holub or Tom McGrath or Sharon Doubiago or Joy Harjo or Tu Fu or Sappho.

However one of the most reliable ways to find her is to go walking, slowly, the pace of slow ocean waves. This isn't easy living in the center of a huge land mass a couple of thousand miles from the ocean, though the lakes here have enough of a tidal rhythm (if on a smaller scale) to somewhat echo the ocean sound. Water helps but is not essential -- if I just walk at the slow pace, I begin to get the inkling of the muse, the slow walking rhythm which is the basic ground rhythm in most of my poems, I start feeling the tidal pull of the earth and the poems start to float to the surface, and if I'm paying attention I'll start to write.

The muse (or Muse, according to the common custom), or whatever else she cares to be called, has never told me her name.

Seychelles - The Decmeber Challenge continues

She asked me to play Bolero as I write this. Yes, like Diego mentioned previously in a poem there is eroticism in the sound of the flutes and the drums in the background resembles the sound of the poems born in a mortar as I crush garlic into sea salt and rub it into Thanksgiving's dinner. The sea, and an island off Africa, there is where she came from hence her name Seychelles and unlike Diego’s Muse mine is the color of Mozambique when she is fired up. She has no wings like Laurel’s for she leaves those for the real angels gathered in Dulce’s house and she definitely is not a Devil like Derek’s muse. She has traveled from the tip of Africa up to the coast and once landed in the eyelids of a half Moor and half Jew woman who lived off the coast of Spain on one of the Canary Islands. She prefers to inspire bastards and thieves who later conquer greatness. Yes she asked me to play Bolero and she is behind me now marching, twirling a baton too close to my head trying to awaken the past.

More after I meet the rest of the Muses.

cattle-prod or, why not enter a december poetry challenge?

my muse tells me that i can live the life of at least one and a half normal people. he tells me this not in spoken words, but in a series of unconscious gestures. he mocks the way animals communicate. i can never be certain of his intentions, or whether what he says is intended as communication. he eschews absolutes. one day i nearly caught him in a mirror. he looked disturbingly like me. or perhaps i imagined this. the possibility i was simply projecting an image has occurred to us both. creating. this is what my muse wants. to trick me into an act of creation; to disturb the peace. i hate him. i gender my muse, make him a man because men are easier to hate. but on half-asleep afternoons he nearly tells me about his femininity. he makes me wear high-heels when no-one is around. he wants to have my baby. he promises the extra half-life i earn in his service will be of depth, not length. he lords both words and experience over me. he cries if i ignore even one performance. my muse is a devil.

December Poetry Challenge: Hi, my name is _________

Her Name is Ascending

My muse is winged. At first, I mistook her for an angel. She hovered above my bed when I was five. She told me my grandmother died. She told me that I was alive; she told me the dark was nothing to be afraid of; she told me that the dark was my friend. My muse reminds me to live when I forget or try to give up. My muse stops me in the middle of street and shows me a flock of pigeons swirling like fish. She shows me the shadow of the peregrine as it soars through the shadow of me. My muse tells me I can fly like that. My muse tells me I was born with wings. My muse insists I listen to the great horned owl asking the night for love before I go to bed. My muse forms my hand into the cup that scoops up the stunned mourning dove from the sidewalk and places it among the impatiens. My muse reminds me of the pulse in my throat fluttering like a moth; my muse reminds me how thin the skin of my wrist is. When I look into the mirror, I see my muse rolling over and through me, wave after grey wave. When I stand still in autum, I feel her pulling me, lifting my arms to the wind, promising that I am hollow-boned, that I have a soul, that I will rise. Up, she whispers. Up.

DQ's Muse - December Submission

My Muse has no name. At least not known to me. I can tell you little about her. I have no idea where she goes when she’s not with me, I don’t know if there are other writers or artists on her rounds, I don’t know where she came from or why she visits me.
Here is what I know about her. She is a naked woman with long dark green hair, green eyes, and light green skin. Sometimes she walks around my home while I write, sometimes she stands behind my desk, other times she sits on my bed. She wears three Hibiscus flowers on her hair, usually pink, sometimes yelow. She drops subtle whispers here and there, words, sentences, titles, ideas. Rarely anything complete from start to finish. I have noticed that there are some words she’s drawn to. “Amber” and “Ecstasy” were two of the first ones I came across after reviewing old poems we wrote.
She often speaks of the moon. She's moody. She is not patient. She's bitchy most of the time. She is telling me to write this. She has asked me to capitalized the word “You” on occasion, saying that “You” should be capitalized the same as “I”. Who knows, maybe she’s right.

At first, I would only hear her voice when I sat at my writing desk. Years later, I saw her for the first time. It was a brief moment. I sat at my desk after a long sabbatical from poetry, and there she was, standing next to me holding out a pen. She whispered “Its time to write”, she then moved behind me and guided me through several poems by whispering words in my ear. From the brief look I got of her, she looked like this.

We’ve developed a working relationship through out the years. We now collaborate more. She has posed for me on occasion, as with this CD cover (on which she had to wear one of my old motorcycle vests for the band to avoid a “Parental Warning” label).

She has made only one request from me. I must mention her every time I raise a glass and toast to something. So, if You and I ever sit together and have a glass of wine, You will say “Cheers”, and I will say “To the Muse, to the moon, and to this moment”.

The December Poetry Challenge - PART 1 of 2

Seychelles
I want to be introduced to your Muse. Seychelles has been bothering me since yesterday to be introduced to you. She stood on top of the rim of the bear claw white bathtub as I cleaned the grout of the white sink. She sat in the back seat of the black Cherokee on my way to work. "Tell them where I came from" she said. I thought about it and let her simmer a while as I took out the garbage, put another load of laundry to wash, as I sat down and broke rosemary and olive oil bread with my children as I threw bits of chicken to the dog sitting at attention for a bit of morsel as I sat in the computer and uploaded audio as I built another web page. So anyway I will be happy to show you mine if you show me yours.

This is the first part of the December Poetry Challenge.

Tell me about your Muse. Please place your story on a new thread. Please make sure to state on the title that this is a submission to the poetry challenge. Once I have been introduced to at least 10 Muses, I will post the second part of the challenge.

Donald Hall ON LOCATION with Grace Cavalieri

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO GRACE'S PAGE ON ITUNES or Stop by Grace Cavalieri's page on miPOradio.net.

Call for Submissions Loch Raven Review Winter Issue

Hi everyone

The deadline to submit to the Winter 2006 issue of Loch Raven Review is Thursday, November 30. The issue will post in December so you won't have to wait long to know if your work is accepted. (Reading period is November 15 - December 15.)

Check out our submissions policy http://www.lochravenreview.net/guidelines.html

Good luck! We hope to see submissions from some of you.

Best regards

Christopher T. George and Jim Doss
Editors, Loch Raven Review
Loch Raven Review

Introducing AFTER HOURS with Robert Bohm

Listen to it on iTunes:




Or stop by Robert Bohm's page on miPOradio.net.

Talking her down

The province of motion
is a pitiful act. Divest
the volume, skip the intro,
make maps out of your hellos.
Outtake your obeisance!
You have these miraculous
feathers in your throat.
You would like me to coax her
if soot were the probable cause.
Scope the pond for mind-over-leaf.
Mortician says: it will be a willful
display, for the skin is liver-marked.
Spotted among the drips, the crowless feet.
Bank left over the city. There's a stadium.
There you are dressed in pink, a lightning
robbed of its equation, foreground.
I have nonchalance as cover-up, no margin
for error, a felony in the plush peach
sans lips as my only ripe offering.
Beyond the vocal register, it is my sun
the one that rolls its Rs and expects
me to be frightened lifts its dress.
A tar roof, utterly sky. Constellatory.
She is sister, the younger, waif one.
The megaphone is shofar dipped in leg wax.
Et lux begins a descent, you can make it.
The net counts on her. Applause is
the dry laundry of rush hour.

Hôtel Nouvel

I think it’s nice now

just never felt that the lobby could hold
You sleeping and me sleeping
Still in our chairs this much later
After the gondola light of downtown pullses
into the glass doors.

At ten o’clock. At 2 o’clock
The Porters’ carts
Brush by now and some are
Neatly arranged by the elevator
(burnished glow in the elevator
door,tallow,You going over/upsetting a lamp
)

I’m trying
I say now it’s no crisis

But the out-of-town couple ready to check in
for the day
They’re looking rather defiant. Happy

you say
Everything is set
Give me that key junior

He has his hand on her neck.
She’s not backing into his knee, exactly.
Not backing.
Though we couldn’t tell, very well,
from this sleepy angle,
whether they were walking,
Or waltzing

But 20 stories above
It’s Less confused
The clean sheets and the hot water
The good view
not a concern of ethics
Not many colors;sculpting
Reds and bronzes
Same in the tapestries on the walls

And on the walls
Which are just
a few feet away

Stormbird

She dwells in his embrace
like a dove returned home.

His hands fold like wings
against her back and raise her up.

In his kiss she feels the wild
flutter of sky, in his gaze

the quickening of lightning.

He is the nest
and the edge of the storm,

she's poised like a feather
on the rim.

I Have Forgotten the Word

I have forgotten the word that
was on my mind that night,

the one that destroyed all categories
into which everyone must neatly fit.

I know there were natives present.
But everywhere one goes, it seems,

there are natives. What was I thinking
that has broken barriers down?

Is there a word that transcends all difference
and sets me on God’s ground, unafraid

yet unable to forget those people I was
filing away? Was it in a dream?

for a boy i used / to know

---

a junkies palette of primary colours
reflects / green red orange / off the wet pave ment /

it's 3 am in the morn ing
& we are doing / the east side shuffle

the east side / getting high / getting
down / getting home scuffle

& that boy / with his tattoo skin /
cover ed in / ink / coat ed in / pain

keeps pace be side me /
a skate board under his arm

he looks at me /
& rain drips from his eye brows

his worn converse runners / slop a long
as we / trace the bus route / back to

the cock roach hotel / also known as
13th street / the place where i live

november rain soaks us
my hair stuck wet / to my face / &

my jeans are heavy / plaster ed to my legs /
& my hands are red / & my hands are cold

34 city blocks / fuck /
i wish i had a car /

& that boy
he smiles @ me /

& tips his face to the sky / his veins
are full / of sugar water & poison

& / i want to get him home to 13th street
to where i live / so i can taste his hands /

so i can press up a gainst /
his shiver ing body

rain falls / in never end ing streaks /
white lines spill thru the haze of coastal fog /

block after block / of orange
street light & white rain & we / keep walk ing

there is no end ing / only the middle of
the end / there is no / love / just attraction

we have / cigarettes & speed /
it's a mutual under stand ing /

there is no moral crisis / there is /
only me & the boy walk ing home /

in the rain








/

Beginnings of Lightness

Their bodies, luminous eggs,
glob along beaches,
golden ovals on black shoals of shingle.

They bounce against the edges of cities,
quiver and wobble beneath the velvet cloth
upon which the moon glimmers a rib-bone.

Endlessly pining, they seek
to engage one another, never realising
the birth they long for is their own.
Slick, thick, oily membrane envelops them
repelling friend and foe alike.
They remain trapped in their aloneness,

cast about themselves for points of view,
for the blade of truth that sets them free.

Alas they bobble,
little bobbleheads -
one by one
down the streets of the enfolding years -
blind, deaf, dumb,
reproducing in brief mitosis,
storing data in streams of binary codes
to explain why they are alone.

A collection of knowledge, opinions
from this one and that,
in attempts at longevity,
the hope that accumulated chicken scratches
might someday illuminate -

never realising the perfect completeness
of their viscous egglike forms,
missing the white light that flares within.

Chain Poem

I must confess ... I've been tinkering with the chain poem too ...
it crept into a couple of things I had been messing about with.


Stone Roses


In my hand I hold a desert rose,
chalk edges on petals of stone.

I am the moon,
dusted into your eyes.
The sound of your name,

soft as sands
flowing to the call
of the wind in the desert,

eats away the stone
bloomed in my palm.

In the hot breath of rose
we fade -

Chain of poems

Little by little a group of more or less linked poems has been forming here and possibly elsewhere: Laurel, Lorna, Keros, Didi, I've lost track of who else. A few nights ago I started working on one, found the rest of it this evening. Thanks to all who have laid the trail this far.

***

moon, silver, water, wind

voice that calls out rolling over the treetops.
moon, silver, water, wind, leaves, wings, night.
the light fails at the end of the year,
light of the heart, curled to a whisper.
sitting in your house we look at each other
with blank eyes. bare oracle a kitchen light.
october leaves in the yard. the rug
pungent with ammonia and salt. the cat
hops cinnamon-furred room to room
chasing lights that vanish, her eyes
crazy green comprehending. you streak
our faces with phosphorescent paint.
walking out into the dark we become
pale green skeletons, x-rays of ourselves.
we look to each other for solace, for promise,
and find shadow, bird bones, nothing.
at the bus stop i get on the bus
and you turn and walk back home.
mist that spills out rolling among the tree trunks.
car headlights along the lake. we speak
and our words pass through each other, like this.
night, silver, leaves, wings, wind, water, moon.

Watching Carla, 1961

FOR ED KNIGHT


Out garage
window

                wind

                lashing the brush box
                back and forth,
                               forth and back,

then in
                a vortex:
                               roots, trunk
                               and leaves,

                spin-rip, right
                               out and up.

No Place Like

No Place Like

Don’t say that my heart is the moon;
you aren’t the earth and my love is not a distant

satellite, pulled. My heart isn’t that sharp curve,
a scythe that rises only under cover of darkness.

My heart is not that hole when the moon
is new and its light, absent. My heart is not full;

it does not call to wolves or signal harvest.
My heart is a witch. My heart is a dog.

My heart is a brick. My heart is a tornado,
a wind spinning back on itself. My heart can tear

a house apart. Don’t you get it? My love is oil
and straw. My love is a fear-filled roar. My love

is the red field that lulls. My love is heels. My love
is the road. My love is the impossible journey home.

Bolero

I could never understand
why I found the Bolero to be so arousing
until this afternoon.
I was standing on the pier
that crowns the end of South Beach
listening to the tide come in.
That is when I realized
that the Bolero is a symphony
that depicts a sexual journey.
Its rhythm is a slow mantra like the sea
music balanced on the wave’s crest.
A subliminal audio aphrodisiac.
Melody. Countermelody.
Ebb. Flow. The slow hammer
of the hip orchestrated in rhapsody.

The Bolero begins quietly.
A flute plays over the rhythm of a snare drum.
A reference to the phallus
and the heart’s response to sexual stimulation.
The melody is then passed
between different instruments
bassoons, the oboe, trombone.
An obvious allure to the importance of foreplay
and the worship of different body parts.
The accompaniment becomes gradually
thicker and louder until the whole orchestra
is playing at the very end.
Passion. Crescendo. Climax. A succession of Yesses.
The sound progresses from soft to loud
and just before the end,
there is a sudden change of key.
The sound descends from a dissonant
B-flat chord to a C-major chord.
Orgasm…and
And finally, it becomes that melody
you remember enjoying, but
can’t quite recall what its called.
You're out the door.

I stood a the pier at the end of South Beach
this afternoon and heard the tide come in.
I remembered a woman I made love to years ago,
she had long dark hair, and beautiful brown eyes.

DQ 11/10/06

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez

Pre-orders now available for Mortal, my new book of poems.
Published by Red Morning Press.

Thanks for checking it out! :-)

New Moon

(after Laurel, who wrote a poem after Lorna, who wrote a poem after me, who wrote a meme poem after Dorothy)

That night after the theater,
me and me crossed lives
a second apart. Tick.
I knew the tin man’s chest
would always be hollow. Tock.

You would find out years later.

We were in my car, the top was down,
I saw the moon pedaling
the sky in slow motion.
She sliced a yellow path
through the canopy of clouds,
her crescent edges sharp as hunger pains.
She was young and thin and her face
made mine glow like a moan.

I was falling.

Falling like a glass kite
on the sky's black painted bricks.
Lava flowed around my pelvis.
My skin burned like a witch.
I saw your dark mane swooping
up my chest, your anklet’s bells
reminisced of Pink Floyd’s “Money”
while your leg stretched below
the glove compartment.

You asked me if I loved you.

I said Yes.

Tick. If the moon’s crescent edge
had sliced my silver can,
instead of clouds,
you would have known the truth
much sooner. Tock.

DQ 11/7/06

Leaving Behind

We have the memories,
their hands
raking our ground,
almost waking
the dirt of our past.
You’re here,
never needing
to hang on to the things
we each grew out of,
laughing about the fires
that burn us away
to take us back
clean and bright,
calling aloud to us
to breathe.

It's spring here on Papalote Mountain
(not to be confused with Wolverton
Mountain)so while I was cleaning out
the garage I found a hand-scrawled
copy this poem which I posted on
my blog awhile back.


Homemade Girl

The sixteen-year-old
Palestinian girl,
bombs strapped

under her breasts
to hide the bulge
walks into the pizza place

and triggers the bomb.
There’s no sound,
no pain.

That was easy,
everything became nothing…
They find pieces of her,

her hair, skin, brain matter
mixed with pizza,
stuck on a chair,

but they find that
her mind
is still intact

and lying on the floor.
Her thoughts
are there

for all to see,
but all of us, every single one of us
looks away

before we
start thinking
what she’s thinking.

Avatar Review Call for Submissions

The reading period for Issue 9 - Landscapes is open through January 2007.

For submission guidelines see here:

http://avatarreview.net/submissions.html

At Nam Viet Pho 79: dining alone, I browse the paper [boomerang]

An international group of ecologists and economists warned yesterday that the world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, based on a four-year study of catch data and the effects of fisheries collapses....

  -- World's Fish Supply Running Out, Researchers Warn (front page, Washington Post, November 3, 2006)

As a special treat   I've ordered Pho Seafood tonight
awaiting my bowl   I glance at the newspaper headlines
if marine biologists   really have got things right
the bowl of the ocean   is facing a treacherous deadline
the sea after all   is source of an ancient breadline
the fisherman stands at its window   beaming and bright
every day for a million years   on these loaves he's fed fine
as a special treat   I've ordered Pho Seafood tonight

the lemonheads 97

evan dando wears a red rain coat
the door he hunches through chipped
& red too – any other night of clarity
you might feel walked over instead
stand soaking up a half-filled bar
a handful of students & quiet
schooners warding off a nervous edge just
cut from not eating / crowd-buzz aloneness
around these the times of going out moshpit
loose & relaxed though it befits: mellow
when stretched alterna-distant else

evan plays guitar as if
he wants to be wrapped up in bed
it’s nice it’s plaintive then solid
with pitch perfect distortion the
girl you’re pressed close to hums
to the knowledge & it rains; a boy
that calls for a drum solo gets one;
a car, a button, a cloth great visuals for
the let down evident as you curl up into
a floor-dark morning: no quiet sleep while
the seventy minutes of loss loops:
a stellar rendition of ‘break me’
always threatening to close

Meditation on Writer’s Block

In unnamed corners
of these blank spaces,
obscure and timid words
avoid my lantern’s beam.

They fear light like the undead.
They curse the writer’s day of harvest
and the prospect of slavery on paper.
Freedom ends when you are written.

My pen moves fast, my goal is simple:
Try to write as many as possible before they stampede.
I write fast, blotch the ink across the page
with the bottom my hand, like all lefties do,

and manage to capture three slow ones.
Legal size, readable, good color.
The school is fast, and most words scurry back
into the undefined darkness where they came from.

My three words lay there,
flat among the blue stains,
as I read them: “roses are red”.
I crumble the paper and let them go.

DQ 11/2/06

SEX with my wife on august 8th

sex with my wife on august 8th

felt very nice & has become as much of a baby as is possible in the months since.

-

Please Read:

~You, Time & Silly Dad - As of November.~

it is the first poeHymn i have completed related to this subject matter.

-

feel free to give some props to the impregnated nic-o-la...

congrats baby! i love you and you are beautiful!! also, dear one, my hope and faith is that this pregnancy will be healthy, safe and pleasantly uneventful for the three of us. ......... also, when i knocked you up... ...my eyes were shaking all rolled back halfway to my brain. it was awesome!!! smoochie XOX

-

baby due out end of april 2007 -

WANTED: IBPC editor for the cafe cafe blog

I would like to start participating in the IBPC aqain. I have been too busy in the last months to send in our poems for the monthly competition. I need someone to take care of this for me. The poems need to be sent in by the 30th each month. Only three poems may be sent in. The only two participants of this board whose poems you may not select from are David Ayers and me.

Everyone else who posts poems here is eligible for the selection.

Okay who is going to step up to the plate and help?

Didi

absolute liars

I am, I am, I am superman
--REM

Lord Lazarus looks
in a little white door
Sylvia Plath comes through
carrying her gown

she says Lazarus,
Hello
they soon lie down

after a while
they rise

meanwhile, here on earth
i’ve begun to bear a false witness
to my life

i feel there is some justice,
there in the fuselage
in the wheelspace
in the wreckage

in the wind
or the tree
or wherever

but the city is shaking
and i’m unable to stop that

how to make this world safe
for my children, who might want it?
how to make my lover hear me?

An Inch of Time

Time. How inadequate we define it.
Every definition of time
has the word time in it.
Why not define it in meters, inches,
or miles of moonlight.

Why not define it by the amount
of faces swallowed by history,
or by the count of hearts we’ve broken.
Why mention time when defining time.

Take the hourglass,
sand falls a certain distance.
Time can be defined in grains of sand
multiplied by drop height.

Take watches and clocks.
Each hand travels a given circumference,
same round distance, repeatedly.
Time can be defined in laps per hand.

The Big Bang, the beginning of time,
is nothing but a pod of stars in a single chrysalis,
chrome butterflies released to infinity.
Soft petals of light flowing
through the fabric of god’s blood, which is endless.

Destiny, the purpose of time,
is a dark haired Cuban woman
and she lies on my bed like a gift of vision,
a collection of strings and chimes
through smoking pyres of incense.

Our lips are an inch apart.
Where are you now
old withered hours.


D.Q. 10/31/06

Lorna Dee on KPFT radio - Audio Archive link

I just posted this to my blog. Hey, Didi, is there a way you can cut certain poems out of here? I read some challenge poems, including the last inspired by Diego's poem. Thanks so much for everything. Being here makes me a better writer. Poetry On!

*****************************

Click on the link to KPFT.org and follow the link to register, then click on link to "Audio Archives" and scroll down to Tuesday, Oct. 24 at 7:30 pm - Nuestra Palabra with Tony Diaz - to hear me on the radio. It's a good hour of poetry featuring "For My Ancestors Adobed In the Walls of the Santa Barbara Mission" with Chumash rattle, "Shelling the Pecans" with Mana on iPod, challenge poems from CafeCafe, a poem for the war dead, new love poems from my new manuscript of love poems, other poems from DRIVE: The First Quartet, and ending on a performance poem, "Bird Ave" from that collection. Then, scroll down to the previous tuesday show, Oct. 17 at 7:30 for an interview with me -- you can forward it to around 8:11. Enjoy. Provecho!

pale'd'latex

pull the text into the between(ness),

Samaritan" constraint (em)

body little finger ass up

admiration 'nalization enters

foots socks all waiting study "it"

"you can say ambiguity but the properties

into panegyric example(s)

betweens between what you assumed might

extending beyond "right on

try with contrast to be described"

winter's coming

did you change
your clock
winter's coming
on its face
hisses letter
designed to make
your brain spin around
inside your skull

it's the smoke
that brings
the scene to life
and the occasional snowflakes
settling on your cowboy hat
over your line of vision
causing havoc on the freeway

the freeze is freezing
everything in sight
and drug-induced
and droopy stockings
and a dry-rotting wig

you really should cut out
the heavy-metal-and-hashish evenings

Deja Vu

We’ve defined our silence
in the shriveled frost of sorrow.
I say heartache is beautiful,
you say I kiss like Judas.

Forgive me for not ever calling,
the end of Autumn darkens
this city darker than your hair.
Days are invisible. It’s always windy.

Leaves scratch the street’s face
with the sound of a kiss.
I hear them unintentionally
cut me as they pass by.

D.Q. 10/30/06

cracked land stranger as prolonged as chain
of the real ungoverned and very you yet
feeding the tail of hesitancy there
bubble to believing time o
when we arm ourselves with spinning
and spun sun to stitch morning shores
should let aloud dear violate with asbestos mind
a mouthaunted fall to take home

The petition

Come lover, what will it take for you to lift me? What will it take to sift the gravel from the curd, the wanton wake of slaking truth from word, the slow gestation of the grit to pearl, the absurd separation of the mother from the girl, the surface deepening of churl, the mealy mouthed platoononing of easy terms? Come lover, but a speck, a lessening mood, a slatted smile, the finger scattish enterprise, the grains, the stains, the fearsome overburgeoning pain, the oh so clichéd salty tears where fears refrain from confliction's moaning ambiguities, the middle ground, the stripped affliction, the same, what tasteless taste for it. Whatever it is, it is not to be paid for as if the thus assisted did not sit right deadcentre: in our armchairs' living rooms the stagnant poor, the disenfranchised mess, the broken pityingless rest, as if deciduous help fell at its first offering. Hark how heralds scoff. Come lover, wipe that sneer from off the face of the powermongerer with a look. Grace, ah grace is the salt in the semen charm, of the slut, of the balm on the cut, the fire on the water, high, high high tide before and after the slaughter wash, wash away my pride. Come hack the alter ego wide, split opened like a fucked sky, sky high fucked. Come lover, take naught bye the bye, walk not the lanes, they are thoroughfares no more, no more the little dirts we crush-call humus cherts, have settled all their score for earth, for the likes of birds, leaves, bark, roots furl unfurl. You are more than worm who turns the penis a mightier weapon than the pen then and only then the shadow, shallow the shell pitching and heaving the sea to the ear, clear honey dew froth and spew the c u m cum of you, hands few debts to the masked missed moments when as lover oh you coulda had silence amount to annihilation, a stroke, a chest rise, the anti-Satan, anti-enterprise, unco-opted stillness of you imbued with steel, a crane, a reel, a pulley system amounting to a citadel, a fork-lift truck, suck enough to empty carnivals, all things elevational, tectonic rifts, contextual shifts, continental drift, what lover will it take for you? And in the lesser moods, the way the fool walks towards the cliff edge, the total way the sedge plays flute beneath the wind's platonic fingering, the sighing, singeing of the careless fire for brush, the sweet, sweet there there cooing of the simplest hush, the dread space as the stupid drooling figure steps over keeling in a greater knowledge than innocence could ever cover, hovers, head turned this'a way to plunder our sympathy, forever caught in naiveté, innocent simplicity, the sway, lover stay, stay forever, damn you what will it take, bereft flesh, time's cessation, to cleave us from this doomed separation, would take from the narrow, biased view all that might eclipse you wherein the unraggéd dispossessed, the lesser, ugly pressing, refugeeic conglomerate, congealing, crippled, bleeding bomb torn thrown out subnormal, ransomed reassessed could shine as if the scales torn from thine eyes and mine as if Saul's roadside thrown, blinding vision bought forth the calling of the countless martyrs and those borderlined slightly less than saintly others, hauling healing it wouldn't be too bad to sunder in the downdirt too, too jaundiced by sophistication, too over stimulated by such signs as say welcome aboard, the sentimentalised fraud of the advertising billboard, indiscrete and awesomely seductive, taints and the spirit hovers a helpless alternative second, plundered are our souls, no round recompense, no avatar for revenge, never a justification for spite, come alight on the first rung. Come, the slate is not yet cleaned as a concept, lost as we are to gotten gains. Conversion's thrall over the big sell. The unsung. Come lover, you must lift the lot, you must lift the blood, the clot, the grief, the snot. You must risk death, you must fall and fall to fall again. It is worth the price you pay for hell, is it not?

At the Floodgates

I dare not follow
too closely behind
(no matter what
I have already sworn).

I am unworthy,
and I forget to breathe,
when I see myself,
through Other Eyes.

And as the truth pushes
at the floodgates,
I cry out in ignorance,
“What is truth?”

New Moon

(after reading Keros & Lorna)

New Moon, You See me Standing Alone

Tick tock, tick tock. His heart, a sad little clock,
winding down again and again until the face was blank,

the hands, frozen. I wound and wound until
it’d never stop. Click-click-click: Perpetual emotion.

Hinges creaked when he left like his mouth opening,
then closing. The house betrayed him. I pretended

I’d been struck in the head. I pretended
I wasn’t listening. I pretended I wasn’t spinning.

Once started, there was no stopping
that momentum. See the witch pedaling

through the whirlwind? See the hag, flattened?
My soles curled into themselves like unborn

fetuses. I hacked my pigtails off. I pricked
the balloon. I killed my dog. I used blue

birds for target practice. I dug up that yellow
path and painted every brick black. But nothing

changes this. The tin man is a hollow son of a bitch.
The dark side of the moon will be my exit.

challenges.... membership.....and such

I am cleaning house again. It is that time of year. No need to keep members who never participate or comment so....

Thank you,
Didi Menendez

The German Shepherd Poem

The poem was standing on all four,
its paws were making ripples on the grass,
the poem was barking cantos at the street,

at passing cars, at neighborhood kids,
at the proverbial mailman.
Soon poets from town

and from all of the surrounding towns
and eventually from LA and New York City
started dropping by

to see for themselves
this barking poem
that stood on all four,

and soon the poets worth their salt
realized that walking upright
wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

My songbird

      yawps
            while

wings spread—I

      too
           ride this

gust of wind.

FREE COPIES OF OCHO

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meme challenge results

The following poems are going to be published in #7 --

How To Overload Your Senses by Lorna Dee Cervantes
Whose poem was inspired by Diego Quiros challenge entry.

How To Overload Your Senses by Diego Quiros
Because his poem inspired Lorna Dee's poem.


David Raphael Isreal "meme challenge sonnet"
Because his poem inspired several others in his blog to write.

Good show on these ---

Lets see what November holds.

"Another"

Another



I wear my heart on my heart,
Hand over the veil. Tears
On my pillow, a rendering of wear,
The threadbare cupboards opening;
Opening on a dream of dare.
One shot hits the balloon
Of the self, that popping of pride,
That divide. Between the spokes,
Autumn, and a falling. Leaving
Behind any hope of home, a last
Kiss always the first again and again;
An opening. Take it and you divide,
Grind into the gears of tomorrow.
The future is a guess on the wheel;
Wheel and throat and croaking, a destiny.
Try this and you take apart morning,
Haze, daze, craze: an eyeful
Of breathtaking.
Remember today? When I was
Ever with you now? It's past
The river at the bend of a heart.
Shaped into the woman that I am
Who could ever be more referential?
Tutelage of a crow with a mockingbird's
Choice, ever karaoke to a tender.
Before now when now you leave
A slow dissolve softens. Sounds leave
Through the crystals and the salty gaze.
A mushing of hushed footsteps away
Before a misting begins on the lured lawns,
Before some kind of tomorrow today.



10/20/06
Lorna Dee Cervantes

"How to Overload Your Senses" (After Keros)

How to Overload Your Senses

after Keros


That night in the crusted theater
the dark flickered against your glowing face,
your angel's grace, rare for a full grown boy,
was crisping in the shadows. You and me
willing the Wizard of Oz onto the Dark
of the Moon, the smell and feel
of a dollar bill musting in the use.
A six pack between us. A tight joint
rusting out of repair, a sound dancing
on a lark, a rocking the baby to sleep.
Already, then, you were falling. Pink Floyd
couldn't save you. The leaking dopa erupting
into fists on the car, a kick to the wheel
of love; a draping of hardness over the windows.
Then, the witch was riding her bicycle away.
I overshadowed you shadowing you down
some alley of disrepair, some back lot
of the self where your reds blotched out
the blues and any blues was an excuse to party.
Was I the evil one? Tired of stomping on
Glenda, never shining like that part
you were born to play. You and I, a photograph,
a negative in relief. Your white blond curly hair/
my straight black mane, my witch's costume.
At the third lion's roar courage comes alive,
a soundtrack begins and a poetry lives
in the layers. The rolled bill in white tight knuckles.
The constant pass. The talking into nothing.
The talking back. Your anger, heaving.
My fallacy of desire, an overload of senses.
No sense in going back, of folding in on
ourselves like this unspent one.
Every time I dare to touch it, it lives
more and more skinlike, slough from touch.
I put my mouth to it and Dorothy
falls into a pit. The ruby shoes
belong to another. The great house
of the senses falls into place
and I exit; expunge; my listening ear
frozen to the Tin Man's chest.


Lorna Dee Cervantes
10/20/06

Listen UP

If you have been published in OCHO - and if you can record your poem/s, please do so. Make sure to mention your name in your recording along with the title. I would like to put them up on MiPOesias Magazine podcast.

Also I am announcing that I am going to pick a poem from October's challenge this weekend instead of leaving it for next weekend because I want to get the new OCHO 7 out by Sunday. So if you were thinking of leaving your entry for the last minute...well...


Didi

Dry-substitute Derogatories

So it is a dayscape. You must decide. If you are to decide for dry you must identify yourself. Which side. For placenta or grouse-supper rituals. Otherwise slow soporifices. Marigold. Caraway. Poppyhead. Their succour strength undiminished by ground, by hard. There is a caul in the offing. Vacillating do the blubber vanes gather. They are known by humps. By what they contain and their pressure evidence. That the gather-reflex has predominated. They are steer differentiated. You must get up a war party store against the line decay. A smudge for every time the fingers have touched. In the shallow muds clarity is not a choice but a privilege. A silver spoon in the river mouth. Watch as it eases a passage out. You must intend also on direction. To sever your entire service-sense you call up the foam animals. They gather in storm circles. The clouds make séance. Then from the crisps they have come. From the scather banks. From easterlies which made even the tongue stick. The roof of the mouth was its best bet. Could not even whisper for alleviation. And swallow a pipe dream. But still the swim-legs come and all manner of relatéds. Counting them a chore unresisted. But resist you must. There is a line. The black line. The black line cuts through everything, everything delayed, especially spiral capable things, those which blossom, those which degenerate, those which point blame, those which honest with no context. It requires a taste steady for gore-gazes, those killer eyes seeking to core. However, it is you who has forgotten more sunsets than there was sky for. Though gut-sad it doesn't stop. Is strong in consistent. Here again the dermis-dependents. Watch for the hawk-carrier signs. The iceglint in the eye. This comes from compressed things which are neither side of the line. All nondamp. All reconsigned in a terrible hurry so that the final word can be gotten in. And this not like a living-harvest which needs chopping. Nor a gathering. Nothing No mucousy cover. No fungi outgrowths. No humus extra. So then to dry after all. It should be in blood but is in a slight tilt of the head. All wakes to the dread-levelling hint. And all shrivels before the consequentials. Despite light your look through the maul-slips. Not one bit that isn't written on the wall. Your call.

akvavit

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Anyone coming to London?

La Langoustine est morte, the 3rd episode.

Monday October 23rd 2006

The Masque Bar,
1-5 Long Lane,
London, EC1A 9HA

Admission £5/£4
7.30pm




The 3rd in a series of evenings celebrating experimentation and innovation in poetics and fiction writing.

The Langoustine est Morte series continues with another night of eclectic literature and performance with an international, multidisciplined scope.
This month performances come from Anthony Joseph reading from his new book, the African Origins of UFOs - this is the only London date of his AOUFOs tour and should not be missed, self styled 'tablapoet' and poetry activist Anjan Saha, the distinguished elder Eula Harrison who was born in Cuba in 1925, raised in Jamaica and moved to London after the second world war, and the legendary Oxford based experimental poet AnnMarie Eldon in a rare London reading.

Hosted by Sascha Akhtar and Anthony Joseph.

More info on www.myspace.com/langoustine

Right Now I'm Making That Sound
From The Vonnage Commercial.
Can't You Hear Me,
Are You Deaf Or What!
Turn Up The Volume
On Your Hearing Aid!

So Much Depends

So much depends
upon a red wheelbarrow
glazed with blood

among the dead Marines
blown apart
by a roadside bomb

or killed
by small arms fire
( : as if there was such a thing

as small arms fire: )
So much depends
upon the things

that we can not control
while George pushes a blood-stained
red wheelbarrow around his ranch.

Don’t know about you but
Mr. Bones feels it offensive
to compare our great President
to a lousy poet!

“No, stupido,” Henry corrects
Mr. Bones, “this poem is by
WCW the Fourth, the great-
grandson of the Fifties poet.”

Footnote, no socks:
William Carlos Williams the IV inherited none
of his great-grandfather's artist gifts. His talent
exhibits itself in grotesque parodies of his
ancestor’s accomplishments. Though WCW the
Fourth did follow his great-grandfather into
the practice of medicine ( : he’s a Vet, specializing
in rats: ), it is rumored that most of his patients

die.

melancholia's tremulous dreadlocks issue 6

The sixth issue of melancholia's tremulous dreadlocks is online now,
featuring work by:

Barbara Jane Reyes - Jeanne Marie Beaumont - John Most - John Sakkis - Justin Marks -
Kaya Oakes - Kira Henehan - Mark Young - Mike Young - Sandra Beasley - Vernon Frazer - The Pines

Art by Lena Hades

melancholia's tremulous dreadlocks is an online bi-weekly journal of poetry and curious bits, co-edited by Andrew Lundwall and François Luong.

http://mtd.celaine.com/

Little Bill (adam fieled)

Little Bill peeks over the fence--
dolphins (propulsive!) up in the air,

fins glistening, flicking water onto
Bill's white tee-shirt; he shrinks;

the dolphins are too sleek (flash!),
too charged, a vision from fairy myth.

Bill wakes up weeping, peeks out
his window; "backyard green tree

cemetary dawn"; thinks of crispy
bacon, viscous maple syrup,

the fluttering lift of Mom's apron.
He wants to eat & eat. He wants

eggs to push the dolphins out of
his guts. He wants the calm gaze

of the morning sun on the curtains--
not the dolphins too-crazy gaze.

It was fire & thunder, a nightmare. Little
Bill hopes he never has another dream.

The Banish-Alternative to Witches

The witches are our ship. Its deck the sea. We lie upon a thin sheet, undulating with the waves, our knees bent into backs of knees where no anatomy names. Sail north against an east coast. Dare wind to drive the counterpane, tugged around chins, ears. We are warm in shared exhale only; the saltdamp searching, seeking between warp and weft, the crest and fall increasing. Seafetch ransacks all intimacies, skin in shiver spots; we tweak blankets to pretend the cold out. Whitecaps whisper in circles above their horizontaless conspiracy and in dreams even the surfzone freezes. Invent a net, contrapted to hitch up against prevailing ice. Ice forms upon its mosquito-surface. We must risk an arm above the bed to tackle a lone, dank haulribbon. Ease it over our numbheads. Uncanter indown within it. Block ice now, outbalancing the wire sprung rim, biting into mini-hinges. Snap it to susurround us. Hang on every indulge to fasten. Yet it bends with the weight of ice. Make the mordant bedding a slivering pine to balance on so that the psyche may recover. We are naked yet the surface solid. Use the soles to tread down any wave formations beneath us. The wiremesh bed husk turns a pale sycamore-cream, becomes bee-keeper gauze, the entire ship ensunned by protection. Ice on the outside lends heatsuck to bare goosedflesh. Pretend heat and the ship can sail on north, slicing ice flows, all mock-hull, flimsy wood and crushable. Turn. Turn the ship to metal. Turn the ship west across the arctic line through obstacles more terrible than diminutive iceneedles into every pore. Sailing steel needs soft. Pull hoods. Pull skirts. Pull sleeves. Pull wraps. All clothing nondescript flimsied atop the head, heads in a chorus. Knuckles masks. Peer out between vista makers. Ponder upon. Drop anchor. At random, dock. The witches little shrivelleds. Make drust. Make seed. Pay heed to blow the deck clean. It is drying in patches where the breath spots. Try stay as a concept. No hay as yet. Nor rock. But home anyway. Take stock.

Elegy for Love

What happened to the bells and whistles of our love,
what happened to the wild desires?
Now you call me sir and I call you ma’am.

What happened to take what you want, when you want,
what happened to the ripping off of clothes?
I sit on a bench at the mall waiting for you to shop.

What happened to the fire that used to rage,
what happened to the tender thunderstorms?
What were our pet names for each other?

What happened to the bells and whistles of our love,
what happened to the runaway locomotives of our lust?
Is that them, derailed and frozen in our Arctic hearts?

(The old lady don’t know I blog
so shut your pie hole, ok?
I wouldn’t want one of you bozos
to spill the beans!) :)

crotchety old man found here

"Beethoven tells me" [gnomic verse]

The romantic era hasn't ended!
          Beethoven tells me as much
the notes he wrote remain extant
          and speak of current things
ah we who live this dreamy life
          you say are out of touch?
there's still a sky!   there's still a sea!
          and birds are born with wings

Ecology Child

Born at the turn of the century
under a new moon,

the waters of her birth are muddy;
she carries pocketfuls of sky
where vultures circle.

She believes in magic,
smoothed from her fingers
into sand, stone, and soil,

but men have woven counterspells
for decades. Henry Ford's spores
lead the soil, rivers bleed
through walls of turbines.

The firmament has shed her soft veil
before the red eye of Orc, and he stirs
ancient gods of hurricane and flood.

Bodies swell through broken
beds of the ocean as the last oil
is leeched from the marrow of the earth.

This little girl sews with a fishbone needle
and a silver thread of light
along the fissure of dawn,
a lacework of memory
of how the globe used to be,
a refuge for bio-diversity.

As she sews she sings a nursery rhyme of A B C ...
remember, remember -

all that remains is this seedlike ember.

Review of OCHO ---

http://www.hyperhypo.org/blog/?page_id=121

LAST CALL

This is miPOradio's "THE COUNTDOWN" working blogroll. If you wish to be on the list, speak now or forever hold your peace. In other words, these are the blogs and web sites we (Bob Marcacci mostlty) will be monitoring to put together the broadcast for miPOradio's THE COUNTDOWN. Poems selected from these blogs/publications will be featured and read by Julie Carter or Luc Simonic. Pass the information if you like.


Reyes Cardenas
Jill Chan
Donna Kuhn
Tiel Aisha Ansari
David Raphael Israel
The Naked Beach
cafe' cafe'
MiPOesias Magazine
Peter Ciccariello
Jim Christ
John Korn
Carol Peters
Luc Simonic
Brian Boutwell
Helm Filipowitsch
Tara Birch
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Derek Motion
42 Opus
William Allegrezza
Andrew Burke
Ashraf Osman
Venereal Kittens

The blogroll is located here.

Thank you,
Didi Menendez
www.miporadio.com

October Challenge: What was the Question Again?

What was the Question Again?

The color outside her window
was chartreuse. Pink ponies dangled

from the faucet, none of them hers;
as she soaked in the bath,

she made the tiny horses gallop.
They seemed so happy, she, happier

as she slipped beneath the suds.
The woman was black and white;

the woman was pregnant and nude.
The moth clung to the lantern

as if it had finally found love
or the moon. The cat was the color

of snow and ghosts. Her father was cold
and still. The aviatrix flew and fell,

fell and flew. Outside, the green leaves
are falling and dying, dying and falling

under the harvest moon. How many dead
dads have I got? What’s my favorite month?

The month I was born into the night.
One, I thought. My window is black;

the moth is laid out on its back.
I’ve never loved light. October. Two.

--- -.-. - --- -... . .-. -.-. .... .- .-.. .-.. . -. --. .

My Contribution to the October Challenge

Overload your senses by simultaneously exploring the synchronicities between The Wizard of Oz, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the smell and feel of a dollar bill, and a six pack of beer.


How to Overload your Senses

Grab a dollar bill. Or two.
There’s an alternate soundtrack
to the Wizard of Oz called
Dark side of the moon.
Mute the movie, start the music
when the lion begins the third roar.
Taste beer 1. Watch. Listen. Listen.

Breath. Dorothy falls into the pig pen,
watch her race towards an early grave
Taste beer 2.

Time. The witch rides her bike.
Listen. Alarm clocks ring.
Taste beer 3.

Money. Grab your dollar bill. Smell it.
Rub it between your fingers. Feel it.
Glinda, hovers on her bubble,
don't give me that do goody good bullshit.

Us and Them. Black and Blue.
Two witches, who knows which is which.
Taste beer 4.

Taste beer 5.
Taste beer 6.

Brain damage. Feel it.
The scarecrow, the lunatic
is on the grass.
Dorothy’s ear is on the Tin Man's chest.
Listen to his heart.
Listen.

sandlot
blossoms over-
take the sand

My Contribution to the October Challenge

Since I would never ask anyone to do something I can not do myself. I decided to participate in this month's challenge. Here is my "meme" poem.

The Beatles Or Elvis You Ask?

McDonald’s Or Burger King?
I prefer a Whopper.
I like a good piece of meat now and then.
Although without a hot tomato
A Whopper is just another Big Castle
except it is not square daddy oh.
The Beatles or Elvis?
I like the Beatles.
John Lennon to be exact.
You’d think a man like Paul
could find himself a wife with two legs.
Okay bad joke.
The Joker or Mr. Freeze?
Which leads to Batman or Superman?
I like to hang from chandeliers so
make it the bat, man
And if you are
insisting that Superman is better
then give me Clark Kent without the cape
and make sure he knows how to screw
on his glasses so they won’t fall down
when we hang
from a building
in New York or Chicago?
Neither.
Give me San Francisco
and a good book or a poet
standing outside of City Lights
waiting for his Black Sparrow.

(c) d. menendez 2006.

Here you find me (Henry and Mr. Bones, too, of course)
trying to produce the definitive poem about Lorca’s death.
As most of you well know, there is only a handful of
Spaniards left --- living like homeless vagabonds
throughout the planet. They are unwelcome everywhere.
The are indeed the scum of the earth. Perhaps (and this
is stretching it a bit) yes, perhaps, they serve a purpose.
(Please pretend not to hear Mr. Bones laughing and
fARTing in the background.)

This is NOT Andy Kauffman pretending to be Lorca!
And any such suggestion will be deeply resented! :)


Burying Lorca

They thought they were burying Lorca
in an unmarked grave,
but the grave grew bigger and bigger

and people started questioning
the astonishing occurrence.
Soon the grave reached

the outskirts of Granada.
Then it grew all the way
into downtown Granada and beyond.

Today Lorca’s grave covers all of Spain.
Nothing can live in the entire country,
a poetic Chernobyl, you might say.

They thought they were burying Lorca
in an unmarked grave
and now the whole Spanish race is buried there.


Visit Henry and Mr.Bones here

October's Challenge

Since this month is "trick or treat" lets write a "meme" poem. There is twist in the trick or treat though. When you write your challenge poem, post it on your blog and leave me a link to where it is here on this thread along with your entry and lets see if anyone actually starts answering your meme and passing it around the internet. Please don't mention in your blog what I am up to. I want to sit back and watch.

The best "meme" poem will be published in OCHO 7.

Deadline is October 31 of course.


On another note, if you have written a poem that was inspired by one of my challenges and it was accepted for publication elsewhere, I'd like to hear about it. I think it is terrific if it is.

Lorna Dee Cervantes Manuscript Net-Auction For Alfred Arteaga Heart Fund

For the next 3 days I'll be accepting bids, starting at $25 for a signed rare copy of a brand new manuscript of poetry, a new and collected volume of love poems entitled "Una poca de gracia/ Bit of Grace" in first draft form -- with all of the proceeds going to Alfred Arteaga's heart treatment fund. Many of these poems are previously unpublished. Some of these are old favorites in a new setting. This is a rare manuscript in that it will, undoubtedly, be different by the time it's published. For example, I have a copy of the first draft of one of my teacher's books which is way different from the final published book in a way that's really interesting. I'm glad I have it. It's one of a few copies.

Anyway, I thought that maybe some people might like to have this collection (it would make a nice holiday gift) and give the gift of life, specifically life-saving new stem-cell heart treatments to Alfred Arteaga, an incredible poet, educator, critical theorist and all around great guy. I know many people would like to attend the benefit reading for Alfred at the Cell Space in San Francisco this thursday, Oct. 5th at 7:30 pm with Alfred, Francisco Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, Naomi Quiñonez, Jean Vengua, Margo Ponce, and me, Lorna Dee, where I'll be auctioning off a few copies of the manuscript. And maybe others have wanted to donate but can't afford to donate that much. Well, buy a book for you and your significant other and help out a good poet and a good friend to good poetry. [Scroll down for more information about Alfred and the benefit, one of a series of benefits held under the title "Cantos ded Corazon/ Songs of the Heart", or click here..]

Just drop me a line at PoetDee at mac (you know what) com and let me know you're interested. You can use my Amazon secure pay system button at the bottom of the blog or just send direct to Alfred Arteaga with an email sent to me with the particulars and a mailing address for the manuscript. I'll be accepting bids until thursday, and maybe beyond that date.

Here's a poem from the manuscript:


Summer Day

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone."
-- R. M. Rilke


The huge press of shadows
goes free, wind in the heavy
wine, a restless command
of fulfillment. I read, wander
up and down the sweetness of your
house: dry leaves blowing, a long
letter I will never have.



Lorna Dee Cervantes