Better Poetry Than Mine

I'll have a normal post up soon (tomorrow, or Monday at the outside). In the meantime, I want to take advantage of this verbal lull to turn the spotlight to one of the coolest girls I know. These are some of her poems, which, as something of an incentive, I offered to show off on her Daddy's blog if they made the grade. They are from a book ("No Listening Allowed") that she recently dedicated to her great-grandmother, and before we drop it in the mail, I am upholding my end of the bargain. She's got more voice than I had at that age (and she's not doing so bad against the old man right now...), a bit of a naturalist evidently, and fond of naked word associations. Her silly streak makes me proud. Enjoy.

(untitled)
Gentle butterflies in my stomach
Waiting, watching, listening
I plea, "Robins sing your first chirp
Sun RISE!"
First day of spring right around
the
corner.

Walrus (Cinquain)
Walrus
Fat, majestic
Swimming, spitting, maneuvering
Mounds of blubber
Upside-down beast

I am Earth
You know me for the eldest land you worship.
My mother is earthquakes.
My father is volcanic eruptions.
I was born in a meteor shower.
I live in the cracks of every rock.
My best friend is the Moon
Because she keeps the world balanced.
We like to frolic in circles.
My enemy is Mars
Because he throws meteors at me.
I fear losing Moon
Because of constant climate changes.
I love the flowers
Because they hide the rocks under the luscious scent.
I dream to go green.

Summer Day (Diamante)
Summer day
Sunny, bright
Sweating, blistering, showering
Sunburns, flip flops, stars, crescents
Soothing sleeping, comforting
Chilly, fresh
Winter night.

5 Ws Poem (included at her request)
Zoot
Eats bugs
On the floor
On Saturdays
Because it's extra yummy that day.

Happy Holidays

It's said great Gautama sat 'neath the Yule tree and pondered,
"How do all the toys fit in the sack?
And when the temples discovered Saturn's forehead uncovered
then how'd that bring the sun back?"

And on Solstice Joe thought that he'd surely get caught
so he conceived of a divine affair.
And when the baby got swaddled, he passed Mary a bottle
and they hung socks by the manger with care.

With the temple degraded then reconsecrated
the Macabees were heard to admit,
"If Elijah came sooner, we could've had that newcomer
turn that oil to sweet Manischewitz."

As mistletoe sprawls through midwest shopping malls
Baldur spins in his cold mountain grave
and tells Ahura Mazda to light the candles of Kwanzaa
to lure Amaterasu back from her cave.

The athiests sneer, "well, it's just about beer"
and the humanists politely agree.
But they'd best get it right, else the Goddess will smite
(which would just mean more dumplings for me).

And everyone's gotta share the wealth for al-Adha
(or at least that one works out this year)
So on the eve of Hogmanay, I wish everybody
the appropriate seasonal cheer.

Meditation

I abscond beneath the ashen knoll
lock the lucid sun behind
its long light grasps at my rabbit hole
and harries the dusty nooks of mind
casts shadows on the fitful sparking globe
races to find thought's chasm rent
compressed to microcosmic nodes
and exploded into firmament
where seraphs link their hundred arms
infiltrate the vast creation
quantum sparks, estranged and charmed
dancing cogs of divine rotation
Angels still hold crystal spheres aright
refracting certain speeds of light

--

I'd say this got about halfway to where I was trying to go. The angels are in the details, I think.

Nods to two of my favorite poet bloggers, and to the forgotten bards of Ægypt.

K

Clementine

[I don't know about this one, I really don't.]

Like a flower, you advertise
clothe yourself
in brilliant orange.
You fill with moisture
a waiting womb, gravid
soon to be plucked
by a convenient lover
who won't be troubled
by your faithless seed.

I have no such compunctions.

I probe your skin with my finger
ungently
feeling for the point
that will yield.
I plunge into the breach
and strip you bare
spread and ravish you
without ceremony.
I fill my mouth with your soft flesh
my head with your floral scent
before devouring
and forgetting you for another.

Reflections of an Aging Writer

It's not dead, not yet
maybe not even dying
but we play a dark game
with the pillow, don't we?
look, it's breathing again
our timing is perfect

I scribbled these walls myself
on dotted lines
how could I imagine that more ink
would possibly help?
this encircling fence
is already underwritten

The greatest horror by now
is to be taken seriously
please tell me it spoke to you
please, won't you like me?
so full of myself
it spills on the page

Another midlife windbag
the pages are full of my avatars
who can I blame
that I haven't lived?
always back to me
and my naïve paternal sentiment

But the door's over there
just past the wet floor
I painted
and if I leave footprints?
...I still care
it's not only my carpet after all

I guess I'll just wait
till it's dull and dry
how much longer can that be?

###

Probably needs more edits. (Thanks A--I didn't take your specific advice, but it helped.)

Autobiographical? Let's say I'm extrapolating. I'm neither a writer, nor particularly old (no doubt this is obvious), a little early for a midlife crisis yet.

-K

Hollandaise Morning

Omelette's hope is lost, forsaken
silken buttercup betrayed
a lonely memory of clouds
bereaved

What fine divisions once entangled
endless texture in one whole
now whisked instead to curdled flocs
as these

Slimy yellow platelets floating
clotted in salty plasm
drifting on autumnal surface
like leaves

Emulsions form and are broken
fatty gobbets find their own
their segregated souls departed
like dreams

###

Okay, I know it's terrible poetry, but I had to drain it from my head.

Chemically speaking, emulsions are mixtures of insoluble liquids (usually water and an organic liquid--oil--of some kind) that are separated into very small domains. What makes emulsions different from your run-of-the-mill suspensions is that they're relatively stable thanks to the action of a surfactant, a chemical that has an affinity for both the oil and the water phases, and keeps them apart at a microscopic level. The result is a soft and pillowy "phase" that, depending on its composition, can sometimes be made to float forever between the pure oil and water regions of a mixture. Which is neat.

The structure of the emulsion microdomains is actually quite subtle and fascinating, ranging from isolated droplets, to columns, layers, and intricate spongelike extended structures. Here's a sylized phase diagram that I once put in a proposal, taken from somebody's review (H. T. Davis Coll. Surf. A, 91, 9, 1994).

When you separate an emulsion, it's called "breaking," which is an interesting choice of terms because you're not breaking the true phases (they are already broken up), but combining them into bigger chunks. You can probably make this a metaphor for human interaction: a bunch of us relating individually across a large network makes for a nice fluffy existence, but when we segregate ourselves (by religion, appearance, geography, whatever), the system goes all to shit.

Which happened in my kitchen this morning, a pitched battle. I like to cook, and I'm good at it, but I've never figured out emulsion sauces. I was, however, so buoyed by my success at making proper French omelettes last week that I just had to give it a go this morning. I added the butter too fast, and that creamy Hollandaise broke up into nasty, salty bits. Dammit.

All Alone Now

I broke my palms on the shattered rocks
and puzzled to watch them bleed.

I plunged my face into the chilling tide
and struggled to pull in breath.

I bloated my gorge with salt water
to see the visions on the edge of the dark.

I torched the bridges that drifted past me
and my skin crackled in the blaze.

I bloodied your line and threw it back
and my heart stopped beating.

I flailed my limbs against the current
and my body flagged and sank.

I buoyed myself to the surface
and watched the alien shore recede.

#

Notes:

This was written for the Wikifray poetry slam intended to be about the failure of redemption, and coincidentally about "the shucking off of things that have turned bad." (It seems that either failure is often self-inflicted.)

I've edited some lines (and fixed the link).

Found Art

(compiled from subjects of junk emails)

Mrs. McCoy, compunction made!
You cumm too quickly and without control.
Don't let others beat you fighting for this bread
Man-made incorporated, lovliness, honor roll.

Decrepit experimental communication
Imagery hidden, successively.
We know it'll go off tomorrow contain
Theses, bridgeport ancillary .

New and hot housing profit sharing,
It will go to the sky tomorrow.
Baby boom mayor, see you at the mounting.
Cautiously dollar, bulging owe.

Have all delights using this wonderful product!
when to stop blogging until summer for.
Re: your letter darzell, was no optic
not fit computer, impunity of the world.

##

That was inspired in part by those crazy cats over at Gun Tamga, and this feller helped nudge it into existence too.

But like most of my, um, pretensions, I can probably thank Mad magazine at the bottom of it all. It would thrill me to get my hands on an online archive of classic Mad articles. Writing this "poem" reminded me of a sixties vintage article (from my aunt's stash probably) satirizing the advertising industry. It postulated future highways so crowded by billboards that they all ran into one another, achieving some kind of accidentally grandiloquent ur-marketing message. Which is a lot of words to describe a silly one-panel cartoon.

Here's what I got 20 years after the fact from memory. If anyone can fill in the missing lines, I'd be grateful for another 20 years.

Treat your cat to Miller Lite
Turtle Wax makes dentures bright
Cutty Sark protects your car
Levi's give you lower tar
Banish gray with roll-on Ban
Keds. now in a twelve ounce can!
[something something Quaker State?]
Ex-lax makes the going great!


Keifus

Event

The writing bug, like too many bugs, bit me much too late in life, somewhere around my thirtieth birthday. Very little of that writing has been poetry, but just this same, I wrote this one before any of that, about ten years ago. It's not much in the way of mechanics, but I still like the image behind it. --K

Event
My memories are events
Images--frozen in four dimensions
Stilled contortions of reality
Liquid suspended in air
A voice captured in its ululation
All devoid of background and out of cntext
Laughing as a child
A fraternal ritual
A smiling woman stroking my knee.

Just several points
On the invisible grid of space-time.
An intersection of the surfaces
Of our existence
Existing still at that point.
At that event
And somehow observable
By the machinations of my memory.

Foundations of Reason (a crappy poem)

[Yeah, poetry. Don't get used to it.]

strung along like a child's toy train wreck or
tenement clotheslines
flapping and fraying exposed in
the wind
our thoughts chattering specters fluttering around
skyscrapers
like bits of litter spiraling unsettled in
the updraft
born from hot sidewalks and the burning blocks of
the human depths
a glint of clarity in the conductor's eye as he careens toward
the wall.