A Note on Poems

 

Thank you for looking at the poems!

A quick note.  I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up.  The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting.  (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize). 

Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy.  I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.

The big downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version.  For this I apologize.  Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.

If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:

owlwholaughs@gmail.com

Again, thank you for your time,

OWL

====================

Poem: Swift Pleasure

 

Swift Pleasure

 

razor gleams of eyes

 open my heart without

removing clothes.

naiveté made them weapons.

 

there's a gash

in the hideout of my chest,

wehere emotions bubble forth,

pain revealed,

forsaking the odds of innocence.

 

how brash 

my foolhardy leaps were,

unprepared for such swift pleasure,

faster than the giddy race

of ridiculous pulse

to stumble, trip and fall

into the oubliette of an unkind stare.

======================

Aug 25 ... fraught poem ... 

Oct 4 2024 eds

Poem: Crystal Ball

 

Crystal Ball

 

an upside-down imp stares back,

leans left for my right,

stretching into bedeviled rainbows.

leans right for my left,

until auras split into caverns and ribs

and circle round to live larger still,

upped by factors of whatnot to ∞.

 

i dive in, immerse, in sync with the imp,

vivid among photons that frolic 

and paragons who vivaciously flow.

it's a hypermath of hula hoops.

a transmogrification of chords 

which strum Saturn.

on the other side of the rings 

a coat hung on a peg 

bursts into a psychedelic ocean,

its tweed bulbous with aurora borealis.

 

this glossy orb,

it holds every coronet in the world,

adoring atop its stand of brass.

when sunlight plays keen, the gold webs:

paisleys into jewels, galaxies into novas,

amid hubbell dewdrops 

emergent  in a big-bang rendezvous. 

it blossoms, this crystal ball,

somehow born from spaceless specks.

it is cosmic, impossible, a language 

of unpredictable comets,

and only then

does it bend to collapse,

fated to render the nothingness 

beautiful.

=====================

8/23/25 .. eds .. hellish poem to work with

10/5/24 eds

Poem: Mosquitoes On Screen

 

Mosquitoes on Screen

 

honor loathes them, such tongues 

which bash into stitches of tin,

and their argot of bloodthirsty whines,

forever obsessive, sharp 

and lean.

it is whispered 

 

they once trusted too much.

too honest.

too intimate.

nothing left in the aftermath 

but a shriveled quest.

now dozens of these skinless wraiths

scrape a cold, threadbare sieve,

poking for any drop of warmth.

any aura of contact.

any meager touch.

before seeking comfort

in the dark.

===============

8/4/25 ... never right

10/6/24 eds  ... I am the mosquito

6/16/24 ... more edits, somehow fascinated by this poem but never getting 'the prestige'

8/28/22  significant mods ... never get it right

 

Poem: A Ghost Leads Him

 

A Ghost Leads Him

 

this elder he

touches but does not,

this psychopomp

who exists but no,

 

she flies through his memory,

salvaging its refugees,

until they incandesce and

collapse into wings now a

possessed guitarist and pianist,

playing a song never composed.

 

this daredevil, arching in his veins,

she streaks to push the rollercoaster higher and higher

through fervor and flight

 

(this ekg, this oscilloscope...)

 

as if his passions 

had always been prisoners of the dull, 

and only now, swift in swerves of release,

could the mortar of his jail cell 

crumble into blameworthy bricks--

 

(his life, too much, was spent within walls...)

 

rectangles of stone.  wood, too, and plaster. 

he buried so much of himself

in such a sturdy habitat so long ago

but now

 

(but now ...)

 

a path lifts above the rubble,

a new kind of steppingstone,  

back upward, 

toward some long-ago wounded 

and yet forgiving and dependable 

joy.

===================

8/10/25 .. 

10/7/24 eds

Poem: Crows In Wheatfield

 

Crows in Wheatfield

 

flecks of pepper

in saffron stipples,

 

summer dreams

tossed on a straw bed.

 

a scythe could reap, 

writhing like a snake,

 

feverish implement,

stroked to obsess.

 

i can hear the labor

vaporing off the canvas,

 

a jagged song, it wavers,

ripples troubled,

 

stung and perturbed 

by ponds of pigment,

overwhelming the lobe.

================

8/12/25

10/6/24

My brother Gudger much liked the works of Van Gogh

Poem: Republicans Vote

 

Republicans Vote 2008 

 

the people had their swill

and now throng the troughs,

not to digest but to vomit forth

what they were told to know.

 

each face puzzles at the caricature

of the one in tandem

as they stand in a cordoned assembly line

of the anguished and the grotesque.

 

a man holds a noosed monkey.

three women wear the same t-shirt:

a baboonish candidate

who sucks a banana and gloats.

 

there is talk

of terrorist homosexuality,

of negro delinquency,

and a liberal anti-christ

urgent to outlaw prayer.

 

but mostly guns.

and Barack Hussein Obama.

 

big-bellied clichés

with beer-red neckmeat

bluster and swagger,

while dog-fierce kids 

fetch to return, return to fetch

the hate tossed when an adult sighs.

 

'unamerican liberal elites.'

'round them up.'  'brand them.'

'force them to leave.'

 

hours of this.

a vexed parade of the bitter.

it bristles as it circles,

 as if to constrict the schoolhouse,

raring to get inside.

 

 

==========================

images based on news footage.

This poem is a way to get out my own hate and rage, focusing on racism.  The enemy is not people.   The enemy is racism and its effects.  

Poem: Fence Wizard

 

 Fence Wizard

 

nervous dagger,

no caesar to slay,

heat will not die

and it surely is king

 

of alabaster and tan,

the only flags known,

crumbling like the foothills,

a fuzzy kind of real

thick with blurry waves.

 

caffeine for cold-blooded veins,

which simmer more fervent

than any mammal,

making love to burning stone,

chest to chest.

one heartbeat enough for both,

the squamous belly sleek

against coarse, mummified clay.

 

this alliance, so fast, 

could flee in a blink,

disappear to nowhere,

evading the pluck of a kestrel.

 

other times, the fence wizard

sits like speckled dough,

impossible to snatch,

camoflauged by its oven-magic.

 

might, at long last,

the wizard choose the talons?

to witness, as a sage might, 

the world from its highest perch?

 

such has always been 

this wizard's beautiful strategy:

staccato reconnaissance 

from hairline eyes--

to snatch clues 

and surmise the truth

from fragments.

========

8/12/25 

"Fence wizard" is a play on "western fence lizard," a common species in the chaparral. 

Poem: Intersection

 

Rainy Intersection

 

fat beads on phone wires 

slide thick to drip,

numb as the drool of a monstrous Infant,

whose grey deformed pliant dome

stares down with mock horror

at the myriad slanted trajectories:

 how they end on hot tar, empty as run off,

nothing but fizzle on a char of roads.

tires slice through the ceaseless slaughter

with the polite manners of dutiful butchers. 

 

commuters,

those metal-cloaked lip-biters,

come and go, chug and roll, smoke and chug,

sit at attention, roll and inhale smoke 

and chug and come to go to honk and brake and jerk to

peel-out screech cuss stress.

they come and roll and stop and go to roll to stop and go to come

and roll stoplights lines limits laws of a 

not-so-friendly legalized mathematics.

such it is, this come-and-stop/go geometry

which enfolds the tin metal cloak 

of  each and every flesh-nucleus.

at least 

so it is here, this intersection.

this watering hole 

of the city’s motion sickness.

this particular hollywood hub-glut 

of narcissistic pop music drama/mine.

what would a last prayer look like here?

splayed open on the never-ending concrete slabs,

vivisected by streetlamps, cleansed by polluted rain,

picked over by the crashed claws 

of wrecked dented shreds of tin metal

under the smog-plump Shadow?

=============

10/7/24 eds

San Fernando Valley, circa 1990's

Poem: Tujunga Arroyo

 

Tujunga Arroyo

 

willow and nicotiana

hobo along the arroyo,

leafy plumage of anemic jungle birds.

strata stash squashed stones in the banks,

catastrophe upon extinction,

sabertooth pupils, long-slitted in black veins,

gazing above shark teeth.

 

my sandals, lost in the aftermath,

sink into dry quicksand

to kick up blossoms of dust.

empty orchids and not-really-there mallows

ogle me with their two-seconds of life.

 

i come to a place

where crows interpenetrate shadows,

both seeking shelter, scrutinous,

demanding proof that their feathers

will not soon die.

 

the gulch has ruptured here,

warded by the fronds of an old pepper--

a place where coyotes come to take rabbits,

and burrs cast hooks,

anglers at a waterless stream.

 

not so deep in the sand-hissed heat

minnow eggs bide their time.

yes, one day, algae will wave, the real thing,

victorious in immersion,

while frogs swell their sleek backs,

harrumphing about the short shrift

of amphibian orgies.

 

=======================

10/12/24 removed a word, modified a word

9/5/24 ... slight mods

Poem: Deselection

 

Deselection

 

it was the age of wired golems,

a construct of cold electronic nests.

cell by battery by cell 

human smiles became byte-cons while

screens transformed into the consiglieri of dreams. 

 

it was a marketplace for mothy hearts,

one seduced by googol spiders in fire-fast webs. 

colorful saviors on pedestals of pixels 

rushed to rise from luminous crypts,   

where they commenced to flagellate our transfixed eyes.

 

mouse idols invoked arrow-magic.

a clickety-quack-prattle of lightspeed lines,

lurid in networks of conspiracy-

laden, multilayered online hives

stole us.

 

no old-world psalm in the sacro-

sanct antique bible had predicted

such a contagion of connectivity.

the great servers of the telecommunicated temples

proselytized quick to infiltrate far

far far far far far far far 

urgent to hawk a new kind of mind.

 

==============

8/12/25 ... 

10/10/24  eds

emoticons

mmorpg

clickety = mouse clicks

 etc.