Poem: Crescent Moon

 

Crescent Moon

 

peg-leg pirouette,

bowed and weathered as a sailor

lessoned by the loneliest deeps.

 

a familiar intaglio

of old ball-peens

worrying its jaundiced pewter hide.

 

does god peek

from behind some secret code in those scars?

some clandestine hymnal?

 

no.  

no justice.

no choir to trumpet

the encrypted, cratered notes.

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1/31/24 ... mods

8/6 ... "could" replaces "does" ... "the scars" replaces "these scars" 

8/2 "what" replaces "and what"

"The experience of my darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay in the light." -- Palmer Parker

Regarding the Poems

 What's going on!  

The poems come from some place deep in the mind.  And maybe our minds are all interconnected with each other, somehow, and with forces we don't understand.  Who knows.

When someone asks me, "How are you?" as we tend to do at perfunctory times, it lifts me far from the deeps and that part of me best able to answer.

It's crucial that ants touch antennae, I guess, and humans are part ant.  

The poems are often very bad.  They get edited over time (as this post has been).   I sometimes leave comments on a poem's journey.

Down, down, and away!

OWL
owlwholaughs@gmail.com

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Poem: Not So Still

 

Not So Still

 

fingers of breeze,

flirty cool flames,

 

they immolate with air,

flicker over jawline,

across lips, behind lobes

 

to trickle my nape,

and pool in dips

where throat marries shoulder.

 

spine, nipples, abs,

a navel whirlpool-possess,

hex across my ass,

my penis and testicles,

 

backs of knees,

singing over calves to savor toes,

gone!  a genie of erotic smoke.

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

1/30/24 mods

11/1/23  ... mods to the last line

8/11.... mods to make the poem more honest

7//26 ... "marries" replaces "joins" ... removed a word

Poem: Banality of Evil

 

Banality of Evil

 

the skeletal

languished in the camps,

digging upside-down monuments,

symbols of darkness and death,

to plug with their own corpses.

 

evils such as these,

as cruel as hell could fathom,

were kept locked away

in the stone-cold belly

of a hungry conspiracy bureaucracy,

 

where torture and murder and prejudice

fed insatiable hate--

 

oh-so-far away from the daily niceties

of the pleasant neighborhoods,

 

where the inflictors wore kind faces,

prayed in church, mowed their lawns,

laughed and drank, hugged their children,

scratched the chins of cats,

 

oh how they celebrated and gave thanks,

how great they were as a people,

how chosen, how perfect, how strong,

such a superior race.

 

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

1/31/24 mods

7/24 .... edits for flow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

Poem: Fossil Shell

 

Fossil Shell

 

poems lap in whispers,

echoes of jurassic foam.

 

an ocean in a tiny coffin,

one that lacks a corpse.

 

for the longest while

 

it nestled in saline sludge,

ducking the wrath of an ice age.

 

(or two, or three, or four …)

 

when glaciers

dragged their shrinking feet

 

the shell escaped on a sob

to watch sunshine christen anew.

 

it wondered then,

 

‘why was I entombed for so long,

so far from what saves?’

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

1/31/24 ... 

8/11  "newly"  replaces "a new era" ... "have" replaces "had"

7/23 ... flow changes, fixed typo

Poem: Finches In Town

 

Finches In Town

 

trending chirps,

sound of old-fashioned typewriter clicks,

 

how glibly they report

above our busy human lives.

 

none of us, though,

read such uncivilized periodicals,

shuttling in our washed-and-waxed cubisms.

 

there’s no room

in our appointment books,

not for such fussy miracles of flight.

 

goals impinge.  invoices call.

computers to feed

with every aspect of our stress.

 

we don’t really know,

not at all,

what the penniless birds

are writing.

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

8/11 ... a couple mods, creating a better resonance

Poem: Is It ?

 

Is It?

 

oil-fed machines roll and burn oh god oh no oh such great collisions and

faster, obscuring the trees, attack of the killer consumers, whip of the boom and bust,

upheavals yanked by winds of fashion and sex-engine drivers and hunger and fear fear fear 

and fear entitled to be cruel and devour develop  devour develop

devourlopers! devourlopers!

on and on and oh and no and who and no and who and what and oh no and 

yes this GW meltdown, this fondue of robot-cuddly-software smiles. 

who neutered the now? who wears the cord leash battery collar of the 

oh no no on no oh no on no oh on no oh no no no

life is a screen is skin who cares why we don't why what is being lost now what? 

ononohohonoohohohononoooonoonoooohooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhh 

01100010100101101111001011011101000010101011011010111010001010110001

life from a screen screen is skin,

sprouts of photons, sprouts of qubit-scumble digitry, electrical umbilicals, 

is this whatever we could ever be about forever what it is?

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

1/31/24 ... mods

7/17 ... desperate edits... seems to flow better... blogger.com won't format it right, so added para breaks

7/14 edits for smoother read 

basically a raw expression of incredulity and anger at human stupidty.  I have to get it out somewhere, somehow.  

Poem: Next to the 189

 

Next to the 189

 

a chain gang of rumbling metal

roils in a heat-wave rut.

slow slow slow bumper-to-bumper,

this stew of blurry killer gases

 silts roofs with carbon, 

cakes cement with grime,

soils the creases of the stressful masks

worn by people who rarely ever have 

an individual face,

 

for in the well-off neighborhood

around the the 189,

only vagrants and their dogs

brave the trash-dimpled sidewalks.

phalanxes of windshields watch them,

stoic as visors on the riot helmets of police.

 

no one is else is outside a car.

no faces on anyone here, anymore,

except, yes, the dogs and sometimes the vagrants,

those folks that have no choice but to dare.

 

the rest of us gird shadowy,

tucked in the ego of machinery,

eyeballs engulfed in UV plastic.

maybe

 

a scraggle of crows, 

homesteading on a phone tower,

hints at something of a tribe.

not so long ago, this land was all tribes.

 

now there are electric grids and phone lines

where crows glower like irate mothers

 at the Jaguars, BMWs and Mercedes 

which consider them not at all,

except once in a long while, to say:

 

how dare those lazy birds recline?

are they immigrants or refugees

wasting my compoundable seconds?

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

7/23/25 big mods 

1/31/24 ...mods

7/26   ... removed a word

7/17 "blurry killer" replaces "global warming"  ... other mods 

7/8 lots of mods for sound and flow and POV

7/7  mods for flow and sound

Inspiration:  overpass between Sylmar and Sunland