mystic_savage

In the meanwhile, it is hot.
Most things are black and thorny.
I swell with my own self-importance
and swelter within murderous crowds
here in the meanwhile.

In the meanwhile, no one is her best.
Slights become wounds,
injuries imagined. Everything prickles
and sticks. Nothing has context
other than its own darkness
here in the meanwhile.

In the meanwhile, conversation
becomes absurd. I accuse you first
of harshness and that quickly becomes
shoplifting vice gambling pimping murder
and forgetting that I don't like french,
I like ranch.
You can't even get the damn salad right
here in the meanwhile.

I live in the meanwhile more often
than I want to. Kindness eludes me.
I want something softer, and sweeter,
but there's no turning back.
No hope for forgiveness, not now, not ever,
here in the meanwhile.

I am a blind hamster on a creaky wheel.
I am the weight at the bottom of a sack of drowning kittens.
I am your overdue taxes with thirteen attachments and nine different forms.

My life is mud.
It is a paradise for sickly toads and preying swampthings.
I slog through it like, I dunno, like a nine hundred pound woman climbing a flight of stairs.

What do I want?

Everything.

Ocean sounds echoing off the walls of my sanctuary.
Soft cushions topping heaps of treasure.
Hot tea in a rainstorm.
Lovers from here to Mazatlan.
Seven angelic children singing like bells at Christmas.

I want to stay young.
I want to be young, younger than I've ever been --

I want straight shoulders
and hairless skin
and white teeth
and perfect eyesight.

The grace of a dancer.
The vision of a priest.
The life of someone starting over,
wisdom remembered, energy building,
all in love with skylines and jet trails.

Mostly, I want your eyes
meeting mine
and telling me
I'm not alone in this.

Notice me -- and show me what joy is.

Love me, as much as I love you.

Today I am drawn to Picasso's blue period. 

looking for beachside tragedies in grey fog

seeing backs where I should see faces. 

Everything is askew, backwards, sad.

There is no reason, just rhythm, a muffled drumbeat reminder:

You don't belong here. 

My father says we are all part of the same hand. 

The distance is nothing. 

He pulls his fingertips together, pads kissing the tip of the thumb. 

Separateness is an illusion, he says.

It can disappear in an instant.

But: I am the missing finger

the one lost in a thresher or blown off by a misfired gun. 

There isn't even bleeding anymore.

I'm the itching ghost where the finger used to be. 

What can you do? 

Piece together a life, as if it matters. 

Put one foot in front of the other. 

March, march, march

Until the moment it slips. 

You were never whole and don't know what that's like. 

But something on the edge there reminds you of…

something…

and that's why you chase it. 

Soften the focus, dim the lights

and maybe you're not such a ghost anymore. 

It's that other life, the one on the other side,

and all you have to do is fall.

--Virginia Lore
 

(postcard to Mara, 2)

a woman
came upon herself
in the desert
naked
bestial
wild-haired
and squatting close to the ground.

She was not eating her heart.

She said:
i have no poetry left in me
and that is bitterness enough.

(postcard to mara, 1):

construction workers
jackhammering the old parking lot;
hospital staff
taking a smoke break on a cement pad;
bicyclists,
joggers,
and just half a stroll downhill

a woman
watching a heron
take off from the edge of a pond.

My mom's poem has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize! 

Displaced

The voices of ancestors pluck at my heart,
Cherokee threads in a tapestry
of dust and corn. In my time even the moon
speaks a different language, hiding behind
electrical wires dissecting its wrinkled smile.
Like a fawn escaping to deeper woods,
I long to leap into that other time,
into land below concrete and asphalt,
below stunted trees marching down fenced streets
where no one cradles an owl’s broken wing
or pauses to smell the river
or puzzles the true meaning of a lightning strike.

Diving below, I feel the pulse of my ancestors’ time:

slower, less crowded, more of one piece.

That pulse holds the earth still

through the harsh knife of winter

while we wait for green to lick spring into life,

while we wait for dreams to sprout again

in blood-borne memories,

while we wait for drums in the distance

to grow loud, as we begin to dance

the old dances with time-toughened feet.

 

Maril Crabtree

 

girl
i been tryin to get me
a way to get outta here

i'm gonna put my stuff in a tote bag
gonna put all my stuff in a tote bag
and then
i. am. gone.

this city is for cheats and losers.

***

i gotta tell you the truth
i don't like poetry
i don't get it
all that talkin about
heather on the moors.
why can't they just
talk about life like it is:
piss on the bus floor,
being bone tired,
and some guy
bumping you over
cuz i guess you invisible.

--virginia lore

The Demise of Poetry 

Today I learned of a magazine
whose editor decided that poetry
“takes up too much space.”  
Does poetry take too much space
in our world? If so,
let’s do away with art and apple trees,
delete the delight of seasons,
expunge eagles and elephants,
sounds of trumpets and thunder,
taste of ripe strawberries and raw sex
on the tongue. Let’s roll back the oceans,
eliminate the clean beauty
of mathematics or a well-run factory,
erase the moon, take back the galaxy,
bow out of the entire universe
and start over without mouths,
without eyes, ears, stomachs or hearts,
minus minds or the ability to speak.
We’ll have space everywhere
and nowhere to go. Never mind.
Poetry has always crept into the corners
of the world, captured silence itself,
waiting until the world tires
of making sounds without meaning.

Another poem I love.  By Mom, aka Maril Crabtree:

This poem was written by my mom, Maril Crabtree.  I love it and want to share it.  She owns the copyright but I doubt she'll sue me. 

( The poem )
Her poetry has won first place in contests sponsored both in Kansas and Missouri. 

And this is me, here: (through gritted teeth) totally. not. jealous.

omnifarious asked this question & I found it so history-provoking that I wanted to share my answer on this journal:


That was the beginning, followed by every possible opportunity in school to substitute a creative story for an essay when doing homework, the first attempt to write a novel (7th grade), involvement in my school newsletter (8th grade) and high school literary magazine (9th - 12th), a summer of writing 4 hours a day (age 19), working on my college newspaper and yearbook (ages 19-21), reading Writing Down the Bones when I was 22 and etc. 

How about you?  When did you start writing?  How?  What does it mean to you?

the uncombed cat, the feral dog,
the beast conduit, the channel
where wild things squeeze through.
behind me is the lion,
shaking heat waves out of his mane.
he wants to roast me.
he does not eat his kill raw.
he roars at my back
and expects me to die,
but i know backs
better than he does.
he is a leo, a man
who opens his palms
to blue flame.
he calls up ancient spirits
with sacred hindu words.
he orders psychic warfare
and plants the jagged teeth
of other kill
around me.
at night he is the raven,
loose, and cawing death.
he is the one
who makes doves disappear.
he swallows rats whole
and demands blood sacrifice.
he is the man
who puts the goldweight of his hand
on the back of my neck
and strokes me
as a logger strokes
an uncut tree.

Her soul is an only child,
bone thin and wild with wanting
as she throws her naked body
towards the bait of any hook.
her clearest mood is murky
like the puddle
of a muddy sidewalk's gutter
and she utters only one strong need.

her thirst is for the earth,
some hillside scene
of root feet and toiling hands
raw in the lands of June.

she also craves one endless night of moon,
a woman's night of urging violent showers
to splash down her peasant brown
thick at the waist and blistered body.

she hungers for the sod,
for one poor meal of teeth-torn bread,
for one quick taste of dippered water,
and mostly, for the calloused blessing
of her grandmother
or some other wise crone
calling her home
from this littered city corner.

Stalking the volcano's edge she clocks
her memory in the smallest beats.
Anything can happen here, in the red
nightmare where the loudest voices are
round like bruises, distorted like
eclectic orbits of broken planets
hurling themselves by instinct
around the sun.  She wants to run
but something keeps her here, hunting
the hurts, chewing common sense
to keep her mouth from going dry,
knowing there is more here than
will ever be revealed, and yet she tries
against the waves of infant's rage
to remember...

(Just got this in my email from my mom, who is in Mexico.  Have I ever mentioned that she's a poet?)

A Valentine’s Day Poem for My Firstborn 

Was it love at first sight?
Not unless you give up the notion
that fear is not part of love
that fear doesn’t in fact pave the way
for love.  In the beginning,
there was fear
that motherhood, still a mystery
despite all the books,
despite the unsought advice
of my women friends
who had already
climbed that particular pinnacle,
would be nothing more
than a badge I wore
without having done the work
like the Girl Scout badges
I earned by hurrying through
the project
when I knew, in truth,
that I still couldn’t tie a square know
or build a proper outdoor fire.
It took awhile to see
that love and motherhood
could actually go together,
could teach each other slowly,
as the days and weeks went by,
as the skills got better,
as the fear relaxed,
and I saw how you smiled,
how you nestled into my breast
for the 2 AM nursing,
how willing you were

to show me the way to your heart.

--Maril Crabtree

 

( The Invitation )

Last night I remembered a song I wrote in 1988.  I remembered it as I held someone who had had a very rough week, and I sang it to him.  I hadn't been able to remember the lyrics for several years, so I want to get them written down right now in the hopes that I don't lose them again.

if you would like a custom written poem, please comment and give me three words or phrases to work with.  i'll reply to your comment when your poem is written.  i'd like to write at least a dozen over the next week, so don't be shy.  and--i'm not promising quality.  just fun.

( here's one i wrote this morning )

This is a perfect poem for this time of year, as the sun ages a little more each day and dear friends fall to old depressions.  My weariest time of year is usually October-November, but I can already feel it creeping up on me, bit by bit.  So here:  a reminder for me, and hope.

If anyone survives this thing and finds this some years hence, there is something you should know about us as a people:

We weren’t that bad.  You’ll have seen our temples to the money gods and our landfills, but what you won’t have seen is the way we hold each other on a Sunday morning, what many of us sacrificed daily for others of us, how we loved our young.  You’ll have read our news reports and you’ll have found many horrors there, but the day to day way that life is woven between us and our neighbors never got to the newspapers.  You won’t have seen how many acts of violence were averted because someone stepped in to diffuse it.  You won’t have a record of what made us laugh, and how much we laughed every day.  We weren’t good at recording our joy, just our misery.  But know this: some of us were joyful.  And we were precious to each other.