NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS: Five new poems...

11

                                                 

 Out of the Ashes

The nastiest,

beastliest purgation

striking from God knows where,                                                         

combustible spark, cigarette butt,                                                        

lightning bolt from heaven—                                                        

eighty-eight thousand souls                                                          

displaced from safe haven,                                                         

forfeiting happy gain—                                                        

God knows when the purging will end                                           

and life reclaimed from the ashes                                                        

of their weary soul, but the spirit of wild                                                         

rose country cannot be broken, and                                                         

the Phoenix will rise again.                                                       

12

Mount Ulysses

Sunday, May 8, 2016, 8:51 A. M.

Mother’s Day, Penny hoisted her

book into the air and declared,

“Yea! Done!” That was her reaction

to the greatest novel of the 20^th Century,

Ulysses, by James Joyce, and when

asked what she thought of it,

she reflected, and said,

                                                          “Yea! Done!”        

  13

On the Menu Today

Coincidence or editorial play, I do not know,

three articles side by side in my Sunday Star;

in the middle, wedged in like a freshly dug grave,

90-year-old retired senator and his 40-year-old

male lover, 15-year affair now marital bliss. The

senator was married before to his great love

of 38 years, their children older than his lover

who filled the hole in his life when his wife died

of acute leukemia, the second great love of his

nonagenarian life; to the left of Harris and Matthew

an article on the Freegan Pony restaurant in Paris,

meals prepared from dumpster food from Rungis

international food market, and to the right of

Matthew and Harris an article on Laab dib,

a northern Thai specialty of raw blood, bile,

and herbs, an acquired taste—

“a meal to die for.”     

14

My Struggle

“What emerged from this

was myself,” wrote the voluble

author of My Struggle. “This was

what was me.” But how many pages

did it take the Norwegian writer to

see himself as his life had shaped him?

I know the story well. Book after book

after book my struggle told itself, but

never in full; until one day, I don’t

know when, Old Whore Life

showed her face, and I saw

that she was me!

15

Alchemy of the Self

The agony of my life was being

a stranger to myself, because the

person who was me was not the

person I wanted to be; so I broke

the mirror of my life and suffered

the pain of putting myself together

again into the person I was meant

to be; and now I no longer suffer

the agony of being a stranger to

myself, because I am me.