Saturday, September 24, 2016

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 20th 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.


                                           

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