TSM 150

~ qbit 
Gentle reader – I walked again 
the beach this morning
for inspiration,
for the cold to cut off my nose
in spite of everything

Where the muttering sea
has deeded seals, deer, shoes, 
and an aviatrix or two –
winter provisions for me to thaw
and saw and see their way into poems

Today there was a piano –
seaweed in many keys and colors –
high and low tangled strings 
pitched overboard, vibrating 
in the felt hammer of wind

Fishing nets,
with notes caught up
from operatic sardines,
clams arpeggiated 
in scallop flats

You ask me how to get to Carnegie Hall 
and I say "Practice" 
but it is many miles to row 
and chase the whaled Manhattan
armed with harpoons of vaccine

Will we return to the abandonded city 
we fled with toilet paper flapping
out the windows of our car
like unspooled rolls from a player piano,
like flags of surrender?

The Sunday Muse

21 thoughts on “TSM 150”

  1. …tales of brave Ulysses.

    Randall, you have the makings of a Beowulf, a Gilgamesh, an American Pie. Or possibly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tinged with shades of Howl. Manhattan as the Kraken, and you astride a heaving deck, flying the Jolly Charmin. This is great stuff you have here!

    Keep scouring the horizon, the death-littered shore, and your inner DeFoe.

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  2. A splendid poem…and the last stanza …. perfection!! I see it all now, most especially with he Jolly Charmin flying from the antenna!! Oh wait, cars don’t have antennas any more. Where will we fly it?

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  3. There is so much really great stuff here! Enjoy the 2nd person POV – it feels like Bronte – pulls the reader in. The piano has become a pivot in the poet’s tale of these last 12 months; gone through the discovery of death in various forms, found inspiration for writing in those discoveries, but now the bigger question of our return. I will say, also, that I enjoy the inner stanzas with unique word play and shellfish images – fun & clever! Lastly, the player piano rolls = TP rolls – that is perfect! The virus has played us and we are all unspooled.

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  4. This was brilliant, I was thinking the other day it’s been a year since I first started working from home. I remember searching for the coveted rolls of comfort. No home delivery for that commodity you had to venture to the store in hopes of Angel soft.

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  8. Toilet paper flapping, what a waste. While others are hoarding again this guy is flying it out his car window. I liked the seaweed part too, who’d a thunk?
    ..

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  9. a veritable pot-pourri of images you bring to poetry – now I know that you collect them from the seashore
    “winter provisions for me to thaw
    and saw and see their way into poems.”

    And what leap of imagination along these old piano keys to Manhattan and away again with a toilet paper farewell

    So much movement to this poem and “the muttering sea” – hmm I wish I’d said it first!

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    1. Lol, Thanks! Yes, for the last year pretty much all I’ve had to do is walk along the seashore (or the moors) and the Muse has dropped something in my path. Death and beauty, can’t ask for more.

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        1. Ahahaha! Yes.That is the way it always feels, right? I know there must be poets who have ideas for poems arriving in their imaginations easily, if not unsolicited. That sure does not describe me. I generally have to work my way through my dispair that I don’t have the slightest idea – no hope whatsoever – how to proceed.

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  11. “Fishing nets,
    with notes caught up
    from operatic sardines,
    clams arpeggiated
    in scallop flats”

    I so love this poem and all its sea and keys.

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