The Quantumverse
That unbeknownst to all,
slumber requires
a leap dream –
like a leap year –
an extra turn or toss
of night
to true up
the gaps in our days,
alms, for shadows
gone begging.
And explains, so, finally,
never feeling quite
caught up
to ourselves.
For dVerse Quadrille #47
The temperature dropped like a stone –
Which made me think
That invisible, freezing rocks must be
Falling from the sky
So I should stay inside.
But no. I wondered instead if could hear
All the pebbles and rocks along the road
Shrinking in their skins
With the same silence as ice
Cracking from cold.
Or maybe down at the beach sand
Might be singing, the way it does in summer,
Except Christmas Carols and Auld Lang Syne.
Hard to hear much over
The sound of the ocean shivering,
The waves coming in
And stamping their feet,
As they try to shake off
This North Atlantic chill
Just down from Labrador.
For The Twiglets
What the winds can’t heal
The contrails sever
Winter howls
from a wounded sky
Spliced fragments of discontent
litter the cutting room floor
Boneyard
Of the hunched and hungry
Light that has never shone
Moloch’s restless domain
Its bitter meal
usurps our Threnody
Offspring of the beatnik fringe
slice their tongues on prosody
Their teeth drowned red
from parsing wine
The young so wise
abbreviated flights in time
Dovetail earth and sky
mulled, singular, primed
Jilly’s Renga Challenge – Winds Can’t Heal
For Jilly’s December Casting Bricks
After college, I spent a few years traveling around Europe, picking up work here and there. In one such adventure, I worked in a shelter for homeless East End London youths. This was back when Docklands still had bombed out buildings from the Blitz and Cockney was what you heard in the streets.
I volunteered for the Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day shifts. It would just be me and about a dozen teenagers who were runaways or who had been tossed out by their parents. They had been living under bridges or worse, and the shelter gave them a place to stay until we could “get them sorted.”
Breakfast and dinner both were beans and toast. Every day, day after day. There was one smallish gas oven/stove, and one pan to heat the beans. You can guess where this is going… Correct! With no cooking experience whatsoever, I went out and bought a huge turkey and all the fixings so I could make the kids a proper Christmas dinner.
My ability to grossly underestimate a situation is a hallmark of my life, and one of the things my friends and family say makes me so endearing.
Dinner a bit late
Turkey rolling on the floor –
Hilarious stuff
For Frank’s Haikai Challenge
A response to Charley’s Challenge. Charley’s original is in the center, and my response is the “frame” around it. I had to load as an image, as it was the only way to accurately preserve the formatting.
For Jilly’s December “Casting Bricks”
Throw a sunburn down
On winter thank you please,
A white heat for a white land –
The thin metal sky ignited,
Slow burning at the edges.
“Thaw” For Wednesday Poetry Prompts
Please whoever gets this:
I am eight and in love
With the pretty stewardess
Who was on our flight
From San Diego to Baja.
She doesn’t know I exist,
She spends all her time with the pilots
Crowded around her on the patio
Here at the same hotel as us.
If you get this and see her
Tell her:
I am true and brave.
If she would just turn around
And see me pushing palm fronds
Into the pool with my foot
One after another
When no one’s watching.
You can take the A train to Harlem, said Duke Ellington,
although no one plays much jazz there
anymore.
If you are looking for Bobby Fischer you take the E or F
to Washington Sq. Park where the chess hustlers
are still playing, even today, in the snow.
But I’m looking for the poet Billy Collins
so I need to take the 4 up Lexington Ave
into the Bronx, where I read that he teaches.
I get out at the station and cross 195th Street, 196th,
getting up in the count. Do they ever run out of streets?
There is a newsstand. I should get something for Billy.
I decide that he is probably a peanut M&M
kind of guy. Not plain, and not Snickers.
Definitely not Skittles.
I show the man behind the window a picture of Billy
from the back flap of Billy’s book, and ask
if he’s ever seen him.
He probably doesn’t understand English
but seems to know what I’m saying
and he shakes his head “no.”
Then I show him a picture of a statue of Virgil
on the back of my copy of the Aeneid.
He smiles, laughs, and shakes his head “no”.
I do the same with the picture of Billy
at the Lehman College security desk.
They are unhappy with this so I leave.
It would be a four hour train ride to Boston, then
30 mins on the Red Line from South Station
to Harvard Square, then 10 mins walking if I recall
to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
where Billy is a Fellow.
Maybe they know where Billy is.
Instead I step into a deli, where they have
rows of food on steam trays and you load up
with whatever you want and pay by the pound.
I buy some scrambled eggs and hash browns,
pay, and find a table where I can sit
and think about Billy.
Billy is always talking to salt and pepper shakers
and teasing out magic from them.
But the deli only has those little paper packets.
I play with the packets, toss them up
and they land on the table like yarrow stalks
that I might read like the I-Ching. But no.
A storm is building, I should make my way home.
I shake out the contents of a packet on the table
like snow maybe, or de-icer.
I touch some of it with the tip of my finger
and bring it to my tongue.
Yep. Salt.
Crème-de-Menthe snow cones
Feel green after too many –
Ever falling down
For Frank’s Haikai Challenge
1962. Virgil, our
bantamweight
Milkman
Threw bottles and
Cigarette smoke
Through the wall
Like punches.
Small for a boxer
But not for a poet –
His crunch and clench
Of bone, time, wives, milk, eggs –
tattoos and fists
Swinging fame
From Troy, NY
To Rome.
qbit 