aprettywar:

Traveler

Your first time out of the country
of your own skin, I didn’t bring a map.

You always hated that I’d been lucky
enough to pick my way through streets

I couldn’t pronounce to find cathedrals,
graveyards. If you were a city, you said,

I’d only like to know your suburbs.

If you were a city, I said, I’d like to know
your poor neighborhoods, your inner parts.

Read your graffiti. Drink your tap water.
Feel your smog and dirt stick to my sweat.

Hear your orchestra of sirens and gunshots.
I’d know which of your streets to walk.

If you were a city, I’d expect to be robbed.

— Heather Sommer

 I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and 
          sat down under the huge shade of a Southern 
          Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the 
          box house hills and cry. 
     Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron 
          pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts 
          of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, sur- 
          rounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of 
          machinery. 
     The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun 
          sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that 
          stream, no hermit in those mounts, just our- 
          selves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums 
          on the riverbank, tired and wily. 
     Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray 
          shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting 
          dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust-- 
     --I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, 
          memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem 
     and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes 
          Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black 
          treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the 
          poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel 
          knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck 
          and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the 
          past-- 
     and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, 
          crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog 
          and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye-- 
     corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like 
          a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, 
          soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sun- 
          rays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried 
          wire spiderweb, 
     leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures 
          from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster 
          fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, 
     Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O 
          my soul, I loved you then! 
     The grime was no man's grime but death and human 
          locomotives, 
     all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad 
          skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black 
          mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuber- 
          ance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- 
          modern--all that civilization spotting your 
          crazy golden crown-- 
     and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless 
          eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the 
          home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar 
          bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards 
          of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely 
          tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what 
          more could I name, the smoked ashes of some 
          cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the 
          milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs 
          & sphincters of dynamos--all these 
     entangled in your mummied roots--and you there 
          standing before me in the sunset, all your glory 
          in your form! 
     A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent 
          lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye 
          to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited 
          grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden 
          monthly breeze! 
     How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your 
          grime, while you cursed the heavens of the rail- 
          road and your flower soul? 
     Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a 
          flower? when did you look at your skin and 
          decide you were an impotent dirty old locomo- 
          tive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and 
          shade of a once powerful mad American locomo- 
          tive? 
     You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a 
          sunflower! 
     And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me 
          not! 
     So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck 
          it at my side like a scepter, 
     and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul 
          too, and anyone who'll listen, 
     --We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread 
          bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all 
          beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're bles- 
          sed by our own seed & golden hairy naked ac- 
          complishment-bodies growing into mad black 
          formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our 
          eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive 
          riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sit- 
          down vision. 
                                

kaleidoscope-view:

Hi, I’m me—
It has become glaringly absurd
this hunt for me
believing that when I was
hunted down
I’d find not only me
but a whole herd
past me’s, future me’s
the whole cart load
and all the years
and where have I gotten to
in this point of time
this isn’t the same mirror
     I gazed into years ago

           It’s the mirror that changes
           not poor Gregory

Hey, in life
    Where I went, I went
    Where I stopped, I stopped
    Where I spoke, I spoke
    What I listened, I listened
    What I ate, I ate
    What I loved, I loved

But what about
    where I went, I did not go
    where I stopped, I moved on
    when I spoke, I listened
    when I listened, I spoke
    when I fasted, I ate
    and when I loved…
       I did not want to hate

Now I see people
     as police see them

I also see nuns the same way
  I see hare-krishnas

Ain’t got no agent
can’t see poets having agents
Yet Ginsy, Ferl, have one
and make lots of money by them
and fame too
Maybe I should get an agent?
    Wow!
No way, Gregory, stay
    close to the poem!!!

At the deadlock, Athena turned up, Athena!
her garment having been kissed by many men or what,
we don’t know, and she in her deciding vote acquitted
him. For us to lose, in effect, a case of matricide
meant the balance of power was shifting.

I pour another vodka. What I didn’t say to Jade was,
it meant we’d be lying low for some time,
centuries perhaps. I remember the fires of earlier camps.
In the distance, border furies, heat furies, storm furies.
The sound of the Barking Owl.

And this owl, a real owl, sounds like a woman being murdered –
Athena, your bird is telling you something!
But Athena, last we heard, was with her cousin Kate Kyriakou
on their way back to Greece for the Olympics.
At the last minute they got a Virgin flight.

It’s an irony of fate, I said, that it was a foremost goddess
who helped tilt that power.
Or not, Jade said, maybe it was simply a pivot-point in storytelling
where men must be shown to be in control, and the best
way to do that is to get a woman to do the job.

Yes, I said. Let’s present it to Athena this way: she’s being chosen
to give an award in a public ceremony and get her picture
in the morning paper, her big chance, as a goddess,
to be kind and compassionate.
To downplay the warlike.

Mesmerise her with theology – Jade said,
and perhaps flirt with her at the same time.
For whatever reason, I said, Athena – without consenting
to matricide – did not give it a high level of punishment.
Certainly she didn’t exact a death.

In that sense you have to admit she is a civilising factor, I said.
Flick your dreads as you may, Jade said.
We hounded the son, though, I said. One time we said
we’d leave him alone for a while if he promised to do
penance at the Temple of Artemis.

—Susan Hampton

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early,
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this,
For time is inches
And the heart’s changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost’s endeavor
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease,
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

-W.H. Auden 

(Source: noblepromise)

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

—Catherine Wing

Day and night
I always dream with open eyes
And on top of the foaming waves
Of the wide turbulent sea,
And on the rolling
Desert sands,
And merrily riding on the gentle neck
Of a mighty lion,
Monarch of my heart,
I always see a floating child
Who is calling me!

- Jose Marti