Category Archives: Great Poems Online

New Poem by Conway: “Smell”

My prison pen pal Conway reports that the hearing on his petition for early release has been delayed until December, crushing his hope of being reunited with his family for Christmas. It’s been over two years since California voters passed Proposition 36, which was supposed to roll back the harsh sentences imposed on nonviolent offenders under the three-strikes law. This Nov. 14 L.A. Times article suggests the state is dragging its feet on releasing prisoners because the Department of Corrections benefits from their underpaid labor:

Federal judges on Friday ordered California to launch a new parole program that could free more prisoners early, ruling the state had failed to fully implement an order last February intended to reduce unconstitutional crowding.

The judges, for a second time, ordered that all nonviolent second-strike offenders be eligible for parole after serving half their sentence. They told corrections officials to submit new plans for that parole process by Dec. 1, and to implement them beginning January.

“The record contains no evidence that defendants cannot implement the required parole process by that date, 11 months after they agreed to do so ‘promptly,'” the judges wrote in Friday’s order.

Corrections department spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman said the agency would comply with the order.

But the federal judicial panel did not take action on other steps it had ordered California to take last February. Those include increasing the sentence reductions minimum-custody inmates can earn for good behavior and participation in rehabilitation and education programs.

Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.

Meanwhile, my friend Conway keeps his soul alive through creative writing. In addition to poetry, he is working on an autobiographical novel about growing up with his brothers and sisters in a gang-ridden neighborhood. I think he could be the next S.E. Hinton! I was struck by this poem’s taut rhythm and rapid-fire rhymes and wordplay.

Smell

This is the smell of a cell…
This is the smell of rust and dust, and sometimes lust.
Plus it’s the smell of double bar-locks, block and blocks, of towers
and useless clocks. If you don’t know what time it is, oh well!

Could it be the smell of a dirty-ass sock, or worn-out useless
fruitless talk? But still, it’s a voice you feel you might trust.
Not that, oh no!
This is the smell of nothing good. No pleasure, no sound,
nobody around to be found, nowhere to go.
Nothing to show, for all the shit you now know.

This is the smell of a place where no one belongs, but still
we’re stuck here. Because the court insists we’ve done something wrong.
This is that place where they’ll put you away, to serve
day after day. And you’ll rust in the smell of the dust and decay.

This is the smell you will always smell, unless
they tell you “your smelling is finally done.”
In this smelly assed life, that’s good for no-one.
This is the smell of no place to be, this is the smell I see.
This is the smell of just one prisoner’s tale.
This is the smell of that living hell.
This is the smell that I smell.
This is the smell of jail…

Poetry by R.T. Castleberry: “Leaving Alexandria”

R.T. Castleberry’s chapbook Arriving at the Riverside (Finishing Line Press, 2010) sings the ballads of a wandering man, that uniquely American character who is by turns a prophet, a drifter, a lover, and a wounded warrior. As he writes in “An Arrangement of Necessities”: “Tomorrow I travel,/see my headlights on the car ahead, lay my pallet in the dust ruts by the road…Leaving is easy.”

Yet, although he may journey from Memphis to Santa Fe to Canberra with little more than a classic book and a brandy bottle, the speaker of these poems also carries the burden of wartime memories, the unwelcome knowledge of how we destroy ourselves. “A morning sun slices leaf-flooded lanes,/curves choked with sites/of church grounds, schoolyard, first house…I watch high-striking jets dissect the compass rose.” (“The Traveler at a Loss”)

In a time when free verse has become weakened by talky informality, Castleberry restores the muscular rhythms of poetry informed by what T.S. Eliot called “the ghost of meter”. The poems’ strong forward motion is balanced by a meditative attention to the landscape’s sights and sounds.

Castleberry kindly shares this poem from the book, which he says was inspired by the Michael Caine movie “Alfie“.

LEAVING ALEXANDRIA

From a balcony above the Eastern Harbor
I treat the scene as photographs for a file:
horizon’s passive line of curving bay, anchored ship,
bathers splashing in the early surf,
a seaplane’s banking turn from the water.
I take Tom Stoppard’s plays, a Fodor’s guide, a map case
and place them beside the pistol in my pack.
Open on the bed is a letter.
“Tell me what was said,” is the only line.

I have wandered my history, to no good purpose—
every mistake I’ve made crowds me in my sleep.
I recall every grievance, each discourtesy,
rooms I’ve entered to win or wound someone softer.
I’ve loved 3 women
all married, and lonely in the world.
I never meet the children. I sometimes know their friends.
I enjoy their confidence, my detachment,
the skilled and hungry sex, a little drama.

There is a seasonal pleasure in waking with a lover—
the sleepy tangle of bedclothes and bodies,
a bath and brunch, a kiss to set another date.
There are other, private times I prefer
the challenge of a married woman’s mind.
A wife who’s known
the comforts and discomforts of a child,
long years, lingering moods beside her husband.
I lean to listen
for wise advice on healthcare and clothes,
business manners, the public polish.
I know the taste of her,
the rise of her mouth to mine.

As we walk the Montazah Palace Gardens
she tells me some snoop,
some over-eager officer has seen us at an inconvenient hour.
“My husband’s home. He’ll want to see you.
He’ll be cool. Calmer still, as you talk. Don’t trust it.
I don’t imagine that will happen. Can you handle him
when I leave for Lisbon later in the week?”

The serial life has stripped me. It poisons as it protects.
I bear no malice, as I can bear no bitterness.
A steamer leaves for Tunis in an hour.
When I land, I’ll make a choice for Marseilles or Montreal.
On my desk the jumble of a Cairo newspaper reads:
“Attempted Murder/Officer’s Suicide.”
The photo spread shows a body beside a car,
another wounded behind the wheel.
I have no faith in explanations, in truth told to pain.
Strangers before, we are strangers from now on.

New Poems by Conway: “City Elegy VII & VIII”

My prison pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life for a nonviolent offense under California’s now-repealed three-strikes law, continues to work on his “City Elegies” series while awaiting a hearing on his early release petition. Like a man on a desert island, he has been knocked down to the bare minimum of possessions following transfer to another holding facility. His survival library includes the collected works of Shakespeare, Raymond Chandler, Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power, and Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings, which has become his personal bible. These poems find him reflecting on the passage of time and lessons learned in captivity.

City Elegy VII

As I stand here, ready to be judged…
All of me has been searched and prodded, so often–
that no place on this body remains a secret.

Dreaming of a fair future…
In the dark vault of the skull; (beyond prying eyes.)
It is difficult to picture a future without locks, or
a true mattress under my spine.
Yet, even an abused child, no matter how bullied or beaten–
in life, still clings to the dream of justice.
The hours sneak past, without favor, or concern.
With an unreserved acceptance for life, my faith
is a state of mind.

Twisted up in barbed wire, obeying the corridors’ mood…
Where guntowers encircle the perimeter, like hands tangled
in thorns, lifted to the sky in prayer.
Cages lined up, like pews before the pulpit.
If I bow, will it still feel as if my head
has been pushed down, forced?

Where amber lights glare at each other across the yard,
searching cold hard dayrooms.
Topaz eyes with no face, or mouth.
Nowhere to scowl but down,
frown at the graffiti of lost souls left behind.
Who dares to mark their name on walls they have passed?

Where concrete halls wrap around us all…
listening for a door to open, a door way beyond
every other door.
It is not louder, or colored differently.
But, it makes a different sound; a spiritual melody–
you’d recognize, like the transparent depth of wide open skies.
If you don’t anticipate any other muted hush,
your future requires you to hear this sound.
This door is quicker than a six second quarter mile,
heavier than a mortician’s smile. It gathers momentum,
echoing down the tiers, then blindly disappears.
Blindly disappears; like a fragrant smell in your ears.

Silent as a shadow leaning against a a wall…
I huddle in a corner, where the door can be
slammed in your face, enough times–
to convince the most stubborn of people.
I was late to understand.
There may never have even been a door, or
to kick your own exit through the wall.
But, if you’ve made it through.
It is best that you swear, you were never
even there.

Still, I ride on;
Day upon day, and night in my mind…

****
City Elegy VIII

Once again, day has passed away as days always do: murdered, by the slowdragging schedule,
which has been sentenced to my own wreckless past…

The sky has become a ghost. Numbered day after day…
Shackled up, and then put back away, for another lesson in patient discretion.
Years came and went, disappeared with slow eyed surprise.
Rumor, whittled away from the nonsense, laid things at my door.
I restrained the urge to check some chins on a few established figureheads,
content yet careful in their mediocre claims.
Myth, and my own creation, built this unknown obligation.

Born sometime along this line, where odd-old places flutter back and forth…
Wasting time tugging on fate’s vast web, and once again shivering in nearly-naked privateness.
Opposed to this familiar stonewall. Monotonous square-footed center, of times
shouted Quack!

Cheered by the sudden slap of dusk: Because it is what most others dread. (The shadow.)
The Shadow plays fair. None is innocent among the convicted. The raw moments of solitude,
are time’s savage instinct. Time stops for neither instinct, nor episode,
as another calendar drifts past.

As this swirling harvest inhales its latest issue, of rusted ventilation dust…
A new dawn, or illusion of such. Struck suddenly kicking the teeth out of another skyless night.
What passes for air, being captured from somewhere, amongst the fumes of circulation,
(inside this whirling frazzle of souls)
wrenched a stench so foul, that I’ve not been able to shake it loose
from my nose hairs to this very day.

In the pursuit to escape this meaningless existence, without the feeling of shame…
I stay prepared for unexpected company. (you might say)
Bringing along a false hope. So they, can take it, all-back-away.
Until this preparation exposes its last heavy locked door on my horizon.
If I pass through, I will have but one debt left on this
primitive soul. A redemption only God can know.

My time, my prayers, spin the rhythm, while a lost forgotten song
with its on and on, hums along in my head…
I must pay attention to the sound, document what’s goin’ down,
as I swiftly walk away from the possession of this prison.
Into an everywhere and anywhere, that can be salvaged from
a future of, whatever might possibly be.

What a righteous purpose I must learn, to earn…

(The song is called Albatross.)

Two Poems from Ruth Thompson’s “Woman with Crows”

Of the numerous poetry books I’ve read this year, Ruth Thompson’s Woman with Crows (Saddle Road Press, 2013) is the most personally meaningful to me. I just turned 42, undeniably middle-aged, and my son starts preschool this fall. All around me, it seems, are warnings and laments that youth is fleeting, and we must cling to each moment lest it pass us by unnoticed. Woman with Crows is an antidote to fear.

This poetry collection, earthy yet mythical, celebrates the spiritual wisdom of the Crone, the woman with crows (and crows’ feet). Because of her conscious kinship with nature, the speaker of these poems embraces the changes that our artificial culture has taught us to dread. Fatness recurs as a revolutionary symbol of joy: a woman’s body is not her enemy, and scarcity is not the deepest truth. For her, the unraveling of memory and the shedding of possessions are not a story of decline but a fairy tale of transformation. One could say that, like Peter Pan, she expects that death will be a very big adventure!

If this all sounds terribly sentimental and “uplifting”, don’t worry. She’s not a sweet, neutered old granny. There are fireworks here, and snakes, and “ooze shining and blooming and with sex in it.”

Ruth has kindly allowed me to reprint the poems below. “Fat Time” was first published in New Millennium Writings as the winner of their 2007 poetry prize. Visit her website for more great work.

Fat Time

Under purest ultramarine the raised
goblets of trees overrun with gold.
We should be reeling drunk and portly as groundhogs
through these windfalls of russet, citron, bronze, chartreuse.

Everywhere color pools like butter, like oil of ripe nuts,
like piles of oranges under a striped tent.

Oh, let us be greedy of eyeball,
pigs scuffling in this gorgeous swill!
Let us cud this day
and spend the winter ruminant.

Let us write fat poems, and be careless.

Let us go bumbling about in wonder, legs
coated with goldenrod and smelling of acorns.

Let us be unctuous with scarlet and marigold,
larder them here, behind our foreheads
to glow in the brain’s lamps
in the time of need.

Each tree a sun!
Let us throw away caution,
emblazon our retinas
with the flare and flame of it

so that in the unleavened winter
this vermilion spill, this skyfall,
these oils of tangerine, smears of ochre and maroon
will heat a spare poem, dazzle the eye’s window,
feed us like holy deer on the blank canvas of snow.

****

Travel Instructions for Elmwood Avenue

You leave the sepia light of the tea restaurant,
lapsang and peony, earth and green twig,
continuo of quiet human voices.

Outside is rain, fat frying, damp exhaust, sputum,
spit of tires on a wet street, brakes tuned
to the pulse of streetlights: green, amber, red, green.

You blunder, glasses fringed with rainbows,
until your own hands swim out before you—
greeny in the headlights, strange as ectoplasm.

Light laps from shattered planes of reflection,
emerges and re-emerges from sheeting brilliance.
Dimension becomes dimension, a turned fan.

Now darkness hums like a bowed string,
anchored somewhere you cannot see,
one end floating here in the spinning world

and what has always sung from around the corner
is no longer apart from you—
it is here, upon you—that blaze of tenderness!

New Poetry by Conway: “City Elegy VI”


I’m pleased to share the next installment of my prison pen pal Conway’s “City Elegy” poetry series below.

This weekend, I’ll be attending the Becoming Church conference, a project of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC, which will focus on Christian activism for prison reform.

My other purpose in attending is to research models for intentional Christian communities, so that I can create a theology working group for trauma survivors. Church of the Saviour is known for bypassing the standard congregation format in favor of intimate small groups based on 12-Step (AA). Group members commit to mutual spiritual accountability and social justice work. Watch this space for my post-game report. Meanwhile, enjoy the poem.

City Elegy VI
by “Conway”

About two years and counting…
 The city left a window open for me
  a muddy puddle of spiraling sights
  that twist and turn a knife named memory.

This wall presses against my core
  it is a cellblock of scornful spent shells
  hungering to be crushed into a new mold.
The brusharound, or flushed down sound–
of this walk. Every step behind
the moment, looking, mapping.
    On a pathway passing tipsters–
playing a pose (straight incognito).

I pretend to crawl away, from war
untried by the tolling sigh, the taste.
The touch torn, as if I am the thorn.
A beggar swelling to be born.

If I could lift the moon…
  emerge from this strangling forest of metal.
  My goal is not these burial stones under foot,
  lain out before my only path.
On narrow steps, gnashing in silence, I wait.
I kneel before a vanishing door.

Here, in these strange woods
my wounds find refuge. But time
cannot lead me to be seen, over the fence.

Here is the entrance, reason for contrivance
as storm clouds bring a newborn saline.
Another downpour of brilliant jewels.

Shimmering topaz eyes blaze everywhere
 tint the brief shadows in amber.
 batting those lashes like a paramour.
  While the streets still rush and hum. (Conspire.)
   Heavy lyrics that spark like a hotwire.

{Do-do-do walk, march into our fire
No-no don’t talk, cops pay their liar
Hang me from that dirty noose of smog
cut me loose from this frustrating fog}

I ride on, day upon day and night in my mind…
Roads descend behind a false mirror, of others–
not there. I dream of my old shovelhead (Rolling again.)
hidden away like a skeleton.
It has taken twenty plus years to get, from nowhere
to here. Amongst the settling shades of memory.

A good woman waits somewhere else instead;
Some said “for a husband, as if he were’nt dead.”
I palmed her hand on a cold window-visit’s caress.
Ceremony sees us deserving such torment.

I taste a scent of gallows…
  The ink under my skin, folded under my jumpsuit
  burns under scrutiny.
    I stand; Ready to be judged.
      Heard.
    I am what I am, no mask.
    I am not what I was;
      Just ask…

Donal Mahoney: “Easter at the Nursing Home”

Reiter’s Block welcomes back regular reader and contributor Donal Mahoney. The characters in Donal’s poems are drawn from our everyday life, but the issues they confront have cosmic significance. They’re fresh and down-to-earth yet also timeless, as the gospel stories must have sounded to their original audience.

Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney has had work published in various publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12.blogspot.com/.

Easter at the Nursing Home

When bread
is this good
a morsel

will suffice
and when wine
is this good

a sip is enough
for the wraiths
and specters

coming toward
the altar now
on crutches

walkers
in wheel chairs
celebrating

the last Easter
some of them
will know

as they await
a resurrection
of their own.

Two Poems from Amanda Auchter’s “The Wishing Tomb”

Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Amanda Auchter’s exquisite new collection The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press, 2012) surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each poem.

About those notes: At first I found it distracting to flip back and forth between the storyline unwinding in the lyric poetry and the factual squibs at the end of the book. Should I break the flow and spoil the surprise by checking the notes first, and risk only finding what I already “know” the poem is about? Should I read the poems first, and endure the disorientation of not comprehending their context? I just had to read the book twice! And I’m sure it won’t be my last visit to these steamy, sad, gorgeous pages.

Upon reflection, I understood that the unreconciled duality of form was part of Auchter’s commentary on New Orleans, city of masks, oppressive and beautiful. A number of the poems hinge on the tension between the official story and the suppressed voices within it. Slaves speak here, and criminals, the dead, the polluted landscape.

The poems below, “Harriet Beecher Stowe at the Cornstalk Hotel, 1850” and “St. Louis Cathedral, 2005”, are excerpted from The Wishing Tomb, with the permission of Perugia Press, Florence, MA. Copyright 2012 by Amanda Auchter.

Harriet Beecher Stowe at the Cornstalk Hotel, 1850

A man and a woman arrive together

in chains. His voice surfaces—
I shall try to meet you there—but I cannot

hear what follows. Tea cools in white china.
I think of horses, the way they walk back

and forth, hold up their heads. Horses,
the way a man in a coat turns them about,

   
opens their mouths, checks their teeth. Scars

on the flanks. A chimney gasps smoke
into the afternoon. The body looted. A child

plays a violin outside the stalls, watches
as women remove their handkerchiefs,

      
show their hands. A whip

weaves close to the ears. The balcony overlooks
a narrow street, a cart and driver.

   
The voices drift out, an edge

of an outline. The voices say, I hope
you will try to meet me in heaven.

      
I shall try to meet you there.

****

St. Louis Cathedral, 2005

The marble Jesus opens his eyes to the violence
     
of wind shaking bananas from tender stems,
  
the crack of two oak trees falling

in St. Anthony’s Garden behind their ornamental gate.
     
Rivers fill his mouth and in each
  
he tastes a shipwreck: torn boards, canvas,

drowned bodies. The slap of purple beads
     
against his bare feet. His arms
  
spread out as though he could cradle the city

inside him, as though the water that rises
     
above porches and windowsills,
  
above attics could abate with his strange light.

While the city darkens, he continues to turn each palm
     
skyward, an offering of damp stone,
  
a leaf caught in the crack of his right palm. Water

falls from his eyes and behind him, the wind
     
tears a hole in the roof of the church.
  
The rain enters the roof, floods

the Holtkamp pipe organ until everything is silent
     
of music. His hands are quieted
  
of their pale prayers—the left forefinger

and thumb broken off by a brick spinning its red stream
     
into the air. They push away
  
from his body. He watches

the city float past with its shattered glass, shoes,
     
telephone wire. How the debris of his
  
broken fingers swirl away from him, then point back.

Two Poems from Diana Anhalt’s “Lives of Straw”


Poet and political historian Diana Anhalt moved to Mexico with her family in 1950, where her parents joined a community of left-wing expatriates who’d left the U.S. to escape Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist persecutions. She would live there for the next 50 years. The full text of her nonfiction book A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico, 1948-1965 (Archer Books) is available online here.

Her new poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Lives of Straw, movingly depicts Mexican cultural traditions and characters from the economic margins. The opening and closing poems are from her perspective, first as a young girl adapting to a foreign country and language, and then her equally disorienting return to America half-a-century later. Within that frame, Anhalt lets her Mexican characters speak for themselves, in colorful, musical, yet often blunt persona poems that show many facets of the struggle for survival. Fortune-tellers, street vendors (including one selling poetry), herbal healers, death-defying construction workers, and con artists must devote all their creative genius to earning their next meal. Diana has kindly permitted me to reprint the poems below.

Dancing Alone

A summer’s night in Veracruz. The Rico Perez band plays a bolero
in the plaza principal. Lanterns thread the trees. I thread my way
through the sidelines. Edge past an ice cream vendor, girls in silk
and denim, dog walkers, two bald babies in headbands–to the center.
Couples shake and shuffle to the music. Some women dance alone,

reminding me of women in Pinochet’s Chile who danced the cueca,
partnered with snapshots of their desaparecidos–husbands, mothers,
sons. Here, an elderly woman in a pearl gray dress, struts, twirls
to the music, flexes her hands, nods her head, pauses to tighten
an earring. I suppose that everywhere, after violence, illness, divorce

women congregate on dance floors, raise their arms above their heads,
swing their hips to a merengue, beat out the rhythm of a cha cha cha,
and dance alone. This woman in gray resembles my mother-in-law,
now dead, who never would have. Me? I only pray, should–
dios no lo quiera–heaven forbid–that day come, I would.

****

Querencia,

a word that inhabits my Spanish-speaking mouth,
lies under my tongue and smells of evergreens,
and rainy Mondays, smoke. From the word querer—

to want, desire, wish. It refers to bulls
who seek their place of solace in the ring.
For the waif in every living creature. I think

of the neighbor’s dachshund hunkered under the porch,
the sparrow haunting a fallen tree, the child
afraid to stray too far from his mother’s side.

We took to driving the Cuernavaca highway
and parked in the clearing with that Mexico City view.
As the air turned hazy with cigarette smoke,

we’d drink wine from the bottle, talk and listen to danzones
on the radio. We drove away soon after, took
our memories with us, haven’t returned.

After years away, our key no longer fits
the lock. And our home, grown used to strangers’ feet,
is home no more.

Two Poems from Heather Christle’s “The Difficult Farm”

As April is National Poetry Month, I thought I’d give my blog readers some relief from the theological heavy lifting, and share some excerpts and reviews of the poets I’ve enjoyed lately.

I picked up Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm at the Octopus Books table at AWP 2011 because of the haunted-looking one-eared rabbit peering out from its acid-yellow cover. He’s an apt mascot for these poems, whose randomness can be both sinister and humorous.

…Dear nasty pregnant forest.
You are so hot!
You are environmentally significant.
Men love to hang themselves
from your standard old growth trees.
Don’t look at me.
…
(“Acorn Duly Crushed”)

The book’s title made me think of “the funny farm”, slang for an asylum, the place where persons deemed “difficult” are shut away, laughed at for the nonsense they speak. But is it nonsense? Christle’s poems are held together by tone rather than logic. They have the cadence and momentum of building an argument, but are composed of non sequiturs. But the individual observations within that stream of consciousness often ring so true that you may find yourself nodding along: Q.E.D.

…I am remembering how yesterday
a falcon landed on the telephone pole
and we stepped out of the car, amazed.
It was the color of somebody’s carpet.
In somebody’s carpet there is a falcon-
shaped hole.
…
(“It Is Raining in Here”)

I had to ask myself whether I perceived the book’s speaker as female because of the author’s name, or whether “she” did indeed sound like the quirky nerd-girl character from indie romantic comedies, who naturally thinks in words like “paraphrasic” and “over-cathected” but acts hapless and adorable in social situations. Whatever the reason, it made her more likeable than John Ashbery, whose technique is similar but never appealed to me. This book displayed an eagerness for connection through talk, while recognizing that we mostly use language for social glue rather than sincere information exchange. So why not serve up a “radiant salad” of words?

Heather has kindly allowed me to reprint the two poems below. Visit her blog to find out about her latest books. Some of my other favorites from The Difficult Farm, including “The Avalanche Club” and “The Handsome Man“, are available elsewhere online. Or you could just buy the book, and help the bunny pay for his plastic surgery.

Barnstormer

I do not have a farm do you have
a farm? on my farm are horses
cows pigeons chickens a dungeon
they tend to themselves it’s so easy!
I do not feel well do you feel
well? my throat’s on fire I mean
missing something crucial let’s say
the filament say filament! everyone
feels really good especially the horses
riding around like a bunch of stupid
chickens those are some foxy
beasts! I think beauty rises from
the dead do you think beauty rises?
like the great retarded sun? like
here comes beauty with its slow
dumb light and it’s touching stuff
& now I’m scattering feed I ordered
from mother nature’s catalog
which everyone knows has the best
pictures that’s why it’s all cut up
& the seed is falling out the holes &
the chickens are falling out
the holes & everyone gets papercuts!
goodbye chickens have a nice
time exploding in oblivion!

****
Stroking My Head With My Deception Stick

Someone shut down the local shimmer
but not the police who thought

it was Sunday and so spent hours
arranging their long and pliant hair.

Constable Jacques is the best man I know
but even he won’t converse with the dead.

The dead are so vain and hungry–
they will straddle your mirrors and swallow

your oak trees with their huge elastic lips.
And then you hear the screaming, not to be found

within the dead, but rather in the tiny
black pot which holds the greater part

of our mass and the difficult
farm where all the hens are black

and black are the wheatfields through which
runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers

explain to our children: if the farm is a burgeoning
snowglobe, then the screaming’s a legend, like glass.

New Poem by Conway: “Indignance of Time”


My prison pen pal “Conway” has made good use of his time to write poetry while he waits for a hearing on his early release petition. Here, he shares a brief intense lyric that he wrote inside a card with his original artwork, inspired by Salvador Dali’s melting clock faces in the painting “Persistence of Memory”. I was struck by the apocalyptic closing image of missiles lined up and waiting. “The day of perpetual consumption” is a uniquely modern American twist on the Last Judgment — the fire that never ceases to consume us, who never cease to consume the world.

Indignance of Time

Dancing on an escalator
   any Blackjack can move
as verse quakes off the sound
   rattling around
This town this shaft going nowhere.

Some shop keep roars.
   From shag deep floors
     But no one keys the door.
   Once done, no’one can come
back out of this inner sanctum
   this Holy glass of need.

We crave to tour the billboard lit night.

   Abundant commerce
      misled souvenir missiles of clay;

Lined up to wake the day
   of perpetual consumption…