We do lyrics all the time ...

I'm in the mood for poetry.

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry


Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.


- Howard Nemerov

Another Betrayal
for Paul Bowles



Because of a slip of the moon's mood
against a flat but exotic blue sky,
it began. Never mind the argument,

the exact words. It could be anywhere,
Cairo or Jerusalem, a crumbling city.

Sand and wind. Old passions, predictions.
A slight decision, as if to light
a cigarette, buy a trinket.

It was as simple as that. In the heat,
in the voluminous night,

a paid woman. Her beauty chiseled
like the first coin earned
that turns in your hand.

Dizzying and all so strange
the layers of dress she wore and

the unwinding. A slow movement
as she loosened the top of her robe,
one color slipping to another and another.

It was after she knelt before him,
after he drank from the Judas cup,

everything was set into motion.
A stain not likely to be blotted
from his lips. This moment leading

through cobblestone streets
that wind back to the blank faces

in doorways, to the black snow of flies,
the dust, the sleepless wife, love's
betrayals about to be played out against

the disarrangement of stars,
the old eccentricities of the moon.


- Deanna Pickard

Stonefruit


To you whom I've hurt
not meaning to

I offer this plum this drupe
no shell but a thin skin purpled

I tender to your mouth the muscle
the sweet sympathetic scar-tissue

surrounding the stone the seed
which wants to be buried



- Rodney Jack

Images
by Tyrone Green

Dark and lonely on a summer's night.
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
Watchdog barking. Do he bite?
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
Slip in his window. Break his neck.
Then his house I start to wreck.
Got no reason. What the heck?
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

C-I-L my land lord!

Sitting across from me,
he offers to share
his blueberries...


Yes, let me taste navy blue
sparkles of sex,
a fresh and warm
exchange
from your mouth
to mine

a chance encounter of lips
would be young
and unrehearsed
and any breath I take
from you
is like a new wind
over my body


stain my tongue with yours,
as my hand slips beneath your shirt
and my fingers play
against muscles
whose shadows
torment me
with every movement
you make


flavor my night with a fever I'll carry
into another world,
one I had thought
I would have to die
to reach,
a fever that will forever
disorient me
each time
I taste
blueberries.....


now,


if only
he could


read


my thoughts...

- Donna Lane (my friend)

American Love Story


1. THE GIRL

Hallelujah, she knows how to shoot pool.
She sinks her eight ball, drinks me under
the table. I whimper for a date, a smooch,
a slap. She hits the jukebox, that old song.
I change taverns but she's there: pigtails
that fill me with moon silt and planet jelly,
lips that just keep on being lips, little belly
I want to ski across. At home she's on top
of the fridge, dog-earing my favorite Azorean
epic. She drives the bus I take, cleans my
teeth, cuts my hair, cashes my paychecks,
taunting me: Going out tonight, Jerry? See
you there, Doll, I say, shaking with optimism.

2. THE SCHEME

If I can carry the pigskin ten more yards,
she'll take me to the movies, an action flick
with Swiss banks and tanks and jagged Alps.
I'll miss hockey, but her swinging ponytail
is better than a puck slung on ice. Her face
becomes warm, hot, thermonuclear. God,
I love her. She has perfect teeth, a straight
spine, and thighs that make frat boys bang
petulant fists during beer pong. Lord, if I sink
this basket, she'll marry me in Lake Tahoe: my
feet in Nevada, hers in California. If I'm clever,
I'll slip into a triple-cherry slot, and I'll love her
more with each rolling coin, each lucky pull.


Mike Dockins
The Gettysburg Review
Spring 2003

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood


The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

Ribh Considers Christian Love insufficient
W.B. Yeats

Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit.
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that's a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.

Why do I hate man, woman or event?
That is a light my jealous soul has sent.
From terror and deception freed it can
Discover impurities, can show at last
How soul may walk when all such things are past,
How soul could walk before such things began.

Then my delivered soul herself shall learn
A darker knowledge and in hatred turn
From every thought of God mankind has had.
Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.

At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
A bodily or mental furniture.
What can she take until her Master give!
Where can she look until He make the show!
What can she know until He bid her know!
How can she live till in her blood He live!

Ballade At Thirty-Five
by Dorothy Parker

This, no song of an ingenue,
This, no ballad of innocence;
This, the rhyme of a lady who
Followed ever her natural bents.
This, a solo of sapience,
This, a chantey of sophistry,
This, the sum of experiments
I loved them until they loved me.

Decked in garments of sable hue,
Daubed with ashes of myriad Lents,
Wearing shower bouquets of rue,
Walk I ever in penitence.
Oft I roam, as my heart repents,
Through God's acre of memory,
Marking stones, in my reverence,
"I loved them until they loved me."

Pictures pass me in long review
Marching columns of dead events.
I was tender and, often, true;
Ever a prey to coincidence.
Always knew I the consequence;
Always saw what the end would be.
We're as Nature has made us - hence
I loved them until they loved me.

"Tonight I Can Write"
By Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Bereft

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking downhill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.


~Robert Frost

Dusk and the Wife


in with the child
who drops like a weighted lure,
flashes down, down to sleep.
The husband suburban, pulls up
a bright folder called Taxes
in the coming dark (his young
coworker in Baja, her unfettered
surface away on vacation).

In the coming dark the grey
squirrel ripples across outside
time-lapse.

So many leaves to the trees
this many this many.

What is it then?

He opens to the red head, her
sheer bra pulled down
lush strap hard pressed
to the fullest curve of her breast.
She slightly bites her lip
while the wife half a dream away
is pressed by his good friend
against a building. They could be
in Florence—all these angels.



- A. V. Christie

Blank Joy
- Rainer Maria Rilke

She who did not come, wasn't she determined
nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart?
If we had to exist to become the one we love,
what would the heart have to create?

Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are
the center of all my labors and my loves.
If I've wept for you so much, it's because
I preferred you among so many outlined joys

fetal distress


bloody rags purely terrified
strapped down as if crucified
scalpel's precision decisive decision
gleaming cutting jagged incision
through layers of skin, fat and muscle being
millimeter careful frantically freeing
the uteral cocoon
slice tissue puncture balloon
spilling amniotic fluid blood
reveal
the miracle
reveal the wrinkled bloody wet bluish-reddish black haired miracle
reveal the baby
reveal my baby
reveal my son
silence relief then
fragile cry rising in crescendo
the beacon the light the sweet melody to my ears
freedom now to release my tears

thank you God.

amen.

-JMH

No me preguntes si te amo,
porque esa pregunta me ofende,
si pudiera colocar moneda sobre moneda
para hacer una torre de todo lo que siento,
créeme llegaría hasta el cielo.

Te amo mujer,
amo tu historia,
amo tu vida,
y amo tu paz,
inclusive me gusta verte estornudar,
tu manía de tocarte el cabello,
tu nerviosismo cuando beso tu cuello.

A pesar de que estés lejos,
lo que siento aquí dentro crece y crece,
que a veces me asusta el pensar
donde voy a poner tanto amor,
cuando ya no me quepa en el pecho.

No importa que te mudes a otra galaxia,
tu siempre estas aquí,
y sobra decir que yo vivo en un mundo dentro de ti.

Porque por más lejos que estés,
por más preguntas que hagas,
no importa el lugar donde estés,
donde tu vives es aquí... en mi corazón.

SONNET 95


How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report.
O, what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot,
And all things turn to fair that eyes can see!
Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege;
The hardest knife ill-used doth lose his edge.

SONNET CXLVII


My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

She Walks in Beauty - Byron (no not that Byron - at least, i don't think so )

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Piano - D H Lawrence.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

roses are red and violets are blue
i smell good and you smell like poo

Christopher said:

TheFrog said:

thank you .....i get so inspired

Donne - The Flea

Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sinne, nor shame, nor losse of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than wee would doe.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where wee almost, yea more than maryed are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloysterd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make you apt to kill mee,
Let not to that, selfe murder added bee,
And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three.

Cruell and sodaine, hast thou since
Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty bee,
Except in that drop which it suckt from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and saist that thou
Find'st not thy selfe, nor mee the weaker now;
'Tis true, then learne how false, feares bee;
Just so much honor, when thou yeeld'st to mee,
Will wast, as this flea's death tooke life from thee.


[This message was edited Thu May 13 2:00:15 2004 by TheFrog]

Christopher said:

Roses - Anon

Roses are red
Violets are blue
All my base
Are belong to you.

starkitty said:

That is superb.

2the9s said:

I like.

LIFE

Born
Worn
Torn
Mourn
[This message was edited Thu May 13 14:34:05 2004 by oldmanjohnson]