early morning poem...because i can't sleep

i can't sleep...even when i read poems....poems aren't comforting to me, they cut deep, they resonate on a level where sleep is impossible and impossibility is where i expect it to be...sitting next to me on my bed, whispering to me all of the secrets that i thought could never be mine...in a song without meter, melody, or key signature.

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.

sunday poem, because i'm procrastinating and yet always thinking about my dissertation

Spelling
Margaret Atwood

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,

learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

ò

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

ò

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.

ò

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

ò

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

ò

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

and you ain't there...

And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.

song for sad thursday

red house painters

"Uncle Joe"
-----------
Where have all the people gone in my life
I'm looking at the ceiling with an awful feeling of loss and of loneliness
The after late night television pain, I'm running out of strength
I'm running, running, running out of strength

And it feels so wonderful
To swim in our fears
And divide inseparable
The awakening of life

Oh, Uncle Joe, could you tell me about what you know?
Of being having mental problems and their solutions, too
I'll give anything a try once
I'll try anything three times
I don't care, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care

But there's no company
That can stand to be with me
So my dependency on you grows
And I am not very well read
And consider I will lose my heart
And can you spare me of my pain
Can't you spare me of my tears?

Oh, Uncle Joe
Uncle Joe
Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe

And suicide's intentional
When I spin in your fear
I am over-influenced
By movies
And you should've gone
To the fear
To my hope
The darkest hope
Did you know?
Lies become the sky
That's all gone
To the fear
To my hope
The darkest hope
Do you know?
Lies become the sky

this is a wallace steven's kind of day....

music score: The Emperor of Ice Cream by roger reynolds



image/installation: The Emperor of Ice Cream by Varujan Boghosian


The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

--Wallace Stevens


I love Helen Vendler’s expository (and poetic) interpretation of Wallace’s poem:


For purposes of experiment, I have put the details the poem gives us into the form of a first-person narrative; I see the poem as a rewritten form of this ur-narrative, in which the narrative has been changed into an impersonal form, and the linear temporal structure of narrative form has been replaced by a strict geometric spatial construction – two rooms juxtaposed. Here (with apologies) is my conjectural narrative ur-form of the poem, constructed purely as an explanatory device:

I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead – all that appetite, all that concupiscence.

Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been

She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau – the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances.

From The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia UP.

somewhere in my imagination i hear a greek chorus singing about sleep, numbness, what counts and what doesn't...but, most importantly, who gets to decide.

mantra from james wright

suddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossom

poem and image for the week...probably a re-post but i don't care

Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith


Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.





From Collected Poems of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith, published by New Directions Publishing Corp. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith.

rooms

painting by nick patten (nickpatten.com)

Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again, for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it was a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.

--Franz Kafka
in a letter to Milena Jesenska

the unbearable lightness of daydreaming in houses

...the house shelters daydreaming, the house proetects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

--Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, page 6

that daydreams can be embodied...that they can wrap around you like a familiar home and that this home is always with you....that's what i like about this passage.

pictures by paul politis at www.paulpolitis.com

poem for the week

One Art


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

images, song, and lyrics

wise up
aimee mann

It’s not what you thought
When you first began it
You got what you want
Now you can hardly stand it though
By now you know it's not
Going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

You’re sure there’s a cure
And you have finally found it
You think one drink
Will shrink you ‘til
You’re underground and living down
But it’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

No it’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up
No it’s not going to stop

So just give up

poem and image

“We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye”
Anna Akhmatova

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.

That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.

poem for today

“For a second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom
and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow
because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more
cruel than this—I’ll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep
breath and blew out the light.”

Katherine Anne Porter, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

pruning time

my arms are strong
my eyes see clearly
from dark brown knots

sculpted by time
and patience

my heart is somewhere
beating deep below
my barky surface

forcing a circulation
of life through my veins

but it’s all very confusing
when the time comes
to prune

to lob off a limb there
shave clean a branch here

to listen to the cracking
of my bones
worn tough by wind
and rain
to watch them break and fall

i’m on my knees
as if in prayer

looking up at familiar faces with
arms unfolded like a letter as if stretching
the muscles awake after a long night of sleeping
falling with force and gravity
making deep cuts
with every swipe

and i cry
while this same heart keeps
pumping
keeping me alive even
as i lose parts

for these parts have their
ways now
their own names

while i still

become smaller
by forced lack
and fragmentation

but my heart still beats
as it has
always done

pushing life through
my veins
repairing the damage
with new growth
because in the certain stillness
that always returns
after the violence
has retreated

i can hear the quietness
of repair
within deep sighs
and extended embraces

oaw
09/18/08

image and poem for the week....

A Grave
by Marianne Moore


Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to
yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this;
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the
top,
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look--
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate
them
for their bones have not lasted:
men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,
and row quickly away--the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such
thing as death.
The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--beautiful under
networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;
the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as hereto-
fore--
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath
them;
and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbuoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped
things are bound to sink--
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor
consciousness.





From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.

poem for today

“One day walking in Argyll with my husband we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn’t know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or desire—I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one in Scotland.”

The Wishing Tree
by Kathleen Jamie


I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland

but in the fold
of a green hill

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood

because I hoard
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.

My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins

I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania*.

Behind me, the land
reaches toward the Atlantic.

And though I’m poisoned
choking on the small change

of human hope,
daily beaten into me

look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.

*This is not a misspelling of Britannia…This is an older version of the word originally assigned to Britain by the Romans. oaw.

hump day poem

i thought that i would preface this poem with a quote from "why i write" by joan didion

in many ways writing is the act of saying i, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. it's an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds


But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.




From Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

poem for the week

My Mother Would Be a Falconress
by Robert Duncan



My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I'd turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.

She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?

I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.

For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.

I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.

Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.

My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.

Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun--
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.

I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will

to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where
the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.

My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.





From Bending the Bow, published by New Directions, 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Duncan.

your revolution

i was teaching my women's and gender studies class today

and one of my students was giving an oral presentation on

women in the music industry

this student's presentation lead to a general class discussion

over what it means to be a woman in an industry that is

insidiously white, male, and (big surprise here: heteronormative)

then the converstation shifted to not just issues of gender but

also race...what are the terms for women artists who are not white?

as my class was productively mulling over the issues related to race,

gender and the music industry i couldn't help but think of audre lorde

and the speech that she gave at medgar evers college in 1980 and the kind

of critique she was developing through her experience as an activist within

the civil rights movement...the struggles of being a woman, african american, feminist, womanist,

and lesbian that made her participation and even her subject negotiation within

the political formation of civil rights groups difficult and highly complex...

she spoke up to a heteronormative, male dominated paradigm that required her particpation

while at the same time demanding that she remain silent...to espouse as best she could

the violent restraints associated with that of an image of "straight woman, african american

woman"

she fought against this pressure

she established place within a third space territory

she was unapologetic for it as well

lorde was not concerned with just interested rights

she was concerned with the flow of power and the assignment of value

she wanted to change the ways in which we all consume otherness

she demanded oppression be addressed at all levels...not selectively

she demanded that perception change not just laws because laws are always

"interested"

this brings me to sarah jones

in the clip below you can hear her perform a spoken word piece entitled

"your revolution" from hbo's def poetry series...

fast forward through moss def's intro and cedric the entertainer's piece (although

his piece is worth a listen as is the interpetation of gwendolyn brooks' "we real cool" at the very

begining) and you will encounter the goddess that is sarah jones...



Sarah Jones “Your Revolution” lyrics


[Intro]

Yeah yeah, yeah this goes out to all the women and men from New York to

London to LA to Tokyo struggling to keep their self-respect in this climate

of misogyny, money worship and mass production of hip-hop's illegitimate child,

Hip-Pop.And this especially goes out to Gil Scott-Heron, friend, living legend

and proto-rapper who wrote "The Revolution will not be Televised." Much Respect.



[Verse]

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Not happen between these thighs

Not happen between these thighs

The real revolution ain't about booty size

The Versaces you buys, or the Lexus you drives

And though we've lost Biggie Smalls

Baby your notorious revolution

Will never allow you to lace no lyrical douche, in my bush

Your revolution will not be killing me softly, with Fugees

Your revolution ain't gonna knock me up without no ring

And produce little future emcees

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not find me in the backseat of a jeep

With LL, hard as hell, you know doin it and doin it and doin it well

doin it and doin it and doin it well, nah come on now

Your revolution will not be you smacking it up, flipping it, or rubbing it down

Nor will it take you downtown or humpin around

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not have me singing, ain't no nigga like the one I got

And your revolution will not be sending me for no drip, drip VD shot

And your revolution will not involve me, feelin your nature rise

Or helping you fantasize

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

No no, not between these thighs

Oh, my Jamican brother, your revolution will not make you feel bombastic

And really fantastic

And have you groping in the dark for that rubber wrapped in plastic

You will not be touching your lips to my triple dip of french vanilla,

butter pecan, chocolate delux

Or having Akinyele's dream, m-hmm a 6-foot blowjob machine m-hmm

You want to subjugate your queen? uh-huh

Think I'm a put it in my mouth, just cuz you made a few bucks?

Please brother please

Your revolution will not be me tossing my weave

And making me believe I'm some caviar-eating ghetto mafia clown

Or me giving up my behind, just so I can get signed

And maybe having somebody else write my rhymes

I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown

You know I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown

Your revolution makes me wonder, where could we go

If we could drop the empty pursuit of props and ego

We'd revolt back to our Roots, use a little Common Sense

On a quest to make love De La Soul, no pretense

But your revolution will not be you flexing your little sex and status

To express what you feel

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Will not happen between these thighs

Will not be you shaking and me *yawn* faking

Between these thighs

Because the real revolution, that's right I said the real revolution

You know I'm talking about the revolution

When it comes, it's gonna be real

It's gonna be real

It's gonna be real

When it finally comes

When it finally comes

It's gonna be real, yeah yeah

poem for the week

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

poem for the week

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Sherman Alexie

The morning air is all awash with angels . . .
- Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He's astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,

I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"
I say. "I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

How did I forget?" "It’s okay," she says.
"I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

And I didn't realize my mistake
Until this afternoon." My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.