Stick Poet Super Hero: Best Poetry Blogs: A Baker's Dozen: Poetry Blogs Help Poets Expand the Horizons of Their Art | Suite101.com

Stick Poet Super Hero: Best Poetry Blogs: A Baker's Dozen: Poetry Blogs Help Poets Expand the Horizons of Their Art | Suite101.com

update

It was 20 degrees when I went to work this morning. Walking Nell my leash hand froze! So my feet will soon be next to the heater. We decorated for Christmas last night. the old homestead looks great. Gwen put together our Christmas card on Saturday. I went to the thrift store and found another book I don't need but for $2.00. I also found a small picture frame and a cheap shelf to put nik naks on. I have completed 10 poems DL Project on my latest book and have matched pictures up with them with staples so I don't lose the hard copies. I am also collecting news items from 1939.

I am an Echinacea What Flower Are You?

~ Wendell Berry ~

The Real Work

 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

 

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

 

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

Dorthea Lange Project

I have not added anything for over a month. That surprises me since I was diligent for a good while. I have about seven poems completed on my next book. Dorthea Lange Project that is the working title right now. Trying to put my thoughts and words into this historic photos as I read about the history and think of my parents who lived through that period as a young married couple. I just finished a book called the Weed Patch School to gain incite to the Oakies  that moved to California for that "better life" Below is a poem I construed from words about the depression from several books.

Half a Dance Wages

Ten cents a dance-

That’s what they pay me.

Twenty-five cents an hour

For cotton.

Ten cents a dance-

That’s what they pay me.

One dollar per ton of peaches.

Ten cents a dance-

That’s what they pay me.

Thirty-five cents an hour

For plums.

Ten cents a dance-

That’s what they pay me.

Twenty cents an hour

For potatoes.

Ten men for every job-

I’d settle for five cents

A day.

Gosh, how they weigh me down!

Philip Booth

Philip Booth"Writing poems is not a career but a lifetime of looking into, and listening to, how words see."

Poets on Poetry: Carl Sandburg | Blotting paper

Poets on Poetry: Carl Sandburg Blotting paper: Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Source: Unknown"

Poets on Poetry: Karl Shapiro | Blotting paper

Poets on Poetry: Karl Shapiro Blotting paper: "Karl ShapiroPoetry is a separate language. It’s a language in which you never really come to the point. You’re always at an angle.
Source: Unknown"

Praise

Flannery O'Connor wrote about Caroline Gordon: "You walk through her stories like you are walking in a complete real world. And watch how the meaning comes from the things themselves and not from her imposing anything."

The Cycle of Writing

I have been looking at much photography of Dorthea Lange of late. She speaks to me as i look at what she has taken pictures of. I have written a couple of poems about her photograph's and will include one of them here. I have marked the pictures I want to write about and have been looking listensing to songs/lyrics from the thirties. This has been enough to start me seeing that another book is underway.

Dorthea Lange Photo

My Hemingway Man 1939
                           For Jenny

The dress I did not wear
Matters little, for now.
Jim, shirtless- my young
Hemingway man, flexes
His security number across
His bicep.

He makes me kiss
Those digits each night
As tobacco smoke dissipates
On his chest hairs.
When Jim leaves
I’ll put on the hanging dress-
My style shines like the pot
To my right.

A Poultice For Belief

My latest book came out this week and it is beautiful. It will be available soon on Amazon.com. If you read my blog and find my book leave a blurb at Amazon.

Thoughts

I see that my blog is full of quotes and my Cool Papa Bell photo/myth. But I have far from abandoned my poetry. My energy is going into transfromative art. I see a figurine that is broken and I must complete it with a bit of crow/raven bits. Above the computer is a bookend of a monk reading. His missing foot has been replaced by a crow foot. A white Greek figurine I found at a thrift store (10% off for helping to lift a piece of furniture onto a truck) has got raven wings and a splash of white that i noticed on a crow while at work this week. I have seen other crows with this splosh of color but as with the muse why now does it show up and say now is the time. I mailed my latest book of poetry off to Red Hen Press, for a poetry contest. I did my usual send a copy by dropping it in the wrong ie. metered mail and not writing Attn. to the specific contest. I called the press and never heard back and it wasn't returned so my awkward method of posting mail continues.

Alberto Álvaro Ríos

"He said: 'The worst thing a writer can do is to think. The best thing to do is to react, which includes thinking but doesn't let it act as an impediment or a censor. When you read something, you think something — write that down. That's what I'm always trying to do.'"

Philip Schultz Poet, quote

"To not fear being vulnerable. Vulnerability as human beings is a necessary ingredient of their work. Strengths in their writing come out of that."

I have been doing some altered art; taking postcards and changing them for my enjoyment. adding a little myth to the picture. This one of Cool Papa Bell caught my eye at a thrift store. I could see putting a crow wing on it and the words below.








The Fall of Icarus
From a painting of
The same title
By Bruegel the Elder


Icarus fell into ordinary time.
His drama transported by wings
Overseeing the routine below.
A farmer plowing
A sheepherder herding
One walking a path.
Of this triad
One looked skyward
Maybe he heard Icarus’
Father screaming-
Another looked to his flock
A drop of wax on fleece
Possibly.

The third man saw the splash
Legs thrashing- defective wings
Anchoring the boy into the nonporous
Surf.

ARTnews

ARTnews

Loren Eisley

He wrote: "Sometimes of late years I find myself thinking the most beautiful sight in the world might be the birds taking over New York after the last man has run away to the hills. I will never live to see it, of course, but I know just how it will sound because I've lived up high and I know the sort of watch birds keep on us. I've listened to sparrows tapping tentatively on the outside of air conditioners when they thought no one was listening, and I know how other birds test the vibrations that come up to them through the television aerials. 'Is he gone?' they ask, and the vibrations come up from below, 'Not yet, not yet.'"

Goethe

"Goethe said, 'Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Looking at its sad appearance who would think that those stiff branches, those jagged twigs would turn green again and blossom and bear fruit next spring; but we hope they will, we know they will.'
And he said, 'One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.'"

Book Time

I am currently putting a book together for a poetry contest. I have till the end of the month so it's back to the computer.

Percy Shelley

"Percy Shelley said: 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'
And, 'Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets' food is love and fame.'
And he wrote,"

From:Elder Blog

"I am convinced that blogging is an almost perfect pastime for elders. It is solitary in the need to sit quietly as we think and write – never a bad thing to take time for a closer look.
It is also social in that blogging expands our circle of acquaintances and friends worldwide. It keeps our minds active and exercised and in telling our stories, it fulfills Carl Jung's admonition in his seven tasks of aging to review our lives as we approach the final chapters.
At a time in life when we no longer have the daily camaraderie of the workplace, may not drive any longer or, perhaps, are not as mobile generally as we once were, some smart people presented us with this marvelous, new way to be in touch just in time for us to benefit."

Diogenes Syndrome

"“Diogenes Syndrome” which, Wikipedia tells me, is “also known as 'senile squalor syndrome'...a behavioral disorder identified in 1975 that is characterized by extreme self-neglect” and “compulsive hoarding, the pathological collection and storage of objects, mainly other people's refuse.”"

Publications

This past couple of weeks I have had two poems come out in periodicals:
Sacred Poetry An invitation to writ href="http://abbyofthearts.com">

Raven Chronicles, where I was first published 20 years ago"a href="http://ravenchronicles.org">

My book Poltice for Belief is in its final stages so I am waiting to see the first copy come off press late summer or fall. href="http://marchstreet press.com">

New Mexico notes

New Mexico Notes

Where Gwen had focused her camera over and over I was striking with my flash of words.


I am under the station of
Jesus falls for the first time.
His body is roped off
In the Tabernacle.
Beat into falling
Weight
Of sins morphed into a cross.
His stained
Glass eyes look at me. I am
Lower in the pew- cameras flash.
People put their hands
On the feet of Christ-
Rubbing Buddha rubbing Christ.

Lorretto Chapel Santa Fe


What is the sky
Doing under- hanging over
The ground without strings?
No jet would fly into that thin air.
A bi-plane would make it interesting
As long as “Lady Lindy” were in pursuit.


Santa Fe Plaza

His bike was sprouting flowers
As he crossed the plaza-
End of the Santa Fe Trail
The Ghost of Comanche’s
Always show colors first
Not putting the beauty
Under a bushel.
“We are beyond
The oldest dust
In your tires.”

He rode on
Singing reggae into a white cup.

Iris Murdoch said

"Iris Murdoch said, 'Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.'"

"E.B. White quote

"E.B. White said, 'I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.'"

Poem: The Story By Tom A. Delmore

The Story
Praying in old temples and missions
Is more conversion and red knees
Than looking for forgiveness
Among holy dirt, rituals
And adorned Madonna’s.

Sometimes I wake
And Mohammed is more
A boxer than prophet.
Miracles come out of
Families of dysfunction
And rings of the pugilist more often
Than a rider ascending to heaven
On a flaming chariot.

There is a belief among boulevard trees
Who worship oversized vehicles; that God
Is in the topiary. And there are those
Trees who believe it is the devil
In the edgings.

Why is there a book of Lamentations
And no book of Oz- a book of Psalms
And no Howl in the canon
Of sacred texts.

When one finds a new
Lost scroll, dead or otherwise,
Do we keep them under a bushel
And whittle out what makes good
Kindling? All stories spark fire
Saints and prophets are full of this refuse
There mouths spitting orange embers.

Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau said: "The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."

Seeing Kelly Moore

When i was in Sante Fe last we I had the opportunity to meet the artist Kelly Moore. He is a fellow "Crow Lover" and we could not leave with out buying one of his paintings. Kelly is recognized as an outside artist, but whatever he sees and paints outside really hits me inside. Look at his stuff. Click his Bio below.

Bird of Prayer


The crows are gardening again.
Up with the sun they peck
the earth.
On some occasions
they bring their young crying
to the land; morsels are stuffed
down tender throats, raw
from cawing.

In summer they solo and caw
to God’s pause, caw again, move,
and caw once more. A trinity
of praise.
In that joy hopping,
movement of flying prayer,
crow recreates a dance of thanks-
never seen by Noah.

Bio Kelly Moore

Bio Kelly Moore

Saul Bellow

"He said, 'In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.' And, 'You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.' And, 'I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.''"

Ginsberg said

"Ginsberg said, 'Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.'"

Frank O'Hara - (reasonably) young and in love

Frank O'Hara - (reasonably) young and in love

Mind’s Eye

Mind’s Eye: "i.e. immediate, intense physical reactions, a sense of metaphor and decoration in everything—to express something not of them—something I suppose spiritual. But it proceeds from the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its place. Sometimes it cannot be made to indicate its spiritual goal clearly (some of Hopkins, say, where the point seems to be missing) but even then the spiritual must be felt. Miss Moore does this—but occasionally. The other way—of using the supposedly “spiritual”—the beautiful, the nostalgic, the ideal and poetic, to produce the material is the way of the Romantic, I think, and a great perversity."


It is always good to get touchstones from other writers/poets to keep our eyes sharp to the world around us. I have dificulty when I see something and can't get the depth of it to my satisfaction. Then I think that maybe I have seen enough. TA

John Cheever

"Cheever once described the writer's task as to evoke 'the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock and the breasts of women.'"

Theodore Roethke,

Theodore Roethke, went into "'Dionysian frenzy' that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about. Roethke wrote in his journals, 'I can project myself easier into a flower than a person.' And, 'I change into vegetables. First, a squash, then a turnip. … I become a cabbage, ready for the cleaver, the close knives.' And he wrote,'I knew how it felt to be a tree, a blade of grass, even a rabbit.' Also in his journal, he wrote, 'I wish I could photosynthesize.'"


Roethke wrote:
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

Quote: George Macdonald/ Poem: T A Delmore

George Macdonald, author of At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin, perhaps still puts it best, over 100 years on. "Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale; then read this and that as well, and you will see what is a fairytale. Were I further begged to describe the fairytale, or define what it is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face; and of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful."

When Eden said enough--- seeing
her first family pushed past paradise
to barren land, autumn fell on summer
and winter was felt
as a cold embrace.

The venture back still happens
like Abraham checking on Ishmael,
soldiers walk out of jungles decades later
wondering how the war passed them by.
Alchemists too lazy for travel make magic
and watch colors collude; maybe into gold.

God and the prophets are safeguarding the risky
edges and Moses could spit into Promised Land
an edenic for his stubborn tribe, but never
his heel.

Manna in the morning is mushy yellow
making forty years palatable travel.
coming back to paradise is not coming home
or paying a visit to a prodigal parent.

We are never greeted at the threshold
except in our imaginations.

Quote G.B. Shaw Poem: T A Delmore

G.B. Shaw said, "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
And, "Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."
And, "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."


As the night closed in
a murder of crows
fled towards the bow-legged moon.

"'Security is not the meaning of my life. Great opportunities
are worth the risks.'

-- Shirley Hufstedler"

quote Ellen Bryant Voigt, Poem T A Delmore

" Ellen Bryant Voigt, said, 'Resist any temptation to use the poem to make its readers like you, or admire you, or forgive you.'"



Reality
She is from Mississippi
Said you had to love fish
As Jambalaya arched
From her mouth to mine.
We got caught up
In a Romanian rhap.-
Her secret sin, dueting
With Eddie Mercury
As we sang: no escape
From reality.
I promised bibs and she
De-shelling the stew
This was too good to be true
And we set aside Monday
For karaoke.

May Sarton said "'If I were in solitary confinement, I'd never write another novel, and probably not keep a journal, but I'd write poetry, because poems, you see, are between God and me.'"

Poetry and Writing

I have gone over the galleys for my latest book A Poultice for Belief I have had worries about an editor tearing my work apart and making it his but that is not the case. I am so close to the work or my tenses are off that he has done great editing. Only one poem will I quibble with hime over really. As for my healing book Crossing up River is the working title, I have to match the pictures up with my text and keep going . I am not a computer person so they the pictures don't line up right. But my goal is to get it down and work it out with the lucky publisher later on.

Recollections from the Ring: A Conversation with Ferdie Pacheco

Recollections from the Ring: A Conversation with Ferdie Pacheco: "Joyce Carol Oates writes that 'watching the best boxing match is like hearing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier perfectly executed.'"

Owlhouse

Owlhouse: "You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them. Maurice Sendak"

Brendan Kennelly Said"'Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one's person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls.'"


Ledge

In my parents house was a wretched ledge.
Unspoken, distant, loathing. Rod of Oak
That was destructive, not creative.
A stick that was leaned on during the rosary-
Visible reminder.
Catching thighs with stinging accuracy
Like tipping a clumsy steer for branding. Striking
Cruel, rising stiff. Injurious wood
Used in a wild dance called the rosary.

Quote: Mark Strand Poem Tom Delmore

Mark Strand said, "Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention."



Coffee Shop Conversation


She sits across from her husband
They could be strangers except for the nearness.
Reading the USA Today to her New York Times
She speaks, completing coupleness. “Honey,
Less than one percent suffer from suicide headaches
Just like mine. A pain in the eyes for an hour
Than dissipating and coming back.”
He does not lower his section to say:
“just like yours” overlapping a painful truth.



She sits across from her husband
They could be strangers except
For the nearness.

Reading the USA Today
To her New York Times.
She speaks, completing coupleness.

“Honey, less than one percent
Suffer from suicide headaches
Just like mine;

A pain in the eyes for an hour
Then dissipating and coming back.”
He does not lower his section

To say “just like yours.”
Overlapping a painful
Truth.

Holy Week

With Holy Week upon us I wrote this poem recently.


O Prince of Peace

Each year the same man
Picks up the whip of scourging
And you are at the post-
Shit-stained and bleeding.

That blood you sweated
Now re-enacted with thorns.
And there you are in the church.

Crazies broke you to bits.
Old women want you
Back on the damp eastern wall
Not in that corner niche.

All this time you could tie
Yourself to that column.
Give the man his whip
Even tell where each pull
Of skin will originate.

The story has metaphor.
And each year someone believes
And someone denies
And that rooster reneges
In every courtyard in the land.

And you say: feed my sheep.

Poem TA Delmore Quote Rimbaud

Outward Signs

Mom did not take
Paxil or Prozac, she had
alcohol and nicotine to bed
this fetus. Me!
It was the fifties
where not knowing and caring
were sub-rewards of a World
War victory.

Upon my birth
no tremors or shakes, ‘cuse
the right balance of smokes
and wine made a space
in my brain. All I had to do
was look at my name bracelet
to know who I was
and flip it convex to know
a fallen St. Christopher
was protecting me.


"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will." Rimbaud

Book Work and Poem TA Delmore

Ledge
In my parents house was a wretched ledge.
Unspoken, distant, loathing. Rod of Oak
That was destructive, not creative.
A stick that was leaned on during the rosary-
Visible reminder.
Catching thighs with stinging accuracy
Like tipping a clumsy steer for branding. Striking
Cruel, rising stiff. Injurious wood
Used in a wild dance named prayer.

I have been working on a book more off than on over the past twenty years on a way to heal the inner wounded child. It has always been sitting in that risky place of wonder what others will think or can I pull this writing together. Focusing outward seemed like a good place to work from, but much has coursed my blood in those years as Rilke aply puts it. Last night I went to my disorganized files and found my pieces and many distractive things I have not seen for years. I brushed them aside except for articles that pertain to this writing. For those who read my Blog keep me in your thoughts and prayers as I move toward this light.

Rollo May quote My Poem

We recall the studies of especially creative people that were made by Frank Barron. Dr. Barron showed his cards—cards with many different drawings and paintings on them—to creative people and their counter-parts, people who weren't especially creative, asking them to pick out the cards they liked best. The latter group chose the orderly cards; they liked things to be clear, understandable, uncluttered. But the creative people chose the chaotic cards. The most striking thing about the creative people was this taste for chaos. They preferred the scribbles where there was no form whatever; they found a challenge in the chaos. They yearned to make form out of it, “to make of the chaos about them an order which is their own,” as Henry Miller puts it. This is the purpose of their existence. This is the fundamental creative aspect of all human beings whether they are especially talented or not.
The human imagination is shown in these strivings—which may sometimes be passion and sometimes simply curiosity—to put things into form. It's what Einstein did when he proclaimed that matter and energy are related in one formula, E = mc2. Our human mind is continuously doing that, obviously on a lesser scale.
—Rollo May from My Quest for Beauty


This Moment

More people are walking
Into traffic; so terrible
So traumatic.
A few get run over
More than once
Shape-shifters
Coyote, armadillo.

We follow human outcome
On the teli, in the paper, from
No name to identification
To obituary.

Many times there is no
Summation, was he/she,
German, Irish, Sudanese?
Did I attend school with them?
Did she work for my dad?
It behooves me to demystify.

Yesterday
A road side bomb killed 35.

Poem TA Delmore and quote by Lorca

Lorca said, "As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”And, "In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world."


Hand Me down Wagon
I had a red wagon
handed down with twine
unraveling on the handle-
old photos tell me so.
The handle bent
as if to say:
“tie me to a bike,
journey me down any hill.”

Sometimes I’d crash;
black handle impacting
pushing into my chest.
Running home to mom
in pain, she, looking tired
oh so tired.

“Where’s the wagon, Tommy?”

Poem by TA Delmore Quote Stanley Elkin

Ear Rings
She has bears on her ears
shiny silver shards
pressed into her lobes.
If one looked closely
at the lapel of those bear-filled ears
an arrow jaggeds itself on the bodies
of these stalwart beasts.
My totem on her lobes
and she keeps repeating:
there are no coincidences.


Stanley Elkin, said, "Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does."

Poem by TA Delmore Quote by Sophie Kerr

The Desoto rolled off the line
In fifty-five.
I was pulled out of mom
The same year.
Desoto’s longevity was waning.
I would grow, wailing
Till I learned to be vocal inside
And shut my voice on the outside.
.

Into this new century
I saw a classic Desoto.
Four people sat inside laughing.
In me there are people, peering
Not laughing. I’m
Still on the assembly line
Of imperfection.



Sophie Kerr, who said, "An industrious sinner I much prefer to a lazy saint."

Quot by Prose Poem by me

Francine Prose said, "For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on the bus."


Winged Medicine
When the dead crow
was placed in the trash-
a perfect wing stretched
to greet me.
Twisting the appendage like a branch
it broke in my hand.
A gift so powerful
I dropped it to the ground.
Certain on some plain
it was in flight.

Poem by me

I saw the Benjamen Button movie today with my son Patrick. What an amazing movie. Very powerful.


Held under water
No sin forgiven
The struggle for breath
Negates remorse.

To put your head under
Shout sin and shame away
As a preacher blatant upon
His pulpit-
Does not inhale.

The poignancy of breath
In purgatorial situations
Lofts sin onto a fisherman’s
Perch
To be scaled and de-boned.

Things

As you all can see i added a book case of books I have read. A little charm for the Blog.
Go to www.abbeyofthearts.com and read the interview with an artist. This is my teacher in PRH, Mary Kolb.
I had a check back with the doctor. I fractured my fibula. The crack is getting wider so I have to have a surgeon look at it next week and see what he thinks.
My nephew Jim sent me some interesting things about my dad's family, I like this one too of my great grandmother on the far left and my grandmother next to her.

Collage Poem

The poem is from a collage I am working on. I don't think it comes out of the myriad of "boxing" poems I have done of late, but more to fit the character(s) in the collage.


Twin’s Boxing
In the living room
Gloves knotted over wrists
In brown cracked leather
Worn-down in others sweat.

Dad’s voice rang
Smoke pouring from his mouth.
Chairs made the ring
And ring-side seats.

Gloves collided, too big
To do physical damage.
One could see any punch coming-
A hook was a birthing process.
All jabs and bluster were right up front.
In a clinch, arms so heavy
One wanted to hold the other
For rest.

We were entertainment for our parents-
Like Lawrence Welk, sans bubbles
And music, and the folks dancing.
Wunerful, wunerful.

Quote/Poem

• "All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
• ""The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without."
• "The shortest answer is doing the thing."
• "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
Ernest Hemingway



Gnawing Bones


When dad asked:
“does her voice make you
hard;” all teaching ceased.
it was now a “man thing”-
in sex etiquette dads
never crossed over.

He sat by the TV
while I undressed
a woman from a LIFE
magazine pantyhose ad.
thigh by thigh
in the living room
calf by calf
on the couch
ankle by ankle
at a distance.

The pause
between question
and answer
father and son
was comparable
to inhaling
a drycleaner bag.

Articles of Faith: Inviting Warren fits Obama's inclusive ideals

Articles of Faith: Inviting Warren fits Obama's inclusive ideals

Ray Bradbury Quote Tom A Delmore Poem

Ray Bradbury said, "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." And, "Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."


Half-way to Heaven
or Where was God?


These were my girls- stacked
like cord wood naked next to a ditch.
Limbs in all directions, along with men-
a death orgy in shades of black & white.

Once we stood in bars leaning on one another
touching layers of material to fumble arousal.
Their names so easy
back then
to remember.

When I entered this death place; fatigue-clad
led by stench to this magi-less scene,
those alive like ghosts from a Dickens’s tale
pointed to these heaps of limbs, half-way to heaven.

Modesty untangles the bodies
as those filled with sin and dust
drag and straighten atrophied appendages
for burial.

These are not just
my girls, come to think of it
they are me
they are you
the abyss the tight rope.

I danced with her
I’d know her ankle anywhere,
and yes that knap of neck, now
so elongated that my lips
would fit thrice in that space-
when one kiss was always
enough. Those places on bodies
we never mentioned but moanly vocalized-
splayed to nausea and averted eyes
and no light. There is no light.