Saturday, January 31, 2009

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.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

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.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

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.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

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.

Friday, January 2, 2009

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.