::: A Taste of Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum : 08.21.09 :::
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” Henry David Thoreau
Matisse (above) brought to you by the dynamically mad duo of K.R.Copeland & Jeff Crouch, giving us a visual feast of the i-mad-gination! These two are in company with over 20 resident artists hanging in Mad Swirl's Mad Gallery!
The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come begins...now...now...now! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every every EVERY there is! Wanna catch a ride with us in the swirling madness? If you're reading this, you already have your ticket.
That's right, we're about to take off down that famed mad road. Why? Because it feels so right to be tapped in and connected to the collective source of creativity! We here at Mad Swirl are truly blessed to receive, review, publish and promote this beat-utiful living masterpiece that is our Poetry Forum. These poems come from the most maddest of the mad poets, from here, from there, from everywhere around this big, blue, swirly marble of ours.
Are ya' ready to roll? No need to answer, we can see that you are...
•-•-•-•-•-•-•
Whip Snap
Whip snap the set trap
Trying to catch those bees
Thinking about my flabby physique
I ought to quit smoking and drinking . . .
Well, maybe smoking
I ought to work out more
Learn to grow vegetables on my roof deck
Learn to dig those furrows with a double-barrel
Because there’s more to repel than grackles and crows
And I’ll have to pollinate my buds with cue tips
Which I’ll have to fabricate from dandelion fuzz
Or something else, like old fiberglass insulation
Because there won’t be anymore dandelions
Or bees to pollinate them
So, I’ll have to get into shape for that
Others will be in shape
They’ll be muscling flat screen TVs
From uptown high rises to take along
To some other, better place
Where there won’t be electricity
But plenty of plutonium slag heaps to plug into
No place for pride or greed
Or credit card wet dream
Instant gratification
We’ll have to work hard
For every little thing
Like picking the fiberglass filaments
From old insulation
To make cue tips
To pollinate our tomato blossoms
Because by then
We will be
The only bees
There are
© 2008
MH Clay
(3 poems added 08.21.09)
My Inheritance
I wish I could find the loose seam
of me where I can unravel myself,
pull back the flesh and check
under each hot organ, just to make sure
that everything lays where it should
that no little cells are misbehaving like naughty school children.
I could feel that my bones are thick, solid,
not hollow and light like a little bird’s wing.
My mother asks me if I will get the cancer test.
And I remember being 24 getting my first mammogram.
She says it’s my choice,
but I wonder what difference it will make.
When the dial on my life changes, it changes,
without permission.
And maybe not knowing
and waiting and wondering
is my inheritance.
The way the night sky gets to keep the stars
till they explode and shatter as if made of glass.
The way the river keeps the stones that fall in its path
and the ocean keeps all the wishes cast in bottles from the beginning of time.
All the heartache
heartbreak
that makes up this story is carved around my skull,
and floats behind my eyes each night.
“No,” I tell her, “not today.
But if I change my mind, I’ll let you know.”
She says she understands,
and her words sound heavy like bones
cracking under the weight of all these questions.
She is sorry, because she is a mother,
for what has passed at birth in the making of
our lives, in the rickety ladder of these chromosomes
the dominant, the recessive
the little consciousness that sits patient like an old poet inside me
holding the answer in a silver chest.
Her news is neither good nor bad,
it is just my inheritance.
© 2009
Ally Malinenko
(3 poems added 08.20.09)
This Little Bottle
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.” – New York Times, April 15, 2008
After all these years they still manage to misspell my name
With an extra E at the end, that which can stand
For anything -- energetic, maybe, or example:
Look what we can do with her.
Such great purpose in such little typeface.
All this motivation on a bottle
As amber as caramel glistening on a stick.
Sweet as candy, this freedom? I think so;
At least, I think I do.
What's light, having never seen dark?
And this little bottle is my flashlight,
Pressed into my slow, dumb hands at the age of 13,
its circles of chalky stars each day carefully
Placed next to my dinner plate and my breakfast toast.
What a sight in those days, my life more a mess
than any teenage angst could make it;
what a girl I was, who as a child seldom liked to
Play, as all children surely do.
And now I can - I mean, play –
At 28, you should watch me go. It’s a rodeo, really, the way
I circle around these boys. Playing hide-and-seek with the bottles,
Well, that’s easy too, if I need it to be. The medicine is not me;
And my interests, my loves, have all been illuminated.
What was invisible then has now been made plain to see -
Except, of course, who I might have been; but we can all
Think that, surely - we can all wonder if the tiger
Still growls behind the door we never chose. I might have been nowhere,
Did you think of that? Or dead, or poor, or President.
I mean, sure, out of the cocoon you can grow wings,
But what good are wings for, if all you do with them
Is constantly bump against the glass?
Christy Gualtieri
(added 08.19.08)
Into my Face
Gone by 5
I sometimes confuse
photographs with memories.
I remember trips to the Richmond Mall
with that blue leash my mom
used to use. But you never feared.
Never used the leash. And I never left
your vision. Ran around
like a bug you said smiling to my father.
I remember my dad sneaking me
in for visiting hours, because the rules
said I was too young. I cried when
we had to leave. My mom made a fuss.
Told me to shush. Thought we were
going to get caught.
I remember sitting on your lap while you ate
saltine crackers in fresh tomato soup
because you couldn’t swallow
whole food. I thought they sent you
home because you were getting better, but
the cancer took you one week later.
When my other grandfather
would miss a little league game,
my father would tell me
how you would’ve been there.
This was to make me feel
better. I felt more loss.
My father never learned Italian because
you only spoke English around the family.
Said that your children were born Americans,
and should sound like Americans. You didn’t
want your kids to get ridiculed
like you did – dago, wop, greasy fuck. You
gave them Anglo Saxon
first names, like William and Lauren.
Changed your first name
to Karl (Marx? ) when you jumped ship
at the Baltimore harbor, running from
fascist Mussolini.
By the time you were 26, you had traveled
across the Atlantic twice, been throughout
Europe and the near East while
working for the merchant
marines. I’ve got your travel
gene.
I hate cigarettes, even as I’m smoking
them. I blame them. I blame them because
I can’t bring myself to hold you accountable
for leaving me. You’d think I would have learned
that cigarettes smoke you. You don’t smoke them.
I should never have started.
When I can’t tell the difference between
photographs and memories, I stand
arms-length from reflective glass, where
I can see my father, and gaze deep into
my face, past his nose and blue eyes
and there’s your smile smiling back at me.
Brad Bisio
(3 poems added 08.18.09)
Tinker
Tense, anxious waiting
What for I can’t imagine
For, the other shoe to fall
For, a handprint on my other cheek
For the fruition of my greatest fears
For the tears
For my voice to silence from sobbing
For time to lose all meaning
As I claw back up from hell.
Clenched, impatient, waiting
For the signal
For this race to begin
For me to lose and you to win out in the end.
Detach yourself from this last place finisher
For you to come to your senses
For endings, one way or another.
For anything but the same.
We can’t go on in this manner.
We can’t perpetuate a vision of us happy
Of our laughter
The two of us are very shitty actors.
Every smile looks pained
Every time we grab for hands the other pulls away.
No one’s buying what we’re selling for this price
For the lie repeated every single day
For ‘I love you” not to mean “please, one more day”
For release
Of self and pride
And the need to make things work.
You tinker in your workshop- the space inside their head-
A piece removed, and you tighten screws and make a bigger mess.
Sometimes an object, person, situation breaks
And it never works again.
Tim DeQuatro
(added 08.17.09)
THE CUP OF MIND
The cup of my mind -
is always full, never empty.
Filled with water
both clean and dirty,
is this consciousness -
which I call mine.
The cup of my mind -
is tightly shut up.
Within the boundary,
and the familiar space,
I move during sleep,
and after I wake up,
shifting and adjusting -
fixed to the known base.
The cup of my mind -
is all my knowledge.
Visible and invisible,
currents of memory
flow within its hedge;
the water, the flow,
and the cup - indivisible.
The cup of my mind -
is the center of all sorrow.
Within its walls,
the many images;
some bring pleasure,
some bring pain;
the former I gladly borrow,
for the everlasting morrow,
till the latter comes along-
with its sting.
The cup of my mind -
is made up of time.
Filled with fear and longing,
ambition and desire,
and lost in its own pursuits.
Deaf to all rhyme,
and blind to nature's fruits -
in the race to climb higher.
The cup of my mind -
is full of itself.
Drops of sorrow fall on it;
brooding on those drops,
it makes them into a river,
using clever excuses as props -
a tree which was once a sliver.
The cup of my mind -
full to the brim,
with many horrors inside,
I place in front of you.
Look at it,
don't let it make you grim.
To see the true in false,
and the false in true -
you have got to trace it.
Now that you have the clue -
let us together embrace it,
without much ado.
So, come now,
let us face it -
I'm not much different from you.
Ashutosh Ghildiyal
(1 poem added 08.16.09)
In a name
When I joined the Legion, they gave me a new name
that I rolled over and over in my mind until I became that name.
On every aching yomp through the desert,
with the heels of my boots rubbing
agonising blisters on my red raw feet,
that name burned deeper into my psyche.
Every time the bergen straps cut into my shoulders
through the thin khaki shirt, dark with perspiration,
or when the cool metal of the weapon across my chest
moved to an awkward new position,
that unfamiliar mix of syllables like a rattle of small arms
accented by the heavier thump of large calibre weapons in a red valley
was embedded deeper in my consciousness.
When they shaved my head,
when I got the crest tattooed on my tanned, muscular bicep,
I became a phantom.
The sweat ran down my dark face and dried salt
tight on my brow and in my stubble
like the crystals on top of a patisserie pastry.
After 5 years marching in line slow time
with highly-polished boots slapping down on a parade square
and the dirge-like regimental song ringing in my ears,
Sgt. Nardo asked me if I wanted my old identity back.
“Non, Sergeant,” I replied. “I hardly even remember why I joined in the first place.”
Sgt. Nardo nodded knowingly.
Jon Tait
(added 08.15.09)
•-•-•-•-•-•-•
Wow, what a Mad Swirlin' ride down the road that was! But the ride's not over! You can hitch a ride whenever you get the urge to. This buzzing path to the poetic conversations going on in the Poetry Forum is always wide open. Drive by, say hi. We dig showing off what's going on under the hood.
Beep-beep,
Johnny O
Chief Mad Man
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." Thomas Gray
Matisse (above) brought to you by the dynamically mad duo of K.R.Copeland & Jeff Crouch, giving us a visual feast of the i-mad-gination! These two are in company with over 20 resident artists hanging in Mad Swirl's Mad Gallery!
The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come begins...now...now...now! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every every EVERY there is! Wanna catch a ride with us in the swirling madness? If you're reading this, you already have your ticket.
That's right, we're about to take off down that famed mad road. Why? Because it feels so right to be tapped in and connected to the collective source of creativity! We here at Mad Swirl are truly blessed to receive, review, publish and promote this beat-utiful living masterpiece that is our Poetry Forum. These poems come from the most maddest of the mad poets, from here, from there, from everywhere around this big, blue, swirly marble of ours.
Are ya' ready to roll? No need to answer, we can see that you are...
•-•-•-•-•-•-•
Whip Snap
Whip snap the set trap
Trying to catch those bees
Thinking about my flabby physique
I ought to quit smoking and drinking . . .
Well, maybe smoking
I ought to work out more
Learn to grow vegetables on my roof deck
Learn to dig those furrows with a double-barrel
Because there’s more to repel than grackles and crows
And I’ll have to pollinate my buds with cue tips
Which I’ll have to fabricate from dandelion fuzz
Or something else, like old fiberglass insulation
Because there won’t be anymore dandelions
Or bees to pollinate them
So, I’ll have to get into shape for that
Others will be in shape
They’ll be muscling flat screen TVs
From uptown high rises to take along
To some other, better place
Where there won’t be electricity
But plenty of plutonium slag heaps to plug into
No place for pride or greed
Or credit card wet dream
Instant gratification
We’ll have to work hard
For every little thing
Like picking the fiberglass filaments
From old insulation
To make cue tips
To pollinate our tomato blossoms
Because by then
We will be
The only bees
There are
© 2008
MH Clay
(3 poems added 08.21.09)
My Inheritance
I wish I could find the loose seam
of me where I can unravel myself,
pull back the flesh and check
under each hot organ, just to make sure
that everything lays where it should
that no little cells are misbehaving like naughty school children.
I could feel that my bones are thick, solid,
not hollow and light like a little bird’s wing.
My mother asks me if I will get the cancer test.
And I remember being 24 getting my first mammogram.
She says it’s my choice,
but I wonder what difference it will make.
When the dial on my life changes, it changes,
without permission.
And maybe not knowing
and waiting and wondering
is my inheritance.
The way the night sky gets to keep the stars
till they explode and shatter as if made of glass.
The way the river keeps the stones that fall in its path
and the ocean keeps all the wishes cast in bottles from the beginning of time.
All the heartache
heartbreak
that makes up this story is carved around my skull,
and floats behind my eyes each night.
“No,” I tell her, “not today.
But if I change my mind, I’ll let you know.”
She says she understands,
and her words sound heavy like bones
cracking under the weight of all these questions.
She is sorry, because she is a mother,
for what has passed at birth in the making of
our lives, in the rickety ladder of these chromosomes
the dominant, the recessive
the little consciousness that sits patient like an old poet inside me
holding the answer in a silver chest.
Her news is neither good nor bad,
it is just my inheritance.
© 2009
Ally Malinenko
(3 poems added 08.20.09)
This Little Bottle
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.” – New York Times, April 15, 2008
After all these years they still manage to misspell my name
With an extra E at the end, that which can stand
For anything -- energetic, maybe, or example:
Look what we can do with her.
Such great purpose in such little typeface.
All this motivation on a bottle
As amber as caramel glistening on a stick.
Sweet as candy, this freedom? I think so;
At least, I think I do.
What's light, having never seen dark?
And this little bottle is my flashlight,
Pressed into my slow, dumb hands at the age of 13,
its circles of chalky stars each day carefully
Placed next to my dinner plate and my breakfast toast.
What a sight in those days, my life more a mess
than any teenage angst could make it;
what a girl I was, who as a child seldom liked to
Play, as all children surely do.
And now I can - I mean, play –
At 28, you should watch me go. It’s a rodeo, really, the way
I circle around these boys. Playing hide-and-seek with the bottles,
Well, that’s easy too, if I need it to be. The medicine is not me;
And my interests, my loves, have all been illuminated.
What was invisible then has now been made plain to see -
Except, of course, who I might have been; but we can all
Think that, surely - we can all wonder if the tiger
Still growls behind the door we never chose. I might have been nowhere,
Did you think of that? Or dead, or poor, or President.
I mean, sure, out of the cocoon you can grow wings,
But what good are wings for, if all you do with them
Is constantly bump against the glass?
Christy Gualtieri
(added 08.19.08)
Into my Face
Gone by 5
I sometimes confuse
photographs with memories.
I remember trips to the Richmond Mall
with that blue leash my mom
used to use. But you never feared.
Never used the leash. And I never left
your vision. Ran around
like a bug you said smiling to my father.
I remember my dad sneaking me
in for visiting hours, because the rules
said I was too young. I cried when
we had to leave. My mom made a fuss.
Told me to shush. Thought we were
going to get caught.
I remember sitting on your lap while you ate
saltine crackers in fresh tomato soup
because you couldn’t swallow
whole food. I thought they sent you
home because you were getting better, but
the cancer took you one week later.
When my other grandfather
would miss a little league game,
my father would tell me
how you would’ve been there.
This was to make me feel
better. I felt more loss.
My father never learned Italian because
you only spoke English around the family.
Said that your children were born Americans,
and should sound like Americans. You didn’t
want your kids to get ridiculed
like you did – dago, wop, greasy fuck. You
gave them Anglo Saxon
first names, like William and Lauren.
Changed your first name
to Karl (Marx? ) when you jumped ship
at the Baltimore harbor, running from
fascist Mussolini.
By the time you were 26, you had traveled
across the Atlantic twice, been throughout
Europe and the near East while
working for the merchant
marines. I’ve got your travel
gene.
I hate cigarettes, even as I’m smoking
them. I blame them. I blame them because
I can’t bring myself to hold you accountable
for leaving me. You’d think I would have learned
that cigarettes smoke you. You don’t smoke them.
I should never have started.
When I can’t tell the difference between
photographs and memories, I stand
arms-length from reflective glass, where
I can see my father, and gaze deep into
my face, past his nose and blue eyes
and there’s your smile smiling back at me.
Brad Bisio
(3 poems added 08.18.09)
Tinker
Tense, anxious waiting
What for I can’t imagine
For, the other shoe to fall
For, a handprint on my other cheek
For the fruition of my greatest fears
For the tears
For my voice to silence from sobbing
For time to lose all meaning
As I claw back up from hell.
Clenched, impatient, waiting
For the signal
For this race to begin
For me to lose and you to win out in the end.
Detach yourself from this last place finisher
For you to come to your senses
For endings, one way or another.
For anything but the same.
We can’t go on in this manner.
We can’t perpetuate a vision of us happy
Of our laughter
The two of us are very shitty actors.
Every smile looks pained
Every time we grab for hands the other pulls away.
No one’s buying what we’re selling for this price
For the lie repeated every single day
For ‘I love you” not to mean “please, one more day”
For release
Of self and pride
And the need to make things work.
You tinker in your workshop- the space inside their head-
A piece removed, and you tighten screws and make a bigger mess.
Sometimes an object, person, situation breaks
And it never works again.
Tim DeQuatro
(added 08.17.09)
THE CUP OF MIND
The cup of my mind -
is always full, never empty.
Filled with water
both clean and dirty,
is this consciousness -
which I call mine.
The cup of my mind -
is tightly shut up.
Within the boundary,
and the familiar space,
I move during sleep,
and after I wake up,
shifting and adjusting -
fixed to the known base.
The cup of my mind -
is all my knowledge.
Visible and invisible,
currents of memory
flow within its hedge;
the water, the flow,
and the cup - indivisible.
The cup of my mind -
is the center of all sorrow.
Within its walls,
the many images;
some bring pleasure,
some bring pain;
the former I gladly borrow,
for the everlasting morrow,
till the latter comes along-
with its sting.
The cup of my mind -
is made up of time.
Filled with fear and longing,
ambition and desire,
and lost in its own pursuits.
Deaf to all rhyme,
and blind to nature's fruits -
in the race to climb higher.
The cup of my mind -
is full of itself.
Drops of sorrow fall on it;
brooding on those drops,
it makes them into a river,
using clever excuses as props -
a tree which was once a sliver.
The cup of my mind -
full to the brim,
with many horrors inside,
I place in front of you.
Look at it,
don't let it make you grim.
To see the true in false,
and the false in true -
you have got to trace it.
Now that you have the clue -
let us together embrace it,
without much ado.
So, come now,
let us face it -
I'm not much different from you.
Ashutosh Ghildiyal
(1 poem added 08.16.09)
In a name
When I joined the Legion, they gave me a new name
that I rolled over and over in my mind until I became that name.
On every aching yomp through the desert,
with the heels of my boots rubbing
agonising blisters on my red raw feet,
that name burned deeper into my psyche.
Every time the bergen straps cut into my shoulders
through the thin khaki shirt, dark with perspiration,
or when the cool metal of the weapon across my chest
moved to an awkward new position,
that unfamiliar mix of syllables like a rattle of small arms
accented by the heavier thump of large calibre weapons in a red valley
was embedded deeper in my consciousness.
When they shaved my head,
when I got the crest tattooed on my tanned, muscular bicep,
I became a phantom.
The sweat ran down my dark face and dried salt
tight on my brow and in my stubble
like the crystals on top of a patisserie pastry.
After 5 years marching in line slow time
with highly-polished boots slapping down on a parade square
and the dirge-like regimental song ringing in my ears,
Sgt. Nardo asked me if I wanted my old identity back.
“Non, Sergeant,” I replied. “I hardly even remember why I joined in the first place.”
Sgt. Nardo nodded knowingly.
Jon Tait
(added 08.15.09)
•-•-•-•-•-•-•
Wow, what a Mad Swirlin' ride down the road that was! But the ride's not over! You can hitch a ride whenever you get the urge to. This buzzing path to the poetic conversations going on in the Poetry Forum is always wide open. Drive by, say hi. We dig showing off what's going on under the hood.
Beep-beep,
Johnny O
Chief Mad Man
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." Thomas Gray
Comments