April 19-21, 2014 #NaPoWriMo14

April 21, 2014 #NaPoWriMo14

#Twitterversary.
Five years twittering.
Post Baghdad-funk –
not even a week in Hawai’i
180 degrees away
could shake the sleepless nights -
and so I twittered;
pre-Damascus-buzz,
duty phoned – don’t answer calls
from that office the next time –
definitely needed-to-tweet period.
This is a poem.

 

April 20, 2014 #NaPoWriMo

It matters that Frost wrote “Stopping
By the Woods” in rubaiyat form,
a Persian, Farsi quartrain style,
imported to the Christian west.

And it matters that the same
person who invented TED talks
coined the term information
architecture. An architect.

I roll the dice: a rising star;
an old man’s thoughts; and energy
radiating out from the center –

The message is in the grammar –
the structure that houses the space –
content – - is just the vehicle.

 

April 19, 2014 #NaPoWriMo

 

Today’s project task is the writing of
a compelling introduction for the
project report.  It is the final step.
Strange practice, one might think, saving for last
the introduction, like ending a website
construction process with the homepage.
Maybe a better analogy is icing
on a cake, a cherry in the middle.
Dare I deliver them poetry?  A sonnet,
perhaps, or rubaiyat? Some terza rima
or octava?  Of course it will be prose,
of course: conventional, traditional,
paragraphical but purposeful prose,
with maybe an occasional hidden rhyme.

April 17-18, 2014 NaPoWriMo

April 17, 2014






A smiling face in front of a skull and
bones can never be a positive sign -
deception, malevolence, subterfuge –
a woman in the middle is clapping,
or wiping, her hands of the matter.
But right to left yields a better message:
danger approaches or is present -
but the woman in the middle
resolves the matter – as a mother protects
her sun, a lover fixes the situation
for her lover - tragedy transforms
to comedy, romance. Boy is happy, safe.
What a difference direction makes.   
"What's in your wallet?”



April 18, 2014


Everybody’s talking about the one percent:
they have all the money, all the connections,
the networks to get more money, MOAR money.
I say let them have their exclusivity,
build those walls higher & higher, thicker
and thicker to keep out the unalike,
the alien, the dissimilar, the impure.
Let their gene pool weaken from incest
and lack of variation, let their diseases       
replicate and multiply inside those walls,
walls that enclose but also block out
light & love & joy & celebration.
Give me life’s richness any day, and color,
and let them perish in their cherished purity.

April 13-16, 2014 #NaPoWriMo14

April 13, 2014


The Five Laws of Poetry (being a take off of Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science)

 1. Poetry is for use, for reading, reciting, and study.

 2. Poetry is universal. There is a poem for every person.

 3. Every person can understand poetry with effort.

 4. Poems should be short enough to convey the message.

 5. Poetry as a literary genre is a growing organism.  




April 14, 2014


Blood moon rising
cherry blossoms
blooming &
I’m outta Zertec.

The weatherman said
it might snow tonight.
And I don’t know
if I am early or late …


April 15, 2014

no time for poems
this week
and yet poetry
still oozes :)
out of my pen
out of my right hand
out of my soul


 April 16, 2014

Princeton decides U.G Gov’t is not a democracy:
no new news there, Ivy League buster,
not for those never invited to the table
to sip slowly of the purple Kool Ade.      

But isn’t oligarchy what the Russians have?
Where very few rich people control the many,
and every official is bought and paid for,
and voting is a joke? A sham?         

But that’s not what we are. Oh no! 
Russia’s theory is economic elite domination,
and ours is biased pluralism. Right, buster. 
All the same in the wash, Princeton. Thanks.    


http://www.policymic.com/articles/87719/princeton-concludes-what-kind-of-government-america-really-has-and-it-s-not-a-democracy

April 7-12, 2014: NaPoWriMo

April 12, 2014: NaPoWriMo

A friend from overseas asked me in a card:
“Ray, what’s it like to live in a country
constantly, always and forever at war?”
I didn’t have an answer so I rolled three dice.
Drama masks; a ladder; catching butterflies.
The masks are for deception when they speak,
all actors on a temporary stage.
The ladder: an escape; a rescue;
a fortuitous disassociation.
Catching butterflies: they will try to lure
you back. Maintain course and speed, ignore their call.
So what’s it like? Constant bombardment, spin,
propaganda, subliminal appeals.
Don’t think about the guy behind the curtain.

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April 11, 2014

Posted on April 12, 2014 | 1 comment    
  

I wandered through a shopping mall looking
for a telephone, a land phone with two lines:
dying technology, I would soon find out.
The mall, normally full of shoppers, was empty,
quiet, flat. Where were all the shoppers?
A few old men sat at tables in the food court,
rustling through papers with young couples,
and big, tatooed men passed through, I could tell
they were ex-soldiers by their swagger, by the glaze
of combat still in their eyes. Looking for jobs.
No jobs today, everywhere, stores are closing.
In Baghdad, the Marines used to say, “America
is not at war, the Marines are at war.
America is at the Mall.” Not no more.

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April 10, 2014

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Story cube prompts: three gears, a high rise building or a tall beehive, a bank robber.   


like gears engaged our lives unwind, unfold,
become enmeshed, entangled in the race.
the buildings that house all our livelihood
contain us, stifle, choke our spirit self.
we are like bees, slaves in a tall hive house –
up and down we weave and work, in and out –
confined and circumscribed, enslaved and drugged.
an enemy sneaks in with a food that kills,
destroys our young – no honey if no brood –
our storehouse of fantasies robbed by thieves,
pimped like whores, a birthright lost, foreclosed.

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April 9, 2014

Posted on April 10, 2014 | Leave a comment   
   

I always called it sing-songy French,
the occasional sweet things she’d say
in her deep southern, swing low tone.   

We lost all contact over time:
marriages, divorces, voyages,
wars and rumors of wars,
storms and floods and broken dikes –   

and now we are too old
to put the scattered pieces back
into their right places.   

But though scattered, the random pieces
of our lost love, words, verses
refuse to go away completely,
to abandon us hopelessly, altogether.   

So we stare at them, the pieces,
the fragments, impossible to ignore,
though equally impossible to re-assemble,   

and the pieces stare back at us,
the sing-songy notes, the French words
we used to know, the whispers,
and rest in peaceful sleep.

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April 8, 2014

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April eight’s
poetry is late
Hana Matsuri
Romani Day   

Jupiter in Cancer
Mars and Earth
and Sun in alignment -
blood moon coming   

roll the dice:
a bumble bee
a swollen thumb
an ocean voyage   

cherry blossoms
blooming -
blood moon
coming

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April 7, 2014 – On attending a lecture by a Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist, Pt. 3

Posted on April 7, 2014 | Leave a comment    
  

At our center
is a dying star:
an empty space -
a black hole.   

It once emitted light
to all inside its orbit;
but now it only absorbs,
and robs, and depletes -    

And yet it still
has force and grace
to bend us at its will -
and hold us all – together.

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April 5 and 6, 2014 - On attending a lecture by a Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist

April 5, 2014 – On attending a lecture by a Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist, Pt. 1

The universe has no beginning nor end,
expanding and unbounded in undefined space
and time. Every event is an act on a stage,
a plot that continually evolves.

Our paths cross like two distant stars –
each star a separate solar system –
but from afar, from Earth, perhaps,
we appear joined, fused, as one.
 
And sailors use our apparent light
to steer their ships by through the darkened night,
and stargazers reckon the passage of time
by the single light they think that we emit.

Yet all their precise calculations miss
the mark, if based on a truth that is false.


April 6, 2014 - Pt. 2

In one year, or in a thousand years
our galaxies resume their chosen paths,
and from afar, from Earth perhaps, the truth
becomes revealed: we are not one – but two,
but many, diverse, distinct, passing through
space like ships in the night. And sailors still
reach their destinations, despite the inexactitude,
still sleep in loving arms’ embrace the long night
through. So what’s the moral of this story,
what’s this sonnet's point? We seek defined lives
in indefinite space. We try to reconcile
our every act, our every word, each thought,
but ere the end all bets are off,
and all is naught but drifting stardust…

 

 

April 4, 2014 – A charm for all that ails

Measure equal portions each:
ground ginger and cinnamon sticks;
whole peppercorn and clove buds;
cardamom pods; nutmeg; and black cumin seeds.
Mix in a grinder until powdery and fine,
store in an airtight metal tin.
 

Heat one teaspoon in four cups of water

until it forms a shimmering slime on top.
Add tea and steep for taste,
or brew in coffee, per your choice,
in similar proportion. Or sprinkle
on ice cream or your favorite dessert. 
The spice mix will de-stress your mind,
soothe digestion and aid regularity.

 

April 3, 2014 - Triversen

three days in
might be three days late
for a beginning poem.

my compass was confused,

I lost my way
in the thickness of the fog.

a late start

is not the end of things –
it is still a beginning:

and I still have you,

and you, me,
and we, each other.

So let’s make a go

of this poetry month
and celebrate each day,

early or late,

lost or found,
beginning to end. 

April 2, 1014 - A favorite book

Prompt: title of your favorite poem, book, or film.
story cubes:  stool, knocking at the door, straight arrow.

 “The legends say something happened in Chaneysville.”

And legends don’t normally lie, though they may embellish,
just a bit.  A big city history professor returns to his rural roots
when he learns a father-like figure is dying.

A transference occurs, a passing of the seat of authority

Now is his turn to sit on the leadership stool.
Truth knocks at the door, the scales of justice
are unbalanced – a historical wrong must be righted.

The old man taught him in his youth how to track game

through the woods.  He used those tools in his new field,
a sleuth tracking information through layers of noise.
But now his sense of direction must be straight and true.

Leave the self-perpetuating baggage in the city.

Discovery and redemption require a certain resolution.

April 1, 2014 - An Ekphrastic poem

Prompt: Ekphrastic poem
story cubes: a slipper, an open book, a bent arrow

Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne

 

Daphne is fleeing Apollo

and her face is an open book of terror.
She’d rather become a laurel tree
than live the captive life
of an object of once passionate pursuit
Apollo’s hand slips around her waist,
her abdomen already transformed to bark,
yet through the wood he feels in her gut
her beating, throbbing heart,
and he, his passion a misdirected vector,
could not care less.  Look at his face.
His focus is the hunt, the game,
her fingers leaves, her arms now laurel branches.
The transformation is itself a meditation.