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[trammel]

Samurai Song
by Robert Pinsky

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

[trammel]

2 previously unpublished poems by Bukowski were released today.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/two...arles_bukowski/

[trammel]

The Cold War [excerpt]
by Kathleen Ossip

Craft is a synthesis: thought in the service

of

understanding. Think hard in order to

open to

understanding: that is craft

K. was hungrily made.

K. is an American creation.

K. cannot recommend realism.

K. cannot recommend surrealism.

K. cannot recommend plain speech.

K. cannot recommend free association.

K. can recommend song:

The tug of the past.
Don't let go so fast
of what you're haunted by—
It'll last till it lasts.

The former things............................................... pass away

Craft will take us through this wood.

[sa1ty]

By Robert Pinksy

Not a "window on the world"
But as we call you,
A box a tube

Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal

Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,

In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much

Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box -- Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.

Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing

Home, the image -- O strung shell -- enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.

thanks to the news hour for putting this one up

[trammel]

The Pressure of the Moment
by Dara Wier

The pressure of the moment can cause someone to kill
someone or something

The leniency of consideration might treat with more
kindness

Which is to be desired. Or at least often to be desired.

But if my house is on fire and you notice, I wish you would
kill

That fire. But if my hair is on fire, while I'm sure
you'll be enjoying

The spectacle of it, act quickly or don't act at all. But
if a sudden

Jarring of us all out of existence is eminent, do
something.

[trammel]

Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding.
by Brian Teare


thought begins as small floral bowls : they hold greens—broccoli stalks,


chopped kale—against Chinese blue


very dark, with a greenish tint :




the way a silence falls to each side


of the knife's stroke, the colors rhyme


softly and I think, I'll miss this when I die. This is how I enter appearances

[trammel]

Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page
by Cate Marvin

Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel
that streams through my dreams of battle. Another
apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in
and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker,
can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to
our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime,
a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost
in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before
she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness.
Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits
in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far.
Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted
to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends.
I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the
child pulls its witching wind between its opposite
handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is
its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When
you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to
let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in
to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you
that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand.
Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends.
I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You
pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day
that the planet circles the night we began. A child
is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib.
Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars.

[trammel]

It is upon us.

By Night With Torch and Spear
by Timothy Donnelly

That fire at the mouth of the flare stack rising
more than three-hundred feet above the refinery
contorts as it feeds on the invisible current
of methane produced by the oil's distillation

process like a monster, the nonstop spasm of it
lumbering upwards into the dark Newark
night like a sack made of orange parachute fabric
an awkward number of gorillas get it on in.

I would worship it. The motion, the heat, the unapologetic
knack of the element to yank the appliance
plug from its outlet, filling the big blue business-
suite of my head with nothing but its own

wordlessness and light. Not now, not knowing
what I can't unknow, but back on the grasslands
before we ever came to harness it I would bow
down among the seething life of that primitive

interior and worship the fire taking one bright
liberty after another. Done listening to fellow
passengers tweaking the fine points. Done rubbing
the dead end of thinking like a spent torch

against the cave's painted walls to make it burn
better. As the train slows down as the track
curves around the body of water the fire reflects in,
it is a form of worship. What is it in me that

hasn't yet been killed with reason, habit, through
long atrophy or copied so beyond its master
it parses like the last will and testament of a moth-
eaten cardigan? It dumps its nice adrenaline

into my system nights I hear the crisp steps of deer
on fallen leaves and stop or when looking up
beneath baroque snow or when I lean over the
banister along the border of a strong waterfall.

All good and well. But the endless hyperactive
plumage exploding from this toxic aviary, this sun
of industry descended from the lightning strike,
obscures its diabolism with a Vegas brightness

so that what there is to fear in it instead excites
me up a biochemical peak from the far side of which
my own voice, grizzled with a wisdom unknown
to me in waking life, reminds me of the conjuror

who grew distraught because he sensed the forces
he had stirred up with his art would not be
mastered by it. It rattles tomorrow's paperwork
where it hangs from the branches of the ancient

timber trees. It messes with my reception, whereas
I do not wish my reception to be messed with.
It tells me to be careful with my worship—that if this,
too, is a resource, then they have ways to tap it.

[frost_bite]

Not much of a poet myself but i did write this:

Why is it that the police seem to be mad at me?
Why do they raid my projects with cavalry causing more discomfort than allergies?
Why don't they see the urgency to stop the resurgence of emergency?
Why can't this nation see that the inflation of the currency is currently hurting me?
Could it be that they don't see the repercussions of hatred and segregation,
the isolation and murder of my people by a self-proclaimed righteous nation?
Butchers of raw hatred, enforcers of laws that are archaic.
How many black children die unnoticed while they morn for the Caucasian.
Why does it take the death of a white Jane Creba*...
For the government to acknowledge Jerome or Shaniqua?
Why does is it seem like the lower class are attacked and trapped by the system?
Why do we empower crack-head politicians who feed the rich with capitalism?
Yet it is ignored when it is before your own eyes
and you continue to elect the candidate spitting those same cold, bold lies..
I was once told that ignorance is bliss, but I would beg to differ
when poorer get poorer and the rich get richer.
Why do the churches have a thousand billion dollars in assets
paid from our own actions they neglect to feed the starving masses.
It's madness, I'm the one portrayed as the heartless villain.
I tell you the truth while the government and church's fuck your children!
Y2K was only a metaphor for the death of the integrity of society
Why do you accept things blindly, followers of philosophies that were conceived privately?
I forgive your blindness. You were dictated and guided by a tyrant.
Closed minded, ignorance is a virus........................................


*Jane Creba was a girl who was killed by a stray bullet in downtown Toronto. It was a high profile case that is still on-going.

by the way, i do not condone the innocent killing of anyone regardless of race, if you focus on the race stated you miss the point. I would have said the same thing if millions of whites were getting murdered in Africa and the media & police only displayed interest in the black murders. Race is not a factor, racism is...

[trammel]

The Place Where in the End / We Find Our Happiness
by Anne Boyer

The history of revolutions is the history of vague ideas,
Shrugging shoulders, not shrugging shoulders,
Standing around, acting without thinking,
Acting with thinking, being penned or penning,

Being a woman or a girl standing around,
A woman or a girl with some flour in her pocket
for tossing up a cloud of flour
to obscure the martial men's sight.

That white cloud of whatever
Among the moving and unmoving bodies
Is that history-like unhistory
of the ahistorical average,
That lovely inexact and provisional something—

weaponized or never.

How totally under-theorized is breathing,
Walking and not walking,
Wanting to have a good time or just having it,
Like everybody is gunning toward Eden
and nobody is in school with their bodies anymore.

The history of revolutions is a history of the orthodox
weeping over their faltering
orthodoxies:

Any precise thing—dumb these days:
The very idea imprinting nothing
on the air between the general buildings.

No human space—a printer's paper.
Nothing exact—impressed.

[trammel]

The Gradient
by Anthony Trammel

Good and Evil are similar
to the difference between
pain and suffering.

Pain and suffering
are gradient points
between Good and Evil.

They all exist
but not
inherently,
permanently,
or independent
from those that measure.

A wise friend
once said,
"The closer to death one gets
the more human one becomes."

That's why Good is
a natural state.

Be human.

[romoe69]

Too crap out dead cows
Too wear the skins
Too see their families cry
Too never come home


We are the sheep
We never forget
We never forgive
We are forever!

[sa1ty]

i usually do not have much to post in here but this is really good.

How To Be Alone

[sa1ty]

“Make big decisions and ‘drop them in’. On this piece of canvas, you have absolute power, you can make any kind of world that you want here. That's part of the Joy of Painting, the fact that you can create your own world." --Bob Ross, 1987

i need to stop being a lazy ass and do another project.

[sorcery machine]

trammel, on 24 November 2011 - 04:03 AM, said:

The Gradient
by Anthony Trammel

Good and Evil are similar
to the difference between
pain and suffering.

Pain and suffering
are gradient points
between Good and Evil.

They all exist
but not
inherently,
permanently,
or independent
from those that measure.

A wise friend
once said,
"The closer to death one gets
the more human one becomes."

That's why Good is
a natural state.

Be human.

Thank you, that was beautiful.

[trammel]

Poetry in Time of War
by Rosalind Brackenbury

I want to forget their names, the generals,
advisors, puppet rulers,
the puffed-up and the brought-low,

I want not to know them,
not hear their plans, their excuses,
the President and the President's men,
the Pope with his white smoke for voodoo,

the suits, ties, teeth, insignia,
the guns, the names of trucks and weapons.

I want to forget them all,
to be washed of them,
to begin again: where no one knows who anyone is,
or what he believes.

To give my attention to:
frangipani leaves uncurling,
the smell of jasmine,
one person helping another across a street;

to the seeds,
to the beginnings; to one clear word for which
there is no disguise and no alternative.

[tprime]

https://www.youtube....h?v=fhoAP9A_mTM

[trammel]

BEFORE THE FEAST OF SHUSHAN
by: Anne Spencer (1882-1975)

ARDEN of Shushan!
After Eden, all terrace, pool, and flower recollect thee:
Ye weavers in saffron and haze and Tyrian purple,
Tell yet what range in color wakes the eye;
Sorcerer, release the dreams born here when
Drowsy, shifting palm-shade enspells the brain;
And sound! ye with harp and flute ne’er essay
Before these star-noted birds escaped from paradise awhile to
Stir all dark, and dear, and passionate desire, till mine
Arms go out to be mocked by the softly kissing body of the wind–
Slave, send Vashti to her King! The fiery wattles of the sun startle into flame
The marbled towers of Shushan:
So at each day’s wane, two peers–the one in
Heaven, the other on earth–welcome with their
Splendor the peerless beauty of the Queen. Cushioned at the Queen’s feet and upon her knee
Finding glory for mine head,–still, nearly shamed
Am I, the King, to bend and kiss with sharp
Breath the olive-pink of sandaled toes between;
Or lift me high to the magnet of a gaze, dusky,
Like the pool when but the moon-ray strikes to its depth;
Or closer press to crush a grape ‘gainst lips redder
Than the grape, a rose in the night of her hair;
Then-Sharon’s Rose in my arms. And I am hard to force the petals wide;
And you are fast to suffer and be sad.
Is any prophet come to teach a new thing
Now in a more apt time?
Have him ‘maze how you say love is sacrament;
How says Vashti, love is both bread and wine;
How to the altar may not come to break and drink,
Hulky flesh nor fleshly spirit! I, thy lord, like not manna for meat as a Judahn;
I, thy master, drink, and red wine, plenty, and when
I thirst. Eat meat, and full, when I hunger.
I, thy King, teach you and leave you, when I list.
No woman in all Persia sets out strange action
To confuse Persia’s lord–
Love is but desire and thy purpose fulfillment;
I, thy King, so say!

“Before the Feast of Shushan” is reprinted from The Book of American Negro Poetry. Ed. James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922.

http://www.poetry-ar...of_shushan.html

[trammel]

semi-linear
by trammel

trinary

infinite truth

threshold logic unit

like a synapse

float data type 0, 1, or 0.00000...

with an assumption of 1 over 0

grey areas

[Lupo]

This was written by my uncle Bob as he died of cancer in S.F. General


Bob's Philosphy

Spit out the bitter - I'm not a quitter,
I don't intend to carry the cross.

I carry the sweet yoke, to shorter
sweeter simplicities,

and lucky I am to be able still to
taste and savor the friends of my memories.

Giving without expecting back,
is the greatest form of love.
Not that which you have more of
but that which is precious and rare.
Your time, your privacy, your spontaneities.
To listen when someone needs you to hear.
To touch when someone needs to be touched.

to be quiet when someone needs quiet.

Memories and magical moments are nothing
unless shared with someone.

I will sail and soar for the rest of my days.
We're all on a grain of sand called earth,
sailing through the universe.
Always chip away at your dreams.

Attention!! To thine own self be true.
Here and now - Bob Gettle,
There and now, Bob Gettle, Attention!

See the writings on the walls.
Always plant the seeds for tomorrow.
Pick out the dreams that linger in your
mind's eye, through the years, and
take them the extra mile.

Don't spin your wheels, don't waste
the time of your life.

Life is not quantity - life is quality.
So - Stay awake!!


—Bob Gettle
written in June 1989
at SF General Hospital