Poetry Circus: The Odious Scent of the Spice Road

One way flight to Egypt,
the ticket left in Portland.

One way safe and knowable, the other
way, is not, a place I know.
lost (ticket) left on a seat
    snow storm casts white
    blanketed airplane
    snow plow clears path.  And

     we will be above all day.

Tight.  Coffin, flight all day
and tomorrow we will land
in the Saffron market
and the towers calling the faithful,
                 forward
in the overcrowded streets filled with boiling Arabs,
           Going to Work, day
           by ordinary day, but we
are newly arrived, and smelling
musky Saffron Mullahs,
not Nudists from Kathmandu,
Orange streets in Egypt not Kathmandu.
where pots hold Saffron to be exchanged
for a dollar.  I worry, "How am I going to get back home
                               without a ticket."

Crowded.  We
smell like money newly crisped.
Rare birds,
squawk at us and kids throw fireworks.
Scents
of a place clings to your American Sunglasses,
YOU.
Like Pip in Melvelle's Whale Book
I CRY OUT LOUD.
THIS IS NOT HOME
Orange Monkey.
The color of rust and congress, praying
O' delayed.
Zeus take me-find my way back home.

No ticket home.
And the wind does not blow back to Rome, red-white-
and-orange-painted temples of Egyptian Gods.
1492, blue waves.
swallow Orange colored cups of tea.
and Bedouins continue to run their daily lives,
like yesterday, and the
color orange is painted on the
ticket home,
Hell is hot! But
Stella does not quench my thirst.
White. Red. Blue: marks me.
I can't blend the colors to fade into the Saffron filled
market and left exposed fearing
                    Camus's Arab.

What key?  The
sense of Africa
where Saffron
is sold
in Coptic Jars.

Poetry Circus: Hail-storm 2005

Clouds swirled, danced
against red rocks
building into
a storm, set sail below.

I was out of breath
keeping pace with a lone doe
she would not stop.
I panted? Clouds swept

the sweat off my brow,
dripped into eddies,
sweat, dripped,
into eddies.

I laid down eyeing white
smelling the damp fetid air -
fluvial currants threatened
Boulder city below.

Clouds gained power
power gathered
into a Pow-Wow
Boulder Threatened
    echoing tom-tom strikes,

wind swirled force-
fully ready to punish sins unrepentant
tom-tom
beating into my Odyssey.

Poetry Museum

To Grandma Pearl Influenced by Allen Ginsberg's Poem to Aunt Rose

My grandmother was a head case with a bitter stinging tongue, but despite her hard exterior, she was my grandma, and I was her grandson.  And I will always love the moments we spent together.

Grandma Pearl - might I see you
with your bent back, purple hair, and your kitchen guilt
of osteoporosis - and a punishing grey tongue
your worn thin dresses
sweeping the floor in Denver on the linoleum,
past the one painting you did,
in the basement
where dreamland rendered
between red painted bricks of your home,
(hysterically) the nice Grandson watching,
while you apply more red to white canvas,
Suffern dreams danced-
Aunt Ruth, Uncle Bob, a stranger with a platform
in his pocket
and huge young bald head
of Denver Nazi Order

-radio spoke bad news
Alan Berg gunned down.
at the hands of a white supremacist

Grandma
Bruce Pierce is dead, Bruce Pierce is in Eternity, Bruce Pierce is with
Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

Though I see you walking still, a ghost in Highland Town Center,
down the aisle, observing my customer service
limping a little with a humped back,
in what must have been a worn thin,
overworked dress,

praising my father, the Dentist, on his visit to Denver
-see you bent over in the kitchen
cooking Macaroni despite Osteoporosis
and lighting the Sabath candles
to bring in one more Passover.

Bruce Pierce is dead and Alan Berg is not speaking
The fuel Berg spilled is not aired
Uncle Harold with his well groomed style,
Greg is married to a beautiful art teacher,
Andy guitar in hand, a monument in San
Francisco Chronicle playing psychedelic muse.

last time I saw you was the hospital
and you had lost that viperous bite
you were on your way out, headed east, 
towards New York 
and your dreams of Swan Dives into a stilled  Suffern Lake.   

Poetry Museum: Kerouac

Kerouac in 1968, explained the importance of Haiku to the Paris Review :

Haiku? You want to hear haiku? You see you got to compress into three short lines a great big story. First you start with a haiku situation—so you see a leaf, as I told her the other night, falling on the back of a sparrow during a great big October wind storm. A big leaf falls on the back of a little sparrow. How you going to compress that into three lines? Now in Japanese you got to compress it into seventeen syllables. We don't have to do that in American—or English—because we don't have the same syllabic bullshit that your Japanese language has. So you say: “Little sparrow”—you don't have to say little—everybody knows a sparrow is little because they fall so you say”

Poetry Museum

Stone Carved by Clark Ashton Smith

One of Theodore Roosevelt's favorite poets to read to his kids was Oliver Herford.  He mentions loving to read one of his poems in his memoirs of the River Doubt Experience.  

This poem comes from his collection, available at Gutenberg, Mythological Zoo. 

Medusa

How did Medusa do her hair?
The question fills me with despair.
It must have caused her sore distress
That head of curling snakes to dress.
Whenever after endless toil
She coaxed it finally to coil,
The music of a passing band
Would cause each seperate hair to stand
On end and sway wand writhe and spit, -
She couldn't "do a thing with it."
And, being woman and aware
Of such disaster to her hair,
What could she do but petrify
All whom she met, with freezing eye.