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Category: Poems

  • A New Poem: “Street Car, Sweet Heart, Sweat Hard”

    I love your Spanish talk.
    The soft ground around you
    Hovers as you walk.
    Chinese flowers grow out of me
    like dreams lifted under a bed
    of yellow Lantana and grapewood rosevine.
    Midnight and a sleep walking Sun
    dip its claws into the milky Moon.

    She blows a serenade and makes a note in her diary: March 14th;
    Or was it the other day when we played through the woods in the synagogue’s court?
    I kept my diary clear
    with liquor? hidden there.

    All those cars have resisted, and those children inside us have died,
    but the moist oil still grasps at the roots of the darkened cells.
    (It’s old, and the unmarried couple inside still snuggle closely to the foot of her screaming limb.)

    Once a bold, minted Moon?struck the head like a bell and turned us red,
    And the merry men of the next town whistled “Dixie” all the way down
    to the smoothed River’s bed.

    A maestro, that dark little secret, always dancing and standing still.
    (She, seh, was the dear. May we call you dear? Take our collective blue beard hand.)

    Governor rubs the chocolate chip lips of white faces that read: “never washed hair.”
    Steers calling sisters for dates and the narrow alley was our field with its
    one chilling little blade.

    All the sorcerers were baked
    Inside a street lit with humiliating desire.
    That moment never turned or backed up when the future,
    blinded, uncaring, unknowingly,
    decided to run us over.

    Someday they will tell me she still lives there,
    every soaked board still crying, trying to pull out the rusty nails
    of the last conversation made,
    and yet, still, even with all the talk,
    That she is never at home.

  • A New Poem: Sonnet #2 “Sunfather”

    Sunfather

    Red Wave Petunias shower over clay,
    All things can open up and show their light.
    A life becomes transparent in warm May.
    Transparent to transcendence born from night.

    Their eyes the leaves foam into greening smiles
    to Father Sun and Mother Sea of dream.
    They feel the music, sibling Wind breathes miles
    through body, bread and crown beneath the stream.

    It is the night of meeting ringing gold
    that dance and sing in drippings of the womb.
    A rushing waterfall that drapes us cold.
    Our salmon hearts dive in the unseen room.

    We sprang out from the sea by silent sounds,
    And fire ringed God’s swung open spirits’ clouds.

    © 2007/2009 Stephen Pickering

    (there still will be a bunch of iteration to do on this one. I finished it, not hurriedly, but in one sitting because of the importance of composition.)

  • Sonnet #1

    "Untitled" by Ruza Bagaric
    "Untitled" by Ruza Bagaric

    (*I figured if Shakespeare can write a hundred than I can too.)

    Sonnet #1

    I loved the girl who lived next door to me.
    Her eyes were blue and clear and sang with joy.
    She was the sun, the grass, the trees, and stream.
    Her hair was blond and bobbed just like a boy.
    Then something happened or was it just fate?
    The summer ended and the snow began to fall.
    The Garden froze and ice locked up her gate.
    Kid’s icy jeers piled up the labyrinth’s wall.
    The schools and churches crammed our time of play.
    We boys formed clubs; girls spoke in secret codes.
    The flowers froze; exuberant dancing went away,
    And natural feelings morphed to vaudeville shows.

    The dragon stole the treasures of our life.
    Until you lift her veil, her love will die.

    © 2008 Stephen Pickering

  • A New Poem: The Cross

    The river flows uphill.
    It isn’t magic.
    Magic is when it flows downhill.

    The arrow of time is pierced
    by eternity

    The man hanging is
    the soul
    awakened.

    The milk girl is dancing
    The “Cotten-Eyed Joe”
    on the gym floor of the mind
    underneath which the oceans of the Cosmos
    Splash applause and awake our Suns.
    On the head of a pin, spinning,
    she offers distance
    heaven’s wooden bowl.

    Living is easy.

    And the Lady of our feet
    washes the expression
    of how things shalt be
    from the Skull’s dead head
    with the Water of Life.

    Below the willowed valley’s flowery eyes
    see without looking
    reach without moving
    teach without speaking,
    and love without thinking.

    Every time one of its olive branches whispers
    the secret of secrets into the Mediterranean breeze,
    a new life is born of virgin birth,
    transcendently, through the middle of the true cross,
    the heart.

    ©2009 Stephen Pickering

  • No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

    The trouble with authentic artists is that they’re in a silo both psychologically and culturally, so its not feeding the culture, and we have a Wasteland situation. Science, Art, Philosophy, Psychology, Media, Business, Politics, Technology, Religion are all walled off into separate silos. There’s no integration because they are controlled by protocols and systems, institutions. They are not feeding or being nourished by each other. The instutition becomes a complex both physically and psychologically that snuffs out the exuberance and spontaneity that gave birth to an organizing factor to begin with. This is what Nietszche calls “Groveling before sheer fact.” Nature, which unites and integrates, gives birth to all consciousness, becomes repressed by systems and institutions, which ironically enough were initially created to make life happy and instead have had the opposite effect.

    Whenever a spring pops up out of the ground, people figure out they can make money from it, and build a wall around it and charge for admission. Then the spring gets angry, dissappears and pops up in a new, unexpected place.

    “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

    No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

    by Wallace Stevens

    He is not here, the old sun,
    As absent as if we were asleep.

    The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
    Bad is final in this light.

    In this bleak air the broken stalks
    Have arms without hands. They have trunks

    Without legs or, for that, without heads.
    They have heads in which a captive cry

    Is merely the moving of a tongue.
    Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

    Like seeing fallen brightly away.
    The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

    It is deep January. The sky is hard.
    The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

    It is in this solitude, a syllable,
    Out of these gawky flitterings,

    Intones its single emptiness,
    The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

    It is here, in this bad, that we reach
    The last purity of the knowledge of good.

    The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
    Bright is the malice in his eye…

    One joins him there for company,
    But at a distance, in another tree.

  • Little Night Poem

    I don’t care what the foam sea squalls say:
    The mountains are made of mint.
    Green I spend gliding upon the emotion-
    Less ramp besieged by the creepy Count de Bourgie
    Of my psyche. The orphaned Queen of my heart will jump
    Straight down into her moat and drown
    If the adventurer of my soul forgets
    To stay on his horse.
    A jacketed smoke walk down to the Bourbon wall.
    It stretches a few quarters, but the one
    Inside, it tunnels inward Universe upon Universe.
    A bleek streak.Beaker Street. Jazz blue smokes Bitches Brew
    To whites of eyes carved out of stone
    Demi-Gods staring back double fisted.
    They can take it even pinned to a mountain for centuries.
    We (the children still inside me) roll in the dough, little sprinkled whites,
    As pigeons of possibility sip cappucino on the departing square.
    Someone shuffles down a back alley
    Of my heart. A glance, and two dark, soft eyes
    Surrender the Yucatan night as the beach waves
    Dive in from the hole the Dinosaur asteroid made.
    We shriek down to drink the Greek god’s salty blood.
    I buy trinkets for her and two dresses embroidered with firebirds,
    One for Mum. They will fly us to the shore. The rest, well…we must save some words.
    The phone call goes through but I don’t hear her voice.
    (Who could in this situation?)
    Someone else (the sloucher) whispers a void
    That sucks away the beach sunrise sunset dream.
    The cats blur in the fiber
    Glass behind locked chained links for winter, but the matted Tabby
    Of my bewilderment is stuck in the roof of my ego
    And moans for food, for a way out.
    Oh, how I reach!
    Sound gets through, light gets through, all the forces of nature get through
    But there is still something else we are waiting for. What is it?
    I never forget the freaky blizzard where even the flowing
    Fountain turned into block. Don’t tell me life isn’t quantum.
    (Even after wave after wave almost drowns me)
    Someone, no, not just anyone,
    She turns to me laughing gingerly in the cold,
    Dark back alley of the warehouse district,
    But I let the flashy city’s neon outlines carry me away,
    Building upon building seeking the sacred pyramidal top.
    Soon enough, though, I’ll be alone in the Pontiac,
    Bristling at the bones,
    Nestling into the concrete, filling another Weller
    With spring water, looking at the gate still not crumble,
    Even as the giant hundred year oaks howl at the city’s brick tablets.
    My one hand left snakes, and an eye opens the Sun curtain.
    One tree and a bounding suspicion race
    God knows where but the car’s breath
    Roars in the hope that at least it’s somewhere,
    Home to someone,
    Who might finally have that expression on her face
    We’ve been waiting for
    Our whole life.