There’s something dark about this town.
It’s made my heart all broken sore.
The stars upstairs they hear a sound.
The dark hair girl she’s at the door.
I want to go somewhere and weep.
She hurts me with her darkest stares.
Through her I walk the lonely street
Of silent dreams and cold nightmares.
The scars of vice in Central Park
Arrest the man the news had lost.
He waltzes girls back to the dark
Who think of nothing nor what it costs.
These folks who tell their dreams goodbye,
Build towers up to cut the sky.
These flowers bloom and the night goes on
The T.V. tells us what’s right from wrong.
*Notes: I’ve been experimenting with different sized ‘feet’ than pentameter. So, the above poem is just like a sonnet in its structure, except its in iambic ‘quadrameter’ or four iambic feet. I don’t know why. Just to try something different. I did another in iambic tetrameter. Oh actually I posted that a few days ago, I think. Oh yes, in this lot of three poems, it’s the first: http://www.stephenpickering.com/2010/08/28/saturday-reading-three-new-poems/
I’ve also been working with some that have varying lengths. I think the best bet in the long run for me, is to let the line speak for itself, in the sense that, however it hits me, whatever length that is, just go with that. And then I think you get to a point where you don’t really need to fit the line into a structure if it doesn’t come to you that way, which naturally is free verse.
So I guess, one of the points of writing within structure, is almost like exercise. You do that (or this) for a while, then your brain feels strong enough, confident enough, if you will, to walk out on the “limbs” alone.
Illustration by Stephen Pickering. "May's River" (cc) 2010. painted on iPad using ArtStudio, with added figurines using Picnik online graphic editor.
You tore on past the river’s flow.
Now I know, now I know.
You walked from the house’s door into the snow
An instinct to let go, to let it go.
The menagerie fortress tower
looms larger by the hour.
Talking to the morning’s vestigial crops
into the elevators’ chop, chop, chops.
And disturbing them like making rings
Outward bound as the sunshine morning sings.
You of the potato patch’s mouth, mouth, mouth
have grown up too early to shout, shout, shout,
and now you’ve got trouble in the military man’s
house, house, house
given way to your sacred gifts’ sound
down South, South, South.
All the Milky Way’s a stir
with the blasted World,
of the strange gifts at night when two strangers eyes meet
down by the wharf with fresh cod to eat
and malted whiskey to drink.
They drive back on one tire
As a family waits by the hour
For some vestigial return at least
For some reason to leave the porch and heat.
‘Twas you that rounded the edges and fastened the ties,
soaked the oars in morning dew butter
before the wind in the hollow’s current died?
Each moment a little more dishonest, and a little piece of you tries,
A little piece of you dies.
Dies to the factories making crap
for the kids churning and drowning in the school’s cyndricular vat.
They reach for the elbows of the crow’s soaring flight,
but their hands seem too tiny in the subliminal sky.
They do not sing beyond it’s beauty.
They come home and sink their little heads into the factory pillow.
The hawk haunts the sky, and the ducks huddle under the willow.
All morning long with a fever blistered pitch
Those sculpted cliffs dive headlong into the ravine’s ditch.
Could you shower up for morning sup
And return fresh and green like a planted cup?
We’ve made winter soup and duck.
We’ve made sauces in planters and pink strawberry wine;
All of this and more from the edge of some perennial vine.
You will come to the forest edge when it’s time.
This we know from the story book rhyme.
You will pass through the walled garden’s oval arch
In time to escape the troops’ Kaiser’s Day march.
We will gather for a picnic ’round Robbins’ Lake.
Take a turn north just before Haliford’s gate.
Be sure and set the case of our dozen forebears down.
So that she may rest without soiling her satin white gown.
Two minutes into her eyes:
the inter tube by sunrise.
Back by noon for a surprise.
Smoothed over by gems from the boogie nights.
The Queen you ask, the heat of the midsummer Sun.
Aye it’s her, that’s the one.
Hold her in your diary secretly until the pressure of emotions
Lifts the gold of the ancient Spanish wreck.
May the two of you bathe in doubloons
Never leaving your room.
None are good enough to fly into this sacred space
that all of eternity’s changlings cannot erase.
But before you leave if you could do only one thing:
Pick up that dial, call the complex, and let it ring.
They and their party will have gone to the beach for the day.
This will give you time to think of what to say.
She wants a little house deep on the other side of the woods.
We know she talked on and on about the city and her friends,
but some lies are understood.
Go wait under that shed and close your eyes
blasted even as it is by flashes of the darkening sky.
Don’t you think she would if she could?
(I mean turn around and stay. Of course, she would.)
But the dancing goes on all night at Park Place.
You’ve done the right thing to leave without a trace.
They won’t remember anything not even your face.
All this time you thought that one memory couldn’t be erased.
Ruby lights throb chaotic motions from the room.
Blue, crazed, and wild, they lay out lines for the glowing Moon.
The jeweled lights never cease
to point toward the balcony’s deserted seat.
You come down a golden flight of stairs.
The company has arrived, waiting down there.
Up from the bottom and flopping onto the beach
even she comes up from 20,000 leagues.
You turn the corner and walk up the street
Thousands of children are at your feet.
His majesty HRH has just flown in.
No one met him at the gates for the parade to begin.
Inside even the cells of the carpet nubs couldn’t withstand
The pressure of a human being freaking out the light barrier
And so dragged the little shanty of a house back in time.
Passed out by the celebrations you left in time to climb the ocean cliffs
leaving alone the flowers she brought you to bob on the tied up skiff.
Parsing weed, bushes, trees, and vine
you’re bruised, scared, and knee-scraped by the sheer climb.
The circled gate
Opened not a minute too late.
And there further than the mountains dotting the African shore
lifted the hand of the one whose eyes gave birth
to an opening in the middle, between Jason’s clashing rocks,
of the Universe’s sacred door.
I want to become the flower
Drinking a hawthorn berry shower.
I feel that the painting is alive
That I could jump inside
and live a life.
The love you want resides inside a flame
Burning Jerusalem to the coast of Spain.
From the secret Indian province
to the street children’s colorful ribbon dance.
A carousel song.
They want to belong.
Children of the Sun
in the land before time begun.
We are the whispering ones,
following the trail of crumbs,
grasping for song,
hoping the the poem will come along.
“Run along, run along, my dears
before those little eyes fill with tears.
They are the dew, you know,
Freshly made from the melting snow.
The only God is in your head,
but he’s real and he’s meant what he’s said.”
We’re so tired. We need some sleep.
It’s so important that we dream.
It becomes the patterned sleeve,
The path by which we leave.
Tomorrow’s sounding more like a bell
On which the doves of heaven sing
To the serpents of hell.
Will we wait here all morning in the rain
For the climbing of that midnight train?
It’s made of blue smoke and jazz,
and all the things that we didn’t have.
Halve a peach with me.
Sit down and eat.
When you were a baby covered in red
Did you know the song would awaken the souls
and bring back the dead?
Don’t forget the poem,
or Lucy living under Lake Victoria’s soil.
Blood made of Sun.
Run, rabbit, run.
London is here,
but her price is too dear.
I’m not sure what would make us happy tonight.
A glass of mediteranean wine?
Distilled from the soapy sea
Of flavored memory?
What should we worry about,
cry for and shout?
We may go to sleep,
Lie about and dream,
or maybe there’s something on T.V.,
then walk quietly the evening streets.
The poem at the end of the mind
peeks its eyes up through the morning’s rhyme,
effortlessly following the golden thread of desire,
moving by magic carpet and doesn’t tire.
It winds up a European cobblestone street
looking for a safe place to curl up and grieve.
It is the red, Irish beauty among the leaves
and the flight to the maiden czar across the eternal sea.
She who holds court
at the end of the World.
At the bottom of that eternal, endless sea
The golden bird, golden horse, the princess
We want to return and long to be.
Don’t be desireous under White Mountain.
The river’s tall feathered tail
Will blast you into the crag’s milky fountain.
Will whisk you away
To a faraway place
In the steam boat’s desert Sun,
Buried beneath a 17th century ruin.
You won’t get to stay up and play.
Each door will turn you away.
You won’t burn your fires at midnight
Or dream of the horse haired magic of twilight.
The cattle callers will stake their claim
Down your captured, straining, mustang mane.
Only for the bewildered and assertive has time begun.
So now you are forever on the run
From the father with a shot gun,
From the book that’s never done.
A story of a man who climbed a cloud
Getting passed the Giant by not making a sound.
But the danger is he may sleep on the stove or be a meal.
When there’s a castle on your head
That’s part of the deal.
If you find your way down
You’ll be the talk of the town.
Covered in Goose down
Eveywhere you go golden eggs roll around.
Rescue Mother from the debt.
Take Newton’s weight off your head.
Lift the Goddess of Sais’ silken veil.
And for the New World set sail.
Buy your Indian master whose been two places at once
Before he sells Manhattan for a buck.
Inside his pipe is a 10,000 year old pine,
Japanese Geisha girls and black Saki wine.
It don’t take science to tell us it will never die.
It’s one hundred deer skin catamarans
Sailing Chinese warriors to settle Peruvian lands.
They’ll block your walls and tear down your office
If all you can think of
Is sex with the White Buffalo Goddess.
So when you approach her, lay down your mask.
Let the blue Moon dance on the snowy fields and pass.
Let the deer’s eyes see through the men with guns
To the glistening forest and endless mountains beyond.
We can all be good.
The rough beast crawling towards Bethlehem
says, “You should.”
But we can let it go,
face in the wind, rain, and snow,
as the falcon of our soul soars off Kilimanjaro.
The distant bells
are Black Sea shells,
and her lips sail closer
as we fall deeper
into a dreamless sleep, dryer than the Sahara,
only broken up by the sparkle of the Sun lasered sand
that the beast remembers as a once fruitful land.
At once we transcend Pharoah’s gold
and the story of Yusef that’s been told
of falling in a well and into Egypt being sold.
It doesn’t hold as much for us anymore now that the fire
has colored the mountain and drinken from the well
of thirsty distraction that’s blinded to the veil
covering the passage to the Promiseland.
We hold true to these words,
heart given to each other,
and our congregation formed like a ring of birds.
One for the Trinity two for the show
three to take the chances so that all can know.
Isis can hold us up even as she nurses the productions of time
in search of her husband the divine.
We sit on the throne, a Supernova
that produced all this gold,
as the serpent slithers towards Rome.
Ptolemy falls from the Alexandrian stacks
carrying the Moon and stars on his back.
Someone such should know
that the Caliphs have buried his secret scroll.
The priests drown the halls in chants
as the prince discovers the burning bed.
Each Irish maidens’ beauty more spectacular than the next
as Olympus opens each door to the morning breath,
and Demeter sprints to Avalon
with the message of Aquinas’ last glance.
