writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
I don’t want to write bestsellers,
Or be president of this great land.
I don’t want to paint like Picasso,
Or sing in a rock and roll band.
I don’t want to star in the movies,
Or do anything that brings wealth or fame.
I don’t want to be an overpaid athlete
Of any professional game.
What I do want you might think is silly.
In fact, it might even make you giggle.
There’s only one thing in life I want. . .
And that’s to learn how to make my ears wiggle.
~~~~
From Poem Man.
Come hither all ye children
And gather round,
For the Poem Man cometh
To your quaint town.
He’s bringing the most magical, beautiful,
Spectacular sounds…
Sounds that you may have never heard before.
He has the sounds of pinks and yellows
And midnight blues.
You’ll hear rainbows and gumdrops
And morning dew.
Come hither sweet children,
Bring your parents too,
To hear the oceans converse with the shores.
Look, yonder cometh he
From the valley below.
Can you see on his shoulder
His talking, orange crow?
Make haste sweet children.
Get ready for the show,
For the time is drawing near.
He carries his poems
In a large, burlap sack.
Doesn’t it look heavy
Upon his broad back?
In it, not a rhyme is missing—
Not a riddle does it lack.
Be still now sweet children for the Poem Man is here.
~~~~
Well, since the poem Butter was reasonably well-received a day or two ago, it inspired me to create a Poem Man page where I’ve included scans of the original book cover and introduction, as well as a Table of Contents listing all the poems and links to the ones that I’ve already shared online. You can find the new page under the BOOKS heading at the top of the page, or you can just click here.
Enjoy!
Boy, I want you to butter the bread.
And remember, I like it buttery.
But Dad, it’s too hard for me to spread the lard.
Can’t Sister do it instead?
Boy, it’s up to you to butter the toast.
Cuz the only way for you to learn
To do the things that you can’t do
Is to do those things the most.
So every time there is bread to butter
I want you to spread the cream.
And soon you’ll be the best bread butterer
That the world has ever seen.
~~~~
Butter is from Poem Man, a children’s book of poetry that my family and I put together, – literally put together: the poeming, drawing, covering, printing, stapling, etc. – back at the turn of the century.
I must admit, that when my children were young I had aspirations of being the next Shel Silverstein, my favorite poet of all time. While that didn’t quite work out for me, it sure was a lot of fun fooling around with children’s poetry back then when the kids, and the internet, were still young.
It’s hard to believe the original Poem Man website, circa early 2000s, is still out there. Check it out if you’re in the need of a good chuckle.
Guess I was doing Indie before Indie was cool…
Almost forgot that I’ve already exploited Poem Man some time ago, tying in a poem, or at least attempting to, called Petey Peter the Garlic Eater with my review of W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage.
Yeah, I know… but what the heck, right?
POETIC LICENSE
Thank God for the passionate poet
Who trumpets the sun’s morning rise
And who writes lovely, pretty sad songs
Of young lovers’s heartbreaking goodbyes
Thank God for the passionate poet
Who reaches right into the heart
To stroke it, to tease it, to please it
And sometimes to tear it apart
#NATIONALPOETRYDAY2014
~~~~
From my poetry collection Poems from the River
Look, take a peek in
between the clicks, the scrolls
to see what you’re missing
or not – the whole bloody
lot of it
Still it’s there, ignorance be damned
Ignorance be blissed
do not fear the dark
for faith requires no light
grace shines through the night
My review of W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece OF HUMAN BONDAGE reminded me of “Petey Peter the Garlic Eater,” a poem I wrote and which was included in POEM MAN, a children’s poetry book my family and I published back at the turn of the century.
Maugham’s classic novel and my less-than-classic poem both discuss, in their one ways, the important matter of addiction and dependency. In Maugham’s story, we find that, because of the protagonist Philip Carey’s love for Mildred, a love so strong she becomes his addiction (his bondage), he nearly destroys his own life. In my poem, we find that both Peter Peter’s excessive love for pumpkins and Petey Peter’s excessive love for garlic, addictions in their own rights, destroy, if not their own lives, then the lives of those around them.
Petey Peter the Garlic Eater
Petey Peter the garlic eater
Sat right behind me in class.
And if he wasn’t busy boisterously burpin’,
He was busy passin’ poisonous gas.
I couldn’t concentrate on my studies
Because of the stink he emitted.
As a result I failed all my classes.
As for graduation, I wasn’t permitted.
Now, if you’re a lover of riddles and rhymes
You might just remember his name.
Cuz his great, great, great, great, great, grandfather
Is famous for a name just the same.
But their names are their only sim’larities,
For they both liked to eat different treats.
Old Peter Peter preferred to eat pumpkins,
While it was garlic young Petey did eat.
Though I can’t imagine eating pumpkins
Unless smashed and baked as sweet pies.
But I do wish young Petey had eaten them,
Cuz his garlic breath always drew flies.
But pumpkins, too, can bring trouble.
It’s cuz of pumpkins old Peter lost a wife.
I guess if you do too much of anything
There’s a chance it could ruin a life.
It’s cuz of Petey’s stinky garlic breath
That every single class I did fail.
And it’s cuz I dropped out of grade school
That I eventually landed in jail.
But as for Petey, he invented a breath mint.
And it earned him a million or two.
And he married the great, great, great, great, great, granddaughter
Of the old lady who lived in the shoe.
An offering from POEMS FROM THE RIVER, a collection of my poetry that will soon be released.
~~~~
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.
The decayed and degraded state
of moral and patriotic feeling
which thinks that nothing is worth war
is much worse.
The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight,
nothing which is more important than his own personal safety,
is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free
unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
~ John Stuart Mills
We war, don’t we
We warriors
We worriers for the world
You, Red Death Warrior
You mobilized
You sanitized
Purified to perform ancient rights of battles
And to stake patriot claims of fragile freedom
In hearts alien, hearts eternal,
Hearts ignorant of all you know
You know
You know
You know, noble warrior,
While you wander through the heaven of Hell
Raking the shit scattered pieces
Of bitter and broken promises
Into neat, heaping piles made ready
For the devil’s dusty full bin,
I, Warrior of The Forgotten Peace
Arming my chair of flaccid command
Long for the glory fight that I never had
The fight I will never know
The fight you will never forget
You know
You know
~~~~
I would like to congratulate and thank all who courageously sacrificed their identities, and in some cases, their lives, in order to proudly and honorably serve their nation while Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was national policy.
It’s the bottom of the ninth.
We’re down and in desperate need of a two-out rally.
So what are we waiting for? Should we go
for the win and swing for the fence?
Or should we just drop our bats,
grab our crotches,
and wait?
Just wait for someone else to come along and bat clean up?
Just wait for them to come along and clean up all of the shit
our silence has created?
Should we wait?
Just wait for the president and the congress and the
governors and every other sleazy politician to knock
the dirt out of their spikes and lead the rally?
Or should we, instead, wait for Wall Street and the
chambers of commerce and the boards of directors
and the unions and even the goddamn Junior Achievers
to stop sucking each other off and let them lead the rally?
No.
I’m tired from waiting,
and I’m sick from feeding on bullshit
and shallow metaphors.
It’s time for movement.
It’s time to say to hell with our condoning silence
and rise up.
Hey you!
Yeah, you in the corner with the pencil.
You, the unassuming bard whose verse speaks in whispers.
It’s time for you to rise up and write the words that need
to be written.
It’s time for you to sharpen your pencil and to tear
and thrash at the page till it bleeds and screams out
in desperate fury.
And when your words are read the readers are shocked
and angered and filled with such passion and rage
that nipples harden and balls retract in their sacks.
So rise up!
Check your zippers and march.
Listen for the rhythm ‘cause no one is leading
and no one is following.
There’s just us.
You Me Her Him We, Each confused and disoriented but
Each coming together and marching in one
Throbbing Mass of Poetic Fervor.
So rise up!
Rub the crap from your eyes and focus.
Breathe deeply then grab hold of today and straddle it.
Dig in deep with your knees and spur the bitch till it bucks.
But be ready ‘cause when it bucks it’s gonna buck good.
And when you fall and taste the dirt don’t spit it out.
Taste it!
Chew on it and swallow.
Because that’s why we are here:
to taste the flavor of today
and determine what ingredients are missing.
So, if your heart’s not pounding
and your hand’s aren’t shaking
and you’re still just sitting on your ass
waiting for someone else to do your work,
then close your notebook and break your pencil
because you are dead.
But if You feel the Passion
and if You feel the Rhythm,
then know that it is You who will do.
You who must do.
Yes, You.
But first You must Rise the fuck Up!
In Japan, today is the forty-ninth day since the death of my mother-in-law, “Mother,” “Okaa-san,” “Obaa-chan,” Seiko. Today is a special day where, in Buddhist ceremony and belief that on the forty-ninth day after passing the soul is no longer bound by karma, Seiko’s ashes can now be permanently interred. Unlike her funeral ceremony where many of Seiko’s family and friends and admirers attended to show their love and respect for her, today’s ceremony is a smaller, family-focused occasion.
How I wish I could be there with the family today to also show my love and respect for her, and to be closely surrounded by them all during this time.
But I cannot. So I think fondly of her and I pray for her and I pray that the pain of her passing will quickly ease for those of us who love and miss her so.
Seiko embodied and lived the values and qualities in character and of action that I wish I possessed as an individual and that I wish I had been able to live throughout my life.
I would have liked to have drawn a picture of her to include here, however, no matter how hard I try, I find that my eyes are too bad now and my hands shake too much that my efforts to capture her beauty, not just her physical beauty, for that she certainly had, and for which her daughter, my wife, also possesses in a very close likeness of her mother, but mostly it is Seiko’s spiritual beauty, which was profound and deep, that, regardless how well my eyes can focus or how steady my hands can draw, I am unable to, nor would ever be able to, capture in one of my feeble drawings.
So I share my loving memory of Seiko in a poem, a poem that falls well short of capturing the good and positive life that she lived, a life which touched and comforted so many in so many different, known and unknown, ways, but a poem which, nonetheless, comes closet to expressing my feelings and my love for her.
Seiko, may God continue to, and forever bless you with Eternal Peace, Happiness, and Love.
Like incense, you burned
true, steady, reliably,
patiently purifying the world around you
with a bright, burning intensity and passion
and unending purpose
that only the gods could comprehend.
Like incense, you burned,
not for yourself but for life,
all of it.
You burned with love for each of us,
for everyone.
You burned with a love that transcended all boundaries
and all languages,
a love that transcended space and time.
Like incense, you burned,
and as you did
your presence permeated its surroundings
and filled it with your sweet soothing sensitive balm,
a healing balm,
a mystical balm,
a beautifully fragrant balm that will last and linger deep within the senses
and the soul of the universe
for all eternity.