Poemunity — your poem community

there are some people i know whose beauty is a crime. who make you so crazy you don't know whether to throw yourself at them or kill them. which makes for permanent madness. which could be bad for you. you better be on the lookout for such circumstances. stay away from the night. they most likely lurk in corners of the room where they think they being inconspicuous but they so beautiful an aura gives them away. stay away from the day. they most likely be walking down the street when you least expect it trying to look ordinary but they so fine they break your heart by making you dream of other possibilities. stay away from crazy music. they most likely be creating it. cuz when you're that beautiful you can't help putting it out there. everyone knows how dangerous that can get. stay away from magic shows. especially those involving words. words are very tricky things. everyone knows words the most common instruments of illusion. they most likely be saying them, breathing poems so rhythmic you can't help but dance. and once you start dancing to words you might never stop.

Sick in bed with a sore throat, I can’t get out of my mind the image of the cat harpsichord from the eighteenth century, soothing a prince with laughter. It worked like this: the tails of them attached to the strings of the instrument were pulled by different notes, and the difference between the way the cats cried was music. A shadow is only a shape. Which is why certain individuals can put their hands in light and make them birds, can say in shadow what they can’t in light. The tiny branches of the hedge in the yard that separates my house from the next look like the rib bones of a bird when the sun hits lunch. The world, they say, is best for a nest but no good for a flying place. Come back, I say to my dead, and the branches don’t even graze the window, when I eat it hurts.

I was arrested because of that internal memo, and ended up in a cell, then I was told to sit with the police and the local bigwigs. In the hushed and fast darkening room they said someone—someone—had reduced the safety margin on the airport risk factor, and I got the blame. The sky that day was a pale, clear blue, but that was happening outside, and far away. The cop on duty would not open the tomb of the deported—sorry, departed—and as usual he had a story. Every movie, he said, depends on a script, and the narrative grows out of market research: a set of standard deviations. Art? What would they know? Open the tomb, and let me in.

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain Beats upon my heart. People twist and scream in pain, — Dawn will find them still again; This has neither wax nor wane, Neither stop nor start. People dress and go to town; I sit in my chair. All my thoughts are slow and brown: Standing up or sitting down Little matters, or what gown Or what shoes I wear.

I Two old men, father-and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas, he who changes everything he touches to Wagner. The ocean's green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors. Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before, his face a white flag. The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way. II A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft. Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by to one-oared bandits. Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off to the mineralological institute in Padua for analysis. Meteorites! Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down to the Brownshirt years. The gondola is heavy-laden with the future's huddled-up stones. III Peep-holdes into 1990. March 25th. Angst for Lithuania. Dreamt I visited a large hospital. No personnel. Everyone was a patient. In the same dream a newborn girl who spoke in complete sentences. IV Beside the son-in-law, who's a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur. It's a disguise. The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him— the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face. V Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station. A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission. He always has commissions. Two thousand letters a year! The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he's allowed to go home. The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VI Back to 1990. Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain. Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf. Dreamt I had drawn piano keys on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute. The neighbors came over to listen. VII The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has something to say. Sighs...ospiri... When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down so the ocean's green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the stone in the building. Good evening, beautiful deep! The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VIII Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late. Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask. Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me. Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion. I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky. I want the cotton fields, tabacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone. O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?

—after Gwendolyn Brooks No matter the pull toward brink. No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits. There is a time for everything. Look, just this morning a vulture nodded his red, grizzled head at me, and I looked at him, admiring the sickle of his beak. Then the wind kicked up, and, after arranging that good suit of feathers he up and took off. Just like that. And to boot, there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color's green. I'm spring. —for Walter Aikens

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, The brilliant moon and all the milky sky, And all that famous harmony of leaves, Had blotted out man's image and his cry. A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers; Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow And true love parting blackens a bright morrow: Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen. But greater sorrow from less love has been That can mistake lack of despair for hope And knows not tempest and the perfect scope Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual Of drops that from remorse and pity fall And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw, Removed eternally from the sun’s law.

who would believe them winged who would believe they could be beautiful         who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin sometimes we hear them in our dreams rattling their skulls         clicking their bony fingers envying our crackling hair our spice filled flesh they have heard me beseeching as I whispered into my own cupped hands       enough not me again enough       but who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire