Poemunity — your poem community

Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread; For Love is dead— All love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdain; Worth, as nought worth, rejected, And Faith fair scorn doth gain. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! Weep, neighbours, weep; do you not hear it said That Love is dead? His death-bed, peacock's folly; His winding-sheet is shame; His will, false-seeming holy; His sole exec'tor, blame. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! Let dirge be sung and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead; Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart, Which epitaph containeth, "Her eyes were once his dart." From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! Alas, I lie, rage hath this error bred; Love is not dead; Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatched mind, Where she his counsel keepeth, Till due desert she find. Therefore from so vile fancy, To call such wit a franzy, Who Love can temper thus, Good Lord, deliver us!

Julia, I bring To thee this ring, Made for thy finger fit; To show by this That our love is (Or should be) like to it. Close though it be, The joint is free; So when Love’s yoke is on, It must not gall, Or fret at all With hard oppression. But it must play Still either way, And be, too, such a yoke As not too wide To overslide, Or be so strait to choke. So we who bear This beam must rear Ourselves to such a height As that the stay Of either may Create the burden light. And as this round Is nowhere found To flaw, or else to sever; So let our love As endless prove, And pure as gold for ever.

…When that joy is gone for good I move the arms beneath the blood. When my blood is running wild I sew the clothing of a child. When that child is never born I lean my breast against a thorn. When the thorn brings no reprieve I rise and live, I rise and live. When I live from hand to hand Nude in the marketplace I stand. When I stand and am not sold I build a fire against the cold. When the cold does not destroy I leap from ambush on my joy…

for John Grant My father-in-law writes from Umbria (where peasants eat songbirds for lunch and pray beneath frescoes by Giotto): Saturday, 30 Jan. (last day of the season wherein big men can kill little birds). Lyndon Johnson, while being escorted by a young Marine who said, “That one over there is your helicopter, Sir,” replied, placing his arm around the boy, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.” Sam said, “I might be white bread, but there is one pissed-off nigger in my heart.” McPherson says he doesn’t see anything in the world worth coming back for. He wants to get off the wheel, says, “I don’t want to come back as anything — not even a bumblebee.” So I say, “Oh, Jim, you’d make a good bumblebee,” but I was thinking: That should be enough for anybody’s God. It would be trite to describe the clocksmith’s house — the way it sounded like bees in there. “You can never have enough clocks in your house.” This from a man who had thousands in his. I asked, “You probably don’t even hear them anymore.” He said, “I hear them when they stop.” Lyle said, “It’s all right to be a fool; it’s just not all right to be a old fool.” Steve, the banjo wasn’t all they smashed. It was every window. It was every thing I had. You don’t want to feel the wind blow through your house that way. Another friend said, “I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.”

A Poem in Three Parts A riot is the language of the unheard.

This is you—Titanus giganteus, your maw snapping pencils in half and cutting through human flesh. My encyclopedia chokes on your bulk. My camera, timid, afraid to look, as if you’re naked—not one adult male, but millions. Few garments sound as fine as flak jacket, the best of the tagmata the thorax, more prime than brains as the body can keep mating, cracking its margins. Your shield like a wing, protects your bulletproof heart from the wind, your right arm black in the cloth of your brothers. Full face visor. Baby gladiator. Beyond the screen, memorized—jawbone like a scandal reflecting all the thieves and beggars. Insect lord, insect mind. This is my fear. You look like my brother, my son. You could kill me with your looks.

We were given a curfew on the second day. Clouds filling windows were replaced by soot and ash from the burned out market on the corner. We lost the smell of buttered beetroot, Wissotzky tea and kishke; a tendril of root infiltrated a crack in the floorboards. We kept our distance and let it grow in disbelief. Someone said we should kill it before it gets too strong. Hours, maybe even days, went by as we hid waiting for attacks and looting to end. At times, when the door opened, a waft of wind made its way to those unfolding leaves waving like the curtains out of blown out windows.

There’s a shadow over the city the light, as usual, framing and erasing Just say you dream fires each night smoothing each collapsing page from the throat talking in a series of measures in the high desert the perfect life in a series of measured gestures an invitation to see the world from a bridge that burns in the next night

The rise of the zebra hurts the zebra. As if she would breathe fire. If  we put natural gold and the black blue into the loaf of  bread it bursts. Find and shove, open and wound. The oars when kneaded in and then stretched, row. How they bump into wheat on the white surface again. Mašenka! There are three corpses in Gravel Cave. One keeps silent. One snowballs. One conceals.

Vodu green clinching his waist, obi purple ringing his neck, Shango, God of the spirits, whispering in his ear, thunderlight stabbing the island of blood rising from his skull. Mojo bone in his fist strikes the sun from his eye. Iron claw makes his wrist. He recalls the rites of strength carved upon his chest. Black flame, like tongues of glass, ripples beneath a river of sweat. Strike the island! Strike the sun! Strike the eye of evil! Strike the guilty one! No power can stay the mojo when the obi is purple and the vodu is green and Shango is whispering, Bathe me in blood. I am not clean.