Poemunity — your poem community

If you had a lot of money (by some coincidence you’re at the Nassau Inn in Princeton getting a whiff of class) and you just noticed two days ago that your face has fallen, but you don’t believe it, so every time you look in the glass it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t. Would you take the money you needed for a new roof on your old house (the house you’re paying for over and over in property taxes) because it’s been leaking for years and you’re tired of emptying buckets and spraying for mold, would you take that money and get your face lifted? Face-lift. They cut a slit under your ears and pull up the slack and they tack it with plastic. Then they pull up the outer skin and trim it because it’s too long and fasten that. (Your skin pulls loose from the fat like chicken skin.) Because once you were almost as beautiful as Jane Wyman ... your friends all said that. Of course at the time she was married to Ronnie and you were involved with the ASU— a McCarthy suspect. Forget about your neck. They can’t do that yet. A face-lift lasts five years. So you could go on being a member of new-speak and re-entry— with the unsung benefits of radiation and by then your roof would have rotted anyway. Or been recycled by some corporate kid. But think how you’d rather be stripped and streaked and while you’re about it get some implants of baby teeth buds that they’ve taken from dead babies’ gums and frozen for this sort of thing. You could still die young.

It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit drying to chalk, trees falling at an angle, taking those moist and buried rootballs with them into deadly air. But someone will tell you the butterfly's the happy ending of every dirge-singing worm, the rat a river rat come up from a shimmering depth, the shit passed purely into scat one can read for a source, the creature that shadowed it one longish minute. And trees, of course they wanted to fall.It was their time or something equally sonorous. And wind too knows its mindless little whirlpool's not for nothing, not nothing—that pitch and rage stopped. How else does the sparrow's neck break.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility; The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea; Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.

a trouble archaically fettered to produce E Pluribus Unum an island in the sea a Capitol surmounted by Armed Liberty— painting sculpture straddled by a dome eight million pounds in weight iron plates constructed to expand and contract with variations of temperature the folding and unfolding of a lily. And Congress authorized and the Commission was entrusted was entrusted! a sculptured group Mars in Roman mail placing a wreath of laurel on the brow of Washington Commerce Minerva Thomas Jefferson John Hancock at the table Mrs. Motte presenting Indian burning arrows to Generals Marion and Lee to fire her mansion and dislodge the British— this scaleless jumble is superb and accurate in its expression of the thing they would destroy— Baptism of Poca- hontas with a little card hanging under it to tell the persons in the picture. It climbs it runs, it is Geo. Shoup of Idaho it wears a beard it fetches naked Indian women from a river Trumbull Varnum Henderson Frances Willard’s corset is absurd— Banks White Columbus stretched in bed men felling trees The Hon. Michael C. Kerr onetime Speaker of the House of Representatives Perry in a rowboat on Lake Erie changing ships the dead among the wreckage sickly green

We have the body of a woman, an arch over the ground, but there is no danger. Her hair falls, spine bowed, but no one is with her. The desert, yes, with its cacti, bursage, sidewinders. She is not in danger. If we notice, there are the tracks of animals moving east toward the sunrise. And the light is about to touch a woman's body without possession. Here, there are no girl's bones in the earth, marked with violence. A cholla blooms, just two feet away. It blooms. There is a man, like her father, who wakes to a note saying I have gone, for a day, to the desert

It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open sea Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood," Roused though it be full often to a mood Which spurns the check of salutary bands, That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.—In every thing we are sprung Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

It is with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. We call things beautiful, not as such, but because of what they mean. Because we commonly attribute beauty to whatever does us a favor, We are reduced to puzzled despair whenever actual beauty says no. Indeed, our calling a thing beautiful almost means it is not. For how can we know it is beautiful until it betrays us? A sage once said “The trouble with these great philosophers Is their only way of doing honor to an idea is to say the idea is true.” It is the same with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. Humiliated, we are no longer willing to call the beautiful beautiful . . . Madrid is reading his poetry to a roomful of unearthed cultural relics. He compares the white hair on their heads | to the flag that signals surrender.

It isn’t me , he’d say, stepping out of a landscape that offered, he’d thought, the backdrop to a plausible existence until he entered it;

NOTES FROM THE REVOLUTION During the beat of this story you may find other beats. I mean a beat, I mean Cantus, I mean Firm us, I mean paper, I mean in the Kingdom which is coming, which is here in discovery. It is also Om Shri Maitreya, you don't go across my vibes, but with them, losing the pronoun. It is Thy, it is Thee, it is I, it is me. Machines are metal, they serve us, we take care of them. This is to me, and this is to you. You say you to me, and I say you to you. Some machines are very delicate, they are precise, they are not big metal stampers, She made enough poetry to keep her company. My Vibes. You intercepted my vibes. The long shadows, the long shadows, the long shadows. My sweet little tone, my sweet little tone is my arm. On what Only: The song that girl sang the song that girl sang

It's been a while since they asked, Who lives in between these houses, And who was he, the last of the last to speak, And who forgot his coat between these houses, And who was the one who stayed. Why didn't he flee? Among the blossomers, a dead tree stands, dead tree. A long-standing error, a misunderstanding of yore, The edge of the Land, where an era begins to be For somebody else. A bit of stillness there. And the current events of body and of hell, The reeds of the end, their spells of sway and sough. The wind passed on its way through that locale And a serious dog saw the humans laugh.