poem by David Ray

[ex-stdymphna813.livejournal.com]

Doing Without


's an interesting
custom, involving such in-
visible items as the food
that's not on the table, the clothes
that are not on the back
the radio whose music
is silence. Doing without
is a great protector of reputations
since all places on cannot go
are fabulous, and only the rare and
enlightened plowman in his field
or on his mountain does not overrate
what he does not or cannot have.
Saluting through their windows
of cathedral glass those restaurants
we must not enter (unless like
burglars we become subject to
arrest) we greet with our twinkling
eyes the faces of others who do
without, the lady with the
fishing pole, and the man who looks
amused to have discovered on a walk
another piece of firewood.

--David Ray

(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

Freedom of Love

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

- Andre Breton
tr. Edouard Rodti

A piece of a minor poem

[whos-on-1st.livejournal.com]

Lines To A Persian Cat

The songsters of the air repair
To the green fields of Russell Square.
Beneath the trees there is no ease
For the dull brain, the sharp desires
And the quick eyes of Woolly Bear.
There is no relief but in grief.
O when will the creaking heart cease?
When will the broken chair give ease?
Why will the summer day delay?
When will Time flow away?

T.S. Eliot

How To Write A Poem

[godplaysdice.livejournal.com]

How To Write A Poem
by Jay C. Davis

First, forget about the words. They'll come
and take care of themselves. Forget
big subjects because they'll just get in the way.
Let's say you want to write about the biggest
fear you've got... something that makes you
mute on just imagining it. That's your subject.
But don't write about it. Write about a mouse
that eats then scurries across the floor
of the kitchen, knowing anytime it could be killed
by the kitchen's owners, but knowing that hunger
can kill as well. Name the owner of the kitchen Fear.
Name the hunger Desire. Eat. Watch.
Run when necessary. Give the mouse your name.
Pull the paper on which these words are written
off the desk, across the floor, through a tiny hole
near the baseboard. Build a nest that's lined with shreds
of paper. Raise your babies inside this warm place.
Expect the worst. Fear lives just outside.
Desire will always bring you closer to Fear.



from Whispers, Cries, & Tantrums

Records by Susie Armitage

[whos-on-1st.livejournal.com]

My sister lost her virginity to the White Album
and even now she thinks Bungalow Bill
is a love song. How music photographs
a moment: I was thirteen, dancing

with a boy I wanted to kiss
when Al Green told us to stay together.
For three minutes and eighteen seconds
I believed, but over the summer
he moved to Wichita. Nights, much later
I fell asleep with someone else
to Dark Side or Kid A, until that afternoon

driving home the day after he left.
Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me, Babe
was in my tape deck--maybe even worse
was the low rush of cars
going over the bridge
after I cut the sound.