the Never-Ending Poem by the Poets of Everything

                         The Return of a Ballerina Fly With grace, the ballerina fly glides one leg along the other  she asks me to dance just before her death in my coffee. What might it taste like to backstroke in coffee with cream, snort caffeine, inhale a half-real, half-decaf ocean, and hear waves of java swish in an over-sized cup? Munich and Mr. Spitz are oblivious to these ideas hanging only in Olympic sizes. Truth is the fly did not ask me to dance, so I'll forego partners who dive from edges into my drinks. Heard tell my father was a ducky shincracker -a good dancer who cracked shins. Overmorrow the fly and I might dance again, a dance revived like the twist.  Big bugs and some people love hard and fast. Together fly and I are mellow  as fish in the sea. The ballerina fly, dead in the coffee cup will come back to life, seems Ms. Kitty will give her mouth-to-mouth, through the tiniest of straws. The...

 

Affording To Know                         by Mary Strong Jackson                                                                         You think your pain and your heartbreak are                                                                                                unprecedented i...

Now and Then   I remember when I remembered better than I remember now but I now know that then I could not know what I know now ...       The color of my delusion   of the pandemonium without and for the peace within   has a hue of unearned comfort and quietude that belies security   a shade that hides the risk required to consummate a private bill of promises       Squirrely   I watch Red watching MoMo smelling squirrel gone up tree watching me   squirrel steals bird seeds clever brain cross breeds its needs tweet to germinate   small hands fumble nut unblinking eye holds me fast still life with twitches -Richard Krasin

       *Hamster on the Isle of L'alamonde       *//It was early Autumn, and Hamster, fraught and /    /thithered by the sounds and smells of the shellacked /    /shotgun in the lilacless green, decided it was /    /about time to leave the island of L'alamonde. /    //    /T'ad been a great summer but his lazy bones /    /demanded more and different stimulation than /    /he could find riding around in his pram of garlands. /    /Yonder Buckingham beckoned through the frizzled stew! /    //    /Setting out into the water, loathe to get wet /    /he used his frying pan hands to manglehandle /    /the fractious maw, the crimson cranium with /    /a firm set of his own cesium jaw. /    //    /Strictly, hardly, bedlam chewed at his /    /inner bedposts and bedrails of exquisite tarnation /   ...

Quick and yet he moves like silt. I envy dreams that see his curving silver in the weeds. When stiff as snags he blends with certain stones. When evening pulls the ceiling tight across his back he leaps for bugs. I wedged hard water to validate his skin-- call it chrome, say red is on his side like apples in a fog, gold gills. Swirls always looked one way until he carved the water into many kinds of current with his nerve-edged nose. And I have stared at steelhead teeth to know him, savage in his sea-run growth, to drug his facts, catalog his fins with wings and arms, to bleach the black back of the first I saw and frame the cries that sent him snaking to oblivions of cress. https://strongjacksonpoet.wordpress.com/

We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.  https://strongjacksonpoet.wordpress.com/

In the Eighties We Did the Wop                                                         By Major Jackson If you end your crusades for the great race,   then I will end my reenactments of flying,  and if you lean down to smell a painted trillium,  then I will cast a closer eye on those amber waves,  then I will turn my drums to the sea and away from   your wounded mountains. Who mothered your love of death?  Here is a heart-shaped stone to rub when you feel fear rising;  give me anything, an empty can of Pabst, a plastic souvenir, a t-shirt from Daytona.   Here is a first edition: The Complete Poems of Lucille Clifton.   Give me an ancient grove and a conversation by a creek, charms   to salve my griefs, something that says you are human,  and I will give you the laughter ...

This Sunday Salon Assignment   was started by Kelley. She sent her stanza to Lauren. Lauren sent just hers to Mary, and so to Steve and ending with Richard.   - Humble Rhymster      Unreasonable, I think as I check the thermometer which hovers around 8 degrees. The pewter sky is flat, void of joy endless, like February itself. I poke at the embers in the fireplace, As rusty orange as the feathers of the Towhee on the feeder outside my window She snacks on suet and sunflower seeds, not a bit bothered by the cold   So come now, fair towhee, all downy a soul, Is yesterdays' endeavor our curious tomorrow's?  
 Fancy us a single note further to penetrate the trill. As we hang weathered from our sills In the flick of your golden hour   Still it snows, yet you remain in brown and black puffer jacket standing on one leg – wax on wax off.   I sit inside with te...

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy                                      Jack Spicer 1925-1965 What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water.  Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet. Or down in the city where the peach trees Are awkward as young horses, And there are kites caught on the wires Up above the street lamps, And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.   What are you thinking? ...

Valentine for Ernest Mann   You can't order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter, say, "I'll take two" and expect it to be handed back to you on a shiny plate.   Still, I like your spirit. Anyone who says, "Here's my address, write me a poem," deserves something in reply. So I'll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment  before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.   Once I knew a man who gave his wife two skunks for a valentine. He couldn't understand why she was crying. "I thought they had such beautiful eyes." And he was serious. He was a serious man who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly just because the world said so. He really liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them as va...

Houses Down by Christian Wiman I loved his ten demented chickens and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox shaped like a huge green gun. I loved the eyesore opulence of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch with its oilspill plumage, tools cauled in oil, the dark clockwork of disassembled engines christened Sweet Baby and benedicted Old Bitch; and down the steps into the yard the explosion of mismatched parts and black scraps jjamid which, like a bad sapper cloaked in luck, he would look up stunned, patting the gut that slopped out of his undershirt and saying,  Son, you lookin' to make some scratch ? All afternoon we'd pile the flatbed high with stacks of Exxon floormats mysteriously stencilled with his name, rain-rotted sheetrock or miles of misfitted pipes, coil after coil of rusted fencewire that stained for days every crease of me, rollicking it all to the dump where, while he called every ragman and ravened ju...