Presented, to your dismay, sans contrition…
A Poem
He blew two sequent farts
of such obnoxious distinktion
that the effluviatic foetor
malingering in the domestic atmosphere
drove him out of doors.
Yea, verily, even into the rain
that, proverbial Bardolotriessence,
raineth quotidiantic,
quondamnically.
— Tuesday, 29 April 2014
I wrote a poem this morning — renovative experience, nearly novel for this old man.
Writing poetry interests me… I composed words in my thoughts striding southwestward (some of which still occur more or less in what I merely recall later with uncertainty), seeking colors and description for what I halfwittedly observed.
Pity now that I had no camera to coldly record what my warm eyes saw, because then I could have a decent photo to include here. This (pretty) photo I found has too few clouds but has some of the effects correct (far too orange for my experience, however, as readers will perceive for yourselves).
But the words come first.
I wonder if this is the real last draft…
♦
♦
rags of cloud,
dark
bluegray and crumpled
like fat ash frozen,
empurple the western sky,
a vault of frayed slate
violet
shredding to ultramarine overhead
♦
eastern cloudfringes,
puffy
refraction-fronted
blush,
pinked and bright
crumpled rosewhite beachheads
♦
That moment was
already past
then, now astray —
the pink prows
of those tattered cloudsails
neon white
♦
and the rest
to the west
declined to gunmetal, grim.
Wednesday, 1 May 2013
©2013 John Randolph Burrow, Magickal Monkey Enterprises, Ltd, S.A.
Having spent Saturday with Janetʼs folks in our annual Motherʼs Day celebration (involving a wicked lunch on really good but caloric and often fatty foods and a shopping trip for flowers to be planted over the next several weekends, the restaurants and now the greenhouses varying over the years), I want to take a short space to commemorate my own absent parents, particularly, of course today, my mom. I lost both parents in just over a year back in 1982 and 1983, my mother holding on through cancer to attend our wedding (The Lovely One and mine) only to succumb a few months later, over Labor Day weekend (better known as Old Threshers in Mt. Pleasant). My father followed at Christmastime a year later, the victim of his own handiness with automobiles, sadly. As everyone tends to say, I still miss them both and each.
This is a poem I wrote while my mother was still alive, but I donʼt think she ever saw it (I never was real quick to share my verse in the old days, particularly among my family).
My mother lives on in many peopleʼs thoughts and memories, but I have enshrined some of her in parts of Aunt Sarai in Stars in Heaven, not the least the love and attention that character devotes to my surrogate in the story.
I see it as a mate to the poem I once wrote thinking my father had suffered a heart attack or a stroke… And itʼs my post for this Motherʼs Day, entitled…
Body wracked with quick endless motion,
knife-filled electric nervewind tears cold-keen
through intricate path-patterns, exorcises me:
human hurricaneʼs wailing implosion
shreds, slices, splatters, cracks controlled emotion.
Autumn iceblasts sleet forgotten hollows clean
and scream away warmth of rational debris,
reveal me bare to air’s acid corrosion.
The insincere wind shrieks silently within,
racing a hundred burnt-end lazy notions
like splintered leaves spat down empty boulevards,
slapped and snapped, shattered epileptic shards.
The disease of existence takes no potions
but that girl-breath brush in youth. The restʼs just sin.
Written on Mothers Day
14 May 1978
What do we know? A little consideration and a bit of serendipity resulted in some interpretation on this piece, tomorrow.
This one is for Janet, mostly because I wrote it about her once upon a time. And also because as of today, she has survived the big birthday party that I mentioned a while back…
The setting is our first apartment together, the one on maple Street that my father enjoyed so much (and which I donʼt think my mother ever visited).
The house resounds with your noises
(and sometimes still your silences)
subtle often but also definite—
floorboards creaking with footsteps
doors opening and closing
upstairs down
stair steps too
running water, coffeemaker gurgles
I have had this sort-of-a-poem on ice (meaning a “Draft” here in WordPress world) for at least a year now. With nothing better to post for today, letʼs drag it from its frozen waiting room into the light of digital day. Thirty-six years on.
Weʼre in the hangover period after the Bardʼs Birthday (yesterday), so a bit of verse, however inept and/or bad, seems vaguely in order. The Lovely One and I are celebrating her parentsʼ anniversary (also yesterday) with them today, so maybe a touch of romance is in order as well.
Besides, itʼs been a very long time since I posted a poem.
What subtle secret magic have you worked on me,
dark like dementia, as savage as dreams,
to take all my wonder from being alone and free?
You’ve possessed my heart. I’m void except for screams
of loneliness that shred the armor of life’s routine:
hopes rust, scales that philosophy will never clean
from the baffles of my imprisoned spirit’s schemes.
You have worked the witchcraft which makes you me.
I have no complex incantation which will wean
me, anguished, from your tenderhooks to liberty.
Your spells are potent: you mystically demean
my solitude with this amoral sweet wizardry.
What mephistopholean magic have you worked on me,
now that you are free and I am we?
And the new year has arrived (optimistically, on my part, anticipating no nuclear holocaust or meteoric impacts or other unpleasantness of any other sort intervening between the time of composition for me and its arrival in the dark of night just after the new year embarks with you). I probably should apologize for yesterdayʼs wasteland of woe. I also have a poem. I printed it earlier here, last year, but as its subject is the turning of the year, recounting a few events from December 31 and January 1 (from nearly thirty years ago), I thought it might make an appropriate statement for the dawn of this new decade as well.
At the time we lived in the little apartment upstairs in the green house on Maple Street.
Birdomen, speak me your meaning:
yesterday you arrived
in dusklight
around nightfall,
circling with silent wings
to find your place
in our fir tree,
sweeping to stop a third of the way
from the top, hidden
among the spiraling branches;
and orbited beneath the tree—
me seeking to spot your plumage,
invisible in the foliage,
until my noise and prying eyes
sent you skittish, wings spread
crimson against the dying light,
southwestward behind the garage,
and gone, a cardinal sign
by sunset at December’s end.
And today, new year, my wife finds you
herself, outside the window,
but you fly off when I peer out,
a rush of red speeding southwest away,
just a glimpse of scarlet
to incarnadine the rust and greenishgrey
of this sullen, cold and troubled day.
Now upon the turning of the year you come,
coloring with fire the Janustime.
No great shakes here, just a poem. And no, I donʼt plan for this year to be a celebration of old posts (although I do anticipate shortening my average length when posts appear), but I like this poemʼs delicate optimism and tenderness for this new year, looking both backwards and ahead. May your 2011 be colored bright, too.
Some years winter comes later (well, later than today anyway). I had dictated this poem and transferred it to hold as a draft on WordPress a long time ago (probably March). I do believe it resulted from a real event (just how real you will have to read for yourself). In those days, there was no pit of Gasser Creosote Gas (which they just renewed on Wednesday with a brand-new truckload of oozing black logs), just a long meadow/field down to the little farmhouse by the distant highway, a lovely vista, especially sometimes when it filled with snow.
Twelve years ago…
Like fog
the snow falls.
I’d missed its start,
and suddenly,
peeing,
looking out the bathroom window over the stool,
I thought that fog was settling
from the north
until I made out individual flakes
descending thickly, fast,
against the darkness of tree shapes
in yards down the hill.
2° below zero.
Has winter come at last?
Somehow, perhaps itʼs the snowfall that I should be shoveling away in about three hours time, it seemed appropriate to finally publish this little bit of non-verse today. At least it was a lot colder then than now. (“Then” with an e = a word indicating an event or time from the past. “Than” with an a = a word creating a contrast, or comparison, between two states or situations. I tire of reading one for the other on the internet. I really do. Tire.)
And, of course, WordPress is making it “snow” on the blog through the month of December, ending January 4. (Thanks, Dave, for the shovel joke earlier. Did you have to be so gol-durned prophetic?)
