Recently published on Monhegans Common on their poetry site in celebration of the island at winter solstice. (www.monhegan.com)

ISLAND POND HAS FROZEN

Island pond has frozen
But not enough for skaters.
Weather says:
Three to five inches
Of white stuff,
Rain and sleet.

Hunker down, Hearth Huggers,
Bolster forth, Brave Hearts.

Yes, we are dreamers
of winter full,
Still shy the solstice
When time hangs still
Twixt shorter nights
And longer days to come–

And Lo! Our bonfires
Beckon the sun
From the dark ocean,
As our faces turn
East in faith.

the invitation has been issued,
your name etched in leaves of gold,
penned with the sacred ink of antiquity
broadcast through the heavens
dispatched to the nether regions of your heart
Look the other way and you will miss the moment!

your presence is now most fervently requested
your place at the table laid with limoges and linen
you will be greeted warmly, embraced without limitation,
annointed with oil of sharon, sprinkled with hyssop
while many, held back by reins of fate or fear, decline –
May we count you in attendance?

respond exactly as you are, as it pleases you
arrive adorned, bejeweled,
stripped bare to bone
come bearing gifts or approach empty, arms open,
present yourself cloaked in completion
or draped and dripping with the sheer desire of becoming–
All excess baggage will be checked at the door.

the invitation has been issued in your one true name
the offer non-transferable,
send no other in your stead
claim no false persona as your own
proffer no papers save those illuminated from within
You are now asked to demonstrate sufficiently Who You Are.

do you not see?
the gesture has been offered from the highest,
everything you have ever wanted now rests before you in disentangled aggregation,
awaits your gentle nod, your audible yes
your outbreath of unleashed surrender –
While you stare blankly at the rainbow, angels wipe your canvas clean.

how is it that you so willingly grovel at the feet of survival
yet keep love’s glory waiting at the door?
you fret and fumble, hem, haw in hesitation –
when will you fling open every gate in joyful anticipation
of what awaits on the other side?
Radiance will not drip onto your tongue from a dropper!

while you rue lack and misappropriation, a weighted wagon groans in the causeway,
do naught but draw a bead on the empty goblet before you
and the call of the endless sea persists, unheeded,
continue to rest your gaze on ephemeral horizons
and you risk skipping the beat of your own evolution –
To knowingly remain in shadow is an inferior proposition at best.

the invitation has been issued, the table has been laid
respond exactly as you are,
as it pleases you
the choice is yours, by free will and freedom:

Arouse from your slumber and seize fresh the day.

Grunts and groans

Sighs and moans

Stiff-legged walk—

Cold water to face

Toothbrush in a race

Don’t forget to cough

And yank the hot & cold

Beyond the window wide

The birds gather with pride

All the answer have I none

Stick a fork in me I’m done

Maybe you’re good & fleet

But I am dead under foot

There goes the wifely shuffle

The days begin with usual hustle

Don’t say there’s no pain

Like Chinese torture

Out in the rain

One more drop to the brain.

ALL PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED WORK HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

www.chrispimental.com

I love the rudely punctured, the taken, ticked and bleeding. Around me swarm the powers who had relinquished their resistance. In me, they find their solace, the soft hand to quell the iron fist. I keep my gifts to them in the deep recesses of my lungs. Leather-flesh slapped against the bane of comfort, the anvil over netherworld motherhood ever wants the presence of the soothing touch which I provide. Spill over me your words of writhing. Hand in hand in mouth in teeth wrapped around a tender button. Spells and charms to ease the pain, I provide the harmony. Together we sing with our notes to break the fear and loosen the wall of twelve pound bucket ice. Organs playing in our throats, both requested and abhorred, reverberate against the shattering pack. Twenty minutes in the dark, half a lifetime with the quail and a season passed away. Place your ring around my filthy finger and fly from damage.

Image by kenne

Poet Wendy Barker read from her new novel in prose poetry, Nothing Between Us – The Berkeley Years this past Thursday evening. You can read more about her appearance and view a video on my blog site http://kenneturner.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/wendy-barker-nothing-between-us/

posted by: kenne g. turner

Note publication of my poem on Monhegan Commons for Dec. 9, 2009: click on poetry tab, poem entitled, “Island Pond Has Frozen”.

http://www.monhegan.com

//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Please…

Don’t raise the shade

My eyes are asleep

In their caverns

Silent in darkness

With no images

But my mind

Awakening in fear

Of a full day

Of scorching lamps

High in the sky

Or over my left shoulder

Bringing to light

A reality much debated

Where no one agrees

And everyone cheats

To make it right again.

Jump wildly into the confines of the inner sphere. I sing metal and water. Hermes etches his moniker into my brittle bones, wearing a shirt of Teutonic fists. Every outlet on the scrape of a shimmering sea battles tied heroes with upright carvings of that garden isn’t there. Force feed me bloody epilogues until, from cramping and profuse bleeding, I die among the thousands of faces in pierced flesh. I broke these chalky bones in twilight beneath the hard ribbons of a deaf left ear. The high priestess of textual physics lacks the cognitive disconnect. She’s tired. She sleeps. Let me borrow a 20 sin note; I’ve got some fun ahead. I need to love her shirtwaist fire, fused in coke, her gold metal bones.

Fail
Rip and
Wonder

Oh, Pioneers!

Scheat can be found in the hollow opening

between idea and action; inspiration and use.

If an artist were to draw a sketch of Scheat’s

rising in the night sky, then this stars aura would

become angled within spirit, aslant with nexus of

beginning.  The curve of his brush would catch in

mid-stroke and he would learn she embodies ethical

and pure astuteness.  A simply sketched lapel upon

the evening’s development.

When Scott and I started this press, we had the rudimentary plans for the books we wanted to do in 2010.  Real life, however, always has a way of mucking up plans.  Queries come from writers one wouldn’t expect, and plans have to be altered to fit reality.   Briefly Bizarre was the first Bandersnatch Book Scott and I talked about.  Basically, we wanted to channel the enthusiasm for twitter and “hint fiction” into prose poetry.  However, something happened over the last two months that made us reevaluate what we can and can’t do, in terms of our limited amount of money.

Basically, when the press was being put together, Death In Common still had a contract at Daverana Enterprises — that book even went onto Amazon.com twice.  Then, the circumstances regarding that book began to fall apart, and Daverana eventually released the rights.  They also released the financial obligations to the contributors to that Anthology.  So, when Death in Common became a Bandersnatch Book, the contributor copy obligations also became a Bandersnatch debt.   At first, Scott and I thought we can just cram it in and make due.  The truth, however: sometimes you can’t create a new slot for a book, and to accommodate, another book’s slot needs to get temporarily axed.

Briefly Bizarre, by the nature of it’s contributor guidelines, was going to carry a substantial debt at first.  Given the 100 words or less design of the prospective pieces, that meant the Table of Contents was likely to balloon outwards, with a large number of contributor copies mandated.  Scott and I knew this when we were initially planning the press.   However, in a recent number crunching session, we realized that taking on Death in Common’s contributor copies would make doing Briefly tougher to do.

So, it’s in the best, that the book be put off to 2011.  We still would like to do it, but we can’t.  It’s also why we can’t take on any new books.  Our calender became filled rather quickly, both with contracted books and the prospective writers we are currently talking to.   Sure, not all of our 2010 books have been announced yet.  But trust me, good things are to come, but sometimes, good things come with unexpected expenses.

Half a decade of decadence and the target seems further away. Shackles built from hot-croix and fetters of letters wasted away within mildew boxes are as strong as they were then. Everything. Every goddamn thing was enacted for the ageless faerie upon which a pyre was engraved. All the uttered and scribbled letters for other seasons were mutterings in the howl of winter. Still, an image from the back and a feeling never again to be rebuilt was ended with a preemptive pressing, deeper than the Virgin’s submarine cloister. Not even the second coming of the Great Populator could withstand the tremor. Templar quests for strands of ruby propagate all intentions. The foetid circlet imagines warmth outside, wrapped around the pumping vein extended from the county seat. Individual memories huddled and cluster-fucked in dreams of да. Benefits are moot when the outcome is the product of catastrophe. Oh, Melancholy Do Die, why was there no warning? Foresight of wrack would have kept alive the kaleidoscopic fungus, bundled blue-coats, punk rock emperors, tails and beautiful, beckoning crème von grá. Planting seeds proves possibly futile, so days linger on in hopes infused of goals to reach a destination 4 years writhing in fever. The temperature rises and redemption is useless.

I thought it might be fun to write stories about some of Ricky Riccio’s individual assignments that made their way into Unlocking the Poem—and this post will be the first of several to do just that.

One assignment that sticks out—in a distinctly positive way—consisted of a sentence Ricky gave to his students to use as the title or first line of a poem: Do not give me things unbroken. Like so many of Ricky’s assignments, this is but a brief snippet from which poems could emerge . . . and emerge they did! For weeks, students returned to workshop with additional “do not give me things unbroken” poems . . . and many of the poems were truly inspired.

We, the students, were so excited by what was happening that five of us decided to collect these poems and publish them. We put together a poetry anthology called (of course!) Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, containing poems from 54 different authors; we dedicated the volume to Ricky and his teaching. (You’ll see this assignment as Assignment Number 417 in Unlocking the Poem, “illustrated” by several poems previously published in Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken.)

Among the poems produced in response to the assignment, we had free verse and villanelles, concrete poems, prose poems, sestinas and sijo—a vast richness of the many different poetry forms Ricky had exposed us to. (Ricky was the first to show me these forms, and I am deeply grateful; for those of you not familiar with them, you can find information about them all in Unlocking the Poem.)

In a later post, I will say something about the struggle to write in “forms,” to adhere to a structure dictated by tradition, but for now I want to point out that one of the joys of Ricky’s assignments is that they create a structure for writing. Having a predetermined structure can be intensely frustrating—it’s not always easy to find the next rhyme, to adhere to the demands of the sonnet, even to use a series of seemingly random words within the same poem—but what is so valuable about Ricky’s assignments is that they provide a focus that starts each poet’s creative juices flowing. Amazing, how each person’s poems are so different, even when they all start from the same stimulus! Amazing, too, that having a fixed starting point can make it easier to write the next poem, not harder!—after all, the poems are out there, waiting to be found.

Here is one of my own Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken poems; maybe it will give you some sense of what came from the assignment. The title comes from an ancient Greek legend, about a couple whose only wish was never to be parted:

Baucis, To Philemon

Do not give me things unbroken,

things wrapped crisply in cellophane,

smelling of newness.  I want

things that have been touched

and worn—

your old, rippled shoes,

their leather softened to

the shape of your feet,

their soles imprinted with

your steady steps.

Do not give me notebooks filled

with blank white glare—I want

warmly bent corners,

pages striped and scarred with words,

floods of them

wearing the paper to softness.

A letter you once sent me,

smudged, remnants of a tear—

I think—

I have held that aged paper to my cheek,

prizing it more than cool and empty vellum,

more than unstopping ink.

Do not give me stiffly-folded clothes—I want

your mole-soft sweater,

rumpled,

one elbow wearing thin,

to lean into its suppleness

as into skin—

through unbending years I dream

of my shaking

stanched

by the branching O of your arms,

arms that know me.

We have calluses,

wens,

loosely hanging skin

and every day

you are more beautiful

in my broken eyes.

Ellen Beth Siegel

First published in Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, 2002

If you would like your own copy of Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, please click the “Buy Now” button below.





The silent distance outside beckons
drawn towards the north; the lights dim
iridescent colours blend with a smoky
grey sky indifferent to anthracite eyes
that stare coldly into the void.
Lips pierced into a cry as the fetid
rotten odour of putrescence matter
ingrains itself to the senses of I.

The air is thick, skin clammy and
the parched tongue hangs loose
swollen like a dog with rabies that
scratches the flesh to bone its blood
long since dried; its breath rasps
into a grating voice

I cover my ears to drown out the noise
but it won’t be silenced. It presses itself
against the bleak night hungering
and all I can do is turn my back
and hope it dies swiftly.

Ice and fog

And thaw

Drip the landscape.

Mystery, it must be,

With detectives

Prowling in hip boots,

Their flashlights darting

Into crevices—

For what lost soul

Or now…body:

Decomposing into hideous grin,

A front tooth with diamond.

Clearly not a crime of property,

Observes a cocksure eye.

Note well, the indefinable fading:

Bloodless white tissue of frost.

[To be read out loud as quickly as possibly, breathing only on line breaks]

Old man. Old dog. Dog older. Man younger. Dog years. In them. Of course. Dog dies. Man sad. Old man. Tears stream.

Dog dead. Big room. Bad smell. Bloody dog. Burial required. Ceremony needed. Man decides. Man acts. He drags. Drags dog. By leg. Hind leg. Rigor mortis. Difficult dragging. Scrape scrape.

Thud thud. Down stairs. Man drags. Man pants. Dog still. Dead still. Great exertion. Bloody dog. Thud thud.

Drag along. Out door. Back door. To garden. At last. Beautiful weeds. Wonderfully overgrown. Mouldy shovel. Sad man. Wet face. Man angry. Bloody dog. Bloody death.

Whack whack. Hits dog. With shovel. Very vigorously. Feels younger. Twenty years. The bollix. That’s better. Dig now. Lest sunset…

Dig dig. Deep down. Stony ground. Awkward work. All that. That work. Lousy dog. Bad smell. Big bother. For what. Life death. Opposites paradoxes.

Back inside. Commode smells. Or bedpan. No matter. Smell growing. Commode basins. Chamber pots. All uncleaned. Filthy commode. Ah eureka. Bury them. Bury all. Filthy stench. Cannot clean. Dirty containers. Bury them. Together forever. Shit piss. With dog. Truly deserving.

Dog down. Into ground. Commodes down. Into ground. Stench unbearable. Dog rot. Rot faster. With Commodes. Faeces etc. Speeds process. Thank God.

Bury Dog. Fill hole. Maybe later. What then. Much later. Dig up. Dog’s bones. Very interesting. Clean them. Filthy bones. Keep them. On mantelpiece. Bleach them. Bleached mementos. Life lived. Now over. So forth. With relics. Move on. With memories.

Erect tombstone. Inscribe name. Rex I.N.R.I. Wrong name. Ah well. Tombstone cross. Cross wood. Not stone. Tomb-wood. Wood plank. Old skirting. Over hole. Covered now. With dirt. With weeds.

Man dog. How different. One dead. But no. In past. How different? One slobbers. Other drools. Both do. Both sad. Both home. Both old. Both eat. Both same? Both useless. Both worthless. Four limbs. Two eyes. One nose. So on.

Had wife. Now gone. In ground. All gone. All ruins. Rubble strewn. Scattered remnants. Ash dust. Ha ha. Ninety years. Or so. Wasted thus. On life. Farcical life. Why bother. All done. No matter. Not now. Leave be. Leave it.

Ha ha. True descent. True darkness. Blinding night. Man’s lineage. Adam on. Now stopped. Stoppered bottle. No more. Not now. No sons. No daughters. No progeny. Just shit. Dog wife. House body. If ever. No more.

World forgotten. Old man. Man forgotten. While alive. Lone house. Far off.

No more. Too sad. Too funny. Too emotional. Stop all. Stopper all. His gob. His arse. Cork both. Be done. With all. It all.

Let death. Death accumulate. Plug holes. Accumulate death. Accumulate shit. And piss. And carbon. No escape.

Tears stream. No face. Not really. No eyes. Not really. No mouth. Yet laughter. And tears. Issueless ceaseless.

Soon over. Dead of. Of night. End it. Little strength. Strength left. Yes yes. Use it. To what. End it. Might try. Or cry. And laugh. At what. This life.

This life. This body. These eyes. These hands. This flesh. Used it. Used well. No resale. Not now. This body. These secretions. Muscle tendon. Marrow bones. He names. Name them. With relish.

And mind. The memories. So few. So inadequate. For life. But death. For death. Perfect memories. For that. Of hunger. Of love. Losses winnings. Of all. All inadequate. Deserved more. Yes certainly. No doubt. Not now. Only assertions.

Young man. Young wife. Grew old. Got annoyed. Very often. With what. Each other. With life. With nothing. For pleasure. Relished annoyance. Pain pleasure. All one. All sensation.

What matter. Wife dead. Man old. Cursing consciousness. But soon. Soon over. Soon none. No more. Sheer being. Sheer essence. Sheer nothing. No torment. No joy. No tears. Nothing given. Nothing received. Sealed off. No expectations. Soon over. All over. Sooner better.

On on. On death. He shouts. Take me. Empty house. Ah yes.

He dies. Gets wish. His wish. Last wish. To die. To forget. His life. Wasted life. Wasted joy. Wasted pain. Wasted death. Wasted wish. In vain.

Snow, sleet, ice

Thawed, frozen again

Into sheets bubbled

With air from last week—

Dusted lightly

With snow confection

Upon which the booted foot

Flies without resistance

To moon surface heights

While the padded coat

Wheels horizontal

The hooded head

Cranes forward

In the instant flash

Between sky and ground

The concussion follows

With the shock of pain.

Convention dictates

He began…

And then lost his way.

Reprehensible, his buddy said,

Have you no respect?

Given the sacrifices

You’re an ungrateful

Despicable aspersion—

All good words.

The blinking customer said,

So don’t push me.

Reporting you as you are

Will bring repercussions

That may scar eardrums.

You don’t listen, do you?

The damage is already done.

It remains here peaking outwards this solitary melancholy.
Morose and rambling at the walls with the yellow fever
a plague of anxiety twitching behind curtains. Forced into
The OCD of neurosis, stifled by the constricting bricks
and mortar. Struggling to sing a masculine siren song
That makes him retch in torment.

A bird, wings once clipped struggles to manoeuvre through
air; her nest evacuated all the chicks have migrated to pastures
new never to return. she continues to gather moss and twigs
from ground. Forced beak salivating, for she is the early bird
that caught the worm. She is belly full and the food is rotten
She eats and eats to fill the void.

She leans against the fading odour of his shirt, stroking its texture
like the body of his Christ, her heart pulsates in manic pace.
His voice a distant ghost; his eyes swallowed into the black gold
of sun, hair drenched in wine – she soaks in its appetiser.
Then wonders how she will live now all the sweetness is gone.

The panthera Leo all senses alert stalks through the thick bush
undergrowth his keen eyes fixed on prey – his strong desire to
copulate forces the beast to unleash his greatest silent roar.
The unhidden odour of lioness forces his survival. As he gathers
pace and sinks his teeth into her young shaking the blood from
his proud mane he climbs her and releases his seed.

24 hour bars the women congregate in corners with dresses thigh
high their drunken stupor unattractive but fair game.
Mutton dressed as lamb yet gravity won‘t win, they search
long and hard in the eyes of young men for a sign their
pheromones still stink; the lack of eye contact answers silently.
While the youth continue to roll carelessly without a shred of
doubt this soon will all end. In the tale of fatalistic surrender.

© 2009 Maria Gornell.

A piece of sky

Cut by a diamond

Dropped on a plate

Blessed by a goddess

Whose kisses press

My nodding head

Till awake & fresh

The meal is eaten

In calm realms

Far above the play

Knocking at the world

An embrace of arms

Collisions unknown

While ignorance avoids

The scripted future

My celestial meal

Saves me from harm.

I don’t usually understand poetry.  Every now and then I’ll run across a poem I enjoy, but in general, poems do not move me.  The poems I enjoy are short and make their point quickly.  I suppose I’m not very cultured.  That’s why, on occasion, I will write my own poems.  Poems that make sense to me.  Poems for which I hold all the secrets.  Ask me why I so strategically placed that misspelled word in the middle of the page.  And the open parenthesis with no close?  There is a reason for that as well.  When I write my own poems, reading them makes me feel like an expert interpreter.  Most people don’t understand my poems.