In times of no change, the advantage lies with those who are receptive to being taught. Parents and teachers may seem truly wise, avoiding dangers with which life is fraught; the stories of the old none would despise when they hold all the answers that are sought.
In times of constant change, advantage shifts to those who, hating school, go and explore. Old answers fail. Fresh questions cause great rifts with parents who are seen as wise no more; questions now turn up unexpected gifts in crossing unknown seas to virgin shores.
Remain alert that there’s a range of change from none, to gradual, to fast, to strange.
*****
A sonnet, or not? 14 lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming regularly and with a final couplet. Though not in either of the standard English forms, it has the organised, compressed, reflective sense of the sonnet. Recently published in Shot Glass Journal, Online Journal of Short Poetry. Thanks, Mary-Jane Grandinetti!
Illegals, both of us; married last year, now she cleans houses, I cut grass, sweep decks, for superrich who see us as mere specks while their big spaceship exit they prepare. Earth will be fishless, treeless, plastic, bare. They’ve offered us both jobs as restaveks, but I said No, they just want us for sex. She said Then suck them off, why should you care? I said, We’ll stay. She said, I said I’d go. I said, You’d leave me? She said, Stay, be dead. I said, That makes you nothing but a whore. She said, I fucked him for your job, you know; I go to space, I’ll live, have food, have bed, and, if I’m good, oh maybe so much more…
*****
“Restavek” is normally a term for a child of an impoverished Haitian family, sent to live as a domestic servant for a wealthier (or less poor) family. There are an estimated 300,000 in Haiti, mostly girls; and an unknown number in the Haitian communities in the US.
This sonnet (Petrarchan, rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) was recently published in the frequently NSFW Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Roderick Bates!
Two rows of heads puffed white for show are turned to watch the gurney go parade-like down the hall and through the double doors, and out of view.
They linger, as the swinging doors are gazed to stillness, and intercourse is but the mingling of silhouettes. Beyond the tumults of regret
and wonder, they are elsewhere, all their architecture of recall connecting lives to family plots, or maybe – further back – in what
may be a keepsake memory – light parade, perhaps – a child’s delight in clowns and cotton candy, high and wispy as puffed hair. Friends die
often, but not in violence – not here, where death comes to the sense in not-quite-joy, and not-quite-grief, but trembling, lightly, like a leaf
that might be blown, or not, or light as dandelion fields puffed white and wispy, wavering. In slow surmise they gaze on quiet with quiet eyes,
filling the hall with noiselessness, and dreaming but to acquiesce to dream, and but to linger some in thrall to stillness yet to come.
*****
Brian Gavin writes: “My poem sort of rips off (shamelessly!) the form and rhyme scheme of the famous A E Housman poem ‘To An Athlete Dying Young‘. It is, however, about a different kind of death – extreme old age – and the gentleness of it. It’s based on something I actually saw in a nursing home, when white heads once leaned out of their rooms to see a friend taken away on a gurney. The image of a parade struck me, and the heads of puffed white hair reminded me of cotton candy at the parades of my youth. Eventually the images of puffed hair and puffed candy morphed into a field of puffed white dandelions wavering in the wind. I almost left the title at ‘Death Watch‘ – which I kind of preferred for the double meaning – but opted to add the rest of it for the sake of clarity. This piece ran in my collection Burial Grounds.”
That is the country we go to, all of us Made young again by music, smooth with oil And lust, all generations generous With youth and laughter. Couples coil And uncoil, casually amorous, With booze in the blender and shrimp beginning to boil. Everybody dreams they have the chance To chase the charms and challenge of romance.
A laughing bard is the essential thing. A patterned shirt, an old six-string guitar, Who urges us to sing and louder sing And clap and dance and order from the bar, And thank hard-working servers as they bring The stuff that lubricates this whole bazaar. And though the bard is covering the bill, Tip well when you’re in Margaritaville.
Oh, parrotheads — imagination’s fire Illuminates the marvel of it all, And conjures every sorcery we require, The call to the response, response to call, A consummation fevered with desire, Beatified by the local alcohol. The song creates the dream. The dream creates Another song the dreamer celebrates.
And once reality is far away, Our youth returned, our stamina restored, We eat and drink and sing and dance and play And manifest ourselves within each chord As if we might entrance ourselves to stay Within this reverie we’ve found aboard The magic vessel Margaritaville, Distilling what distillers can’t distill.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “Someone immediately floated a raft of shit my way over this poem, claiming, in a local Cleveland group generally given to local music, that I’m normalizing alcoholism. I know — it’s an astonishing misinterpretation, but there it is. And in spite of my protestations, he insisted on shouting that I was a lush, a drunk, and an idiot for promoting and approving a disease. Well, it’s not as if poets aren’t used to being misunderstood.
The odd thing to me about this is that I work hard to trigger people through poetry. That’s what art does, in my view, confront us with our frauds and foibles, and makes us look at them in detail. If, of course, we read poetry at all. There must be some corollary to Murphy’s Law that states that when a poem can be misinterpreted it will be misinterpreted. Normally I’m delighted by responses to my poems that are outraged and offended, because normally those responses are from the people I’m trying to outrage and offend. But this blindsided me. The entire Jimmy Buffett phenomenon was built on the fantasy of sun and sand and sea, which is only tangentially alcohol-fueled. No doubt alcohol plays a role in lubricating the enchantment, but it’s the enchantment people go for, not alcoholism.
And that enchantment is powerful. It makes people wear loud clothes and play loud music. But the central lure is that we can think of ourselves as all multi-talented and tanned, slim and young and horny. It’s not the lure of tales of drunkenness and cruelty on a summer afternoon, but rather the opposite: tales of slightly disreputable fun, but tales of the lure of the freedoms from regimentation for the freedoms of a more relaxed like-minded culture where everyone is youthfully attractive and eagerly lascivious.
And what a lure! Even those of us whose only encounter with youthfully attractive and eagerly lascivious were our own dreams had those dreams. And with Jimmy Buffett the price of admission was a seducing tune and a clever lyric. You didn’t need a white sportcoat, much less a pink crustacean. All you needed was a sense of lockstepness of the modern bourgeoisie and a desire to escape it. The whole thing is all in your mind. You create your own sensitive young poet self in a lubricious setting among the young and eager to love you. It’s thrilling, it’s fulfilling, it’s art.”
*****
(Editor’s note: From the title, to the ottava rima form, to the themes, ‘Sailing to Margaritaville’ pays homage to Jimmy Buffett by riffing on W.B. Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium‘. Beginning with Yeats’ opening words, “That is no country for old men” and all the way through, Bales echoes and plays with Yeats’ words, bringing everything to Buffett’s Margaritaville.)
Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).
If we could but instill in Life–that hack!– The element’ry rules of composition, Prevent the crude and sloppy maniac From spoiling every scene with his tradition Of shouting in our faces like a pack Of drunken sailors wailing their rendition Of “Captown Races” or “My Drawlin’ Clementime,” Their rhythmic belching almost keeping them in time.
For Life to utilize the art of Art Could help in many ways that we could mention. Some structure and suspense would be a start. To get us upright in our seats, fists clenchin’, A little rising action would be smart (Or something that would help us pay attention, Instead of simply zoning out a lot And missing half the details of the plot).
But Life, I fear, shall never learn to craft A decent tale. (It hasn’t that ambition.) It uses characters extremely daft, And wastes far too much time in exposition. It never bothers to revise a draft, Too taken with its own first thoughts. Perdition! Each aspect of the story is a shame– And worst, the ending’s always just the same.
Max Gutmann writes: “Don Juan Finish’d fancifully completes Lord Byron’s unfinished comic epic. Excerpts have been contributed to Light, Lighten Up Online, Orbis, Slant, Think, the website of the Byron Society, and Pulsebeat, where ‘Life, That Hack!’ is among the excerpts to have appeared. The complete poem is still unpublished, though I privately printed some copies to share with friends and colleagues. Like Byron’s poem, Don Juan Finish’d is often philosophical, at times facetiously, as here.”
Editor’s note: As with Byron’s original, Gutmann’s Don Juan Finish’d is written in ottava rima: eight-line stanzas in iambic pentameter rhyming ABABABCC, with the final line or two typically used to humorously deflate whatever more high-sounding statements were made earlier in the stanza.
Max Gutmann has worked as, among other things, a stage manager, a journalist, a teacher, an editor, a clerk, a factory worker, a community service officer, the business manager of an improv troupe, and a performer in a Daffy Duck costume. Occasionally, he has even earned money writing plays and poems.
Although not of their class, I went to church with Bryce and Nicky in the congregation. In a shop’s parking lot and in the lurch I asked Bryce for a job, loan, or donation. Then Nicky’s car came up and Bryce got in, the bastards swerved to hit me, ran me down; when I got up, they ran me down again, hit the wall with their car, left with a frown. They don’t apologise, don’t feel the need – “You caused it all ill-manneredly,” they say. “Our car was damaged too.” (But did they bleed?) I bothered them; they wanted me away. The congregation says “Forgive, forget.” Decades have passed. Forget? Forgive? Not yet.
*****
This Shakespearean sonnet (iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) has just been published in this month’s Snakeskin. Editor George Simmers expressed concern that it might be a true story… let me reassure everyone, I neither attend church nor get hit by cars. The poem is at most a parable, a parabolic approach to events.
Who’ll take my dead? I’ve carried them so long my mind is swaybacked from their aching weight. I can’t just cast them off. It would be wrong to leave them in some shed, like unclaimed freight. How could I walk away as Cathy’s smile collapsed, as Brian gently said “Take care,” and Grammy begged “Please take me home now” while I shut them in the dark and left them there?
I’ve jettisoned so much I took to heart— the afterlife, belief in justice, prayer. I’ll have to lay my dead down too, I know. After a party, when my friends depart, I wash up, stow away what’s left, yet they’re still here. The dead are always last to go.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “I love the way a cliché can take on new life if the words are interpreted in a nontraditional way. The title of this poem seemed painfully poignant to me when I imagined it applying to the dead we all carry around with us. It would be nice to be able to walk away from that sadness, but of course who among us could bring ourselves to do it? Though I try to keep the voice of the poem sounding natural, I pay attention to the play of sounds in the words, as in the echoes of consonant and vowel sounds in the first two lines: “take,” “swaybacked,” “aching,” and “weight.” In the sestet of the sonnet, the imagined action of the speaker’s leaving her dead behind in the octave is reversed when she is herself left behind by her departing friends, with only her dead to keep her company. This poem first appeared in the online journal 14 by 14, and later was published in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”
Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean
When I looked at her, and when her lips Pulled back to show her teeth, and when her voice Broke into laughter, I could only think Of moments that I’d pissed away, each choice I’d left to others, and the careless slips That landed me beside an empty drink. That afternoon, I could have sworn I saw A thinner, hopeful version of my face Staring from behind her retinas– Familiar, yes, the eyes, the skin, the jaw, But in that instant somehow out of place. It cast a knowing frown. The gravitas Was overbearing. Nonetheless, we filled The void with gossip, anecdotes and smut, Comparing chatty journals–note by note. Like poets, we dissembled in the rut That each of us was in, our chances killed By loss of nerve or failure to emote. But still, a sneer could not have hurt me more Than her clear laugh that sang of expectations So long forgotten from a distant day When youth still spread before me, and the poor And pitiful attempts at explanations Still lay in ambush, only years away.
*****
Quincy R. Lehr writes: “This poem was literally about running into a high school friend of mine by chance on the day I defended my doctoral dissertation (though that’s not in the poem). It’s funny how old I thought I was at twenty-nine.”
Born in Oklahoma, Quincy R. Lehr is the author of several books of poetry, and his poems and criticism appear widely in venues in North America, Europe, and Australia. His book-length poem ‘Heimat‘ was published in 2014. His most recent books are ‘The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar‘ (2015) and ‘Near Hits and Lost Classics‘ (2021), a selection of early poems. He lives in Los Angeles. https://www.amazon.com/Quincy-R.-Lehr/e/B003VMY9AG
Once you adored me. I would bask in looks you saved for me alone, giving no hint—if any ask— of secrets only I have known. But now you find me hard to face. I care for you too much to lie, copying lines you would erase. You hurry past, head down, and I, sensing your pained indignity, return your look of mute distress. Though you no longer cherish me, I do not love you any less.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “I took the idea of a talking mirror from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mirror,’ but whereas she presents the mirror as being totally dispassionate, my mirror reflects the emotions as well as the faces of those who look into it. Sometimes, if you see someone beautiful, you may think “the mirror loves her (or him).” But it occurred to me that mirrors love everyone. They just as gladly reflect the old and ugly as the young and beautiful. In this poem, I imagine the mirror’s sorrow that its love is not returned. In French, “I’m sorry” is “je suis désolé” (“I’m desolated”), which always seemed charmingly over-the-top to me. It occurred to me that the phrase “the mirror’s desolation” could refer both to the sorrow the mirror feels and to the devastation it causes. This poem first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, and then in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.
Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean
Sweet are the uses of divinity And sweeter yet in keeping us engrossed Is the simple complex concept of the trinity The Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Is making sense of Them too much a bother? Is there any way to master Three-in-One? The son, the Holy Ghost and Father, The Holy Ghost, the Father and the Son.
I use this ancient form, the cranky sonnet To crank out my aberrant Dunciad And what evolves from overthinking on it: The Spook, the Kid and–dare I say it?–Dad.
It’s true that poems are made by fools like me But only God can make himself a three.
*****
Edmund Conti writes: “I wasn’t going to get into any interpretations of the Trinity. Just noting that scholars writing about it don’t shed much light. So I decided to shed my own. Somewhere along the line I may have gone a little overboard. (Pray for me.) I think my cranky sonnet has its own rhyme scheme, not one from the books. Meanwhile I’ve forgotten what ”Dunciad” means except that it was a good rhyme word. Forgetting all that, I guess this whole thing was inspired by Joyce Kilmer’s memorable last line.”
Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, released by Kelsay Books https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/ was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-ragHis poems have appeared in several Potcake Chapbooks: Tourists and Cannibals Rogues and Roses Families and Other Fiascoes Wordplayful all available from Sampson Low Publishers
Form in Formless Times 