The Poetry Marathon

“I saw her yesterday, again, in an antiques shop,

billowed

cotton floral dress,

dusty rusty gray and faded silver-oxide blacks,

a 20th century still-life in motion, tin type, I think,

I want to bring her here,

now, impossibly,

but,

would my America scare her?”

My last duty here,

ten days ago, I buried my grandfather with

his cherished tin-type, its wedged in

folded musing 

to himself.

I must not hold on longer, we need

high ground, and better food.

Mood music is not illegal.

But why not?

Can free peoples be trusted to feel,

as they are want to feel,

under the influence of lyric free music?

Can whole sentences be formed with sounds other than words?

This sounds dangerous. Dissonant.

These are Supreme questions!

Whose woods these are I think I know.  Robert Frost

Ganja dude,

right out of the 40’s black and whites. Only him in the color of truth.

Good stuff, jerk pork tastes the best,

(can’t call it the munchies there),

one finger’s worth, only a dime Jamaican.

Coconut palms, fronds, master wind conductors,

randomly flung, no farm house, no rows, perch gained along Nigril’s beach,

drifting to moonlit.

Wave rhythm, salt smell, backpack pillow, nothing,

nothing, nothing could beat this.

Then ganja dude, him in the color of truth,

switched frames.

Oaks everywhere, leafy bunches against the sky, darkest green,

no fronds, no skinny scaled perpetually layered stems,

no power to re-call the hypnotic palms.

Only today, maybe it was yesterday,

I can say, or said,

Whose woods these are I think I know…  

…These woods are mine, mine,

these woods I brought with me,

these woods are mine

from home.

Screaming, screeching, tantrum horn —

Startled sleep,

rocking left and right, gyroscopically down, up, a seaman’s lullaby,

some days.

A piece of it, towering, framed by sky’s dimmer-blackness,

alone, jagged, 3000 feet cone, piercing shark’s teeth shoals,

cresting waves,

terror moonlit, postcard perfect,

some days.

Phosphors flickering on then off, sideways wake

of 100 feet of double planked oak hull, under gaff rigged sail, made some place else.

All hands

on the gunwales, halyards, helm, sextant, compass.

Where had it come from? The push and pull of blame off South America.

Caribbean currents, pushing, roiling around fragment of Venezuela?

Deadly seas, always there, not feigned playful by a Norwegian,

or whatever cruise.

(Can I swim the mile,

or is it three?

survive shoals, sharks, and eat kelp and crab until,

Until when?

Some day?)

Island

I think I never saw anything else, I mean,

I only saw islands,

Until I saw the sea.

(The dividing-definer of islands;

Does an island exist w/o its definition?

Does a sound exist if no one hears a tree fall in the forest?)

a 360-degree aquatic surround

and a certain geological dimension.

(Curtail the efforts to undo the importance of islands,

As in,

No man is an island, and so on…)

Islands are important.

Islands require hard work to understand, I think,

(there’s the hurdle of the first person plural)

since

We are,

were,

always separate,

With a surround defining us,

Us needing it to be otherwise, while its not,

for this: The bell tolls for thee and so on….

And other reasons.

For example, without Islands, what use Love?