The Poetry Marathon

Dancing or Not Dancing (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 12)

We can leave
Anytime
After we smile
And dance
The sun and moon
Are of no consequence
Indoors climbing
Towards a destination
A place never been
Never seen
And if they smile
We smile back
And if they wave
We wave back
We turn trumpets
Into words
And words
Into flutes
They are wind instruments
And won’t mind
The transpositioning
We hold our hands out
And dance with strangers
Each to our own rhythm
They are strangers to us
Not to others
We were invited
Someone invited us
To join in the jamboree
I only know one dance
And one move within that dance
But you know more
You know how to sway to multibeats
These strangers can enjoy watching
You find the right flow
Time no longer matters
After a drink or two
I need those drinks
To calm down
To be involved
To lower my inhibitions
But it doesn’t help me
Find the dance floor
It doesn’t help me
Find the beat
It may even make my dancing worse
You’ve seen me dance
You’ve instructed me
In a fine technique
I cannot understand
How to move a figure eight
I move my feet back and forth
Pretending to follow you
But I am off by the time
It takes to figure out what you did.
Whenever you’re ready we can go
Whenever you think we’ve been here long enough
They smile at us
We smile back
They wave at us
We wave back
We weave our way across
The dance floor
We hear applause
For someone else
Not for us
I don’t know if I really want to leave
I am unhappy either way.

The Joke (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 11)

The other day you told me something
Funny you read on facebook
I reacted by clicking the wow Icon
As I almost fell off my chair.
I’ve never been good remembering jokes,
Sometimes I remember the punchline
Sometimes I remember everything but the punchline
But thank you for sharing the essence of what
We all need to shake us out of the doldrums
After 2 years of hibernation.

I am scratching my head now
Wondering what made me break up
With tears in my eyes
Causing an earthquake in my chair.

I know you don’t remember either
Jokes being as ephemeral as nitrous oxide
Just hiding within the ether.

Just for the fun of it
I try to find it on facebook
But maybe it was instagram or twitter.

Let us just enjoy the few seconds of mindlessness.

The Rabbit and the Owl (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 10)

Once upon a time
In a village for away
Lived a family of rabbits
Franklyn Jr. was the head of the household
He father Franklyn senior
Along with his wives
Lived with Jr.’s family
Jr had only one wife and was deeply in love
One day on his way to work
Jr thought he saw an owl flying overhead
Jr as one of the leaders of the community
Knew that the owls had made a treaty
With the local rabbit village
To stay out of the village
Jr was worried for his family’s safety.
The local rabbits had grown
Accustomed to the lack of predators,
And did not exercise as much as
There ancestors had.
Sr used to tell stories
Of how the rabbits
Would often race each other
As a way to learn how to avoid predators
Like owls and hawks.
Jr had a vision that if nothing was done
The owls would descend from the sky
And destroy the rabbit village.
He rang the alarm over and over
But all the other rabbits had grown complacent
With their stations in life.
One rabbit was so bold as to say
That after the tortoise had beaten the rabbit
In the famous race
And nothing bad happened
Well, nothing bad could happen.

Jr kept hearing the voice that told him
To learn how to run faster
So Jr, his wife and children
Would go out in the overgrown fields
And run as fast as they could for as long as they could.
But even Sr would not heed the call.
And Sr his wives and other children and grand children just laughed
At Jr and his family as they practiced everyday.
One night seemingly without warning
The owls attacked and ate all the rabbits in the village
Except Jr, his wife and their children.

Family Dinner Time (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 9)

My mother used to keep spaghetti
Warm on a hot plate heated by a candle
She’d mix in the sauce and mix it in a bowl
And place the bowl in the frame
And then light the candle
We ate dinner as a family
We listened to the news on the radio as we ate
Every night was a meal designated for that night
One night was meat night and it could be beef
Or lamb or whatever my parents could afford
Another night was chicken a la king night
Where we ate chicken in goop
On either white bread or rice
Another night was spaghetti night
My father used to mash his peas into
His potatoes as he didn’t really like peas
He was not big into vegetables
Though his parents used to own a fruit
And vegetable store
He taught his father that tomatoes
Were fruits not vegetables
I’ve learned since then that there are
Many what we call vegetables that are really fruits
My mother did her best to cook dinner
My father usually made breakfast
And his trick was that he would cook the eggs
Using the toaster timer
So the eggs would be ready at the same time as the toast
My parents did not really like food very much
They had no curiosity about food
And would not eat anything they were unfamiliar with
But my mother had this contraption
That was a kind of hot plate
That she used to keep the spaghetti warm
Heated by a candle
After she put the sauce in, whatever sauce was on sale that week.
My father hated it and would yell at me
If I had changed the station on the radio
In the kitchen
And didn’t change it back
As he was not very good at tuning the radio
That was before the radios were push button.
My mother heated spaghetti and discounted sauce – with a candle.

What the _____ Man? Poetry Again? (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 8)

People think that poetry as an art form has died
There is nothing left to say after you get rid of rhythm and rhyme

Stream of consciousness writing creating structural associations
That only the writer, if anyone, truly comprehends (TS Eliot tried to crawl
his way out of this conundrum or perhaps paradox)
Modernism, post modernism, surrealism, impressionism, expressionism
Abstract impressionism, abstract expressionism, realism, super realism
Deconstructionism

As analytic devices are fine to comment on other forms of art
But poetry by definition

Needs structure
As certainly maintained by anyone who has ever and only read Trees by Joyce Kilmer

What is poetry after all but words on a page
People think that poetry as an art form has died

As analytic devices are fine to comment on other forms of art
Are the words too hot to touch after prosody is cancelled (or should we say eliminated, or should we say no longer needed once writing was invented)
Have you ever tried to memorize ee cummings

TS Eliot had his comings and goings, and had his women coming and going (was
there a pun involved?)
Would he really have been happier living at the bottom of the sea?

Parading up the Canyon of Heroes (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 7)

In Manhattan up the Canyon of Heroes
Are parades to honor those
Who have done something amazing
Usually NY sports teams that have won
The championship for that sport.
They parade up the Canyon of Heroes
In flatbed trucks and cars
And people line up to cheer them on.
We throw from the window bits of pape
(What at one time was shredded paper
Known as ticker tape
And is now paper shredded in a paper shredder)
From the high rise office buildings that still have windows
That line Broadway in lower Manhattan
And they turn on Chambers Street
Along City Hall Park
The Woman’s Soccer team, the Yankees, the Giants
When they won, they paraded.
And from time to time real heroes
Returning veterans
Parade up the Canyon of Heros
911 First Responders
Covid Pandemic workers
Also got to parade.

I would take a camera to work as the building
I worked in
Was on the Corner of Broadway a block North of Chambers
And I could take a ton of pictures
And I would share them on Facebook.
I never stood along the street to cheer
And I never threw anything out the window.
Littering even for a good cause was not my thing.

In some of the pictures the shredded paper was so thick
It looked like colored snow.
We should have a ticker tape parade
In honor of the passing of ticker tape.

A Dog’s Day (Poetry Marathon 2022 – Hour 6)

Today we celebrate your birthday.
We celebrate you everyday
As we take care of you
And you give us emotional support.
You know how important you are to us
And we know how important we are to you.
Enjoy your day and the extra treats you get
Love you today and love you everyday.

An Evening of Wine and Cheese (Poetry Marathon 2022 Hour 5)

An evening with you
Where we can share
My favorite white wine
With a faint scent of oak
If the proper wine glass
Is given room to breathe
And your favorite yellow cheddar cheese
Since I’ve known you
You’ve always loved
Yellow cheese
I think you have a thing for yellow
Though you never mention yellow
As your favorite color
Maybe yellow just goes with your smile
I noticed you have changed your nail polish
You used to be so careful to use either clear or pink
But now you have decided
To use the yellow of sunflower
I guess to match your slice of cheese
As you lift it delicately
We have a few glasses
The space between us
Filled with silence narrows
Before we ate we spoke about our days
And how hard it has become to beat the pavement
You reminisced about how your mother
Would spend the night
Watching tv and knitting
But you and I are beyond that
Now that we have settled in
And put the day behind us
We have no need
In our dialogue for words
We communicate
As all lovers do
Without the need for verbal communication
We use our other senses
Our defenses our so far down
That any disturbance
Will destroy the fragility of existence
In this moment
We can talk later
About sunflowers
And the yellow roses
I bought for you
On my way over

1922 (Poetry Marathon 2022 Hour 4)

The war to end all wars
Had ended
The Spanish Flu epidemic
Was over
The era of
Electricity and automobiles and airplanes and radio
Was now
Human potential was exponential
The stock market reflected the confidence
That things will only get better
In a world where we finally understand
The economy is everything
A new kind of dancing to a new kind of music
Led to a new kind of understanding
Of human nature
Benevolence momentarily overtaking the
Negative reaction to modernity
And yet

A warm dry wind
Blowing from West to East
A realization that
Human capital is unpredictable
As European empires built
Over centuries
Could not recover
From the destruction
Of war
And the devastating effects of the flu
And the combined unimaginable number of deaths

The low pressure of reality
Met the high pressure of expectations
Of technological advances
Creating a long-lasting unsteady shifting unstable violent storm
The consequences of which led directly
To the economic and then political collapse
Experienced through the mid 20th century
Even more unimaginable deaths
From war and famine and deliberate cruelty
How do we call it inhumane?
And still today

And yet

TV and computers and access to unlimited knowledge
Human capital is fungible and ultimately expendable
In a world where we have internalized the understanding
That the economy is everything
And yet

We have recently learned there is no point
In trying to modernize
Because the only thing that matters
Is what a few men thought
About human rights at the end of the 18th century
The lessons of the 19th century,
The 20th century
And the 21st century do not matter
When it comes to life and death
And perhaps yet

A Trip to the Supermarket (Poetry Marathon 2022 Hour 3)

Painting within the lines
Finding the right ruler to measure
With colors found in nature
Coloring in by numbers
Painting becomes a number game
Superrealism superimposed on reaslism
My hand shakes with anticipation
And slips across the page
And all thought of accuracy evaporates
So you can see from the evidence
Of page after page found in the garbage
I cannot draw
I have a camera

Still life photos
Downloaded to our computers
We run them through
Programs to saturate them with colors
My favorite photo is a weeping willow
In a meadow near the desert
Where the extreme heat
Creates vivid waves
Upon a clear background
My favorite color is a hue of purple
Not found in nature
The extreme sun washes out
Any hope of shadow
I choose no shadow
In the box
I choose no wind
In the box
I choose no people
In the box
The meadow is barren
Life is still
Purple fills the box
I draw in some hills
And some clouds
The sky is a contrasting green
More green
Contrasts well with the purple tree leaves
And pinkish meadow
I do not draw within the lines
I do not choose colors found in nature
I am not very good with instructions generally
But yes I am on my way to buy groceries
In the same supermarket
Where housewives go with their shopping lists
And husbands go with their cell phones
To ask if that is what you mean
But I would rather take my camera
And take pictures of Campbell soup cans
And saturate the colors to purple and green
Until the photo becomes indistinguishable
From a lonely purple tree flowering purple in a meadow
Within a still life of pinkish weeds, under a green sky