24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
In a moonbeam night,
smelling old books on my shelf,
I want to feel a soothing coffee.
From there I will rise,
move like a lazy beauty,
piercing the fog.
And I will climb the fir,
I’ll sing loud the canteen songs,
which I sang once with my dearest ones!
Damn!these dreams are very,very short to live!
When I am happiest,
I speak of forgiveness.
I speak of books
and worksheets and practices
to get you there.
I speak of letting go
and of laughing (at yourself,
mostly). When I am happiest,
I remember being asked
“What do you want most?”
I think of likely answers—
wealth, luck, immortality,
love. I answered that I didn’t
always want to be happy.
I want to be at peace.
I come home, the house dark and still.
I eat my dinner and watch the news, wishing to discuss this crazy world.
I read in bed, my cold feet wanting the warmth of yours.
I turn out the light and say goodnight to you aloud, missing your endearments.
I lay on my side of the bed, wanting the comforting pressure of your back against mine.
I wake from a dream, in tears, calling out your name.
Wish you were here.*
*Based on the title of the book by Stewart O’Nan
Eve Remillard
6/22/19
In the hush of the canteen
surrounded by rarely seen fir trees
along the concrete path to the university
with hot coffee in my cold hands
I make my way towards the fog
and early morning classes.
out of the fog’s hush, a moonbeam
I filled a canteen with coffee
went out to the concrete dock
under the fir
shelf fungi like ladder rungs
climbed up its trunk
damn! was all I could think
silently gloating in my solitude
The coffee at the canteen’s no damn good, you know
I think the supplier slipped the kitchen super
a bag of cement mixed with topsoil—
you’d think they’d have figured it out
when the shelf collapsed under the weight of the sack
But no, they kept it hush-hush
so Lieutenant Moonbeam won’t end up
scraping barnacles from a ship in drydock
They must figure the guys on guard duty
won’t care what they’re drinking
when it gets so cold the fog turns to ice
I hear Corporal Feynman used that slop
to cement a fir stump to the Lieutenant’s Lexus the other day…
(22 June 2019, Hour Ten)
The chill
Fir tree shakes outside
Giving a damn to the chill
As a hollow chime reverberates from the dock
Moonbeam gleams haughtily
On the coffee table beside the shelf
And the night fog rushes through
With a hush
Damping the concrete canteen wall
Hour 10
@varenyas
I stand in the light of moonbeam
I slowly survey the dock
My gaze it turns into the fog
It sees the shadow of a concrete rock.
I take a sip of my coffee
From my battered, metal canteen
I stealthily move beneath a fir tree
To better hear what I think I’ve seen.
Hush! I tell the night sounds
So they don’t hide the noise
Of something crashing through the fir trees
Is it animal or is it boys?
I place my coffee on a shelf
Softly laughing at my fears
Because damn if that noise isn’t what I thought
But just a couple of deers.
Even fog
knows to hush and still
until coffee.
It waits yet,
‘til I’ve had my full
canteen fix.
Moonbeams stretch
to touch my cup-fall,
caffeine flood.
Fir above
moon-glow, dockside lake,
bean-brew love
Lyrical Toad wrote like a blues man, like the blues man he was… meter, rhyme, meter, rhyme… If you can’t dance the slow boogie woogie to the blues, it aint the blues. Years and years of his life… meter, rhyme, meter, rhyme. Caught in the spokes of conformity.
Then Toad, from his horsehair lily pad thought, what if I stopped writing for the dancers in my head, and wrote foe the music in my soul instead? What if I stopped obeying all those rules, and just let words fall out of me, any words, all of the words? And, Toad closed his eyes and let himself go, no rules, no rhyme…
and for the first time in his life, he wrote about the night sky without using the words moon or stars, he wrote about joy without using the word happy, he wrote about Sarah without using the word beautiful, because he didn’t have to. The words told his every feeling, his every unchained emotion. No line lengths, no counting, just paragraphs of truthful, free poetry…
and Kerouac smiled over his coffee cup from wherever he was in the Universe at that moment, looked over, and saw that Ginsburg was smiling, too.