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 |   Poetry in April -- in celebration |
 This is my Second Book of poems. I may not have eaten the plums from the icebox, but I am guilty of writing poetry without thinking too much, without laboring over words and lines. This Is Just to Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold by William Carlos Williams You, too, forgive me for I only love the writing process; the result is secondary...And please never mind that I am also aping William Carlos Williams's false apology.    From where does the title Beetlebung and Kettlehorn come from? The name Beetlebung and Kettlehorn has to do with ancient whaling practices and Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. During the nineteenth century, because of its dense white wood, the tupelo tree was used in whale oil casks made of copper. Beetle was the mallet made from the Tupelo tree and bung was the stopper in the cask hole. In Martha’s vineyard, the Tupelo tree is still known as the Beetlebung tree, and at Chilmark there, is a Beetlebung Corner, with shops at Chilmark Center, from where roads lead to other interesting points. Kettlehorn, as well as being an ancient surname, refers to a piece of equipment resembling to but much bigger than a shoe-horn, used to stir the hot blubber and separate the fine oil from the denser particles. Whale oil was a popular commodity and, as a fuel, was used for lighting the dark, burning to provide heat and as an aid in cooking. After the whale was hunted, men in a boat cut strips of blubber from the whale's back, tied them together and rowed ashore. There the fat was cut into smaller pieces to be boiled into oil in large copper kettles. In addition there exists kettle corn in Cape Cod which are corn chips fried in kettles and sometimes mistakenly called kettlehorns. For some reason, way back when, the words Beetlebung and Kettlehorn were used together and, at one time or another, were given to shops and other things that go together as titles. I adopted the name for my on-the-spot poetry in reference to the idea of blubber. "Poetry the shortest distance between two humans" Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
Did you see our streets broken, daisies blotted out at storm-tortured riverbanks, and wild weeds that forgot to sprout inside cracks? And why do we give ourselves away in a reckless lunge by flinging missiles, bullets, ferocious words, practicing no thrift with venom? What a gift it would be to gain atomic vision to spot the bond between atoms, so we, too, could blend and cherish --my atoms, your atoms, our atoms, everyone’s atoms clinging together border to border in artistry-- to let the daisies grow where our children play! ==== Prompt: a superpower |
| I sing old songs when alone lyrics in broken parts my mouth a gate to this secret combining words bending them along the way in hieroglyphic code but the heart is what matters or so I surmise and though I’m winded on cue deep breath, I continue backwards and forwards, croaking in glottal fits, cappella jangles the pitch cracks scales jam tune blunders, until note after note, the solo dies and afterward, my jolly pulse beating double with no trouble I still feel the music in me ===== Prompt: A Secret Joy |
| First, let’s get this straight no way you are pets nor do I wish to hold you on my lap so hide your blighted brambles and better scour your faith off the shambles of my nerves. Crotchety if I am cantankerous and dour, sarcastic I won’t be even at billionaire novels with loose-shirt covers endlessly cycling about or the games my memory plays windows 10, Comcast’s fakes my joints that creak and stuff with a leak. You, as peeves, better believe anything that bugs me I hold to be your fault. and your constant persistence always charging back at me, historical though may be I, respectfully, boycott. ===== Prompt: a pet peeve (or several of them) |
| the common harvest the blood in my veins locked up in chains of chromosomes twisting in gilded silence and no equal on the throne, with infinite passion for life the gatherer of crops mourns with lordly pain, since in predicted conceit, I hand down my goods to my sons =========== Prompt: genetics, the gene, or a mutation |
| A new wrinkle in the clouds wind roars, trees shiver on the shadowed streets and torrents like regrets accost the pavements and the eddies of the rabid river rock the untethered boats while you explain to me, your voice revolving tirelessly in grief and pain as if a hurricane, you came to go away, your words more murderous than the tempest. === Prompt: extreme weather |
| In the bed and breakfast, at Monticello, where they say folks without forms glide down into guests’ rooms on the orders of great Duke Costello where things tune out of time, and the earth is but a stone with clouds electrified and lights go out at the faintest intercept, and present entangles with the past. While my room is still and armoire lifeless, night-table holds coins, keys, pearl earrings and window’s open, and an abalone moon casts glances at hazy kudzu on oak branches. Not to last but for a few brief seconds, love comes to me from an unexplored territory with Duke Costello, his long hair in curls, a high-waisted silhouette in breeches who scoops up my icy depths with a bow then vanishes shimmering into a universe boundless and multiform. Such grandeur, such nobility, only without a body or limbs. He is not my ephemeral invention for his essence is free from the defective clock of time, which goes berserk with a secret or two, and I, too, with a tangled verse wish to slip, longing, into his solitude. Now, you tell me, how else could I interpret this vision when the soft mattress under me creaked in the bed and breakfast, at Monticello, where they say folks without forms glide down into guests’ rooms? Note: My husband and I stayed for two weeks in 2009 in a haunted bed and breakfast in Monticello, Florida, not to mix up with Monticello, Virginia. Although I didn’t see or hear anything, I always felt the seclusion and the stillness of the place. I thought about that place, John Denham House, while having fun with this prompt. ==== Prompt: ghost, ghostly |
| I refuse to use a knife in Arizona in case, I point it by mistake to a prickly cactus with long thorns and sharp jabs under the demented sun. As I’m clumsy and imperfect and blur reality, I may veer off to illegality and cut down a cactus of green innocence. And the cops in the City of Surprise would hop to read my rights in minutes of reckoning with iron bars beckoning, That is why, in Arizona, I may hold on to a gun but refuse to use a knife. Note: It’s illegal to cut down a cactus in Arizona, and the City of Surprise: Police Department does exist. ------------ Prompt: Something illegal |
| tiny globe, with radius, a millimeter long sitting on a metal thorn to keep it from getting out of hand angels since middle ages* spinning magic under our skins have danced on it say scarlet gospels ** in sepia print yet, powerful, supernatural two-souled hellraiser, *** an iconic who pricks and whispers mantras for mental control then coming to a standstill it helps me secure heaped up silk for my niece’s gown urging me to see the angels’ mystery ========== * A religion question: How many angels can fit on the head of a pin? ** Scarlet Gospels: Clive Barker’s book, also a horror movie *** Hellraiser or Pinhead: horror movie character based on Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart ========== Prompt: poem based on a tiny object |
| alone though I never feel it for people I know stay safe in their cabins ocean curls around the hull while I lurk on deck holding my Kindle wood planks under my feet complicit in decline are rising and falling a treacherous predicament alone though I never feel it for people I know stay safe in their cabins in this maze dream of the wrong sort port side opens to a paradoxical lounge a labyrinth alit sits in the middle with crystal doors in Swarovski colors I get lost since I’ve dared to enter to find the art no one sees alone though I never feel it for people I know sleep safe in their cabins ============= Prompt: poem based on a dream |
| We run into each other at the town center, in front of Haberdashery and Hallmark. My breath draws clouds in the air as I stand on stilettos, lost in my shock and sorrow. Limp words, like drifting fall leaves, float down from your lips, cynically trying to resurrect our long-ago link in hesitant nostalgia capturing the vibes in my mood ring, now out of fashion. Yet, I know full well our only reference lives in photo albums of a failed past, perfectly incomplete. May I ask why you’ve now let your mangled phrases swoon over once-upon-a-time toxins, afflicting us both with grief? ========= Prompt:something unfinished |
| ENTER: everything fits on a dot in microcode on the motherboard where ROM rams the cards distorted by a hack or a virus, Heaven forbid, like the Ouroboros in binary infinity biting itself imaginary distances lines and colors, ghostlike mirage gnaws at my face no wonder I am spooked into a nightmare of crooning screens freezing in mid-notes as I strut through this strange land of illusions “Just why do I linger so much here, inside this machine?” ESC...SHUT DOWN ====== Prompt: any aspect or object of technology |
| my unfolding story in tomes cycles and recycles in trails of scrolls, proofs, signature, right hand raised, papers in order, classified, with no historical gap, yet, not set in stone for there exists so much more you don’t know about me like the harmonic pulsing of smooth surfaces, shadow garments, my soul wrapped in various silences, acts ritual or sacrificial or the skulls I’ve strung across my cross-grained landscape ====== Prompt: Documentation |
| Carp in front of you, Uncle, by a stream in my old world, the common carp danced urging you to lift the rod toward the gray sky wary of the Ides of March, the fish shuddered when held and stared, accusatory, while you took your time to unhook and toss into the torrent that carp, surviving luminous but useless and you turned to me with your eloquent smile as you showed without saying anything at all to throw away the unfeasible or the unforeseen, sudden pain, petty hurts, petty griefs thrashing like that fish. Note—My uncle used to take me fishing during my childhood. Prompt: carp or any kind of fish, fishing |
| Corrosion finds me easy reddish at the hinges blushing, humiliation, not that I am of iron nor am I full of pride, but why thoughts oxidize why word pipes freeze I cannot tell because cobwebs over unused doors block my view. Still, I admit for some slanted reason my devotion’s intact to my obstinate spine fractured yet mended strong, urging my hands to scrub away this rust as self-service before burning out and turning to dust. ====== Prompt: rust, or the color rust |
| At the corner of Orchard and Pulaski time struggles into its galoshes to splash in the rain, to hurry us along, and you, aping Gene Kelly, greet me gesturing wildly, arms legs akimbo, and sing as if all life were a musical while someone claps, pretend applause for the way you throw your head back and open your mouth wide to show your fillings testing the utter heroism of my decorum. Squirming, I flash you a soggy smile and, stepping in a puddle, reach for your hand, for I can only relate to what I know, how you once huddled and cried in your sleep to erase ancient scars from your dreams as nothing slips by when our fingers connect, and though we might boil over at different degrees, where I touch you, I am also touched. ----------------------- Prompt: an assignation/lovers’ tryst |
| You, the contrite one, dwell as a rock of refusal; yet, the requisite enterprise eventually consumes each business. On the counter, for your butchery, a stiffened mackerel with accusing eyes and your repulse for all things domestic, but you begin the boning cutting through your idiocracy. Was your fantasy cycle just a passing force? How did ancestral kitchen goddesses, craving sacrifices on their altar, triumph and why did you concede, wielding the knife? What purpose to your resolve, then? ================== prompt: an assignment or obligatory chore |
| With a hasty desire, yet frazzled, palms itching, you transplant your trickster boxes into trash in repeated dashes, boxes of wounds or peripheral magic flashing from edges of the past now bound with ruffled spirits. Silencing the rat that packed your clutter, you hold many a scream inside but, in disguise, let a smile stretch as goodbyes to your demons neatly in those boxes while the undertone of the mind whispers: “A slapdash life must tidy itself before its end.” ============ Prompt: a cardboard box or boxes |
| you sift through letters as if perfumes some delicately scented others with ugly odors hold-your-nose ugly making you rush away into sunlight to scrub and polish your alphabet such a tiny scrap of victory your luminous letters but you stretch and rise in their afterglow and the one on the cross holds open arms wanting to hug you with that T in thanks for your wits when you soar to someone’s smile ======================== Prompt: a letter |
| Around and around on the outdoor carpet cacophony flows off the vac while I, spooked by fatigue and dirt, lose gait of reason, all cogs whirling wild, loose hazardous, in the unhinged mind. Then, when I sink into a chaise lounge to catch the sun drooping fast flooding indigo with gold and rose, deepened clouds wrinkle and wink to remind me of gratitude that no one can hear my thoughts. ============== Prompt: the mundane and/or the sublime |
| no one makes knives better than the Japanese each perfectly balanced for a specific task like the nine-inch Yo-Deba, hidden in the knife kit in your closet bulky, top-heavy, bone-cutter to split joints, chop off heads grotesque, when you dissect our give-and-take to find my deformities severing the reason behind them ======================= Prompt: prove a claim or support an argument |
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