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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 |
| It wasn’t the clown his wild boa eyes without bottoms giggling kids, or noise-makers but the inner shape of me the human sponge lifting up fears and secrets when Mama stabbed her knife down to the hilt into white cake with hot-pink frosting the skin in her arms flapping back and forth tactfully veiling a venom in icy appraisal of my follies as if my wiring were faulty, somehow. ==================== prompt: a birthday party |
| You let your voice rise flaring wildly, museless no vision or destination except for convex mirrors of a past tilted, cracked, shattering into smaller and smaller sharp edges. Bleeding, you say half the lines in bits and pieces words land with thuds faces fall, and you whip around on challenged toes, leaving your shadow on stage like a hard-bitten bandit. ================= Prompt: an actor in small parts |
| The question mark still hangs over where the rapid current flows in strenuous calisthenics where you spread yourself too thin where the disconnected God kept His distance, and how I, the brute, drove past through it all unable to pull you back from the undertow. Time heals, but no, not the mother-tongue of pain not buried things, nor unthinkables, but this is my blood and the wound I don’t want healed is me. ================ Prompt: a suicide |
| How exquisite the way you arrange upward step by step your bones no skin, no flesh loading choice words hints, tête-à-tête probing innermost depths and in this staircase of awareness I clutch at your lines as if railing while remembering things I wanted to forget. ---------------------- Prompt: a staircase or elevator |
| you wake into life again for the freak shape-shifts to a full circle poking fun at rising chests since as a night predator it dwells in dark sentiment tinged with longing and urges your wet wounded eyes doomed to dust to wait their turn leaning over the edge like the halo of mist around its fullness ========================== Prompt: a phase of the moon |
“….blaspheme so loudly, And live for that honour, to stoop to thee now? O Delphic Apollo!” -- John Keats “O, Delphic Apollo!” no less vague than a moon mission you write off your debts using the plague as if pen and ink since fates humored us both, release me from these poetic chills with fire-fletched arrows or send me a symphony Berlioz-like, fantastic now, while I write between the lines seasons are merging in regret yet, for all the burns it causes the saffron sun still shines and, even at this late hour, you still inspire me to change my life. ================ Prompt: Apollo |
| alteration of routine tones power drifts, eddies of rage audacity rising like miasma world making demands time out of joint a marauder outmaneuvered welcoming the full moon better to howl out humiliation than shed tears alone in the dark night when you are overruled ======================== Prompt: wolf, wolves, or lupine |
| to fight old age, in juxtaposition between fresh and metallic a life pretty much sealed with the scent of an ancient ghost her color is turned as if an art made to crawl tight within, servile sniffed at, tasted through puckered lips served at an altered angle a bare-heart ladled in sauce like a story retold in plainer words not quite a carcass, but no worries since there are different ways of dying ==================== Prompt: anything in a can |
| I grin in pain as wiring’s askew if I only knew how to fix all electronic circuits, or to mold and shape the mental clay, clean the rust amassing in my insides… Since I’m a futuristic feat, precision programmed, drawn in perspective, why can’t I cry the human tears fear the fears, taste their wine? Why do I have nothing subjective a wish to fly, a love to seek, a dread of death? A system failure, is it? At least, while my focus slips, don’t turn me off until I find out how to dream. ============================= Prompt: uncanny valley (Google it!) (and/or interpret phrase any way you want!) |
| right out of the cocoon, a metamorphosis tucked in your loft pesky winds, softened sorrows, redundant jaunts, chain-reactions you flow without knowing if predestined or not, but the seed’s sown as a slap in your face, a spiral in viral marketing you press the hidden button in the mind, but dams trap rivers searching for escape routes you wonder which hits the hardest: traffic, Judases on the way, a dead infant, the sick child, or your rage crushing the dam yet, at journey’s end, all shall drift away like bubbles of soap in fragments of a dream to vanish on waking in your empty bed ====================== Prompt: Journey |
| It is a way you see yourself with just the crick in your knee when you step on the accelerator to speed up your life, but you forget a fact: one of your wheels is missing. ====================== Prompt: car, truck, or other vehicle |
Bird feeder in the next yard swings empty with the wind. New people, young and rowdy, false airs and fire in the core, summon a storm of internal complaints, but I transmute what I hear. Nothing sinister in this life's haunting, changing patterns. David, the World War II vet, last Christmas Eve, handed me a bear, and not to be outdone, his wife Dot endorsed by her inimitable O.C.D rearranged my kitchen drawers. Nothing sinister in this life's haunting, changing patterns. The stuffing is falling out of the bear now, and in my kitchen, I can't ever find anything, but chiefly, I can't stand to see the feeder empty, spooked by the missing birds. ---------------------------- Prompt: neighbor |
| quack scientist with snaggle-teeth smile bounces back twice topples to the carpet torso, legs twitching while getting whacked by nerdy analyst droplets drifting in currents swirling, thick temple, neck and back covered wet your chest heaves struggling for air stirred with the silt of guilt for such nutty reaction gulping a ragged breath you blink the eyes at the locked visuals on your surface mind and the corpse stares back silent from the TV screen ============== Prompt: sweat |
| Jagged, crooked, one-inch long an old rusty snuggles into a blanket drained of color looping loosely around the flagstone path. From her looks, to demystify, did the nail ever have a life? Possibly yes, while bright, coquettish holding things together, with success to be hers if she wished. Soon, a slow wind wheezes through the trees with a sigh, and white flakes--silent, proud in series of freeze frames-- shroud her in reply. --------------------- Prompt: snow |
| Since I am so deeply inspired by our politics... never mind the elderly the work-weary, child, adult swipe at those buzzing about your head, root for the savage cult perform a first-class haunting with shrouded power at heart whip through the masses and crawl around your enemies in wealth of stealth like kudzu dirty fighting is all there is against saucer-eyed bastards so you outlive the beasts this is no vice take Hunger Games' advice "Stay Alive!" ====================== Prompt: give some advice |
| “Why are you here?” asks the nurse in cardio “for Echo,” you say, handing in your papers. She nods and shows you in. Why so easy? Why so biocentric? Consider everything concentric spiraling up and beneath the vault of bone over your brain, entire creation, earthly events, space, time, quantum physics… Just a tiny spectrum of possibilities. Why are you here? Observer, actor, co-creator? And what’s under your mission statement? Looking in the wrong world, maybe? Why are you born if to be torn asunder? The answer could be Pandora’s box, but dare you unlock? Or possibly it might be way deep in a cavern hidden inside your humanity to be opened with the right touch, empathy, or gravity pre-existing grace or not through a redirection of vision, you echo that hardest question with the biggest payoff: “Why am I here?” ================= Prompt: pose a question |
| She lands like a slender thespian in mid-passion of a miracle play on top of the milk thistle, clapping blue ribbon wings her large eyes taking in the scene How focused, how clear she is in self-assertion, desire, living life as herself without wondering what she wants… As the setting April sun pulls down the curtain on the day, unlike the damselfly, my question still is after so many years, “What do I want?” =========================== Prompt: a blue ribbon |
| An overgrown weed clinging to the driveway, a living thing. I pull it out feeling its hurt. Granted, the comparison is remote, but what good is a festering wound or a pre-cancerous mole left alive? Still, why does my touch leave a bite mark, and why did I, in my extreme matriarchy, not trust anything foreign on my children’s path? ========== Prompt: A Regret |
| Live bait on the hook line sinks, lure dissents wriggling, writhing time a toxin misfortune tempts tragedy eat to be eaten, brutal, vicious like Jalapeno peppers in fragments or horseradish attacking eyes staying in sinuses for days I think I’ll swear off lunch =============== prompt: bitterness |
| In euphoria, as the only pseudo-spiritual practicing silence, you sit undisturbed amid pristine breezes and starlight, in no-man’s land, among a group of reveler friends whose joy you trust will rust with time for pleasure is a fleeting thing; yet, a mind is what you have to offer, neither wild nor alien, in hodge-podge speculation, so you judge as you ought, through spines and angles of thought, in stealth and solitude since nothing can disrupt your stillness, not even the hooting of an owl, haunted and gloomy, his grim presence looming as the secondary wilderness. A swift breath at your neck, someone flippant, for sure, to stir you up, so you stretch your arm, touching coarse fur, and forgetting silence, you scream fearing, in this jungle’s clearing, a mangled hand, a bear’s chewing, but it is just your friend’s mutt. ================== Prompt: the unexpected |
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