Just a few days in and it already feels like the world around us is pretty heavy. At times like these, it often helps that we have limericks to keep it light and make us laugh.
There once was a president named Trumpet who liked to have pee with his strumpets. He would set down a cup,
ask Russian harlots to fill it up,
then lean his hair down and dunk it!
For the first 100 days of the Trumpet administration, this blog will feature a new poem of protest, by my own hand and by others. They will be polished gems, or rough cut drafts of rage, or in process pieces searching for peace. They may be haiku or tanka, limericks or lyrics, verses free or fettered. If you would like to submit to this endeavor, please send an email, with poem saved as a word document (.docx) to waxyandpoetic AT gmail DOT com. All rights remain with the author. Please address any formatting preferences in your email. I will post submissions time permitting, with at least one per day. Editing will be limited to obvious errors of spelling and the like.
Read, follow, share, re-tweet, submit, live, love, spread light! Don’t forget to use #100Days100Poems !
For the first 100 days of the Trumpet administration, this blog will feature a new poem of protest, by my own hand and by others. They will be polished gems, or rough cut drafts of rage, or in process pieces searching for peace. They may be haiku or tanka, limericks or lyrics, verses free or fettered. If you would like to submit to this endeavor, please send an email, with poem saved as a word document (.docx) to waxyandpoetic AT gmail DOT com. All rights remain with the author. Please address any formatting preferences in your email. I will post submissions time permitting, with at least one per day. Editing will be limited to obvious errors of spelling and the like.
Read, follow, share, submit, live, love, spread light! Don’t forget to use #100Days100Poems !
Today’s poem comes to us from Catherine Harren Barufaldi. An untitled haiku, its brevity does nothing to diminish its power, or the stark contrast it makes against what we’re fighting.
Mine will be just fine, he said. Not enough for me Since they are all mine.
Author: Catherine Harren Barufaldi. All rights reserved.
*****
For the first 100 days of the Trumpet administration, this blog will feature a new poem of protest, by my own hand and by others. They will be polished gems, or rough cut drafts of rage, or in process pieces searching for peace. They may be haiku or tanka, limericks or lyrics, verses free or fettered. If you would like to submit to this endeavor, please send an email, with poem saved as a word document (.docx) to waxyandpoetic AT gmail DOT com. All rights remain with the author. Please address any formatting preferences in your email. I will post submissions time permitting, with at least one per day. Editing will be limited to obvious errors of spelling and the like.
Read, follow, share, submit, live, love, spread light! Don’t forget to use #100Days100Poems !
The Guggenheim Museum here in New York City recently closed a wonderful retrospective of the Swiss artist duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. For those unfamiliar with their work (as I was), I suggest reading this from one of the Gallery Guides who posted on the Guggenheim Museum’s blog. Explore the site further to learn more about the exhibit.
One of the things that struck me about the retrospective was the infectious sense of play that clung to the works and also influenced museum goers of all ages. You could hear laughter and sighs of contentment, bursts of Aha! as jokes or visual puns sunk in; the entire space was filled with the buzz of people not just talking and reacting to the art, but feeding off its energy and fun. I’m currently working on a poem that more directly deals with the themes of Suddenly This Overview and some of the popular opposites that emerge there. But this present blog post comes inspired by a completely different piece in the exhibit, the Large Question Pot (1984), an enormous painted polyurethane and cloth vessel, filled with dozens upon dozens of questions on the inner wall, written in German in various colors.
In keeping with the theme of play (and, in some cases, the juxtapositions found in popular opposites), I wrote answers to some selected questions that the curators translated for the exhibit. These answers, at times short poems, or even poetic bits, or simply sharp responses, were written in quick bursts, as the muse struck, with no rhyme or reason necessarily to unite them, other than the poetic exercise itself. At some point I’d like to find translations of all the queries inside Large Question Pot (my German being, well, non-existent), to continue exploring what Fischli and Weiss bring out of me with their work. Until then, you’ll need to be content with these selections.
"Midnight" Plays mid-night in the Middle of the Cacophony of a Bar I Frequentfor Tommy
So it was late one night in a sports bar &
restaurant, the kind where the TVs are shiny black &
hi-def & numerous, hanging on walls like finished
framed tableaux in an artist’s studio, displayed
for the visiting curator who may or may not buy any of these
finished pieces, but they’re showing all the highlights of our modern-
day mass entertainments with the red & white team
gunning past the blue- & white-striped lads playing the foot
ball you play with your feet & another screen
with the blue & red guys smashing the black &
silver fellows while they battle for the football you handle
with your hands & on another screen the orange ball is stuffed in a hoop
& on another the stick hits the white ball & you can almost
hear on another screen the grunts & racket of shuffling ladies from one
side of the clay court to the other & there’s
no sound from any of these screens, the aforementioned
sports bar opting to pump popular hits through the speakers
& I’m sitting there, flanked by friends,
fringed by friends of those friends & on the speakers
I hear A Tribe Called Quest’s “Midnight” & everything
around me stops & I’m suddenly whisked back over 20 years
to that night in my car where the CD player kept
playing track after track on that album & our heads
were nodding in unison & in synch we both bust out with
"Intensity, most rappers don’t see it / Spirit wise,
musically you gotta be it!" & I reach to turn down the volume
& we both look at each other to agree that even then we
felt a crisis in hip hop coming on & that our favorite
emcees & DJs weren’t getting the attention & accolades
they deserved because lesser cats with weaker raps were easier to play
on the radio & thank goodness we could hit the
track back button & hear “Midnight” again or turn
to “Award Tour” as an apt send off as we leave the parking lot
behind the theatre & turn north to take you
home.
& it’s late in this sports bar & I think
how long you’ve been gone & I try to remember our
last conversation as I replay in my mind the montage
sequence of how we lost touch after leaving junior college
& phone calls every couple of months changed to a couple
calls a year & how we used to see each
other every day & had lunch together often &
how we used to play the dozens between classes &
before rehearsals & never worrying for one second that
your your momma jokes or my momma jokes would cut
to the quick & I think now that subconsciously
I carry on these quick quips with my sister & friends &
co-workers in a nod to your absence though no one
ever has the comebacks you did & some lack the good sense to
remember it’s all in jest & just as “Midnight” starts
its second verse here in this sports bar with the blonde bombshell bartender
whose bright white smile reminds me of yours I think about
how great it’d be for you to be in the chair beside me
egging me on to flirt with said bartender inflating the
courage & the ego in me the way my tall beer wouldn’t &
I wonder if you’d be surprised at the intro-
vert I’ve become & my tendency to sit quietly &
observe & be Q-tip’s nocturnal animal & I think if
you were here we’d think about putting some poetry to a
beat & then I remember that time listening to
Guru rap about it being “Mostly Tha Voice” & you looking at
me to say I had the voice & laughing & pumping
your fist before giving me a high five & that night is on
my mind, the night is on my mind, the sun’ll still
shine.
& I remember I’m stuck in this sports bar late
on a Sunday night & I’m two beers & two shots in, but
no one knows I’m back in that godforsaken East Texas
city pulling my own CL Smooth reminiscing over you because
A Tribe Called Quest called you back from
the past & here I am in that sports bar thinking
how Boyz II Men told us how hard it would be
& how hard it is now to think that I never
really told you & despite all these TVs &
the eye-catching blonde pouring another pint, the night
makes the aura, the sports bar the soundtrack & outside
the way the moon dangles in the midnight sky
and the stars dance around, hey yo I think it’s fly
& I think the memory has that intensity, & I nod my head, still
in unison to yours, thinking you’ll see it,
knowing you’ll see it, & then I slow down as
the song fades into some more current obnoxious hit
and that night's on my mind
the sun will still shine
but that night's on my mind
& you still shine
and that night is on my mind
the night is on my mind
the night
This poem contains a line, and plays with other lines, from the song "Midnight" by
A Tribe Called Quest.
crise always never knowing d’identité mirrors remain unhelpful crise photos only archival de conscience i’ve only ever known what i used to be, visions of what i will become crise what i am remains the (in)variable unknown d’identité reflection always foreign, a stranger—the ‘Hello my name is…’ forever blank; i have at various times played the Black Widow Gambit, relying on who i was with Her and without; and Her always either just leaving or just arriving; stay, it seems, only applied to my execution crise it is up for debate whether the scars make part of who i am or vice-versa d’identité i’ve grown accustomed to not knowing my own name, moments where i do not respond to … one time, after several drinks, i thought i met the man in the mirror—having passed out soon after, i forgot to ask his name crise i’ve carried around this cahier, grateful it’s never been lost (no one would know to whom it should be returned); every word written with my right hand, but i can only tell you what the left looks like d’indentité i remember very well what they both have caressed, including my own abandoned form; no book i’ve ever owned has been inscribed; bills addressed to resident; despite regular prompt payments to the phone company, i’ve never heard it ring; it seems long ago i should have ceased posing the question, content with shadows, one-handed scribblings, unaddressed whispers, blank sheets, one hand, empty sheets… i’ve too often heard ‘Good bye.’ i’m holding out for just one ‘Good night ______’; just one.
II. Obituary
The Greeks did not write obituaries; after a man died they only asked one question: Did he have passion?
—Dean to Jonathan in “Serendipity”
DS, sometime poet, sometime friend, died last night due to complications under as yet misunderstood circumstances. At this time, it is only confirmed that he died by his own hand. His final days are a mystery, though it seems that pieces of his life remain less so. It is certain that he loved, evidenced by the scarring of three vaguely female forms etched just below the skin on the left side of his chest. The women of his life were always either just leaving or just arriving (why wouldn’t they stay?)—reflections in his eyes and nothing more. His struggle was complicated by the fact that he defined himself by what he used to be or what he would become; his inability to ever know who he was proved debilitating. . He was found with an un-dog-eared copy of Endless Life, a small black cahier and a fountain pen, from which the ink would fall onto paper then leap onto loose lips, and from loose lips, ink spatter, sprayed as much as said, would fall onto deaf ears and into mute eyes; we can say with confidence that too few understood. His teeth were stained Bordeaux, he smelled of sage flower and vanilla. Ink had shaded portions of his right hand and the tip of his left index finger. His eyes were open. The room echoed with a sax and trumpet, a wine glass shatter. Nearby, next to the drunken shards, a map, several roads marked “Too few, too few.” He is survived by a few poems, some scattered, some tattered; by innumerous filled and dusty bookshelves; by the words bouleversant and authentic; by manuscripts long unopened. Services have not yet been arranged, though it is thought that he only wanted one question to be asked by mourners, and if the answer should prove to be no, that he be buried without…
Waxy & Poetic 