Have You Seen This Man?

Last seen in the early 1970s in Seattle, Washington wearing his prophetic Bin Laden disguise. As evidenced by the blue button on the lapel of his flamboyant, red revolutionary shirt, fervent McGovern backer during the 1972 Presidential Elections won in a landslide by Tricky Dicker-Boom Nixon. Left the US in late 1972, deeply disillusioned by Reader’s Digest and no longer able to stomach the likes of that other crook, Spiro Anagnostopoulos aka Agnew, whose frenzied vocabulary was famous for alliterative phrases that sent the hair of effete, hirsute, intellectual snobs into frazzled curlicues.

Any information leading to the arrest of this dangerous malfeasant will be held in the strictest confidence and the rat rewarded with enough blue cheese to keep him/her over the moon until it turns into mozzarella.

First Things First

In poetry one should not wait
Until one knows what one believes.
--Carl Rakosi

1.

If one does not, one will not
Know where to begin.

2.

Any questions?

3.

If not, you may proceed.

Word of Mouth

Imaginary burning
Words of moth

In flame, spreading
Like wildfire,

Never again.

(from Triptych, Kater Murr's Press, 2005)

Frank Farewell

Aye,

Blunt you were indeed—
In the blink of an eye,

A blade-wielding tongue
That cut deep, a rogue

In dire straits we
So sorely needed.

"The Squint-eyed Kid" Up to His Ears in It

In this, the latest chapter of the Kid's continuing saga, we find him in the guise of Icarus Falling, as he forgets to remember a poem by Robert Creeley on a bridge over troubled waters; though it's a rewritten rerun, it's well worth another read, just to remind us that poetry, booze and speed do not mix well with nightingales.

Divine Accommodation

God has a heart so big it holds
Everything he’s taken away.

Definitely Not Lemmings #20

It's a pleasure to welcome one of my former English students as DNL #20; Vicky is currently studying Journalism at Panteio University, Athens.

Old Woman Bearing Flowers

Black-clad,

White-haired octogenarian
Has just picked some

Purple lilac
And one red

Rose from the road-
Side a goodly way

Distant and is now
Bringing them back

Home to where
Who knows what

Memories await her.

Sweet Smell of Success

My, isn’t it pretty to think that

The stench men have made of
The world will one day

Dissipate and disappear,
And leave us smelling

Like a rose.

A Goner's Doggerel

Doggone it Doomsday,
I told you he was one

Poetic son of a bitch
Doomed to go all the way

Entombed in the worse of verse
To his dying day.

It Stands to Reason

Just as that fledgling starts
To leave, its branch begins

An imperceptible trembling.

Vagrancies

A bed

Of crimson mushrooms
In the forest

.

In the clearing, a sea
Of blue anemones

.

In the wind, a gleaming copper

.

Penny for your thoughts.

Stalker

Coming

Alive or dying, we sensed nothing
But the haunting thought that told us

Something was wanting.

Making It Anew

--after Ezra Pound

At sunset,
Confucius say

Nothing new
Under the sun

But old lunatic moon
Set in way.

The Further Adventures of the Squint-eyed Kid

In this chapter, we discover The Kid and
his accomplice holed up in a "howling wilderness", picking off clunkers left and right.

Defying the Laws of Gravity

Easter Sunday 2010 at "The Milk and Honey House"

Yours truly looking as if he's getting ready to fall flat on his back during a dizzying, whirling dervish zeibekiko. A bit before this photo was taken, our party was pleasantly invaded by a trio of itinerant Rom musicians whose lively music entertained us until they had had enough food and wine (plus the obligatory "tip") to spirit them away to their next stop. Opa, manges!

This next photo I have aptly and lovingly captioned “Invoking My Muse”— Eleni demonstrating that some women are equal to men when it comes to dancing the zeibekiko, though some rebetika purists disagree, and insist that the zeibekiko was and should remain a dance performed only by men and by only one man at a time at that.

Barque

Once in

Drifting out, there comes
A point where you can’t see

The sunken forest
For the sea of trees.

The It Theorem

Learning to live with it,

Where it is an axiom in-
Dispensable as

The life that lives it,
Proves it.

Definitely Not Lemmings #19

My thanks to Momo Luna, an exceptionally gifted artist from Arnhem, Holland for hopping on board the DNL Locomotive.

Honest Injun Meets Manifest Destiny

No snake oil salesman and still
Wet behind the ears, he was strung up
 

Like pemmican, while forked 

Tongues licked him

Year after year.

 

 

Bookmark, Selected Poems, William Carlos Williams

From dry fragile still
fragrant yellow-

green stalks & leaves placed
between the descent

of winter & the locust tree
in flower stems

the scent of spring.


NB: Just got word that this little poem has been selected for the anthology Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams to be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. Good news received on this sunny spring Monday after Easter Sunday celebrated with a large gathering of friends at our "Milk and Honey" house.*

*So named by us because Meligalas means meli(honey) and gala(milk).

Against All Odds

Of that most distant

Possibility even—
That one left

To fend for oneself
With nothing

To the nth power
Will go to any lengths

To find even that.

Loss

Knowledge is understanding how
Each word traces its own

Means of leaving.