Lament of the Obese Wraith

Now that I'm dead I need more exercise.
Death strips you thin, they say, but they're dead wrong.
I roam back alleys, heavy with regret.

In my day men loved my supple lies,
my breasts like loaves of bread, my promises.
Wise men thought twice and gave me up for Lent.

Now I buckle sidewalks with my thighs,
trigger earthquakes, stagger like Queen Kong,
half her height and twice as corpulent.

An irate priest once tried to exorcise
my bloated presence from his parish yard.
I stuck in his gate 'til winter was half spent.

Greed transcends the grave, entices flies,
distends the ego, basks in disregard.
I haunt dark corridors, fat and out of breath.

Frieze in time

Frieze in time

Ah to smell the white sweet pea blossoms
in the cradle of civilization
rocked by the poetry of Hafiz.

& to wish on Delta trucks of hay
as they zoom through fields of tomato lies
on the 70 mph asphalt
as “heart of stone” plays bye byes.

& to seize the moment christ breathed his last
as you google the five greatest metaphors of all time
starting with “the right people on the bus”
that even the Sufis
do not frieze
in rhyme.

Green Haired Surfer (Catawamp)

Everything changed yesterday when I saw the surfer
Even keel on a hill with slope:
vibrant, bleached, soft green tresses

like kelp beds of meadow drawn
down the back ditch in wild array. She loped
on wheels, serene blesser.

The ocean of rasta moss was drawn
back loosely, her uphill float
an effortless glide the earth caresses.

Inspired, I imagined quitting, becoming an ocean outlaw
to flow through smooth terrains and sprout
locks like wildernesses.

My revery of soft foam crashes
against the tunnel of day job cloak.
I ponder a green freedom that reality distresses.

Peerless, ample surrender, undulant flashes
beckon as the mountain of suits gropes
for my throat. Only the growing earth gets me out of these messes.

Is it the ocean color or the serene stashes --
equilibrium of butte -- that in my heart stokes
what verdure expresses?

Everything changed yesterday when I saw
the green haired surfer. A moment became arctic, frozen,
in embodied growth. What senses

will that tidal rift awaken, gnashed
by the gravity well of two sheering continents, space stolen
from time, what bright, grass-colored lenses?

Or new eyes even? A waterworld mashes
in the orb of one eye-terrarium saved
by a momentary green-haired rider - I'll never know her name, what sends

her out on Friday night twilight, this merwoman who washes
across my awareness, the quake
of gentle green she condenses.

(If a song, the refrain...*)
Even suited, I will be this surfer. Dashing,
verdant Medusa uprising, like new continents shaking,
a mesmerizing body of peace.

6/11/11

* Note: Little sound file of the refrain...Newb at Garage Band, have to wait for it to start...

untitled (about what)

I’d like to welcome all things without names.
Not almond slivers, spring fever or motherboards.
Not baby’s breath, embouchure, heliofranticulating or stein lids.

But this poem isn’t a muster roll call, award pageant or paean.
It’s an open field of summer that barely contains its own accord.
It’s something like the unnamed soul of a fictive goat kid.

I want to invite not those things either but my own mind to the game
of conceiving what things might fall through a sky-lintelled undoor.
Try to describe in a teenager’s vocabulary the face of God.

Does everything called a dandelion look the same?
Please don’t label the line between the winter tree and the apple core.
The phenomena of names is only a grown-up cloud

that has insertions where some other welcome waterflame
verbing unaboutly holidays its last shardcords
(of deselected ancientless pluribus-tethered kiteydids).

untitled (adjustment)

After last Sunday’s memorial ritual,
only dance could release the enzymes
that turn grief into a citrusy meringue.

And 12 hours after that trance, my muscles
seized on the stillness of aftertimes,
stalwart through pain’s harangue.

This creaky morning I guessed 1997, fall,
as the time Zeda, my grandpa, lay supine,
his soles and my belly conversing in a language

invented mythic eras past. Breema, it’s called.
My wife-to-be demonstrated its inclines.
Zeda and I: a waterwheel in the Yangtze.

For 80 years, no message befell Zeda Paul,
but his body opened, proving simplicity sublime.
His form, the cello, and mine, the bow, sang.

Now with all those calendar grid lines fallen
and rigor mortifying the tissue that grips my spine,
Juliet’s dead mother and Zeda met in a tango,

came down in the veil at dawn’s inkling of pall.
Zeda bent to heal me, sighing a sign.
My vertebrae tapped a tambourine.

His presence tick-tocked craniosacral
equilibrium into my body as I slept in timeless
proximity to the true truth about the great ring.

Catawamp Form: Healing Poem

The body heals by degrees,
by flashing sunwise whorls and spirals.
The ocean of blood beats pulses of mending.

Tissue bridges are architect's decrees
with big bang energy in building gyres
as life rafts between catastrophe's sending.

Using tears what healing weaves;
can we stop the universe's fire?
Water's warmth carries originary blessing.

My shoulder is an ancient monument built by thieves.
They stole the night stars in choirs
by flood tide's rending.

My rotating sinew is cantilevered greed,
arc of galaxy arm collapsed to grasping desire
to hold canteloupe while bending.

Healing redraws creation's grief.
While throwing stars and eating constellations' flare
We receive the balm of forgiveness' tending.

It heals because of blueprints we retrieve
from ancient libraries carried in stars within DNA's lair,
where we read of matter's branching.

We heal because we remember and believe.
We take the galactic dare
to incarnate as water blossoms, dancing.

Prompt: Catawamp Poem Form and/or the concept of "Catawampus"

Here's a new poem form that came to me this morning. It's called a Catawamp.

A catawamp is a multiple-stanza poem. Each stanza has unique rhyme endings, let's call them A, B, and C (or it could also be A, B, C, and D), which appear in cascading sequence in each stanza. Each rhyme family, A, B, etc. has its own metaphor or body of metaphors it draws from that inform the content of each line A, B, C. No syllable constraints. The Catawamp is about change. It has a transformation point, or describes, within the often contrasting or elemental bodies of metaphors, a transformation. Often the rhyme scheme somewhat changes during or after the transformation in the poem to signify the transformation. (I'll respond with an example to make it easier to understand). Please write a Catawamp or otherwise frolic with the concept of mountain lions, wild animals, or things askew, as the term itself "catawampus" conveys...

Here's how Leif in Washington describes the meaning of catawampus, in case you'd either use the word itself as a prompt, or just because it's interesting to learn new things:

A "catawampus" can be a fierce, imaginary animal, the sort of vicious critter that jumps you in the woods shortly before you're never seen again. But "catawampus" can also mean "askew" or "out of whack," as in "Larry's elopement with Eloise knocked Cindy's wedding plans all catawampus." Neither meaning can be definitively traced, but "catawampus" in the eat-you-alive sense may well be a variant on the American folk term "catamount," short for "catamountain," or mountain lion.

The "askew" sense of "catawampus" is a real puzzler. The first element of the word, "cata," may be related to "cater," also found in the related word "catercorner" (or, as many folks know it, "cattycorner" or "kittycorner"). "Cater" in these words comes from the French "quatre," or "four," and "catercornered" originally just meant "four-cornered." Today "catercorner" means that two things are diagonally across from each other. The "wampus" part may have come from the Scots word "wampish," meaning "to wriggle or twist," which would certainly seem to fit with "catawampus" meaning "askew" or "crooked."

Prompt tags: poem, catawamp, [poet's moniker]

Picture Credit: Lion Cub by Beverly Joubert