-This week we entered 3 new poems from Jimmy into a local DC literary contest. I tried to attach a beautiful photo of Jimmie typing his poems literally from scraps of paper & napkins onto this blog, but technology?! prevented me for showing you the pix.....(perhaps later)
-So here are 3 freshly baked poems for your diet.
-Eat slowly and digest entirely.
nathanc
1. Reparation Song
(in the Marlywinds surrounding le tombeau of Langston Hughes)
You wronged me now; did it again
Back in 1910. Promised a path
the deliquescence, then and again,
in 1810. And in 1911 sheltered me
from the tree of knowledge; I built
a hi-road for you, high up among the ash
and fir trees, where snakes and smokes and spiders
made their homes. My fear, I
got over it. So rivers
of gold
and rivers of silver flowed like honey
among the promist redemptions, for songs
I have yet to commit. Under
the tree of knowledge. Two sisters sat:
the check clicked on the clock. What
brothers I have who are still not dead yet,
the unincarcerated mellow like tobacco leaf
in prison. All that’s left is to languish, Lang.
Prepositorily all that’s left is the song.
You tell me and I’ll sing it.
2. Highway Song
Dodgson sang
to a Spanish guitar
and a Brazilian beat
The Church is always the Enemy of the State.
Gershwin sang
to a French guitar
with a Calypso beat.
The Church is always the Enemy of the State.
Nevada sang
I mean Neruda
he hasn’t stopped singing yet
Away he ran
he hasn’t stopped running yet.
3. On Looking into the Eight Ball
It’s not an odd thing, not odd at all;
even, in fact, if you’re thinking about the eight-ball:
in whose sacred precincts all futures revolve. Mine,
it says, may not be so sunny after all:
“Thou liest,” sez I, for I’ve been deep and long asleep
in the life of Shakespeare’s favorite creep:
Richard III. Also Poe,
who destabilized literature
(the world was his winter, the world his discontent)
penned like a lotion
to the ears of devotion
poison, his poison in the porches of mine ears.
Shall I worship,
like baudelaire on reading poe?
I think so;
stain’s darker half.
But this modern oracle
holy eight-ball, like a Shakespeare fool
full of holy fire
vessel which Richard read at Ganymede
pulls up better lives than egg’s albumen;
“you’ll never do it!”
“Thou liest,” quoth I, in echoes of the hubraical lament
down the dark and endless centuries.
