Poem: Li Po In Disgrace

By Jack Brummet

Four hundred and forty-thousand

Moons ago, Li Po sits
Drinking wine on a bluff.

The Sun fades into blue mountains.
On the other side of the ball,
The sun scales the horizon.

Crickets tune up
And the first bats
Sail from roost to roost.

I think about Li Po drunk again
In the mountains, waiting for word
And listening to the wind songs.

Lost and alone,
He stares at the cup
And wonders when his pardon will come.

He holds a inkpot, scroll, and brush.
He listens to his skin fold
And his hair turn grey.

Between the mountains and stars,
A crow wheels over fogged red pines
Spiring in moonlight.

LiPo shakes wet peach blossoms
From his coat
And fills the cup.

Moonlight dances
On the golden wine
In the silver cup.

Who needs a clear head this night?
         ---o0o---

Poem: Bercilak de Hautdesert

By Jack Brummet

Grey light pools
On the floor in the distance.
A green knight walks toward you,

A battle-axe in one hand
And a branch of holly in the other.
Bercilak de Hautdesert asks if you want to play a game.

You take the axe and swing. The helmet flies off
And smashes against a stone wall.
The head tumbles down the hallway.

The Green Knight picks up the head
And tells you to meet him

At the Green Chapel New Year's morning

For his his exchange blow.
The Green Knight's head chuckles
In his arms as he slips away.
                ---o0o---

Poem: The Earth Is In Motion

By Jack Brummet

The mountain is the youngest child
Of heaven and earth,
Striving ever upward

And simultaneously tumbling down,
Like the five volcanoes
That surround me.
  ---o0o---

Poem: Sailing to Athens

By Jack Brummet

In a pale grey fog,
I see the ghosts

Of ancient Helleniki mariners
Sailing phantom steamships, sloops,

Prams, dories, catamarans, dinghies,
Trawlers, purse-seiners, frigates and tugboats

Across the cerulean blue sea,
Trawling for missing fish.
          ---o0o---

Poem: A flight of swallows

By Jack Brummet

A flight of swallows
Spins outside the window.

One by one,
The stars turn on

And the yellow sun
Transmogrifies to dusty rose

As it sinks
In its ebbing light.

The moon's in tune,
Stars turn on

And clouds drape
Across the sky.

In the web
Of the Milky Way, we careen

Through space, twirling on earth's axis,
Around the sun, and into the black.
           ---o0o---

Poem: Overlap

By Jack Brummet

We cover the earth

With Venn Diagrams

As our steps
Bisect old steps.
    ---o0o---

A poem by A.E. Housman

By Jack Brummet
















This is a favorite small poem by A.E. Housman that has always stuck with me. . .

“The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.”

- A.E. Housman

 ---o0o---

Del Brummet's spontaneous poem, from way back

In honor of our son Del's graduation tomorrow night, here is a movie of a spontaneous poem Del created when he was about six years old. . .
---o0o---

Poem: The Cover-up

The absence of facts
Further inflames
The conspiracy theory:

The missing facts
Point to the utter and diabolical
Efficacy of the cover-up.

---o0o---

Poem: I've Looked At Clouds From Six Sides Now

[Provisional? Maybe it is done. . .nor sure. . .sometimes means that if/when the real poem emerges, it may include only two lines or all of them, in some sort of subset or superset].

1
The Seattle skybox
Is defined by a thriving
Patchwork of clouds
That resort themselves
In the gathering winds
And rotation of the earth
Forming new collages
In the patterns overhead.

2
A mother-of-pearl moon
Unveils itself in the night sky
As the four winds
Weave tufts and strands of cloud
Around her like fig leaves
Revealing and concealing,
Draping the Sea of Tranquility
The Marias and the crater Tycho
In a cloak of modesty.

3.
250,000 miles below
Under murky clouds
The moon performs
A forbidden hootchie-kootchie dance,
Like Salome or a whirling Turkish Dervish
Spinning in the shifting clouds.

3.
Clouds add a necessary roundness
To our angular lives.
---o0o---

The Needle - a poem by Ken Kesey he claimed was Robert Service's

Cover of the last supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog - click to enlarge

Ken Kesey contributed this poem (among his other curious contributions) to The Last Whole Earth Catalog and supplement.

I read The Needle when it was first published, attributed to Robert Service. It was undoubtedly written by Ken Kesey (maybe in conjunction with Ken Babbs).


Ken Kesey, back then


The Needle
by "Robert Service" but probably by Ken Kesey

First, brothers and sisters and spirits of our sphere,
I wish to make one thing perfectly clear;
During these last ten turnings of a year
I have been
Jacked-up, jerked-off, brought down, strung-out,
And I've
Holed up, come on, cooled off and hung out,
And I've
Rushed and flashed and flushed and twitched
And I've
Sniveled and snorted and bellowed and bitched
And I've
Been spaced out atoms in the heartless void
And a slightly-plotted tightly-knotted paranoid,
I've watched friends grin goodby as I spiraled down the drain?
I've had doctors shake their fingers at the fungus on my brain;
And I have called, friends and doctors, oh I have roared out my soul
From the compass busting bottom of the false magnetic pole,
But it was a place beyond friends or medicine's reach--
A senseless 3-D cry from a binary breach--
And the heartless void can listen but doesn't seem to care
And my call was never answered until the needle turned to prayer.
---o0o---

Poem: The Velvet Glove

1.
With every hesitation,
Trouble widens.
The dragon is unleashed.

You won’t begin what needs to begin
Because you’re searching
For a sign.

2.
You move in the troops
And impose order
With a velvet glove.

3.
When the horse
And the wagon part,
Bloody tears will flow.
---o0o---

Poem: Snow Day In Kirkland, Washington

Silhouetted against blue bisque skies,
Crows bounce on snow-draped tree branches,

Shaking powder to the ground.
They survey the valley

For their prey, now in stark and dreaded relief
Against the glimmering white fields.
---o0o---

Sheer profundity from the poet E.A. Housman

This snippet is from a longer poem by the Victorian poet A.E. Housman, written in the 1890's. I've noticed this poem quoted a lot in various places in relation to our current economic woes.

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.
---o0o---

From Robo-poet: The Throbbing Vortex

Robo-poet is a cut-up style poetry generator (cut-ups are a form "popularized" by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin).

Clearly they structured this poetry generator around lines beginning with an adjective and noun, and ending with a verb paired with an -ly adverb. This might be OK for a couplet, but any longer generated poems end up seeming rote.

This poem would be better if you deleted all the line-ending adverbs (like most writing), and varied the adjective-noun constructions. However, as I dip into all the internet poetry generators, I do want to give you their flavor. Clearly, moving the verbs around in the sentence would also help.

Robo-poet uses a fairly interesting vocabulary, and you could, with some editing, create interesting poems from its output. Robot-poet would work better without such a fomulaic approach to the line.


aggressive street dies thinly
dingy corduroy sucks impersonally
soundless rider sullies unholily


broken dream capitulates bleakly
throbbing dream usurps perfunctorily
perfect rider nags dimly


vestigal life boils grimly
capricious dope crashes irritably
concrete nothing defies awfully


deliberate enticement sucks triumphantly
uniform body smotes awfully
traveled vortex capitulates dazzlingly


foul light concocts sleeplessly
stout enticement looks hysterically
throbbing vortex shrieks completely


undisciplined entry mars completely
baleful enticement envelops dimly
raveled vowel nourishes dryly
---o0o---

Poem: Holding together

Chart courtesy or NASA - click to enlarge

1
We could hold together,
Like the water
Covers this sweet green sphere,

And eventually become
A beige world of one purpose
On the road of love,

With no jihads or wars,
Klans or factions,
Bombs or bullets,

Corporations or landlords,
Parties or armies,
Walls or fences.

2
There is one ocean
With seven names
And into this ocean,

Sooner or later, flows
Every river, creek, and teardrop,
Every lake, bay, and lagoon.

Every spring and aquifer,
Every pond and swamp,
Every snowflake and mudpuddle.

But to coalesce people
You need a nucleus,
A leader

With greatness of spirit, love,
Consistency, and strength.
Let he or she who wishes to gather others

Under their wing ask themselves
If they are equal to the undertaking
When no natural laws create the union.

3
The door is locked.
You jiggle the knob.
The door eases open.

4
Water fills
The lacunae of the earth
And clings fast

In a way we can never
Cling to each other.
Water flows to join water

Because the laws of nature
Will not be broken.
Selah.
---o0o---

Poem: The Broken Chord (rewritten & reheated)

The rain falls
As you practice arpeggios

Running out shimmering notes
In an ever-shifting

Pattern of music sifting
Through the caesuras between the notes

Forming a counterpoint
With the drumming of the rain

Thousand of patterns and polyrhythms
Weave around and through other patterns

The rain chicanes in the wind
Breaking up and merging again

Billions of drops in midair

Bump together in a choreographed ballet

We can never reproduce
But that's nature for you

We sing paint and write the same story
Over and over and over again

And nature trumps us
With her singular snowflake.
---o0o---

Poem: How He Lived

If he steps back
The whole machine

Wheels past in a blur.
Some nights he jettisons

What is left of his soul
Out into the void

And it dogpaddles back.
He's been it for too many turns.
---000---

Poem: Stackabones

[I started this poem 21 years ago in Berkeley, California, the week before my daughter was born. I finished it tonight, in Irvine, California]


Stackabones

for Claire

"What is it?," you'll ask, and I'll hedge.
Things with no title aren't,

So make a name. Our dreams have no lexicon.
We'll look at wildflowers

In the chapparal and fill the silence
Around the blossoms with a name.

Waiting on you to be,
I try to remember not to forget.

In a dusty corner of my head
I've opened files with Websters of words,

Waiting on you to be.
We'll cover the earth with Venn Diagrams

Of our steps bisecting the old steps.
We'll breach the barricades

And walk circles from here to here.
The wheel itself rolls flat

And you can't slow it down;
With each spin of the ball it grows flatter,

But still rolls up and down the hill.
The list of whom the bucket was kicked by

Grows longer every day
And that bucket fills with tears.

Our job is to stay off that roster.
Back to the story.

God, gets the fire going
As She spins us back into the sun

To warm us up in the morning.
The sun didn't rise today,

But the sun doesn't rise.
The last cricket falls asleep,

And the birds begin their rounds.
Earth rolls over like a dog,

And the light
Floods in.
---o0o---

Poem: In California, I write down the names of every great tree name I can remember

Cedar, cypress, juniper mulberry, buckeye,
Gingko, hickory, ironwood, magnolia, persimmon,

Paw paw, pussy willow, sassafrass,
Sumac, tupelo, witchhazel, oak,

Alder, crabapple, devilwood, dogwood.
And they call me John.

Who do trees and meeting rooms
Get all the good names?
---o0o---