Poem: 3 A.M.

By Jack Brummet

The house is still as a painted boat
On a painted sea,

Quiet as the pond
In Monet's Water Lilies,

And as dark
As Mephistopheles' rectum.
---o0o---

Poem: The Man In The Mirror

By Jack Brummet

There's a civil war in his head:
Lobe against lobe.
---o0o--- 

Poem: Mission Statement

By Jack Brummet

The Army has two duties—

Break things, and kill people; 

Everything else 

Is fluff and overhead.---o0o---

Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty in Wisconsin

By Jack Brummet

The wonderful signage of Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty.  This is one of my favorite Paul Bunyan monuments.  The restaurant has locations in both Wisconsin Dells and Minocqua. Wisconsin.

Paul Bunyan Restaurant – Wisconsin Dells
411 Hwy 13
Wisconsin Dells, WI  53965
608-254-8717

Paul Bunyan Restaurant – Minocqua

8653 Hwy 51 N.

Minocqua, WI  54548

715-356-6270

--o0o---

Poem: Limits

By Jack Brummet 

We like to believe
We can endure anything for five minutes.

But that theory—cooked up
In your hermetic study or bedroom—

Comes apart at the seams 
When you imagine being on fire,

Or having crows feast
Upon your eyes.
---o0o---

Poem: Gone Fishing

By Jack Brummet

As the forests swamps and bones

Turn slowly to coal
The last pterodactyl
Soars overhead
Calling for a friend.
     ---o0o---

Poem: Counter-insurgency

By Jack Brummet 


You think one thing,

Say another,
And do a third.
    ---o0o---

Faces No. 439: in the break room

By Jack Brummet

[24" x 24", ink on strange semi-opaque acrylic "cloth"]

 ---o0o---

Happy National Poetry Month - Robert Lowell's For The Union Dead

For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam." The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die-- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year-- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessèd break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease. ---o0o---

Faces No. 438 - Naked Paper Towel Guy

By Jack Brummet 

---o0o---

Happy National Poetry Month - The Snowman by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter 
To regard the frost and the boughs 
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

---o0o---

                                 

Poem: Growing Up

By Jack Brummet 

Growing Up

The 1950s were about
Giving ourselves The American Jitters:
The Day The Earth Stood Still, Huntley-Brinkley
The Thing, Ed Murrow, The Blob, Fidel
Godzilla, Senator Joe McCarthy, Gorgo.

Wild-eyed Nikita pounded his loafers on TV.
He promised to bury us.
The Cold War ignited on Ike's watch
As alarms shrieked duck and cover.
Dad was in the basement
Sandbagging the jam closet
And caching beans and gasoline.

We scared ourselves for good
And grew up to fear nothing but nothing itself.
                ---o0o---