Yesterday,
During Friday prayers,
A bomb killed twenty-six
Worshippers—
This time Sunnis
Killed by Shiites.

Just one year ago,
Twelve pleasure seeking folks
Watching a movie
Were shot dead,
And seventy more wounded
By a nut with a gun—
The anniversary marked
By nasty demonstrations
For and against
Guns for nuts.

As I passed our garden fence
I saw a Monarch butterfly
Bouncing about,
And a busy hummingbird
Feeding at the complex purple bloom
Flaunted by a Lily-of-the-Nile.

I cannot find the words.
(7/20/13)

Well known unwritten protocols insist

On generosity, however mild.

One never growls “Dear friend, please, please desist!

Your hapless, somber verse leaves art defiled.”

The editors (kind, always) never say:

“Your poems just stink—please, please why don’t you quit?

Your fumbling words convey an ass’s bray.”

Their rejects purr “Quite nice, but don’t quite fit.”

My wincing friends respond “My fav’rite lines

Are E and F”—they never say “You bore.”

And recently, one editor opined,

“Two of your verses really struck a chord.”

Which chord? A flared C major CRESCENDO,

Or B flat minor diminuendo?

(6/3/13)

Percussion sometimes takes a softer tone
When ancient joints emit their creaks and thuds.
Though nothing dominates digestive moans
So much as belches, burps performed in floods.

Recently, seared scallops or ancient fish
Broadcast some strange and horrid music noise—
All night long incessant rumbles, ghoulish,
Gurgled, thundered—conveyed no lyric joy.

My ER doctor knew that symptom’s name—
The medic’s term for ugly gastric flames—
Loud and terrifying gut enigmas?
Offbeat peristaltic borborygmus!
(4/30/13)

What, one reasonably asks, are poems for?
The answer’s not so simple. They must bloom
With color, fragrance, substance at the core—
With words that swim, reverberate, and croon.

Those words must dance, duel, parry, stroke your mind,
Inflame your latent senses, all of them—
Provoke your spirit, forcing you to find
The stuff to love, the evil to condemn.

I know someone who’s suffered much of late.
She lost her husband, watched her brother die,
Relieved a grandchild from abuse, and saved
Her errant son before he went awry.

Most would have drowned, whelmed by a sea of pain,
But not Eileen—her beauty, strength, and grace
Keep her afloat; her empathy—the chain
That anchors her—commander of her space!

And, though her body’s turned on her—alas!
We—who know her well—know, this too, will pass!
(11/14/12)

Anoesis—check it out! Emotion,
Sensation—pure, untrammeled by the spell
Cognition always casts. Feelings that shun
All thought—shimmering heaven or bleak hell?

The notion took me back to innocence,
To ancient Eden, harboring that tree,
Before morality gave birth to sins,
When male and female wandered nude and free.

One bitter bite (defining virtue, vice)
That cost us all the loss of paradise.
(7/11/12)

1. Non Sequitur, Los Angeles Times (7/8/12)

Some Hebrew Bible poems
Are not too bad.
After all, they are
The words of god
(Reported by stenographers).

But some are plain grotesque.

If I were teaching poetry,
I’d have my students read
The Song of Solomon’s
Fourth chapter,
And cherish
The growls, grins, laughs
Its similes create.

“Behold, you are beautiful, my love.”

Not a bad beginning.

But then comes
The flood—
Divinely wrought similes:
“Your eyes are doves”
“Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead”
“Your teeth are like” (wait for it)
“a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one of them is bereaved.”

Yahweh, please—
Teeth like shorn ewes,
Each followed by twin lambs
Yearning for a teat?
When my beloved smiles,
I bask in the effulgence
Of shorn postpartum ewes?

Then, a torrent,
Bemused as a mountain waterfall.

“Your lips are like a scarlet thread,”
“Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate,”
“Your neck is like a tower of David, built for an arsenal
Whereon hang a thousand bucklers,
All of them shields of warriors.”
Mama mia! That is one prodigious neck!

But the best
Worst simile
Embedded in the long
And varied history of poetry,
Remains: our beloved’s breasts—
“like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies.”

Got it? Reclining there,
The most beautiful woman
In the Bible:
Doves for eyes,
Goat hair,
Sheered sheep teeth,
Thread lips,
Pomegranate cheeks,
Arsenal tower neck,
With hungry baby gazelles
For breasts.

We must,
I suppose,
Gratefully
Thank god,
Or its stenographer,
For not imagining
All the bulk
Of that ancient book
In verse.
(6/29/12)

Plainly, some things are just not fair.
Industrial, proud Birmingham
Came to be called “brummagem”—lair,
It seems, of all things tawdry; damned,
It seems, by counterfeiters back
In sixteen thirty-seven—cheap,
It seems, meretricious—flash crap—
Imitations sold by slick creeps.

Ridiculed for a few false groats—
Noun and adjective “brummagem,”
Stuns a decent city—connotes
Sick merchandise akin to phlegm.
                        (2/27/11)

     Haecceity may be defined in some dictionaries as simply the “essence” of a thing,
     or as a simple synonym for quiddity or hypokeimenon. However, such a definition
     deprives the term of its subtle distinctiveness and utility. Whereas haecceity refers
     to aspects of a thing which make it a particular thing [its “thisness”], quiddity
     refers to the universal qualities of a thing, its “whatness”, or the aspects of a
     thing which it may share with other things and by which it may form part of a
     genus of things.

This guy down at the paddle tennis courts
Likes to pull my professorial chain
From time to time, and asked, last week, what sort
Of place did “quiddity” hold in my brain?

He, psychologist, twinkled, as my jaw
Dropped, while I, literature guy, knit brow,
Glum, discomforted, thought about the raw
Pain of life—the figurative fields ploughed

By rank necessity just to survive—
While thinkers distinguish (without pity)
“Whatness” from “thisness,” in fat texts that drive
Men mad—quiddity or haecceity?

How does that put food, drink, on the table?
Funny thing—the argument waxed deadly
In the early church. God? Real or fable?
“How can three be one?” some asked, scratching heads.

“Fools! Whatness is not thisness!” they replied—
Those ancient priests—“accept our writ or die!”
                     (2/25/11)

Wish to pursue this matter further? Start with Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308). Then consult the First Council at Nicaea (325)

II
The glow in my head
Darkens as clumsy fingers
Cannot grasp the words.

III
My passionate dreams,
Impotent, cannot swim through
Moats surrounding them.

IV
I cannot convey
The spirit driving my soul;
Too gassy for flesh!

V
Glorious aura,
So bright, swims within the mind—
But drowns in dark ink.

VI
That numinous world,
Sieved through sensory prisms—
Bland leftover stew.

VII
Words contaminate—
Deadly pathogens poison
Crisp thoughts, infect minds.
               (8/8/10)