Shaving - Charles Simic

Child of sorrow.
Old snotnose.
Stray scrap from the table of the gods.
Toothless monkey.
Workhorse,
Wheezing there,
Coughing too.

The trouble with you is,
Your body and soul
Don't get along well together.
Pigsty for a brain,
Stop them from making faces at each other
In the mirror!
Then, remove the silly angel wings
From your gorilla suit.

-Charles Simic, Shaving

Isn't Life

The man-headed calves
Came out of their caves,

Isn't life tragic enough?

Medusa frowned in her
Jeweled and gold rimmed mirror,

Isn't life mysterious enough?

Hercules was transformed instantly
by the gentle touch of Midas,

Isn't life abundant enough?

I curl inside myself as
A shield above a family mantle,

Isn't life comedy enough?

-Patrick Conners Jr

You

You,
time is short
you would probably
                Say that
you usually do,
you.

They say we shouldn't
waste our lives
and give incredible advice
on shopping, etiquette,
fine dining.

Have a date with yourself
and show up late
but come up with the
most unbelievable
fantastic excuse
something you wish was true.

You know its christmas
soon
and everyone is trying to find the perfect
gift to say how much they love you
I hope, for you,
someone has the courage
to give you just those words
instead.

-Patrick Conners Jr

James Wright - Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

-James Wright
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15590

The Cross II: Poland Was Pink

The great rulers
                                of kings,
                the crown
                                of thorns,
                crafted
by wood
                from
                                His Cross.

Last Friday
                the World
was conquered!,
a great day
                                in history.
                                Thank Christ!.

Then the man left the
Church
Seeing
                only

                                Colors.

-Patrick Conners Jr

http://inspiredfortune.blogspot.com/2011/12/outline-of-history.html

The Cross I.

Standing before the
Cross for hours and
Breathing the very breath of our salvation.

A man in agony crawls
Through the portal;
The wide doors swallow
His wounds.

The transfiguration
Written on his face
Glows like holy scripture.
Tears, like holy water,
Wet his lips.

He approaches his own
Face erected upon the
Rough wood of the cross.

-Patrick Conners Jr

http://inspiredfortune.blogspot.com/2011/12/christ-i.html

Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLxyTFDxE

Bukowski 1

 

tonight I wonder where my Bukowski went, looking tirelessly under laundry, plates, sheets, bottles, and more scholastic books. I pause at an anthology American Modern Poetry!

Flipping through the pages until confirming Bukowski is absent and Tom Waits is silently looking out a dark window at pigeons eating out of children's palms. so quiet.

I Would swear he never lived.

-Patrick Conners Jr

Alone – by Philip Levine

Sunset, and the olive grove flames
on the far hill. We descend
into the lunging shadows
of goat grass, and the air

deepens like smoke.
you were behind me, but when I turned
there was the wrangling of crows
and the long grass rising in the wind

and the swelling tips of grain
turning to water under a black sky.
All around me the thousand
small denials of the day

rose like insects to the flaming
of an old truth, someone alone
following a broken trail of stones
toward the deep and starless river.

-Philip Levine, Alone

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/118/3#20595193

Dying Hour

I want to use these great lungs of mine
To hold my breath for an hour.

I practice meditation for hours,
Warming up for the final act.

The final pause at the end of Life’s stanza.

The Taoists say holding your breath
Is yang, it strengthens every muscle

And every bone in your body.
The Taoists say that exhaling is

Yin, it relaxes and prepares
The body for some final rest;

And so, to breathe out, even to sigh
Is to die. When you read poetry

Out loud, you die. Not metaphorically,
But literally. It is the cycle of life.

I want to hold my breath for an hour
So that I can feel immortal. So that I can

Feel a strength that has never been
In my muscles and flesh. So that I can

Hold time still for just that short, minute,
Dying hour.

-Patrick Conners Jr

Have You Prayed by Li-Young Lee

When the wind
turns and asks, in my father's voice,
Have you prayed?
I know three things. One:
I'm never finished answering to the dead.
Two: A man is four winds and three fires.
And the four winds are his father's voice,
his mother's voice ...
Or maybe he's seven winds and ten fires.
And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,
dreaming, thinking . . .
Or is he the breath of God?
When the wind turns traveler
and asks, in my father's voice, Have you prayed?
I remember three things.
One: A father's love
is milk and sugar,
two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what's left over
is trimmed and leavened to make the bread
the dead and the living share.
And patience? That's to endure
the terrible leavening and kneading.
And wisdom? That's my father's face in sleep.
When the wind
asks, Have you prayed?
I know it's only me
reminding myself
a flower is one station between
earth's wish and earth's rapture, and blood
was fire, salt, and breath long before
it quickened any wand or branch, any limb
that woke speaking. It's just me
in the gowns of the wind,
or my father through me, asking,
Have you found your refuge yet?
asking, Are you happy?
Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.
The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

-- Li-Young Lee

Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud
You have some
Beautiful lines, but
You know that—

“L’amour divin seul
Octroie les clefs
De la science”—

I don’t speak French,
I’m sorry, I can’t understand.

“Goodbye chimeras,
                ideals, errors.”

~Patrick Conners Jr

In The Library

In the library,
Human Physiology
Looks across
At Climate Change;
Their gaze unbroken
For these many years.

Behind them listen
The Dynamic Natural Gas
Industry, and
Potroleum Product
Handbook.

There are entire encyclopedias
Written in the dust
On their spines.

~Patrick Conners jr

"The hand that writes is as good as the hand that ploughs."
~Arthur Rimbaud

Optimism

There will still
Continue to be
Cats named
Patches
Next year

~ patrick conners jr ~

from Dylan Thomas Poem in October

 It was my thirtieth year to heaven
     Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
        And the mussel pooled and the heron
                Priested shore
           The morning beckon
     With water praying and call of seagull and rook
     And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
           Myself to set foot
                That second
        In the still sleeping town and set forth.

 -from Dylan Thomas, Poem in October
       http://www.bigeye.com/october.htm
or
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnoHCSU5yn8&feature=related

Kept Awake

“God’s refuted but the devil’s not”
-Charles Simic

I used to be kept awake
For hours each night,
With poems circulating
Through the veins of my mind.
It was a chore keeping up;
Like keeping the yard clear
               in the fall.

They were mad thoughts.
I thought they were not from me,
But from some dream state.

I collected more lines than
A confessional booth;
The notebook I refused
                to set down.

In the morning a shadow
                remained on the page.

-Patrick Conners Jr

Morality is trivial
Mice make metaphors

Unfocused eyes see
Nothing out the window
Today

Crayons, markers, glitter,
safety scissors, stick glue,
Elmer's glue, colored pencils,
finger paint, Pastels.

Stuffed rabbit, Legos,
G.I. Joe, soldiers,
Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures,
cars, Quake.

Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak,
Shel Silverstein, Bruce Coville,
R. L. Stine, Poe,
Lovecraft, Stephen King.

Pretty Pretty Princess, Candy Land,
Mouse Trap, Checkers,
Life, Monopoly,
Risk, Chess.

Gather, Hunt,
Grow, Culture,
Plow, Irrigate,
God, Math, Philosophy.

Stick, Sling, Sword,
Catapult, Cannon,
Gun, Bomb,
Nuclear end.

-Patrick Conners Jr

The Seducer Only Smiles At Himself

There is so much more
Security when everything is naturally
                At odds--
Then we do not need to invent ways to
Fill the silence
                So unnatural.
Crafts and trees should
All be bells,
They should scream or just echo
Their last brilliant murder.
Dullness is never sought.

We need to
Fly toward the vibrant
Light until unconscious flies.

We need to be stuck in a
Wind tunnel. Though we crave
                Control,
Silence we cannot
Master--it breeds in us,
We do not produce in it.

If we only appreciated
Stillness, surely there'd be
no survival--Life depends
                on strife.
Love moves toward war of forms.
When you've gotten everything
Else done, just get high,
                You deserve it after all.

The alternative is stagnation,
un-accomplishment. Motion measures
man--growth, worms, cities,
rain, the heart beat-- Movement
                is connection.
Sound unites, we are
Comforted by distraction. Jesus
Was born, performed, spoke, died
Rose once more--even in death
Was not silent--silent, stillness,
                A disease,
There are pills for that!

If connection is holy, we must live in a
Holy age, right? Contemplation, no, that
is odd--Seclusion shows an indifference
and intolerance--War has always been
                a love story. The seducer only
Smiles at himself.
A soldier is anyone who knows
For whom he died.
                God does not smile at all.

-Patrick Conners Jr