The Children's Eyes

 

The weak ones and the wounded ones,

The ones frustration tears,

Pick helpless victims for their hate –

They make their children bear.

The children learn that love is pain,

And blows just show you care.

Even though the bruises heal,

The pain is always there;

And generations down the line,

The painful pattern grows.

Some survivors make it through –

The scars all may not show.

The twisted parents shift the blame

And tell their alibis,

The children hold their twisted love

Deep in their blackened eyes. 

In their eyes you see the future,

In their eyes you see the past.

In their eyes you’ll see how well we’ve done –

We’ve made the evil last

In the children’s eyes. 

For boundaries only in our minds,

For dogmas soon forgot,

For cold ambitious power plays:

The wars just never stop.

And from the rubble watch them come –

Survive’s too strong a word.

And though some of them live to grow,

They can’t outgrow the hurt.

The legacy of hate we’ve left –

We’ve taught them all we know,

And generations down the line,

The violence just grows.

From Ireland to Vietnam

The whole world’s heard their cries:

The price of war’s not cities, friend,

It’s in the children’s eyes.

In their eyes you see the future,

In their eyes you see the past.

In their eyes you’ll see how well we’ve done –

We’ve made the evil last

In the children’s eyes.

 

 

Wanderlust

The urge to move is itching me,
The highway sings a song.
I’ve got the wanderlust so bad
My whole life just looks wrong,
But deep inside my soul I know
To go won’t change a thing.
My enemy’s inside my brain
And that’s the real sting.
‘Cause you can run around the world,
No matter what you find,
And even at the speed of light
You’re trapped inside your mind.
But still I’m full of wanderlust –
The far hills look so green,
And maybe in another place
The people won’t be mean.
The highway sings its siren song,
The only words I trust:
I won’t return if I give in
Just once to wanderlust.

Sometimes I’ll just be glancing round
To see what’s there to see;
My eyes will fix upon a man
And unexpectedly
The sight gives me a hot, sharp pang
That hits and moves straight down.
It seems to make no difference if
His hair's red, gold, or brown.
Can’t really say what catches me,
The way he moves perhaps,
Or humor in a pair of eyes
That sparkle when he laughs.
Intelligence gets to me, too –
The dumb ones make me yawn.
Yes, strength is sexy, goodness knows,
But humor beats out brawn.
These crushes never last too long,
They singe me then they fade.
My lust has wandered near and far
But never has it stayed.

A TALE OF THREE TOMCATS

Come little children and sit by my knee;

I’ll tell you a tale of my tomcats three.

First there is Bandit, my shy Siamee;

Then Muffin, the tiger, all orange and white;

Lastly there’s loverboy, black Starry Night.

When I got three I made one oversight.

 

If one can’t find mischief, the other two can.

They sail past my fragiles like a catamaran.

They’re making a fuzz-ball of my new divan.

Star chews my hair while he purrs oh so loud,

Bandit does yodeling while pacing around,

And Muffin picks fights with the whole naughty crowd.

 

Bandit sheds cream on the dark brown stuffed chair.

Star likes the white chair to leave his black hair.

My blazer of blue looks like orange mohair.

Yet sometimes, when Muffin curls up by my knees,

And loverboy purrs without even a please,

And soft murrows come from that loud Siamese,

I know bad things and good things both come in threes.

 

 

Written in 1981, about the three cats I had in my first apartment. They were a lot of fun and aggravation.

 

 

REFLECTION ON MORTALITY

Autumn leaves

In brilliant colors

Release their trees

And dance on the wind,

One last flush of bright

Before forever dust.

When I am ninety

I will dye my hair

The color of autumn leaves

And dance.

SELF-IMAGE BY THE NUMBERS

A woman died the other day,

Starved to death for beauty’s sake.

Dead is worse than fat, I’d say,

And I’ve been fat since I was eight.

Step up on that magic box,

Step into a paradox.

If the number’s up your heart is down;

Hey, we can’t all weigh a hundred pounds.

There’s compact cars and Cadillacs,

Siberian tigers and domestic cats.

Even flowers come dainty or bold,

Why must women be of one mold?

Self-image by the numbers,

Even now the myth endures:

You’ll never be too rich or thin,

And only beauties are allowed to win.

                    Old poem, written when anorexia claimed the life of Karen Carpenter, one of my favorite singers. With the current War on Fat People I think it's relevant again. I support Health at Every Size, and am against body snarking - though I'll admit it's a hard habit to break. I'm inspired by Ragen Chastain's blog Dances With Fat. Check it out.

February Midnight

Sometimes it’s nice to just let go your life

And let someone else’s words take over.

I think now I see how nice it could be

To be drunk or drugged rather than sober.

When there’s no escape from emotional rape

And the weight of the world has you kneeling,

Why pretend that your mind doesn’t bend

And your senses and soul aren’t all reeling?

Deep in the night let logic take flight,

Let your subconscious loose from his cage.

Slip out of the noose and turn it all loose –

You’ve got nothing to lose but your rage.

Writing poetry

            Posting that old poem, it occurred to me that I haven’t any new ones. I started writing poetry in high school, as most teens with a literary bent and a lot of excess angst do. I wrote them through college and into my early thirties. The 1980s, when I couldn’t seem to get a novel going, spawned a lot of poetry – some of it meant to be song lyrics. Then, somewhere in the late 1980s, the poetry urge completely dried up. I have no idea why.

            Of the several notebooks filled with poems, I have forty-six I’m not ashamed of. I think I’ll post them one by one on this blog, as poetry doesn’t sell. Only one has ever been published, in an anthology called Light Year back in the 1980s, and I didn’t get paid for it. Had to buy the book. Oh, well, at the time it was worth it to me.

            So what makes a person a poet, as opposed to a prose writer? A lot of people are both, but I’ve always been rather single-minded as far as the creative impulse. I’ve noticed that when I’m writing a lot, I stop knitting, and when I’m knitting a lot, I seem to nearly stop writing. I have never figured out what it was about that particular decade that inspired the type of writing I did then. It was a hard decade. I was working at a well-paying job that I absolutely hated. My father died in 1983, which plunged my dysthymic self deep into the dark flood. In 1984 I got laid off from that job (thank God), and never have earned that much money again, though the stress wasn’t worth it. When you burst into tears every time the alarm goes off and it takes you five minutes to unclench your jaws in the morning, you need a different job, no matter how good the money is. To illustrate the sort of people I worked with, here’s the primo example. My father wasted away from cancer in the first half of 1983, dying the Thursday after Father’s Day. I had been telling people at work who asked how he was that he wasn’t going to recover. When he died I called in to tell them I wouldn’t be in for a week. The person who answered the phone, who I had considered a friend, said, “Oh, he really died? We thought you were just saying that.” 

            I wrote the poem February Midnight at a midnight in February, into a small tape recorder I kept by the bed then. In the morning when I transcribed it, I didn’t change a single word. I still think it’s my best poem. The little tape recorder helped with a lot of inspiration, because by the time I found the light, a pencil, and my glasses, I lost the thought, even when all that was on the nightstand. Just picking up the recorder in the dark and hitting the On button was a lot faster. I’ll post that poem tomorrow.

Here's a poem I wrote a long time ago.

PRAIRIE PEOPLE

Prairie people have the need

To see as far as you can see.

They grow inside the silence, then

The silence grows inside of them.

Listen to the earth breathe –

You can hear the earth breathe.

Green things grow fast in the sun,

Giving life back when they’re done.

Green’s a fragrance, don’t you know –

Soothes the heart and quiets soul.

Stop and watch the grass grow –

You can see the grass grow.

Prairie people watch the sky,

Love to watch the clouds speed by –

More obsession than pastime,

Watch the weather all the time.

At night a billion stars gleam –

You can see the stars gleam.

Prairie people understand

Infinity’s not grains of sand.

Infinity is endless sky

And changeless seasons cycling by.

Wake one day and you’ll know –

Take some time and you’ll know.

Listen to the earth breathe,

Stop and watch the grass grow.

At night a billion stars gleam –

Wake one day and you’ll know.