It’s a fine day
And I’m talking with the sun.
"I don’t think there’s only one sun,"
I say. "There are no end of you,
And of course there are the stars:
To be means to be numberless.
"And yet, O magnificent,
I delight in your heat.
Dust speck, I adore you."
Shinkichi Takahashi poem "Sun" opens several portals that are attached to my belief structure. These portals are like the sun peeping around the clouds, and I begin to see something other than gray-white smoky configuration of my sheltered and protected fear filled reality. I sense the presence of other aspects of my self; I feel like a new year that comes rolling out of a calendar filled with rational symbols that have not been touch by my thoughts and beliefs physically, but have already been experienced in another intensity of my consciousness.
To "be" does mean to be numberless, when I allow this self the opportunity to look at a dust speck and sense another reality filled with the ingredients of life. Remembering to delight in the heat of my own energy, I discover a new aspect of awareness that fragments into selves, which experience consciousness in a series of sequential realities that occur simultaneously.
And yet this cornucopia of selves hides from my reality and forms independent focuses that dance through the stars of other realities and express their energy in random impulses and reconfigure my beliefs and choices in obscure and subtle ways. I know them, yet these strangers from my essence intermingled with my ego consciousness like the minute life forms that automatically support my physical structure. I know these cryptic partners, yet disown them like a modern day Judas with no cause.
The message that Takahashi sends me is a simple one; I am much more than I think I am, in fact, I’m many more than I believe I am. When I tie my religious and scientific beliefs to my metaphysical anchor of awareness and let them sink into the clear water of consciousness, I find dimensions and realities that patiently wait for my awareness. In this world of crystal clarity, a dust speck of my consciousness floats through the life of another self and forms a frequency of vibrations that repeats itself in the redundancy of a fine day.
Hal Manogue
http://www.shortsleeves.net/
http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/
I’ve been in lust before.
Well, I can handle that.
Toss out a little tease.
And see if it comes back.
Sometimes it does.
But this loving you thing,
That’s a whole other deal.
Want to touch you, taste you,
Want to see how you feel
It might be good.
If you would hold my heart,
Then I could see your soul.
We could love a long time,
And never have to go.
I want to try.
What do you like for breakfast?
What do you do late at night?
Can I come into your world?
Well, wouldn’t that just feel right?
What do you say?
Jan Bossing © 2009 Joelton, Tennessee
No excuse
I am utterly selfish with time.
Ask for my failings
My mother, sister, even
The cat left wailing.
But everything I do
Hangs on the weather.
I scan the morning cloud
A burning feather
Whose rain will blind.
I hear the quick hooves chime
Caught on the darkened road,
Where we have no more time.
The Coach Passes Chelsea
Here is the bridge they strung with lights
which blazed and wasted longer nights.
Not yet switched off, its harp unfurls
too low for stars, too warm for pearls.
The lit boats swing. You long to be
seated and served, eat greedily,
stroll moneyed dark streets, without haste,
a stranger’s arm around your waist.
But having gnawed your apple core
you watch the river fade, before
the motorway where late shifts work;
the modest door you push from dark
upon a man who goes nowhere
on cats who blink and scarcely care,
into the river of your nights
to skies like orchards, hung with lights.
Alison Brackenbury’s seventh collection is Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008. “A quiet lyricism and delight,” says The Guardian. New poems can be read at www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk
Looking for the cat
It is the time of night when the blood slows
The time of cold when steel grinds in the locks
The time of moon which wakes, on street’s dark side,
The distant icy barking of the fox.
Alison Brackenbury has recently produced a chapbook of new animal poems, Shadow, available from www.happenstancepress.com.
Valentine’s Day
Roses of every shade
Pink, yellow, red and white
Planted on my college campus
Such a lovely sight.
Romance is all around us
as their aroma fills the air.
Students hold hands
with a care.
Birds sing their song
from branches way up high
as young lovers kiss
and sigh!
And I think of you!
The love of my life
And why I am glad
to be your wife.
Submitted by Irene Brodsky, Author of Poetry Unplugged (Outskirts Press.2008)
Sir Algernon and the Poets
An Anthology of Modern Verse (pub. 1921 & reprinted 48 times to 1959).
The copy I picked up today for 50p in Cancer Research has penciled in: Diane Campkin neat above the faded ink stamp of County Grammar School, Windmill Lane, East Grinstead. The edition we used, and another.
A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920 – 1940, but this time i/c poets.
These (and hymns, I suspect) taught us what poetry is: metered, neat, and as the Introduction says, no danger to rectitude & respectability. Sir A. Methuen hands on the baton to C. Day Lewis and Strong, L.A.G.
No wonder in late 50s & Shock of the New 60s it was pop we hummed. What was Diane Campkin like? Blonde, brunette, or redhead with the whitest of teeth, flashing eyes, and the risk of mascara for school, hmm?
And who nowadays recalls A.E (George Russell) or Eva Gore Booth, Austin Dobson or Helen Parry Eden (Mrs. John Lane)? Bygones they are now, just as, like Ozymandias, we shall be next century.
East Grinstead is Scientology Central, is it not? And is the Grammar there still on Windmill Lane, or bulldozed for commuter pods, desirable?
But not all of it is utterly forgettable:
Eliot, Blunden & W.H. Davies jog my forty-five-year-later brain: La Figlia che Piange;
Rain-sunken roof, grown green and thin
For sparrows’ nests and starlings’ nests;
Dishevelled eaves; unwieldy doors,
Cracked rusty pump, and oaken floors
And my favourite W.H. – What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare? Not while you have to cram for exams, you wretches. It is only, only poetry, and all of you have livings to earn. Poetry? Pah!
Copyright April 2009 C.J. Heyworth
When You Fall Asleep
This one is for all those people who are far away from the one they love the most.
Daylight slowly fades into the western skies
Putting on a show to tease my wondering eyes.
Imagination takes me to wherever you might be,
Even if it’s a million miles beyond reality.
I can hardly wait for sleep to ease my mind,
Hold you in my arms and leave the world behind.
And I whisper a silent prayer offered up on bended knees,
When you fall asleep tonight
I hope you’re dreaming of loving me.
Never wanted to be so far from your loving arms
In a place a world away from you and all your charms.
But there’s one thing I know for sure
No matter how it seems,
When I fall asleep tonight
I’ll be walking in all your dreams.
I’ll be there for you…
When you fall asleep.
I can hardly wait for sleep to ease my mind,
Hold you in my arms and leave the world behind.
And I whisper a silent prayer offered up on bended knees,
When you fall asleep tonight
I hope you’re dreaming of loving me.
Dennis S Martin
Website: http://www.iwritesome.com/
Blog: http://www.iwrtiesome.blogspot.com/
Storefront: www.lulu.com/dsmartin
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