Soul from Seoul

I have experience of careers going to the dogs
Now I have experience of a dogs going to Korea


Right next to me
in a bag
twelve hours
on a plane

Wednesday Words

What the Buttocks Think

Don't tell me that nothing can be done.
The tongue says, "I know I can change things."
The toe says, "I have my ways"
The heart is weeping and remembering Eden.

Legs think that a good run will do it.
Tongue has free tickets; He'll fly to heaven.
But the buttocks see everything upside down:
They want you to put your head down there,

Remind the heart it was upside down
In the womb, so that when your mother,
Knowing exactly where she was going,
Walked upstairs, you weren't going anywhere.

(Robert Bly from Morning Poems)


Haiku (seventeen syllables, three lines with the middle one longest)

With a wave
My heart joins an unknown child
As the train speeds by

(WRM)

Song

The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck,
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck,
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn
The undertaker
pins a a small note on the coffin saying "Wait till I return,
I've got a date with love>"

And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop,
The village rector
Dashed down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm,
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm --
To keep his date with love.

(W.H. Auden)

BIG NUMBERS

Million a seven digit baby
Measured in seconds
Just a couple of weeks

Billion has ten keys to press
Enough seconds
For thirty four years

Trillion has thirteen numbers
If you started saving
A dollar per second

During the last ice age
Thirty four thousand
years ago

You would
now have almost
a trillion dollars

The pile would
reach beyond
the moon

Two hundred
Seventy one
Thousand miles

A trillion atoms
side by side as long
as a football pitch

(WRM)

In The Evening

The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.


In the sky, traces of clouds,
the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

( Billy Collins)


Photographer

Remember me?
You asked if I minded
You hugged and smiled
At my command.

Do you even know
what I look like?
Do you care?
Was the picture any good?

(WRM)

Stalin's Ghost

The Prologue

Winter was what Muscovites lived for. Winter knee-deep
in snow that softened the city, flowed from golden dome to golden dome, resculpted statues
and transformed park paths into skating trails. Snow that sometimes fell as a lacy haze, sometimes thick as down. Snow that made sedans of the rich and powerful crawl behind snowplows. Snow that folded and unfolded, teasing the eye with glimpses of an illuminated globe above the Central Telegraph Office, Apollo's chariot leaving the Bolshoi, a sturgeon sketched in neon at a food emporium. Women shopped amid the gusts, gliding in long fur coats.
Children dragged sleds and snowboards, while Lenin lay in his mausoleum, deaf to correction, wrapped in snow.
And, in Arkady's experience, when the snow melts, bodies would be discovered. In Moscow that was spring.

Martin Cruz Smith 2007

Tuesdays Words

Boarding House

The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light

above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall

in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light
under the blind man's door, and all is right

Ted Kooser (US Poet Laureate)


Let Me

Let my eyes feel you
Let me wave lusting heat lamps
From above to below you
Overheating chosen places

Let me in through your eyes
let me feel my welcome
Let me probe your intimate thoughts
Give them to me

Let my sight roll over the undulations
Of your face, shoulders, breasts and arms
Feel my imagination as you stand
Naked and proud before me

Watch my eyes melt down your thighs
Yield to me as I ascend you with my gaze
Let our eyes consummate
Let me

WRM - a while back

Monday Morning Mourning the weekend.

Budapest

My pen moves along the page
like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager that has nothing
on its mind but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.

It wants only to be here tomorrow,
dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt.
nose pressed against the page,
writing a few more dutiful lines

while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest
or some other city where I have never been.

Billy Collins


Sexy Little Black Number

I dress in special clothes
take her out from
my secret place
pull her top down

Broad and squat
hugging, like a jellyfish,
anything below her.
Sticking like spilt tar

Testosterone boosted shoulders
the extension of my puny figure
embracing driver and libido
in a single compactness,
she carries me and my ego
At different altitudes.

Intimate with weather,
and parking lot conversations,
smelling trees, barbecues
exhausts, perfumes,
hearing birds, radios, wind
in a frapped blur

WRM

Santa Fe Easter Morning

Outside the only awake
Native jewelry sellers and
Paper man in the middle
Of the street
Selling in both directions

Inside Starbucks
French music competing with
Infinite permutations of size
Strength foam fat flavor blend
Temperature and soy

People arranged as atoms in a
Crystal lattice with mathematical
String lengths between them
Fixing precisely their allowed
Balance of intimacy and privacy

Glances, the human
Equivalent of dog growls,
Inhibit threatened infringements
Of sipping Sunday paper reading
Oxygen using space time

(WM 2003)

On a Lighter Note

Languor

I have come back to the couch -----
Hands behind my head,
Legs crossed at the ankles-----

to resume my lifelong study
of the ceiling and its river-like crack,
its memory of a water stain,

the touch of civilization
in the rounded steps of the moulding,
and the lick of time in the flaking plaster.

To move would only ruffle
the calm surface of the morning,
and disturb shadows of leaves in the windows.

And to throw open a door
would startle the fish in the pond,
maybe frighten a few birds from a hedge.

Better to stay here,
to occupy the still room of thought,
to listen to the dog breathing on the floor,

better to count my lucky coins,
or redesign my family coat of arms-----
remove the plow and hive, shoo away the bee.

(Billy Collins)




Free Waits

Take the free way
Take the freeway
The only way
To the free weights

Wait while I work out
With free weights
Fitness is free
Fitness freak

Freak out
Waits are free
Waits are frequent
On the freeway

Weights are free
You don't have
To own them
Lift them

Free me
To flee with thee
on the free way
to the free waits

And the free weights
And the blind dates
And slim wastes
Of slim waists

Slender pickings
From the date tree
Fat free
Flea free

(WRM)

Dylan Thomas and me

The hand that signed the paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country:

These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose's quill has put an end to murder

That put and end to talk.

The hand that singed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

Dylan Thomas.

The Bomb Maker

I make explosive devices

Dropped, hidden, trodden,

Handheld, mailed, custom,

I do them all.

Proud of my profession

Its' effects outlive me.

My favorite is the land mine

A child with a limbless lifetime

A dead parent

An unrecognizably damaged

Face on a beautiful woman

My clever prodigies

Made from plastic

Live forever waiting

In beautiful beach or dessert

Undetectable

But detonated

By the tiniest footprint

I can blow off feet or legs

Kill instantly

Rise to face height

First and then

Spray chosen parts

With maiming

Shrapnel.

Tell me what you want,

Anything is possible,

At a price,

With discounts for

Quantity.

WRM 2002

Poet of the Moment

Frederico Garcia Lorca


Six Strings

The Guitar
makes dreams cry
The sobbing of lost
souls
escapes through its round
mouth.
And like the tarantula,
it spins a huge star
and tracks down the sighs
that float in its black
wooden cistern.

(Lorca)



Dark Sides Of The Moon

The moon wakes first today
Beaming my wake-up call
Silver sickle in black sky
Seasoned with stars.

Floating on pre-dawn light
Still hidden from my eyes.
The winking eye
Clock watches for the day

shift to come in
Staring the sun in the face
Never turning
Walking backwards

As if from a queen
Until extinguished
By the same flame
Driving me from bed

(WRM 2002)