Saturday, July 29, 2017

The MorningStar makes me smile.
A mysterious guest in the morning sky.
It never looks like that's where it should be,
A wallflower watching
While the world begins its busy day.

But it knows it's own largeness.
Yet does not worry to scale.
She has her own dance partners
In a ballroom we can't see because of the clouds
And the atmosphere
Here in this incubator
We call earth.

She dances with worlds
That are on her level
And makes music with the other spheres,
And make no mistake,
Tho the Goddess seem disheveled to you
In the morning,
By evening, as her other name implies,
You will be able to tell that
She will forever be where she is supposed to be.

In fact, she is always dancing,
Night and day,
And she is named by many names.
And when dusk comes and you see
That one star shining in the sun set,
You perceive, awkwardly.
That will be her just the same,
The evening star,
The one all the children wish for
And on.

-jenn
I feel about five,
Chasing a kitten,
Tears in my eyes,
Someone has said something mean.
Tell me, why did I come here, again?
If I don't seem to matter to them,
Am I making a difference?
They already have their lives.
They don't need a baby,
Or a three year old boy, or me,
A five year old little girl
To ignore,
Or to project their own insecurities toward.
They have each other for that.
And I have this wild, untamed baby cat
To chase.

-jenn

Thursday, July 27, 2017

In a dead person's day,
Busily, they push up daisies.
They get a few breaks
Per the crew boss's hankerin'
Or the dead persons current union sanctions.
Everyone smokes,
Because what does it matter?
But there's not a lot of chatter
Because in the twinkling of an eye,
Everyone came to know everything.
So nothing is really up for discussion.

But when a dead person lies down to sleep,
And begins to dream,
This is where the seams between life and death get hazy.
This is where the hauntings take place,
For, it's then, the dead person can go,
And be in the land of the living.

And if a living person and a dead person dream  the same thing,
They can meet on a street of gold,
Or just an old street in someone's memory,
And if they find a mattress lying on a curb in town,
They can lie down on it together,
And sleep and dream a dream within a dream.
And if they never wake up they can dream forever,
In an endless looping equation that physicists call infinity.

And this is why you find so many of these mattresses
Lying around outside,
Some thrown out by the living,
Some thrown out by the dead,
And if you take a snapshot of these,
Sometimes you can see
The graphs of certain equations,
Parabolas and rays, extending out
In both directions, for all eternity.

And this is why I take pictures of mattresses.
(Well, it's as good a reason as any.)

-jenn

You can see lots of squirrels in the neighborhood,
But you rarely see them breed.
They prefer the privacy of an out-of-the-way place
To spread the seed of their DNA
Into the next squirrel generation.
They prefer to die privately, too.
But sometimes some seemingly unavoidable event,
Whether it's fate, or an accident,
They pick a no-win battle with an automobile.
They lie there in their own form of state in the street.

Maybe they give themselves for us to see
A prophetic warning.
It's best to steer clear of humanity
And humanity's progress.
It's best to do all the things that really matter to us
Privately,
And never even let the right-hand know what the left hand does.

-jenn

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

I create a masterpiece each day
Using different shades of grey and pale blue,
Silver, woodland caribou, burnt sienna and dusk rosee.
And everyday, it fades, until
Not a smear is visible to the naked eye.
But this does not deter,
Nor would I ever shy away
From applying make up to my face.
Ephemeral pieces by the thousands
Vanish through sweat and tears, and love,
And various states of arousal.

- jenn

"Who would wear sun dials on their feet?
As telltale a sign as a cloven hoof!
That old devil reminding us
How short our own time is,
And every time we check our footing,
There the shadow would foretell
Some destiny, some strange heaven,
Or hell, awaiting!"

"No, Grand-ma-maa, you asked what kind of shoes those are,
And I told you, 'sandals.'"

-jenn

Do I talk in my sleep anymore?
No one seems to know.
I sleep alone
Deep beneath the sands of time.
Do I moan and toss the night away?
No one can say,
For I lie deep, deep beneath the clay.

In my somber neglige,
The frilly stillness of my tomb,
I am finally alone in my room,
And someone else has fixed my hair.
I finally have something to wear,
But alas, nowhere to go.

But do I still talk in my sleep anymore?
No one can say.
No one can know.

-jenn

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Defy me, great odds!
You, who tell me how to ride my elevator up!
You, who tell me that when I arrive at the top,
It's not the door, but the floor that will open up
And drop me out to certain doom,
To begin again in my quest
From formula.
I have other elevators that you don't know about,
And all of them take me somewhere that I want to be.
So, whether it is the great spirit,
Or the great spirit of wisdom,
AhuraMazda,
Or the great living god,
I also have odds,
Great odds in my favor,
Pulling for me.

-jenn

Saturday, July 22, 2017

An older brother died today
Was it yours
Did you know him
Did you say
That he was in a better place
Was it yours?

How do you know anything about death

Oh I had a cat that got out once
I put him back in
And he often stared solemnly
Out the front door
But he never wanted out there anymore

So I'm not sure
What to think about that

Friday, July 21, 2017

Just when religion was starting to play out,
We got TV.
Now we can have the opiate of the people
On opiates.

Or we can show the world the beef stroganoff
We're having for supper on social media,
And be defriended because we eat meat,
Or because we made it with tofu.

We can write people off very easily these days.
One synapse doesn't agree,
One touch on a touchscreen,
And our lives are lauda-numbed again.

-jenn
Go ahead, Fly.
Flirt with personal disaster.
Fly just outside the fringes of acceptability.
The air is cool between the inside of the refrigerator
And the open refrigerator door.
But open doors always shut on refrigerators.
They're designed that way.

You'll think you've died and gone to heaven
When you find yourself shut in--
A fox locked up with all the hens.
You, a kid, stuck in the candy store.
But the very thing you seek
Will be the unleavening of you,
When you find that you have died,
And, is there a heaven for a lowly fly?

-jenn

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

One afternoon while playing doubles,
The moon came into my square,
And, naturally, out of pure reflex,
I batted it away.
But then I saw what I had done,
And wondered, as we continued to play,
What sort of catastrophe
My act had brought on,
And just what day the world would end?

Out of the corner of my eye
I watched the moon backspin off,
And with 80 percent of my attention
Still on the game at hand,
Suddenly I heard a distant 'pong,'
And looked and saw
The moon was coming back again.

And so for now, let's just say
I'm involved in a very long distance volley,
But meanwhile, here on earth,
It's advantage out.

-jenn

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Jerry McGower could talk for an hour
And never take a breath.
He wrote what he called poetry
And bored us all to death with his wit,
Which was almost witty but not quite,
And his deep thoughts which he summed into slogans
Which were almost trite,
Yet not quite up to the level of trite,
If there's something just a little bit lower than that,
Then that's what Jerry McGower's poetry could be called.
The old hot air blower could go on and on.
And so if there's one thing that could be said
It's that he was continuous.
And that might be good if you were in bed or needed CPR,
But no one could bring themselves
To tell him that all the true poetry stars are dead,
And that "living poet" is a term
The literary world speaks of as oxymoron.
And maybe he wouldn't hear that first part,
And then he would know
What he truly was--
A northbound end of a southbound pushcart.

-jenn
A fossil's sad beauty often belies
And disaffirms the calamity of a cataclysm.
The miracle and the upshot--
Preserving something that otherwise
Would not be around today,
A misadventure, a pure mischance,
A quick and thorough deluge,
And, by happenstance, some lowly
Organism, a stem, a bit of bone,
Was covered quickly, and unbeknownst to everyone
And everything, the inundation
And the flux reduced it all
Until the great production.
The curtains go up and there it is--
Petrified viability,
And yet more interesting to me
And more valuable
Than a diamond.

-jenn
It made you happy that I left.
I don't like making you happy that way,
Because it means there's less of me.
It means I don't get to dance all the way 'til the stroke of midnight.
You think I should go home early
And be sad like you,
Be glum.
It makes you happy when I'm glum.
 You gloat.

But you don't know,
I'm not going home.
I'm going to a grove of trees deep in the woods,
A perfect clearing,
A round, ring ballroom.
I will shed all my clothes and petticoats and stockings
And hang them on limbs
All the way there,
And when I get to the vaulted ballroom
With stars shining directly over my head and into my eyes,
I will be naked and happy,
And I will dance all night
And right into tomorrow,
Right into the very sunrise itself!

-jenn

Who will come and go with me?
Who will volunteer
To let me do the things I want to do?
Who will stop with me if I need to stop?
Who will go if I want to go?

Only my shadow.

I have always been the one
Who tagged along.
I helped others do the things they wanted to.
A few small things I did for me
In between
Things that seemed to mean a lot to them.

But now it's my turn to go,
To do, to be,
To show the world the me I know.
And now who will go
And be there for me?

Only my shadow,
And all my enemies,
Waiting for me to fall,
But I will show them all.

For it's my turn,
And I have earned the right
To do the things that I have in my heart,
Things that only I can know.
I'll share them with my shadow,
If no one else cares.

-jenn


Why

You don't want to know,
And if you do,
Then I don't want you to.
Because you might want to know just a little too much.
My loss may be your gain,
And if I have to explain it to you,
So that you can smirk inside,
Then I might have to slap you.
Because right now,
I don't feel like putting up with it.

-jenn
Hey I am one of those cars
Some rich old guy bought 50 years ago,
Put it in one of his garages,
And forgot it ever existed--
A 57 Chevy,
Mint condition,
Cherry red with white interior.
There are only 11 original miles on the motor,
Four on the floor and three on the tree!
Well OK maybe not all that's true,
But,did I say mint?
I meant, meant.
Meant condition.
I'm going to make somebody's grandkid real happy someday,
(Probably my own)
If he or she can only learn to appreciate 260 air conditioning.
Roll down two windows and drive 60 mph.

-jenn

Saturday, July 15, 2017

If raincrows had gills,
They would be the whippoorwills
Of the sea.
They'd fly on fins
To places where the deep ocean
Mingles with the air,
And clouds are born.
The raincrows would coo
And sing,
For that is the thing that raincrows
Were born to do.

But here on the plains
There are places the rains forgot,
And even we sprays
Of low flung daisies don't
Seem to be able to spark
A thought to remind the rains to come.

And so the raincrows abandon us, too.
They have to find some rich oilmen
Who can afford an irrigation ditch.
They wish us wild flowers well
And go and swell their throaty chirps
To foreign fuchsia, and dahlia lush
And men who have nothing better to do
Than stand in their porches and belch
And ignore their green golf lawns,
Their yawns and burps so loud the people
In Japan can hear them.

And maybe it is never rude to go
And be where you can sing your song.
Maybe the twitch and rhythmic clicks
Of the sprinkler system are just the thing
The bossa nova raincrows need
To keep regular this time of year,
And not get constipated and constrained
And confused by all the natural lack of rain
And all the pseudo rainbows.

And who am I in this living dream?
I am all.
The wild wall flowers that hide in the brush,
The foreign fuchsia, the dahlia lush,
I am the rich oil man, the throaty thrush,
The raincrow, the cloud, the ocean deep.
I am you,
And you keep me
From going extinct.


-jenn
Crepe myrtle hues are never wrong.
You can tell a year
From any other
By the way a pale pink is sometimes not
And just how hot a hot pink bud might bloom.
But when the myrtles crimson tall
In June,
Grooms best look for a place to fall out
And flop in august and understand,
Brides will girdle and bridle
And band together
And molt,
And revolt is at hand.
They might decide to burn their bras again.
And yes,
It's going to be that kind of year.

-jenn

Thursday, July 6, 2017

My bush has gone wild and untamed,
But its flowers by any other names
Are roses, and the scent of them
Is pure as heaven spun moss and bud,
For all they've ever tasted is sun
And rain from sheets that fall
Across the sheer blue sky.

And when the blooms get old,
They fold themselves into cocoons
And sleep and fall into a deeper gloom
Than you can fathom.
But imagine, if you will,
Their joy in waking, swaddled and new,
More pink baby buds, more blue skies,
In the arms of some young mother
Who's still in love with their father.

-jenn

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

I stood in line at the health food grocer
Behind a man named J W B*****.
I knew his name because it was written
On the back of his old fatigues
In big black faded letters
A good deal above my eye level.

He was buying one ear of corn,
And believe you me,
No one asked him a damn thing about it.

-jenn
He had always practiced basketball in the street as a kid growing up.
There was a slight curve in the road by his house
And an ever so shallow dip in slope
As he approached the goal.

And tonight, as he headed in for the game winning layup,
He could swear he felt all that, under his feet again,
The same curve of the road, the bend up the hill, the dip!
Two points! He was home alone! A kid again!
Playing like no one was watching!

And as the crowds roared and champagne poured,
He thought how ironic it was
That as a kid in the street
He'd always played as if a giant crowd were watching him,
And now that they were, he played as if they weren't.

-jenn

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

We crashed the wedding for cake
And mockingly said "I do,"
At the proper times.
We toasted ourselves
With glasses held high,
Drank the punch
And whisked ourselves off for a heckuva honeymoon.
It wasn't our wedding,
But are we married now?

-jenn
Eating can be such a hassle these days.
I'm going to start a page on Pinterest
To display my beautiful creations for
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
A tidy collection of drab food pellets,
Fractal and akimbo, gluten/soy/dairy/ nut free,
Lying in the palm of my hand.
Yum yummmmmm.
The future is flavorless.

-jenn
Some people need a good religion,
One that will reward them for all their sacrifice,
If not some great seat in heaven,
At least now, the whispers of the ladies' auxiliary,
Praising,
Saying, "See how she stands by him,"
"See how she cares."

Some others may not have a need for external rewards.
They may do what they feel is right, too,
For just the right reasons,
While the ladies' auxiliary whispers,
And vanishes, and she says,
"See how they run."

-jenn

Sunday, July 2, 2017

He had that look on his face that said
He was embarrassed to be stuck with her
As they waddled out of the Cracker Barrel
Together, single file.

But truth be told,
We're all stuck with each other,
And the quicker we accept that,
The better off humanity will be.

-jenn

Saturday, July 1, 2017

My ball of twine unravels each day,
And at different intervals,
The string produces different sounds
And different melodies.
And sometimes I want to do something else,
To sing an alternate harmony
From an alternate reality.
And sometimes I do, and sometimes it comes out all wrong.
But sometimes when the clouds
Hold their mouths just right,
I can be perfectly in tune,
And I can sing you a true love song
That has never been heard before.

-jenn
Come my children and I will explain
How the millions of grains of sand
Came to be on the beach.
In the olden days of yore,
The olden giants ate more and more
Til they were giant-er,
And the other gods were startled at
How fat the giants had become,
And so, as the gods before them did,
They came up with a food pyramid
To instruct the giants in ways to lose their girth,
Recommended for all but those who were preggers,
Or at the moment giving birth.

Now the food pyramid in those days
Had a big layer on the bottom, of spinach dip,
With the next tier being nuts,
And no ifs or ands, but the next layer
Was a healthy portion of smoked meats,
With potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant next,
Followed by berries and cherries
And chocolate on top.

Now I could stop here, but let me state, that these foods, while slimming,
Are high in oxalates, and that, dear friends, was the problem,
Because giant is as giant does,
And the giants developed giant kidney stones,
And in a desperate attempt to solve them,
Or dissolve as the case may be,
They drank too much kombucha tea
And shattered into a zillion pieces
And washed up and down along all the beaches,
And that, my dear children, is where allllllll that sand came from.

- jenn