I'm Hungry

“I’m hungry,”

I cry to whomever might listen.

“I’m hungry,”

I cry to the broken world,

But the world has nothing,

Nothing to offer,

Nothing to feed my soul.

“I’m starved,”

I cry to whomever might hear it.

“I’m famished,”

I plea to Mother Earth,

And Mother rocks me

In her cradle of plenty,

And peacefully bids me nurse.

-jenn long

Cuneiform

I could translate Cuneiform

If they hadn’t abbreviated.

If they’d used the classic endings

And fully conjugated their verbs,

And not contracted here and there

And acronymbed their way across

The crescent so bloody fertile

And all.

-jenn long

Song of Socrates

Oh what songs he might have sung

If he hadn’t waited for the day of his death

To “make and cultivate” the music

As his dream recurred to say.

I see his face in the patterns of

The faded ivy, lace, and ferns

Imprinted on my bedsheet here,

And a tear falls on his nose.

I cry for you, Great Socrates.

I beg you, sing,

Please sing for me.

-jenn long

Seasons

In the morning, it is Fall.
But afternoon brings Indian Summer,
Mating season for dragonflies,
Last hurrah for moths.
Now the rustle of the leaves,
The clucks and chirps
Of swallow and thrush,
Brings the Monarchs south again
On their way to Mexico.

My heart yearns to follow them—
To flutter off to some warm beach,
Dig my toes in the sand for a season
And laugh a lot with you,
Until some unknown force at work
In us says, “Yea, verily, verily,
Time has come to migrate north again.”

But since I have no wings to fly,
And my bones aren't hollow ones,
I'll stay today where I am put.
I'll stay tomorrow, too,
And sing my song
With it's clicks and chirps,
And pluck my tenor banjo strings,
Saying much more
Than, “Here I am,”
Until such time when I can fly away.

-jenn long

Locked

Tell me baby, and I'll never forget.
The pressure waves that gurgle out
Over your larynx
And whisper your secrets
From the tip of your tongue
Rearrange the carbon
In my 5 carbon sugars,
And change the combination

Of my nitrogenous base.
No one else can open
The place where they're hidden,

Only deep retinal soul scan,

Voice recognition,

Your sweetest “I Love You’s,”

Sweeter still, your embrace.

-jenn long

Come See Me

Come and see me

In the morning

Come and see me

In the dawn

Before I’ve draped

My garments bout me

Before I’ve put my makeup on

See my heart

The child within me

The dreams I hold

The smiles I hide

Then smile at me

With eyes wide open

So I can see

What you have inside

-jenn long

Day Old Hay

There's a scent of afterloss
In a field of day old hay,
Like blood left spilled

From yesterday
On a routed battlefield.
Hearts lie bloody.
Good as dead,

They whimper,
With nothing else to lose.

And yes I know, the war wrought plenty.
And yes I see, the cows will eat.

But look at those with spades a-ready

To bury the dying.
And what of those

Who break their own hearts
As they choose?

-jenn long

To A Few Louses

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An' foolish notion:

What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,

An' ev'n devotion!” ~Robert Burns from “To A Louse”

I heard some things I probably shouldn’t have

My neighbors making fun of my writing

Making fun of me

It really hurt my feelings

Sigh…..

They don’t want to understand the poems

They don’t even want to try

And all this time I thought they liked me

They were nice, at least, to my face

But when they thought I wasn’t around

Quite another case, I guess

Maybe there is power in seeing ourselves as others see us

Maybe it would free us from many a burden

(If it didn’t hurt so much)

And so I looked hard at myself in the mirror

But I don’t have any lice

Not today anyway

Just a few lousy neighbors

-jenn long

Nameless

Might I but say your name aloud?

I tremble to think I might take it in vain,

Or that the vulgar, commonplace might crowd

The purity of the thought wherein it dwells.

Or, if in giving speech to the dream

It might, as wishes, swell

And burst, if uttered first, before the candles blown.

And so, ineffable, I retain them

Unspoken,

Only to scrawl them on my heart—

The consonants alone.

-jenn long

Starved for the Cosmos

I stand in damp sand,
Cool to the touch
Of the soles of my bare feet.
I face east
And swallow big gulps of the sun.
I’m starved for you--
And the cosmos.

There's not a trace to the eye
Of the true sky,
Of the black energy
That stretches beyond,
And the magnetic resonance of the stardust
That stares holes right through us.

But the force of it pulls me
Hard this morning,
Draws the desires of my heart
Toward you,
Claws the animal mesmerism
Out to the forefront,
And woos me to some former place
To feed and spawn.

-jenn long

Fecund Fall

Cupid is older and wiser now.

He comes disguised in leaves of gold,

Strolls through autumn like a nonchalant thief,

And shoplifts what hearts he may.

His arrows hide the true aims of Fall—

Earth’s great time to sew its seed.

Dry kernels fall in the hurry of harvest,

Unnoticed and unkempt,

Until the breedy earth says, “No?!”

“No more, and then the hush begins to fall.”

Nature may abhor a vacuum,

But Nature surely loves her Winter—

Who quiets her heat and gives her deep meaning rest.

And Eros smiles. His work is done.

He let Fall drop us

Smooth in the lap

Of the greatest lover of all.

-jenn long

Cup Pickin' Time

When I let him pick out his own cup,
He climbs up onto the counter
And monkey paws through the cupboards
Til he finds the one he wants.
He ain’t lookin’ for no sippy cup.
He chooses the biggest one in the house—
A giant wide-mouth mason jar,
Bigger, almost, than his head.
He has to hold it with both hands
And drag it up to his little lips,
And get him a big ole, big man drink,
The size o’ Texas, y’all.
Yes, he may be a little guy, now,
But inside the legends of his own mind,
He is huge!
He’s gonna pick out his own cup
From now on.

-jenn long

"I Have a Feelin' It's Gonna Burn"

“I have a feeling it’s gonna burn,”

He said of his old house there at the end of the drive.

“Lots of things burn out here, you know?”

He lapsed to a faraway smile.

He never heard another word I said.

The promise of phoenix rising meant nothing to him.

He had a bootstrap theology

And pulled himself up.

He didn’t bother praying for disaster

When he had the power to create his own.

-jenn long

Lavender Mine

I slave away in the lavender mines,

Tend to the peppermints,

Cultivate clover.

Catnip and chamomile sprout about

As I sweat over fragrant buds.

Finally a slight breeze

Over the basil

Brushes the anise flowers

Up through the hyssop.

I wipe my brow

And stand in the dewy mud.

And all is well,

My Love, this morning.

All is well.

I’ve taken root.

All is well

In the world with me

And Thee.

-jenn long

Last Blooms of Summer

A hurried burst of 
Grounded flora
Rushes out penultimate blooms.
And the faintest 
Aroma bergamot
Covers the stench of a million tombs
Of love gone by
And hasty statements
And times forgotten by the masses,
Of vulgar unabated grief
Of my proletariat working asses and oxen.
And finally opened,
Finally fertile,
Finally alive and urgent to blow,
I savor their scent,
The stirring last kiss,
Til I breathe the winter’s barren snow.

-jenn long

Corn Whisperer

Corn hardly grows during day.

It needs the rustling sounds of love

At night to noctosynthesize

Its photo-sensitivities.

Come camp with me in the bittergreens—

The dandelions,

The clovers,

Until the sweet alfalfa blossoms

Shoot the merry moon.

And may even the joyous corn silk whispers

Kiss your spirit, your lips, your whiskers,

And rock your cradle of love unto your soul.

-jenn long

Let There Be Love

Love brings to me the next dimension.
There was no shape,
No color, no depth.
There was no light
Until there was you,
Only chaos upon the face of my deep.
There was no sound,
No word, no song.
There was no beauty,
No primordial goo,
No star in the heavens,
No shine in my eye.
There was nothing
Til there was you.

-jenn long

Love Buzz

Oh, you make me buzz at a higher frequency!
You send me high!
You send me free!
Bouncing off the waves
With a lovestruck buoyancy
Of hi-energy streaming
And wonderlust!

My pressure waves crash and fall upon you,
And droplets of singing angel choirs
Mist the distance
Of once barren sand,
Now littered with glisten
And diamond dust.

For I am rich
When I'm with you,
Unmistakably highly queued.
Skipping thru the universes,
Tickled pink,
From loving you.

 

-jenn long

South Field

I close my eyes and
Stand in the shadowlands.
Tall wisps of lovegrass grow
Up to my waist.
Southwind blows
My big straw hat.
Clouds go tumbling close.

I pull a shoot from a sagey clump
And walk with the sweet end in my mouth,
My long skirt winnows in the wind.
I taste the silty green.

Tomorrow the tractors will come and rumble.
The swather will rattle and roll and cut
All of it down to a raze and an end to the row.

But today it is my field of dreams
Where great birds swoop
One for the other,
And fieldmice scamper and nibble and mate,
And rabbits chew the ribosomes
Of the lovegrass where it tufts.

Yes all of this exists
In the shadow of my eyelid,
In the hazel of my mirrored marble eye.

Come and go back there with me,
Today, or better, yesterday.
Give me your hand and shut your eyes with me.

 

-jenn long

Alive

I have seen the Lord within you--
A terrible wonder,
An awesome fright,
An expanding mystery,
Wrapped in swaddles
Of infinite symmetry
And dazzling light,
And weapons and power,
And peace, and holdings,
Vaster than multiverses,
Greater than all!
And stirred to behold you
In your kingdom,
In love and honor,
I fall.
I fall.
-jenn long

Gone

 I’ve grieved for you today

As one would for a stillborn babe,

As one would cry for an amputation,

Or an abortion forced upon.

I’ve plucked out my own right eye for you,

So that I would never sin,

And cut off my own horn of power

To enter heaven maimed,

So that no vain imagination

Could ever come between

Your own deception

And the fact that I don’t exist.

 

-jenn long

Beamed

I creep down through a chiseled shaft
Perfectly 4" by 8" by 8"by 4."
I drop into your King's chamber,
Overwhelmed at the hands
Of extreme intelligence.

There, the faint residue
Of zinc-hydrochloride
Hydrogenates my core.
The vibrations beam me,
At microwave frequency,
Back out
And through the Ethosphere toward Orion.
And now, as I escape Earth's orbit,
I fully understand.

-jenn long

Muffet's Mountain Bike

The spider's web is on the move,
And quite without his scant permission.
He steps down upon his stoop
To see his world go by.
He made the mistake of making his home
In the handlebar of my mountain bike.
His terra firma turned out to be not too firm.

So now he desperately looks for hope.
He finds some at my fingertips,
Then creeps up further
The soft skin on the back of my hand.
I pick him up and give him a blow,
And he para-sails with legs un-akimbo.
He lands in the autumn grass in the ditch
At the edge of a deep, sweet wood.

And this is his forever after,
A happy one? I like to think?
For this is the forest where the piggy lives
With the ring in the end of his nose.
This— the eternal honeymoon site

Of the owl and the pussycat
And their never rustable, runsable spoon.

And yet tomorrow, when the page is turned,
I will be sure to check my handlebars
Very thoroughly!
(And you can bet your sweet patootie on that.)

 

-jenn long

Gingerbread Girl

You can't graph her—
Even 3d,
The woman in my dreams.
She struts and zips and telestutters,
Then vanishes into thin air,
Only to reappear from someplace
That physics formulae finds not feasible.

She has gingerbread for breakfast
And never gains a gram of weight.
She smiles a dazzling set of teeth
At all those who tell her she "can't."
"Can't never could," her backend says
As she shakes it on her way
To the next dimension of her
Impossible dream.

Come to me great queen of the sky!
Shine your confidence my way!
Tell me your slightly off-color jokes
Until my belly cramps from laughter
And my cheek muscles tone like yours.
In the beauty and wisdom and grace of it all,
I'm assured that the self-righteousness of this world's eye
Is but filthy rags of tattered dogma
And chains to hold us to the ground.

But the giggles of her inner children,
The twelve elders of my amygdala,
And even ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths
Percent Pure Love
Pop around me like champagne bubbles,
And Victory is here!

 

-jenn long

Affirmation

I hope you don’t think
I could ever forget
Even one of the sweet words
That drop from your heart.
Like honey, wherein no harmful thing can grow,
Like amber, that surrounds and protects me,
They keep me from the harsh rays of reality.
They heal me from the callous echoes
Of things that should never have been said,
And nourish my soul by the utterance
Of all the things that should have been.
 
-jenn long

The Very Idea

Just the very idea of you
Elevates my mind,
Takes me to a higher plane
Where thought alone is enough.
But the Spirit of your Personality
And the genie of your soul
Grant the wishes of my life
And open heaven’s vault.
 
And so I lack for nothing,
Except more time with you—
Hours to sunbathe on eternity’s shores,
Minutes of precious splash,
Miles of cubic seconds
To walk hand in hand and bask
In the healing glory
Of your majestic presence.
 
-jenn long

Sun Kissed

The sun's lips at sunset
Rest deep in the caverns.
Warm and full,
They set waters ablaze
And burn through the night
In sweetness and glory
Til he rises at daybreak
With a strong love and light.

And his kiss has moved me
To a new place in orbit.
And his sweet kiss
Has changed me and purified.
Age old dross evaporated.
He left nothing poor to hide me.
I shine like sheer gold.

-jenn long