Category Archives: Poem

Tofurky Asafoetida Blues

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Tofurky Asafoetida Blues

My brother’s new wife has the whole family curious.
Her allegations seem New-Age and spurious.
With the result that grandma is furious.

She turns family gatherings into a podium
where she expounds on the dangers of sodium.
Meanwhile, the whole family is on Imodium .

Off to the bathroom, each one in a hurry
after imbibing in her saltless curry.
Will grandpa recover? We all share the worry.

Her asafoetida and cumin and dahl
have certainly cast an ominous pall.
We hardly enjoy family dinners at all!

She stuffs us with pita and gags us with bulgur
because she thinks regular rice is just vulgar.

But macrobiotic and Christmas don’t mix.
We miss all the old foods she’s certain to nix.

No turkey, no dressing, no cranberry sauce.
And no Christmas pudding, ’cause she is the boss!

For years, family dinners went by with no glitch,
but not so since bro married this tedious bitch.

So Santa, this year it would be very pleasant
if you gave us all just one communal present.

Please, Santa, deliver us from her tofurkey
and restore us to pudding and dressing and turkey!!!

 

Note: Asafoetida is a strong spice with a pungent smell, often used in Indian cuisine. It has been known to cause burping, farting and swelled lips.

Words of the day are ditch, insist , spurious, vulgar and sodium.

 

Unruly Behavior

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Unruly Behavior

His mat of curly snow-white hair his most distinctive feature,
he wore his pelt upon his head like some lanigerous creature.
A trial to this innocent lamb was that daily battle
with his unruly students who milled around like cattle, 
and because he was a gentle man who never used the belt,
they never knew precisely how horrible he felt.
Still, tongues can drub as lethally as bludgeons or as bats
to destroy  a weak opponent. So, without a doubt, that’s
why he walked out on eighth period, and what he did instead
was to resolve the problem with a bullet through his head.

In the early seventies, with its schools grossly understaffed, the Australian government started recruiting abroad, offering airfare and a “settling in” allowance to any chosen foreign teacher willing to emigrate to Australia. I jumped at the chance and days after my graduation from college, I flew to Sydney for a week-long  orientation session, then went on to Wollongong where I finished out the school year as a supernumerary teacher in a special school for the top students in the area, taking over a few classes from each overburdened teacher until I could be assigned to my own schedule the following semester. What happened, however, was that after a few months, I was reassigned to replace a teacher who had been fired for smoking pot with his students at a school in a government migrant housing district in the middle of the steel mill area.

The classes were not only overfilled, with 38 students per class, but they were also ability-grouped, with top students in the A group and the lowest-performing students in the D through F groups. As a new teacher, I was assigned mainly to these low-performance classes which in truth meant that I was also teaching the classes with disruptive students who displayed the most behavior problems.

So it was with Charles, another teacher recruited from the states—an older man who after flying to Australia and furnishing his apartment,  one day in the middle of an especially confrontational class session with his 3F class, walked out the door, packed his bags and flew back to the states that night, leaving off the keys to his apartment at our apartment on his way to the airport, directing us to dispense with its contents as we saw fit.

I was reminded of this on Facebook today when a fellow-teacher marked the 50th anniversary of that wild year by sending me a photo of kitchen utensils they had culled from Charles’s apartment—which they use to this day. My roommate and I scored his dining room table, a single mattress which we put on the floor in our living room to use as a couch, and a woven tablecloth we hung on the wall above the “couch.”

Although some of the details have been changed to allow the prompts to be used, (our Charles was bald and thankfully figured out a less-violent solution to his problem) this poem was inspired by the memory of his action. I, on the other hand, finished out that year and re-upped for another, completing  that year as well before becoming one of the notorious “Berkeley 14,” who prompted a district-wide walk-out in protest to teaching conditions. But that is a story for another day, another prompt.

Here are the only photos I have of my Australian crew of friends, all of whom taught at the school where I taught as well. You can see Charles’ table, his mattress (floor couch) as well as his bedspread we hung on the wall in our dining room. My friends did not always dress this strangely. This was a Bazza McKenzie party–and guests were to come dressed in the worst possible taste to reflect Bazza’s stereotyped Australian personality. The guy in the “revolutionary” outfit complete with steel-wool beard and pineapple grenade (compiled by us, to reflect his anti-Bazza personality) is Chuck–one of the instigators of the Berkeley 14 protest. Can’t remember how many others in this group were part of it. I think I’ve explained it in another post. If so, I’ll include a link.

Prompts today are lanigerous, belt, innocence, drub and battle. The photo of the sheep is by Sulthan Auliya on Unsplash.

Poetic Reconstruction

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Poetic Reconstruction

I’m going to the hospital. I’ve made a reservation,
for I am much in need of a creative restoration.

I need an operation to regain my way of seeing.
I’m going to regain my glow–the fiber of my being.

I suffer from prosaism. Triteness clogs each vein.
My poetic diagnosis? Derivative. Inane.

The abundance of my poems does not refute the fact
of the originality that lately they have lacked.

So, take me to the hospital. I’m ready to be cut.
I’m ready to be lifted from my creative rut.

Unveil my eyes, unblock my brain. Clear pathways to my heart,
but as you improve parts of it, please leave the broken part.

For all the pleasures of the world do not make up a whole.
It also takes some sorrows to feed a poet’s soul.

 

Prompt words today are abundance, hospital, fiber, prosaism and glow.

A Skin of Me All the Way Down, For dVerse Poets, Jan 26, 2022

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A Skin of Me All the Way Down

“There is a human wildness held beneath the skin.”- Arts, Jim Harrison

I leave a skin of me all the way down,
shedding my body 
like petals of a flower
as I go down
through hard edges
I scrape against,
leaving parts of me
against the walls
as I fall down
into the place
where blood runs together
into a bowl which breaks
and spills into earth
which sinks down
into space which is a hole that is
the middle of a world falling down.

My dust falls after me
as I fall
down
to the horizon
of my center­­—
that hard stone
whose discovery
 is our purpose
 for going down.

The edge of me
is almost gone
from falling down.

My center,
clean pip stone,
hangs from a stem
caught in the beak of a
mockingbird that’s cawing, “Up.”

Motes on the dust of its wings
pull me up
while I still want to be down.

The bird with my mother’s hands
pulls me up,
voice from a dream
of childhood,
calling,”Judy”
and pulling me up.

Up through the walls
of the world which
puts my skin back.
Away from the parts of me
left on the floor 
 that are not coming up.

Wings beat me up,
pulling my layers
back over and
around me,
pulling my life
back up to me—

the spelling bees
and the recipe
for rhubarb jam
and our secret
family pattern for
cutout May baskets
and car payments—

all the skin of of me coming up
along with accordion music
 and  geometry,

and I rise up
through the dust
of chalkboard erasers
beaten on the school fire escape
and broken tea sets
and mud pies
and the stillborn calf
and taxes.

Let me go back down,
I plead,
but still, I rise.

Wings pull me up
and the bird holds
my invisible wrappings
in its beak
by the string
that ties me to the up,

and though I chew at it
and rip it with the hands
I’ve grown back rising up,

and though I cry out
for my release,
the sun rises,
and
I rise up
with it,
a part of me
still pleading,
“Let me fall down.”

 

For dVerse poets, we were to write a poem based on a line from  Jim Harrison. Go HERE to read more poems written to this prompt.

Ode to a Grackle

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(Click on images to enlarge.)

Ode to a Grackle

A variation of the crow,
you strut wherever you may go
unless you’re flying post to tree
to get a better look at me.

You stick your chest out, spread your tail
horizontal, you haughty male,
then fold it neatly, like a fan,
to vertical, because you can!

Three toes in front and one behind,
a songbird of the perching kind,
at a moment’s notice, you’re on the wing,
soaring above everything.

No cat that ever stalked a grackle
succeeded in his stealthy tackle.
No quagmire brings about your fall,
for you just glide above them all.

Every grackle that comes along
sings an ever-changing song.
He chirps, he purrs, he clucks, he whirrs,
whistles, squeegees, chatters, chirrs.

No bird save you, my coal-black grackle,
has such variety of cackle.
And when you deign to land en masse,
your music sounds like broken glass.

Though Mexico was your first home,
both south and north you chose to roam.
Like me, you dared to spread your wings
to see what that adventure brings.

And when you perch upon my tree
to share your company with me,
such varied music swells from your chest,
of all loud neighbors, I love you best.

 

*Grackle feathers were used ceremonially by the Aztecs, who it is speculated, brought them northwards for this purpose. Zanate is the Aztec name for what in the north we call mynah birds or grackles.

Prompts today are save, variation, grackle, quagmire and chest.

Picky Eater

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Picky Eater

I can’t stand mushrooms, abhor liver.
To dine on brains just makes me shiver.

Drinking milk’s against my wishes.
Fish is simply for the fishes.

Raw tomatoes? I’d rather die.
And one more mouthful I won’t try?
I have no taste for humble pie!

For the dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Shiver

Pierced Dove

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Pierced Dove

Art historians aver
and modern artists would concur
her paintings are a visual feast
inspired by the dreadful beast
that consumed her from within.
She painted it time and again.
Her sketches were a handbook of
pain of body and of love.
The thorn, the arrow, the pierced heart—
the years together and apart—
her happiness oft on the wing
prompts the cash register’s cha-ching
more than sixty years since she
finally set her spirit free,
leaving part of her unfurled
in paint, on canvas, for the world.

This is the piece I did for an exhibition in Mexico City honoring the 100th year since Frida’s birth. Its title is “Painterminable” (Pain, Painter Interminable.) I was very honored to be one of two non-Mexicans invited to exhibit. It coincided with a retrospective of her work. Sorry that my piece is so much larger than two of hers. I wanted to exhibit all three of her works as a gallery. Click on them to enlarge them. 

Prompt words today are cha-ching, handbook, sketches, aver and feast.

New Walls Can’t Make Good Neighbors

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For this prompt, I’d like to reblog a poem written eight years ago, soon after I started my blog. I actually went back and edited the original, so it is a newer version of itself. HERE is the link

Weekly Prompts Weekend Challenge: Walls

Little Jobs

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Little Jobs

Why is it that just as I find a time for resting,
I think of another job life seems to be requesting?

Little jobs pursue me, destroying all my fun.
Life comprises all of them until my day is done.

Dogged and determined, I fulfill all of them,
tolerating constant toil, my life filled to the brim.

I am a proper martyr. I toil with little resting.
I have no time for joyful acts like partying and festing.

Tasks that are debilitating to much lesser folks
are to superior ones like me, merely nature’s pokes

to spur me on towards greatness—to glory and to fame.
In the annals of history, you’re sure to see my name.

So thank God for little jobs, for they add up at last
into that great accomplishment within which fame is cast.

 

Prompt words today are debilitating, dogged, resting, comprise and tolerate. Image by Irena Carpaccio on Unsplash.

Now and Then: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Wordle 537

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Now and Then

In cracking the present to reveal the past,
it shimmers, triumphant, expansively vast.
I tend to remember the moments most happy—
successful and positive, silly and sappy,
but when I remember it using a filter,
it leans to one side, completely off-kilter.

The same number of memories from days gone by
if remembered at all, are recalled with a sigh.
I reach into my heart and remember again
the more negative moments of days that have been.
Then I quiver with passions, now full of dejection
of the losses and failures  and pains of rejection

It’s the way of the world to give us one day
what in the future it will take away,
but nonetheless, we must live for the present
and accept all it offers—both painful and pleasant.
When we pin all our thoughts on past sadness and fun,
We fasten ourselves to a life that’s undone.

This is my answer to John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”

The Sunday Whir Wordle 537 prompts are: undone cracking triumph expansive reach quiver shimmering filter way reveal sigh moment