POEMS FOR PLAY OR PLAGUE

Augurs

Are bones cast around

A cavern floor dark

Like music that's found

In the singing lark?

Or more like lightning

Come out of the blue,

Like storms now tight’ning

Around me and you?

Are sheets not slept in

Yet torn at the seams

By shadowy sins

From shadowy dreams?

Are words of warning

That from pens will shout

Spell armies storming

A future redoubt?

Do bones of a mouse,

Found in a bottle say

Who'll starve in the house

That they'll make one day?

…..

Finally,

Will those letters 'graved

Into a tree’s bark

Spell hope is yet saved

In the coming dark?

Mote

Across the bedsheet,

by the mountain

of my shoulder,

an inch from

my glacier nose,

a spider races—

whose whole family

could sit for tea

on the head of a pin.

Its red body is so small

I can’t see the legs move

as it races across

the linen plain,

as if pulled along

by an invisible string.

And my eye, giant

above the only horizon

it will ever know,
blinks in wonder

at the perfection

of such a mote!

The Flat Sun

In the hot

and burning

parking lot,

the day’s oven-heat

stirs up currents of air.

Like disease vectors

they come coiling out

amid the steel and glass artifacts.

They flow, writhing out,

but stall at the pavement’s edge,

rebuffed, suddenly abated,

made mad  as swirling dust-devils.

They hold at that place

where trees once stood.

They rage at the ground

where limbs had twined

beneath colourful canopies,

and where branches

once swelled and flushed

at the coming fall.

NEWS OF THE
WORLD #9

Newspapers tell us;

TV compels us

not to dwell—us

upon the rest.

“Money’s so maddening!”

(Gurus are fattening.)

People are battening

down the hatches again.

And those prices did kill.

Those bankers did shill.

And winter still chills

old bones.

So countries implode

while people explode.

And banks, á la mode,

play with matches.

A planet of debt?

Their only regret:

there’s no credit left

in heaven.

But royals will wed

and stars will bed.

Oh, what they said!

And so on.

…

Our stormy seasons

are no longer treasons.

“And the reasons?”

(Turn the page.)

A blue top spinning?

Or a dervish, sinning?

We spend our time ginning

up our global wobble.

Floods come and go,

and things still grow.

But that radioactive glow

is so arresting!

Earthquakes and landmines:

real estate’s prime time.

All show a fine line

soon erased.

Mudslides and day cares;

bullets and teddy bears.

(Too many over there.)

“Is that my café mocha?”

DRONES—THE NEW BEES!

(It’s Jesus they please.)

Now, down on your knees

for snaps.

By dropping our bombs

we will get along.

We’ll all sing a song

in blood.

…

Our hearts have grown feral:

Like fish in a barrel—

those children! Now sterile

in graves.

…

For while winds all the day

wild fires will play

(they will burn from May

to Kansas.)

Our Dorothy’s left Oz,

her slippers rubbed raw.

They'll make some new laws

to deport her.

But she won't return

though all of us yearn

to keep what she’s learned

from tornadoes.

YOUR POETRY TOOLKIT’S TOP TEN LIST!

#10. A Tool Box: Without a kit to put your tools in, you’ll just keep losing them. Label that “Experience”, son.

#9. A Hammer: You’ve got to start somewhere—keep banging away; you’re bound to hit the nail on the head at some point.

#8. A Saw: Saws, old and new. Under most circumstances you’ll be able to shape some sort of plank with them. Some saws are made of pretty thin stuff and are weak; others will cut way deeper than you’d ever imagined.

#7. A Plane: Even the best of us have lots of rough to shave off. Nothing in life is smooth, so why should a poem be any different?

#6. A Level and Plumb-Bob: Tell me: when were you ever able to draw a straight line, or to face something square-on without at least a little help from a handy leveling tool?

#5. An Awl: Everyone needs to make a point now and then. Just keep the pointy end pointed away from you. (Unless making punctures in your skin is the point.)

#4. A Tape Measure: No matter what you think, your skills will never be so refined that you won’t have to take the measure of things. Ballparks are for baseball. If you can’t be precise and do it by the inch, you’ll never be able to do it by the mile.

#3. Clamps, Glue, Screws and Nails, Twine, Wire and Duct Tape: For a whole lot of reasons, a whole lot of things need to be held together at the same time. Building a poem isn’t serial—it’s like a pot of bubbling stew! Everything is ready to come roaring up and spilling over. Use all of what you’ve got to keep it together. It’ll be a mess if it gets out of hand.

#2. A Drill: And when putting things together, you may need to drill down a long, long way before all the connections can be made. Be sure you pack extra drill bits because there’s plenty of knotty wood along the way, and you’re sure to break a few until you get the hang of things.

#1. Plans:  And the number one poetry tool you need in your kit are plans. Plans are the most important thing: Plans for the future, for the past; clear or vague plans; God’s plan or yours. Whatever. But if you don’t plan, if you can’t or won’t plan, or if you don’t know that you should plan or how to pan, then when the time comes to assemble it all together on Life’s Great Workbench, you won’t be able to tell your whole from any of the others.

By a Woodlot Sometime

Brimming with happiness,

the carefree gurgling of a hidden brook

signals a change in the woodlot.

Soon, birds land on the new real estate

of green shoots that will someday 
grow into limbs.

Squirrels meet at the feet of mossy stumps

to organize new gatherings.

A deer snacks on berries

by a row of long-corded wood.

In an eddy by the water’s turning bank,

a catfish nods hello, then swims away,

playfully twirling his moustache.

A drying crayfish and a hungry ant

race across warm mud in a dead heat.

Contented worms eat their fill.

Bees gather tasty nectar

from increasingly speckled blossoms.

Flies land on a dying beetle

to make their crèche.

And winds swirl through impatient trunks

eager to grow apart.

……….

Much later

under swifter waters,

rocks are smoothed

and polished into stones.

Rules of Engagement

There are things that make us glad

And things that make us sad.

But will we learn to stay away

From things that make us mad?

I’m still reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.*  I read a bit at bedtime for some light reading. It was published in 1722 and is a fictionalized account of the 1665 bubonic plague that swept through London and killed 97,000 people that year. It’s the same plague, in a slightly more virulent form of course, that during the mid-fourteenth century killed in Europe an estimated 1/3 of the population, and was commonly known as the Black Death. So reading about the London plague gives me a bit of perspective on Covid-19, and makes for a more restful night’s sleep.

One Journal entry I just read has our fictional narrator (Defoe had no first-hand knowledge of the events of 1665; he was an infant at the time) walking in the street after checking on his brother’s now-abandoned house.

“In these Walks I had many dismal Scenes before my Eyes, as particularly of Persons falling dead in the Streets, terrible Shrieks and Skreekings of Women, who in the Agonies would throw open their Chamber Windows, and cry out in a dismal Surprising Manner; it is impossible to describe the variety of Postures in which the Passions of the Poor People would Express themselves.” (78-79)

"Is this far enough away? Are we good, now?"

I never knew that women "skreeked", and that's good to know, but you can see why reading the Journal gives me a good night’s sleep. Things aren’t that bad—at least for now.

And speaking of poor people, I went into a convenience store the other day to buy lottery tickets and, I’m ashamed to say, junk food. Going in, there was a young guy, probably in his early 20s, sitting begging for money beside the door. He sat there with his shoes off, his belongings in bags beside him, and he spoke in the confused and disordered manner of someone with a psychiatric disability. I gave him some money and wished him the best. There but for the grace…

It’s quite unusual to see people (pan-handling? is that PC? I don't mean any offense) like this young man at a Mike’s Mart convenience store, but with so many public buildings, businesses, stores and restaurants shuttered in the city, he went to where there was still some foot traffic and business. How many people like him will have to live rough and weather the biological and economic storms we’re entering? How many will afterwards? I'll wager a lot more. Will it be a harsher place for him to eke out his living afterwards? And for the time being, what will we as a society do to make his life a little better? Are our federal and provincial initiatives, and the massive spending proposals to deal with the Covid-19 crisis adequate to address each citizen’s needs, including that young man’s? I’m not so sure about that.

And not to get all world endy and so on, but when we start letting more and more people slip through the cracks, where will they go? They won’t end up sipping Merlot in their wine caves, I should think. Some of them might start tossing sticks of dynamite into those caves! Just sayin’. 
So, here's a few poems before the Apocalypse comes round, to help you stave off zombies and all the rest of the infected masses for a spell:

NoW #9—I wrote this several years ago sometime after 2011. I know it was later because I reference the Norway massacare of 77 young students, in July of that year, by a racist nuttbar (in the line: "like ducks in a barrel"). And I thought I would put in because the NoW was a bit angry and had some pointed criticisms about banking and greed and corruption and war, and “mudslides and teddy bears”—all good stuff, all timely topics, I think; all the topics we like to mull over constantly, devising ways to stop them from occurring, even as they occur.

AUGURS—not sure when I wrote this, but I must have been reading

Another Junk Food Victim

something archeological or pre-historical or doing lines of mummy-powder, and got in the mood for casting my own bones around to see what they might tell me about myself or about the future. But since my bones come wrapped in a lot of wet biologicals, no-can-do, I’m afraid. I’ll have to wait until they bleach out in the sun for a while before anyone can roll them for me. No doubt they will come up snake-eyes. [I remember as a teenager I once found a mouse in a bottle, behind a woodpile dead and mummified . I can't recall whether I had the genius idea to put a piece of cheese in there to trap him. I hope I didn't but I wouldn't put it past me.  Ed.]
MOTE—was based on an early morning observation some years ago. Maybe I dreamed about the little red spider running across my sheets, I'm not sure. Something so small and so obviously alive and compact—a bundle of tiny, living matter expressing itself in this vast universe. It had purpose and direction (to get the hell away from me!) It's kind of mind blowing, man! I felt a bit like like God for 3/10^ths of second. 

"Normally, I don't put one of these into eyes."

I put in POETRY TOOLKIT—as an aid to all young and aspiring (to be better than me—which is a rather low bar), do-it-yourselfer poets. Get out your toolboxes and start your collection of those necessary tools, today. It might take you a day or a lifetime to find just the right set to use. But they are necessary. 
Writing poetry is about as frustrating and futile  for me (at times) as farting against thunder (the thunder being my ego or stalled soul or something that automatically gets in the way). So in order to write something that can compete with all those blowhard winds, get those tools ready! 
WOODLOT—Another woods with critters, another brook, more stones and time—all the usual suspects to try and tie up in a neat package, with a pretty little bow on top. Time is the main factor, or main culprit, perhaps. Or maybe it’s just brain chemicals fooling their titular master. Oh well, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…” as the poem says.

Poems can be anybody’s business, if you can afford the rent.

Cheers, Jake.

"I'm of two minds on this."

* Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. Penguin Books, London, England, 2003. First published 1722.