1.
The anemic widow wears her black dress of letters
and clicks high heels on the concrete
the damsel's taps awaken the genteel gentlemen
and brings them all to quick attention
warm soot whirls
with yesterdays obituaries
making small tornadoes spin
about the gray field of their knees
the breeze parts the slit in her skirt
the words drip weakly from her painted mouth
the widow shifts the wind closes her eyes
quietly pleased
uptown
the Quilting Bees pause in their prattle
their applique stitches so risky
so phallic in nature
to glance out the window
and hiss collectively
at the pugnacious beast who rules the alley
the subway rats itself out from under the blacktop
factory doors belch out melancholy workers
Lies ride to the suburbs on the sides of commuter rails
2.
Why have you come?
Gargoyles sweat algae on the rooftops
rain runs down copper gutters long gone verdigris
on the slick street
cats squeeze through iron scrolls
slip into the park
their eyes the blades that slice the dark
there a man sits on a black bench backward
sticking his tongue in the ears of those who will listen
to the stories of tribes and corporations
run amuck inside this mad prank
the smell of piss emits from pores in the sidewalk
his hands shake holding his hat out for donations
the City clock unticks the hours
and a thief smiles from the shadows
Why have you come?
Does the metal on your tongue tingle from what you last swallowed?
Here comes the pale child with moon flowers.
3.
"Ezekiel saw the Wheel, way up in the middle of the air"
begin with what will excite them --
Salome's dancing veils, details in letters
barely visible
now smell them fall on dirty hotel sheets
barely white --Sal Paradise mewling to get in the backdoor
He can't hear and she's Excited. Neil is driving like he always does
did/iswaswillbe. Holy shit it's a Time rift... Batman!
Yes, yes there are always pert breasts and gaping holes
“Dante's First Circle of Hell is where you'll go”
Too bad you're Catholic
but we''ll pray for undressed Angels
dancing on the streets of gold, sans disease
no, baby, Ovid doesn't interest me
except for conversation and what I can steal
Without punctuation Ginsberg's stuff is nearly unreadable
when the puncture occurs you bleed out
bleed out
bleed out
bleed
a blood lake a blood moon blood on the rocks blood like milk
white blood that flows down from Blake into open mouths
only to be vomited out
smeared into odes hymns into poems
screamed out from dead animal horns across the vacuous plains that cluster
in star-starved unborn universes
unheard help me in this unquelling
when the body falls into the vortex
when all that is left is a speck composed of Everything
return my heart to my throat
ease my hate of the well-dressed Man in a gray suit
Cary Grant Ruth Martin Maureen Robinson
Uniron your sheets June Cleaver
Believe in the resurrection of the dumbsaints
Wait with me at Tree's feet with laurel coronation leaves
uneat the fruit
4.
"better to be bugged I think”
Mr. Baudelaire let me hold his arm, we walked
he smelled of opium and starch
everything was a delicate curlicue, the foliage, fences, the rusty ironworks;
it had just rained and the light inside the lanterns swelled
like his voice that blistered over the perimeter
then quickly blasted back into the ether.
I shouldn't have forgotten to tell you
he spoke in a feverish whisper
about a seething Crowd
their bodies warm and pressing new shapes and sounds
from the air. His irises, vague starpoints staring
toward a City
distant still.
5.
It was in the seduction of the mist
the unsure dampness
which doesn't fall but lingers
clinging to the molecules that gather up space
Why are you afraid?
It is a natural reaction. The pant and groan
the violet unknown where the spirit sinks
before explosion.
Why are you afraid?
go ahead
unfeel
The sculptor's voice echoes between skyscrapers
“Here is the mica and wings
here are letters and bits of all unsure things
create what always exists but has not yet been seen.”
5. Pasithea, an unsculpted Grace outside the City
on October 10, 2007. © All rights reserved
to A. Canova
the Flowers and frivolity upset me
the way the voices drift
the way he scores the scarf across your privates
obviously enamored with your asses;
o' my silly sisters of folly
while you dally in your bourgeois ignorance
I have been jumping cliffs
holding the soft hand of that petty thief dressed
in tattered burlap
we tramp cloudburnt and heavy with lambskin bags
mistakes marking our paths
drifting inside the poppy's seeds
the death of things unborn raw on our lips
we lick the color of water from the stream
from each hillock, Byzantium beckons
the arrival of the dirty children
longing to answer
the City's mournful wail
Author notes
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1 - 26 of 26
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6. ah ha! something else i know: Pasithea (i graduated from humboldt state univ., in calif.; look up humboldt gold). this is the patron goddess of northern calif. flowers in the hair and poppy seeded deep blue sleep . . . nothing's more recumbent than ignorance. i like the city on the hill image, byzantium . . . both a wistful feeling and strangely intoxicating. before that, you were on a path, and before that jumping cliffs, which is how i have felt on this journey you call 'urban poems'. -dirtychildfish
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you're killing me
5. i prefer lust in the dust to fear in the fog, but they both have panting and groaning in common. fear and loathing, fear and loving: i can see there is a rushing and pouring back and forth between the vessels of human emotion. once, when i was in high school, it thought i was falling in love one day with my english teacher, but it turns out that it was just normal lunchtime hunger and low blood sugar levels. i just bring this up because speaking of unsure things, love and fear are often confused. maybe because they share a lot of the same emotional real estate as the two least sturdy, yet most profound, forces of human nature. -silverfish -
4. eyes of beauty in the beholder: the use of fillagree images is interesting. like it, the hardness of rolled iron in a relief of natural curved patterns. that's a great city foreground/background composition. i know that's not a focus of the narrative, but i like it. also, that the blistering voice, feverish whispter sound somehow louder than the boar roar of the city and the crowd. -silverfish
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no no no it is i think, actually a focus. thanks.
the City. i can't be in any city without thinking of Baudelaire and other poets who wrote of the City Universal.
i am really enjoying your comments on these... thanks.
xo
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3. first let me say, hey! i actually know all those literary, cultural and poet references, and some of their works. so this is great fun for me. sometimes, i don't know what the fuck you are talking about, so i have to spend half a day on the Wik. the ginsburg section is a hoot and a howl. at the end there, the 'uneat the fruit' hooked me. i am thinking the image of uneaten fruit is a ref to a little Innocence regained from a paradise lost. get's full circle anyway from the wheel in the sky at the top. oh. and i just like the name 'Ezekiel.', and Salome jabs me in the spine, reminds me of a stripper i once dated. oh. there was dancing and heads rolling let me tell you. so thanks for this midrif section of your poem. and that little guy Ovid, he's the jewel in the belly. -silverfish
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believe me when i write -- i barely know what the fuck i am talking about. that is why i love readers.
xo
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i'll come to the rest of you later. only so much time to read right now.
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the 'why have you come?' line(s) i find enigmatical, but the stanza resonates with urban sight and sound, and smell, something that can be said of many settings in poems, but this time the larger scene surrounds the reader with small pings of words (ticks, blades, mad pranks) from the poet's ball pein hammer. -fish
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ok. the 'quietly pleased' stanza gave me a head rush. i'm not kidding.
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I love the beginning of this piece (I truly like the whole thing, but) it just really pulls the reader in and it so rich and well textured that it is akin to eating a great meal. For my own sake and the flow of the poem, I would have preferred an end note where you have the quote because it broke up the poem for me, but I understand why you did it that way.
'go ahead
unfeel'
For some reason, those two lines really jumped out at me. The placement was perfect and the idea is maddening. As I said, I like the whole work there are many lines, many descriptions I could go back to and comment on, but I just don't have the time.
Great job.
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Yeahhh...what they all said & then some. Saved & savored. I also enjoyed this part of one of your replies to Balldinger: "She represents Hope and without her I probably couldn't go on creating." I hear ya. With clarity. 
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No crit. Just here to say I read, and will read many times.
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I love the street scenes of the widow and the bum.
The thing about the smoke around the knees and the obituaries floating somewhere around there was great. Also the slit and painted lips, sitting backwards in a black chair - great craftsmanship. Quilting Bees uptown reveals intimate knowledge of the territory - I'm thinking of New York... (the workers - so we have a triumvirate of elite, workers and bum.)
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The whole of this is beyond my wee ability to critique in any meaningful way. But I've re-read to find my stumbling spots.
!. Great, my only quibble was the sides of commuter rails. For whatever reason, it has a sticky spot for me. Perhaps, to my ear, something
like - astride commuter rails would read better.
2. Don't change a thing, although the girl seems a bit disconnected. I think I needed her though, for light.
3. This is straight-up beat poetry, and very good! I do not, will not fuck with it, well, except I wanted more of these / in the bit about Neil, very cool.
4.Nothing for you here, perfect.
5. Again perfect
I'm not qualified to critique better work than mine, but made the effort, if for no other reason than a clinic of sorts, a study of superior work.
Every time I feel like I'm wasting my time here, I stumble across something like this, and remember, I've so much to learn.
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Rob,
If you are qualified to read -- you are Definitely Qualified to crit.
Many thanks to you for the ideas you have shared for me to chew on. I haven't looked at these in a year and getting the feedback (honest feedback) is always helpful to me,both on these pieces as well as when I go forward. I'm habitually an awful editor of my own poems and so all the help I can get will go to good use.
Hope you are well.
Lisa
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by numbers...
1. make damsel non-possessive - damsel taps - the rest rides nicely - perhaps a bit of clean up in the end.
2. leave the pale child with moon flowers out – no space for her in this piece. the rest is exquisite and trolls on its own.
3. carve and mold and come back to see how accurate it went. key characters to watch develop in this section.
4. ditch it, or rework it in it entirety – time is of the essence here…! sorry, I’ll settle down
5. crafty, yet not nearly as revealing as pieces 1 & 2. I’d grab some spice from the rack and sprinkle at will on this piece.
Overall, lot’s of fine pebble-puncturing attributes here, Ms. Lisa.
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Ballsy!
Wow. Thanks for the careful read and comments. I'm stoked.
I could never, (I'm sorry) remove the Light Child from that section -- She represents Hope and without her I probably couldn't go on creating. Perhaps the fact that she *feels* like she doesn't belong there means she belongs there? I don't know .. I will definitely consider your thoughts as I consider what it is these poems are attempting to do ...
you rawk.
Lisa -
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you know, i did wonder if her out-of-placedness did mean she was meant to remain. she's your baby - treat her like you will. each piece definitely brings it's own charm, and like so many multi-layered pieces i've read in the past, including my own, they always tend to come out with teeth shining, ready to devour and tend to be gumming their way at crumbs toward the end. guess it's somewhat like sex for males - the first e-jack is usually the best. well, maybe, but not always, but....nevermind....best wishes with the carving knife.
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I'll shoot you an IM when I've done something worthy here -- hope you'll come back and let me know your thoughts often. Appreciate them GREATLY.
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1. high heels – if universe movement would somehow be personified
it would wear high heels – the way their tap draws attention equilibrium is kept
with elegance and eloquence
between quietly pleased and uptown there is a “petite morte” moment
I think it’s a venus trap – advantage
most people would put it at the end but it’s still a fissure
you either find an after cigarette passage for it
either round a gasp
somehow I see a “Lies ride to the suburbs on the sides of commuter rails”
equivalent fit for the passage – it rolls
my point is find the corresponding echo between the two conceptual opposite poles of
this and accentuate them
and do the same for the flow
2. this twists like meanders
spins sense like whirlpools in a river
shocking without being bothersome
nothing for me to add other than I like it
3. it starts like Salome’s dance
and at the first sight I say this
should be sensual freezing in obscene want points of focus
somehow (and it is a twist but rather a general one)
the exotic dancer is replaced with erudite mumble
and excitement with some sort of psychotic whirlwind of whys and
right hand crafted exclamation marks posing in erudition
its shock is less poignant with each guess of the claiming to be
obvious truth
I would rewrite a second version
Salome’s dance in the eye of a Salome rather passionate by dance
than monochromatic games of power
and that wouldn’t just be Salome so I would write to find
out what she metamorphoses into…
4. les fleurs du mal
in lotus position resembles a city
I guess is the conceptual pollution
mass opiates – sleep of reason
better to be bugged too I think
nothing else to add
5. fractals
they always look like tentacles
few notice that in the void around
their self generated convulsion creates atmosphere
if you don’t hang on them you fall
and if you’re afraid of falling
you’ll just disintegrate in the abyss
instead blooming
in one of these energy generating flowers
because you’re nothing else but seed
of the same universal nature
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Thanks for the careful read. Much appreciated.
The piece with Salome -- that I wrote as a Beat piece -- meaning wrote it without looking back at all. I know it is full of flaws (as is everything here) but I hesitate to torque with that too much because it was written in a cascading down the page -- mind dump way. Maybe some of those ideas need their own section -- something with more precision and development.... mmm.
I wasn't sure of the order either -- Just threw them up to see how they looked as a whole. I should grab the other sections.
There is a quote ... let me find it
"There is no history for a people, as there is no personality for a man, unless he consents to inflict upon the stone, the sound, the word, the bold adventurous action do not reveal their secret except to those who have had the innocence to break through the framework to which habit and law pretend to imprison men's souls, in order to precipitate their passions into new ways, which will carry before them antagonist passions, so that a new harmony may germinate within the struggle itself, and rise alone above all the blood that has grown cold, and the dust that has fallen. "
There's another -- I just can't find it in this very old book right this moment called The Dance Over Fire and Water by Elie Faure, I'll find it though...
Thanks again. The consideration you've give this gives me reason to continue its exploration.
xo -
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you don't need to explain
I try not to tell you what only comment on my views on how
on Salome* I completelly missed the beat
maybe it's because of the page aligments
it's hard to read aloud the bulk
especially where there are different direction so I try to fcous on the personal
expression essence
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oh. just thought i'd tell you -- not defending or anything just conversationing because mostly it helps me see '
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6. I was about to say that you could sometimes give up characters
and try a non figurative approach – as an experiment
which you do here –
I don’t know about Flowers though
I think the entire take on generalities can’t be personified just using caps
that’s why maybe Chrysntemums or Daisies should replace the need of a character
I’m not trying to point a “racial” choice at a crossroad
rather to encircle the obstacle that builds a Byzantine hieratic mall in the path of diversity
because of the way it goes even if the poppies hint to mass opiates
the starting point is still a stereotype – an exotic bazaar offering not merchandise for sense but rather chasing a monetary void of valour
and maybe that’s the cause of dirty children and mourning walls
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I like the naming idea... straight up. -
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I like it too
it's like an animist revolt against biology books that state
this is the flower and that's just it simply does
off from the trophic context
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