[
In
I ate like it was a birthday but everyone stayed the same age.
We let the elephant seals prosper, they were our spirit animals.
The men seals roared in defiance, protected their lubricated
loves.
The women seals nuzzled with the fresh salt of the infants,
the babies slept the tender dream sleep of the first morning.
I crept to your bed in the night and forecasted my doom
where we would explode perhaps too soon but the bang is loud all the same.
Now I have had enough, enough of something
and there are days of starving ahead, starving and
You stand up on the toilet seat careful not to fall
you are in the library peering out to the overgrown courtyard
you are dreaming of planting ceiba trees there,
you have only four years left some say.
In
staring at the stars as though they were free cable,
you do this and you do that
and just like so
the time gets up
and it must go.
In the library courtyard you practice your Brazillian
moves
and on the other side of the mason's wall, someone mows grass.
If you listen closely enough
you swear you can hear the leaves screaming.
It must be terrifying to be a piece of grass in
You think these things and you think those things
and you do this and you walk miles to do that
and just like so, the time gets up
gets up to go.
You are everywhere and nowhere every day and never.
Where is your lover or your friend, your mother or your father?
What are the babies eating in
How will the white tailed deer survive as the chain saws
complete their sordid pine tree blood bath missions?
You are everywhere and nowhere every day and never.
Your center cannot hold, you are an eye.
Your movements terrify the meteorologists, the
chickens squawk
in pain, the weathervane considers the life of a hobo.
You are everywhere and nowhere every day and never,
you wonder where you will sleep even as you are snoring.
You wonder this and you wonder that
and just like that, the time sprouts wings
to fly like so.
© Copyright 2007 Dennis Ray Powell, Jr. All Rights Reserved
thinking of Sentimental Sharks [
you stand in lines
waiting for head eruptions
or at least a leaking of your soul,
your soul, though, (the truth of it)
is a natural gas
and there are bic lighters loose!
so go ahead and pray for explosions
because i am going home for Christmas,
a cattle driver of wastebasket heartthrobs am i,
a roaring river flowing though silver lands of the deaf.
and there is she in some sick night dream,
what would cause my flying mind to quake?
is it the incessant porn of the freight trains?
the nonstop firewood to be gathered to my crackling
crotch?
i wait, too, for souls and
heads to explode
and for god to interrupt the movements of train stations.
PART TWO.
music is a corral
for the wild horse poetry, i believe
since poetry roams the high plains Everywhere,
for every man hears the thundering
of the hoofbeats of the words
that the heart might speak...
for every woman hears the thundering
of the hoofbeats of the words
that the heart might speak...
so the novel is the microscope
that peers at the cellular adventure of the poem
and i am the Scientist!
the plucker of hidden juicebox heartstrings!
the silky tonged shaman of the Steppes,
for poetry is the heart beat
and music is the holy spirit humming in a stethescope
and the novel is the homeless dreamer
falling through trap doors in the sidewalk...
the poet is a joke machine
wearing robes of black and white
and she rolls in rainbowed meadows
keeping harmony in sight...
POME 3.
What is a greyhound station made of?
i mean, what ghosts drop
quarters
into these lonely video games here?
and why do i care of how the
without
would describe my flowery within?
the greyhound station, always hungry and gone.
you could fly a kite on the sighs.
raise a flag on the moans.
raise a family on the groans.
build a castle of the poems with no ink.
muttering complaints tell the stories
of the dead gone river gods,
those gods that washed away
to become bottled mineral water on
No heart became deeper here, only wrinkles,
the armed security guards draw cartoons,
confiscate stolen sleep.
everyone just got out of prison,
they're all going back tomorrow.
there are ragged tents in the bathrooms,
young sailors are going home
while dreaming clean dreams...
END OF POMES.
(quote by Gary Snyder...)
"I'd emphasize again the importance of a sense of community, a need for
the poet to identify with real people, not a faceless audience. There should be
less concern with publishing, more with reading. A reading is a kind of
communion. I think the poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe. This is
close to the ancient function of the shaman.
It's not a dead function. The poet needs a long view. He can't just plan in
terms of poems to be done immediately. He may be eighty years old before he's
ready to do his masterwork. The creative imagination doesn't stop growing like
the body. It keeps growing and getting ready to strike deeper into the basic
relationships between the personal perception, the social ritual movements, and
nature. Poetry is a life's work."--Gary Snyder
© Copyright 2007 Dennis Ray Powell, Jr. All Rights Reserved
[
the rain is my little wigwam.
i smoke the night away, i have no cigarettes.
the homeless man asks me for change,
i push a banana toward him.
he declines because the raindrops are like liquid marbles
our faces are made of jacks, our faces scatter like hope
but the child in the sky gathers them up again,
the homeless man has one opaque eyeball,
he stares at me through it and declines the banana,
my lord, i need a pen, my lord
hustle me down to the village where tired bones
yelp out satisfaction at the dry love in the eves
where the hats are all warm and silk lined,
i swallow mexico, i do not spit
i recollect the national geographic pictures
and gather up the jacks.
the rain is my convalescent home.
it showers me with memories of storms before,
i fight off the cold like a punch drunk boxer,
the afternoon approaches penniless
and the sun dials collect.
© Copyright 2007 Dennis Ray Powell, Jr. All Rights Reserved
[
In
And walked off.
Caught a ride to
Then in
The little styrofoam cups in
lieu of bank accounts. Dry and ready to crack, creases in the coffee stained
white tableau. That is the bank account of the homeless. And
all of us health nuts walking to the gym or to the grocery store to buy organic
garlic. I guess it's just the way it is. I wonder what to do when there
isn't even a quarter in my pocket and I know I only have seven dollars to eat
on for the next few days. Sure and certainly my vagrancy is a chosen but I feel
the burn in my belly all the same when there is nothing to eat. I choose hunger
and alone and when I've had my fill of it I go back to the warmth and the love
and why does one keep doing this thing? Where is the value in this existence, or rather, what is the aim?
A life without aim or method is a confusing, swirling, troubling thing. As I
walked down the street, down Geary toward the Ave's I
was thinking of the tiny little library that is always filled with Asian people,
beautiful and quiet and silently typing away on their matching laptops. With
their beautiful children making loud footsteps to their startled dismay and all
of the meditative "shhhh"'s of this way of
living and reading.
On Geary I noticed the smell of fresh bread in the middle of the night and
swooned. My head was spinning and my legs were lame. I noticed the mexican bakery with carts of fresh
bread and pastries pushed out through the loading dock, thick leaves of plastic
draped over them to keep the cold air out. A few of the pastries and loaves
were in hands reach and I stood close thinking about snatching one up. Then I
saw a matronly Asian walk toward me on the sidewalk in the glown
darkness. She poked her head in through the loading dock leaves of plastic and
spoke abruptly but gently. Her call was heeded. I watched her walk down the
street with a bag filled with tiny rolls in her hand, fresh as sunflowers. So I
dug into my pocket, pulled out a one and stuck my head through also. A mexican man with sinewy arms
flexed and worked, moving sheet to cart, sheet to cart, and everything so fresh
in my nose...
I showed him the dollar silently when he noticed me. He wordlessly nodded,
grabbed a plastic bakery sack and asked, "pastries?"
I nodded at his assumption in hunger and he threw in two giant croissants. One
baked with a fried egg and cheese in it and the other more of a dessert, creme cheese with almonds.
So in San Francisco, somewhere on Anza street behind the meditative library of asians some high class hobo eats croissants and dreams of
home, wherever the hell that might be...
© Copyright 2007 Dennis Ray Powell, Jr. All Rights Reserved
Sunday. Part One. [
More and more, I feel this great influx of personalities into my life. I feel a
tremendous kinship to a pneumatic anything. I am covered with large breathing
pores that allow the world in and all of its billionfold
voices to breathe sensuously into my ear. It's so nice
lately. Sunday morning I wake up at someone's house. This someone is named Ian
and when I open my eyes atop his couch, I see a cell phone on a foot stool.
Pick up the cell phone immediately and without thought call my family in
Subsequently, both Jillian and Ian left, leaving me alone with these three
ladies that I was sitting with at an outside table. I knew one of them to be a
girl named Jada. She's from the open-mic sessions that I read at and the first night I read and
screamed like a stab-wounded donkey into the microphone, she approached me and
told me that she loved that poem. It had pieces in about my family and how
certain members parallel certain Beatles songs. That punctuated by the donkey
screams. I eventually gave her that poem to which I had no copies. She has the
only one in existence! (dun dunnn
dunnnnnnnnn) I sat there with she
and some of her friends and told them about fighting. I had this fighting
feeling. A feeling that fighting is extremely sexy. "There's something so
incredibly sexy about fighting. It's so rough, as other things can sometimes
be. Know what I mean?" I don't know what had gotten into me, or for that
matter, what HAS gotten into me recently. I'm feeling so sexy all of the time
and I see cartoon women flying naked throughout the air and they if I think on
it long and hard enough, they always end up having Meredith's face, no matter
who I'm picturing. It's so strange and exciting for me. The girls all just
laughed and called me crazy, which people are prone to do around these here
parts. I continued and then two girls came up and asked if they could take
pictures of me. I swear to God! I know how intensely this may seem to be a lie,
but it is not. Two girls asked if they could take pictures of me and they told
me to just act normal and keep talking as I had been. Doing what they told me
to, I told a story about almost purposely severing fingers when I was sixteen
just because I was so bored. When they were leaving, I asked if I could come
too and they said I could. Bid farewell to Jada and
her friends and then we ran off seeking beauty in all forms. We shambled down
the sidewalks like magnifying glasses with souls and they took pictures of
whatever I pointed out to them. A picture of a Mountain Dew can, empty and
betrayed to an existence of garbage can wakeup calls. One of a squirrel
pondering the meaning of Life, I supposed. So many wonderful
pictures. Then they walked into Athena and began to take pictures of
rocks and I grew INCREDIBLY bored. The day outside was lovely so I walked out
into it and fell immediately to sleep upon a green plastic bench.
This is the end of Part One.
© Copyright 2007 Dennis Ray Powell, Jr. All Rights Reserved