tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91706345081177852172024-02-20T08:37:41.619-08:00The Poetaster's RevengeInferior Verse by a Would-be Rhymester and Warrior PoetRob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-25895426762530354192010-06-08T10:20:00.000-07:002010-06-08T10:53:53.772-07:00Mired in the WireA pigeon toed its way over to me, <br />Orange feet caught in a twisty mess of thread<br />That needed human fingers to untangle <br />What the bird’s beak couldn’t snip away.<br />I wanted to swoop it up and cup <br />Its plushy breast in my weathering hands,<br />Using one to grasp, the other to save,<br />And unravel it to flights of greater feathered freedom—<br />New heights than what’s been stolen from it by a shackling string.<br /><br />Like a slave promised liberty by its master,<br />It peaked up at me from beneath the bench <br />On which I sat, faking rhyme to pass the time.<br />It cocked its head from left to right, up<br />And down in sympathy-seeking blinks <br />And Jerks of the neck, looking,<br />Leaving me feeling helpless as it sought a savior out,<br />Pecking at my conscience like it would the trash that’s trapped it. <br />I almost bent down, but it flew away too soon,<br />Flapping the air with stuttering wings, unsteadied in its trajectory <br />As though panicked by a shortness of breath or the sudden loss <br />Of a heartbeat or by paralysis of the limbs and other such wordless sufferings. <br /><br />It beat the air in a claustrophobic fit for more space<br />To stretch itself out in the mixed metaphors of my mind like<br />Ever-expansive sails, setting themselves wide over an old, exquisite sea,<br />As it streamlines the sky above, claws locked flat against its chest,<br />Perched in the shadow of its winged body as though tires <br />Retreated into some tucked away compartment of a plane. <br /><br />And across the wet, sweeping-blue scenery <br />It could have traveled, were it free,<br />Some thousands of its distant-cousined species sink <br />In the mucky sheath of an off-shore leaked refinery,<br />Calling for Noah and his arc in cawful cries from the mire,<br />Searching for some clarion sign of that mythic dove<br />That’s prophesied to carry the arch of a new dawn <br />As the sunny start to a suddenly remembered covenant, <br />A peace offer hanging like an olive branch from its sacred bill.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-85924837753017984992010-06-04T18:46:00.001-07:002010-06-07T09:21:14.319-07:00Seal Beach1.<br />One Friday at the beginning of June <br />I walked a path along a metal post fence shaped in wide, oblong A’s—<br />All that stood between me and the edge of a cliff <br />Blotched with the red tops of green, reefy plants,<br />Picked at by the beaks of matching birds, <br />Their small skulls laced crimson feathers.<br /><br /><br />I watched the surfers weave in and out of the ocean's rollicking enormity, <br />Pumping their boards up and down against rolling crests, <br />Pushing hard to pick up speed. <br /><br />Out of the corner of my eye, meanwhile,<br />I sought to steal some glances,<br />Make some trysts I admit <br />Would see me browsing Craig’s List <br />For any I might’ve missed.<br /><br />2.<br />The day was overcast.<br />The color of steel gray that made the blue sky shine yellow.<br />Hot enough to burn red if you didn’t watch it, <br />Or borrow some bottled mix of sun block like I did<br />From a friendly, long-haired chap who was scoping waves, spying<br />On the height, breadth, and depth of the elements <br />He’d be diving into soon enough.<br /> <br />I was struck happy by his courtesy:<br />“Take as much as you’d like,” he said.<br />I did, thanking him and moving on to find a family—<br />A mom and her three girls, teenagers—<br />Emerge from a cleft of rocks like mermaids.<br />The youngest one had a distant look in her eyes, <br />Like she had just been the unfortunate witness of something wrong.<br />Her eyebrows furrowed, head hung low <br />With a single braided pony tail curled around her nape.<br />I shuddered a bit and wondered what went awry.<br /><br />3.<br />And then I knew <br />As I soon saw from farther up the hill I hiked<br />People taking pictures below like anxious tourists, <br />Recording a thing they’ll never see except <br />In muted retrospect,<br />Without the death-stench of that baby seal <br />Sailing up and smelling of wet, dirty socks <br />Or a heaped mess of upturned sewage-dirt and rot.<br /><br />The dead mammal, delivered as though an ill-fating omen,<br />Had me wondering how the scene would be different <br />Were a human corpse washed ashore,<br />Harkening the week’s end with a somber message,<br />Sobering families on vacation like that woman and her daughters visiting from Vegas,<br />Slapped awake from their California dream <br />By the plump smack of blubber hitting sand,<br />Likely confused and severely disappointed as in those first blinking moments <br />Between toxic half-sleep and jittery-stomached hangover. <br /><br />4.<br />The seal, as far as I could tell, was decomposing in flags of loosening skin,<br />Peeling off in a net of holey flab while the round thing’s blubbery body <br />Rolled about the beach where it plopped to corrode like a weathering landmark, <br />Signaling what else lie in waste at sea.<br />I stood there, leaning against the rail, guessing <br />At what ruin or reward the off-shore giants have portended for you and me <br /><br />When,<br />Back at the car, an invitation was waiting,<br />Flapping in the wind.<br /><br />5.<br />I later plucked it from beneath the windshield wiper to read<br />In big congratulatory letters from someone named, Ty,<br />An advertisement for Hollywood Paws' complimentary <br />Animal acting workshop and evaluation to have taken place <br />The following Sunday.<br /><br />I thought, then, about lovers luckier than us<br />Who would be wrapped around each other like a caduceus, <br />Twisting their bodies in the spiral after-glow of Saturday night <br />And its lingering humidity, painted in short, panty strokes of steam <br />Across bedroom walls echoing the ecstasies of such little deaths<br />As I can just barely reproduce in dreams.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-88556932858042007812010-05-27T08:09:00.001-07:002010-05-27T08:09:36.087-07:00Kite-WatchA mother learns her daughter to fly a kite,<br />Arms raised on the wind like a pagan sun dance reaching<br />As her body cuts through breezes that lift<br />Lift the stealth shape of cheap plastic into flight,<br />Gliding stationary as though standing still<br />Surveying the treescape beneath and rising ‘til<br />It reaches its last inch of rope pulled tight <br />‘Round her fist and resolute <br />In riding on the string of hope<br />Tethered to the palm which first gathered to her heaving bosom<br />The body of an ever-growing thing<br />Now staring up in wonder at what a little wind <br />And the sun at its highest can do.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-35200253395927966532010-05-16T11:45:00.000-07:002010-06-04T18:45:59.226-07:00To Beat or Not to BeatI feel kindred with Ginsberg <br />And his metaphysical urge for uncreated worlds of bliss<br />While the real thing spins around me <br />And I play with my mind and its too-many axes to grind <br />In self-grievance for not sharpening my dull shape <br />Into secrets of which the living poets are born to speak.<br />Filtering through thoughts as space through time,<br />I skip towns and fly over cities and make for hilly meadows <br />Mottled with Whitmanesque procreancies,<br />Flowery poesies and other fading fruits <br />Of a desert mirage and its barren inconstancies<br />While new seasons change into more poor rhymes<br />And even less reason.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-69615475896517944562010-04-28T10:59:00.000-07:002010-04-29T07:10:19.171-07:00FirewaterLast night the sea bid me to kneel at the feet of its wind-booming welcome.<br />So I pushed past the rough-hued texture of the storm as through a closetful of sailor wool,<br />Trembling for fear an earthquake would swirl the world into Aphroditic rage<br />And drown me in the corners of its water-black walls.<br /><br />I leaned there like a ship steering my nose as though a pointed bow <br />Into the surf of the West's littoral regions, <br />Unsheltered by the cold and at a loss for sails just to say <br />I had stood there<br />Like that,<br />Drilling resolute into the shore of the East's sandy exhale,<br />Staring into its eye and ready to colonize my canton <br />If only to meet my captain's fate beside.<br /><br />But alas,<br />In a fit of admitted retreat,<br />I scurried back to my sister's old gas-guzzler of a car parked on the hill, <br />Panicked and trying to preempt any aftershocks with my sprint.<br />My legs fluttered like white flags across the shadows of windy palms,<br />Outlines of swaying sentinels and other blurry bodies obscured and weighted down<br />By the adjoining width of a world-swallowing darkness,<br />An apocalypse proclaiming,<br /><br />One day there will be a new world that's just now waiting to happen, <br />One with junk piles of computer chips and Styrofoam; <br />Oil spills and burning oceans that will outlive our children's children<br />And any irrational scares I have of being buried alive.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-78239247176775747292010-04-28T10:52:00.000-07:002010-05-04T19:19:09.487-07:00Am I the man I really mean myself to be?<br />A being human and praying after <br />The flesh-hold that others too<br />In their breathing seek.<br />A seeking on a foothold sturdier <br />Than the muck of our stagnancy<br />And cemented in the logic of the love we use<br />To guide our way before <br />All we've seen of us.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-15701298916226319552010-04-26T11:33:00.000-07:002010-04-29T07:14:36.489-07:00A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to John1.<br />I met a sixty-some balding type with a gray beard<br />The other morning at mass.<br />His name is, John. <br />He sat behind me the entire half-hour it took <br />To admit his curiosity about <br />My book. <br /><br />I handed him Kinnell's.<br /><br />Oh-you-mean-this?<br /><br />And taking it in his grasp he <br />Paged<br />His way <br />Through <br />Consecration,<br /><br />Scouring haphazardly the text, hurrying the moment <br /><br />Up with one eye on<br />Reconnaissance<br /><br />For the right time to <br />Plumb the depths of my disclosure <br /><br />And vault like the sharp edge of a flag-pole<br />Into the treasurefield of my journal's memory,<br /><br />Mapping my exposure like creation<br />and God-conquest <br />To become suddenly and <br />All at once<br />A soulmate and stranger,<br />Late to receive the body because <br />He was busy drinking my cup,<br />Sapping its sweet but not unbitter pithiness<br />For capture of all the rapture I've dismissed.<br /><br />2.<br />I came back to my pew after communing<br />And with a glance<br />Furtively up over up and down,<br />Turned to cover my leather-bound, boring history <br />With a poem written on the palm of my right hand,<br />Its sweat inking blue while I tried to hide myself<br />And stare straight<br />So as not offend <br />This new proprietor of my psyche. <br /><br />He got in, <br />Just like that,<br />Entering just as unassumingly as he left,<br /><br />Though I imagine him hiding <br />A shyness in his non-chalance. <br /><br />Either that or he called my bluff,<br />Inwardly disdaining and <br />Shaking his head at <br />The sad litany of my pedantry: <br />Pseudo-intellectual diatribes <br />And poesies full of unconjugaled panzy.<br /><br />3.<br />It wasn't until after the last <br />Alleluia<br />That I caught his name.<br />And that only happened because I swerved around <br />To ask <br />Just as<br />He was bending to retrieve and leave with his Christ-rote, <br />Bound in red and marked in hand<br />With gold letters on the cover in<br />"Christian Prayer":<br /><br />David's songs and other psalms I've read<br />That search my ground with an airy tongue<br />To slake slake its thirst <br />On the bush-burn that rises in a swirling phoenix of alchemy<br />Chanting its ecstatic cosmos <br />Up, <br />Upward into narrow concentrecities of steeple-straight incense. <br /><br />4. <br />I've probably parroted worse incoherencies, <br />But I wonder anyway,<br />Whether or not this John will judge my truth as<br />The real truth,<br />So help me, God,<br />And not <br />Some nonsense,<br />Glossed over with the decaying sweetness<br />Of maudlin letters about love's impatience<br />And other trifles to which Kinnell would've given <br />A far-more patient <br />Justice.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-55484875757709654372010-04-25T08:35:00.000-07:002010-04-29T07:15:43.421-07:00The WindstarI sleep on the whims of fancies.<br />They pass like peds by as I <br />Lose more in my wake than all dreams <br />I've dared to ride:<br /><br />Trips under pacific skies <br />That sound off suns like emergencies <br />Caterwauling me into that sharp awareness <br />Of post-ecstatic refractory,<br />Fractaling my inscape with residue's glint <br />And glistening eye I've used <br />To hear what prophets call in guilt-stricken sighs:<br /><br />A marvelous love.<br /><br />A home from where I'm prone to run on prodigal roams <br />Along highways on the border of metal pasturelands-- <br />Cities farmed on shallow wishes, gathered up and chucked <br />Into one great horde of unhoned detail and image,<br />Junked to rot with the rust of a father's squandered wealth.<br /><br />And yet I'm still struck like all of us<br />With a willful lust for a God I brush<br />With ash-black strokes across traveling books<br />That leave no more of me to reveal or look,<br />Not even all this skin and bone I've mused <br />To wrap its fleshy grasp around an open fuse.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-75211539551761589612010-04-22T16:51:00.000-07:002010-04-26T07:06:54.274-07:00Memorial Mass: April 20, 20101.<br />I remember this funeral hymn,<br />Its melancholy sung in a chorus unmelodied.<br />It’s the note the angels evanesced by holding their breath<br />A little longer into the thin, church air,<br />Holding the hope<br />That they could carry the next note<br />Across the stain-glass shine,<br />Lighting up cares like candles<br />That shape the evening’s pattern.<br /><br />2.<br />Descending,<br />The silence swifts through space between chapel-glass doors,<br />Sneaking into my hour's adore<br />Old voices flying on the wings of a psalm, saying,<br />There is still time, yes, still time enough to fill<br />The heart with a new hollow for growth<br />To seed its fledgling youth in a harvest of craving,<br />And the six-foot long past from which it sprouts<br />To collect like Church dust on Easter Lily-cusps <br />The stuff that gathers after <br />Our farmhand steps kick up life like dirt <br />In pursuit of many a missed surprise,<br />Hastening the work-day’s end<br />Toward tomorrow morning’s sun.<br /><br />3.<br />All this before it has a chance to star itself<br />Into night’s utter dark where desire lurks low<br />To thief the souls of holy men<br />And steal me with them<br />As the gold-treasured bounty of its bed-tide pillage<br />Under the spell of a spring-turned-summer moon.<br /><br />4.<br />There is no praise to hymn high enough<br />The unrefrained movement of this dance at survival,<br />Surviving all the ever-suffered stuff of poets,<br />So adept at choreographing God in tough-love-thrusts<br />That plumb the plush womb of eternity,<br />Offering their tastes of bitter grapes-made-wine<br />At an altar fit for humble feasts of bread-made-body,<br />Seasoned with Easter and the unleavened yeast<br />Of a human moment,<br />Remembered precisely <br />For its brief encounter<br />With levity’s life-long libation<br />To the seriousness of the brevity<br />Which takes us all.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-611346584049072642010-04-22T15:38:00.001-07:002010-04-25T11:06:10.344-07:00715 Hollen RoadThe pines out back speak their story in branches<br />Bending with the wait of witness and their close watch<br />For the loud import of childhood laughter<br />Shared like heavy plates serving dinner at night <br />While mom wondered how much longer <br />The floor could hold my two brothers and me,<br />Rough and tumbling in rumbles to see <br />Who could out-do who in brute-strength,<br />Pretending our victories like the buckle-shine of wrestling belts<br />Before offering our guts over to meatloaf and starch<br />And chugging more milk to fuel this march <br />On forward-moving streets toward new houses and homes <br />That could never quite keep us from moving away.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">December 26, 2009</span>Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-16567739006675518662010-04-22T15:07:00.001-07:002010-04-26T20:52:47.288-07:00This Strange Island1.<br />Time reaches out as a cliff with treacherous claws,<br />taunting the sea that batters itself to pieces <br />like love<br />on the jagged reefs of <br />brutality, <br />ignorance, <br />misunderstanding.<br />Such is a critic's apt description<br />for this deluge of an ocean's clamor<br />that's cracked open all my levees.<br /><br />2.<br />Morning, that beast, sucks me out in a place <br />now here, <br />now there<br />like the sun at its setting.<br /><br />I fall somewhere in the in-between:<br />now half-way from self-contempt,<br />now half-way from God,<br />where everything is<br />only because it seems to be.<br /><br />Here,there is <br />no architect for conviction,<br />no scientist for invention,<br />no artist for imitation,<br />no city for construction,<br />and no land to beach the blue endlessness.<br /><br />3.<br />Our unlearning is a shadow that falls forward<br />with the quickness of a shutter for a snapshot <br />of that first night we spent stranded <br />on the sin-stained shores of our separation.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">December 2008</span>Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-15568122958447188832010-04-14T13:53:00.000-07:002010-05-28T09:20:36.261-07:00The Willows' Weep1.<br />This afternoon, under some weeping willows, <br />I sat on a park bench, <br />Watching time pass like an old-ager <br />Pushing his wheel chair uphill in slow steps,<br />Making progress with the strength of a skilled horseman <br />In his last chariot's race with death.<br /><br />2.<br />Behind me, <br />I heard a group of spring-drunk <br />Mexicans chanting love songs in Spanish, happy<br />To have an hour free from wage-labor and <br />Playing football as though wooing the first virgin named,<br />Maria.<br /><br />3.<br />Overhead, <br />The birds sang in chirpy laughs <br />At the dumb merriment of us fools <br />While under those thousand leaves <br />I eavesdropped on other strangers' soft-speak,<br />Looking with their voices for a springtime romance <br />Or a willing ear to hear their loneliness <br />That not even God could understand.<br /><br />Sometimes I see them—<br />Images of me at seventy,<br />Sharing stories about my failing health,<br />Appeasing the whims of homesickness <br />In exchange for the shelter of my former self.<br /><br />4.<br />Sitting where the forest meets the field,<br />I read the trees’ still, alive engravings <br />Of bygone lovers’ bodies,<br />Traced in misshaped circles on bark—<br />Hieroglyphs as ancient as passion and speech:<br />“Matt loves Natalie, ‘93” and other lost names <br />Carved inside the cartoon permanence of unbroken hearts. <br /><br />5.<br />An aging married couple, either ignorant <br />Or acutely aware of their own absurdity,<br />Passed me by on the border-path ahead, <br />Pushing their Shitsu in a stroller <br />As it stared back at me like a puppy-eyed child.<br /><br />6.<br />Looking away, <br />I saw the hills rise into the old-ager, <br />Stretching, arm-in-sling, from where he perched <br />To watch the soccer match end, <br />Readied and armored with his solitude<br />To finish that which fears lesser men.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-62161147315045982922010-03-28T09:47:00.000-07:002010-04-22T14:54:12.361-07:00Hymie's Basement: Bolts and HandsLights flash in like camera angles on the planned-for symmetry of city streets and sidewalks,<br />Country-road vistas and two-lane highways narrowing into morning’s tree-lined mist,<br />Where the sunrise speaks East in barely audible whispers, <br />Softer than a white-coated kitten’s whiskers <br />And the light of a coffee-table candle’s flicker,<br />Written faintly on the walls like a suicide note for mom <br />When she finally gets home from work:<br />“I love you all, <br />But the world can go on and kill itself <br />For all <br />I care.”<br />And then she can share in a good cry, weeping with dad over the why <br />Of a mother’s spilled milk—<br />Why?—<br />Across the kitchen floor before the last bomb hits <br />With the strike of a match<br />And the first chord of some distant angel’s harmonic <br />Pluck <br />On a harp’s radiant string, <br />Striking us all still and dumb,<br />Though not unknowing of this eschaton,<br />Prophesied by the saddest children of sadder men.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-66299093796187460172010-03-21T10:06:00.000-07:002010-04-28T06:34:09.202-07:00Orange Sunshine in '66One of these days I'd like to turn on, tune in and drop out.<br />Read some psychedelic pages from a book of the dead and come alive on a Harvard professor's trip.<br />Sing it loud for Leary and grin for Griggs<br />With a big toothy smile hiding wryly under wiry folds of golden locks,<br />And really mean it when I say, <br />"I love everyone."<br />Like the the gray, scraggly-haired Laguna greeter<br />Whose plaster statue stands like a monument for a lost and misunderstood generation<br />That beatniked like Ginsberg and his procession of sunshine-dropping proto-hippies<br />Across America's marijuana belt, howling at the moon <br />When it waxes full across a sky of Lucy-eyed diamonds.<br />I'll sing real sweet and low for sure and hold up the cross for Christ<br />As Hodgson did in the perfumed gig of a beached-out bungalow or<br />A secret hamlet in Dodge City.<br />Hell, maybe even shake Manson's hand like Wilson did before bailing <br />From the mansion to echo pet-soundish bells for the masses to toll<br />Across the shanty church air around Modjeska Canyon,<br />Bidding the leagues to transform time into space for the spirit's renewal and<br />Flaming like the fire of an orange sunset that rings eternal <br />Into the closed circuitry of a cosmic lemniscate, <br />Orbiting the earth while announcing love's new arrival<br />Like a satellite sending messages of brotherhood <br />To wash the brain of the world <br />In the great undulates of the Pacific Northwest <br />And rainbows too bright to be discerned.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-65114130926767138142010-03-04T07:12:00.001-08:002010-03-04T07:12:30.944-08:00The Bird Man1.<br />I am the bird man and Alcatraz is everywhere <br />Inside my parents’ spare room,<br />Inside a complex of condos,<br />Inside a kushy Orange County,<br />Beneath too many power lines and towers full of coded info,<br />Spouting raw voltage like a fountain of electric cancer,<br />Sounding under the lapidary rhythm of loud Pacific waves,<br />Secret numbers told in the muffled fuzz of white noise:<br />Saying in snide catch phrases<br />Variations of one theme:<br />“Consume or be consumed.”<br /><br />2.<br />I choose neither and build my library instead,<br />Making of Alcatraz a sanctuary and bed—<br />A place to pray and a place to stay.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-48285954443248516322010-03-04T07:02:00.001-08:002010-03-04T07:03:18.761-08:00February 5, 20101.<br />There is an ancient tribe becoming extinct right now <br />as its last member dies—<br />This was the first of the headlines above <br />a list of others in a news-ticking frame on <br />igoogle this morning.<br /><br />2.<br />Just another Friday in February, <br />dark and raining in Orange County<br />while the North East goes up in a drift of <br />nuclear snow.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-26407797206021721842010-03-04T06:54:00.001-08:002010-03-04T06:54:35.651-08:00Babette's Feast: For MadeleineThe table turns a cocktail into a banquet <br />Just like God changes the devil into a servant—one who gets it all done. <br />Give him his due <br />And he’ll give you yours<br />In some sweet laughter, a frivolity, and a dance more raucous <br />Than the wedding feast at Cana.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-33532319502712127742010-03-03T10:48:00.000-08:002010-04-25T08:28:02.389-07:00A Utah Layover1.<br />Sitting at a dirty lunch table with a sticky top, I ate some part of a Quizno’s sub,<br />increasingly unappetizing with every reticent bite,<br />gross with the texture of wet vegetables, and<br />mushy with a mustard more like mucus.<br /><br />Half-finished, it met its sad fate <br />with a "fleump" to the bottom <br />of an over-stuffed trash can.<br /><br />2.<br />So much for the starving kids in Haiti,<br />Or the other ones in China,<br />Who may just feel the trembles of my bad-turned karma <br />in the trails of a frozen yogurt, <br />flowing like icy lava through my veins.<br /><br />And I absorbed all of it,<br />self-righteously,<br />even after the first failure--<br />a mere drop in the bucket.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-6433715193236651282010-03-03T10:37:00.000-08:002010-04-25T11:08:29.078-07:00A View Found from the BridgeI mourn myself—I admit it—with a certain alarm.<br />No, I’m not purely good.<br />But at least I am myself purely:<br />As much the despot of systemic corruption<br />As the betrayed victim in strange, psychological country.<br />I allow myself to be wholly known<br />And then end up alone, like Eddie:<br />A gullet swallowing the tonnage of the world,<br />A chorus for my own tragedy,<br />A stolen catharsis rife <br />With borrowed claptrap to heal the masses.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-74433595985433757702010-03-03T10:33:00.000-08:002010-04-26T15:36:37.787-07:00The Noospshere1.<br />My world exists between lifeguard stands 10 and 12<br />where I pretend to read about the Omega Point<br />while scheming God-chase scenarios of holy intrigue and seduction,<br />matched in volume only by the Song of Songs.<br /><br />I pace this beach back and forth <br />in hot pursuit of whom I imagine <br />is a wayward sage with an earthen belly <br />and age lines on his smiling face.<br /><br />2.<br />Hiding deep in his expression<br />there is some ancient innocence to engage—<br />mine and his—<br />by joining our sex to make substance of our atoms<br />like foam after two waves thunder in that suck and boom <br />and delve into the sand’s uncreated infinitude.<br />There, crystals of brilliance spark like stars<br />born in Nature’s laboratory as gold in the refiner’s fire.<br /><br />3.<br />New centers will form in the complexity of our shape<br />and what we are shaping in our magmatic spirals <br />of quiet protest against all storms<br />that stay the progress of sharing our parts <br />from within the secret stratum of a world, <br />like an ocean, without walls.<br />One where we surf the gravity that pulls us close,<br />securing our wealth in the heat we hold.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-77008888318572485982010-03-03T10:00:00.000-08:002011-12-08T22:02:53.130-08:00Corpus Christi1.<br /><br />There was a day like this in my infancy <br />When asleep in your pulsing womb I was shocked awake.<br /><br />All of a sudden full grown and sorely groomed for an escape,<br />That cold departure from your warmth<br />Which alchemized for nine long months my small frame <br />Into muscle and skin and light, subtle <br />Like the last glowing vestiges of a fading California sun. <br /><br />2.<br /><br />I never knew I could speak<br />—with the wholly naked command of a sincere prayer—<br />Something so inborn as that deep jolt, electric with the joy of surprise<br />At separating into a new and different birth<br />Emerging with tears for dear life at those shooting pains<br />That’ve shaped us as an artist would with chisel to stone<br />Into this quiet moment, cut <br />In smooth, manteling curves of maternal love <br />Sculpted soft like a living Pieta.<br /><br />3.<br /><br />You’ll miss me when I’m gone, wandering on,<br />My back casting a long, cruciform shadow across your windows.<br />Wandering off if only to return with a lifetime spent scribbling <br />A million frenzied thoughts composed in bloody prose.<br /><br />And when Calvary’s reached its longed-for peak<br />I’ll leave the moon to its ocean-bidding in big, swooshing gusts of high tide, <br />Alone. Without haste, I’ll make my slow way back home<br />To rope my two arms around your little warm body, worn, <br />Though willed strong enough to hold me up while I pull you in<br />To shoulder my head and rest my heart <br />As it beats its blood through arteries full of ache <br />That has this son still calling Mom—<br />Always in the dark.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9170634508117785217.post-56657137572370285612010-03-02T17:29:00.000-08:002010-04-28T13:16:05.247-07:00Kathy in the Sky with Diamonds1.<br />A South Philly son has a story to tell<br />about his ma-belle's bout with cancerous spells,<br />committing her like age to a hospice cell <br /><br />and a bed by her daughter's sleeping all<br />giving blanket to a mother's broken-bodied fall<br /><br />down the still hour before birth where,<br />not long during the end of all care,<br /><br />She awoke again. Again, like Lucy to light, <br />through cracks in the streets of a lily-flowering night<br /><br />blooming over the weedy streets of all our Italies-<br />no home for the likes of the earth's Eleanor Rigbies.<br /><br />2.<br />A bird call and signal to spring, <br />Kath sings the anthem for the blizzard's end,<br />tapping water ice-fresh in revolutions of thaw.<br />The seed she searches out she becomes and sprouts,<br />thin like stalks into fruit's fragrant mist,<br />playing the sky as a teenage girl <br />who spends her heaven with Sgt. Pepper <br />and his merry troop of hill-fools,<br />tripping on magic down Blue Jay Way<br />while coffee percolates like vinyl's pop-and-crisp <br />in the early summer of strawberry-sweet fields,<br />forever.Rob Peachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12986856228269291960noreply@blogger.com0