My post on the Vice Ministry of the Supreme Social Happiness of the Venezuelan People is up. That government agency’s work, it seems, isn’t as extensive as its name. You can find the article here at Caracas Chronicles.
The International Times and the editor/publisher of one of my books (William Everson: The Light the Shadow Casts), Rupert Loydell, chose to publish three of my poems: one piece of selected doggerel (or, as I call it, “dogmarel) and a couple of others, one new piece (Note and Photon) and an old piece that didn’t make it into my book of selected poems, (Once it’s all Lost). For a long time I quit writing poetry, and then forgot I ever wrote it, then I was reminded, and again reminded, and again… and now I’m starting to write poetry again. Beginning from the beginning. It’s a wonderful process, really; one never, I suspect, feels one’s self to be a master of it since each poem is a completely different entity requiring a beginner’s mind to finish it.
3 Poems
Note and Photon
At last I, too, will leap through that black hole—
or maybe limp or crawl
or be carried
or led by some unseen hand,
but finally will fall
through that pinhole
where even light is bent
and twisted into coils
that wind around night.
There deep darkness
nestles a gleaming universe
with all the brightness of a mind,
a single Life, endlessly
weaving its awe inspired tapestry
of light and music, warp and weft.
And I?
A single note of music,
or the last photon of light
that winks where I once was.
Contra-Dogmarel
Neither fish nor fowl, it’s dished out
in doctrines and trite truisms
without music or rhythm,
or else it’s straight-up dogma
in doggerel wrapped in rap,
rant or raving, but called “poetry.”
You’ll hear it at every venue
where chic revolutionaries hold services
without having seen a revolution
except on two-week tours through Cuba
where their minders served as blinders
as they viewed the circles of hell
they’ve come to call “heaven.”
When they return, their verses
serve as hymns to the victory
of socialism, battle cries for wars
they’ll never witness.
Cheap words like ads
for last year’s fashions,
doctrines drawn from the leader’s
speeches, interviews and texts,
then barked and growled
in North Beach readings,
waterfalls of rhetoric
oceans without waves,
storms without rain,
sermons without salvation,
but at least inspiring enough
to make me write some
of my own.
Once It’s All Lost
Once it’s all lost, everything,
down to the last button and crumb
all tumbling back to earth,
remember the earth.
We were never the gods we thought ourselves to be,
one step beneath the winged angels,
we, always just another creature
recently risen from the wild sea
or the muck or dust.
May that wisdom lost in all our knowledge
then be recalled when all is lost;
may we save the wisdom
that saves us as we fall:
this earth hungrily embraces
even its wayward children,
we who had forgotten
and thought we were lost.