AFTER LISTENING TO A POETRY SLAM,
AN OPEN MIC READING, I WROTE A POEM
INSPIRED BY GEORGE HERBERT’S “JORDAN”
Who says that girls with brass globes pierced
In the middle of their snake-like tongues,
Girls with atomic explosions tattooed between their shoulders,
Girls with their heads shaved bald
Are the only fit subjects for postmodern love poems?
Is there no longer any attraction to a body
Not mutilated with metal and garish colors.
Is there no longer any beauty in a Vermeer face,
Or a Botticelli Venus arising nude, not tattooed,
Among falling roses to stand on a scallop shell?
Must Venus have a bouquet of yellow roses tattooed on her ass?
Is all good structure, a termite-eaten, collapsing stair?
Must one write only what was once tabooed words,
Meaningless monosyllables to express
The intricacies and profundities of love?
Who states and advocates this new aesthetics?
Is the high school teacher with a fierce tiger
Tattooed three inches above her left ankle,
Or the spaced-out college professor
With a pink knee peeping out of a tear in his faded blue jeans,
Or the old, lickspittle professor trying to popular with hoi polloi?
I say this is new aesthetics is not required for expressing
love.
I’ll go back to Italy, touch magpie shadows
On the bare shoulder, not tattooed, of a Slavic Teutonic blonde
As we sip Campari among olive trees and poppies.
A POLISH BLONDE
Once, a real rose
Grew inside her heart.
The real rose had thorns,
She tore the real rose out.
Now in her heart
She has a thronless, wax rose.
It never changes,
Stays stiff, gathers dust.
A POLISH BLONDE AND A SLAVIC-TEUTONIC BLONDE
Ligeia combed her
Beauty-shopped golden hair
With a comb of real gold,
Barefoot, she sat
On a diamond rock,
Combing her alluring locks.
But Thetis with her blonde wig,
Propped tinsel-slippered feet
On coral colored bed sheets,
When a poet creates fantasies
Or realities, which girl should he
Have step on his imagined blue Turkish rug.
Which one should this aesthetic poet have walk
Among his bibelots, ivory lemurs, agate apes,
The one barefoot, or the one shod.
He could be au courant, have both,
But he wants his fiction intense.
Only one can provide the intensity,
See Aristotle’s Ethics, Book X
For the authority on such situations.
But the poet knows, as Coleridge said,
“Hope without an object cannot live.”
MY EDUCATION, A WASTE.
I WAS TAUGHT WHAT NIETZSCHE
CALLED “ THE HERD MENTALITY.”
I stayed up all night with a flashlight
Gazing at wild flowers, for the next day
I would be forced by my teacher
To go an ice cream factory.
I thought if I stared long enough at the wild flowers,
I would memorize their colors, shapes, and their lives.
When bored among my classmates
With their herd mentality and admiration of machinery,
I could conjure up wild flowers and imagine I was in a field
Rather than paying attention to paper cups
On an assembly line to be filled with chocolate and capped.
As I stood at the ice cream factory, an alien,
Being bored by machinery, so uniform and tame,
I thought how exciting each tree was,
An individual, authentic, and wild.
I wondered why my teacher
Never took us to look at oaks.
THE ILLEGAL ROOSTER
Roosters are illegal to be in the city limits
Of a petty city called “Tampa,”
But someone slipped a rooster in,
And it hid among the bamboo in their backyard.
When the rooster crowed,
People in Tampa had never heard a natural sound before.
They were accustomed to the sound of airplanes in the sky
And the sound of motors below.
The people ran out of their houses
With axes, pitchforks, sickles, chain saws and shotguns
Trying to find the source of this strange noise.
Many said it was sound of someone from outer space.