Today I Submitted a Poem to The New Yorker


When I write poems I want to be accessible without being stupid, entertaining while still saying something of value. Okay, I want the whole world to get me...and, I admit it, love me. Well, maybe I don't want Dick Cheney or Pat Robertson to love me (is Pat Robertson dead yet?), but everyone else. Is this too much to ask? I want to be the 21st Century Queen of Poetry.

Killer Queen

She keeps a Moet et Chandon
In a pretty cabinet
'Let them eat cake' she says
Just like Marie Antoinette
A built-in remedy
For Khrushchev and Kennedy
At anytime an invitation
You can't decline

Caviar and cigarettes
Well versed in etiquette
Extraordinarily nice

She's a Killer Queen
Got that agility
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime

Recommended at the price
Insatiable an appetite
Wanna try?

To avoid complications
She never kept the same address
In conversation
She spoke just like a baroness
Met a man from China
Went down to Geisha Minah
Then again incidentally
If you're that way inclined

Perfume came naturally from Paris
for cars she couldn't care less
Fastidious and precise

Drop of a hat she's as willing as
Playful as a pussy cat
Then momentarily out of action
Temporarily out of gas
To absolutely drive you wild, wild
She's out to get you

Wanna try?


Queen

The Everyday



Got up this morning because Weezer WOKE me up with a phone call. After talking to her, I made some coffee and got out the Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay to read. Low and behold, both kids wake up despite having gone to bed after midnight. This having no time alone because BFI lives on a boat HAS GO TO STOP. Read the forward to book with Cartoon Network in background and realized something about poetry forwards...when they are successful, they foster this strong anticipation to delve into the poems while you're still reading the forward. I felt like a horse bucking behind a barn door while reading the Millay forward. For example, got to a part about Millay's "almost Blakean sense of the mysteriousness of ordinary life" and wanted to jump into book and find poems with that sense. Here's one:

CITY TREES

The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.

And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.

Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,--
I know what sound is there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

My God...How Did I Get Here?




AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I can't stand my own children! Screaming, whining, fighting, smart-mouthed nightmares. Someone get me out of here and away from this. I just want to sleep for a year, in a nice clean motel room near the sea somewhere... somewhere WHERE NOBODY CAN FIND ME. Friday night after a grueling day at Binder where I worked like a maniac on one summary letter, making argument after argument to convince some stupid judge in Texas that the palsied, mood disordered senior citizen applying for SS benefits actually could not work. Also turned the page of a medical record and came upon two technicolor photos of some poor soul's hemorrhoids. I put my head on the desk, somewhere between laughing and crying. Now I am home, it's 8:15 and Sponge Bob is on. My house is a mess. I think I am going to get an ice pop and join kids on couch. If you can't beat em....

Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.


Mary Oliver

Dutch Treat



Jr. has jetted off to Holland for a vacation with old friends. I hope she's having a great time in her old stomping grounds. I imagine she is bicycling all over, eating eels with the heads still attached and speaking dutch like the native she once was. Bon Voyage Weezy, and don't fall in any canals!

Here it is 6:00 a.m. and it's cold! Hump day but Binder will be a little easier to bear as yesterday I got an incentive check for four cases I got remanded (approved to be reheard by Appeals Council based on arguments I wrote). Nothing like cash to make a job less hideous. My brain feels like a sludgy mass and I need more coffee. Unfortunately, I forgot to buy sugar AGAIN so coffee is barely palatable. Will end here and post a poem by a Dutch poet that will at least be more coherent than the rest of this post.

Miss A

On September 19, a misty
nineteenth, Miss A stepped-off
from the wrong side of her house-boat
Sweet Content
into the waters of ‘The Deep’.
The cold had come, she had been unable
to get the stove to light,
her old mother had died,
everything was creaking, going to rust,
from her galley God and the
DHSS seemed out of reach.

She disembarked.


Rutger Kopland

Save the Cupcake



Dear god, they're banning the cupcake in classroom birthday celebrations! You can read the horrifying story here. This is supposed to be to promote good health. What about spiritual health?! What about tradition?! It is not a birthday celebration without cake. Taking away an occasional celebratory cake is not going to make a kid less obese who eats badly at home. Nor is it going to turn a healthy kid into a junk food-scarfing monster. Childhood should be made of small joys where ever we can create them. Cupcakes accompanying a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday is one of those joys. Replacing cupcakes with fruit salad is an act of joylessness. I can already see the PTA nazi mommies in my school district leaping on the anti-cupcake bandwagon. LONG LIVE THE CUPCAKE!

Contained in this short Life
Are magical extents
The soul returning soft at night
To steal securer thence

As Children strictest kept
Turn soonest to the sea
Whose nameless Fathoms slink away
Beside infinity

Emily Dickinson

Bleed

This morning Jack told me that when he was little it felt like his grandmother was more his mother than I was. How many different ways can one kid chop you up?

Words

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

Sylvia Plath

Birthday and Every Day



It's been a long time since last post...I blame back to school and finger healing! Okay, maybe sheer laziness. It's Saturday morning and Jack is in the shower, little mama is still sleeping and we are scheduled to go to IHOP and the dentist's office to pick up a root canal referal for Ms. K. Ah my exciting life. My birthday party last week was beautiful. Table full of friends I love and really missed. And the best presents! Went to a place called Supper in the East Village and aside from Frank sitting on my mangled finger and sending me through the roof, it was a fantastic re-entry into the social stratosphere. Gin and tonics, pasta pesto, birthday cake, discussions about Big Foot and Chupacabras, and gifts like gourmet coffee, an anniversary edition of Howl and a diamond necklace. 47 is not the depressing birthday I imagined. I have fallen too deeply in love with silence and my couch when I am kid-free. Stefanie, Stephanie, Miriam, Frank, Weezer Jr., Troy, Strawhead and Russ, I adore you all. On the subway platform on the way home, a guy singing and playing the guitar did "Jackie Blue", making my birthday ending perfect. My life is full of artists, poets and musicians and they remind me there is more to my existence than the every day Binder rat race. The Infant of Prague waves his giant scepter over you all! Kudos to Jr. for putting the whole thing together.

Strings

We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larva
And the evil of stars
Is a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
Thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
Like the moon, spit out like
A broken tooth.
"Oh," groans the world.
The outer planets,
The fizzing sun, here we come
With our luggage.
Look at the clever things
We have made out of
A few building blocks—
O, fabulous continuum.

Ruth Stone