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Chickasaw
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Parting
With appreciation to poet Brenda D'Alotto
The half-empty cup of coffee leaves
Grounds upon my bitter tongue,
Not unlike the taste of tears
You left streaming down,
Down across my patient, parted
lips.
Moments ago I met you,
Wrapped in the sharp autumn smells
Of last October, when the sun shone
Like the promise of Love you gave so
Freely, so easily in that moment
When I realized, you never gave but
Took; and that soft light reflected
In your eyes was only mine. Cast
There until it filled me as the sun still
Fades into the coldness of an autumn
night.
It's a Melancholy thing
by Gawaine Caldwater Ross
to be a poet.
According to Rimbaud, the poet is
the technician of the sacred,
the psychopomp and priest -
but he needs an audience,
people to hear his cries
and shudder at his rages:
in other words, a public,
or at least,
a tribe.
Without these one is nothing;
no matter how finely crafted
each polished line -
Poets have killed themselves for this.
Hart Crane leapt off a steamer,
Sylvia Plath gassed her head,
Anne Sexton,
she offed herself too.
Yours truly knifed himself
and sliced a major artery;
one minute of frenzy
gave six months of agony.
Behold the scars of madness!
The scopolamine dosage
dried out his eyes so
that blinking felt like sandpaper
scraping across the eyes
and he shit a bag of sand
and then ten whole months
on the psychiatric ward
eking with schizoids
and alien abductees
there is so much to say
and the nation is deaf.
Range Finding
by Robert Frost
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.
On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.
The
Chickasaw
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