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Poet Autumn Konopka-- Leads community-based creative
writing classes for children and adults in
Her
readings in the
http://www.winterspringsummer.com
Stephens With a “ph”
This is not my name.
But its what I was given,
and I’ll hold you to it:
Stephens, with a “ph”—
the illegitimate daughter
of two tiny words (step/hens)
combined to make a nonsense sound
that is altogether instinctual.
Don’t slice it through
the belly with your unimaginative “v.”
I am more complicated
than that,
and this is how I bleed:
in bird song,
in growing grass,
in sunburn,
in wet snow.
I perish in changing colors,
in lunar cycles,
in seasons,
in winter, spring, summer,
Autumn.
This is my name, and
I’ll hold you to it.
The bastard child of a bass player and a bookkeeper,
I am trailer parks and Catholic school,
cheerleading and streets without sidewalks.
Open your eyes
and you can find me
in the yard not three miles from the landfill.
I am turning over in the earth,
with the beer cans and banana peels.
I am rising up in full bloom
with the dandelions everywhere.
§
Hush
the abrupt rush of fist to face. Hush
the scuffle, the raw knuckles, the buckling knees.
Hush the leather-belt beatings. Hush the hollers that ricochet over rooftops.
Hush the 30 years of broomstick battles over borrowed shoes and broken heels.
Hush the hand-me-down addictions. Hush the silent suburbs, the secret
abortions. Hush the touching. Hush the brother who said, This
is how you learn to love. Hush the mouths that swell with lies. Hush the
garish garland of obscenities. Hush the tugged hair, torn shirt, pride in the
punch well landed. Hush the skin-scraping stillness of blacktop and bruises
opening like wild irises. Hush the headache behind your eyes. Hush the moan of
approaching sirens. Hush the shuffling shadows, the silhouetted witnesses. Hush
the pressing charges. Pressing. Charging.
Like the bulls of
§
She wants to be a blade
of grass.
She wants to be more
than a blade of grass,
parched and blonde,
a thin strand of hair
among the other strands
tucked behind the ear of the field.
She’d rather be the
field.
But more. More
than the entire fleshy field. More
than the tips of its fingers,
the pads of its sleeping feet.
She wants to be the
path
that bends through the field
like the space between legs.
But not this dirt path,
so soft underfoot, tire tracks
like stretch marks,
ostentatious as a parade
along the inner thigh.
She wants to be the
cobalt sky.
No, she doesn’t want to be sky—
ubiquitous, mercurial sky—
of oily clouds and grim demeanor.
She wants to be the
crow,
splintering out of its black background.
Not the entire flock of crows,
breaking like spider veins
across the legs
of field and sky.
One
crow.
A singular crack in the smudgy bruise of moon.
Sergei Yesenin
The Back Streets of
The farmhouse is lonely without me,
And my old dog is gone from the door;
God sent me to die in the back streets
And I can’t go home any more.
I’m in love with this overdone city,
Though it’s dirty and falling apart;
It reminds me of stories at bedtime,
And the street sounds hurt my heart.
I go out for a fix after
And the fix that I’m after is fame,
So I head for a bar in the back streets
Where everyone knows my name.
It’s noisy and dirty and drunken,
But nobody there drinks alone –
The bartenders buy me a my vodka,
And the hookers cry at my poems.
My heart beats faster and faster,
And I say to the drunk by the door—
“I’m like you, my life’s a
disaster,
And I can’t go home anymore.”
Oh, the farmhouse is lonely without me,
And my old dog is gone from the door;
God sent me to die in the back streets
And I can’t go home anymore.
--Sergei Esenin
Translated from the Russian by Paul
Schmidt.
Published in The New Yorker,
Allen
Ginsberg
from "Wichita
II
.
. .
NBCBSUPAPINSLIFE
Time Mutual presents
World's
Largest Camp Comedy:
Magic
In Vietnam—
reality turned inside out
changing
its sex in the Mass Media
for
30 days, TV den and bedroom farce
Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room
Generals faces
flashing on and off screen
mouthing
language
State Secretary speaking nothing but language
McNamara declining to speak public language
The
President talking language,
Senators
reinterpreting language
General
Taylor Limited Objectives
Owls
from Pennsylvania
Clark's
Face Open Ended
Dove's
Apocalypse
Morse's
hairy ears
Stennis orating in
Mississippi
half
billion chinamen crowding into the
polling
booth,
Clean
shaven Gen. Gavin's image
imagining
Enclaves
Tactical
Bombing the magic formula for
a
silver haired Symington:
Ancient Chinese apothegm:
Old
in vain.
Hawks
swooping thru the newspapers
talons
visible
wings
outspread in the giant updraft of hot air
loosing
their dry screech in the skies
over
the Capitol
Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint
Flesh soft as a Kansas girl's
ripped
open by metal explosion—
three five zero zero on
the other side of the planet
caught
in barbed wire, fire ball
bullet
shock, bayonet electricity
bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat
While this American nation argues war:
conflicting
language, language
proliferating
in airwaves
filling the farmhouse ear, filling
the
City Manager's head in his oaken office
the
professor's head in his bed at midnight
the
pupil's head at the movies
blond
haired, his heart throbbing with desire
for
the girlish image bodied on the screen:
or
smoking cigarettes
and
watching Captain Kangaroo
that
fabled damned of nations
prophecy
come true—
Though the highway's straight,
dipping downward
through low hills,
rising narrow on
the far horizon
black
cows browse in caked fields
ponds
in the hollows lie frozen,
quietness.
Is this the land that started war on
This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?
Are these nervous
naked trees & farmhouses
the
vortex
of
oriental anxiety molecules
that've
imagined American
Foreign Policy
and
magick'd up paranoia in
and
curtains of living blood
surrounding
far
Are these the towns where the language emerged
from the mouths
here
that
makes a Hell of riots in Dominica
sustains the aging
tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipeh city
Paid for the lost
French war in Algeria
overthrew
the Guatemalan polis in '54
maintaining United
Fruit's banana greed
another
thirteen years
for
the secret prestige of the Dulles family lawfirm?
.
. .
I'm an old man now, and
a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to
speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because
not only my lonesomeness
it's
Ours, all over America,
O
tender fellows—
&
spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in
the moon 100 years ago or in
the
middle of Kansas now.
It's not the vast plains mute our mouths
that
fill at midnite with ecstatic language
when
our trembling bodies hold each other
breast
to breast on a mattress—
Not the empty sky
that hides
the
feeling from our faces
nor our skirts and
trousers that conceal
the
bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
white
smooth abdomen down to the hair
between
our legs,
It's not a God that
bore us that forbid
our
Being, like a sunny rose
all
red with naked joy
between
our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we
call Love, want and lack—
fear that we aren't
the one whose body could be
beloved
of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed
all over by every boy of Wichita—
O but how many in
their solitude weep aloud like me—
On
the bridge over Republican River
almost
in tears to know
how
to speak the right language—
on
the frosty broad road
uphill
between highway embankments
I
search for the language
that
is also yours—
almost
all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
wires ranging from
Junction City across the plains—
highway cloverleaf
sunk in a vast meadow
lanes
curving past Abilene
to
Denver filled with old
heroes
of love—
to
Wichita where McClure's mind
burst
into animal beauty
drunk,
getting laid in a car
in
a neon misted street
15
years ago—
to Independence where the old
man's still alive
who loosed the bomb that's
slaved all human consciousness
and
made the body universe a place of fear—
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
no
giant demon machine
visible
on the horizon
but tiny human trees and wooden
houses at the sky's edge
I
claim my birthright!
reborn forever as long as Man
in
reborn
after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
imaging the throng of Selves
that
make this nation one body of Prophecy
languaged by Declaration as Pursuit of
Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this
auto to make Prophecy,
all
Lords
of
human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked
covered with ash
Khaki
Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
Sitaram Onkar Das
Thakur who commands
give
up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquillity
Kali Pada
Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
William Blake the
invisible father of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna
master of ecstasy eyes
half
closed who only cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own
praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with blood
destroyer
of battlefield illusions
million-faced
Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah
the Compassionate One
Jaweh Righteous One
all
Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of
heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
&
holymen I chant to—
Come
to my lone presence
into
this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of
American language now,
I
here declare the end of the War!
Ancient
days' Illusion!—
and
pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let
Congress legislate its own delight
let
the President execute his own desire—
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless
Mystery—
published to my own senses,
blissfully
received by my own form
approved with
pleasure by my sensations
manifestation
of my very thought
accomplished
in my own imagination
all
realms within my consciousness fulfilled
60 miles from
Wichita
near
El Dorado,
The
Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
houseless brown
farmland plains rolling heavenward
in
every direction
one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord—
Pure Spring Water
gathered in one tower
where
Florence is
set
on a hill,
stop
for tea & gas
Marine Going to Court
Martial
Chest bright with
medals.
Trim and neat in his
greens.
His lawyer strides along on his left.
In their combat boots,
pistols and night sticks at
their side,
“chasers” -- prison
guards
parade him into
the crucible of retribution
But wait, someone said,
that Corporal killed
An innocent Iraqi.
How can you grieve for him?
Only one?
What of the preachers who preached for this
war
The pols who called
opposition treason
The pundits who derided all who said no?
What of the other 650 thousand dead Iraqis?
What of he who killed them?
--John R. Guthrie
The
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