Poem of the Month

National Poetry Month, Day 18

Submitted by Dot Tom Cafe

Biography of a Bipolar

At first friends share the ecstasy that comes before the burn:

“That night he was going crazy everyone

was too drunk to care.”

But after years all learn:

“His conversation grew brilliant and alarming.

Students were frightened by his lecture on Hitler.”

“He wrote the most pitiful letter;

though I was not angry, he spoke of us fighting.”

“His religious notions, never stable, flowered

into oddity; his judgment went haywire.”

“He was barricaded in his room in his skivvies when the police came;

he was surprisingly polite.”

The poet obligingly provides snapshots from hell:

“I meditated Detachment and Urbanity but the old menacing

hilarity was growing in me.”

“What use is my sense of humor when the brain blinks

like a radio station rapidly distanced?”

“I lay there secured but for my skipping mind.”

After the delusions pass, he lacerates his soul with reason:

“Seven years ago Bloomington stood for Joyce’s hero and Indiana for

the evil, unexorcised aborigines, while I suspected myself

The Holy Ghost. The glory and banality of it are corrupting.”

The poet’s wife learns to suffer a fool who falls in love

with students, madhouse nurses,

any woman but her:

“I don’t think he realizes the damage.”

New drugs offer old hopes of Panacea:

“To think of all that suffering for lack of a little salt in the brain!”

Theories suffer the usual changes:

“Recent research shows mania’s a summertime dis­ease,

perhaps an excess of light.”

…

-Tom McClellan

Podcast:

http://bonniem.podbean.com/2011/02/03/biography-of-a-bipolar-by-tom-mcclellan/
…

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National Poetry Month, Day 16

Submitted by Sandra Price

Symphony of the Seasons

Spring’s song bursts forth in warbled note,
As woodland sports a light green coat.

Hot Summer hums and croaks and trills.
Her gentle breeze too quickly stills.

Crisp rustling leaves and wild geese call
Announce that Summer’s bowed to Fall.

As north winds howl and nights grow long,
Old Winter dreams of Spring’s sweet song.

-Sandra Price

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National Poetry Month, Day 11

Submitted by Mukul Pandya

A Sort of Prayer

On rage-filled nights, I reinvent you, my god
And spew angry bile at your black-hole divinity.
Leave what is vile,
Absorb what calms
Like a wash of sleep after a nightmare.

Had I faith, I would pray – not to a formless void
That contains galaxies, but to all that is
Gentle in us.
And praying, re-awaken my spirit
From numbess, the distance of fear.

Teach me, o sky-faced god, to pray:
Teach me words that do not spin in futile orbits
Around the universe, but touch
What is best in me.

-Mukul Pandya

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National Poetry Month, Day 9

Submitted by Aaron Landcastle

ah oh let me love you
let me be the first to mourn
on an ennui tomb
in your proud red summer later

whilst the frolic ends

ah or have you sprawled over the midst
telling me less mangy at first
your prayer

besides
I am where the light goes
the stuff it ebbed my sigh
true my days caged foxing up a hole
oh caring this an that
for sheer obedience
for the laughter hence my laughter
in a thicket of breath
breathing my airs of impulse
hair twiggy in the frozen thump
for I am oh so
not for whipping out a lute
also freakish with a bone
I must’ve lost that lute in a bone wager
gambling all
black as stench
in the faroff your nose is lost

fish-eye beyond me my heavenly Williams looks
he’ll shave a copper spoon for right
and place that suck
near his bosom shine bloody
whoever who shall watch him prove
who dies will
let the light burst in through the dark oak dampy doorwell
and the shadows flitter up the beams
chasing you
seeming to melt that old precious old room into us
nude upon a hush
ah hark
I demand a poisoned summer

–Aaron Landcastle

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National Poetry Month, Day 7

Submitted by Hannah Waterman

(he wears rude billboards for wrists, an easy guarantee)

we lick – black air beside whiskey, lips reflecting plum lines

him – tasting more like stale cigarettes than a hurricane’s mortal pride

(while my expression leaks atmospheres – camouflaging his bouquet of fire)

our silhouettes penciled together above colour’s loyal surrender

(he smiles from right to wrong)

unraveling my bare spine’s shouldered-switchblades

and darning the keen curiosity that stiffly fiddles restraint,

clouding each other’s modern science

–Hannah Waterman

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National Poetry Month, Day 5

Submitted by Robert David Williams

my hands were first loves and we never stopped dreaming of blurred joys a plastic world hurling itself in begging begging to be tensile to the latest disciple supple curls realized in throes along with the unyielding betting betting dear in hopes that we would never learn of anything harder while tools and glues tarried knowing the day for solution sauntered apiece with the horror ideal that well is not all and walls are but pretexts the limits of the stage and we are but playing little little do we get to apprehend until too too and ages later i’ve got mother dirt for you now some crocus blossom to thrust through your fertile folds of surface your tension better sundered and rude beauty as i was a plant once crawling blind from the surf to seek the attentive two have been everything and through the star stuff i’ve caught sight of other coined sides interim my will water filling as gravity lent and refracted by the wont this vessel demands and who am i to pull at the tiller i say as you say and neither captain and though works pray to be done we today are idols painted in each our image own we we retire to our corners pretending to have disagreed when a stone has but presented itself before the plow

“blurred joys”

-Robert David Williams

(to read more poems by Robert David Williams, click here)

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