Monthly Archives: September 2014

Two Farmers-Market-Poets’ Hastily Composed Odes To Youth

Today, I encountered topacio althaus for the first time. She regularly sets up a small table and typewriter at our local farmers market, with a sign asking for a topic and a price, promising a poem at the end of the transaction. 

topacio althaus at work

My sister-in-law approached ms. althaus with a financial offering and a suggested topic of our young children: brother and sister and cousin, one of them a newborn, one three, one four.  Here now is the poem that resulted:

 

 

 

I too took up the challenge of the topic and created the following on my phone: 

 

Three 
Three wee ones
Some whipping like warm summer wind
Through the forest of ancient wrinkled calves and knees 
Saturday’s lumbering farmers market shoppers
One sleeping, mouth gaping, chirping like a settling bird
Three  
Three!
Weeeeeee!
Bound by blood
Sister brother cousin
Georgia in her mother’s arms, three weeks old
Isaac, three plus one, so four, patiently enduring the face painter and stares from tiny cousin Merryn, three 
She who is eager to run and play more before his batman cheek is done
Three! 
Bound forevermore by this memory
The warm early autumn morn
Among those busy being old, shopping, and nearly born 

 

 

I made no money.

A good day for poetry.

And berries:

 

 

Three!

 

 

old song for the new

Yes yes and please more yes
Tell me again how old I am
Whisper wrinkle free how irrelevant my culture has become
Yes yes and please more yes
Join me in this haze of conventional whiz dumb
And allow me to wring my worried hands over your imminent decline
Attending the ascendance of your lost generation
Yes yes and more please yes
Throw up any barriers you can young man
My convalescing mates will gladly dance that most removed of dances
And chant that invocation of phantom castes
Yes yes and more please yes

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A Friday Morning And The Rush Begins

If you’re paying attention you will come to realize in fleeting seconds there is this ease to tapping the deep trenches of pain
In such a moment the moods can shift and the cool crisp happiness of a cloudless and hopeful Fall morning will chill further so that the bright disposition is revealed to mask a wet muddy sadness
Maybe not depression but certainly a deflation and a slowing
A drifting into subtle agony begging one to succumb further by the breath

Instinct – if I’m listening well – tells me not to run from this or coat it in a Teflon gloss
Instinct says stay here for a spell, the tilt is trying to tell you something
Well instinct I’m ready to receive whatever it is on this plate before me
But please let’s make it quick
I have a meeting I need to get to and in business there is nothing worse than a gloomy colleague and yes I’m hoping for a raise so I don’t want to be that guy, if you know what I mean, the late guy all depressed and weepy. Ug.
I’m waiting
I’m open
I’m in

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Getting Old Is Always So Depressing

How do those words feel falling from your mouth?
These ideas you’ve scoffed so long and now own?
How far removed from the orbit of your soul do you find yourself today?
Has the reality of the failure begun to set in?

Or have you just accepted this dry wrinkle your days have become?
Let the humorless warm bath of rigid frigidity soak in?
And is this all just okay?
You fuck.
You mother fuck.
Feeling good?
Proud of yourself and this language, these narrow thoughts in which you’ve jailed your imagination?
May you always remember the late night you gazed up from the earth and felt profound irrelevance and omnipotence all at once, the understanding you possessed in that instant.
May you never forget how you have forgotten that!

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