Ah Coffee reading makes more poetry

It is a heady experience being a featured reader. Many of my friends came and bolstered my confidence and the hosts and creators of The Poet Experience were welcoming, and their poetry was awesome. Amy's compositions are so lyrical and her voice so amazing that she should sing all the time, even words like "Where's the pumpkin? I feel like a jack-o-lantern." And Sylvia had an image of a horse in her poem that lingers with me still and Don (I think that was his name) painted beautiful southwest landscapes and some one else read about her 31 year old self (sorry I forgot your name). Susan Moger's prose and poetry were so moving that my sister cried.

Last night I woke at 3:42 AM, my mind awash with details from the night. As it turns out, my friend Susan also awoke about 4 AM and wrote a poem in her head that just blows me away. Here is her poem and it speaks to the reading more than anything I could possibly write.

I want to be a poet for Halloween
With golden hair like perfect parentheses
Wearing a transparent-sleeved blouse like a metaphor for hidden meaning;
In shoes as beautiful as the words "heart" "belt" "dock" "coat"
I want to be a poet for Halloween
Glamourous in the old way -- magical, spell-binding--
Turning words and hearts inside out

I want to be a poem of Mary's for Halloween
With turns of phrase that hook the heart,
Water images that melt sugary surfaces of perception
I want to be a poem of Mary's for Halloween
At a party with other poems, in a ribbon-tied book, made just for us.

Public Appearance! Ah Coffee with Rocky Jones and Cliff Lynn

At 6:30 PM this Friday, I've been invited to be the featured reader at an event called The Poet Experience. This is held at Ah Coffee 1015 Bay Ridge Av, Annapolis, MD 21403

If you've never caught Rocky and Cliff's performances, they bring a whole new element to the poetry reading environment. With unconvential forms and Rocky's drums, they define a new expression in creative spoken word.

As for my work, expect poetry, a few very short stories, and a glimpse at my pillow book. These are not your mother's poems. There will be confusion. There will be questions. All answers will be provided in san skrit.

The reading includes open mic time so bring your own verses along and take a turn at the mic.

Last night I was chased by a big brown bear

Last night, I dreamed I was in a large wood, with cabins and trails and wolves who howl as you press your head to the pillow. In the morning, I took my long walk to see the sun fall through the lattice of the tree leaves. I reached the farthest rim of the park, the last cottage and a woman who was just packing her final suitcases into her Subaru outback.
“G’morning,” I breathed and smiled at her.
“Best be careful.” She said and nodded toward the outhouse in the woods just beyond the road. “Think the bears are hungry.”
A clapboard of planks housing a latrine under the arch of pines shook. The wooden door swayed a bit. She opened her car door. “But I needed the bathroom,” I say. It’s so ungracious, so human, such a thing in the woods to realize.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d like to help. But I’ll miss my flight.” She opened the driver’s door and put her right foot in. “You better get on.”
And the outhouse door bounced open and the broad back of a large brown bear backed out. I didn’t wait for the bear to turn around.
Her car backed up the road over pavement. It was solid ground and uphill. Downhill there was brush, limbs, maybe rabbits, deer, and camouflage. Brush and other bear-like distractions and below was the camp meeting house, a glass walled A-frame.

I raced downhill with all the agility and speed I held when I was twelve. My legs were agile and strong, my feet were solid and sturdy and my speed was miraculous. So I reached the meeting house and turned to see the bear standing twenty feet away, the light coming from the house confusing him, messing with his vision. He was smelling me out. He was tall, brown and shaggy and sniffing the air.

I opened the door and the click was like a shotgun to him. He lowered and lumbered straight for the meeting house, an A-frame structure with only two rooms, a large meeting room and a small office. All the walls were glass except the door to the office, the bottom third, a solid panel, would hide me.

I raced inside and the camp dog raced out, barking and spinning, the black and brown spots on his white back spinning as he circled and yipped, his teeth bared and his ears on alert. The dog ran into the great room and I knew how to live. I knew what would happen. The bear was at the front door. I pulled the office door nearly shut, lay on the floor, pulled up close to the door and breathed the mushroom mildew scent of the floor, the metal smell of my own breath, and heard the dog growl, and bark, his claws ticking on the wood floor, faster than flamingo dancers. The bear’s heavy mud-cased step and sweep of the arm through the air terrified.

I raised my head. Saw the bear catch the dog, heard the cry, and put down my head and prayed that it would be enough, that it would satisfy the bear.

You’re Bringing Out the Elvis in Me.

Country music is not my first choice but once in a while a woman needs/wants/ thrives on the verses of Shania and Faith Hill. And as for me, I have to say when I ponder what it might like to be to have a partner where our blood beats with the same passion and build a universe we can call our religion, I think of Faith Hill and that guy she’s married.

But then I wonder. She wrote this song What’s In It For Me? And I should listen to this song more often. Instead I plummet into the stream of Breathe and It will Be Me. Isn’t that the way that’s love supposed to be? Maybe. But I can breathe and I know how precious the feeling is of the hearts and breathes in tandem. My babies sleeping on my chest, my own chest pressed against yours. . . same beat, bellies warming. So how do you find love after all?

This is the dichotomy of country music. I was reared in the role of the family enabler. Guilty as charged but, of course, not guilty. At this point you wouldn’t think I would confuse it with other things but maybe things swirl so it’s not all this or that; it so rarely is black or white. My needs are in the mix too. I know it. I can help you. Whoever decided that that concept is right anyway? How come an enabler can enable while people can really only help themselves and you can't help someone who doesn't want help?

I can do anything to which I set my mind. So here is my mind set: whether country music sets your world on fire or not (and it is not my first touch on the juke box), I want what I imagine Faith Hill has and I can find it, nurture it, curl it into my arms every night even if I find it like a piece of coal. If the conditions are right, we’ll have gems.

But just as often, I hear Cheryl Wheeler sing Almost and there is no doubt that I’ve been found out. I counter it with Faith Hill’s You’re Bringing out the Elvis in Me. It’s a good disguise.

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. "

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. "
Rumi

Making books and making poems and making poems in unexpected places, on unexpected surfaces: there is beauty there and I love to do it. So I'm making books and posting poems. I may slip them into restaurant menus or people's mailboxes, leave them on car windows, paste them onto rocks and set them by the shore, write them on the bottoms of people's shoes as they watch a movie, post it note them to the backs of passersby, put them inside books at Borders and Mad Annas. You might go to the bathroom and pull on the toilet paper and find a poem rolling out. Maybe I'll make them up as coasters and put them at City Dock Cafe and 49 West. Maybe I'll leave them between the lace and silk in the stacks of Victoria Secret panties.

Imagine There's An Image: Sunlight and Wind

Imagine There's An Image: Sunlight and Wind
Please visit my friend, Steve. His photographs are remarkable, authentic, and have performed as a muse to many poems and stories.

Pain is a catalyst. . . .

Emotional pain, physical pain. A heaviness in the heart or a thump on the head. I have endured physical pain as most people of my age have; appendicitis, falls from trees and roof-tops, menses, migraines, birth, wrist surgeries, cuts and stitches, broken bones, sinus pain, stubbed toe pain, bit my own tongue pain. It is surmountable. We can get through our own pain, eventually it subsides.

Emotional pain is more difficult. The scars run like rivers in us, small tributaries that feed into others, they bleed into good intentions and adventures we never take, they create assumptions that blind us to truth. Emotional pain, well rendered, brings insight and strength, courage even. Details? Okay

“She’s just a girl,” her father said. “Why does she need to finish high school?”
“You will never be beautiful, Mary, so you must create the illusion of beauty.”
“Do you know how silly you look?”
“What are you going to do if you leave your husband; go live in a trailer with cats?”
“You’re ugly.”
“This won’t hurt.”
“She didn’t deserve that award, if you know what I mean,” wink wink.
“No one will ever love you like I do.”
“I hate you.”
“I want to live with Daddy.”
“Get out of my house,” my mother said.
“I wish you would die.”
“I can’t see you anymore.”

That’s all you get. Believe me, I have mined my emotional pain in my writing. I know the writer can’t hide even if they try.

Pain is a catalyst to action. We know something must be done, our lives must change.

Tao of Beatles

When one is contemplating the big questions in life, one can always find comfort in the Beatles. This is my tao of Beatles lyrics:

“And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.”

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly”

“Let it be, let it be.
There will be an answer, let it be.”

Recovery

Recovery from any injury (physical, emotional, or spiritual) is an every day thing, an hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute stilling. Standing still is sometimes the best that I can do. I'm standing still. But it doesn't feel much like living. It feels like catching my breath.

Recently my daughter called me her "lighthouse." The lighthouse may be still, but the light is nearly endless, full of purpose. I could be a lighthouse. Better than the boulder under the surf at the land's end. But it is fruitless to compare one thing to another sometimes. Such as now.

Flogging

Michael Chabon wrote, “every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.” I wonder what happened to him so he knew that. I wonder about the minor loves, if they are terrible mistakes or just misdemeanors? I wonder about the people I’ve hurt and if they feel loving me was a terrible mistake. Of course, though he tempers the quote with “in some measure.” Does that mean that in all other measures it was a wonderful thing? My head hurts. My heart hurts. Here is a poem I am not going to finish, so feel free to do something with it. I don’t want it anymore.

Maggie carries her heart on her sleeve,
which was particularly painful on
flogging day.

Sucker

I feel the need to explain something.
There is a difference between the quick
rip of a band aid
and a sucker punch to the gut.

With the band aid, you were already
wounded, and afterward there
is usually a hug and sometimes a lollipop.

The sucker punch,
is a crepuscular event
denying defense, breath, or explanation.
No hug. No lollipop.

Has Been

So there she is, the minor farceur.
Here is what she supposes;
to have been
Some force, incalculable,
A tutelary shelter from the fray.

Instead she steps into you
under a stem of sandlewood.
Your fingers wrap over
hers to dress Palmer
method fluency into
her southpaw stammer.

Drawings in the Alabama red
clay tell the faded tales
they deny with peach
tinted souls.