Jazz Age

Jazz Age

Take it from the steal

take it from the street

take it from the speakeasy

the deck tossed under his feet,

swaying drunken flower in his

flannel bags, fedora, 
pipestem clenched,
teeth grating, another
Fitzgerald whored to
the Post. Glass raised,
posed amidships
she's an indigo nonsense,
a mad moondanced Zelda
traveling in night, losing life 
gin-draped in felt folds,
white wealth of self, 
pointed toe
broken starfish arms.

Drop it in the deep
drop it in the well
drop it in your sleep
hard to say when he fell,
drank the last bottle
smoked the last fag
wrote the last script,
oozed over the side
without making Paris, Riviera,
Antibes, never reading
Papa’s last laugh
just a sink and sigh 
in the peace blue 
sea, looking up going down
at the dancing starfish
in her tulle shroud gown
wings barely showing 
in the dark.

September 2011

Posted for    Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Loosely inspired by the Fitzgeralds and some fragments of dream

Blast From the Past

One Stop Poetry is featuring a look backwards into ourselves today, and asked for postings from the very beginning. I couldn't pick between these two, so you have both my single published poem that ever won a prize, Dialogues with Angela, and another called Dead Poets. Dates are approximate, but both were written when I was between 16 and 19 years old. I have strenuously resisted the urge to polish or rewrite, and you have them here as they came off my battered Smith Corona.

Dialogues with Angela

I can see from here quick squirrels

and the trees they run quarreling over

and the parallel swamps of street and sky,

stumbled over by birds or boys.

And, from here,

the cats, black and bitter, trotting over the frozen ground.

        “An infinity of interconnection,” she intoned.

        “Everything is hungry”

I took a grey walk through harmonious vacancy

but through some miss of chance I saw

‘Franz Kafka was Here’ red-chalked on subway walls

and laughing, she said,

        “That kills me.” but refused obstinately

        to fall in front of the train.

We walked hand in hand, through the greenhouse.

It may be that day winds are dark winds,

but the flowers are to be loved.

I pointed to the tables of petaled cream, of smoked white

and suggestive smoothness.

And Angela, gently pointed:

        “The magnolias,” she said, pausing significantly,

        “have dry rot.”

We went on sadly together, our eyes folding

on faces frozen in suspension,

The real cows are not in pasture,I told her,

Prudent chewing, producing contented milk.

Cows and squirrels and mice are fat and happy in the city.

        “Kangaroos and camels are beautiful,” she muttered,

        “And I think it’s a pity there should be none here.”

1966

Dead Poets

There are no more poets, the frosts have killed them off

in their Floridian orange groves, once long ago

the copses of Aphrodite.

The long north wind blowing from America has taken them

with the trees it turned to slime.

The poets were banalized to death,

pursued by Daughters of the American Revolution,

social secretaries,

and in their turning sleep

the ghosts of Mid West college boards hunted them down

with speaking appointments before creative writing seminars.

Their eyes grew shadowed with a lack of dissipation

and they took to yogurt and NET,

sobbing sometimes in the night loud enough to be heard

by their wives and wishing machines.

But one was found, running naked down a Pacific beach

with daisies braided in his pubic hair and

smack tears puddled  on his thistled face screaming

weeping diamonds of words to the L.A. cops,

who belched a little as they booked him,

anonymously

for he had given his name to the little gods

and the graves of his youth.

Written sometime between 1966 and 1969

(NET refers to the extinct network, National Educational Television)

Posted for A Saturday Celebration~Your Past  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry