Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Perry Apr 2020
A lost black and white picture
-Misplaces forever
A protruding tree in a pond
-Endlessly drowning

But I showed you a strong face
Yes, I showed you a lie
I thought for you to leave in peace
It was necessary for my burden
To find a place to hide

Home in your eye veered north
A rebel endeavor to outrun
The fire that is your skin
Like a shooting star

A star that had to die
For my unremarkable eye
To catch a glimpse of light
Teaching me how to say

-Goodbye
  Apr 2020 Perry
Nat Lipstadt
~for Lori Jones McCaffery~

Lori Jones McCaffery commenting on
“a new time (poetry in the time of pandemic)”^
“Tender and brutal at the same time. Like the times.”*

                                                     ­          <>
your observation, a commission, opens an incision,
bleeding out a Noah flood vision:

                                                        ­        <>

when we begin, to compare and contrast the movable tender and the unstoppable brutal, the poetry must rise to equalize the pressure of unbalanced times, the tender, and the brutal in an uneasy peaceful coexistence, at the same time, same place
                                                           ­     
                              
                              
                            
The Brutal                                              The Tender
—————                                             —————
life in the epicenter, the greatest,       in the darkened bedroom,
noisiest city, now landscape               she awakens, her hand quick
painting quiet,                                      comes to rest on my chest,
one lives/writes/eyesights thru       the quality of motion+volume
pink mask + a minimum six              of heartbeats, is it loud enough,
feet of separation,                                steady on, no need to dial 911!
a citified tableau of macro wave       she unaware that I can hear
forces in crashing collision, upon     her loud, tender exhalation
your skin’s cells                                   celebrating surviving day#?

newspaper images of Death’s            many volunteer, food delivery,
ministers applauding the newly        though I am asymptomatic
arrived mobile morgues, for 100        my request tenderly, firmly
died yesterday,                                      denied, for I meet too many
their brutal death rattles                      of the vulnerable criteria,
overwhelmed  the super-surround.   instead, offering food to me,
sound silences of                                   to deliver to me, to deliver me,
brutal emptiness of millions of           tenderly I say, no thanks,
sacrificial                                             ­    my tour of duty, almost done
                              
                                all of us isolate lambs, in day jailed,
                                for we still breathing the maybe tainted,                
                                oxygen molecules of no safe surety      

a consummate perfection,                    the same, taming words I tell  
the holy quietus of                                 my son, young father,
those no longer breathing,                   tender me necessary tasks that
they now rest up above,                        require outside journeys, say I
hid in a white cumulus                         send me into the red hot areas
cloud cover, a noise suppressing         insert me into the front line,
sky coverlet, moving across a               militarized zones, he replies,
bright blue pure background,              ”you’re too old, part and
a train of funeral caissons,                     parcel of the most vulnerable,
brutal noisy hooves clacking             better-write-you tender-poems”

daily, hourly, the statistical alerts,         why so hard, to write tender
brief résumés delivered,                         so easy of the brutal, their
drumbeating, look now!                         curses so readily supplied,
are you up to date?                                  is tenderness short supplied?

catalog the debris, organized with brutal necessary efficacy, quantify, qualify the costs, include even the tender ineffable, countdown and graph the brutal calculus of the curve infection, and you, numbed, past the point of eyes capable of what once was tender droplet tearing

highlight the unknown faraway, the tender hope of a distant apex inflection, while plotting the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of a brutal yet trending upward *****, the ascending all-inclusive stat, infected, the rate of change of decedents, downed, descending, giving in...gowned in hospital blue, for the funeral pyre

a city of lines, crosswalks, velvet ropes, unused, unemployed, social separators, no one about to need to separate, anymore, only the living and the dead, both staying indoors, so neither in attendance, at the empty funeral services, everybody is on the out list...

the now newly indistinguishable, the irresistible collision of two one-sides polarizing poles of no longer opposites, the tender and the brutal in a single embrace, but no, not kissing, embargoed, as we are stationed from above, far, high up on the watchtower observatory, observing the contrast dye that flies so fast on people denuded grand boulevards, down narrow hospital hallways, body-lined decorated, tales of millions of lives isolatized, and don’t forget the brutalizing discovery of scores of elderly, dying alone, withering in the dark, counted, lumped in to the category of statistically irrelevant, if dead, who cares, matters not now, in the afterworld no one asks how,
                        in a fashion both tenderly and brutal,
                        what was the actual cause?
  Apr 2020 Perry
Sarita Aditya Verma
Simple interests
Complex values
Evaluating
Desired profits
Loss of interests
Principal principles lost
  Apr 2020 Perry
r
Black Lilacs
blooming -

a blossoming
of grief -

dark fallen pollen
on the breeze -

I can see it falling
all around me -

there on the wall
for us to see -

April will be
the cruelest of them all.
“ April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land...

I will show you fear in a handful of dust...

...And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls;...”

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922.



Our LOVE candle
Burns at both ends

We are connected
By a single
LOVEz waxed wick

One end is yours
The other is mine
But we are singular
Skeletal waxed string

BURNING - ON FIRE!

Both sustaining flames
To melt their ends
So to come closer
To each other

Slow deliberate burning
With patience & perseverance

To merge & extinguish
Our opposites energies
In unison of attracting
Two ends of ONE light
To become powdered ash

May be life will not last
The duration of
Our wick's length

But ah...
To all those who LOVEz
To all those who do not LOVEz
To the friends and foes
To the dark and light
To the old and young
To the sad faces and brights
And to those who care or not

Our LOVE gives light
To celebrate our UNION
Of true-soul-connect

See, our LOVE candle
Gives a heavenly bliss glow

Reminiscent of the TRUTH
That one day our LOVE
We'll surely merge into the
Darkness of LOVEz Light





Next page