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This is not a poem.  This is about a poem.

Poems require words.  This poem does not require words.

This poem requires memories' muscles.
This poem requires what is called colloquially love.

Learn that what we share here is not poetry.

Your poetic senses that produce the words that mark you present
are but surgical tools to extract, release the whole and the parts of you that help shape that single sense borning in your chest that defines you at any particular moment.

Quæ est mater Laureat.

She is the Mother Laureate.

She is the boundary you must learn to cross to be more than a re-arranger of letters and alphabets, but a translator of the human essence and fill our veins with the a sense of awe and wonder felt when we read each other and think aloud,
"yes, exactly, that was and is precisely what I was feeling."

She is the glue that keeps us sticking here, sticking together, each of us sticking to it.  

You do not know her?  
No worries, she will find you when you least expect it, perhaps
when you need it.

This is not a poem.  This is a human who's a poem.

Understand the difference and then you may begin a journey
that has no destination other than weaving the connective tissue that makes us anticipating excited when we log on.

Happy Birthday Mother Poet Laureate!

I do not think I can write a better not poem for you.  
Forgive me then, if going toward, I repost this every
October 24th as long as the chemical composition of
blood, God, spirit, logos or reason runs free within,  
exiting as words encased in tears that formulate into
human poetry.

nattyman

P.S.There are 800 poems here with Sally in the title, and least 700  are about Sally B.   If you like, please  feel to free to add yours, old or new.

the bus poets

we are the modern day chimney sweeps,
the ***** black faced coal miners of the city,
digging up its grit, toasted with its spit,
the gone and forgotten elevator operators,
the anonymous substitutable,
still yet glimpsed occasionally,
grunts of urbanity
provoking a surprised
whaddya know!

once like the bison and the buffalo,
we were thousands,
word workers roaming the cities,
the intercity rural routes and the lithe greyhounds
across the land of the brave,
free in ways the
founders wanted us to be
us, the stubs and stuff,
harder working poor and lower cases

we were the bus poets,
sitting always in the back of the bus,
where the engines growls loudest,
seated in the - the most overheated
in winter time, so much so
we nearly disrobed,
and then come the summer,
we were blasted with a joking
hot reverie from the vents,
but vent, no, we did not!

no - we wrote and wrote of all we heard,
passion overheated by currents within and without,
recording and ordering the
snatches and the soliloquies of the passengers,
into poem swatches;
the goings on passing by,
the overheard histories,
glimpsed in milliseconds, eternity preserved,
inscribed in a cheap blue lined five & dime notebook,
for all eternity what the eyes
sighed and saw

books ever passed
onto the next generation in boxes from the supermarket,
attic labeled, then forgotten beside the outgrown toys
with our names writ indelible with the magic of
black markers

if you stumble upon a breathing scripter,
let them be, just observe,
as they, you,
these movers and bus shakers,
as they, observe you

tell your children,
you knew one in your youth,
then take them to the attic
retrieve your mother's and father's,
teach your children
how to read, how to see,
the ways of their forefathers,
the forsaken,
the bus poets.

little remains
of my grandfather's house:
raw rafters, warped planks with hints
my uncle invested in paint

the windows all gone, time
and twisters took them, and much
of the roof--what is left of that sags,
a silent submission to gravity

a woodstove survives, cold
to the touch, with no memory
of the fire it once birthed, the precious
prairie timber which fed it

now it knows only mourning
doves' song; winged squatters
unperturbed by my presence, as if
they know I lay no claim to now

the old boards have stories
I will never hear: the birth of babes,
reading the Word by kerosene lamps,
the last breaths of men

the songbirds may know,
but they woo the living in flight--a
future of nesting and fertile eggs; they
owe no belated dirge to long lost kin

June 6th 1944 was D-Day.

an ordinary Tuesday,
delightful divided into an ordinary gamut,
a potpourri of Earth-Ordinaries,
with me doing my very best job ever,
bus stop eavesdropping.

Buses are for everyone,
but ever since they taught the
city buses to kneel to the elderly
and gave them an additional limb,
an elevator for wheelchairs,
they seem more majoritized by those
who have earned
the discounted fare of senior citizenry.

two prim and rose blushed ladies await the M31,
to head uptown on York Avenue,
where the many hospitals
have elected to build edifices
side by side, to more easily share illness,
and rise far as the Babel elevators can climb.

prime material for a bus stop poet,
and sure enough, these two, mid-eighties,
I reckon, provide me rich veins of
words, matériel, to cross under the arches.

What is the proper way to put in toilet paper so it dispenses
properly, which somehow is super fascinating.

who has had their hips replaced and who passed,
because they did not.

the deterioration of bus service under the new mayor who seems always to be out of town, or late.

a few blocks before bus approached Sloan Kettering,
where one was to be scanned precautionary,
while the other was due an intravenous cocktail of poison,
the more aged of the two changed the subject extraordinarily.

do you know what day this is?

the other replied,
oh yes,
the day your older brother died upon a French beach,
the brother but eight years older than us,
the brother your adored and that I loved, even at age ten,
was to be my shy one, betrothed unto me

for seventy years my darling, we have together remembered,
even in the years that my abusive husband wrested me away
to California, and forbade my seeing your countenance,
and the second, a good man of proud Missouri stock,
poorer than an interdenominational  lmouse,
who wished but could not afford our joining,
have we not always chattered on this day,
of this and that,
so you could ask as if by chance,

do you know what day this is?

this is the day
they chose to name with scarlet ****** letter,
not an A but a black and bold
D,
and redirected our lives,
its tremors and
remembrances,
its directed chances and luck of the draw, and diminishing memories,
knowing that we shall never again be separated till we have word
choice
stripped from our vocabulary.

now our stop has come so let us alight and delight
that we defeat yet again, that deathful enemy,
and even when he must win the day,
we three will be reunited in a victory,
in a victory so patiently awaited.  

missed my stop by ten blocks,
and was thinking maybe
being an eavesdropping bus poet stop
was a more dangerous profession than I could handle.