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tonylongo Mar 2020
are earth's dominant life form, having converted the atmosphere from 5 percent to 21 percent oxygen and thus totally reformed the shape of everything.
anyway, anyone who would name a poem after a virus is a prevert.
tonylongo Mar 2020
you make me woozy
tonylongo Mar 2020
My sister’s a mister. She cares for her plants,
Her orchids from Cuba, Tahiti, or France.
She grows lovely children entirely from scratch
In homemade production runs, two to the batch.
She teaches the women of her little town
To belly, to yoga, to boogie on down.
She’s always found living alone such a bore;
A harvest of husbands – she’s on number four.
She drives a Miata with careless aplomb,
The very ideal of a hot soccer mom.

But me, I was thinking of how to invent
A Booker prize novel to cover my rent,
Or lysergic rhapsodies for the guitar
Or finally learning to drive in a car.
The hours spurted onward in skips and in bounds,
Years twirling away down a hole in the ground;
How gently appalling my ultimate fate,
To grow wispy white whiskers, and sit on a gate.

She spins on the dance floor like wind on the wing,
To Western and Latin and Manhattan Swing;
Her elegant limbs grace the South Jersey beaches,
And people go mad for her raspberry quiches.
Her daughter (my niece) with her blue eyes so dear
Sets the upper crust of Baltimore on its ear,
While her brother my nephew is cutting a swath, (um)
Through the au courant circles of fashionable Gotham.
That’s my sister, triumphing wherever she goes,
And she never had anything done to her nose.

But me, I was dreaming up world-shifting rubrics,
Or imagining screenplays to shame all the Kubricks;
My ****** could make you explode in your jammies,
And my song lyrics won theoretical Grammys.
Of invisible kingdoms I was the past master,
I walked with Elijah, I lunched Zoroaster.
Yet somehow I find myself at this late date
With my brain in the clouds, and my *** on a gate.
This imitates a poem by the White Knight although that might not have been the poem but what the poem was called as opposed to the name of the poem
tonylongo Mar 2020
1
Borrowed boots carried him lightly
To the Mule Neck Glade
Where the dawn star rising
Cut like a damascene blade.

2
Borrowed boots carried him lightly
To the Mule Neck Spinney
Where the dawn fire’s reflection
Burned like an acid Jinnee.

3
Borrowed books carried him lately
Through a mare’s nest of days
Till the cryptorium’s meek updraft
Smashed his kennings to a craze.

4
Burrough’s books stick like court plasters
To the Tourette’s sufferer’s face
Where irruptions of night terrors
Stitch their goggle-eyed trace.

5
Bare bones faithfully uncovered
One last forgiving needle
Our final view upon Ascension -
The Analysis of Beetles!
tonylongo Mar 2020
there seems to be
a strong preference
among the hottest, most feverish poems on here
for ones where the first line
is less than six syllables
tonylongo Mar 2020
The robed and turbaned guides lead us
Station to pillar to post
Here the last puddle of sacred blood outlined in platinum,
There the stray knotted whipstroke picked out on the
Mudstone wall in jasper and rarest peridotites
- Change yer shoes for the final hill to the death sanctum,
Last sonatina set to begin, with eye max.
But, but here monsignor, what’s this minor
Scatter of comic beaks ‘n bones off to the side in shadow,
This fouled corner irrigated by ninety-nine generations of
Three faiths and their pets?

- Pay no ear, it’s got no voice or at most
The scalded steamkettle hiss of a dying gull,
Was never no human language
Nor saw anything really seen
And those what claim to have dug up gored pieces of value
From under there just kissed the *** of madness.
tonylongo Mar 2020
We (as far as I can remember)
Started out to recreate a sane conversation
In which facts of all shades and shapes would
Simply emerge and connect themselves into
Acting structures.

There was a phase in which
Burgeoning ways and means of
Unearthing and spreading these bits
Occupied and riveted most attention;
Followed by something – Fear? Sense? –
Expressing as allergens to ungrounded factoids
And structures acting not from meaning
But obviously from the hindbrain.

After who knows how many rounds of
Lunge feint riposte I found my little self in a
Small drifting group which seems mostly set on
Maintaining through and despite all that something
Uniquely value-added – esthetic, mimetic, cosmogenic or
In any case fertile in cross-breeding ways – is going to fly
On be nurtured and eventually cover the terraqueous globe.
But there seems to be a tacit condition set in this local world,
That the “novel factoid” stream from ongoing earth-21st century
Goings on be ignored. Which begs the question of why do we need
1,200 geosynchronous satellites to do this.
Or –
Was that my drift?

— The End —