"plums" poems
(Inspired by and dedicated to John Edward Smallshaw, and his "Spice")
I am a summer-man,
Because I'm blessed to sit by the sea.
Let it and the other two Musketeers,
boon companions to me,
Sun and Wind,
erase my discomposure as I
reside in the Poet's Nookery.
Let them have almost
all that troubles,
but not all.
I am a summer-man.
On the bay, on the beach,
I see birth, I see death,
osprey nests, carcasses of
mussels and horseshoe *****
This, somehow reassuring,
the cycles,
this circularity,
the tides and inevitability.
I am a summer-man.
Student of languages seasonal,
Peaches, plums, cherries, poetry
and loving Woman.^
This, the summer alphabet-soup
of my multiple tongues.
I am a summer-man.
Sancerre and Pinot Gris, super cold,
Paul Simon, Nina Simone,
with proper aging,
getting hotter,
Salsa and Afrikaner hints,
super louder,
Even "Still Crazy After All These Years,"
that-who-wud-be-me,
chills outer.^^
I am a summer-man.
When ever this lad's writes appear,
it proves once again,
there is no truth that his
name was once Dr. Seuss
In a prior life, even if
each is signed by
Ogdiddy Nash**
I am a summer-man.
**Disrespectful of the calendar,
if I can, try to make
summer season stretch-marks from
May to October.
I would add April,
but the IRS is already
****** at me.^^^
Though the cherry blossoms of May
now gone away,
the lilies of June
arrive, but but for a week or two,
soon, like my mom, withered away.
Acorns in August^^^^ have arrived too swiftly.**
This summer, beloved,
and love of summer,
deep-rooted.
Season of my Peter Pan Poetry Galore Festival.
A love, incapable, impossible, of ever
growing old, ever growing cold,
it cannot wither.
It is summer heat reminders exposed,
how it misses its man,
that hide in the flames of
the teasing, popping, reminding
Winter fireplace's crackling popping***
Aug 25, 2013
Aug 25, 2013 at 9:33 AM UTC
big sweaters, ghibli, acrylic paint, cafes, knit blankets and unplanned afternoon naps on the couch, gardens, bananas, vanilla almond milk, soft yarn to crochet into ****** scarves, candles after midnight, the big trees with bulky roots, patio furniture, pianos in random buildings, the internet, manatees, the boundless colours of nail polish, peanut butter & honey, rubber boots, pens that write well, fresh new notebooks, skylights, american netflix, mothers that understand, tête à têtes, one glass of sweet white wine, awkward eye contact that turns into comfortable kissing, airplanes, fresh air, baseball caps, the female collective, the really good dark chocolate, flowers, pumpkin spice lattes and ***** chai lattes, candid laughter, yoga, oceans, high waisted shorts, striped t-shirts, docile cats, playful pups, french presses, integrity, sunscreen, meerkats, penguins, chameleons, autumn leaves, fall fashion, ruby woo mac lipstick, osho, dynamic meditation, compassion, siblings, scrambled eggs, smart phones, garageband, metronomes, hot glue guns, quinoa, ferry boats, soft hands, bicycles, real people, fat snowflakes in ample, graceful ********** backpacks that don't hurt your shoulders, hair conditioner, multi-vitamins, soft sand under bare feet, people that own up to lies, clarity, samsara, satori, samasati, visions, echinacea, lavender oil and frankincense, ambrosia apples and ripe avocados, authenticity, Morgan Freeman's voice, good kissers, ******* iced tea on a hot day, curtains, the smell of beeswax, art galleries, hand massages and foot massages, reiki, plums, mild thunderstorms, soccer ***** good surprises, when birds don't **** on your head.
Oct 9, 2013
Oct 9, 2013 at 7:24 AM UTC
Endless stains of blood
On white t-shirts
On nights that scatter blue trees over black earth
Alight by shooting stars
The mother tells her child
Unwilling to unlock the truth
The truth those stars
Don't grant your wishes
They grab them
With scarred scratching hands.
Alight,
The damp stitches in the soil
Cemetery symmetrical to hospital
Those shooting stars circling
Like a vulture
Speeds towards dead carcasses
Still, the murdering star will not cease
To break bones
That have already broken
To take lives
That have already been taken
To burn
What is already charred
Today
smells like burnt muddied skin
feels like gnawing on your own fingers for feast
sounds like tired, howling machines
spurring and sputtering, never-ending their onwards trek
Swallowing distances and with it, nameless faces
countless places
Today the earthquakes of death
Don't make the land shake anymore
For it has learned to cope
With the desolate cemeteries filled with mute bones
Today burns like gasoline
Looks like intestines decorating destroyed doorways
Today it rains curdled crimson
Tell me shooting star
If the child liked jam on his toast
Did he snore?
Did he like math? Or english?
Shooting star doesn't know and neither the bombs.
As bodies fall from trees
like rotten plums.
The world was born in blood
And has not ceased to suckle its wounds
Endless blood thirst, Endless war
But not endless skin to bleed.
Oct 15, 2017
Oct 15, 2017 at 2:41 AM UTC
I was distracted from colors so bright
By the scrumptious cakes and chocolate bars
I walked through those doors, taffy past my height
Where I saw sweet teas and candy cigars
Bins filled with lollipops and gummy bears
Colorful gum ***** and chocolate coins
Chocolate dipped plums and delicious pears
Oh, how very sweet! The ache in my *****
One man so strange tapped me on the shoulder
“Hello,” said the man, breath scented of smoke
“There is more candy out where it’s colder”
I follow him out. He hands me a coke.
But to my surprise, no candy outdoors.
In the trunk of his car and on all fours
Apr 20, 2015
Apr 20, 2015 at 9:15 PM UTC
Poems on a Mirror
~for Glenn Currier~
you don’t know me
I don’t know you;
poems on a mirror I ken
truly well
poems on the mirror saved, and then,
comme the seasoning of leave-falling,
poems dropping and drained...the post-it glue loosened by
the daily heat of watery tears,
making a space for
this one, for you...
there are poems and they arrive with fresh arrogance,
each an arrow demanding your all as a target regardless
of what the shooter really thinks or wants, other than
obedient acknowledgment and their self-loving flattery
but some render where no rendering should be allowed
those are the ones affixed - ones you chose to join the chosen,
slapped onto mirrors - so many that they almost
cover complete your image from presentation
almost only because these poems are yours, you,
they’re the truly accurate reflection even if not your words,
indeed especially because they’re not yours
but they start your day as a poem should
and in doing so,
become you
What a Hall of Fame, to be a poem on Glenn’s Hall of Mirrors
go pick the plums...
Jul 15, 2018
Jul 15, 2018 at 2:18 PM UTC
The braches of the faint oak were bewitched to a dark gold under
the orange, thick silk sunset.
The wood, as the sun lowered, changed from apple green
to golden billow
which swept foamy,
rose clouds along a now cucumber, blurry horizon.
Plump plums and fruit rinds
litter ripe walkways alongside the flower beds who's tickled buds
are closing slightly as the fickle sky, gone nine, turns to a majestic
Indian blue and the June monastery's milky swirls are lit by the sugar lump stars.
Apr 26, 2014
Apr 26, 2014 at 3:27 PM UTC
Puffs of thistledown
floating in the air.
Lovely lady
dark blue plums
and the tracery of lace.
'Toot' says a trumpet
to the cry from a clarinet.
Tinkling piano notes
flowing
lilting, rippling, fleeting
fleeing.
Bows, strings and violins.
Echoes of yesterday
fading into grey.
Sep 24, 2014
Sep 24, 2014 at 4:40 AM UTC
I like to be annoying
Only when it's sweet as the sugar plums
I'm relentlessly hard-headed
But i take immense pride with that
No doubt in my mind
Not a single doubting fragment
I'm a magnet
That never stops it's force
When it comes to my passion for you
Oct 26, 2015
Oct 26, 2015 at 10:18 PM UTC
If apples were pears
And peaches were plums
And the rose had a different name.
If tigers were bears
And fingers were thumb,
I'd love you just the same.
Aug 1, 2016
Aug 1, 2016 at 1:05 AM UTC
I am your denial, your Lent fast
The mania in your DNA,
the way the helix twists around itself.
I am the finger-shaped bruises on the inside
soft of the thigh, the color of ripe plums
that you can’t stop pressing
because it hurts just right—
like us, the way we crack our knuckles.
The scoliosis question mark,
bent spoon of your spine like
Scandinavian silverware, its unfunctioning beauty.
The snow of a thousand dandelions gone to seed.
The sugar sacks of fat around my body
that I love to touch and hate to see.
I am the thrift store of your desires,
a polyester pantsuit resold.
The starch of morning arthritis.
The dark under your nails
that isn’t really dirt.
The yellow smoke smell in a jacket.
A mango eaten off the pit,
stringy mango veins that stay in your teeth.
A washing machine that doesn’t drain.
A man cursing in his native language,
foreign words that don’t translate.
Apr 19, 2012
Apr 19, 2012 at 4:51 PM UTC
I think it quite strange living here walled by this house
when I was wilder than now I lived in nature
stalking birds and pollen laden things
always my toes in sands or hot footed in summer.
I was in love with the sky, no matter the weather
in storms I hid beneath branching cedars
sleeping on mossy pillows, in the woods of my backyard.
I never gave much thought to houses then, I only went there
to sleep or eat and waited to leave again
waited for an inkling of sun to warm the cold grass
spent days climbing trees, red plums and cherries
I imagined that's how life would always be,
living outdoors under the sun or clouds
wet with rain, always picking flowers.
Aug 28, 2017
Aug 28, 2017 at 10:49 PM UTC
When my dark clouds rise
And dirt clods fly and I try
In sheer panic to replace
Rotten fruit with dull wax fruit
And wilted blossoms with
Plastic flowers and she thinks we
Will be on yet another short-lived
But cold cycle of tightrope and
Eggshell walking . . .
She comes home
With bags filled with
Apples green & red
Peppers yellow & green & red
Grapes green & purple
Plums yellow & purplish-red
Strawberries, peaches, tomatoes
Bananas & Greek salads.
This usually inspires me to go
Outside to make
For this setting a centrepiece of a
Vase filled with a variety of fresh
Picked wildflowers which brings
Her more joy than two dozen
Of the overrated overachiever rose.
At times this seems like
One of few bridges back
To a healthy & colourful world.
Feb 2, 2017
Feb 2, 2017 at 11:57 AM UTC
Masticated Ectoplasm to Lance Corporal Tom
Masticated Ectoplasm to Lance Corporal Tom
Bumming your fat knobs and insert your helmet naked and unashamed
Masticated Ectoplasm to Lance Corporal Tom
Kicking off kick-off, cyborgs brought face to face
Tartan sunstroke and may Mumbo Jumbo's **** all lie among you
Nine, eleven, seven, thirteen, six, quinquereme, ******** ********* Tweedledum and Tweedledee, unsocial person, erectoffensive!
This is Masticated Ectoplasm to Lance Corporal Tom
You've really ****** the naval officer
And the hatchet faces want to know whose blouses you abuse
Now it's time to evacuate the ******* if you have a free hand
This is Lance Corporal Tom to Masticated Ectoplasm
I'm fancy dress dancing through the cat—flap
And I'm groping inside a swollen grotesque sailor
And the plums look gigantically unusual nowadays
Ergo from Land's End to John o' Groats am I piddling in a crumpet slammer
Telescopic hindward the lump
Uranus Arsenic is scatological
And there's sweet **** all I can have ****** *********** with
With the proviso that I'm Ichabod celibate centipede sextillion heads
I'm fondling vigorously paparazzo
And I think my sputnik knows which direction to ****
Tell my ballbreaker I ****** her vigorously for England, she bonks
Masticated Ectoplasm to Lance Corporal Tom
Your menstrual cycle's kaput, there's oojakapivvygizmo spleen
Can you smell me, Lance Corporal Tom?
Can you get to the bottom of me, Lance Corporal Tom?
Can you delve into me, Lance Corporal Tom?
Can you...
From Land's End to John o' Groats am I vibrating ring my crumpet criminal lunatic asylum
Telescopic hindward the groupie
Uranus Arsenic is scatological
And there's sweet **** all I can have ****** *********** with
Mar 27, 2010
Mar 27, 2010 at 4:22 PM UTC
Send the immigrants back; unfortunately the referendum was based on that.
Misplaced Hate,
Created by power,
Forcing a debate of the darkest hour.
Hate towards immigration, but wait!
What if you need an operation?
The health service is crumbling, needs multiculturalism to keep the cogs turning.
So you want a debate on immigration?
Let’s talk about your integration.
What’s your heritage?
Where is your blood line from?
I doubt it will be a solely British one!
Our kids walk the streets with knives and guns, yet our politicians talk with plums.
Claim to understand society, but driving flash cars is their priority.
Don’t give a **** about local business rather see corporations strip our economy.
Self-Serving politicians feed the fat cats ambition, Cameron or Corbyn? It’s us the people who are suffering!
Jul 4, 2016
Jul 4, 2016 at 6:04 AM UTC
I think things like "weigh my belt"
That weight dowth felt thy girly wirly smell
hand made
sew maid for two plums pie
I cry I cry I almost pass away
way to the future down
down to below. Oh
how can I
be so
naïve before the summer glow
a basement bash of feet below
below a hazard haggard waist
wasted on the belt loop of his father
a potter
plain before your very eyes
a seismic ray of disbelief
a cobble stone of sticks and leaves.
No
I could be a sailor man
and I could eat things from a can
and inching toward a rubber band
Damsels in distress
they're not impressed by you
or shallow deeds
deeds begin to play
beneath my skin and things that float away
and inching toward the silos of
a tribal super plane
a racecar a racecar
I'm ******* erasing it all
Aug 18, 2014
Aug 18, 2014 at 1:15 AM UTC
At last these Plums took the Daughter in Kind
From Lord Raffles' Paradise she adored
A Marriage of Saints she thought to remind
Though behind her Door was Melancholy.
But who a Pony-Child in Fashion's New
Could taste the Recipe she may not like?
Clotted Cream? Or Fish in the River-View
Tore through the Muddy Dress to greet her Delight
This is not the Age, Tories of the West
To switch on Lights dimmed for your Books to read
She is a Sweet-Tooth; Or Filmer at best
Just give her a Spoon; She makes one Great Mead.
She is my Friend. And the Plum's Diver Son
Rewarded a Follow never un-done.
Mar 9, 2013
Mar 9, 2013 at 4:39 AM UTC
i have a wish for christmas.
rainbow dream an turtle dove.
yummy yummy to my tummy,
on this christmas day.
i have a wish for christmas.
ginger bread men.
and candy cane.
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day.
i have a wish for christmas.
rocky road cookie dough
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day.
i have wish for christmas.
rainbow dots an sugar plums
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day.
i have a wish for christmas.
rainbow dreams an turtle dove
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day
i have a wish for christmas.
ginger bread men and
candy canes
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day
i have wish for christmas
rocky road and cookie dough.
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day.
i have wish for christmas.
rainbow dot sugar plums
yummy yummy to my tummy
on this christmas day.
repeat verse 5 time that the song
Dec 4, 2010
Dec 4, 2010 at 9:12 PM UTC
Loons in the vineyard – sound the alarm !
Satan is milking his metaphors.
Such silly music portends no harm;
call home the cows and open your doors.
Brian Hugh Warner, a paleface freak
after finding his mom’s mascara
darker enlightenment did seek
and crowned himself with Baal’s tiara.
Scary drag-queen, scandalous, vain
Marilyn – the creepy thespian
rolled that fish-eye and snorted *******
like Crowley… how pedestrian.
Flashing his glowing cataract,
he gave the mommies quite a fright.
Censorship launched; no badder act
did sail (or assail) our sinking night.
Gothic dim-wits purchased CD’s
bought the goods, pierced parts, wore black.
(Cause for certain parents’ unease:
MTV’s Antichrist on the attack).
Son of Man – or rather, Manson
Milked to the max his demonic cow;
playing Satan’s naughty grandson
showing the flustered milk-maids how.
Urban legend surrounds this fowl
(those ribs removed – like Adam’s sin!)
Is he a misunderstood night owl –
or a has-been loon in a loony bin?
Rock-stars age (well, most) like a cheap wine.
or else in the way once-ripened grapes
withering, sun-struck, off the vine
transform, with age, into wizened shapes.
No – I am wrong. They age like prunes;
plums thus pass into their glory.
Even Luciferian loons
find lakes of fire at end of story.
Sep 10, 2015
Sep 10, 2015 at 9:23 PM UTC
I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs
Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,
Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that ******* drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
3.3k
The plums tasted
sweet to the unlettered desert-tribe girl-
but what manners! To chew into each! She was ungainly,
low-caste, ill mannered and *****
but the god took the
fruit she'd been *******
Why? She'd knew how to love.
She might not distinguish
splendor from filth
but she'd tasted the nectar of passion.
Might not know any Veda,
but a chariot swept her away-
now she frolics in heaven, ecstatically bound
to her god.
The Lord of Fallen Fools, says Mira,
will save anyone
who can practice rapture like that-
I myself in a previous birth
was a cowherding girl
at Gokul.
2.9k
Nana thinks the magazine is the devil.
“THE PEOPLE WHO DREW THE BLESSED ****** MOTHER OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST IN A BIKINI ARE GOING TO HELL.”
Whatever you say, Nana.
When we left my Nana made us tacos and tamales. She gathered all the food in the house to send us off and took all the cash she had and stuffed it in my pocket. She purged the cupboard of all the bananas, plums, nectarines, and apricots and placed them in a bag with two bottled waters a coke, a diet coke and sprite.
She told me that she loved me and that she hated to see me go. That, “I had just gotten there” and that she would “miss me so much.”
Before we left she sent me with a card that was “very important”. It was a picture and a coin embossed with my guardian angel that she bought at the church gift shop.
My nana loves me more than anything else in the world.
My nana still calls you my friend.
Jun 28, 2013
Jun 28, 2013 at 5:33 PM UTC
Have you ever "dashed through the snow"
"in a one horse open sleigh"
Seen eight maids a milking
saw the three ships I saw today
Have you ever seen a reindeer
With a nose that blinks bright red
Dreamt of fairies and of sugar plums
While sleeping in your bed
Have you ever put a penny
In the old man's hat
Sat down in the parlor
And played "the ministers cat"?
Have you travelled off to whoville
Seen the grinch, his fur all green
Have you ever seen Oriental Kings
Frankincense..I've never seen
But, at Christmas, yes at Christmas
We all sing and sing so well
Of these things that we believe in
And of things we know so well
I've never seen a Christmas
Where a snowman comes to life
But, for me, he lives each Christmas
With Jack Frost, and Frosty's wife
Seeing is believing,
But at Christmas, not so much
We believe in Father Christmas
Things we can't see and won't touch
Christmas is more than giving
It's a feeling in your soul
It's believing in mankinds goodness
Christmas makes me whole.
Nov 11, 2012
Nov 11, 2012 at 6:22 PM UTC
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out,
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.
2.6k
These demons in my head
Are no less real than the
Pills in my hand
Laced in glossy white
And pink
A heavy dose of
Dreams
What's the diagnosis
Besides my obvious
Inability to sleep?
Maybe I am allergic
To these bright lights
Strung around the world
In little clusters
Maybe I am repulsed
By the faint smell of
Pine diffusing off
Her clothes
Maybe I am appalled
At the thought of
Sugar plums twirling
In my ****** up head
While I try to rest
On the stone cold floor
I have a case of hate
A disease completely
Impossible to escape
Jolly is not a word
To me
Anymore
December, December
The way you make my
Pale lips shiver
In the frosty air
The way you make
The green grass crunch
Under my cut up
Feet
I think I may have
Loved you once
Many moons ago
Back when that
Fat guy with the beard
Was real
But now things are
Different
You make my nose
Glow red
And my skin
Dry up in flakes
And I swear,
Miss December
You are ruining
Every second of
Every day
Because it's so much easier
To place the blame
On someone who isn't
Exactly real
Now, back to the pills
Down they go
Along with my words
Along with the poem
Goodnight,
Miss December
I pray to wake in
January's light.
Dec 13, 2010
Dec 13, 2010 at 1:58 PM UTC