"steamboat" poems
We'd bound around
For golf downtown
Frisbees always in hand
"The students are coming!!”
Was a seasonal refrain
As we’d goofily gallivant
Mother’s Day shows
We‘re free, mother-suckers
For your kids, a show we grant
A CLOWN SHOW!
A DOWNTOWN SHOW!
THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN’T!
Rock their world with juggling
See the Doctor for what ails
Rudi and O in laundromat land
Jeanie, Splash, Allison, Donna,
Silly girls astonishing with
Leaps, jokes and handstands
Chewey, Steamboat and Grog
"Yeah-yeah! Yeah-yeah!”
Silly boys grandstanding
All hail Papa Gale! We
Funned with Cpt. Plunge
Leader of the band!
Sweet Georgia!
**** croquet!*
It was grand!
**** croquet was the official lawn game of the Sweet Georgia Brown Clowns during the summer 198x Trinity Country tour [wherein we masqueraded as a Norwegian Salmon Kissing team at a Moose Lodge Talent Show in Lewiston, CA* {true!}]: “Don’t forget your hat!”)
*(we won)
Oct 6, 2018
Oct 6, 2018 at 9:11 PM UTC
RIVERS MAKES ME QUIVER
Youthful mind left wandering just feeling the wetness from yards into the curbs
Ripples running curbside over toes, forming those first streams for a meandering mind
Clouds collecting power,mists collecting,forming Drop by drop rains flowing into their reserves
High mountain lakes reflecting their passion, partitioned by beavers to make their own pond
Broken into brooks flowing faster downward into streams,cool and clear their taste like sweet liqueurs
Beauty not confined to a torrent but gifted with greenery and wildlife ,flowers that make the forests more confident
Trickles forming into cascades downward making outpourings & overflows waterfalls forced through the fissures
Gravity needs spaces we watch as it heightens then widens,making it's way through the continent quickly becoming most prominent
Admire her beauty but reap her rewards,wet bounty to feed the fields, food for fishes ,generations receive her treasures
Canoeists,kayakers or legendary steamboat captains are fond of their flowing, boys wondering where she will go ,knowing our tears of joy will flow to the sea should be our greatest compliment. R.C.
Sep 12, 2018
Sep 12, 2018 at 9:19 AM UTC
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics—each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat—the deckhand singing
on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench—the hatter singing
as he stands;
The wood-cutter’s song—the ploughboy’s, on his way in the morning,
or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother—or of the young wife at work—
or of the girl sewing or washing—Each singing what belongs to her,
and to none else;
The day what belongs to the day—At night, the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.
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Come on down to Louisville, Kentucky
For the Fastest Two Minutes In Sports
The first Saturday in May is Kentucky Derby time
It's the end of a two week celebration; the best of times
The runners race that takes a lap around the track
Thunder over Louisville has fireworks and planes fly past
There is a balloon glow and steamboat race
Where else can you go for a time so great
Now it is race day; an all day party
The insane gather in the infield and they can get naughty
You have celebrities, mint juleps and crazy hats
The Kentucky Derby is where it's at
The beautiful horses parade around
The bugles sounds and My Old Kentucky Home plays
The excitement peaks; it's time for the race
Dreams of the Triple Crown; the Kentucky Derby is the first leg
The Run For The Roses; someone's dream starts today
May 3, 2014
May 3, 2014 at 10:28 AM UTC
~
*It began at sea
this music box
playing your calliope
fingers churning
like a paddlewheel*
~
Sep 22, 2021
Sep 22, 2021 at 11:32 AM UTC
Once I looked to the Bard for words profound;
ageless, his wisdom ran unabated.
Yet Hamlet is now ideologically unsound,
“the slings and arrows” historically Iocated.
I wept for the creature of Frankenstein,
spurned by his master, forced to roam the Earth.
But I’d been subjectively positioned in a paradigm
by Mary’s anxiety about childbirth.
I read Balzac, Hardy and Henry James
describing “worlds” which seemed quite sensible.
Now Eagleton’s exposed their bourgeois games
I find them morally reprehensible.
I dreamt of being Robinson Crusoe
or proud, fierce Hawkeye in his buckskins dressed,
but Fenimore and Defoe have to go,
they’re culturally encoded and empirically obsessed.
Inspired by Guinness, did James Joyce sit down
to see what magic flowed when he was ******
The stream of Ulysses floats Bloom-about-town
dreamthinkingnever : “I’mamodernist”.
I’d gladly give Woolf a Room of Her Own
and be one of the boys with Hemingway,
but sensitive guys leave their bulls alone
say de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray.
No more fun with Wordsworth being daffodilly,
no simple pleasure reading Mickey Mouse;
Steamboat Willie can’t help but look silly
dissected by Foucault and Levi-Strauss.
The Bible shows intertextuality
says the two Jacques, Lacan and Derrida.
Judas, a construct of bisexuality?
The **** fixations of Herod are?
It’s got so bad I deconstruct a holiday brochure.
I can’t even **** without Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 12:06 AM UTC
THIS is the song I rested with:
The right shoulder of a strong man I leaned on.
The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of a canal boat.
The eyes of a child who slept while death went over and under.
The petals of peony pink that fluttered in a shot of wind come and gone.
This is the song I rested with:
Head, heels, and fingers rocked to the ****** mammy humming of it, to the mile-off steamboat landing whistle of it.
The murmurs run with bees' wings
in a late summer sun.
They go and come with white surf
slamming on a beach all day.
Get this.
And then you may sleep with a late afternoon slumber sun.
Then you may slip your head in an elbow knowing nothing-only sleep.
If so you sleep in the house of our song,
If so you sleep under the apple trees of our song,
Then the face of sleep must be the one face you were looking for.
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DRUM on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree-tops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans-make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.
Can the rough stuff ... now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo ... and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars ... a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills ... go to it, O jazzmen.
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You are the fragrance of dark coffee.
You're slow jazz and flamenco guitar -- depending on the weather.
You're the sweet smell that happens after it rains; and the soft pitter-patter of the rain that sings me to sleep --
You're that too.
And the caffeine and the lost jazz musician and the cold rain hitting his face as he walks home to the song of a memory and the smell of rain on brick -- almost sounds romantic, doesn't it?
You make my world romantic.
And not in the lovey-dovey sense of the word, not just that.
Romance as in the knight who seeks great treasure,
Mark Twain in his steamboat down the Mississippi,
The old sailor who sails the seas just for the constant surprise of just how beautiful the world is --
Romance as in adventure.
And you make me feel like the best kind of music,
And you make my heart beat faster than caffeine,
And you make me feel as beautiful as when the moonlight shimmer against the dark clouds and it looks more exquisite than anything Van Gogh did.
And you --
You're more handsome than a starry night,
Better than the smell of good coffee,
more than any prior fabrication I'd ever had of "perfect--"
And I love you.
More than the smell of rain on brick.
Apr 14, 2013
Apr 14, 2013 at 3:10 PM UTC
It's alienation across the nation.
End of the break
the whistle's blowing
The sailors going only a short way
to heavens
Subterranean souls, yet
extraterrestrial minds
(I want to have a magnificent, celestial time)
Someone is dead
True, someone might be
curled in dread, somewhere
But the staff chooses not to
voice these concerns
to their guests
They-are-all
transported
to a place where their veins
don't show up blue
under that black light, yellow
dans-le-ciel
It's a dalliance for souls
(They are all lost.)
A denouement for souls
(How much does it cost?)
Better question,
who sends them here
(Every zephyr is cold)
who sends them here
to die and behold?
If I had a friend
they would ask,
"Why so alone?"
Because I move with the
Tintinnabulation across the nation.
People saying the most
cringe-worthy---
Like the nation
I fear I have become
an imbrication
repeating myself in every
application
Working on that steamboat
the-band-wagon
isn't as good as it gets
Saccharine, summery lake
Do we, perhaps, need to escape?
And, perhaps, we can.
Dominated as we are
by Society, who is crying in need
Believes we must be a
panoply!
Apr 1, 2015
Apr 1, 2015 at 4:34 PM UTC
CLOWNS DYINGFIVE circus clowns dying this year, morning newspapers told their lives, how each one horizontal in a last gesture of hands arranged by an undertaker, shook thousands into convulsions of laughter from behind rouge-red lips and powder-white face.
STEAMBOAT BILLWhen the boilers of the Robert E. Lee exploded, a steamboat winner of many races on the Mississippi went to the bottom of the river and never again saw the wharves of Natchez and New Orleans.
And a legend lives on that two gamblers were blown toward the sky and during their journey laid bets on which of the two would go higher and which would be first to set foot on the turf of the earth again.
FOOT AND MOUTH PLAGUEWhen the mysterious foot and mouth epidemic ravaged the cattle of Illinois, Mrs. Hector Smith wept bitterly over the government killing forty of her soft-eyed Jersey cows; through the newspapers she wept over her loss for millions of readers in the Great Northwest.
SEVENSThe lady who has had seven lawful husbands has written seven years for a famous newspaper telling how to find love and keep it: seven thousand hungry girls in the Mississippi Valley have read the instructions seven years and found neither illicit loves nor lawful husbands.
PROFITEERI who saw ten strong young men die anonymously, I who saw ten old mothers hand over their sons to the nation anonymously, I who saw ten thousand touch the sunlit silver finalities of undistinguished human glory-why do I sneeze sardonically at a bronze drinking fountain named after one who participated in the war vicariously and bought ten farms?
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Cherubs! Cherubs reaching from aluminum clouds
to stab the hearts out of lover's--kings and queens of too much is enough--minds.
Bold martyrs dying as abolitionists
to an illiterate pop-fractal-culture
weeping about zealous posters of apathetic narratives.
The infinite wilderness of glaciers calling the fading background
of planet Earth--steamboat particles in reverse
suckling till the chimes of apocalypse come.
we are slaves beyond truth and defiance
Sneakers hit confident roads with black widow nests in gutters
--the sun is a word,
she says it is a culture.
--The dark is a force,
she says it is a child.
*realistic tendencies are as hollow
as romantic ones*
She laughs and I laugh
pity is polio
too sick to bend and
too accustomed to power
Feb 12, 2013
Feb 12, 2013 at 1:38 PM UTC
Most of us are poor
when it comes
to the currency
of retweets.
We are unworthy,
at the bottom
of the Twitter feed,
Swimming in a stream
littered with what is trending.
Rafting whitewater
every time BuzzFeed tweets:
*Follow
the bouncing lamb
Vine account
immediately.*
Bots multiply:
I want a #lamb
and we're
drowning.
CHOO CHOO!
It’s moving.
QUICK. JUMP ON,
the steamboat
of salacious content
is
LEAVING.
I say:
Let's fight the current;
Stop being
slaves to click-bait;
Start a revolution with
140 characters.
@KarlMarx
Topple the Verified Twitter users.
Aug 29, 2014
Aug 29, 2014 at 12:50 AM UTC
When he tells you
That you see through the eyes of a poet,
When you see the evening traffic
Like a string of glistening pearls in the sparkling cold of a wintry night,
When you hear the steel letterbox snap like a mousetrap
And the mail flop behind your door like a dead rat,
When your finger traces the days’ old dust on your coffee table
And your eyes trail in the wake of a churning steamboat ,
When you say you accept chaos and it’s underlying order
And vice versa,
When he brings you coffee and you say “Thanks”
He tells you
That you see through the eyes of a poet
And what he is saying is...
You Are Mad.
And you realise why you see him as blank verse -
Prose pretending to be poetry.
Dec 15, 2009
Dec 15, 2009 at 1:03 AM UTC
I'd like to pretend I lean in and kiss you
I'd like to pretend I look like her,
I'd like to pretend everyone looks at me
But in reality I'm just a girl in a Steamboat Sweatshirt
With a dorky smile that makes her face wrinkle
Who is ignored more than she'll admit
And still winces slightly when seeing a mirror
But I think I'll go back to pretending
It's much more fun anyways...
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 11:17 PM UTC
you made quite an impression on me
old man. Something about the dichotomy
of your mangled mechanical motion
and the cobble stone streets of Portland
-and every other city constructed with a bipedal complex-
made about as much sense to me as a lilac shooting
upwards through the parched desert earth. From the other
side of the street I saw your ***** calloused
hands grasping the wheels of your entrapment.
Hands for horses crooked legs for reigns,
your mind harbors the immutable knowledge that your
wheeled prison can't be escaped. But then, for a moment, it happens:
With a desire for movement unparalleled by even the most
diligent of wayfarers you break free from
the confines of immobility.
you are a great steamboat disembarking
from a familiar port, traversing the
***** rivers of black tar and cement,
fires stoked by the thoughts of what was and is no more,
drifting along to the tempo of a softly beating heart and
the feel of a woman's touch....
it pounds and you listen
and you and her are wrapped
tightly under sheets of linen again,
legs intertwined, arms embracing
the undulating curvatures
of a supple young body
and she says she loves you
and you say its requited
and she says we can make it
and you begin to run your
clean youthful fingers through her hair
and then boom,
your ship runs aground
and you once again become enslaved
to your affliction. Upon the curb
you sit old man, stagnant,
face in your ***** hands
thinking of where
you've been
and where you will never go.
Dec 28, 2012
Dec 28, 2012 at 6:53 PM UTC
Miss Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell (ding ding)
Miss Lucy went to heaven and the steamboat went to-
"Hell, you're king of asphodel and I'm the
queens are only figureheads pretending to
'rule the chalky darkness and master your
light' fires in my soul with a lonely wet
match up the boys and the girls and ignore their
desire is a sickly sweet syrup, poisoning your
veins are so easy to reach when a blade is your
cure me cure me but only how I want to be
cured minds are a cracked figment of our
imagination is henceforth forbidden, it hinders
conformity of anger is an empty and broken
safety has always belonged to those who lie the
best hate others or they'll love to hate you
first come first serve, no matter where you came
from the sewage of the silt of society we will
'rise if you believe in miracles' no, but I think there's
hope is the thing they say we have but forgot to give
us quiet kids are always too busy being
NORMAL is not what you said it was, nice try
though we are free, you have forgotten to tell us
so it goes, so it goes, one day I had been
dreaming is something she hates so she's begun to
smile, it's a wonderful mask to wear when you're
collapsing is my specialty, I'm just like all the
others being in pain does not mean I should not
cry out all you want, science proved that God's not
listening to the sound of silence is long since out of
style is a name and a number and a broken
incarceration may cure me, but once I was just like
you have the power but we have the money to fake
it cannot drown softly if it never wanted to
begin at the beginning and we will all be
lost along the skeleton bridges, I began to
walk with me, walk with me. It's always a day that's-"
Darker than the ocean, darker than the sea!
Darker than the underwear my mommy put on YOU NOT ME!
Oct 26, 2014
Oct 26, 2014 at 1:02 PM UTC
Two years ago, almost to the day, I scribbled into my notebook a single line: "When in doubt fall into those old rituals"
Two weeks later I was sober for the first time in eight months.
This morning I put whiskey in my coffee and took a pull from the bottle besides. I catch cold easier when I'm not drinking, my bones shake and rattle, I can hardly read.
If you know me more than most,
you know how desperate not reading is.
When in doubt, fall into those old rituals.
Smoke rising in the diner, two hands with a cigarette each hovering over two respective cups of coffee.
A plate of fries or perhaps an omelet and of course coffee after coffee after coffee, no cream, whiskey from the flask.
Cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.
The newspaper this morning read
"Annual Steamboat Children's March"
My bar won't open till 3.
Apr 9, 2017
Apr 9, 2017 at 3:40 PM UTC
I'm missing the smell of sunscreen splattered in white blotches across my wind chapped cheeks, that will soon blend in with the snow
I'm missing the three layers of socks I yank on and stuffing my boots with shakeable hand warmers because my toes always freeze
I miss the sound of heel toe heel toe heel toe as the hard plastic boots click against grated metal stairs down to the buses
I miss the smell of hot chocolate and barbecue in the air and snow flurries tenderly kiss my face floating downwards
I miss the sound of the chair lifts thud thud thud and clicking my skis together to shake off the fresh powder that has accumulated
I miss the sound of my poles hitting each other accidentally, and the dots they make in fresh champagne powder between the glades
I miss the feeling of relief when I ski into the four points lodge by sunshine peak and grab a cafeteria trey and get my usual macaroni and cheese
I miss the feeling of watching snow flurries melt as they land inside my hot chocolate that tastes cheap and watery but so warm
I miss singing songs on the lifts, especially the quads, and deciding which runs to do next, black blue or green?
I miss saying mountain words like "elk head, jackrabbit, slopes, hockey stop, sunshine express, morningside, storm peak, thunder- head" the list goes on
I miss feeling completely at home in a helmet, huge goggles, fleece chilis and a ski jumper
I miss Steamboat, I miss skiing, I can't wait for this year.
Nov 10, 2015
Nov 10, 2015 at 9:56 AM UTC
Full-voiced, thunderous
the voice of truth whispers
There was never nothing
Never, death in Raine's morgue
granted beauty
en terra firma--
Never, soldiers sprawled
like Fenton's bottles--
You object?
Yes, of course.
But still you drank the blood
while the dead soldiers piled up
surrounding your feet.
Never, the steadily advancing rhythm
of hands meeting, unintentionally
speeding up while their voices
intone faster and faster:
Miss Susie had a steamboat,
the steamboat had a bell.
Miss Susie went to heaven,
the steamboat went to -
He'll be fine they said
or at least well-read
And who knows?
Maybe he'll learn to bestow
aesthetics to evil.
Mar 20, 2012
Mar 20, 2012 at 8:18 PM UTC
Momus is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.
Yes, Momus,
Men have flung your face in bronze
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
into dreams, by God.
I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
solemn repetitions of history.
A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
silent;
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
women
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
the salt of tears,
And blood drops of undiminishing war.
1k
I'm walking down a country road just west
of Silver Lake with my dog, Cinder. Just east
is the Kansas River, woods between it and me.
I'm not alone exactly. With me are Sherry,
Stephani, Kathleen, Susan, Cara, Anne, Cynthia,
Nancy, Kristin, and Patricia--at least in memory.
As I amble, I'm in a trance. Moments of laughter.
Afternoons of picnics--hotdogs, potato salad,
lemonade. Trips to the Rockies. Steamboat Springs
was my favorite destination. When you got high
enough in the mountains, not only could you see
their majesty, but even better, you could smell
the fragrance of the evergreens, the ultimate high.
Rafting down the Arkansas River sometimes,
down the Colorado other times. A melange of
memories. Decades of intimacy, nights of passion.
Some tears, but more kisses than tears. Cinder
kept up with me as I would occasionally kick up
dust as I continued my country walk. If was as if
I were walking through my past. I guess that's
exactly what I was doing, remembering the mountain
air, the tender touches, the silence lying side by side.
I was taking a walk down a country road with Cinder,
but we were not alone.
TOD HOWARD HAWKS
May 5, 2023
May 5, 2023 at 7:21 AM UTC
huge places along the Baltic Sea
Lithuania never to see that six year old again
rusty condensation he licks from within his floating steel chamber
crushing sounds of storage containers and ******
“Blessed” mother tells him “Labadini” you’re going to America
small buttons from her blouse
torn from his country
his traveling companion
a mouse
just until hunger hits so hard
the taste of fur stuck in his throat
comes to mind in Disneyland
Mickey and that wretched boat
Feb 3, 2016
Feb 3, 2016 at 8:43 PM UTC
My son goes to prison in 5 days... everyone sees the man who steals and uses ****** I see the sweet, gentle, loving boy I raised. When I visit him in jail, behind the glass is not that man you see. To me it's that 10 year old boy who sang "beautiful" by eminem to me when I was having a bad day. I see the 5 year old who started climbing cliffs on camping trips while I held my breath, I see the 12 year old who loved to bmx and was an amazing parkour, I see the 9 year old who was filled with excitement when he got to meet mike row from ***** jobs and be behind the scenes. I see the 7 year old sledding down the hill with a huge grin whose picture was on the front page of the steamboat pilot. I see the teenager who tried so hard to help me and his brother survive on the streets and find food in dumpsters. I see the 15 year old who came and took his brother from me off the streets to give him a better life. I see my beautiful newborn as he is being placed in my arms for the first time. I see Brandon Scott Mustagog one of the most amazing talented human beings I have ever met. I see my son whom I love with everything in me. I know you can not see these things. I know you only see ****** and crime. But please when you speak of my son keep all of these things in mind.
L. Mack
2/2/19
Feb 3, 2019
Feb 3, 2019 at 8:48 AM UTC