| Starpoet Newsletter Vol. VIII, No. XLI |
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| News - Newsletters | |
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Sunday, 07 October 2007 | |
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The
Starpoet
Newsletter
Vol. VIII, No. XLI
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ I'm not the lonely
Alienated Seventeen year old poet Hanging around street corners Asking the gods What they want from me You are not
The enfant terrible Raging through the universities And the jungles of 'Nam
Until your many weapons
Were deadly sharp Together
Decades later
We garb ourselves In prosperous robes To chart a new world
With our agéd magic Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2007 C.E.
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Pushing ninety, the heat not age. Last weekend we gave a going away party for a friend, attended a gala benefit dinner, went to a memorial service for a woman who died from acute leukemia, then, on Monday, took the first friend to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Work, on Tuesday, was a needed respite.
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ a brief beginning
Oh-Four-Thirty
At four thirty in the morning,
The mind wakes the body,
Checks the time, Checks the bladder,
Counts the days
Before inviting the dog
Up on the bed beside her.
Lisa Jain Thompson October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ Bored in the news
Radio Nonsense
Here we are at the Pentagon,
A major gathering of phony soldiers,
Working to end the war
That has taken too many of us,
The target of a draft dodging drug addict
Who hides behinds microphones, Rhetoric and bluster.
I hurriedly wrote down those lines
And then, I awoke
From some measureless dream
To realize that a fat talk show host
Was not worth the time or effort To answer his audience pandering blather. Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Marcel Marceau
1923-2007
 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ inside the Pentagon
The Softest Cambric Veil
I was talking to another woman,
Who was well along in her third trimester, Discussing Caesarians and exchanging stores
Of various scattered delivery rooms
And the messy reality of birthing babies. She was wondering if she was ready
For a second baby on top of her military career (And realizing she was seven or eight months late To be worrying about such things): Come December the question will be moot. Babies change everything, no matter your age,
No matter how shiny your eagles are, You have a small human being Wrapped in your arms, close to you heart,
And the world moves ever more. What was important yesterday cannot survive
The scent of your own child quietly asleep
And ever so firmly attached to your breast.
Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ A man does not insist on physical beauty
in a woman who builds up his morale. After a while he realises that she is beautiful -- he just hadn't noticed at first. -- Robert Heinlein
Time Enough For Love __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ starpoet
Before The Great Ships
I won't be my father's Jack,
I won't be my mother's Jill,
I'm loose asail uncharted seas, Daring ancient oceans stop me From completing my lifelong voyage. In the face of the shrieks of the sea fowl beaks,
I pin my standard high atop the mast
Where passing ships can easily see My course holds firms through storm and night And safe harbor, once distant, grows near. I am no pirate nor king's dragoon,
Nor will I be impressed in unjust cause, My voice rises up in the bright new morning
To pass wave to sand across the world. Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects
is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship. -- Robert Heinlein
Time Enough For Love __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ for a friend, gone too soon
Processional
At the memorial for our friend and supporter,
Dead of acute leukemia within six weeks,
The vocal transgender activists, The ones who write their Kool-aid soaked letters
Demanding gender spectrum purity, The ones who show up noisily at meetings Of Harry Benjamin men and women Claiming some divine inspiration
Of unified grand theory, The ones who push to the forefront
Whenever government grants Or media cameras and reporters are present,
Were notable in their absence. For all their shouting demands for freedom to dress
Their tearful cries of victimization and inequality, They could not slip from their bedroom closets, Put on their favorite cross gender finery, And pay their respects to a lesbian who spent her life Working for gay rights and a cure for AIDS, Who used every spare moment for her existence To capture for posterity every aspect of queer history, The drag queens and kings, the Pride festivals and marches, The civil demonstrations for freedom and equality, The poor, unmiddle class men and women
Who find themselves on the street unable to work, Unable to obtain even the most routine medical care
Or food to sustain themselves and their friends. Once she was dead and her cameras were silent,
The cross-dressers and transvestites, The great wash of publicity transgender, The purple haired university kids and multi-punctured punks, Could not find it within themselves to spend a few hours
Remembering their tireless defender, honoring her life, Standing up among the lesbian and gays, The women and men with Harry Benjamin, The queer preachers and elected politicians, The university professors and the people of color, Who joined her sister and brothers and her extended family To say a public goodbye to their friend and co-worker.
No primping transgenders, no hustling gay twinks,
No predatory middle-aged senators,
No camera hungry clamor jostling for position — The public's eye of queer America —
Bothered to attend or so much as offered a hand In helping in the memorial celebration Or participating in the tributes, Not a word was spoken was by anyone other
Than her friends and the young drag kings Who danced for us and for her. Where were the cross-dressers and those needy transgenders
Demanding freedom, liberty, and our total, absolute attention? Where were they when Cheryl's ashes were remembered?
Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ The hardest part about gaining any new idea
is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it — once you can honestly say, 'I don't know,' then it becomes possible to get at the truth. -- Robert Heinlein The Cat Who Walks Through Walls __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ HOWL
Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz ... __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ the poet starpoet
The Burning of the Brain
One hand on a comet,
The other hand on my love,
Riding the edge where stars meet planets,
Dropping everafter towards the earth.
One eye on the corona,
The other eye on the core,
Dodging the prominences and solar flares,
Slingshotting back up and out. A tumbling rose,
Shedding petals in the darkness,
Giving glory to the night. Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ Political tags
-- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surely curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbours than the other sort. -- Robert Heinlein Time Enough For Love __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ the moon, the stars, time passes
Mystery Train
The end of the world has passed me by
-- Once, twice, three times more
The millennium has ended -- And I awake to find the stars still shine,
The rivers still flow, and carbon based lifeforms
Still inhabit the weather kissed earth When the eatern coast horizon dares to rise And softly rock my radio to stretch My body's drowsy complaint. Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^  __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ You don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain;
you don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain. When you touch something, the sensation is not in your finger, it is inside your head. The ears and eyes and fingers are just data collectors; it is the brain that abstracts order out of a chaos of data and gives it meaning. -- Robert Heinlein Time for the Stars __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ tasting the moment
Ever the Garment Plunders Me
I used to sit crying my apartment,
Frustrated that time moved so slowly,
Despairing over how far away
The future and the operation seemed to be,
How tenuous this all was,
How dependent on money, my physical health, And the vagaries of divorce and broken cars.
Paxil helped a little, soothing my psychotropics,
But nothing shut my mind from exploring
The endless possibilities of tomorrow's failures,
My anger at those who were actively obstructing me,
The disheartenment at the thought that they might win,
The temptation to surrender to my dejection And end these decades of seemingly permanent internment In muscle, penis, and far too much unwanted testosterone. I took to spending my nights in local bars,
Nursing pain and Maker's Mark in equal proportions,
Making friends with the neighborhood men and women,
To fill the gaps between work, electrolysis, and weekly therapy
And shorten the nights of disrupted sleep Interspersed with post-midnight cable of dubious artistic worth. I survived, but barely, and as I shut the memory of my dark nights Behind the gated walls that conceal my tears and uncertainty.
I am alive, reincarnated along the lines of the original game plan, To watch my friends, condemned with Harry Benjamin, Struggle to overcome our vagaries of birth and gene expression. Lisa Jain Thompson
October 2007 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^  __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ PEACE
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