StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XIII, No. XVII

Each morning, on our way to work,
We all attempt to become someone else;
The poet becomes not-poet
But a specialist in logistics
And semi-coherent ERPs,
A wielder of grand strategies
And even grander funding profiles;
In the bus, however, I am a reader
Of women's soft core, the current
Best selling novel on my Kindle.

Up at the fourth floor,
The fog is worthy of the Central Valley,
Stealth cow dense and unpenetrable;
The word for world is gray
With a promise of sunlight
Somewhat later in the day.

We might as well be in Sacramento.

The poet's optempo varies with her seasons,
Sometimes a great notion,
At others, a shipwrecked island,
Tempest blown and desolate,
Peopled by imagination and extended reference;

A bright true line across the cosmos,
Star to star, light to light,
Bending with this,
The best of all possible universes
As she extends her moment of spacetime.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (April 2012)

Eva Cassidy lies rotting in her grave,
Taken from this earth at the peak of her talent
By the cancer eating its way through her body;
She's singing on my player, Live from Blues Alley,
As soulful and in the moment as she ever was,
Bringing a tear to my eye by her voice alone;
Our minutes passed before I saw her perform,
Thinking we both had decades left to make our choices,
Choose our songs, and sing as if life depended on it.

The earth is a dark spot circling a dim star
Barely visible from Centauri;
The universe is more vast than this finite wit
Can find words and phrases to describe it.
I can no more master the cosmos I see before me
Than I can write a poem more perfect
Than a spring day.

It is merely a question
Of machinery and intersection,
The working of body against body,
Flesh against flesh,
The junction of minds caught up
In strategic maneuver,
The placement of arms and legs,
The movement of fingers and lips,
The desperation interaction
Of human on human sex,
The monkey fucking set in motion
By proximity and rushing hormone,
The chuckling conversation
Of Moon and Time as Night
Slowly passes.

The noses itches, eyes red and run,
The throat grows scratchy and constricts,
Molecules of oxygen are counted one by one
As they are dragged into the lungs;
The mind begins to believe
The word for air is vacuum,
Increasing the heart rate,
Driving adrenalin into the blood stream
As the back brain whispers fear and panic
And I place my emergency inhaler close at hand
To push the lurking irrationality
Back into my darker corners.

Mr. Clark

Dick Clark should not be dead,
How can he be? How can he?
I was 9 years old
When Kenny and Arlene
Danced across the Bandstand stage,
My mother and I watched
Each afternoon together
As the kids from Philadelphia
Did the Stroll and the Twist.
I'll give you a 10, Dick,
You always were the best.