Best Uninitiated Poems
Bold is the heart of the adventure, seekers of the undiscovered
Frontiers beyond the realm of mankind’s knowledge. Hardy, bulling
Figures the unafraid, the uninitiated these spirited wilderness men.
Of epic proportions whom challenge fate, and defy death itself.
Railing against its white rapids of the unknown.
Hailing their indifference by yelling at the top of their lungs,
We will not surrender until the ending of our final journey,
Has come and consumes us utterly, leaving nothing left
But footnotes at the bottom of historical records dusty pages
Behind as our only existing legacy.
The great serpent snake of the Amazon, crawls through the open
Belly wound of the Brazilian rainforest, splitting the devils dark
Jungle in half, a beckoning demon calling unto the heart
Of the adventurer come explore me if you so dare.
Adversities freedom stalkers, heeded this challenge,
Grappling at the serpents tributaries rattling tail, biting
And spitting at them, with sufferage's malice, the reptile
Of aquatic distain, cost many lives of the innocent in its
Vengeance aftermath.
In this river of doubt called the Rio da Duvida,
This vipers poison travels fast through the veins of mortal
Men, starvation, Malaria and the mistrust of others destroys
The flesh from within and from without.
Leaving spiritual wounds that will never heal no matter the
Strength of one’s faith, or the endurance of the individual
Whom survives the attack of this snake called
The mighty Amazon River.
Three adventures made it through this black jungle of death,
Theodore Roosevelt’s, his son Kermit, and the leader
Of this historical group Mr. Rodon.
After reading about their story of bravery, I the author
Of this tail have one thing to say in their memory, bully
Gentlemen, and on wards unto your next journey’s adventure,
And may its endings final current find you well at the end.
BY: CHERYL ANNA DUNN
'Tis a challenge fer the uninitiated to drive a Model 'T' Ford!
There sure ain't no starter, automatic transmission or GPS aboard!
To start it, you must select the magneto settin' and adjust the choke,
Then, at yer peril, spin the crank and pray that yer arm don't git broke!
There's a baffln' array of switches, levers and pedals to operate,
That take a heap of coordination to get the 'T' ready to navigate.
There's three pedals located on the floor - clutch, reverse and brake.
If you know yer left foot from yer right, drivin' the old girl is a piece of cake!
To go forward, advance the throttle lever located jes' below the steerin' wheel.
Press the clutch pedal with yer left foot - with experience you'll git the feel.
To back up, stop the car, disengage the clutch and press the pedal fer reverse.
Be sure there's nothin' behind you - you might hit yer mother-in-law or worse!
In an emergency, stomp all three foot pedals to avoid hittin' a telephone pole!
That'll bring you to a joltin' stop and provide you with a modicum of control.
Use the oogah-oogah horn to shoo chickens, cows and goats outta yer way.
If you slaughter a farmer's critters, you'll sure enough have 'ell to pay!
Now you know more'n you ever wanted to know about drivin' a Model 'T',
And you've gained this invaluable enlightenment and it was all fer free!
If you are foolish enough to drive a 'T' I'd advise you to drive with care,
And if I may paraphrase the Good Book - "Gird your loins with faith and prayer!"
Robert L. Hinshaw, CMSgt, USAF, Retired
(c) All Rights Reserved
Wine, women and song-
delirious impressions
both over- and understated.
Nonsense to the uninitiated.
This is how my daydream began:
gyrating on stage with long hair
like and adolescent shaman-
visions of a young Jim Morrison.
Wine, women and song-
punk, funk, southern boogie drunk
battle ax guitars, pounding drums
blacken and brutal beer soaked bars.
This is the dream come true:
an insidious reality
that suddenly struck rude.
Nonsense to the uninitiated.
Now, it is still the wine
women and song that I long for.
Indelible impressions
both over-and understated.
Base Ball
Give me basically any ball and I love it
Hate to say it is Rugby this side of the
Ocean that divides but we are joined by
the language though we call it ‘Rounders’
Round ball and here it is the oval crick and crack where
talent meets and bats propel with sonar
speed and sweet delight when cheering leaders
sport their curves and acrobatic tantra
For uninitiated and confused spectators
a leather bullet approaches with all its might
some poor guy or gal not allowed to duck
or dive but brace it with just a wooden stick
Projectile forces redirected emphasize the
need to run around in squares of enchantment
with crowds jumping up and down hand to
heart in orchestrated anthems of support
When all the running hitting throwing stops
and all the adverts are digested the better
side has won but everyone should receive
a shiny medal for taking part in unison
Innings and outings have a greater meaning
though once philistines have counted all
their blessings and aggression has abated
it’s just a game and warfare was transcribed
When followers of baseball passion leave the
stadium and paraphernalia crown the streets
good shots and hitmen women of gymnastic pride
agree that ball and basic instincts kept the Peace
Embedded in national culture heritage and thrill
the soft sporty cushion of engagement bereft of
disproportional lateral harm and collateral damage
has shown the world for once a peaceful resolution
11th February 2017
Dear Miss Monkey Manners, I am writing to you for guidance if you please,
I’m seeing a Howler Monkey who likes it when I’m on the stage doing my striptease.
I can’t say that he’s not exuberant or that I feel unappreciated,
But when he yells it will scare the pants right off of the uninitiated.
If I’m up in the spotlight, doing the bump and grind or swinging from a pole,
There’s a deafening howl and everyone drops their pants before I reach my goal.
My boss would like it if my clothes came off Instead of those who watch me work.
I’m afraid that he’ll tell my boyfriend to quiet down and then he’ll go berserk.
I know that I’ll never do my best unless he’s there to watch me on the stage,
How can I tell him to quiet down without hearing his howls of rage?
Dear Gentle Reader, you may not know it but I’ve had some experience with peeling.
When I used to come on stage to do my act the apes would stack up to the ceiling.
I would hit the light dressed as a banana and invite them each to tug on my peel,
I’d love to hear them all as they each gave out with a delighted simian squeal.
One night while I was doing the act and about to land a banana split,
I heard a yell from a Howler Monkey coming from the orchestra pit.
His screams of joy were so sincere that I married him the very next day,
My advice to you is to do the same and leave your boss nothing more to say.
And if you keep your job doing the strip or end up writing a column like this,
Trust me when I tell you that you’ll never get tired of hearing his howls of bliss.
Each time my Auntie Rosa went to shop in the High Street,
She’d bring us back a pink-iced bun; it was our special treat.
We’d take them up to Grandad’s (we preferred to eat them there)
We’d scoff them in the kitchen, in his big old Windsor chair.
And Grandad made us thick black tea, as thick as tarmacadam,
And carrots from the garden (if the rabbits hadn’t had ‘em!)
He tried, I guess, but honestly, his cooking was quite ropey,
And since he washed his plates in Daz, it always tasted soapy!
He kept rabbits out behind his house (some of them were tame.)
In the front grew antirrhinums – ‘bunny-rabbits’ once again.
Their soft and furry noses looked exactly like each other:
Each flower a tiny replica of its herbivorous brother.
His house was full of assegais, elephants and gongs.
He’d tell us of his voyages and sing us salty songs …
He always wore a waistcoat and a greasy old flat cap.
He still walked with a sailor’s roll, the nautical old chap!
When Grandad wanted 'baccy, I’d go down Kit-Cat Lane
To the musty shop in a wooden hut - ‘The Cabin’ was its name.
T’was just like in a cowboy film, with barrels and all-sorts;
But best of all was the real stuffed bear, moulting on the porch..
Sometimes we’d go to Gordon’s house. His garden had a swing.
We’d crawl under his veranda, and discuss Lee’s brother’s Thing!
Gordon did love swimming! He went in the sea each day.
He went in once too often, for he drowned out in the bay.
Those summers on the island seem so very long ago.
These days I can’t remember why it is I loved them so …
But sometimes, when a nasty pong comes drifting from a drain,
It smells just like the Canvey dykes, and I am there again …
I’m padding down a sandy path, between two slime-filled ditches,
My hair is wet, my skin tastes salt, my swimsuit rubs and itches.
I turn the corner of the lane; the graveyard smell is gone …
In Grandad’s garden, there’s my Dad! He’s come to take me home!
For the uninitiated (or simply younger!), an assegai is an African Zulu warrior's long spear,
and tarmacadam is the stuff you put on roads - blacktop!
Calcutta.
Hot and unberable in the searing summer heat
and unberarable for more reasons than the heat.
In a popular tourist cafe an American widow
obsesses on her dead husband: she has a bundle
of photos, letters and other mementos to show as
she tells stories, ad-nauseum, about his now stiff
prowess as a prolific and technically perfect lover.
She moves from table to table with her bundle
of banality disturbing patrons at random with her
loneliness. This happens in the Calcutta stink of Indian
cardamon, paprika, cinnamon, sour sewer and rotted
garbage. All this aromatic decay combines with the
overpowering scent of jasmine. Mother Theresa's
favorite intoxicants.
But other smells and stenches permeate and nasuate your
senses. Certain streets are dedicated to the putrid permanence
of sensory corruption. But only the uninitiated visitor seems
to suffer insult to their olfactory awareness. The indigenous
poor are scattered on the streets and walks in somnambulist
slumber, like fatalistic, hashish soaked, discarded rags.
Children with sunken, obsidian eyes and belly-swell of abandoned
malnourishment reach out toward passing lost-eyed foreigners,
their palms-up; "Rupee please, sir, I am hungry, sir, coins please sir,
I am hungry, sir." The widow from the cafe slaps a child's reaching
hand with her bundle of deceased memories then trips over a sleeping,
legless beggar and splashes face first into the fetid stream of seminal
waste flowing from under his two exposed stumps. No one, including me,
offers to help the child-slapping widow onto her two intact feet.
Calcutta.
Church on Christmas Eve
Experience of spirit
Secular delight
Candles flickering
Stirred by one communal breath
Casting bright shadows
The choir whispering
Mournful cadenced melodies
That bless the silence
Drunken folk giggling
Respectfully hiccupping
Noisy chundering
Strange and precious faith
The uninitiated
Wary, questioning
Through agnostic eyes
Such peculiar mystery
Custom, novelty
The truth hides in love
Ancient priests and children know
It’s simplicity
The door is opened
Out in to the night The Word
Flies on sacred wings
Midnight mass; the light
In darkness comprehending
Emptiness with joy
by Gail
I feel a nauseating revulsion to see scraps of prose
Bundled together in a neatened pile in the name of poetry,
And prizes being awarded for such otiose verbiage
And praises being heaped for such boring coquetry.
Poetry, my dear uninitiated impostors,
Is the language of the mute solemn gods.
You ought to choose your nifty title well
And thus commence your verse against the odds.
Avoid Soyinka’s worn-out style of incompetent blank verse,
Instead, give it the rhyme scheme of the unbeatable Yeats;
The superior verse that one Tom Mboya has never read,
The taste that a Kenyan editor will haul over the rooftop sheets.
Line after line beg the company of some higher Muse
So that you may pen the will of the gods and not your own;
Alliterate here and there though you must not make it your aim,
Then lunge into deeper thought with a deity-like melancholy tone.
And never seek fame for your sacred poetic tasks.
Leave the young to sing your lyrics centuries upon your death,
And remember a great weaver of rhymes long deceased
And pray and wish you immortal blissful health.
I hasten to place much faith in idle talk
Reality tells me i am never getting out of here
Rather I am destined to die here
Beside these other condemned band of brother's
This sorry War friends has forced upon me to rely
Word has filtered through the end is nigh
But though false dawns may lift the spirits
Of the uninitiated
A seasoned second tour trench institutionalized vetran
I remember this more than my walls and streets of home
And what if the rumors are to be proved true
I Fear the Man I shall Return
Is no longer the carefree Boy who Left
Another lifetime ago
How am I to live out my Day's
Knowing now what I have seen and done
For King and Country
My Sunny Valentine has been replaced by my Riffle
And the reflection in my polished bayonet
Bounces off my tin helmet
I inherited from some poor soldier never going home
Make what sense of the following sentence
You must
I will be sad to leave this place of untold misery
Come that Day
Saying Goodbye will be paved with raw despair
For so many other reasons than those we lost
Along the way
You asked a boy to buy into this War
And now I stand before you a Soldier Sir
It isn't fair Sir
Please don't send me back Sir
This is all I know now
I love the way the shell's fall darkening the Sky
Exploding into shrapnel furness plumes of Death
The Mud
The smell of human faces
The bloodied broken bones
Blown into a thousand piece's
I am so accustomed now
I think Id miss shell shock
Once more over the top please Sir
The War isn't won or over yet
And Sir
I am not ready to go home just yet
The snow is capable
of taking on infinite patterns
Individually, each flake
assumes a separate identity
Collectively, however,
a true stratum of conformity takes place
It may manifest itself as the light powder,
innocent, just its appearance
makes you want to throw yourself into it
Spin with delight
But under the powder, there is, too,
the danger of grey snow--
the trap above the grave
Dirty and streaked with debris
This is not the snow which retains
a beautiful and exquisite uniqueness
The Greenlanders knew each stage
of such snow strata
Knew just how much pressure was safe
Where every foot placement must come down
And if one is uninitiated to every criteria
for staying alive
Arrival is no longer a question.
Out to the bleacher
We were drawn
By sun burning down,
Melting stubborn
White snow mounds,
While the girls
Still with wintry-pale legs
Trotted the bases
Or lowered to grateful grass
In the broad outfield
And stretched calves out
With spread lean thighs
We somehow knew
Would one day open
That way for love,
So we bee-essed
About doing it,
How much, which one,
Braggadocious banter
Of the uninitiated;
And some cute face
Buried in the shade
Of her batting helmet
From time to time
Would smile through
Wire backstop diamonds
At us, bat shouldered
And gold block letters
Denoting “West High”
Adhering to the contours
Of her nascent bust
While darkness stained
Cloth at shaved armpit
And atop pert fanny;
Maybe, we hoped,
One or a few
Would mount the ladder
Of wooden bleacher
Up to us after practice
And offer thanks that we
Shagged foul balls
By letting us inhale
That perfume-sweat-red clay melange
Only a girl can attain,
Fragrance that lingered with a guy
Late at night
In a desolate bed
During the sublime chaos
Of his spring of life.
Mollie's gone and lost her brolly,
left it on the bloomin' trolley,
what to do now she's fried,
Mollie's fit to be tied,
unprotected, without any lolly!
*******
Notes:
brolly = umbrella
lolly = money
bloomin' = friggin'
for the uninitiated...
Flames from numerous lamps flicker, refusing to die
Like shimmering flakes of gold adorning the night sky
Burn on, shine bright – shed some cheer in my tired life
Illumine with your light, let peace reign in place of strife
Let joy return to eyes which have often cried
Cleanse the grime and the tears which have dried
Enrich the lives of those deprived
Bring love to those denied
After dusk, when darkness descends
Envelopes the earth and light it fends
Shaking loose her long and dark tresses
In a moonless night is worshipped Kali, the goddess
Awesome in form and terrifying to the uninitiated
For, with blood is this four-armed deity sated
Blood of evil doers and demons
Naked save a necklace and a girdle of bones
A penitent tongue protruding out of her red stained lips
Frozen in mid-stride, while blood from her mouth drips
In this form she is known to us
Worshipped alike by the pious and scalawags
She was a creation of years of yearning
By the righteous and pious to rid the world of suffering
At the hands of demons and devils sowing evil seeds
Causing untold misery by their never ending misdeeds
She arrived eventually and with a vengeance
Destroyed and killed with a view to cleanse
Retribution she dealt, and struck fear in the heart
Wiping out evil doers from the face of the earth
Driven to frenzy and covered in gore
The heavens too trembled, knowing she was capable of more
The gods were shaken and help they sought
From Shiva, the blue necked god, her divine consort
On earth, Shiva laid supine, waiting on her path
And she stepped on him unknowingly – thus the penitent tongue
and the end of the blood bath
Onyemaechi: A Tribute
My earliest encounters of him was during the war
The war fought in the hinterland of cities and suburbs
Cities and suburbs filled by aborigines and internally displaced persons
Displaced persons mingling in blood and death, bemused, hungry and doing all to survive
To survive the war, they learned and began to do simple uncommon things
Uncommon things, to the uninitiated, heartrending and daring
And daring were his exploits to rescue his own despite the odds
The odds stacked against him in the line of sporadic enemy fires
Enemy fires notwithstanding, he blazed through the blitz attacks
Blitz attacks targeted at uncommon people who started off as ordinary people
Ordinary people who in their distress stood their ground
Created new consciousness, refused to bulge, made fear to be afraid and discouraged discouragement!