Long Sunflowers Poems
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Imagine waiting for something or maybe it’s someone. Someone you look for in everyone you pass by but not someone that is easy to find. Everytime you pass by these people you look at their feet first, see what kind of shoes they have on. Destroyed black sneakers that are stained darker with red. Then you move up to their ankles, boney and sticking out like balls of compressed dirt, filled with worms and insects on the inside. Your gaze moves up to their knobby bruised knees that look like perhaps they’ve been painted on with watercolors. Next your eyes follow upwards to their thighs. You already know that they say it’s just their cat. Past their skirt you get up to their short-cut top, their ribs sticking out from their skin, looking like they’re trying to rip through to be free. You move your eyes up to their scarf wrapped around their neck hiding the bruises from their so-called lovers. Finally you reach up to their face. So sweet yet such a saddened look going across it. Pale white skin with tints of blue from the veins trying to shine through. Yellow and brown eyelids like dying sunflowers in a sad vase left behind and forgotten in a dark room with the blinds shut tight. Eyes that look like drops of golden honey or maybe even sap from a maple tree dripped into them, giving them the somewhat ‘life’ that they long to have. Their nose, glazed with hints of red around the openings from being wiped so many times to get away the excess ‘powders’ that make them feel again what they believe to be called joy and happiness. Lips redder than a blood moon that occurs only twice a year, peeling apart from the hours upon hours of picking and ripping apart with their teeth. Lastly your eyes wander up to their thinning hair which was once before very lucious and thick. Your eyes return to theirs as the passing is almost finished. You can see the worry in their eyes slowly go away a little bit as they find comfort in a stranger's eyes, yours. You smile and they return the expression back. You look back down at their mouth when they smile, their decaying teeth slightly showing right before their mouth goes right back shut to its distressed resting position. After you two pass all the way you start to wonder, do other people do the same? Do other people observe others as you do with everyone, looking for that person in someone else that you forever will long to be with?
To the proud parents, Anna and Theo
A serious lad, silent and thorough
A clan of preachers
And dealers of art
From the southern Netherlands came Van Gogh
When sent to school, he did not want to go
The separation led to much sorrow
But he learned to draw
Whatever he saw
Sent off to sell art in Paris, Van Gogh
His happiest time, and now in love, oh
Till the landlady’s daughter told him no
Now a broken heart
Surly to sell art
Fired from his job in Paris, Van Gogh
Vincent sought out a coal miners’ burrow
A priest of sorts, but a squalid fellow
The church was appalled
And cursed his resolve
To the asylum for crazy Van Gogh?
His father baffled, on the verge of foe
Art interest, once again, began to grow
Back to school again
This time, in His name
To paint in the service of God, Van Gogh
School’s out, back to his parents he would go
Using neighbors as subjects to ditto
Proposed to his cousin
Which she found disgustin’
Burning his hand to see her, holy Van Gogh!?!
Now off to The Hague, a family furlough
To live with Sien, a boozing bimbo
A man to see ya…
Caught gonorrhea
Three weeks in the hospital for Van Gogh
The pain of loneliness drove him back home
Once again, a failed love with fair Margot
Then Vincent’s father died
He grieved deeply inside
The tragedy further refined Van Gogh
Finally, Vincent’s work was in the know
“The Potato Eaters” made an art show
Just add more color
Said his dear brother
Rubens brightened the dark gloom of Van Gogh
Vincent’s diet: coffee and tobacco
Mixed with absinthe began to take its toll
Though he kept on painting
Then Paris, more training
The end was getting closer for Van Gogh
The masters: Monet, Degas, Pissarro
Cezanne, and Seurat in his studio
Influenced his style
Learning all the while
That time was running out for Mr. Van Gogh
Then he moved to Arles, bad health in tow
Completing great works the whole world would know
“Sunflowers” (in vase)
“The Café Terrace”
Minus one ear, the frail, ailing Van Gogh
With his tattered mind, and mournful woe
Committed to the asylum, Mausole
With his final works
“The Church at Auvers”
“Starry Night” was painted in pain, Van Gogh
“At Eternity’s Gate”, he was sorrow
Wandered into a field, farmer’s fallow
Put a bullet in his chest
In hopes of peaceful rest
“The sadness will last forever”, Van Gogh
To be a polylepis tree you gotta know
You're a polylepis tree & this knowing
Cements by being a polylepis tree,
Knowing between diagrammatic cracks
Fork'd already info knowing during descent.
Mud run through alpine meadow. Rubberized
Crunch on ruddy paths, rucksacks looped,
Deltoids, silly sound serious bulge spine
Ached before leaning away to swallow,
Sepia bark holding his musculature;
Paparazzi march out crimped edges
Of fungi, sussed then left together.
Glottal ribbing. Skeumorph thread
Discs, spades, b-side timpani under eaves.
Copper sheaves, wine burning in cups
Thickening until dark brown oozes
At a lesser velocity, blown eardrum,
Given the climaxes of greater viscosity—
Green epiphytic ferns stitch airy
Misconceptions (soil, root), the drawing in,
& expulsion, the search for a golden
Arboreal rat. A tunnel-maker
Said to be densely populated in woods
Near-gone to potato farms, cattle,
The absent lecture, then, on survival plastic
Spool of thread glued to the back
Drawn in a thin white line, followed
For ur-experiment, hundreds of feet
Climb up the lateral limb, down, dug under
Grass, tunneled, then over miniature crick,
Through nodule floor-sponge, a wetland,
A watershed for a whole valley, to grass
Again, below, finding elaborate nests but
The rat escaped, the sinewy string left.
A choreography misses it, an instinct
Closest but dull, so a blind sight in high
Sun, a canopy growing at itself not up,
Sift, shrift, the want to lay down before
Night freezes the water inside the air.
A return at night to the espeletia, giants
Sunflowers shocked by moon, switch-backs,
Doing Zs, squared, cubed to the tenth clouds
Departing, something horribly there not
Constellation no not a galaxy those are
Not things let them not be where’s the
Name laying in the grass, alpine creekline
Eschatological curvature, mutter, murmur,
A yellowing light flung, the cold how they
Open little air, the screaming sleeve, there!
Of not-this this, in it, out it, here & away,
Something recalled, what a string, rat,
What ways you move, only that body,
No containers for the humans so the sea
Could get that travel-manic blue, sworn
To make another moon of it, another go,
Unfixable, in need of fixing, air adjust,
An alkalinity expectant, a Sulphur rain,
Chattering cargo setting fire to night.
I only learned one thing in school
And that was how to fight
The teachers were always so good at it
And they were always right.
One teacher was nicknamed spitfire
Because she'd spit as she spoke
All the teachers wore mortar board hats
And wore long black cloaks.
Always late for lessons
Always got the cane.
School books hidden in your trousers never worked
You had to feel the pain.
One teachers face got so red when he got mad
We only had a riot in class nothing unusual
Didn't think we were that bad.
Our sports teacher used to whack us hard
When we forgot our P,E kir
And make us run through nettles
In bare feet the hurt more than a bit.
In science we always tried to make a bomb
And leave the gas taps on
We'd make pea shooters from biro pens
And when the teachers were facing the blackboard
We'd shoot at them then sit poker faced wasn't me Sir.
We'd hide around building corners
To gamble and smoke a crafty cigarette
Until one day a teacher came around suddenly
With a water jet.
One teacher had an affair with an other teacher
With a very pretty one with nice legs and blonde hair
I used to dream about
In my fantasies she was mine
It just wasn't fair.
I was convinced they were not human
But came from some other planet one day in spaceships
And not cars
Maybe they were from Mars.
We'd put condoms on door handles
Let the teachers tyres down on their car
Sneak into the girls changing room for an eye full
And steal their knickers and their bras
Sing rude words to songs at morning assembly
Throw stink bombs in the teachers lounge
Draw funny pictures in our books of our teachers with their trousers down.
Sometimes I'd be madly in love with a teacher or a girl pupil
And do nothing but day dream all day long
Skipping through fields of sunflowers hand in hand
Kissing like to clams under a tree all day long
Oh I was always in love with someone
And would often burst out in song.
I got good at forging homework diary signatures
Explaining why my homework wasn't done
It was always some far fetched story
Like I was chased by Atilla the Hun.
Ahh school days yes we were nothing more than savages
But the teachers were savages too
They should have changed the name school
To Human Zoo.
''I was a good boy I was''.
Peter Dome. Copyright.2015. June.
The Seconds
[Excerpts]
(c) 2019, Anita Lerek
Section 1/4
First Generation - Before the Holocaust
Lvov, Poland 1930s. Mother, you were a Jewish girl but you were not expected to enter history. You played outside time like a star burning for trillions of years. Hands of pleasure created fire, and tossed in rags of exotic oils and sunflowers to heighten the mingling of school yard bodies barely formed. You lived inside bushes filled with chocolates, ghosts of guardians, and boys measured by swagger and expensive shoes
Your lives were handcuffed by words, set in the grammar of racial separation. But there was no one else, just you and your friends, beauty marooned in floodlit trance
————————-
Section 3/4
The Survivors
............
You lie on the beaches. You lie in the fields. You are bits of debris, tufts of life stuck together, shadows thrusting and contracting in search of embodiment
So many lost, beyond mouthing. What history removes, language cannot restore. Rather it is a burial ground, an anti-galaxy of boarded up stars. How many forms are there of nothing?
Ancestors cry out to you from pine trees and flowers, from buds and branches. You hear nothing. You seek out strangers. By touching them, you try to rouse a sleeping god of your lost civilization, to reach the boys, the sunflowers, the shadows begging to return
Your limbs touch, boxes smacking against each other, filling, releasing. You barely move. You let him have his pleasure. Then without a word, you leave, and return, to release the one valve, day after day; all others seized by horror. You never exchange names
—————————
Section 4/4
The Second Generation
..........
I was of the same cloth but not the same cloth. I did not occupy the same land as you. I grieved our severed skin
I come closer now, hover at your borders. Mother, your elements are wearing down, motions slowing, your fragments crumbling
Stop, stop, stop the cycle
of trauma: its birth, hardening into splintered towers, falling apart and re-forming
Let me into love before you leave me, here in this final land
where love crystallizes
into the expansive images
that cradle me
in beds of rock,
the last images
that I send up
to mend babel’s darkness
for trillions of years
Days pass into the weak, loveless nights. The moon blinks.
The stars swirl beneath Van Gogh’s brush, as he links.
Comet light passes twisting cypresses, a schizophrenic’s concussion.
On and on, the wind twirls the trees, and does not complain,
nor, does the cosmos cringe awaiting reciprocation.
Lightning bugs mimic the stars. Atoms sneer.
Those who spout love and friendship abandon him, sneering.
Their images dance beneath his lids, when he blinks.
Though denied a compass, his soul does not reciprocate.
Through pain, physical and mental, he still connects, links
with the life which absorbs and excludes him, not complaining.
Nights pass without his mistress, Sien. His mind is concussive.
His face trembles torn in the brass sounds of the storm’s concussions.
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, all of them, sneer.
How unmerciful, this cycle, this God to whom he does not complain.
If lack of mercy is just, may he not know why? Time blinks.
Thinking causes pain. Only painting connects him, he links.
He accepts art and the pain, as gifts, choosing not to reciprocate.
Voices, the paint, the moon, the voices say, reciprocate.
He chases mice. The cheese plate falls with a loud concussion.
He rubs his gnarled hands across his lids. He maintains the link.
How? Why? But, the mice eating his cheese only sneer.
The sunflowers shimmer and wiggle in their vase, as he blinks.
Stumbling, he falls attempting to sit, the chair does not complain.
He had thought God clear as sunlight; yet, the paint complained.
He was not God; he could not capture the light. He must reciprocate.
After all, who was he, but a mere man, ashes to dust; life blinks.
Ah death, le grand mal, no minor concussion,
He must escape, join the celestial spin, and avoid their sneers.
Sick, yes, sick to death of not being understood, not linking.
The brushes call. He prostitutes himself. Oil spills, connecting, linking.
Theo, brother, never would he forgive. Many others would complain.
Ah, Gauguin, His dear friend, he would understand and not sneer.
If God was truly a loving God, surely, he thought; God will not reciprocate.
The mockers who did not live in Dante’s nine levels of hellish concussion,
they will call his actions cowardly. Merciless, they did not live between the blinks.
Days pass into the weak, loveless nights. The moon blinks.
The stars swirl beneath Van Gogh’s brush, as he links.
Comet light passes twisting cypresses, a schizophrenic’s concussion.
On and on, the wind twirls the trees, and does not complain,
nor, does the cosmos cringe awaiting reciprocation.
Lightning bugs mimic the stars. Atoms sneer.
Those who spout love and friendship abandon him, sneering.
Their images dance beneath his lids, when he blinks.
Though denied a compass, his soul does not reciprocate.
Through pain, physical and mental, he still connects, links
with the life which absorbs and excludes him, not complaining.
Nights pass without his mistress, Sien. His mind is concussive.
His face trembles torn in the brass sounds of the storm’s concussions.
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, all of them, sneer.
How unmerciful, this cycle, this God to whom he does not complain.
If lack of mercy is just, may he not know why? Time blinks.
Thinking causes pain. Only painting connects him, he links.
He accepts art and the pain, as gifts, choosing not to reciprocate.
Voices, the paint, the moon, the voices say, reciprocate.
He chases mice. The cheese plate falls with a loud concussion.
He rubs his gnarled hands across his lids. He maintains the link.
How? Why? But, the mice eating his cheese only sneer.
The sunflowers shimmer and wiggle in their vase, as he blinks.
Stumbling, he falls attempting to sit, the chair does not complain.
He had thought God clear as sunlight; yet, the paint complained.
He was not God; he could not capture the light. He must reciprocate.
After all, who was he, but a mere man, ashes to dust; life blinks.
Ah death, le grand mal, no minor concussion,
He must escape, join the celestial spin, and avoid their sneers.
Sick, yes, sick to death of not being understood, not linking.
The brushes call. He prostitutes himself. Oil spills, connecting, linking.
Theo, brother, never would he forgive. Many others would complain.
Ah, Gauguin, His dear friend, he would understand and not sneer.
If God was truly a loving God, surely, he thought; God will not reciprocate.
The mockers who did not live in Dante’s nine levels of hellish concussion,
they will call his actions cowardly. Merciless, they did not live between the blinks.
Haiku With Variations (Both Sonnet & Free Verse)
Haiku Number 2
hail rides air updrafts
raindrops crater planet's skin
your breath’s clouds, fall skies
May 12, 2016
Mother of a Winter’s Night – Shakespearian Sonnet
Her distressed sighs rise up like nascent hail,
(Tears blown to ever colder zones of sky),
Where frozen prayers see gravity prevail,
Release their pain on what they think is lie.
These raindrop tears sew cratered fields as well,
While farmer's labor washes out to to sea,
(Those tender roots that split rock - time's to tell),
But impact strips her lover’s legacy.
And with the fall as cold means leaves turn blue
New growth goes dormant and awaits Spring’s lease,
Confusion reigns as her breath’s clouds subdue
And haiku’s calmer images release.
If I am wrong let no one take offense
She’s not to blame, but my own lack of sense.
May 14, 2016
Poet's Note:
Please excuse the paraphrase of Shakespeare Sonnet #116's couplet. :-)
Mother of a Winter’s Night – Free Verse
Your distressed sighs are the updrafts
That hurl nascent hailstones skyward,
Freezing tears colliding, clumping as they go
Into tortured spheres that could kill a horse,
Certainly knock shingles from the newest of roofs,
Or pound a field of sunflowers straight into the ground!
My vulnerable fields cratered by your tears,
Whether in their frozen form or flowing wet,
Top soil now enroute to the sea itself,
As if the history of its creation were of no consequence,
Tender roots that pried a farm from solid rock,
Swelling into cracks that are always present,
Turning stone to fertile soil.
The sea’s surface, that not so long ago
Mirrored a most gorgeous sunset,
Now a tortured and a rabid foam,
Laid to waste, craters overlapping craters,
Gone in an eye blink, all my love a non-event
In geologic time it seems.
Winter has come early as your breath’s clouds
Mask all reason and confuse me,
A bitter chill fills every corner of fall’s skies,
Even leaves turn blue and cannot breathe,
Oxygen sucked from the room we live in,
My only recourse is poetry and prayer.
May 13, 2016
Long Tooth
Poet's Note:
It was an interesting challenge to try to write the same poem three times and keep the meaning of the original haiku intact.
As the sky weeps
in periwinkle petals of
multicolored roses,
rinsed in lemons, and lavender,
the poet within me
releases a bougainvillea
bouquet of unfiltered gratitude,
swaying to the celestial duet
orchestrated by
the angel of raindrops,
adorned in braided
wildflower crowns and
windswept wishes,
echoing dulcet melodies
rendered in whimsical accents.
I ponder, if tears had a tune,
would it be the
sound of drizzling dewdrops?
Would you then feel
the pain I carry,
veiled in smoky silence?
Or would I forever be
the silhouette cloaked
in fogs of charcoal confusion,
too dark to be deciphered
by the fragmented eyes
that eulogize
all that sparkles and glows?
But when stained sunflowers
swirl beneath starless spheres,
scattering seeds of sorrow
to cultivate a garland of grief,
puddled with poignant poems,
I remain throned,
as the goddess of black rain,
riddled with cosmic rituals,
sprinkling kaleidoscopic dust
upon forsaken fields,
while listening to the
drifting leaflets in crisp air,
pleading for the demise
of my unfaltering faith,
oblivious to the truth
that I fear not
mists of melancholy.
I surf through surging seas,
unafraid of twirling torrents
and blazing tides,
piercingly striking
shimmering sapphires
floating in deafening despair.
There in the abyss of obscurities,
I’m nestled within restlessness,
in rooted resilience,
like a perplexed paradox
weaving crippled odes to
the sun that longs to rise and sail,
splashing hues of cinnamon clemency.
Tonight, I’m counting crooning comets,
amidst quivering hailstones,
dancing in cataclysmic rhythm above,
to find my home within
an island of daphne dreams
and singing seashells.
For I hear the flaming flowers
in their solitary stillness
serenade rain rhapsodies,
to awaken the petrichor
soul of heavy horizons,
wrapped in stringed
milky-quartz beads,
bursting forth blooming tomorrows,
illuminated by chamomile water,
concocted from charismatic spring falls…
Yet I think of us, engrossed
in umbrella moments,
Cupid too envied this
symphony of romance
where love conquered all,
and grief but a blurred memory,
in sunlit souvenirs of yesterday.
I drove down the boulevard as I did a thousand other times
Passing by the aged blue-gray house - the bachelor's pad across the street
Hunkered down like storm clouds in a mist of yesterday's legacy
And there he stood....the soulful captive, haunting his past
Black pants with hips flung to the side and held low by his own design
His stance altered the walkway like a steel girder posted upright
His boundless laugh seized the spotlight then scattered like wind chimes
Embracing a sweeter, livelier time before he slipped away
I pulled over to the side of the road to let my illusion wander
Sitting crippled in my car - his entranced prisoner
Pulling in the stardust memories of heading down the artists highway
Driving in his cherry red rock-n-roll car his guitar in the back seat
Where his expression, his music lived in vivid hues of youth
Startling the stage with words of rebellion
Becoming the cause of all the commotion
He challenged his crusade with the heat of revolution
His list was his own, his sequence bore his own evolution
Disobedience for the sake of itself scrolled on his flirting brow
Teasing each consequence with the audacity of sunflowers in the snow
Life was struck as a downer and he a loner
Whose heart yearned for the lyrics to sanctify his "hell on earth" anthems
A hungry wolf in a pack of sheep, growling at his own shadow
Licking the wounds of his notched dissatisfaction
Unable to disguise his truth to fit into his abstract woolly landscape
Always coiled up to the max of his amplified intensity
With his super jet speed brooding melodies
His cool blue eyes, his ocean vastness, his sky all reflected things in motion
All headed down the Pacific Highway in a finned Batman 60's Buick
Colliding with the universe
And memorializing his words of hard and lonely places
Pounding and throbbing with the sounds of his guitar
I drifted back
Losing this poltergeist of the past, this shadowy myth
This specter of a defiant paradox of love and hate.....
As the melody faded I embarked back to my journey
Riding down the boulevard - He in the seat next to me
January 17, 2020
Strand no 650 any theme any form Poetry Contest
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