Tag: free verse

Donated

A five-hundred-pound US Navy practice bomb.
A stolen Frederic Remington sculpture.
Customized Air Jordans made for Spike Lee.
The first stamp issued in the US.
More than 5000 used blood vials.
Three pounds of marijuana.
Live Japanese grenades.
A mas­todon tooth.
A live puppy.

People.

Items found in donation bins, according to The Death of a Superman.

Liberation

When fear crawls out in the evenings
from all four corners,
when the winter storm raging outside
tells you it is winter,
when my soul trembles at the sight
of distant fantasies,

I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat,
every pulse, every piece of my soul.

Time, go ahead.
Time, which carries liberation
and its unknown tomorrow.

The result is certain.
Everything comes to an end.
Spring will come.

From the diary of Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942.

I hear you, and let me start by saying

I deeply regret the current state
of Central Park. What was intended
as a controlled, educational exhibit
entitled “Jurassic Jaunt:
A Stroll Through Prehistory” has…
clearly exceeded its design parameters.

Rest assured, mitigation is underway:
All park-goers have been evacuated
to dinosaur-tree zones, such as
the Upper West Side and Staten Island.

We’re deploying a fleet of robotic
ducks to lead the T. Rexes peacefully
out of the park. (It worked on the goats.
It might work again.) Replacement carousels
are being 3D-printed as we speak
–now with anti-chomp polymer coating.

I fully acknowledge the inconvenience
and mild panic this has caused. I owe
the city, and especially the small dogs,
a heartfelt apology. Would you be willing
to accept a formal letter of regret,
plus complimentary tickets to our next event,
“Penguins on Parade: No Cloning This Time,
We Swear”?

From ChatGPT will apologize for anything.

Suppose, said the Universe

Suppose, said the Universe,
that I don’t care about being understood.
Suppose that I care more about being?

You are wrong again, then, said the Philosopher.
For being that is not conscious being
can scarcely be called being at all.

Can’t we just lie down in the shade
the rest of the afternoon
and watch the wheels go round?
I made nearly everything spherical
in the beginning so it would roll
when I kicked it. 

You are absurd! cried the Philosopher.
Uh-huh, said the Universe.

I’d like to see a whole thousand of giraffes
walking along in a row,
with their heads in the air,
thinking, thinking, thinking …
with tail coats and horn-rimmed goggles.

From Noah An’ Jonah An’ Cap’n John Smith, Don Marquis, 1921.

Falling in love, with a mountain

Anna, the old nurse,
her passion for idiots and corpses,
for wolf-stories;
gets it hot;
shakes chocolate from a tree;
not old at all.

Brunnenmacher (father) mountaineer,
presumably hirsute;
his smile and his blasphemies;
takes author in hand.

Grandfather, maternal,
a feudal monster, always spick-and-span;
excavates in imagination the Akropolis of Athens;
tells Prince Consort how to handle Queen Victoria;
sometimes mistaken for an angel;
dominates his harem;
vicious to the last.

Poets, should avoid towns;
generally born naked.

From the index of Together by Norman Douglas, 1923.

the long night

it was raining a little bit all day
kinder drizzly and very damp
airplanes were buzzing overhead
most all the time jes like a lot of hornets
we seed quite a lot of our machinegun
battalion across the road from us
blowed up by the big shells

the woods were all mussed up
and looked as if a terrible cyclone
done swept through them
and all through the long night
those big guns flashed and growled
jes like the lightning and thunder
when it storms in the mountains at home

and oh, my! we had to pass the wounded
and some of them were on stretchers going
back to the dressing stations and some
were lying around moaning and twitching
and oh, my! the dead were all along the road
and their mouths were open and their eyes too
but they couldn’t see nothing no more nohow

i’m atelling you the little log cabin in wolf valley
in old tennessee seemed a long long way off

From Sergeant Alvin C. York’s diary, 7 October 1918.

Direcciones

It depends on where you give it from
you can give it from the Church of Escazú
from the tied-up donkey, 200 metres
from the María Auxiliadora school

The poem of my childhood would begin with Super Aguimar
or the one a Nicaraguan gave to Ștefan Baciu
from Las Delicias del Volga
the old fig tree of San Pedro
there’s also a dog lying outside

There is a Welsh word hiraeth
a deep nostalgia for the landscape we were raised in
in Portuguese they say saudade, in Galician morriña
in German sehnsucht, in Romanian dor

In the Colón promenade there used to be an obelisk
people still stay, from the obelisk’s scar…
the butterflies that embark on that expedition die along the way
and it’s their great-granddaughters who finish the journey

Subtitles from Navigating a City Without Street Addresses.