fflo | Entries tagged with poetry

So that guy a couple of days ago in that postcard with Ginsberg was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He'd just died.

I'd already had him on my mind, having caught a glimpse of the spine of one of his little books, Back Roads to Far Places, on my shelf the other day, and thinking I might pull it out, though I rarely look at books any more. You could even say he was on my mind when I posted that card from Coney Island, given that what he is best known for, besides the bookstore I've been showing postcards of, is his book of verse that crossed over into broader popular culture. A little like when people I knew who didn't read fiction were nonetheless reading The Color Purple, people who didn't so much read poetry still often had read, and even had a copy of, A Coney Island of the Mind. If you're vaguely curious about poetry, it's a fine volume to crack.

If I weren't including Harvey Fierstein in my twitter feed, I might not have yet heard the word--- as he put it: "Ferlinghetti gone." The guy was 101, so no spring chicken--- and maybe he didn't exactly call it in the famous poem in which he says, at the end of the world being a beautiful place if, that it's right in the middle that along comes the smiling mortician, for it was surely closer to the end that it happened to him. Although when it happens, of course, it's the end, whenever.

I was glad to know the news, vs. finding out months later, but it hit me as these things hit folks sometimes, and my day was immediately derailed. I wrote my boss and my second/assistant-me that I would be in and out at best, and apart from a long voice meeting in Discord with the IT head, I mostly took the day to read and feel me some Larry. Best reason for a holiday I'd had all pandemic, really. Somehow.

My first thought about this post was to write it in the style of a Ferlinghetti poem. And maybe I'll do a Ferlinghetti-type poem soon. But what I have is a narrative I want to tell bits of, from that night 40 years ago, which was also the birthday of the first woman I'd sleep with, a few months later. And I wanted to give you more narrative than would have been in the poem.

I was just over halfway into my freshman year ( ... read more .... )

It was quite a night.

Turned out it wasn't a slice of life I could later run off to be a part of, ongoingly. When I got to the city, it was queerness and intimacy and a friendship cluster and the rudiments of making a living that I'd be negotiating. Along with a girlfriend who didn't want to be a lesbian. That was a lot.

You can maybe get, though, why, when I found it many years later, I stuck the poster for the reading that I'd grabbed off a phone pole into a cheap frame, and have kept it around.

All is clouded by desire
The opposite intensities

As fire by smoke
A mirror by dust

Know an assassin by his eyes,
The misery that's in front of you

Become children again
Become ghosts

living dangerously

I slept hard, having caved to eat a painkiller in the wee hours. So I slept in good, with the whole physiog relaxed fully flat, like it never is on its own anymore. Then somehow when I got up I got stuck playing a game on my phone for hours. Just opened it on a whim, to see what it was like. A cube doubling game. The catch was that I kept not "dying". I kept staying alive, and cube doubling. Paused to feed the cats and have some coffee but ended up stopping, finally, when it was going to be getting dark soon, I deleted the damn app, put on my rubber boots, and went out to get the mail. Then I made brunchinner.

Oh, but I also paused in the game to put away socks and underwear, so's to empty the laundry basket so's to (when I finally dumped the game) take it down to have ready in case the clothes in the dryer were dry, from last night, which they weren't. And, while rearranging some socks for a more current and winter-oriented layout, up against the side of the sock drawer I found a sheet of paper folded in 4. 'Twas an old poem of mine, shown below in a photo, as I'm trying not to fire up the computer attached to the scanner this week.

I know I've edited it since this first version, as I remember dealing with a few prosaic bits I don't like. But this version's fine for taking me back, and reminding me what it felt like to be with that girl on that day.

bras drying on doorknobs
socks yet unpaired

how oft one might sweep! could sweep,
must, to have nothing more to sweep!

at least I do not stand here ironing
or need a haircut or color

but I will need more soap for the washing machine

Mavis the toddler with the old lady name,
out there again, is entertained indefinitely
by pebbles picked up and
plunked, splosh!, into puddles
in potholes we're grateful for now,
in the new crazy-simple walkabout world.

Before not-singing screen-chorus
game time tonight, I'll drive
the small blocks to Steve Steeb's
to leave the Jeep for retraining
to this atmosphere, and rotated tires.
Then walk back. Mavis may be

on stick-poking duty by then,
or peering into drain grates,
those curious depths, in how
big is big, how small small,
and how far down does that go, for
Mavis, the toddler with the old lady name.

Squeak Up

But I wasn't raised like you

the brown-headed cowbird might say
if it'd heard its reputation,
and spoke this language,
knew dull; noisy; nuisance; parasite.

Whoever despises the gregarious

it might go on

isn't having very much fun. Try
gleeful squeaky gurgles in packs, and
everybody whistling. You might be surprised.
Or put your dull brown head by the dull gray branch
with the new baby green cordates, lobed, palmates.
It will make a pretty picture if you drop that hierarchy
of colors and excitement, your paint-based sensibilities.

And on the whole kid thing, I disrupt
your family-by-blood pigeonholes, your
species-ist insistences. Not everyone
hangs out only with their kind, and
maybe I know better than you
whether I should be the one raising my kids.

It sounds like a chip on its shoulder
but it's chirps, and doing the things it does,
which is what we do too, and

Hey, I'm not criticizing you. I bow deeply. Let's relax
and I'll tell you about when I used to follow the buffalo,
which I don't call bison either, so we have that. Then,
if you want, I'll give you the scoop on the hostel roost
with five million of us mixed breed flappers, full
of grass seed and weeds, and the occasional
crunchy-nutritious snail shell, all in one wild
hangout in Kentucky, just being what we are.

In my dream with a friend I arrive at some thing
that I know you'll be at, and know you know I will,
the friend and I still mid-escape from some man
who'd stop at who-knows and has already had
our blood rushing adrenalin-quick, but the
first glimpse of you poof! ---he's gone, in the crowd.
You walk with the people you're with, along aisles,
this busy gift shop off the lobby. You're talking, but
focused, I know for dead certain, like me. It's forever
but finally we're in the same row, both our clusters;
with physics and math, yours comes down as ours up,
the slow ramp, the same rate, and your body I know
doing inside the very same thing that mine is.
And then there we are, here is the moment, we pass

and my arm moves my fingers, as your arm moves yours,

before on with our everyday people, away,
and, hours now after waking, I still feel right where
on each of 3 fingers, our skins slid together, and how.

hey tire service god(desse)s
i beseech thee
or anyway how about
you get me in and out of somewhere
tomorrow between the several other things
quick or quick-ish and
without having to replace any tire(s)
all fixed up and roadworthy
please

thanks very much if you can
and will
and exist

i'll send you a postcard if you help
or seem to've
unless you don't want a postcard

maybe that kind of thing piles up
there at tire god(desse)s headquarters

and maybe you don't have curbside recycling
tho if that's the case, it don't seem fair

anyhow thank you for your
time and attention
and have a nice weekend
reigning however benevolently
over all of us
and our tires

I took back The Collected Greed no one wanted, weeks
down with the corner freebies, its Black Sparrow tactility
and there goes Diane again with George Washington
not enough, maybe, against the all-caps deadly sin
plus that focused hissing serpent on the cover, striped & curl-poised
to pounce on whoever's just past the reader's left shoulder,
which is probably why I gave it away to begin with,
vs. the Son of a Bitch grave dancing I'll keep 'til someone else
has to deal with what remains, and why I'll give it away again,
if no one is grabbed by it and grabs it, here at the office, then
via the university town second-hand leftover mishmash
shelf-piles where I can imagine it finding its new lover,
willing to pick one thing over another, so not greedy but
quite okay with Greed, knowing how to breathe past that snake,
hold the volume in hands, and find out everything there is in there.

You said it was like when your grandmother was still alive and for me it's like all it is for me, plus that, and there's no two ways around those whole nine yards, in the very air.

My old friends' old dog died. She was 108. Bessie Mae. The big goof.

Been rewatching The Sopranos. We're about to be joined by Steve Buscemi. Tony and Carmela are separated. Furio fled, leaving the future Nurse Jackie devastated.

Third day in a row afternoon thunderstorms never came. Another coupla days and we'll have the highs in the 70s that got skipped over, 60s to 80s. I love the 60s, but the 70s are very good too.

The stars and planets are crystal clear tonight. ♫ Are the stars out tonight? I can tell it's not cloudy, but bright. 🎶

This clear cold night, the Pleiades
jump out at me, hollering
Lisa. Up here. Over here.

Yes. Here.

What are they trying to tell me?
Nothing, of course. They're not
talking to me. But they are

grabbing and holding my gaze and
me, frozen, of a sudden just a post
for the tether to the dog I half-hear smelling spots

in the same small circle of crunchy grass
miles below, light years further away
than seven blue sisters in the sky.

So much happened today
I was nearly asleep
before I remembered
the cardinal this morning,
fluttering in the snow( cont'd )

I dreamed I was holding Betty Draper,
whom I haven't seen in weeks,
comforting her yellow coifed period head
in its break-up aftermath. It was
brightsiding, maybe, when I told her
one thing I'd got from the advertising men,
what one had shown me about anxiety and
drugs, forgetting that she wouldn't care.

There was once an ad for The Gap, probably before there were Baby Gaps and other Gaps, that had a song that ended with "Fall in-to The Gap." It plunked its way right down the scale from the 5th to the tonic, all even in beat, fat quarter notes all the way. When you arrived at the Gap in it, the Gap seemed to be a place you'd really arrived at, maybe even a place to arrive at, and at which you'd really arrived when you'd arrived at it.

Advanced Wound Care

Hello, sweatshirt.

[to be continued]

fflo

Hello.

CURRENTLY FEATURING
the
Postcard of the Day

(a feature involving a postcard on a day)

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For another postcard thing, see
my old postcard poems tumblr or
its handy archive.

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I'm currently double-posting here & at livejournal. Add me and let me know who you are, and we can read each other's protected posts.

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"What was once thought cannot be unthought."

-- Möbius, The Physicists

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July 2025

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40 years ago tonight
Can You Be the Unmet Friend
strange day
nonpoem stuff
Mavis the toddler with the old lady name
bird song
or maybe it should be "semi-Subconsc-"
another dream poem
there's a tack in my tire
yo-yo book poem
caesura
winter sky poem
Monday poem (from last week --- a world ago) (unfinished)
dream poem
Fall in-to the poem.

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Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 11:08 am

Your Source for 'Ff'lo

a compendium of that and this, but not necessarily in that order

Entries tagged with poetry

40 years ago tonight

Can You Be the Unmet Friend

strange day

nonpoem stuff

Mavis the toddler with the old lady name

bird song

or maybe it should be "semi-Subconsc-"

another dream poem

there's a tack in my tire

yo-yo book poem

caesura

winter sky poem

Monday poem (from last week --- a world ago) (unfinished)

dream poem

Fall in-to the poem.

Hello.

July 2025

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries