Duality, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Dark drinks
Out of ghouls
And romance
Unimaginable fright
Satin sheets, rose
Petals strewn on floor
Breadcrumbs
For pressing lips
And both waking up
In cold sweats.

God’s Enemy, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

God has to kill
The Poet, the poet
Is his enemy
They create darkness
And light, love
Hate, rage, disaster
The moon beds with
The wolf, the owl
Preys on the mouse
Juliet sits on balcony
And all without his help.

Under The Porch , By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Damn it Sylvia
You need to stop
Doing that. Seriously
What’s next? A stab?
A car ride into a river?
One of these days Sylvia
Arial is going to give you
Exactly what you want.
(end)

This is a very serious poem to me. Bittersweet and short and to the point. I write it because to me, her words means she is still alive to me, even though she is dead. So every time I read a poem I of hers I have not read before, I feel like I need to intervein and stop her, so she can write the stuff I am reading now.

Fall On Your Face, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/METTA and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

It’s comical when your cat
Or your dog, run into
The clean sliding glass door

They look back at you embarrassed
“You didn’t see that”
And they know your laughter says

“Yea, I damned sure saw that”

But despite that, as far as this poet
You don’t need to beat me up
I run into that sliding glass door

All the time, when I am writing
And it isn’t funny in the least to me
When I miss my bad spelling spree

And hit submit anyway, that glass door
Was a brick wall, no , no , no, more like
Falling off the Golden Gate bridge
Hitting the frigid fog covered water

And the seals, and whales and sharks
All laugh at my belly flop, the carnage
I took with me, bared myself for all to see

When I fuck up, I do so in epic fashion
The opening of the Olympics of poems
Only that it is more like a circus show

I am the clown running away from the bull
See what I mean, not a circus, but a rodeo
I am on the trapeze with no partner to catch me

I feel like the dog’s flee, just hanging on
Desperately, hoping that there was no one to see
The crash and burn at the smash up derby

But I still do it, tie my shoelaces together in public
Trip over my words, like some video show
Canned laughter, under the microscope

And why you ask, do I put myself through all that
Show you my unfocused photographs, or
The ones I spilled my coffee on, stained for all to see?

It is actually easy to understand, it’s better than being dead.
(end)

I don’t work like many poets. Many hold back, run over their work over and over in private until they absolutely are sure it is presentable. I am fine with that. But with my maladies, and my anxiety, that would be far worse for me, it would make me more depressed and suicidal than I have ever been.

I need to get it out quickly, even if messy, because I can forget quite quickly, or get distracted from my A.D.D. So it has always been far more important to get it out first, even if messy, then go back and fix it. The message to me outweighs any potential embarrassment. I operate like a high speed photographer. I don’t worry about the bad shots being seen. I keep going because eventually I do get something right.

Did you notice the one stanza with 4 lines where all others were 3? Did the message get lost to you? I don’t think it did.

This is not a poem. This is a highly recommended must read poem suggestion. If you have not, do yourself a favor and for the love of poetry, read and or listen to Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror.”

Anne Dates Hitchens, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Lexicons for both, as large as the universe
So eloquent, as to make Shakespeare blush
Menthol or full flavor, rocks with something wet
Numbing whatever respective nerves either has left

Ubiquitous ashtrays accompany their typewriters
Like the parasite fish feeding off the belly of the shark
To provoke, incite thought, agitate complacency
Create wildfires when need be, feared by authoritarians

Theologians, conservatives. Who have respectively
Become Plato’s Ultra Man, Wonder Woman, standing taller than
Mt Fuji, ready to do battle with absurdity, and purity
Ready to get dirty,

I could see them, meeting a juke joint, in some New York speak easy
Sharing a full bottle of whatever, towering over their glasses
Exchanging stories of the scars of their lives, their livers and lungs
Could tell such horrid stories of meeting close ends, several times over

And she would size Christopher up, eye him like a slab of beef
The zookeeper would feed to her, the lioness, Hitchens should be
Easy work for her. I should know, I have her complete book of poems
And it is as big as Hitchens “Portable Atheist”.

And he, he wouldn’t be so easily intimidated, he’d be a quick wit, maybe
A dirty limerick, as to which Hitchens would ask her to read her
“Furry Of The Cocks” as some sort of way to break the ice, but they have
Plenty of that, I’ know he did, I’ve seen him glossy like a Krispy Kreme.

And by her own admission, she wasn’t shy with the rot gut, from beer to
Whatever went well with sleep aids. Somehow, through all that self Destruction, haze, self medication, they towered over the most important
Endeavor . The core of what life is, the rawness of being, the sickness

Of being. And they wore those death masks daily, almost daredevils, knowing
One day they’d jump the Grand Canyon one too many times. And eventually
They both did. To say Hitchens wasn’t a suicide is folly. It was, most certainly
The smoking and booze was an Olympic Marathon to him, a relay race,

Where dusk handed dawn his next drink, and midday handed afternoon
His next. And Anne, I highly suspect, Plath was not a good influence on her
That’s the girl in the Highschool bathroom, asking you if you want to skip School and get fake I.D.s and get drunk, and race horses full speed to the

Edge of a cliff, with a sudden full stop as to cause you to flip over Arial’s head
And if lucky, that bridle is still there, with you dangling off of it, 500 feet
From death, laughing at what you almost did, as if it were a Playgirl model
With that chicken giblets and gizzard you both chuckled about, but she let go

And you didn’t and you envied her, and Hitchens, he sat and watched Knowing you’d follow, and he’d lose his barmaid, drinking buddy, intellectual Equal. He’d clank his glass to you, ask you to read the Jesus Papers then have A debate, disemboweling an unsuspecting preacher, reminding him that the

Penalty for rape is a fine, and forced marriage to the victim.
Anne would take her turn and read “Her Kind”, they’d empty the bottle
Light up another, and another, one armed bandits, except two, the other
For booze. And Hitchens would tell her why “God Is Not Great”.

And and what of last call? You know the endings of both movies.
(end)

They both lead legendary lives, but also flawed and very tragic addictive lives. Anne suffered mental illness of course, but she was also a drinker and took sleep aids. And Hitchens, while he could not really be called suicidal, he was a heavy drinker and heavy smoker and he might as well have been suicidal. It did eventually catch up with him and he died of cancer.

This poem again, is imaginary “what if” Anne Sexton and Christopher Hitchens dated. But they are raw reflections of amazing but very tragically flawed human beings. Now when I say Plath was a bad influence, I don’t mean in a literal sense, but as far as having a friend commit suicide, I am sure that weighed heavy on Anne who had her own thoughts as well.

Detective Brambles, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

I am going to sue you
For intentional infliction
Of useful language
And ban you from your quill

From the attic window
I look just down the hill
I see words, I have never seen before
In your garden, you tend so well

Somewhere under hidden
The cargo nets entwined
Blueberry, blackberry
Rosebush, prickly shrub

Ancient ruins
Of the white kitchen timer
Buried on it’s side
3 minutes to the Acropolis

From your kitchen window
It committed suicide
Landed in your garden, years ago
Barren of sunshine

Alabaster nasal dorsum
Pokes through the compost ski mask
Layers of tangled fishing line
Obscure it from your sight

Iliakό orolόgio
Dialing up my dialogue
Be it rain or shine
I’m not taking your quill

Your garden looks just fine
I am not going to see you in court
I’ll be a good sport
And let it slide this time

Your tabby staged the crime
It was no suicide
He pushed it from the window ledge
Yet he’s way too cute, charges won’t stick

Look at those shifty whiskers
Basking in the sun
He’s got you fooled, he owns you
Naive garden gumshoe

It is the cat’s occulted shade
You know he’s got it made
The jury stacked, off Scott-free
You know you’ll never convict.
(end)

A fellow poet named Lisa inspired this poem. It was in response to seeing words I had never seen before, and enjoying learning them. “Brambles” is a type of shrub blueberry, blackberry, rose, ect. And she introduced me to the word “occulted”, meaning being cut off of view.

This is an imaginary poem, in where I am in another house, looking down a hill, and I see her cat knock down her white kitchen timer, which eventually gets buried over time by mulch and and brambles and the nose of the timer sticks up out of the mulch but is obscured. The cat is also “occulted” by the shadows of the trees and brambles and he is the guilty party as to why her “sundial” or “Iliakό orolόgio”, is lost. In this case the white timer landed on it side so the nose would stick up like a sundial.

But this poem is really is about thanking a fellow poet for introducing me to new words.

Reaper’s Song, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet On FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

I wish I had
A time machine
There would be
So many
I would go back in time
Just to see them
One more time
Or for the first time
But that marching man
Doesn’t give a damn
About my feeble wishes.
(end)

Nine Tenth’s Of The Poem, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Once you hand out
Your poetry
It is no longer yours
It belongs to the world
They get to decide
What poems they like
What lines they like
If they like it at all
Some will soar
Some will fall
But for me
That is better
Than not writing at all.
(end)
#vss365official #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #poem #poet

The Echoes Of The Cave, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

Soundwaves bouncing around
The canyon chasm sound
My isolation cannot be found

Below the surface, the miner’ s found
My buried body in the dusty shaft
Don’t light that match

It talks back to me
The conversation with nobody
Clicking my keyboard fervently

I might as well be, in another
Galaxy, there is no sound, you see
In space, they cannot hear you scream

The stove hood, two tiny lights
Of in the distance, look like
A close encounter, alien ship

Of a 1950s si fi b movie
And that Orwellian TV
In front of me, keeps track of me

My printer won’t cooperate with me
Jamming up, when
Printing my poetry

I shout in this megaphone
I let out a sound, like a negotiator
Talking down a hostage taker

But I am the hostage taker
And the hostage, in the shaft
That everyone hears, but cannot see

The echoes of the cave
Talk back to me, telling me
To be quiet, nobody cares.
(end)

My house has a very large kitchen/ living room. It has vinyl flooring and very crappy insolation. So it echoes quite easily when I am talking, on the phone, on my computer on Skype, or FB voice. But I get really frustrated when something goes wrong with my poetry, and I shout, and it is very loud. I have to force myself to be quiet. I especially do that at night, be quiet that is.

But the echo this large room creates makes it sound like a large cave, or canyon or tunnel, in some remote place, where nobody else is. It is a very lonely sound too.