Every Sunday I post an original poem.
I.
The Road
The jungle breathes
with its own rhythms
for its own reasons.
The road is a knife cut
parting the jungle
and no use can claim it
from its source.
Ghosts jabber among the thick-veined leaves
Panthers dream of standing over campfires
Jowls sag over flames and sparks
This road is a gullet
into some animal too vast
to comprehend.
His grandfather told him, when he was a child,
How he used to bait bees with sugar and steal
Their honey, licking it from smeared fingers
While they strung a line of yellow dots to his trap.
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A really long time ago now I wrote a song that was sort of about the Rapture. Specifically, it was a song that wondered, what if the Rapture happened, and because the world generally sucked, almost nobody actually got taken up? I decided to write a song about the one town that was actually good enough to get saved. I wanted the lyric to have an urban legend feel — like, how did anyone ever hear this even happened if the whole town vanished? (That’s why it comes from “a friend of a friend.”) And what if it was aliens, instead — how do we know it was really the Rapture, and not something else? The song was an acoustic piece, lots of floaty suspended chords and fingerpicking, very mellow vibe.
Another really long time ago, but not as long — maybe eight or nine years — we had a spare bedroom where Todd McKimmey & I would do recording. And one of the tunes that Todd decided that we should record was this one. Naturally, Todd being Todd, he wanted to put drums and electric guitars on it. I think it was one of the first times I ever played to a drum machine, actually (which means I wasn’t very good at it!).
Well, I found that recording lurking on my hard drive this morning. Alas, Todd was unable to scare up a choir for the chorus, so there’s a point where there’s nothing but clapping and the voice. That’s him on bass and electric, plus the drum machine programming of course.
We went on to do some rather odd and interesting co-writes, usually with him supplying the heavy rock & me doing lyrics and melody. I have those lurking on my hard drive too.
The wee ones might want a Wii;
Restrain yourself from shouting “Whee!”
Sneezes and coughs
& freezing your ass off
Are all the lines buy you, you see.
Expect another post with big panorama pictures of the lines shortly.
In the middle of the night, coughing, I resorted to one of those mentholated Halls cough drops; candy with a bite. Drifting off to sleep, a few iambs popped into my head, and here I am now, posting a Sunday Poem at 3:07 am.
Candy
A single stagnant drop of sugar, caught and coalesced and cooked to crystal shine.
It’s fricative and fresh, this lump or lolly, taffy, toffee, gumdrop, goo or fairy dust.
It conjures summers, jujubes and dimes. A stick of pixie, lips of wax, and time
To race about, the dog at heel, the swarm of kids, the tinkling ice cream truck, the sweat.
The sweet is sharp; your tongue gets bumps. A crack can catch your gums, cut you, leave wounds as small
As any cut inside your mouth: enormous, one more thing to suck on, strawberry.
We face the same hard choice of every day: to crunch would be to hurry it along.
It’s sweeter far to savor sweets and time before the time and sweets are soft, then gone.
