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Thursday, March 07, 2013

Small Bangs & Figments

Evan Myquest (Mikey West)


facing the music          

product of life
product of stress
product of sun and weather

i like to think i earned the artist’s work
i like to think it’s not punishment for surviving
i like to think it’s character not aging or disease

not happy to be the object of lost youth’s palette in store
of warts lesions scars wrinkles or worse—and more
like blotches discolorations and melanomes
the list is endless according to derma-tomes
ah my youthful face once undiminish'd
my mirror shows the artist of aging’s now nearly finish'd

___________________

a thousand & one


they marched &

they marched



wherever these knights

of the world went

they left rivers of fever behind



their contagion never denied

villages & cities became voids



the intention was

to bring enlightenment

but as intentions often go

what was brought

was less than what was there

in the first



these knights were

without footprints



the knights arrived on killing winds

from their far off homeland

conscripted by the glowing fire

to bathe in far off fountains



their message in a begging bowl

know yourself

free yourself

eat the apple

drink the pure

find oblivion

find yourself



dance dizzy circles



the knights

became the destroyers

of all they touched

looters of the flesh

they harvested

in their name



on their return

to their homeland

their aged selves

were blessed & anointed

paraded & held aloft



as more than had left

so long ago



more so in the new

contagion they brought home

which turned

home & world to windy dust

for the ages



all that was new was old

all that was old was dead

left behind

for the new explorers to find

in past rivers

___________________

sport

the system is competition

testosterone warfare

insidious dueling up ladders

of status & money

gladiatorial supremacy


top doggedness



but i witness the cooperation



agreeing on rules

training in groups at agreed upon times & methods

from youth to seniorhood



how much sacrifice

to build coliseums & arenas with common revenues

that could go to feed the hungry



take all the teams & designer uniforms

follow every statistic

but see the lines to enter the stadia

ant lines up eighty or more rows


college alumni with canes will climb

such narrow steps in the rain



witness the cooperation in feeding the crowds

with their fondest desires for frenzy

a president takes a seat on the fifty yard line

while the rich view from glass boxes



how competitive it is to get these rewards

after the cooperation reaches its point of no return



in my old age i am drawn less & less to

the competitive system

so i look for the cooperation involved

in competing across continents



it is there

but it has its limits

who would pay to see cooperative sports

eighty or a hundred thousand in the stands to watch

as their captains go out on to the field

toss a coin
shake hands

then go home


Mikey West (with Bill Gainer) at The Book Collector
—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis



figments 

adam to eve
to turn over that leaf
how unfair this garden we must leave

eve to adam
just wait a season
for what happens every autumn

and while it greens every spring
a bit of breathly steam can cure any static cling

____________________

small bang theory

small hope in a locked box mystery
where does it all come from

the mystery of origins
the something from nothing magic
tiny somethings add up
to large karmic constructs

trust me on this
it gets weird from here

the constructs float through the cosmos

free floating multicolored energy balls of trust & love
become concrete in a hubble picture way
clouds of cosmic matter coalescing via unimaginable spin forces

one small bang &
dinner is served on the periodic table

a bored teenager looks out a bus window
cellphone to her ear
as she makes a last ditch call
to save a friend a wait on a corner
bang
that puts another planet on the map

multiply that call
times a cosmic billion
bored busriders
& the world would need a space telescope to begin to comprehend
its own expanding universe

bang

feel that new gravity
in the locked box mystery
where it all comes from

maybe if you were on a trampoline
on top of the reigning tallest building
& were getting some radical air with each bounce
while texting

in the distance
you would see it shimmer a bit
& then in a few moments you would feel it
over the skyscrapers
bang

but a small one
that will puzzle its future citizens no end

___________________

Today's LittleNip:

bas relief to alto relief 

chizzle chizzle
no relief for the frustrated sculptress
from a loveless union
then she did her classic david
such a well endowed statue
now his’ll his’ll
and that’s some shizzle

___________________

Thanks to Mikey for today's Kitchen fare! Evan “mikey” Myquest (Mikey West) lives in retirement from being a ‘numbers guy’ with his wife Eva in Rancho Murieta, CA. He has been published and cover featured in the Sacramento News & Review, Blue Fur, Primal Urge, Poems-For-All, Medusa's Kitchen, and WTF. He has a poem in the Sacramento Anthology of Poetry 2012. He is a 1974 alum of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writers workshop. He tells people his influences are Brecht, Rimbaud and Calvino when he really is a total product of Edgar Poe, Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash and some nameless guy from Nantucket. If he had to pick a section of the bookstore for his poetry, he says it would be in the “weird” section under the leg of a table to keep it from wobbling. Mikey is an avid attender of poetry readings but does not take the stage himself. He says it gets him home that much earlier. His pen name, Evan Myquest, is a combination of that of his wife and inspiration, Eva West, and his own name. Evan Myquest—get it?

___________________

—Medusa



Mikey