SWIRLING PAST
—Stephen Kingsnorth, Coedpoeth, Wrexham, Wales
The irony,
that only photo, grandad’s war,
wading duckboards, flooded trench,
should sink now through the stink and stench
of our once cosy living room,
mud and sewage splattered, drenched.
Our picture box,
the children, grand, first toddle steps,
towelled, fluffy after bath,
their puzzled face, great aunts’ caress,
that spick and span, start day for school,
daubed paintings washed, swallowed, swamped.
That freezer food,
trout, salmon, quiche, choice joints and fowl
for wedding feast, noon repast,
invested, cooking care those passed,
mixed condom wrappers, blocking sump,
entangled, fish-hooked, water foul.
And swirling past,
framed family scenes, canvassed folk,
relics, symbols, pilgrim faith,
ripped tide of sacred texts, a cross,
and icons, craftwork, thanks for care,
sunk collage, tapestry of life.
ONE SOURCE
—Sayani Mukherjee, Chandannagar,
W. Bengal, India
Beaches perfumed solidify dissolving
The rainbow mysticism
My soul wraps in multitudes of playfulness
Visionary soft high and low
Deep breathings suppressed
Nuanced unbuttoned shirts
Marooned Stockinged hearts
Tan holes of sweet delicacy
My strawberry shakes unfolded
Visions of mermaids drowning deep breathings
Inhalings are invalid to vision souls?
Nonchalantly keeping scores aligned
Rains drizzled down my blue nerve weather
Wrecking ball of sweety soury
The blue uproar crimson bliss
Husky voice my unbuttoned red
Cosmography zeal my potion's heavenly muse
Will paint you till deathscape
Duality eyes and one source true drop.
GONE IN AN INSTANT
—Caschwa
(Response to Sam Barbee’s
“On the 8th Day” from Medusa’s
Kitchen, 1/14/23))
we sat in school and learned by rote
the alphabet, and that asbestos would
protect us from fire
1 place we should sit in the classroom
2 sides to a page
3 wheels on a tricycle
4 corners of a square
5 senses
6 legs on insects
7 seas
8 sides on a Stop sign
9 planets
all of that brought to us by mature
adults citing the findings of scientists
and other “experts”
and then WHAM BAM!!
no more Pluto the planet,
and asbestos will kill us,
causing us to wonder
what else that we were
taught had we better ignore?
the alphabet?
numbers?
names of the months?
mature adults, some with golden
parachutes taught us all that crap
which now ain’t worth shit
the whole educational system
failed big time, all that honor we
were supposed to have for our
elders who only pretended to
be mature adults
gone in an instant
HA HA, SELF-DRIVING CARS
—Caschwa
“My name is Tesla, and I’m a driverless vehicle.”
I will carry the weightlessness of you to AA
meetings, DMV driving tests, drive-thru eateries,
drive-in movies, solitary confinement, Death Row,
Tesla-teacher conferences, tunnels of love, and
jury duty.
Painted frogs
Descended into jungle,
Inside rotted logs.
Jumping out
Upon arrival,
They quickly seek
The means
Of their survival.
Dragon-flies
Look tasty,
But how a tongue might seize?
Something distant,
Floating lazy.
If only tongue could reach!
THOUGHT POLICE VERSUS “TANK-MAN”
Thought police are close
Behind me—
Watching every word I say.
Thought police are almost
On me—
Only inches away.
We used to think
We lived in a
World of freedom,
But that
World has been taken
Away
By “fact checkers”
Trolls and propagandists,
Censors and content-dispensers,
Who won’t let truth
Get in their way
Of steam-rolling over the conscious mind,
Leaving “Tank-man”
2-D on pavement.
SLOWLY GOES YOUR OWN LOBOTOMY
—Joe Nolan
Conduct your own lobotomy
Slowly,
One day at a time.
Let worry drift away
Very gradually—
Less anxious,
Day by day.
Don’t consult the news,
Full of trouble,
Through and through.
There’s much you
Do not need to know
To get along.
Hum a little.
Take a walk.
Listen to
Your favorite music.
The world can crumble
On its own
Without your watching closely.
THEORY OF UNIVERSAL DEMOLITION
In this most miraculous world,
I am you as
You are me,
Or somewhere
In-between
A fifth dimension.
Albert Einstein
Is coming to a new
Interpretation,
In search of a theory
That unites all opposites.
Opposites attract,
So it shouldn’t be so hard
To bring us all together
Into one unifying theory,
But these days,
You can find plans for
Universal Demolition
On cocktail napkins
From cocktail parties,
Left behind
As reflections
Of what’s in people’s minds
These days,
Sad to say.
About California flooding, David Fewster writes, “The current weather in California brought to mind this poem, which was written almost exactly 18 years ago.”
EULOGY
—David Fewster, Tacoma, WA
Third day of floods, tornadoes, lightning & hail.
A 16-year-old girl had already died
in Orange County from a mudslide.
I turn on Peter Jennings to see if this
unnatural Los Angeles weather was
nationally newsworthy.
It was the top story!
My friends in the Pacific Northwest
must be laughing their damn fool asses off.
Sunny Southern California. Ha.
“Hug a palm tree for me down there.” Right, sucka.
If you can dodge the fiery bolts from the blue.
In the kitchen microwaving asparagus,
I hear through the radioactive hum
the announcement a writer has died.
“Who?” I ask my host.
“Hunter S. Thompson.”
Holy shit.
Hunter Thompson, who’s ruined more young lives than
Thomas Chatterton, Ozzy Osbourne, Arthur Rimbaud,
Jim Morrison, Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain
Put together.
When, in the spring of 1980, Rolling Stone did a piece on you
plugging the god-awful movie, Where the Buffalo Roam,
and you said your current favorite drink was
Scotch and Nyquil, yeah,
I ran to Super Sadie’s for a bottle of Black Velvet
and some cold medication.
And I didn’t even like Scotch.
So imagine what it tastes like with the bilious green Sludge
that is Nyquil.
I was drunk, sleepy, and nauseous—
but my sinuses were never so clear.
Hunter Thompson who,
in spite of my background as a first-year dropout
of the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications
at Syracuse University, taught me that no journalist
worth his salt ever researched a story
unless totally fried on acid—
a technique that miraculously actually worked
when I got my first printed piece ever in the LA Weekly
(and also explains why it was nine years before
I was published again),
Hunter Thompson who, regardless of my first perforated ulcer,
I still admired unreservedly as the Ultimate Unrepentant Reprobate
for his refusal, after his assault/drug bust,
to cop a plea and go on Oprah as the first leg of
“The Inspiring Story of My Recovery from Drugs & Alcohol Tour”
like all the other pathetic whiny Hollywood losers
who don’t have the guts to pay the piper when the axe comes down,
and thus are all at the Oscars tonight.
O Hunter,
you never told us what you really felt.
Were you sad living in the O’Farrell Theater,
the porn palace run by the infamous Mitchell Brothers
in San Francisco for two bloody years
Quote Researching a Book Unquote
when you couldn’t even get it up?
Were you angry when the cheapass binding of
The Curse of Lono came undone,
making an intact copy of that piece of tripe
the most valuable first edition in your canon of work?
Was it really hip and back pain that drove you over the edge,
you—the man who had his teeth
kicked down his throat by the Hell’s Angels?
O Hunter, will you ever send
that story racketing down the Mojo wire
to Jann Wenner’s office at the Rolling Stone?
But, I forgot, there is no Mojo, we have the internet now,
and Jann is at the Academy Awards show
with his hand wedged up Scarlet Johanssen’s butt crack
while laughing uproariously at the antics
of a network-sanitized Chris Rock.
And Gonzo is dead.
O Hunter, who can forget your immortal motto to live by,
“When the going gets weird, the weird
Blow their fucking brains out.”
No, wait, that’s not right—
O Hunter…
Today’s LittleNip:
Green ivy, relentless,
conceals old pathways,
a flood of leaved tendrils,
reveals a locked door that no one
has opened, green ivy
is simply this moment in time.
—Nolcha Fox, Buffalo, WY
______________________
Welcome to the Kitchen on this 37th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Today’s Shahai are from Barbara Anna Gaiardoni (alias “@bag”), who was born in Verona, Italy. She's a freelance Pedagogist and Love Writer, as well as a writer of books dedicated to children, and she has published books with various Italian publishing houses and has participated in national literary and poetic competitions, obtaining the publication of her texts.
Barbara currently publishes Japanese poems such as today’s Shahai (a picture with Haiku or Senryu) in English on the international trade journals. Drawing is her passion and her motto is "I can, I must, I will do it". She creates Haiga in collaboration with Andrea Vanacore, life partner, visionary photographer & videomaker. They’re both fans of good food from all over the world! Welcome to the Kitchen, Barbara and Andrea, and don’t be strangers!
For more info about Shahai, go to allpoetry.com/column/15809452-Learn-About-the-Shahai--Photo---Haiku-by-D.E.-Navarro/.
We’re talking about “Flooded”, our Seed of the Week, and, as usual, the Kitchen was flooded with fine poetry. Our thanks to these poets and visualists, including Carl Schwartz and his photos of his neighbor’s fallen palm tree. Scenes like this are playing out all over Sacramento (the City of Trees) these days; I hear they’ve lost over 1000 trees so far—painful cause for us to grieve the deaths of all these majestic beings.
NorCal poetry for this week starts this morning with Poetry in Motion in Placerville (10:30am), but there will be no Sac. Poetry Center reading tonight, due to the holiday. The action then explodes this Thursday with Winters Open Mic (6pm); Online Workshop with Indigo Moor (6:30pm); Brad Buchanan and Frank Dixon Graham at Poetry in Davis (7pm); and Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Cafe in Sacramento, featuring Poetry Overturned: Ladies of the Night (8pm). Wow! What a shame to have to choose from all these fine readings on just one night!
Later in the week, next Saturday’s Sacramento Storytellers Guild features Dave Boles at 2pm. Then, on Sunday, there will be another Capturing Wakamatsu Poetry Walk/Workshop with Katy Brown and Taylor Graham (10am); be sure to register at www.arconservancy.org/event/capturing-wakamatsu-a-poetry-walk-workshop. (I assume this event will depend on the weather, so stay tuned.) Click UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS at the top of this column for details about these and other future poetry events in the NorCal area—and keep an eye on this link and on the Kitchen for happenings that might pop up during the week.
_______________________
—Medusa
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
All you have to do is send poetry and/or
photos and artwork to
kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world—including
that which was previously published—
and collaborations are welcome.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
