Broken Crayon

 

—Poetry by Mike Hickman, York, England
—Photos Courtesy of Public Domain

For Alice, always

 

HEART
What would we do without one?

Make a fist and squeeze it tight.
Hold it to your chest, just to the left, not the right.
Consider the miracle of the muscle
That sustains your existence,
Atria and ventricles constricting,
Every second of your life
With such persistence.
Consider what we tell ourselves
About this organ, pericardially suspended,
Consider its position in our stories,
How its absence in so many is lamented.
Hold that fist in front of you,
Open the fingers one by one,
Imagine viscera and parietal layer parting,
Imagine heartache unravelled, desolation undone.
Then believe the heart is not the cause
Of any of these, as the fingers close once more,
Believe that they’re wrong when they blame the
heart
For heartache, when heartache’s hurt
Is caused, you know, elsewhere, before
Reminding yourself, as you squeeze your fist,
That life is the cause of all of these,
That without the heart there is no pain,
That with the heart there will be more.
 
And this is why the heart is love,
For love is hurt as much as bliss,
For without love, there is no life,
And this is why my heart persists.

 

 

 

TULIP FUTURES
And they say they are overpriced…

Semper Augustus, flame petaled in white and red,
Was worth more than a mansion, or so they say,
When tulips first came to the Netherlands,
And the first of the bubbles, before South Sea,
Before railway, before dot.com
Was inflated by fear of scarcity
And the greater fear that ignorance of value
Might reveal the Emperor’s clothes
In their so charming shade of pink.
 
Tulipmania embraced most the broken bulbs
In their variegation and their rarity,
With growers risking unpredictable results
In pursuit of ever higher rewards.
And for all they spent on their endeavours,
These were flowers that would last, at most,
a week.
 
And we would laugh at the Dutch for this,
As we laugh at them for having lived their lives,
And for not knowing what we know.
And for not valuing what we value.
As we would laugh with our own obsessions,
And our own values,
And our own tulips.
As if we know the value in our own variegation.

 

 

 

 

 

PROSOPAGNOSIA
Looking for the man in the moon

Lunar maria or woodcutter banished for working
on the Sabbath?
Cain, the Wanderer, forever doomed to circle the
Earth
Or smooth basalt covering old craters?
A face screaming from the void
Or the wisdom of the millennia smiling down on
the Earth?
Recognition depends, they say, on the fusiform
gyrus,
So alert to faces we will see them in clouds,
So, of course, we think, there is a man in the moon,
Our certainty programmed into Brodmann area 37.
Our certainty so certain we do not appreciate
the gift
Of seeing that face yawning down on us on those
moonlit nights.
We do not realise that there are those who cannot
see him,
Those who do not look up, no matter how clear
the sky,
Those who do not look for faces even where faces
would most be expected.
 
They call it prosopagnosia, the inability to see
faces.
And this is true—the condition exists.
But some, you know so well, do not have that
excuse.
Some do not look out of choice.
Doomed to circle the Earth and banished in their
own way.

 

 

 

 


BROKEN CRAYON

Not a broken record, for my song still plays,
Albeit warped and at the wrong speed,
Because the belt is on the way to perishing,
And the turntable recognises neither 45 nor 33-1/3.
Neither a broken rhyme,
For the poem still scans
And, after all, isn't it acceptable
To rhyme break—
Down with quake?
Which, yes, is what this honesty inspires,
But I will provide these analogies for your sake.
 
Not a broken record nor a broken rhyme,
Yet I have thought of myself as so very broken
In my time.
If it has to be articulated, illustrated,
Translated into metaphor,
Then I will give you the broken crayon,
As the choicest avatar for my condition.
And why, you ask? Why?
You can still write, you say,
As the record plays,
And the poem rhymes.
And you would be right, and you would be wrong,
Because I thought I had a fountain pen in my hand,
And I thought I was calligraphising,
When all along these are not words,
But howls of pain, I am writing.

 

 

 

 

 

AS CHARITY AND CERULEAN BLAZES
 
In their silences, she fears they are...
As the floes, as the nuclear standoff after the
Cuban Missile Crisis,
As the representation of an anthropoid cast  
in an alloy of copper and zinc.
In their silences, she fears they are...
As the heart in the Hank Williams Song
(Although Midge Ure got there, too),
As the farm in Stella Gibbons' book,
As the double glazing call she did not solicit,
As the feet that kept her from what she most
needed,
Or wanted,
Or desired.
In their silences, she fears they are...
As iridescent as cerulean blazes,
As the large bird in the genus Meleagris,
As the words she uses in her attempt to
describe how she feels.
 
In their silences, she fears they are...
As her inability to use the word makes her.
As the silences make her.
As the charity she no longer feels,
Deep within her cerulean blazes.

 

 

 

 

 

THERE ARE NO WORDS
FOR WHAT I AM FEELING RIGHT NOW…

There are no words for what I am feeling
right now,
Except there are, you say,
And you give me disappointed or upset or
let down or angry,
Or frustrated or appalled or aggrieved or
outraged,
And I thank you for them,
I really do,
Because you’re trying to help me articulate,
Because you believe it might help to articulate,
What it is I am feeling
About this monstrous injustice,
About this act of cruelty,
About this abuse of power,
About this arrogance borne of hubris.
You think it would be good if I could name
these feelings,
Like the naming of witches
Is supposed to bring them down,
Is supposed to melt them back into the ether.
And I thank you.
I do.
But you miss the point.
Because there are no words for what I am
feeling right now
Because—and this is the point I don’t want
anyone to miss—
There should be no words.
There should be actions.
 
All of them shorter, swifter, sharper
Than anything I might say.

__________________

Today’s LittleNip:

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

__________________

Welcome back to the Kitchen to Mike Hickman, a fine gentleman from York who writes equally fine poetry, and we thank him for these! All of these poems were all previously published in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself, with the exception of “Heart: What Would We Do Without One?”, which was previously published in Move Me Poetry.

For more about Tulipmania, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania/. And there’s more about Prosopagnosia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia/.

Today is a busy poetry one in our area, with the MoSt Poetry Workshop at the library in Modesto; D.R. Wagner and Dave Boles reading for Sacramento Poetry Alliance; Beast Crawl in Oakland; and Shelley Wong in Auburn. Click on Medusa's UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS (http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html) 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

 

 

 

 Mike Hickman



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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