douglass carmichael: Poems

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:26:22 GMT

1/6/2005

Iraq and Tsunami

I give my gift to you

My life I give

The metal of the bursting grenade

Enters my body, my soul

Blood, scattering flesh

Brain bursts

Heart sags

My marionette limbs

Spread noodles on the ground

This phallic

Made in Tennessee

I read on the internet

A woman who came to work

A few months ago

Watched TV and Bush

Sweat flowed off her dripping husband

As the bed shook

And breath

Oh to have another breath

My Lungs shattered like spilled popcorn

Her breath picked up speed

Sperm and deed

And at work recalled

All thought back

None forward

To imagine

Entering me

Releasing me

From hope

Fear

I give my gift

My life

On a dusty road

Last glimpse of

Others ripped too

We are to be

Unremembered

Togeth…

I give me gift

This life

This flesh

This beautiful skin

The quick water

Rose up

Like a man over a woman

And more and more

Like a heavy breeze with a load of anger

Hit like a fist

And my body yields

Learned standing on earth

My father my mother my childhood

to water to instinctive swimming

Head back for air

But water

Sun and sea

Day after day

Shimmering fish

Nets repaired

Need to get to the market

Nose full

Taste of salt

This is the food of death

Don't swallow

My wife my son

I swallow

Eyes open

In swirling mud and sand

mother

Sounds of all sounds

Enter my ears

I reach

In the whirling

Submerging

Down

Crash against

Something dull hard

Unconscious of me

I yield

My gift

My only

Life

Allah

Somebody

Grab me

I gi….

Everything...

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 17:30:48 GMT

Politics

Old folks say past 55

Feel still alive and hopeful

That what has happened will

Be helpful to the future

And deeply recognize

How profound is

Merely getting by

Surviving

So many haven't,

More than all the fingers and toes.

The resonance of language, the

Recognition with each new place, new face new thought

This path has been trod

Before.

The Younger of us

Look ahead

And treat the older as if we're dead

Full of anticipation

Of love or dread

Success or mess

It never occurs that was has happened

Might be answer to what is to come.

Even the reweaving of old thoughts

Turned cliché

Mixed with hard words

Fuck this shit and half exposed tatoo

Feel new and vital and wedgy

Into the hazy horizon

Of the next moment.

Thus older feels conservative

Something to conserve

As Younger feels progressive

With lots to observe.

The wise know these diverge

In order to converge

Make whole

The dying

The living

The not yet.

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 17:14:25 GMT

poem

our language

Our language

Phrases like stones

polished in the flowing streams

of thoughts bursted out in speech

Phrases in words

That Caress our throats

as we caress the air

Pushed from our lungs

What I say we both hear

In shared objective

Subjectivity.

We must bless each word

And honor the uses made

In anger, hope, guile,

Or just saying "hello"

Short for "hell not be over you"

And "good bye"

"God be with you

Until I can again look you in the eye"

And all the other words whose

Mud earth gut origins

Have been left behind in bath after bath

Of use

And repression

Leave us

Still the word

Pearled in use

Polished

But still serviceable.

As you utter

Let the thought sink

Into the recesses of your body

And come forth more resonant

With human feeling

Animal feeling

Tide and storm and spring

Feeling

Made into honest art

As you speak to one

You must love

Because they can hear you.

poem

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:26:52 GMT

WE who living die

We who living die
We do not get death correct
It is not to those who go direct
But to us who remain
To feel the pain
Of the other's oblivion
That reduces us to nothing
Crushes our ego
Dwarf's the body and its skills
Occludes from us the distant hills
The joy of refreshing
Trapped as we are in narrow regressing
Bathed in tears,
still advancing in years.
Death is a fact for the living left behind
Not those to whom it was rather kind
The sadness at their disrupted projects
Is ours, not theirs. Yet death
we like to think, is unfairly blind.