SOUTH AFRICAN POETS III: JUDY CROOME

Meet Judy Croome, a South African poet and fiction writer.  Although she lives and writes in Johannesburg, South Africa (which she describes as the economic powerhouse of Africa), she was born in a little village called Zvishavane in Zimbabwe and as a child played out in the Zimbabwean bush.

Judy stresses the focal point of her writing: “With the beat of Africa in my blood, my poetry and my novels are set in this continent, which has deep passion as its heart.  The driving motivation of my characters is the search for love in all its forms.”

From her book of poems, a Lamp at Midday:

A PRAYER FOR SOUTH AFRICA

Nkosi, you have brought us so far.
Nkosi, you have guided us through
A thousand,
Another thousand,
Years of suffering.
We rose in rainbow queues,
Snaking along the parched dry earth.
We stood under the smiling sun,
Warming us with hope.
We rode in rusted wheelbarrows,
On rickety bicycles and in
Long silver Mercedes-Benz cars.
We signed up for a paradise:
A return to Eden.
Nkosi, your beautiful phoenix falters,
As the new and old colours of hatred wind
Sinuously through our hearts.
We forget to ask our ancestors and you:
Nkosi, yizwa imithandazo yethu
Nkosi, sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo.

[Note: isiZulu, from the first verse of the new South African national anthem, which is a combination of a hymn composed in 1897 by Enoch Sontonga and an Afrikaans poem, written in May 1918 by C.J. Langenhoven.  The words mean “Lord, hear our prayers / Lord, bless us, your children.”

and another of Judy’s poems:

THOUGHT ON THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA

Two thirds of my life was white under white
One third is white under black.
Hoping to find unity
I see the same old divisions changing faces
From Eugene to Juju.
Too many of our rainbow people
Wretchedly cling to the myths of a departed age.
Victimhood is the new badge of courage.
All cry about their past pain,
And, in so doing, let their wounds fester and
Infect all that is hoped for.
The violent struggle of evil versus good
Blinds them to the promise of the only lasting freedom:
The liberation of the soul
Which, passing through the convulsed pains of re-birth,
Tames the turbulent savagery of both past and present lives
And, when calm again, wins the unity of the self.

Judy Croome’s book, a Lamp at Midday, is a personal collection of poems.  One reviewer describes it as “a hauntingly beautiful volume of poetry that speaks to our deepest emotions.”  Another reviewer characterizes the book as “a snapshot of real life, and unfortunately death.”  Especially in the first section (about her father’s approaching death), these poems speak with a brave and earnest voice.

Here is a poem from the first section of Judy Croome’s book:

LET ME

The sacred three is certainty and power:
Three fairies, princes, witches.
Thrice-greatest Hermes.  The Holy Trinity.
The cock that crowed three times in denial.

Yesterday you had another major stroke:
The third one.
Now the little of you we had left is lost.

Your arms and legs rubbery
And your tongue thick and silent.
Your eyes … oh, your eyes
Continue infinite sorrow.

Your hands reach up to my face
Never still.
I hold them, to find their power vanished.

How can a child protect a father?
I am yet strong and healthy.
Although weak with grief
And helpless.

Let me protect you,
And keep you safe,
As you have done for me.

Only tell me how
I can close your eyes
And let you rest in peace.

Judy Croome’s poetry collection, a Lamp at Midday, is available through Amazon (in paperback and Kindle versions).


Click here to see the book on Amazon.

Judy Croome, on why she writes:
“I write because I believe that words have great power: they can bring comfort, joy and hope.  They can reveal secrets and lies.  And, while they may not change the world, they can – at their best – change people’s lives, even if for a moment.”

FEATURING CHRISTOPHER BURSK

One online reviewer of Christopher Bursk’s books of poetry claims that Bursk’s poems are addictive, and I can attest to that.  Recently I grabbed one of his books off my shelf and headed to a medical appointment.  In the waiting room, I started reading the poems, in order, from the beginning of the book.  I was enjoying them so much that I was disappointed, even miffed, when I was interrupted by the nurse.  Later, impatient, I hurried home and read the rest of the book.  Yes, Christopher Bursk’s poems are addictive.

My favorite of his books is The Improbable Swervings of Atoms, which won the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.  Besides his devotion to language, what I appreciate most about the poems is the approach by which he employs history in a personal way to relate how a boy growing up in the 1950s in the US tries to make sense of the world around him.  These poems are humorous while often, and at the same time, poignant, even painful.

“One Nation, Indivisible, Under God” begins:

On the day that the St. Lawrence Seaway opened
for saltwater ships to sail deep into the heart of America,
I was being launched into water too,
my head stuck in the toilet
thanks to the good offices of the student council
vice president, the class treasurer, and the captain
of the volleyball team,….

In “E Pluribus Unum”:

…and what is going through your head
is a locker room full of naked presidents,
all the Jamses and Johns showering together.
When you got on the school bus this morning
you didn’t plan to think about Grover Cleveland
scrubbing Chester Arthur’s back….

“Irreconcilable Differences” starts out:

Khrushchev and Eisenhower, that old married couple,
were bickering again, over how often
each could blow up the other,
but I had more pressing matters to deal with:
exactly when and where I’d have a chance to
get Sally Hamilton’s blouse unbuttoned.

And these are just a few of my favorite poems in this book!

Click here to see this book on Amazon.


The Christopher Bursk book I grabbed and took with me to a medical appointment, and with which I became absorbed/addicted, was The First Inhabitants of Arcadia.  Here, it’s not history but the English language and literature he uses to anchor his narrative poems about growing up.  Early in the book, he explains that in junior high he “invented/ theories about the letters/ of the alphabet/ and the lives they led,…”  Throughout the book, he employs this device to tell stories about different letters.  One example is “Why a Boy Is Drawn to Lowercase p” which begins:

It even looks dirty, dangling
below the line
like a kid taking a leak
while treading water.  For some boys
that’s paradise:
to be able to piss
in public,…

Also included in this book are poems which describe the adolescent male’s encounters with various homework assignments of high-school literature classes.  Here the high-school sophomore tasked to memorize “Dover Beach” churlishly characterizes Matthew Arnold as “a fop with porkchop whiskers” — about and from whom the teenager wishes to learn nothing, declaring with typical adolescent high drama:

If I gave in and felt sorry for all the poets
who didn’t know when to shut up,
let myself worry about the entire nineteenth century
and even the poor teachers who made us read
that panic disguised as elegy,
I’d not make it
to my next class, much less survive one more
day on this planet, its confused alarms,
its ignorant armies, its darkling plain.

Or how, in another poem, after:

One lucky classmate got Ginsberg, another Kerouac.
A third, Hemingway.  I got a woman
with three names.  A whole semester
with the spinster author….

The boy wants to get back at the teacher for this assignment and plans to “dig up dirt, turn bobbins into dildos, a sewing kit/ into a womb” in each essay he writes on this allotted author.  At the end of the poem, in dismay, the teen asks:

Why did the very writer I was determined to despise
have to turn out to be not so different
from me?...
What hope was there for me
if I was going to fall in love
with everyone I read?

Click here to see this book on Amazon.

Bursk’s narrative poems capture not only the sometimes absurd imaginative world of the boy — his fictions about the lives of letters and his perceived maltreatment at the hands of English teachers and their homework assignments — but also the angst of a boy growing up against a backdrop of large world events.  Bursk has an eye for the revealing illustration that is both penetrating and compassionate.  These brilliantly observed moments are truly engrossing because they’re rendered with disciplined musical sense and a true craftsman’s knowledge of his material.  With a seemingly easy, conversational music, formed of one exactly right word after another, Bursk’s poems radiate with grace, energy and understanding.

Christopher Bursk, recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew Fellowships, is the author of nine books.  In addition to having worked as a volunteer for three decades in the corrections system, with those on probation and parole, he is currently a professor of language and literature at Bucks County Community College.  His work has appeared in magazines such as Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Manhattan Review, and The Sun.  His poem, “Ovid at Fifteen,” won the Another Chicago Magazine Award, judged by Robert Dana.  He has been recognized for his work with prisoners, the homeless, food banks and women’s shelters and has won numerous awards for his humanitarian and literary efforts including Bucks County Citizen of the Year and Poet Laureate of Bucks County.  His book, The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns, won the Bright Hill Chapbook competition.

Here are three poems Christopher Bursk sent me to share with our readers:
  
Why Algebra Ought Not to Be Taught 

When I'm 10, you'll be 70,
and when I'm 20, you'll be 80
and when I'm 30, you'll be 90.
By the time we pull into our driveway I'm older 
than the trees planted by my home’s original owner.
I'll be 40 and you'll be 100.
You'll be 110 and I'll be 50.
My grandson likes how this will always stay the same 
between us. Long before junior high he's fallen in love
with algebra, the equal sign's unrelenting logic.
No matter what the world is like –
what seas shrivel, what cities burn,
plague, conflagration, tidal wave, war – 
when I'm 120 and Jake's 60,  things will continue
to add up. Jake can't get over the power of zero,
the metric system, that act of faith
that lets us put a 1 next to a 0 
and have it mean 10
and add another 0 and it's 100,
the universe infinitely expanding on the paper 
before him. If you're 2000, I'll be 1,940.
You'll be 4,000,080 and I'll be 4,000,020.
School's over for the day but Jake's still doing math
at the kitchen table, increasing his life expectancy 
and mine till we're as ancient 
as Biblical prophets or the ocean or  solar system.
As we wait for his mother to come home
time multiplies before our eyes:
You'll be 5,000,090 
and I'll be 5,000,030.
The unswerving hubris of the exponential, 
the autonomy of zero, 
the impenetrable beauty of all these circles in a row.

A Shower on the Bridge between Trenton and Morrisville

The cops left the rain in charge
of crowd control. We are so drenched now
what’s the point of packing up?
It’s too wet to imagine ourselves
anywhere else. The rain won’t let our minds
wander. It prolongs its interrogation,
wanting answers, but nothing we say
could satisfy it. Honk for peace
we shout like a gaggle of geese
who’ve made themselves so obvious
drivers have to steer around them.
The worst place to stand in such a shower
is on a bridge. Everywhere we turn: weather
with no intention of making this day
any easier for us. Soaked,
there’s no comfort to be had
gazing at a river. Look up
and the sky might as well be a lake.
If only the rain were just an old busybody 
who can’t help repeating himself,
and, if ignored, might go away,
but this muscle-bound, methodical 
downpour, this munitions factory 
assembly-line worker, this assistant 
district attorney? No one knows better than rain
how to reduce everyone to a common
denominator. What are we doing
five or six miles from where Washington crossed
the ice-cold Delaware, forming a human chain
across a bridge whose huge blinking sign
boasts WHAT TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES?
The rain exiles all,
takes a beat-up city, and beats it senseless.
We hold up placards that began bleeding
as the first drops fell, no match 
for the rain, its familiar, relentless,
uncompromising history lesson.


Hulmeville Marine Dies in Car Bomb
    - For Cpr. Robert Parnell 

The kid I taught the difference between affect and effect
is front page news today, only he didn't get there 
by pitching his Babe Ruth team to the playoffs.
At the breakfast tables of 33,500 newspaper readers 
he gives up his life for his country. 
Soon I'll get paper and pen and write a note 
to his mother whom I met at graduation
or maybe type a letter to the editor or my congressman.
Certainly I'll make a donation in Rob's memory.
That's how we humans fool ourselves: we act
as if there's always something we can do.
I turn to the place I look
when things stop making sense,
and out the window is the neighbor's kid
who seems to be growing muscles in the process
of jumpstarting his dad's mower. Often
cutting lawns is a suburban kid's first chance 
to feel anything come alive in his hand, 
spark plugs igniting, sheer urge bucking under his fingers.
He's not pushing as much as taming the mower, 
that id with blades, all that combustion his 
to do with as he wishes. 
At his age, tired by the day's fourth lawn, 
I'd be tempted not to stop the mower from its destiny: 
cutting down everything in its path 
till nothing fragrant remains
standing, every rose reminded of just how irrelevant 
beauty is to a blade. 
The boy takes no prisoners,
waging battle against infidels
sprouting back almost as soon as they're cut down.
Like many kids his age this boy seems to have no time 
for belts, their outdated strictures, 
his pants already slipped past his waist 
and riding his hips. Any minute 
they may slide all the way down
and he'll step out of them. The small of his back – 
wars could be fought over a thing that innocent.

WAYS TO START WRITING LOVE POEMS

Valentine’s Day will be here before you know it so consider writing a love poem.

You may want to start off by writing a short poem.  Certainly, Emily Dickinson’s poems are concise.

It’s All I have to bring today (26)

It’s all I have to bring today – 
This, and my heart beside – 
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell – 
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
— Emily Dickinson

For a subject, consider writing about when you first met, describing how you felt and where you were.  Or about one of your first dates.  Don’t forget to ground your poem with heartfelt messages.

One way to write a short love poem is to construct it along the lines of a cinquain – but, instead of counting syllables as in the traditional five-line cinquain, use words.  Jennifer Goode offers suggestions on how to write this short poem:

In line 1, use a noun (that also can be the poem’s title) – 1 word
line 2: a description – 2 words
line 3: an action – 3 words
line 4: a feeling (use a phrase) – 4 words
line 5: a noun (either repeat line 1 or use a synonym) – 1 word

Here’s what I wrote using Jennifer Goode’s exercise:

YOUR KISSES

Kisses,
tasty cocktails,
intoxicate with touching
tenderness.  I treasure each
embrace. 

Another mode to use is to write an acrostic poem in which every line starts with a letter of a word that is displayed vertically.  Jennifer Goode suggests using “I love you” in an acrostic poem:
I
L
O
V
E 
Y
O
U

Or you could use your sweetie’s name or the nickname you call her:

H
O
N
E
Y

Why not try a method used by Pablo Neruda?  In “Your Feet” he takes a less-often admired part of his beloved’s body and writes why he loves them:

YOUR FEET

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.

Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.

I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.

Your waist and your breasts,
the double purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.

But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
—  Pablo Neruda

Perhaps in your poem you’ll say why you love her neck, her small wrist, earlobe, dimples or freckles.

For the adventurous among my readers, try your hand at composing a love sonnet.  To make it easier, here’s an idea that came from Jim Behrle on The Awl:
steal (excuse me: borrow) the end words of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and fill in the lines.

The end words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCVIII (“From you have I been absent in the spring” has easier end words than his sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”:
spring
trim
thing
him
smell
hue
tell
grew
white
rose
delight
those
away
play

With these end words, you have opportunities for comparisons and for sensory images.

And finally for the last-minute love-poem writer, there’s a website that let’s you fill in the blanks (Remember MadLibs?).

For a simple love poem:

Click here to start the fill-in-the-blanks love poem

Or a Neruda poem of your own:

Click here to generate a Neruda poem of your own

HOW TO BE A POET -- and how to be a sensitive poet

HOW TO BE A POET

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill ⎯ more of each
than you have ⎯ inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditional air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

⎯ Wendell Berry

Source: Poetry, January, 2011


And on a very different note...

THREE TUBAS

This is the way I’m starting the year — with an oompah-pah not a whimper.  For the first post of the new year, I present the large, the loud and the illustrious tuba.

The word tuba originally was the name of a straight-built Roman trumpet and was the medieval Latin word for trumpet.

The serpent, probably invented in 1590 by Edme Guillaume of Auxerre, a French canon, was made of wood in a serpentine curve with a 7- or 8- foot bore and six finger holes.  Originally, it accompanied plainchant (Gregorian chant) in churches but from the eighteenth century was the standard wind bass in military bands.

The invention of the bass tuba by a German instrument builder named Johann Gottfried Moritz in 1835 provided a more reliable and more even brass bass than its predecessors.  This was the bass tuba in F, with five valves.

Richard Wagner, also in the nineteenth century, had special tubas designed to create special effects for his opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung.  The Wagner tubas formed a tone between a French horn and a tuba (described as a quieter tone color than both instruments).

Modern military and brass band tubas are of two sizes used together.  Orchestral tubas vary in different countries.  Great Britain and Germany use tubas in the original pitch of F while the US and parts of Europe use large instruments in the C pitch.

Enough of the history of the tuba (use the information three times and it’s yours for a lifetime).  Let’s go to the poems now.

INSTRUMENT OF CHOICE
by Robert Phillips

She was a girl
no one ever chose
for teams or clubs,
dances or dates,

so she chose the instrument
no one else wanted:
the tuba.  Big as herself,
heavy as her heart,

its golden tubes
and coils encircled her
like a lover’s embrace.
Its body pressed on hers.

Into its mouthpiece she blew
life, its deep-throated
oompahs, oompahs sounding,
almost, like mating cries.

“Instrument of Choice,” by Robert Phillips, appeared online on The Writer’s Almanac on May 5, 2007.

The second tuba poem is from Scrambled, by Trish Dugger (Garden Oak Press, 2012).  Trish’s book was featured on this blog last year.

RASH OF TUBA THEFTS IN SOUTHLAND HIGH SCHOOLS
LA Times, Dec. 12, 2011

I can’t get those tubas
out of my head.  I imagine
culprits in dark hoods
trying to hide humongous
tubas behind their backs,
bumping into lockers,
knocking over trash cans,
cracking windows.
I’ve never stolen anything
unless you count
Lucy Crane’s boyfriend,
Corky Taylor, and I never
knew a guy who played
the tuba, which I can’t
say I’m sorry about but,
Corky played a wicked
harmonica when we
weren’t making out
behind the bleachers.

    — Trish Dugger

This post’s final tuba poem is from me and appears in my new book, The ABCs of Memory.  (Okay, I’m starting off the new year also with a shameless plug for my book.)

RED SHIFT

A distant train trundles into the night,
    working hard, going somewhere else.
        It reminds her of the time he explained
how the Doppler Effect was confirmed
    by an Austrian mathematician
        who used a Dutch locomotive,
three separate observing stations
    along the track and fifteen musicians
        on the train playing trumpets.

She’d pictured the coming and going
    with its rising and falling to be more
like a herd of tuba players in a German
    oompah-pah band, exuberant men
in lederhosen and green felt hats,
    their cheeks puffing out, puckering in,
out and in, and all for the love of science.

He maintained they’d played trumpets.
    As the train went past the three stations,
the trumpeters all played the same note
    while musicians with absolute pitch,
posted on the platforms, attempted to catch
    changes in frequency.  In his most forceful
and sonorous tone, he tried to impress
    on her the simple seriousness of science.

As she coasts toward sleep, she considers
    the sad, single note testing and retesting
the returning.  Or was it the leaving?
    And an unsteady recollection he’s said
something or other about Edwin Hubble
    using what the trumpeters had proved
to validate the galaxies racing further

apart.  Red Shift, he’d called it,
    where light from distant stars downshifts
        toward the red end of the spectrum,
to lower frequencies and longer wavelengths.
    So much going somewhere else, a nocturne
        for all the worlds and loved ones leaving.

     — Lenny Lianne

SPLENDID SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF POETRY

You don’t need the Sugar Plum Fairy or even visions of sugar plums in your head to delight in listening to the splendid sounds of poetry.  There are many websites that offer audio recordings, podcasts and videos of a variety of poets and poetry readings. 

This holiday season (and all through the year) sit back, relax by the glow of the computer screen and treat yourself to the voice, rhythms and words of a poet you admire (or one who’s new to you).

Here are a few sites to visit:

The Poetry Foundation has a wide variety of both audio and video offerings.

www.poetry foundation.org

The Library of Congress has both their Poet Vision series

www.loc.gov/poetry/poetvision.html

and “The Poet and the Poem” radio program webcasts

www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html

Moving Poetry is “a compendium of video poetry from around the web with a new video every weekday.”

http://movingpoems.com

Lunch Poems is a very fine poetry series at the University of California – Berkeley under the direction of UC Berkeley professor and former Poet Laureate Robert Hass.  The series is broadcast on UCTV.

www.uctv.tv/lunchpoems

Enjoy.

THE ABCs OF MEMORY

DRUM ROLL PLEASE.

I’m delighted to announce the publication of my new book of poems, The ABCs of Memory.

Click here to see book at Amazon.com.

Click here to see book on publisher's site.

Unlike the way I organized each of the previous collections (around a narrative, told mainly through persona poems), in this new volume, I wanted to apply a wholly different structure (a simple, and familiar, framework used to catalogue various pleasures, ordeals and mixed blessings of American life).  

The ABCs of Memory contains two sections of poems titled alphabetically.  The first set of poems, called “An Alphabet From An Ample Nation,” probes the American psyche by examining such icons as Mr. Potato Head, Elvis, a Playboy centerfold, Mary Worth and Wonder Bread.  This grouping includes a prize-winning parody of Ginsberg’s “Howl”.  The second section, “An Alphabet of Modest Means,” explores little life moments of ordinary people and it’s the aggregate of these experiences that throws light on facets of American identity.

 Let me show you a poem from each section.  
First, from “An Alphabet From An Ample Nation”:

WONDER BREAD

What you do remember of the rapid years,
when you spent your days learning how
to hokey pokey and to read simple stories
about Dick and Jane and their dog Spot,

was how in the evening after dinner
your mother grabbed the familiar white bag
with red, yellow and blue balloons and 
pulled out two slices of simple Wonder Bread.

She placed one round portion of baloney 
between the pieces of white bread before 
she sliced the sandwich.  Always vertically
and never cutting off the crust.

On winter mornings when you could see
the wispy body of your breath as you rushed out
holding your metal Howdy Doody lunch box,
always anxious about being late,

you were confident you carried the bread
Buffalo Bob said builds strong bodies eight ways —
more crucial, you thought, than the handful
of carrot sticks or a snack box of raisins.

You can’t recall exactly when things changed.
Certainly it was after Clarabell finally spoke,
lips quivering as he whispered, Goodbye, kids,
and there was no more Buffalo Bob and Howdy.

Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Roy Rogers were gone.
Annette and the other Mouseketeers no longer
sang and danced in Roll Call each afternoon.
One day it was all different.

The earth mothers moved into kitchens
in cities and suburbs.  Their sleek hands
kneaded bread dough, punching out air.
The aroma of baking bread was everywhere.

Soon alfalfa sprouts appeared
with hummus on whole wheat
or spreadable Neufchatel with sunflower
seeds or bananas on multigrain bread.

Overnight metal lunch boxes with the faces 
of our favorite TV characters on the front
disappeared, gone with Wonder Bread,
while mothers mouthed Just as well.  Good riddance!

In its own way, whiter than God intended,
even enriched with minerals and vitamins,
bread became somehow tarnished and not good
enough for us who no longer trusted in wonders.

     from The ABCs of Memory, 2012, Lenny Lianne

                And from the second section:

NOTHING BUT TROUBLE

The pyracantha bush taps fingers 
against the window in a code
he doesn’t bother to comprehend.
Down the street one car horn
blasts twice in reprimand. 
Even the wind hurls its own slurs.

More and more, every noise annoys him,
especially his wife cracking an ice tray
over the spine of the sink, a cipher
that splits the air like an angry bird.
Up early, she is alone in the kitchen
making the same flavor Kool-aid
she’s made every day but puts
no smile on the pitcher anymore.

In the beginning he trusted familiar 
things he’d known all his life --
squirrels at the bird feeder,
husk of snake’s skin in the attic,
red and white soup cans on the far side
of the pantry -- all the household
gods of modest means.

But over the years he’s learned 
he travels, locked in place.
As the moon pales and plunges,
he is a bird bashing its head
against the empty picture window
while the waking world wishes him
nothing but trouble.

     from The ABCs of Memory, 2012, Lenny Lianne