love is in the air
Welcome to the annual Romance issue of the Ezine. I hope this year many of you will be snuggling up with your favourite love one on the 14th of February. To sum up the day, Valentine was a martyr of the early Church. He was either a priest or a bishop that was beheaded for his faith by an Emperor "Claudius". The concept of linking romance to this day deals with the days of Rome, in February there was celebrate of Vali a deity known for romance. At least that's what is said in Wikipedia, there is also reference to a famous Gnostic named Valentinius who in an effort to present an alternative to the extreme asceticism of his day and believed in the importance of marriage. Rather an interesting concept, I suppose I should say 'take that Catholic Church', gnostics were right. As well, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of the legend of birds finding and staying with a mate on St. Valentine's Day. Whatever Saint or deity you care to follow, we acknowledge the importance of romance in the month of February. Perhaps there is someone who would point out that with a nine month gestation period, it would mean women would give birth in October, which would be a good month. That sounds sad doesn't it, sort of reduce romance to a simple act of evolutionary pragmaticism. Then again, there are too many evolutionists who are boring pragmatists. In fact most of them are, plus pretentious. Then again they are boring. Totally boring.
Sorry where was I? Yes the romance issue. There is a number of poets who accepted the challenge of the day and we celebrate their vision of romance.
Let's consider poetry
Poetry
Our first poet is Paula Gordon:
Private Letters
Love letters were written
one to the other,
between two people
who never met.
Private conversations
written down throughout
the history of a nation,
never meant for the eyes
of anyone but their recipient.
Arguments made about
fantastical discoveries of
intimate written words,
published for eyes never
meant to read.
If I profess my love
in written word to you today,
will strangers of millions
read them when I'm gone?
Fabrics
Changing worlds takes
but a breath of a butterfly.
I speak unto you--
you speak unto me.
Exhalations intertwine and
become soft winds to cover
us in stained glass fabric.
Break Away My Days
The days break way into different seasons,
a metamorphosis that goes un-noticed in the
complacency of human conditions.
My seasons of you do not come in colors,
they are of tastes, cinnamon and ginger palatable
nuances that leave scent spread across my tongue.
Your landscape is porous, soaking up glints of
moonlight bouncing off porcelain skin that you
color blush with urgent feather finger-tips.
Glistening rivulets travel the length of
sweet whimpers falling onto crisp sheets the
color of frozen tundra, tangled and intermingled,
our days are born with a signature scent.
Pirouetting and prancing
wiping the sand from each petal,
brilliantly showered with hues of
every color.
We now waltz upon the wind
cradled in its lilting hands,
watching the shift-shapers try
to fool our being into coming down.
Physical embrace upon a searing west wind
we pollinate our trueness unto the other,
creating a new species in this dry
and desolate garden of sprinkled life.
Hourglasses become monoliths raised
high in the amethyst sky, as they are
stifled and set in lightning stricken sand
that takes the shape of icicles.
Chains of thick mist make our lofty bed,
we sleep with the thoughts
of sanguine petal dreams.
Robert Demaree returns to the ezine with these poems
AT THE CARD SHOP:
FEBRUARY 13, 1999
Once again I’ve waited too long:
At the card shop,
With others who had planned to do better this year,
I wander from rack to rack,
Scanning depleted stock,
Maudlin, tasteless cards,
Unchosen by yesterday’s more caring shoppers.
Do they value their loved ones more?
We queue up furtively to check out,
Laying our guilt, our dismal purchases
On the counter beside little bears, chocolate oranges.
The clerk, Cupid’s sullen agent, enters data:
Bar codes beep, eyes do not meet.
MAGI ON THE INTERNET
They had met in a chat room:
Coy small talk into amorous protest
With the click of a mouse.
But now she posts at auction
The antique vase he bought her,
Its blue-green finish crazed in journeys
From dealer to collector and back.
He notices the listing
But not the lister,
And so again he places love’s winning bid,
His heart bouncing as if caught
Between autoreplies.
Robert H. Demaree
Taylor Graham sends these February inspired works:
AIRMAIL
Here’s that box of letters, each page gone thin,
as script turns onion-skin into a bygone page.
Blue paper folded on its dotted lines and sealed
and sent, his lips touched briefly every bygone page.
Trans-ocean airmail costly then, just half an ounce
of phrases in his careful hand on a bygone page.
As if he weighed each sentiment he put his pen to,
never quite expressed in words on a bygone page.
When he wrote of ancient lovers’ passions,
you knew them for his own on every bygone page.
How Dido loved Aeneas, and Tristan his Iseult,
each tale retold, embellished on a bygone page.
You’ve kept them in a heart-shaped box: onion-thin
layers, a skin upon the heart, a bygone page.
Today, like old history come alive again, you find
his script on thin blue paper – not a bygone page.
THE ROAD TO SEVRES
[Alfred Sisley, oil on canvas 1873]
The foreground flanked
with cropped-off tops of trees.
You know you’ve been on roads like this
before – parsed to a tedium
of schedule and deadlines,
one train stop after another. One
four-square building raised
against the next.
But this is the crest overlooking
Sèvres, where she lives now –
so soft in the haze of an artist’s
perspective and lavender
distance, it might be awash
in dreaming.
FIRE-SAFE
I fell in love with your way
with fire. Smoky bear-man with shovel
and a can of gasoline, set to ignite
a backfire line of defense, to clear
the woods of danger.
I loved the winged flash and feared
the mindless bursts erupting
with any change of fuel or wind.
Still in charge, you rode the edges
for the rogue cinders.
That was years ago. Your shovel stoops
over yet another slash-pile,
while with a rake I scurry around
the outskirts, no more at ease with fire
than a young girl in love.
Our skin’s worn thin with years,
the heat bites deeper. It’s hard to see
a message in the peaks and crowns
of flame. I wait for the guttering,
at last the embers. Safe.
Taylor Graham
piper@innercite.com
Dina Televitskaya presents poems for February
The February poems
1.
The Younger Son
The winter has grown very old.
She is lonely and depressed.
Only the younger son helps her,
The modest and timid young man,
Dressed in a unfashionable coat.
He is hopelessly in love with the lovely Spring.
February, February, my sad boy!
Your destiny is unlucky:
Every year, when you go away
Nobody is sad or misses you,
And nobody cries bitterly about you,
Nobody take your hand tenderly.
2.
And Again in February
And again in February I recollect you.
I write poems for you.
Happy days of February are short.
February only has had time
To drink a glass of wine
And to hug the new girlfriend,
But already the pipe calls him: " It is time!
Get on the road! "
And February again rides on a horse.
There, ahead, are only woods and a snowy distance,
Ahead, there is no love
And there is no home.
Ah, poor, lovely February,
I very much regret you,
Probably, I would divide with you your destiny.
But he has already dashed away,
Has covered up his traces with snows
He has sent me only greetings from blizzards!
I recollect you, I write poems for you
But I even do not want
To dream of you today.
3.
Love in February
My life is not so bad!
I have again the happy instants,
Because I write the in-love poems
to someone.
February, February!
Please, do not cook for us
The new blizzards.
Instead of that, please
send cheerful letters to Spring.
My dear February, you understand:
that we still can love,
We are young and, perhaps,
we are immortal!
Dina Televitskaya
A new poet to these pages, Nicholas Messenger presents a number of poems. His biography follows after his works:
LEAVES.
The tree has made a heap of yellow leaves, and mocks me
with them. It has raked them all together layers deep.
The show-off lets them trickle through its fingers
They’re so yellow that it makes me salivate to look at
them. But if I put them in a painting you would simple think a
lapse of good taste had come over me : a kitchen calendar
was being perpetrated. On the other hand, suppose the garden where it shook
down
guilders, were a childhood, and we were in it, we would throw
up fistfuls of them, till we swam about in yellow; and were I talented
enough, well you could romp like that in paintings, I suppose.
I’d lay such pigment on that, like this pile of leaves,
it would be yellow even under the surface where sunlight doesn't reach.
Unamuno's
sky lies in the lake's embrace.
Encapsulated is its compliment of stars and moon
within the fringes of serrated mountain tips,
just like a picture in a book. But then, that's what it is.
For instance, here's a painted cat, called calico
because that makes the colour magical perhaps.
It catches something comical and mischievous about the creature.
Miron has this dangling clown, his hanged buffoon,
who puffs up ripening on his neck-rope, swings
a stinking censer, from the vaulted branches of a solitary
tree. A pictured stench. And others such
as single and exact as postage stamps.
Those stranded whales that trumpet on the coastal bars;
or brazen apples tumbling around lunging boys
to turn to acrid cider in a farmer's jars
or more corrosive calvados to sweat from copper nozzles
at those wood-stoked brook-side stills.
SETTING SCENE.
So few strokes it takes to set
scene, westering the sheets of sails
patch-buccaneered; the papier-mâché gun ...
Yet so much labour, slogging stage
by stage into the frame of lights;
the wash of clapped encouragement ...
The canvas colour-daubed balloon
so gaily ragged in conception
hefted up such cumbrous air;
to dream of breeze ... a clumsy
lugger.
Cast out your incredulous
and jaundiced gaze; your drudged regard
on what the neighbour's wall chucks out :
dissimulating buoyancy
the way the great patch-pocketed
brown dropsic moons, the steeper flanks
of sticky hay-bale dusks
lug up their gravity.
THE MARCH.
Xenophon. And you long marchers.
There's another war undone
and no warm home fires left to rouse a song.
The pillow stone cools bloody dreams
and even their slight peace is shaken off at dawn.
I have in mind the turn-around; the goal
forsworn in perpetuity. The hardening begun.
A staggering withdrawal, the would-be tactical
retreat to fastnesses. I have in mind
your bold grave saying how :
“We do not march ahead in hope
but with conviction in despair.
Therefore we here renounce the victory
and commit ourselves to war."
About Nicholas Messenger.
Nicholas Messenger had his first poems published in New Zealand as a schoolboy. He won the Glover Poetry award in New Zealand in the 1970’s. In 2006 he has had poems published in About The Arts, Blackmail, Boloji, Coffee Press Journal, High Altitude Poetry, Identity Theory, Jacket, Monkey Kettle, Off Course, Pulsar, Taj Mahal Review, Web Poetry Corner and WOW. He has had a few small one-man shows of his paintings.
He was born in 1945, and after completing a degree at Auckland University, travelled extensively in South America, and lived in Europe for several years. For a long time he made his living as a teacher, of science, art, and languages, in High Schools in New Zealand, where he was a long-standing member of mountain Search and Rescue organisation. Now, after nine years in Japan teaching English, he is running a small home-stay business in Hokitika, New Zealand, with his Japanese wife. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage.
Dec, 2006.
Nicholas Messenger nansei@farmside.co.nz
171 Weld St
Hokitika
New Zealand
G. David Schwartz sent to abovegroundtesting, these poems:
Audiotapes Are Not
Audiotapes are not tapes of automobiles
And cacography is not a cart of graphics
So you can imagine if you want to
That sinister melodious seeming
Aint no good singing.
I Have Been Dreaming
I have been dreaming
All about our past to be
Me standing nest to you
And you here with me
I have been ruthless
Twisting away the past
That wanted to capture us
And let the good live past.
Peace Is Made With Wisdom
Peace is made with wisdom
And teeth are cleaned with chew gum
War is made out of bray
Like teeth with tooth decay
War is reduced by battles
The very thing which makes them
So I am not surprised that
War and wisdom are not like that
Check out my book on Midrash:
www.amazon.com/gp/product/1418489565/104-8454011-6722310?n=28315
www.merlesworld.com/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=290
Dr. Charles Frederickson is going to be featured in the March issue of the ezine. Yes Dr. Charles, I am working on the questions. I am looking forward to learning more about this fascinating poet-physician.
Here are some of his works:
Heretical Believer
1.
My religion is kindhearted compassion
Taking pride in enabling others
Fiercely independent loner craving soul
Mates making a difference together
Pragmatic realism whatever works best
Discovery learning derring-do gut instincts
Nothing is impossible wandering dybbuk
Surpassing expectations imposed outer limits
2.
Daring to dare take risks
Afraid of nothing save self-deceit
Restless nomad exploring uncharted vistas
Challenging out of bounds taboos
Mercurial above see level visionary
Winged feet firmly off ground
Connect the dots stellar constellations
Walking tightrope horizon balancing act
War Weary Worries
Bullyrag justifications fail to convince
Them versus US delusions shattered
Ever deepening chasms impetuously hell-bent
Shaky foundation trench mortar cave-ins
Battle lines drawn in quicksand
Sunken head muckamucks disown lies
Broken hourglass shards barefoot splinters
Shifting dunes burying overblown ruse
Americans more exposed than ever
Stationary targets for uncivil warmongers
Shiites battling Sunnis elsewhere insurgents
Splattered guts juicy squeeze play
Caught between hard-boiled rotten eggs
Scrambled yolks whites trading places
Chickens misbegotten sunny side crossovers
Shell-shocked poultry tried retried again
Trigger unhappy pot shot snipers
Taking aim at spacey invaders
Ragtag militias rocket propelled grenades
Nothing smart about cluster bombs
Mea culpability runneth over faults
Seismic vibrations quaking immovable forces
Refusing to listen learn love
Crimes against humanity guilty verdict
Dr. Charles Frederickson
Dr. Charles Frederickson is a Swedish-American-Thai pragmatic optimist, idealistic visionary and heretical believer who has wandered intrepidly through 206 countries, an original sketch and poem for each presented on http://www.imagesof.8k.com. This maverick e-gadfly is a member of World Poets Society, based in Greece, with 200+ poetry publication credits on 6 continents, such as: angelfire, Ascent Aspirations, Auckland Poetry, bc supernet, Blind Man’s Rainbow, Both Sides Now, Caveat Lector, Cordite Poetry Review, Dance to Death, Decanto, Eclipse, Flutter Magazine, Greatworks, Green Dove, Indite Circle, International Poet, Listen & Be Heard, Living Poets, Madpoetry, Melange, Newtopia, New Verse News, Planet Authority, Poetisphere, Poetry Canada, Poetry of Scotland, Poetry Stop, Poets for Peace, Poetry Superhighway, Pyramid, Sage of Consciousness, Stellar Showcase, Subtle Tea, Sz, The Smoking Poet, T-zero, Ya’Sou! Ygdrasil and Zafusy.
Following the January issue, I received this email from Lillian Brummet. It's about a webstie and I invite you to follow the link. You will also have links for the Brummet's, follow those links as well.
--
As I mentioned, the March issue will feature an interview with Dr. Charles Frederickson. I've also got an interview set for April, so look for more details regarding the person. I'm keeping it a secret until next month. I'm going to finish this issue with a poem from me, but before that let me remind you that all work is copyrighted by the author. If you wish to contribute for the March or a future issue, send an email to paul@abovegroundtesting.com, or click on the Contact Me link on the homepage. The homepage is www.abovegroundtesting.com, there you can read the present issue and link to past issues.
As you can read, this is the 94th issue. This issue is produced using the Nvu Web Authoring System. It works with Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
And now, for my work
Who Really buys Edible Panties
the eyes glance from side to side
a prayer is made
"let no one see", as he approaches the door
the sign says "Adult FunWear" and "XXX"
makes a man conscious of what others might think
sure the neighbours would say "pervert" and the laughs
he would endure the smirks and comments
and his wife would die if she thought
he had been seen
but all he wants
is something nice
for Valentine's Day.
he enters the store
with its electronic buzzer
announcing to the employees
another One has arrived
the sales clerk, always young, tatooed and pierced
looks up for a second
"another one" she thinks and goes back to talking
on the phone
the other men steal a quick glance too
when their eyes lock on
he sees the same fear
"oh god, is this someone I know"
and in a brief moment
a quick relief is seen
strangers on the same mission
looking around for the right gift
for a night of passion
a few check out the magazines and movies
they don't bother to turn around
there's a couple, young man and woman
even a couple of women
talk about sex toys and compare the merits
of various vibrators
"this is bizarre" he thinks
and wonders why he's here
he goes over to the lingerie
the sales clerk, finished her conversation
walks over
"Can I help you", she says, sounding happy
a come on, sure
he says after clearing the throat
"something for the wife",
"you know, Valentine's Day"
"oh sure" says the clerk,
with the skin tight t
and with aplomb steers him to
the edible panties,
a small leer on her lips
she taunts him in her own way
loving how they squirm when she holds them up
but he's gone too far
and here he's safe, no one admits
why you're here
"how 'bout these"? she holds up a pair
"they're very hot right now, and she would probably look good"
he looks and wonders
if she's right, this would mean
he'd be out and back in his car
parked far from the entrance
"okay I'll take them", he stutters
and she saunters to the till
he makes the purchase
and quickly departs
clutching the bag of edible panties
that he hopes
his wife will enjoy
or
at least laugh at his attempts
of making them pretend
they're swingers.
Paul Gilbert