The Sonnets Part II

Here are Sonnets IV-VI which round out my mini-collection of Barrigan style sonnets. (Sonnets I-III are up from last week) Hope you enjoy. Next week going to get a bit weird with a CAConrad exercises.

IV

Dear Susie Asado-sweet tea-sweet sweet tea

Sweet Susie, This is that room. The one

with the yellow wallpaper and the Parriot,

“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!”

I am the boy breaking glass.

We ran to the sea with a bed sheet and a bucket—

Hot sand on toes, cold toes in sleeping bags

A bucket for dreams to drain. This is that room.

The note on the door: ‘I have eaten the plums,

But the present is clearly here to stay.’

I am the boy breaking glass. Whose

Broken window is a cry of art.

Forgive me they were delicious

so sweet and so cold.

V

I do not celebrate myself!

There is that in me- I do not know what it is-

but I know it is in me- This is that.

This is my 14^th grade hand scribbling:

When we danced last night I could

only hear the beat enough to know I was off.

Dear Margie, I am with you in the Lime Tree

where you’re madder then I am.

Your poetry makes me have particularly

emotional reactions on Tuesdays that rain.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

No one knew where I was and now

I am no longer there— Only this and

nothing more.

VI

Where are we going,                                    ?

Listen to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.

This is the courage to say what I couldn’t

say in the 4^th grade. The only people for me

are the mad ones. Mad to live.

My hands scribbled the ending you read aloud:

“The last word he pronounced was -- your name.”

The Horror! The Horror! Forevermore.

Mad to talk, mad to be saved, “How to even begin to get it all down.”

Just hold on we’re going home.

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.

While the Weary Blues echo through my head

I sleep like a rock or a man that’s dead.

shantih            shantih            shantih

Sonnets Part I

Last quarter I had the opportunity to read Ted Berrigan's "Sonnets". Which was one of the most fascinating and perplexing books of poetry that I have read. In the collection Berrigan re-imagines the sonnet form and creates a poetry that is "inhabited by acquaintances, family, poet friends, and well as material stolen directly from said friends". 
Here is the first Sonnet of the collection. One of my favorite of the whole collection and one I came back to time and time again as I fumbled with writing my own:

The Sonnets: I

His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze

Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.

In the book of his music the corners have straightened:

Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands.

The ox-blood from the hands which play

For fire for warmth for hands for growth

Is there room in the room that you room in?

Upon his structured tomb:

Still they mean something. For the dance

And the architecture.

Weave among incidents

May be portentous to him

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

Wind giving presence to fragments.

Its both poetry of chance and re-imagining while being poetry that is deeply tied to the community around it. In many ways it embodies what I desire the re-appropriating of my blog to be. So let's begin with Sonnets!

Writing my mini-collection of Sonnets was  one of the more enjoyable projects I have undertaken. What I am reading, poems I love, music, bits of conversation are always creeping into my poetry. I am always trying to balance how much I let these things creep in and how much I try to "shut" them out. With the Sonnets I threw open the doors to creep. My desk and the floor around my desk was covered with anthologies, books, old notebooks, pages of poems, hand scrawled notes, it was sheer chaos and the energy if this chaos is apparent in my sonnets. Enjoy, and maybe write a few poems fused with lines from your favorite poems, your favorite song, what the person in front of you at the grocery store said and what over else creeps its way in.

Sonnets

I

No, No, No.

There is no room in the room that I room in.

I never met you there that time. When

I chose to instead live in the wasted dream

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.

This is not Tomorrow.

Dear Neha, be careful about rooftops—

how quickly your heart beats the faster you climb.

This is my 4^th grade hand scribbling

What am I suppose to do?

Crush her heart or crush mine?

Then Pancho Villa came to town, hung the mayor.

These scribbling hands are good for climbing.

Tomorrow I will start to be happy

Today is almost yesterday.

II

No, No, No. Yes.

There is room in the room that I room in.

A campfire Girl,

Only a part-time mother and father

You told me no one ever falls in the Grand Canyon

We lost our virginity at recess.

This is thee lunch hour, a chain between your thighs,

a cut down chandelier, a book of poems

I hid from my mom— notches on my bed post.

This is supposed to be an independent thought

But it is just a strained leash.

Dear Margie,

Friendship and Love are not in my blood.

They are there for you.

III

Even the Lover Poet knows that

¿El sueño de la razón produce monstruos?

Do you hear this babe—

My voice is a carousal of lies.

Your scent saturates this, hot breath

bands with the beat— smell of sperm flushed

by men with Orange shovels.

I trembled the first time I rhymed our story:

She will always be just a kiss and a hopeful idea.

A single lie lays in the line.

dear Son of Man, its 5:15 GMT

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images.

*Next Week: the rest Sonnets IV-VI*

The Prelude

It is just a few month shy of three years since I last posted in this space. I forgot it existed. But I love re-invention and re-appropriation. That is why I am here, to take back my own space!

Over winter break I had the time and opportunity to take in lots of awesome art. The highlights included:

• Francisco Goya at the Norton Simon Museum, which has one of my all-time favorite pieces of art: 

"El sueño de la razón produce monstruos"
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

• Childish Gambino's new project Because The Internet. The script, the album, and all the little bits in-between make it a multi-media masterpiece that deserves a look even if you are not a hip-hop fan. 
• A bit of a warning the work is rather dark and gloomy,which is why I like it, but it sat heavy on my heart for a few days as I digested it. It is also quite explicit. 

• The architecture of downtown Los Angeles, specifically the post-modern mind benders The Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Westin Bonaventure Hotel

As I took in all this art over break I found it brought me great joy and stimulated new ways of thinking in my mind. Which is what I believe art should do. I am re-claiming my blog space because I want to inject a bit of art into the small community that will stumble here. My goal is to publish a poem a week here on my re-claimed blog. I hope my poems will get you the reader thinking, writing, searching for actually good poetry its mostly all here and maybe even discover a bit of joy in art. Its a journey I am committed too and hope you will join me.