The Sunday Poem

Every Sunday I post an original poem.

  • The Sunday Poem: Herbie Hancock on a Headache

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem

    I had a headache today. Fell asleep multiple times. My son’s got a fever too, has had for a few days. Blah. I’m ready for illness to stop going ’round. Anyway, caught intermittent pieces of a documentary on the making of Herbie Hancock’s Possibilities CD. And the experience of drowsing off the music while headachy got me this:

    Herbie Hancock on a Headache

    The thundundering of the duhduhdurums,
    The lashing of the cymbal crasharashing.
    Piano diddledaddle flatting fives and nattering,
    The bass boom thrumming thump thrump on.

    Play the drum head, pound that skin,
    Send jolts of timbre dazzle down my spine.
    Blow my mind, bounce the skull, a countercoup,
    Ivories xylophoning tickles in a line.

    But the music, music, music ocean sloshing close,
    Washing-whipping, whirl-a-looping, a vortex
    Vast and varied with snatches of a song;
    In fugue I fade before too long, the scribbled charts

    Rocking me to sleep, eleventh for a pillow,
    The tang and ride a blanket muffling me to dark.

  • The Sunday Poem: If you…

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 6 Comments

    If you…

    …Push through the keys on a piano, what’s on the other side?
    Not wires and hammers; not wood, but desires.
    An echoing chamber of fires and lovers and lies.

    …Bite through the skin of an orange, what’s on the other side?
    Not citrus but summer, both light and burnt umber,
    A country far distant all tart and remembered and bright.

    …Look through the slits of an outlet, what’s on the other side?
    Not six thousand currents pulsing reverberant,
    But magic brought low, in harness instead of in sky.

    …Stretch through the screens all around you, what’s on the other side?
    We reach for each other through bytes and through phosphor,
    Past Borges’ big library, at play in the forms we provide.

    We never think shells are the essence; we crack without asking why.

  • The Sunday Poem: Sometimes a Duck

    Hours Categories Game talk, The Sunday Poem
    Comments 2 Comments

    Sometimes A Duck Is Just A Duck
    (A Semi-Sonnet On Whether Strategy Guides Are Cheating)

    Suppose you had a duck to deconstruct.
    It sits atop a log, it quacks at things,
    It flaps its wings all frantic, daring, dumb.
    What parts of duck are really duck, you think?

    Take feet. They’re webbed, for sure, and orange-black.
    But geese and other cousins have them too.
    That is not duckness, any more than spoon-
    Billed beakness is a sign this duck is true.

    It might reside in quacking; ducks take pride
    In never shutting up. Perhaps parades
    Of ducklings crossing streets like in old books?
    A duck of culture, a consensus made,

    Composites made of pieces sharp and blunt.
    I must conclude that ducks are… elephants.

    This is, of course, a riff on the poem I posted a while back called “Pondering a Duck.”