Quotes about alleys, page 18
Type-Writer Dreams
I walked down jazz alleys rolling cigarettes
and a head filled with typewriter dreams,
silently praying to sidewalk Gods
for the inhaling of coconut rum,
Chicago and Havana,
minds heavy with thoughts of steel and uranium
in the years before cold war, red missiles,
and the rusting sickle of Russian terror,
seeing dusty men gathered outside newspaper stands
waiting, plotting, in quiet conversations about bombs,
and in America, small bankers with obscene mustaches
fingering money with a capitalist fix, primarily out
of silk lined jackets of men who pretended to be middle class,
stuck in first like early model Cadillacs, but blooming
in the 60's like early spring lilacs, violent purple, pink,
and the blue of acid blotter fractal brothers and Grey's
later paintings of cross-sectioned life, where Jesus splayed out
examined in new eyes of a public embracing science and
the sub-atomic nuclear buzz, in the years before computers
and solitary confinement of plastic and lamplight, in the years
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poem by Wolf Wandering
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A Sentiment
The pledge of Friendship! it is still divine,
Though watery floods have quenched its burning wine;
Whatever vase the sacred drops may hold,
The gourd, the shell, the cup of beaten gold,
Around its brim the hand of Nature throws
A garland sweeter than the banquet’s rose.
Bright are the blushes of the vine-wreathed bowl,
Warm with the sunshine of Anacreon’s soul,
But dearer memories gild the tasteless wave
That fainting Sidney perished as he gave.
’T is the heart’s current lends the cup its glow,
Whate’er the fountain whence the draught may flow,—Â
The diamond dew-drops sparkling through the sand,
Scooped by the Arab in his sunburnt hand,
Or the dark streamlet oozing from the snow,
Where creep and crouch the shuddering Esquimaux;
Ay, in the stream that, ere again we meet,
Shall burst the pavement, glistening at our feet,
And, stealing silent from its leafy hills,
Thread all our alleys with its thousand rills,—Â
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poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Circus Clown
Suddenly from somewhere
A street urchin-
An untamed bird of the wider sky
Dropped down
Into the circus tent
Before him was unfurled
Scenes eerie….awesome! !
Roaring lions and tigers,
Gibbering baboons, caravans of camels,
Animal tamers and acrobats,
Artists balancing on poles
Swinging from bars to trapeziums
Pliant girls with plastic limbs
And pouting breasts,
Walking on tight ropes
A queer world
Peopled with beasts and men!
His face, painted white and red
In motley dress, he was arrayed
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poem by Valsa George
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Let Me Wake Up Young
Let me wake up young at early dawn again
And welcome the showers of spring first rain
Let me love and peer up at the morning sun
With half shut eyes and comfortable fresh cheek
Let me live a sweet life tale full often to seek
Through meadows and pathless woods where rivers fall and run
Let me love again my brightest beautiful one
Of heaven and divine let me slowly speak
These love tunes to the night and the starlight meek
Or the moon, if that her hunting be begun
Let me know, let me relive these delights and be prone
To moralize upon a smile and a tear
And find at once a region in a world of my own
A meadow, a bower for my spirit where it will steer
To alleys of forest gloom where pine tree dropp their cone
Where foxes hide, robins chirp and leaves are fallen sere
Let me wake up in strength and vigor hope
Worship the morning, the mystic night, the light the shade and lush lea on slope
Let me glance again fresh on wide plains, fair foliage trees, and at sprouting flowers
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poem by Isaac Ziv
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4 Shorts
4 Shorts
In Paris
Somewhere in Paris alone
Watching rain change empty streets
To glistening black veins,
He stumbled.
From the hour and the Pernod.
Now finally, he thought,
I am a poet.
In Sacramento
Hitched from hell with an old farmer.
Slow truck, cold beer.
“Where yah goin’”
I paused. “Home”
“where’s that? ”
I paused again and thought.
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poem by Stuart Welch
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Controlled Rebellion
Trouble always starts with a smile,
especially when punctuated with deep
hazel eyes. Come seven on a Saturday,
my heartbeat syncs with the song on the radio,
my left foot sinks as it races nightfall,
and the goblin within heads for
where the wild things are.
Wild nights – Wild nights! Were I with thee…
we would charge the alleys of hailstorm abandon.
But beware the badgering foe of fun:
the Lilliputian leash of children asunder.
A mental head-on collision ensues,
night racing past me twenty years to victory.
I surrender the sport and retreat to the driveway.
I am far from curfew,
and this is not my parents’ home.
Yet, I am doomed to restriction nonetheless.
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poem by Lori Boulard
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Stars
'THESE are the floating berries of the night,
They drop their harvest in dark alleys down,
Softly far down on groves of Venus, or on a little town
Forgotten at the world's edge—and O, their light
Unlocks all closed things, eyes and mouths, and drifts
Quietly over kisses in a golden rain,
Drowning their flight, till suddenly the Cyprian lifts
Her small, white face to the moon, then hides again.
'They are the warm candles of beauty, hung in blessing on high,
Poised like bright comrades on boughs of night above:
They are the link-boys of Queen Venus, running out of the sky,
Spilling their friendly radiance on all her ways of love.
'Should the girl's eyes be lit with swimming fire,
O do not kiss it away, it is a star, a star!'
So cried the passionate poet to his great, romantic guitar.
But I was beating off the stars, gazing, not rhyming.
I saw the bottomless, black cups of space
Between their clusters, and the planets climbing
Dizzily in sick airs, and desired to hide my face.
But I could not escape those tunnels of nothingness,
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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This Cosmoccocic Treadmill
This cosmoccocic treadmill, if I may borrow from Miller. This Cosmoccocic treadmill we find ourselves contending on. This monomaniacal rat race full of its solecistic gods and managers, its presidential parties with their tautological bull shit. Shit that oozes down to the perspicacious jetsam of society the bum's -who are washed into alleyways, washed from clean and copacetic streets, of marble banks with Parisian balustrades. The radical thinkers, the students, the protesters, washed from the streets by financed police states. These banished souls wise to the puppeteers behind the political curtain, voiceless alone but with style; while the old rich birds fast with novena and the chthonian saints with the miasma of stale alcohol fast with hunger and fuliginous grease found in alleys and roadside gutters. These ragged saints have no ounce of hope for provender or carom let alone enlightenment and peace. They do have something. Inferring that which the rich lack, an insight to the struggles of domain. Hardware stores, grocers and community centers evicted by bank of America when corporate-Mart moves into town. The pulse of transgression and flux metamorphosis kept out of the claws of capitalistic vultures.
poem by Jerome Moore
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Labyrinth
It descried me,
The sleeping tiger's fang
Hampering my neck,
And the endless brunt
And the plastered smile
Shrouding the perdition
Thawed with the white snow
As stark as amnesia
Where am I
Amidst your indifferent stares?
Cloy me again
And pilfer my vision
You are my adamant eyes
Sunken in delusion.
It caught me
The lacquer compassion
And the myopic acceptance
Chafing the fortified resistance
To undrape the bronze skin
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poem by Norman Santos
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Désolé(I'm Very Sorry)
Life led wrongly
Heart beating for all the wrong reasons
Eyes searching for all but one
One searching for none but all...
A soul whose retina has lost focus
With lenses focused on fame and glory
With nothing but bare thoughts you
write your story
To the ones mulled down
Désolé means nothing
Iris painted with shades of gray
Good is gone and bad to stay
Fences are true haven for cowards
In taking no side, all stand pleased
Life forgives this not
Désolé means nothing
Born great, living inane
Born king, living slave
Gifted, normal
Genius, unleashed
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poem by Jenim Dibie
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