James Lee Jobe

Donald R. Anderson

The Flamingo Sticks Out Its Tongue

Flight is a painful drag,
a lot of feathers are strewn
across lonely highways
where there wasn't enough takeoff room.
In my pocket is a key,
I turn on the world and it lights up
like Nagasaki
and I hover, accelerate,
drift into space.



I think Donald R. Anderson should be the poet laureate of Stockton. Nice guy, very active in the lit-arts scene there, excellent poet.



I picked up Jack Gilbert's REFUSING HEAVEN at the library today. I love Gilbert anyway, but especially this book. Here's an example:



Jack Gilbert

The Lost Hotels Of Paris

The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit hearts of women,
to go into their bodies so we feel
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we used to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it's the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much/
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

--

I'm a huge Jimmy Santiago Baca fan as well. Something about the Gilbert and Anderson poems made want to to re-read this one:



Jimmy Santiago Baca

Crying Poem

     For the longest time,
    I haven't been able to cry.
    Tears start to come while I'm watching a movie tears
    starts to come,
    swelling my whole body a tulip starting to open under moon,
    then the petals of my eyelids
    stiffen
    and something in me braces
    and I don't cry.
    When we crashed into a telephone pole
    my dad yelled me not to cry,
    I was terrified, almost killed –
    but don't cry,
    he said.
    I couldn't cry because men don't cry.
    When the dog bit me on the leg I couldn't cry,
    when Joey died I couldn't cry –
    how cool it would feel
    to have a tear slide down the corner of my eye
    on my cheek,
    to the curve of my lip,
    where I could taste it –
    but I don't cry.
    Something blocks the paths, channels
    under my skin.
    Tear ducts are red cracked clay,
    for thirty years,
    drought famine'd,
    since I was eight when I got a beating for crying.
    My heart an open furnace oven door,
    rage seething for tears to cool it down,
    but coal hoveling men keep feeding it
    don't cry don't cry don't cry.
    I want to untie my hands like a tired boxer's gloves
    and lay them down on the table, gripped in their tight
    clench of defense,
    and I want to grow new hands
    open flowers,
    moistened by my tears.
    I love the color blue
    color brown.
    I'd love
    to touch my chapped cheeks
    and whisper in tears
    my compassion.
    But I've always had to stop it up in me, hold my breath back,
                                        keep my mouth shut tight
                        so as not to cry.
    Man, I cry,
    and it's a lie I don't.
    I embrace my brother and pray shoulder to shoulder.
    I kneel and kiss earth,
    and I cry -- if only I could cry.
    Don't translate my tears into thought,
    I want to sob autumn tears on my window,
    streaking the pane blurring the world.
    I want to fill every hole in my heart with glimmering tear pools,
    fill my kitchen sink with tears,
    just thinking of me not crying all these years,
    makes me want to cry,
    but I been taught not to cry –
    big people don't cry, people say,
    ain't those alligator tears boy,
    can't fool me with those tears –
    bullshit!
    Fooling no one but myself not crying
                        step aside –
                        I'm going to cry,
                        until my shirt is drenched,
                        and my hands shimmery wet
                        with tears,
                        running down my face on my arms,
                        my legs and breast,
    and you have to look at me,
    because I'm drowning your manly ways in my tears,
                        to get back my tears.
                    I'm crying until there isn't a single tear left
                        crying,
                        for what we been through not crying,
                        how we fooled ourselves thinking men don't cry.
    I'm crying on the bus, in bed, at the dinner table, on the couch,
    enough to float Noah's boat,
    let out the robin of my heart,
    bringing me back my own single shoot of greening
    life again –
    and you go fuck yourself
    dry eyed days,
    here I come,
    giving you a Chicano monsoon season,
    here comes this Chicano cry baby,
    flooding prison walls,
    my childrens' bedrooms,
    splashing and tear slinging
    tears up to my ankles,
    planting rice and corn and beans
    in fields glimmering with my tears,
    and all you dry skinned nut-cracking ball whackers,
    don't want to get your killer bone-breaking boots wet,
    step aside,
    because I'm bringing you rain.

    Goodbyes were crying events –
    Goodbye to grandma, to my brother,
    friends, my neighborhood,
    teachers and other boys,
    and I never shed a tear,
    though I felt them coming up in me.
    I bit my teeth down hard to hold the tears back,
    lowered my face and thought about something else.
    I kept hearing voices in me,
    telling me not to cry, don't cry, don't cry!
    Boys don't cry,
    leave yourself open,
    become liable to get an ax in your heart by some non-crying fool,
    be a sissy,
    puto, you be hurting
    yourself if you cry.
    I hurt when I didn't cry,
    all those times when I didn't cry ashamed
    to in front of people,
    fearful others would think I'm not a man,
    fearful I'd be made fun of,
    whole groups of us heard tragic news
    and no one cries,
    because it ain't right –
    we need to weep –
    get up in the middle of the night,
    and cry, like a endurance's hips and stomach convulse during
    child birth, we need to give birth
    to that terrible convulsion of tears,
    weep for those we never wept for,
    let the legs shake and your arms embrace you
    in a junkie habit for tears,
    weep for the poor in prison
    taken from their families,
    the fieldworker's daughter
    eaten by cancer from pesticides,
    and weep,
    for all those homeless
    who couldn't meet mortgage payments,
    those sleeping under bridges,
    and the hopeless,
    cry our differences into a lake,
    where we can all cleanse our goodbyes and apathy,
    papas cry for their children,
    let children cry in my arms,
    men cry in my arms,
    endurance cry in my arms,
    let us all cry,
    after lovemaking and fighting,
    make cry a prayer,
    a language made of whimpers and sniffles and sobs,
    cry out loud, louder, cry baby, cry! Cry! Cry!


--

You can send poems, too. jamesleejobe@gmail.com

all. good. things. jobe.

--

Crystal Anderson - 3 Poems



Strange Language

I.
An inspired bevy
of words: the Poem.
It rows up the backs of men,
A vessel with carmine oars.
Stem cells float up
from the froth. The worst
offenders pop cathartic and stall
the sails. But the oars can pull
back fetid, fertile gems
from the nerve’s infrastructure.
When Man sculls, digs down deep,
there is something in the blindness.

II.
The Poet pulls the string
from his sternum.
Thread tangled in the xylophone
ribs of oarsman . The words tear
away and indelibly slather
meaning into muddled, crisp frames.
Tell us what you see
From the spinal boat.

III.
Take a hold of the string
like gray, winding anatomy.
Gripping ropes and canvas-
dripping mucus and all -
All that Poem generated.

The Reader
blows the bottle.
They are his
one-ton snowflake words.



To Matt, Whom I’ve Never Met and Do Not Know

                       “But generally speaking, it is
                        always more difficult to write
                        four sentences
                        in one,
                        for example, than one in one, as in philosophy.”*
                  
Say I press my face against a blue whale.
No need for sculling beside it. Mass can ride
the underbelly. Say we’re diatoms
and turn our world to a sulfur
color while riding our whale.
We’ve managed to miss the dicrotic
of the whale, of the water,
anything as long as we don’t float away.

Euphausiids are going to get caught.
It’s inevitable. Their transparency
Keeps no secrets and while they filter,
They give themselves up,
Swarms of honesty inhaled.
They don’t come out alive or
The same. Ever.

This whale is not the most gargantuan,
but it is pretty blue.  Still, this one
will be the only giant some know.
The only whale you and I know,
my diatom neighbor. 

As this mass in aqua dives,
moves purposefully, those alive
and attached naturally go
along.  The whale’s belly
doesn’t get bigger, it just seems that
way when you’re less tiddly and
realize that people walking down
streets in all this yellowness
see you. There are moments
where we can’t even hide
behind fluorescent screens.

When song seems to escape
our whale through its holes and plates
we, too, make dialogue with meaning
that continues beyond the finish
of interaction. Perhaps the inverse
Apex of the dive “is the depth of darkness
Not wanting to be said.”* 

*From “Sartre at Seventy: An Interview,” August 7, 1975


To Matt: Not Everything Can Be Said

I carried an opaque whale
into your study. It was a magical
puzzle of sorts, cooking off materialism,
snapping its moorings. It was a sack
of imagery on my back. I tried to speak
in Sartre
from behind the whale.
I offered up nothing.
Experience has changed my language
into a rubik’s cube. 
What good does transparency do at 26?

Let’s be like Frank*.
I won’t speak of jumping
Chinamen or pretend I’m a boat
in danger of sinking.
We both know the earth
is full of people and not one
of us has started the Transparent Revolution.
If we did, we would remember
to use our blinkers, would trust
the news and the critical element
of our dialogue would last
after our fingers stopped typing,
after our mouths quit just saying,
and listening carefully became habitual.

I don’t leave my apartment
unless I have to. $550 a month,
the shower is standing room only,
the ceiling leaks and 20 feet from my back
door run the tracks. It is safe.
On February 16, 2008, I got my oil
changed and my blood jammed hard
through my system. I sat in the Jiffy Lube
waiting room not reading Camus. The book
was open and 3 other people also waited. 

Every Tuesday and Thursday, 22
college kids look at me as if I need
to say something clever. One of them
majors in astrophysics. He does not speak
often, but he writes in concrete language
and sonnets about things that are not science.
I tell them Ginsberg is overdone and tell them
Joy Harjo’s lilacs and cocaine are the center
of her Santa Fe. I do not count
how many times I crash over my tongue.

The you I know
lives 8 hours in front of me,
says he gets to stand in front of Jesus,
will look out of a window at least twice
in one day and mouth pleasantries
out of necessity. But the you
I don’t know is my impenetrable whale
and neither of us live
in a see-through society.
I can hardly blame you. There is still
swimming in a glass of vodka,
a burning sort of transparency,
and I wonder if you are less
of a casanova than the you I know.
But not everything can be said
and not everything wants to be said.
Most days you will see and read people
that you can’t speak frankly with or
at all. Your surface is a narrative,
but we will have to work to understand
the you that is free verse. 

      *Frank O’Hara



Crystal Anderson is a Davis, California poet, and a recent graduate of the University of California, Davis, where she studied with Sandra McPherson. I find these poems to be incredible.

Also, Mario Ellis Hill sent me this announcement:

Dear Lovers of Poetry and the Arts,
We need you!
We need you to come out this week to show your support for an incredible poet, writer, playwright, educator and wordsmith - Sacramento's very own Bill Carr.
Mr. Carr will be the featured poet at "Poetry Unplugged", happening THIS THURSDAY.  The festivities begin at 8 pm, and entry is FREE!  Come early if you would like to sign up for OPEN-MIC POETRY, or just to get a decent seat!
"Poetry Unplugged" happens at Luna's Cafe (1414 16th St.), in the heart of midtown Sac. "Poetry Unplugged" is also a great venue to get out your announcements about community events you may be involved in.  Let me know if you would like to come out and make an announcement as well.  It'll be great to see your face.
See you soon.
 
All Good Things,
Mario Ellis Hill
Co-host, Poetry Unplugged

(end)

Mario and Bill are both nice, decent guys, as well as fine poets. Show some love. And feel free to email me poems, poetry reading announcements, or poetry links. Really. I need the attention. I'm pathetic.

jamesleejobe@gmail.com

ALL GOOD THINGS - JOBE