SEPTEMBER

I miss the tilt and racket of your face,
the collapsing factories of your anger,
the shoreline wearing your boas of foam—
the steel mirror of your silence,
your glass contingencies, in the night’s hold.
I miss the morning’s coverlet of cloud,
one gull flying east over the moving distances
while closer in
the same boulder is kissed again and again.
As the blacksmith plunges the bruised steel into the tub,
erasing the heat of his industry,
I have cooled my brow
with the ice of your disdain—
I have held your cold hand in the rain.

  — Jim Armstrong. Blue Lash (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Jim Armstrong. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org.

FLOGGING MOLLY - DRUNKEN LULLABIES

Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Five hundred years like Gelignite
Have blown us all to hell
What Savior rests while on his cross we die
Forgotten freedom burns
Has the Shepherd led his lambs astray
to the bigot and the gun

Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Cause we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin’ drunken lullabies

I watch and stare as Rosin’s eyes
Turn a darker shade of red
And the bullet with this sniper lie
In their bloody gutless cell
Must we starve on crumbs from long ago
Through these bars of men made steel
Is it a great or little thing we fought
Left a conscience blessed to kill

Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Cause we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin’ drunken lullabies

Ah, well maybe it’s the way we’re taught
Or maybe it’s the way we fought
But a smile never grins without tears to begin
For each kiss is a cry we all lost
Though nothing is left to gain
But for the banshee that stole the grave
Cause we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin’ drunken lullabies

I sit and dwell on faces past
Like memories seem to fade
No colour left but black and white
And soon will all turn grey
But may these shadows rise to walk again
With lessons truly learnt
When the blossom flowers in each our hearts
Shall beat a new found flame

Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Cause we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin’ drunken lullabies

THE BLUE ANGEL

Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.

She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.

Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.

She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.

She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings.

—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.

  — Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997), American poet

Is it cheesy to crib a post for your own blog from comments that you’ve left on someone else’s?

Fastgrrrl wrote today about having a sense of place, and how places leave their mark on people.

My place … I’m still trying to determine exactly where my place is …

It’s the Tennessee River, drifting along in a fishing boat. It’s Chickamauga Lake, learning how to slalom. It’s the dogwood tree in front of my great-grandmother’s house in Chattanooga.

It’s the treehouse my friends and I built with stolen building materials from the houses in our new development above Lotus Lake in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

It’s the cobbled roads and small little cafes and bars of Belgium, albeit not by bicycle, as I wasn’t a cyclist then.

It’s the North Beach bars and jazz clubs of San Francisco. It’s the streets of San Francisco dodging buses and taxis, and the roads of Marin County where I truly came into my own as a cyclist.

And it’s rapidly becoming the Utah mountains and canyons, where my knees scream on each attempt to climb higher, but my heart soars as I descend, whether with boards strapped to my feet, or astride my trusty steel steed.

I have a long way to go before I am defined by any one particular place, but as long as the journey continues, I will take it all in and make it a part of who I am, and who I want to be.