Sirius bright atop the midnight sky
Shaming Orion’s more familiar glory
What a grand way to start the new year
What joy to be alive
Come join me while we dance
All the presents are opened,
The wrappings gathered
Into a large garbage bag,
The boxes neatly stacked for next year.
The post-present lethargy lingers over the house
As we struggle to make sense of the gifts:
The wine bottle opener in the red mahogany chest,
The blouses and dresses, the sweaters and slacks;
Which book shall we read? Which DVD shall we watch?
Which earrings, which necklace, which lotion or bath salt?
Slowly order proceeds from anarchy:
Clothes are hung, sweaters tried on and warn;
Eventually even the dog stops scurrying from box to box,
Having identified and catalogued the identities
Of both presents and gift givers.
From all this holiday joy.
January 2009
Overcome by art,
I revise my words, rejigger my meter,
Searching for the exact meaning
That will please both poet and reader
And eventually, some graduate student
Who will revive my reputation
Within academia and among the Cognoscenti.
Once I have had the good sense
To prove my value by dying.
A post-doctoral visionary
Will make his fortune on the lecture circuit
Explicating the random witty
Lurking among these lines.
Screw them.
StarPoet lives here and now,
I write of the living,
By the living, and for the living,
Not some over intellectualization
Caught up in his sibylline boundaries.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
by Randall Monroe
The ocean grew still more silent,
The stars, a wrinkleless projection lighting the dome;
A wind softly feathered the night’s calm reach,
The moon, a shattered beacon on the horizon.
The mildness of my repose glides seamlessly in time,
Though the waters would anchor me to earth;
I part the swell like a great golden ship,
Rising effortlessly, engines firing, upon the firmament,
To discover no sign of the leeward wake.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
Sunday morning, two days past,
A handful before the new year,
Time moves slowly, brightly lit
By winter’s cold blue skies.
Spring lies buried, an eon off,
Cenozoic to my cretaceous,
Neither daffodil nor cultured tulip
Will rise towards the sun for months.
Earth follows her ellipse, outward spinning,
Tilting northward to her shining star,
Soon daylight will regain its radiant control
And time stretch again in opportunity.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
BBC. Anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV/AIDs are being bought and smoked by teenagers in South Africa to get high. Reports suggest that the drugs are being sold by patients and even healthcare staff for money.
Schoolchildren have been spotted smoking the drugs, which are ground into powder and sometimes mixed with painkillers or marijuana. AIDs patients themselves have been found smoking the drugs instead of taking them as prescribed.
Anti-retrovirals are used to boost the immune system of people with HIV and to suppress the virus in the blood.
"I couldn't believe it. I was shocked at first, these were school boys in their school uniforms," documentary-maker Tooli Nhlapo told the BBC World Service's Outlook programme.
"They take a pill and grind it, until it is a powder. Some also mix it with painkillers and others mix it with marijuana," said Ms Nhlapo. "They showed me how they roll it and smoke it."
Whether we all are judged in the end
Should make no never mind how we live;
We are all too soon to die and yet
We watch the moments trickle down
Without volition or action,
A passive co-conspirator in our damnation.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
Lowerings
If you would not chase a whale,
What good is this air we breathe?
This blood that courses through us,
Eyes that should grant vision,
Give false witness that we live
If we refuse to lower for the chase.
What benefit of bone and body
If our hearts are not all in it?
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
The Book of Bills
It seems to have cost
A third of a million
(Dollars U. S.)
To keep my body alive
-- I’m not sure anyone
Is worth that kind of money,
Even if I consider
The impact of inflation.
I can’t be sure, however,
As there seems to be
A two day gap, maybe three,
In my memory of the hospital,
My surgeon, and my doctors
-- Perhaps that price includes
A weekend in some resort,
Eating at a five star restaurant,
And drinking one hundred year
Old cognac or ancient port.
I just don’t know,
But it seems like a lot of money,
Even if the alternative is death.
I could feed a million starving children
For the price of one poet,
Or buy a hundred thousand kids’ meals
At McDonalds (tax not included).
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
when we are alone
Estradiol Dues
Talking with the other women,
Comparing notes and bad dates,
The men that we’ve loved,
The women we’ve bedded,
The inevitable heartache
Of time and growing older,
We find we are more alike
Than gender studies would admit
And less oppressed than the
Discussion at a women’s seminar.
We would not trade our lives
For any man’s we have met.
Lisa Jain Thompson
January 2009
Oink if you want money.
· $4.8 million for a polar bear exhibit in Rhode Island.
· $100 million to redevelop land for a casino in Philadelphia.
· $13 million in improvements in Las Vegas, much of it for a pedestrian bridge at the Tropicana hotel-casino.
· A yet-to-be-determined amount for a proposed $50 million museum in Las Vegas devoted to organized crime.
· $6 million for snow-making and maintenance facilities at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota.
I am no hero,
Heroine, whatever …
Whenever I’m given the choice
Of being shot or not,
I chose not.
Sorry if that disallusions you
Or ruins your day,
And don’t even think
About that role model thing.
January 2009
At Night, Alone
At night, alone with my darling,
Snuggled in our bed
While it snows outside,
I would the moment last forever
Between wake and sleep
in my lover’s arms.
January 2009
© Lisa Jain Thompson 1948-2009.
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