StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XXVI

Summer is here and the women are out,
Dressed in their best legal scanties,
Tanning their legs, their shoulders, their arms,
And as much of their breasts as they dare.

The girls dig the way the guys get all wired out
Watching the girls walk by; the guys,
Without question, enjoy bare girl flesh
And would not change a thing,

Except for the gay guys who prefer boy muscle,
Testosterone appreciates naked estrogen.

We freaks and monsters,
Children of our own strangeness and imaginations,
Learn to deal with the world as given
Or die alone on some forsaken corner,
Prisoners of our tattered tragedies.

We outcasts and losers,
Formenters of our own torments and inhibitions,
Strike out upon the world as we find it
Or condemn our genius to decay:
The way to the top is often through the bottom.

Some of us go through life
Without a single magazine cover,
Condemned to unmention
By TMZ or US magazine;
We are just like us,
No hot pix pictorials,
No hidden paparazzi
Or red carpet loose talk.

We are the ones who change
Heaven and earth
While the camera is looking elsewhere
And the eyes of the world
Grab hold of the latest spotlight darling.
Our genius is to appear invisible,
Even as we shift the planet,
Our fingerprints seldom revealed,
Our foottracks quickly covered
By a mob of eager claimants.
But we know, and history knows,
Even if everything is still well kept
In a black box in some basement
Below the Potomac.

Sunlight, bright sunlight,
Bright migraine flaring sunlight;
No clouds, no respite,
Unfocused glaring sunrise,
Jarring the optic,
Disconnecting the synapse,
Force marching the brain
Across frenzied alien sands
Inhabited solely by unrepentant
Boojums and Bandersnatch
With a fondness for my gray matter.

Slow brain, lagging synapses,
A group conversation on a primitive undernet;
I float, drifting in and out of multiple ghost sessions,
Seemingly unconnected from space and time;
Though surely I sit here, this chair exists,
The coordinates are fuzzy and my velocity
Even more so. 

                            I herd cats swimming in jello,
Each one attempting to escape as I struggle
To force my neurons back into line.

Once upon a solstice clearly,
I spied a raven overhead,
His wings were dark against blue sky
Where flew I know not where.

The day was bright, the heavens wide,
His destination unrevealed,
Still he soared like some sable jetliner
Time-conspired to slip off schedule..

All along the Potomac,
The princes come and go,
Each one believes he holds Excalibur,
Each one falling short of being The One
Who leads us out of the desert.

We wander in desolation,
Our questions unanswered,
Rifling through the pretenders
One joker after another,
Discarding one-eyed Jacks
And Burlesque Queens
As fast as our minds can deal.

Can't anyone here do this job?

Waiting for the bus this summer morning,
Two deer were disney-posed,
A young buck, two points on either side,
And a lovely doe, two-thirds his size.

They looked for cars, then crossed the street,
Entering an unsuspecting backyard
Before leaping a fence and continuing on
Back to Accotink via the neighborhood swim club.

Like Shakespeare, my words are on a stage,
My thoughts, my lives,
My pages are up on a screen
For all the world to see.

Should I vanish with little trace,
My globe deconstructed,
These electrons burned and quite forgotten
By both critic and university,
You will remember these sparse fragile lines
And the moment when we all came together.

My name is Lisa Jain, a lyric American poet,
Well taught by humanity,
The democratic child of literature and history
Who admits to both parents and muse;
You will remember me, honor me in death
For what I wrote when I still had breath.

My name is Lisa Jain,
Ms. Thompson, if you please,
Welcome to my stage and spritely dance;
I am StarPoet, a daughter of the ages
And all the brave new worlds yet to come.

I sing of the body human,
Born without angels or godly design,
The current end product
Of ten million years of evolution.
From the stars we were born,
To the stars we shall return,
One more creature
Among the many billions,
One more lonesome child
Finally coming home again.