StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XXXI

Pendragon lingers beyond our reach,
An ancient hero outside of time,
The once and future ruler of our hearts.
All his knights have long since vanished,
Their armor befouled with grime and age;
His queen became a most darking fable,
Yet Arthur lives, Camelot survives,
And we are the better for it.

Religion allows us to maintain a clean conscience,
Follow our precepts, do god's will,
Blow up health clinics, run planes into buildings,
Destroy mosques and sacred places,
Hide pedophiles behind our marble altars.
God is good, god is great, bell, book, and candle,
He turns a blind eye to our human transgressions,
He enables true believers to follow god's plan,
His hands quite unspotted and well washed.

Go away, I'm asleep,
And have been so for several hours,
My body is down, my eyes are closed,
My brain is doing three-sixties and crash landing:
One, if by morning, two, if by noon,
Three for the road if I don't sleep soon.

A poet must follow her instinct,
Be fearless, even impulsive,
Then control and edit what she writes;
It is difficult to make this look easy,
Appear spontaneous when obviously
I've spent years learning how to construct
Apparently unadorned casual verses;
The art is in the seams, behind the mirror
That leads down the rabbit hole, the one
You don't see if I craft a good poem,
Unlike this artless one which stumbles down
The page like some aging Shakespearean fool.

Earthquake, lightning,
Smokestacks all a-tremble,
The world is falling,
The earth is shaking,
The sky is green with envy.

All along the riverbank,
All the people come and go,
Newscasts scurry with their cameras
But there's nothing left to show.

High-up in the offices,
Above the rock and roll,
The wind is whistling,
The air vents howl,
But no one hears a thing.

I was eating lunch,
Munching on my bison,
When Ted walked in
Trailed by a half dozen
Washington businessmen
And sat down at the table
Next to me.  Our eyes met,
Acknowledged, and we went back
To what we were there for
As the wait staff tried for
Friendly efficiency:

He ordered and conducted business,
I sipped tea and ate my burger
Before returning to my own meeting
Up the street in Crystal City.

In the corner I sit quietly watching
The everlasting party go on around me;
Finger food, cheap drugs and cheaper drinks,
Grandios discussions of repetitive invention,
Sexual mores infused with binary predation.
College professors write profusely,
Proclaiming their questionable, self-appointed
Sexpertise to any camera that will have them,
Writers share their freelance pop-psy rambleology
With the women's and boy's fashion and soft porn.
The poet observes the world spinning about her
Tastefully choosing her make-up and color pallete
As she takes her careful notes and makes metaphor,
Constructing the lyrical universe you see before you.

Serena,
Cut muscled and strikingly hipped,
And the crown princess of tennis
Whenever she might wish,
Wears her clothes as well as she plays,
An uncommon beauty on court or otherwise,
A woman of quiet strength and not so quiet temper
Who does not suffer fools much at all,
Nor should we expect her to.

You read this, my weekly life mask,
Sipping your caffè latte, slipping through your email,
As you pick apart the flow of time;
In the quiet of my room, I gather my experiences
To shape my well crafted realities
With the shade of earth and heaven I choose,
Knowing that if I bore you, I shall vanish as easily quick
As a touring actor in last month's failing production of MacBeth.

Listen my dear,
By the Goddess, I swear,
Dead you'll lie here unregarded,
Your girlhood wilted
Like the flowers in your hair.
Stir now, loosen your slender limbs
Before the world comes to abhor you
And your muse no longer cares
For the sweetness of your tongue.