3rd PFFA Poetry Competition - character poems

[Harry R]

This thread is reserved for entries to the third PFFA Poetry Competition.

Harry

[Harry R]

Orchid

by Rik Roots

She hums for Jesus as she cleans
the bath, sponges and wipes, strokes dust
from the shelves and loops towels
on their proper rails. An orchid
sits in bark on the window's ledge,
each full leaf pert. It strains
to bloom as she trashes the clippings,
turns her mind to sprucing herself.

When she steps from her shower she towels
dribbles from her skin, takes care to wipe
the soft cloth along the lines
of her folds. Veins in her hand
arch through her skin, their net
morphing as she wipes lower, slower
to take pleasure in the scrape
of wool through white wire. Today

she will call herself Alice, and she'll
make an effort to forget the names
of her nephews and nieces. A memory
taps her cheeks, tightens her lips. When the sun
slips a beam through the window she smiles,
knuckles her puckered fingers into the cloth
and polishes, polishes until she hums:
petals unfold.

[Harry R]

Tambourines

by BrokenSword1

I'm hearing harmonicas...

“Lord knows he's paid some dues gettin' through,
Tangled up in blue

I’m not a folk-singer -
I just sing a certain place, is all.
Don’t wanna make a lot of money,
just wanna get along
but people have to be ready,
have to see me once already.

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief...”

Harmonica around my neck,
I used to play piano, used to play great piano.
I believe in logical, like the length of my hair –
the less on my head, the more inside.
Can’t clutter my brain with crewcuts,
I have to be wise and free to think.

...he was consciously trying
to recreate the southern porch
and melodies of rude beauty.

Money? I don’t know how much I make;
sometimes I ask,
sometimes I don’t.
Right now, I’m using it for boots
and bananas and fruit and pears.
Just ‘Be’, you know?

“Always on the outside of whatever side there was
When they asked him why it had to be that way,
"Well," he answered, "just because."

30 poets committed suicide?
There was a boy, once, before he died;
he pumped gas all his life –
no one called HIM a poet...
if Robert Frost can be called one,
than so can that boy.

“Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles.”

Are you kidding? The world don’t need me –
Christ! I’m only 5’ 10”.
Everyone dies, don’tcha know –
“Poets drown in lakes...
I just try to harmonize with songs
the lonesome sparrow sings.”

“In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dyin' voice within me reaching out somewhere,
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.”

They can’t change me,
I just write songs.
I’m trying for 3 dimensions,
for more symbolism,
more than one level...

Used to get scared,
scared I’d not last, so
I wrote my poems
on anything I could find.
I’m a label now;
the voice of my generation.
I don’t know; I can’t give you what you don’t have.
Would you say that I’m your voice?

“Well, you manage to say
a lot of things I’d like to say
but can’t find words for.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the same
as being your voice.”

Chaos won’t let me.
I write about chaos
and watermelons, clocks...everything.
“It’s like; I accept him – does he accept me?”
Truth is chaos, maybe beauty too.”

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums,
art should be with the people,
on the radio and records –
that’s where people are.
Staying on the shelf won’t make you happy
and answers keep on blowing in the wind.


Pete Seeger said,
"All songwriters are links in a chain."
I say;
"somebody else would have done it."

They call me ‘instigator’,
the one who knew that songs could do more.

I’ve shaken hands with Shakespeare,
with Byron and Thomas...
Alan and Jack gave me beat
while Woody and Hank tended roots
in folk poetry gone acoustic.

“How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?”

“Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted
Can't help but wonder what's happenin' to my companions,
Are they lost or are they found?”

Look around you –
our language is the world’s plainest;
take this grace, instill this time.

Okay, Arlo Guthrie recently said,
"Songwriting is like fishing in a stream;
you put in your line and hope you catch something.
And I don't think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan
ever caught anything."

“People have a hard time accepting
anything that overwhelms them.”
Evolution is the tail of a snake
in its mouth –soon there,
soon tails are found.

Simple melodies, based on life,
based on growing up;
you can use a song for anything
but the world don’t need more songs.

“Your life doesn't have to be in turmoil
to write a song like that but
you need to be outside of it.
That's why a lot of people,
me myself included,
write songs when one form or another of society
has rejected you.
So that you can truly write about it from the outside.
Someone who's never been out there
can only imagine it as anything, really.”

It’s all a game, you sit around
you take the thrill and think;
“well, that’s never been rhymed before.”
But it doesn’t have to be exact,
not anymore,
“nobody’s gonna care if you rhyme
‘represent’ with ‘ferment’,
nobody’s gonna care.”

“Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you


I'm still hearing harmonicas, though...

[Harry R]

Enough... Men ( for Dorothy P.)

by Searcher

Your wit,
perhaps piqued the quandary
that daunted Bob’s decade of chats
round a table, a la bourbon and barbs,
at the Algonquin Hotel. Pity Ed, the husband
who left you: just his good name. Vanity
cost you, when you wouldn’t rollover:
taming your critical cynical lash.
A New Yorker, you fared better
with poems and screened plays. Paris
enticed you; befriending bold Ernest,
machismo aside, you learned to hate
fascist and Ezra alike. A paddy
from Boston, cuffed you pink,
pricking a new socialist pride.
To Alan, you were his twice wed
crusader, but to Joe-- just another
high-brow, kike-commie-whore, he tried
to indict. Alone, at the Volney,
you were missed by the doorman
who found you in bed. Leaving
Martin, who believed you an angel
in death.

[Harry R]

Mirabai

by gwen

I myself in a previous birth
was a cowherding girl
at Gokul.
—Mirabai, A Cowherding Girl

I. Bombay: My Grandmother’s Mantelpiece

She was pink plaster in a white paint sari:
straight tiny nose, head bent, eyes
thick curves of kohl. One pretty hand
just touching the sitar. Her lips were pursed.

II. Vrindavan: The Novice

When we let her in at last, she was damp with rain,
an old woman, bone-thin, tracking mud footprints
over the new-swept stone. Her teeth were stained.
Still, what turned my head as she walked in
was that sound: the clear copper ring of her anklets
like a prophecy of her voice. When she sang, eyes closed,
fierce with joy, the village women sat still and stared
and stared at her, the grinning widow with her unbound hair
and marigold sari, and so did I. She stayed two weeks,
and each night I knelt awake and listened
to her voice that rose, and shook,
and rose again. I was seventeen then and I’m sixty now,
but I hear it still sometimes, just before dawn,
or in the early evenings, sweeping out the altar
after the last pilgrims and gossips are gone.
Giridhar gopal. Those days, I can hardly bear
to set the crimson flowers at God’s stone feet.

III. Mewar: The Sculptor

It was the best commission I’d had all year – twelve gold pieces,
and how hard could carving one blue cowherd be? Two weeks,
and I had it done, spent a third of my last commission on the paint
and peacock feathers, and she sent it back! Three attempts
and half my money later, I went to see her. The room
was a shadowy mess of scribbled papers, paintings,
incense. The colour is wrong,
she said, sat there with her bulging forehead
and arrogant mouth, fanned
by three sweating village women. He is not blue,
but indigo. The Rajput bitch – with famine in the city –
doubled my commission, sent me to spend
six months of that starving year
on one three foot, dark blue god. You know the rest:
how she went crazy, ran away, jumped in rivers,
disgraced the family so her sisters could never marry,
and vanished at last. Now they worship her, and just last month
I did six of her for pious housewives
and their daughters. God, I was tempted
to make her as she really was.

IV. London: The Atheist

An old woman sings an older song,
swelling from the stereo, in a language
that I almost know. I translate slowly
to myself, staring past where she sits,
in my room now, in the window,
a little chipped, but still pink and white and silent,
against the snow that brushes the dark pane.

[Harry R]

by carneni1

By the window he stood
All dressed in flannel grey
Color of a dull day
That promised nothing good.
To him who came to pay
He smiled a quasi frown
Then murmured a “sit down”
That did not want delay.
When first he dressed the gown
Did this charge weigh at all?
Sole thing he could recall
Was the strap leather brown.
He skimmed the paneled wall
Up to the trophy rack
He knew each single crack
It mattered not how small.
With hands behind his back
He gave a look severe
Moved four, five paces near
The distance of a whack.
“Reports came to my ear
From sources well informed
That you have not conformed
To what’s expected here”
And while these words were formed
Which years of service taught
The youth before him sought
Fair cause to be reformed.
**
He passed for first the gates at twenty-eight
With coal black hair perhaps a touch too long
And through the court-yard filled with noisy throng
Advanced erect, discreet, with rapid gait.
The course he chose was difficult yet straight
A vocation lofty with motives wrong
And soon it came that heart forgot its song
And concern all its altruistic trait.
**
In twilight’s glow he set again for home
Well clad with wool- of late he feared the cold
And feared to die alone now that his spouse
Had gone. Her faithlessness just made him foam
As did the note received, which stressed in bold
That he was nothing but a worthless louse.

[Harry R]

Red and White

by shadygrove

I. The Hunter

At 16, he liked to see
snow fleas swarming the drifts.
He liked waking nightbirds
to watch them flush, liked antlers and
tailflash in galloping panic --
but he shot to miss.

Still, once in a while his aim was faulty.

Norwegian snow-men, thick through the middle,
silent at all hours, his people weren’t the kind
to make a boy drink blood to mark first kill.
They drank stronger spirits
half-viscous in a snowbank,
sun caught in glass.

He wasn’t squeamish with shears
breaking bone, draining blood to ice,
field-dressing the winter’s venison.
In those days, everyone he knew had a freezer
big enough to hold a body.


II. The Surgeon

Daily now, it’s “What the hell am I doing?”
but more in the metaphysical than the practical sense,
usually. Knifing 3 young women and an old man
just tonight -- care so intense
it’s closer to murder than love.
Sleek muscle ripples when you touch it.
The heart shivers and sleeps like a feverish child.

You can sew a man up like a doll,
bloodless as new snow.
Scabbed skin seams over and forgets the scalpel.
Scars fade.
He still drinks too much --
whiskey, not vodka.
Vodka is too clear,
too thick and too cold.

[Harry R]

The Dominant One

by Melanie

Semen, the white fluid - symbol of life.
Blood, the red fluid - symbol of death.

Child killer, wife of death, demoness, quean
of dreams - yes. I am Lilith, master and molder
of the fluids, arbiter of life. Not a woman broken
from the bone of a man but spun from the dust
that shaped him. I am shameless and uncontrollable
like tears wept over a baby's grave.

You buried our marriage with commands
and rules, Adam. Bade me to be the lesser,
to lie on my back without motion as you controlled
the consistency of the fluids. I refused your offerings
and fled your bed. But I returned with a thirst
to avenge, to flood your wake with bodies
of blood, to drench your dreams in semen.

Eve was the obedient wife, feeble and timid
as fangless snake. Weakened
during her creation from a secondhand bone.
She was submissive. She was naive
enough to be sweet-talked by my serpent,
yet predominant enough to seduce you
into swallowing the fleshy white after slicing
through the skin of red. Delicious.

[Harry R]

LENIN IS DEPRESSED

by Dale Michael Houstman

Lenin is depressed
and his voice of white marblelite tolls
the broken slats
of his ferocious bed.
That Sleeping Beauty!
Soldiers scatter serrate gold leaves
over our shoes.
The ivy of his long-famed breath
is done in white marblelite.
It is always winter in his breath,
and in his snake train,
and in his robe of white marblelite
set off by one white marblelite leaf.
A leaf blanched by palm needles of frost
which screwtails into my drink.

A White Russian, thank you.


Lenin is depressed
and his teeth—as reported—
are the butler’s old teeth,
and he smiles as if he were a drunken drama critic
cadging a butt from an actor.
Stars keep falling
as his cypress bell lectures
from beneath the pillows.
Pillows of white marbelite. The white marblelite avenue
running between the fingers of the blue hand; a naiad rinses
the cypress bell lecturing from beneath the pillows.
His teeth the butler’s old teeth
and it is reported that his decorative hand
is a white marblelite trout,
or one leaf blanched
high upon a whiter marblelite oak.
His hand’s tiny zinc flame
or a collarpin diamond
catching a spark
which screwtails into my drink

A White Russian, thank you.


Lenin is depressed,
his tough city kid eye now a rose-tinted trout
running between the fingers of her blue hand. A naiad rinses
the rose-tinted trout beneath the pillows,
the rose-tinted pillows,
the red-veined cypress bell lecturing beneath the pillows.
The pillows of white marblelite,
the ferocious bed of white marblelite,
and the white marblelite rain
that dampens my sleep.
His hand’s tiny zinc flame
or a collarpin diamond catching a spark
which screwtails into my drink.

A White Russian, thank you.

[Harry R]

The Eye Of The Beholder

by Scotty

Cumulus and latte were the backdrop
for the day when they first met.
Her voice had grabbed him first;
he beamed a gap-toothed grin and spoke
of how he’d cricked his neck
to find her through the scooters and the chat.
Later, caught up in conversation as he was
(and despite the dominance of a ham and cheese croissant)
he’d hoped that it was she who’d just walked past
with citrus entourage in tow - kiwi, peach and mandarin.

She saw him straight away;
his smile bloomed into view as she walked in
and a rush of blood had rouged her cheeks,
as in an orchestra of café bees
she’d thrummed, inner strings pulled taut
to see his slender fingers tease at hair,
to note the ease with which the timbre
of his gentle baritone countervailed the crowd.

She is a photographer, he, a writer:
three children, two dogs and several stray cats later,
she still loves to snap a roll and capture
what she calls the melting, blue ice of his eyes
while he adores the ever-changing read
of the Braille that is her face.

[Harry R]

Ragdoll

by Seremba

She mimed her song to backing tracks of raping toms,
a cry that once lifted those long dead to dream of ghostly visitations
was wasted on the new age occupants of the adjacent territories.

She timed her descent, from when slippered feet, spoiled and twisted,
splayed her from the top step, forced cloth hands out like duck beaks
and the very thread of her unraveled with each sickening second.

She reclined, badly tacked into the hall, wool fingered,
afraid to touch herself for sparks. Her button eyes fixed on the front door,
a mahogany coffin lid between her and those who rarely called.

[Harry R]

Recollections of a Marriage Guidance Counsellor: Client #

by mindsweeper

She said he was edgier
than the back-garden regulars
cocoa-dark and glossy
as a travel brochure.

He showed three sides
father, son, and devil
take the hindmost
to quote her mother.

She craved his earthiness -
the compressed rot
of exotic forest floors -
his distance from all familiar.

He was difficult to get a hold on -
guarded as a tango-dancer.
She nagged at his resistance
pressed for reasons why

he wouldn’t undress
with the light on, why he deserted
their bed when she was fat
with his child.

When their daughter turned
eleven, he cracked.
She tasted his substance
shuddered, spat.

Nothing
she tells me
will wash away
the aftertaste of bad.

[Harry R]

LENNIE

by Dunc McReil

We’d meet for a beer, and someone’d say,
Remember the time our Firsts won the Shield?
and mention Lennie, whose scrum-half ways
got him called Flash and Dirtiest on Field.

Knox - our tight-head prop - drives a cab these days.
"This dressed-up pair hailed me late in town.
She called him Leonard. They dawdled good-byes
with ‘Ron’ and ‘Suzanne’. We drove. Then he frowned:

Bugger! I forgot - meeting’s tomorrow.
Forgive me please, dear; I shouldn’t be long.
Driver, we’ll drop her, then I’ll need to go
to my offices. He kissed her with tongue

and she went inside. When I checked the map
he coughed and murmured, Mate, a change of plan -
just take me back to where you picked us up.
Waiting alone there for him was Suzanne.

Mate, I’ll pay by card, said Lennie. His cards
bounced one after one, while Suzanne stood there.
At last he produced a note, without words;
and counted his change, and then smoothed his hair.

‘Poor Suzanne,’ I thought; ‘she’s about to learn
who does the paying when it’s Lennie’s turn.’ ”

[Harry R]

Freeze-Frame

by shadysteve88

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube
-John Updike, “The Ex-Basketball Player”

I remember him calling me Sunday at ten-
a most inopportune time to call a teacher,

especially one engaged in rearranging
furniture on a caffeinated night when twice
through haste I scarred my hardwood floors.

I picked up the phone, surveying my antiques
lording in their places, the cherry cabinets,
the mahogany dining-set accenting my prize:
the stately, antebellum clock. Its pendulum

mandating time as he mumbled how
his family was leaving town, moving on
like refugees mouthing the ancient refrain
not obligated to explain, but eloquent
in monosyllables and hazel, aqueous eyes.

I felt sorry for the kid, it must have been hard
for him to scrounge up the courage to dial me:
the blazer-sporting, pine-oil-smelling, big-word-using
man from English class- less avuncular, more pedagogue

Slowly, like a headache dissolving into pillows,
my back didn’t throb so much, problems drifted
into pettiness. The woodwork on the clock
seemed ostentatious, its movements irritating tics.

As I stammered my condolences, he
must have mustered up his courage,
before the click and guttural goodbye
he paraphrased a poem we’d read that week:

I don’t wanna learn a trade,
pump gas, check oil or change a flat;

I had a chance to play, but now it’s gone.

And I was hurled into last week; officiously
appraising the pages of Antique Trader
while striding past the gym where he had exited
triumphant from the tryout-

bouncing a faded rubber sphere and clad
in a tattered piece of mesh with Jordan, 23
faintly imprinted on the bleach-stained back.

The furniture glared garishly. I thought
with loathing of the manuscript pigeonholed
away alongside the renderings of my life.

Their isometric angles drafting this brisk
blueprint for failure: advanced degrees left unattained,
my book un-published and my ordinary name

tacked in block letters to the panels of the door
of classroom 102 in a suburban public school.

What more chance had I than he of ending up
immortal; I anthologized or he enshrined on
national TV? What chance for my book or his
jump-shot to be remembered any longer
than the mindless chiming of my clock?

And as I muse, a camera fastens on the tunnel.
A monochromatic figure accelerates forwards
while a thousand mouths open in a muted cry;
he launches upwards, arched between base-line
and rafters, fixating every eye in that arena.

So I see his face: inhaling the essence of a dream
and levitating above the basket, ball poised;
paused until time erupts into a Technicolor scream.

[Harry R]

An Uncommon Life

by cookala

I. October, 1921

They moved to the brown-boot world
of the Jefferson, Missouri barracks
when he was three. While war took
an extended holiday, he grew tall
surrounded by the daily spit and shine
behind the perimeter of barbed wire fence.

His daddy had cold hands and blue lips,
tooted a clarinet for the Sixth Infantry
Band; objectified an American Primitive
with his stovepipe hat and high-top shoes
and thirsted for folding money like someone
who’s been four days lost in the desert
without a drop.

A fruitless soldier, he was a drunk, a gambler;
an albatross
who remodeled their home into a speakeasy
for his frittered paychecks, and brewed whiskey
in the closet of his son’s upstairs room.

His mammy spent her days prickling
with needle and thread or fretting at the stove,
selling meals to help put clothes over their bones.

By night the boy withdrew to his booze-stink bedroom,
ears pressed by the tomfoolery below; terrified
of the thin, crickety sound of the dark,
the policeman’s knock; stigma's shadow.

He swung in the winds of adolescence like
a hanged man, felt yoked with two pails of sweat
until substantial Mrs. Emma Nettie Bradbury arrived
like the prow of a great ship, and took him onboard
into her classroom of expression lessons.

Cut from his tether, flushed with fresh air,
he became aware of Kalliope’s voice
borne on the veering wind.

She was calling out to him.


II. June, 2001

At first look, everything about him suggested
native: proud stance, hawk nose, high cheekbones,
long ponytail. It was easy to envision him dressed
in Choctaw shirt, beaded tie, sashed waist; performing
a war dance, chanting beneath a black hat.
Looking closer I noticed his silver hair
didn’t stand up like a rooster’s comb
though he crowed while perched on the podium.

He holds master’s degrees from both schools;
can weave musical incantations, clear and graceful
as a wizard’s spell; or exhale one breath
of memorable visions onto a line, its lyrics
as burnished as a copper bowl.

Humble as a Sunday preacher, quick to shake hands,
he had the eyes of a Dali Lama. I likened him to
“The Thinker”with an attentive ear whose replies
came in soft rasps and humorous joie de vivre.
I could tell he’d jettisoned his albatross. Scratches
made by thorns of isolation healed, he's become
a farmer, harvesting with notebook and pen.