POETS PLACE
SEPTEMBER 2020
Hello friends We’re still here!!! AND…. It’s getting closer to that time where we begin to harvest our political leanings and formulate our decisions about the upcoming presidential election. I don’t need any convincing. My mind was made back in 2016. Witnessing our America allowing and enabling people to fan the fires of hate, openly and without guilt or shame, was enough data of horror for me to fuel my personal shame of this country, especially towards the leaders. But on a sweeter note… It’s my birthday!! Ya baby!! Time to party like it’s 1999!!!! Oh yeah right. No congregating. Many of us have been celebrating our birthdays on facebook. Sharing our lonely cakes, eaten only by the celebrant. Blowing out that lone candle, wishing for the cloud of doom to open up and SHOUT. IT’S JUST A BAD DREAM!!! OPEN THE DOORS AND LET THE CROWDS BACK IN AND PARTEEEEE!!!
Oh well….
This month we are hosting some new faces and definitely celebrating our fans who are contributing almost monthly to share their thoughts of strength, wisdom and faith- that we can survive even in the darkest times.
MUCHO Thanks to all of you!!! YOU have kept me going. Bless you all!!!
Can’t Go
By Linda Kaye
8/21/20
Can’t go outside
the thought of it in this heat makes me nauseous
Can’t see my friends or at least all at once, cuz they could possibly infect me with their humor or dreadful notions of Armageddon
Can’t eat too much food
food will add disgusting weight to the middle of my body causing tremendous anxiety about becoming fat which just the thought of that makes me sick
Can’t hide my disgust of the state of the country
words containing hope are hopelessly not found in my vocabulary these days
Can’t watch the news that continually spouts lies and perpetuates the ridiculous behaviors of stupid people and raging idiots that claim science is fake
and the president is the knower of all truths
Can’t leave my room because it’s cool in there and it’s hot outside so hot that my brain starts to sizzle the moment the door to the patio is open
there’s no justice
Can’t be impulsive because the state of impulsivity requires acting without forethought acting without forethought in these days could get me jailed or worse
Can’t go there
To write or not to write
By Daniel Schack
To write or not to write. That is the question. But not to write is a lot of spite about what it is to write. But is right? Write on!
Mr. Daniel Schack is a high school graduate and had 3 and half years of college at s.u.n.y. Buffalo and s.u.n.y. Purchase from 1982-1985. He writes poems and creates visual art. Find Daniel Schack(on poetrysoup.com) to see more. Be well all.
Sexy Rain
By Julio Rodriguez –
3-13-2020
Sexy rain
Do love ya
Come down
Get me wet
Draw your curtain
Dim your light
Pour your sound
S-h-u-s-h-i-n-g cry
Your moisture
Tour mood
Gotta tell ya
Under the hood
Sexy rain
Falling sky
Fill me up
Blue’s delight
See ya
Smell ya
Feel ya
Love ya
Light you a candle
Have your tea
Your longing moment
Feeling free
Sexy rain
Sexy rain
Sexy rain
Sexy rain
Julio Rodriguez is a rare act. A cross between the late 50's beatniks playing bongos and doing radical 50's poetry and Gil Scott Heron and the "Last Poets" of the Late 60's early 70's. People have said that his poetry takes them back to NY's Harlem days... Julio Rodriguez, the Conga Poet found his nitch when he started writing poetry. He had found himself without a music band to play with, and one day combined his newly found poetry with his Afro-Latino conga rhythms. For the last few yrs he has played in many of LA’s poetry venues, concerts, nightclubs, protests, and street festivals. When he could, (pre-covid) his favorite place to play was on York blvd during the 2nd Saturday of each month. The Conga Poet recently released his first dbl CD (one in Spanish and one in English). He sells hard copies but the CD's are also available on iTunes and CDBaby .. His poetry is simple, sincere and provocative.
DISTRACTION
3:28 a.m.
8-27-20
By Mary Cheung
Distraction is what you do; When something is too painful to think about. But you can't stop thinking about it.
Distraction is what you need; when your will power is low and you just wanna have a scoop of ice cream and you find yourself eating 3xs as much.
Distraction is your way of coping; When certain ideals don't mesh with you, but you feel powerless to change it.
Distraction is a survival tool; When Covid-19 kills any hope of a sex life, and
the idea of wearing a full body condom is just too ridiculous.
Distraction is welcomed; When you know you should exercise more, but the thought of doing it, just tires you out already.
Distraction is required; When you wake up with scary thoughts and fears for your kids and you can't talk to them about it at 3 in the a.m.
Distraction is option #2; When you have an idea for your next painting, but you don't want to go stretch a canvas and haul out the paint and brushes.
Distraction is an alarm you set; While waiting for voting day and you're sick and tired of the state of your country.
Distraction is your self-help book; When you start re-living past relationships and you drive yourself crazy with wondering where the heck is Mr Right?
Distraction is your reprevail; Because all of a sudden you can't eat like you used to in your twenties and everything gives you heart burn and makes you gassy....
Distraction is what you do to forget: That the checks aren't flowing in because stupid Covid-19 has halted your work for 6 months now!
Distraction is your cereal bowl; because you are up in the middle of the morning and it helps to quiet your growling stomach.
Distraction becomes your "To-Do" list; When your daily schedule and structure is turned upside down and you have no set schedule.
Distraction becomes the most important thing; When your Birthdays come faster than you want and you can't seem to slow it down.
Distraction is the name of the game for me these days.
But I gotta remember what's really important and what's not.
So I don't miss out on my 1 shot in life, all because I got, Distracted....
Mary Cheung- she is an innovative Artist and Costume Designer. Her works contain a strong sense of story as well as a highly sensuous style. She mostly works in paint or photography and sometimes making art that is wearable and innovative. She states “I am usually more of a Visual style Artists and have only recently been open to sharing literally art/poems, often paired with visual art of my creation, birthing a new form of spoken word art as another form of expression”.
"At War"
by Lisa Montagne
The early morning light,
Before I can see the world as it is,
Looks like war.
The haze of despair
Lay on me like a blanket.
The early morning air,
Before I can breathe it in,
Smells like war.
The stench of it presses on my chest
like an elephant’s toe.
Depression lay in wait
While Anxiety
Rigs my brain chemistry.
I see you, I say,
As they creep up the stairs.
They are stealthy, but I am
Quieter, softer, gentler
Pushing through the underbrush
Of my psyche, knife
Sheathed in the long boot
Of my soul,
Ready to strike.
You may take thousands of lives
A day, I say. But you!
You will not win.
I stand my ground.
They shrug.
They’ll be back for
Another round.
Lisa Montagne, Ed.D.
A native of Southern California, Lisa Montagne, Ed.D., is a poet, writer, artist, and college English professor who specializes in online learning. She has read her poetry to audiences in Los Angeles, Portland and Tampa, including at the Beyond Baroque poetry center and for Writ Large Press and PenWriter America. She has been published by The Ear literary and art magazine, the Variant Literature Journal, Boomer Reviews, and Running Wild Press.
America: Mystery Babylon
By Ronald Carrillo, August 2020
Prelude:
America on the brink
Will she sink like a stone
Or will she be able to reverse her downward spiral
Will her people be picked to the bone
Or will the one per cent be revealed to have no soul
Interlude:
Our founding fathers writing hypocrisy democracy
The thirteen becoming one to form our nation
Separating infant colonies from her mother country
This child was born with serious birth defects
The infant country was Siamese in a north south divide
These twin selves could not live as one
Slavery was a luxury for the confederate gentry
However Dixieland was no friend of the black man
Kidnapped these people were reduced to a foul name
The geographical schism created a caste system
Liberty with cotton fields, lynching’s and plantations of shame
Absolutely a constitutional contradiction to enslave one race
A promise of freedom to form a more perfect union
Promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty
But only for white Christian men and their prosperity
Abstract constructs that remain in a dream space
For the immigrant refuse coming to Liberty’s shore
It’s a Ponzi scheme for a cheap labor force
That rushes through the turnstile of a false democracy
Like Rome her colossal skyscrapers were forged
Her infrastructure laid down on the backs of these huddled masses
Mother of exiles the whore of Babylon beckons the tired and poor
She offers nothing but an empty welcome and a hollow cry
This stony mother has no milk
No real nourishment for the homeless and tempest-tossed
Her manifest destiny went from coast to coast
Decimating the indigenous peoples and stealing their land
Warring on a weaker southern neighbor to seal the deal
Her industrial revolution brought more moths to her flame
Her poisonous perfume of power was now in full gear
The American experiment seemed invincible and real
The dreamers surviving on placebos
And still yearning to breathe free in her red, white and blue
Slavery now exchanged for government penitentiaries
The cruel pecking order of this democracy maintains the status quo
A malleable middle class fortifies the rich and creates an illusion
The bottom feeders don’t matter just fill the gap
They are the compost heap of progress
And the quicksand of the middle class can bullish or bearlike
Depending on the fickle stock market of Wall Street
She’ll go to war to make more greenbacks
She’ll interfere with other governments
To confiscate their natural resources
She’ll topple foreign leaders that don’t bend to her rules
She creates government gangs of security with impressive acronyms
She’ll assassinate her own leaders that don’t fall into line
Beware the military complex of her nature
This false mother condones crimes against her own people
She went off the rails of her own making morphing into a monster
Planned parenthoods promoting a policy of disguised eugenics
Public education to populate America’s factories
But an Ivy League education for the wealthy
G.I. bills to lure the poor to war
And loopholes in the law for the financially advantaged
The middle class tow the line and have been thrown a bone
Ball and chained with a mortgage for thirty years
And the underclass in ghettos, barrios and government projects
Low in-come with credit card enticements toward bankruptcy
Gee the American pie is covered with flies for the poor
The middle class gets a small slice then gets to pay taxes
She had to realize her dream of empire
She would not occupy foreign lands only devise a devious plan
Of financial dependency to rob 3rd world countries of their resources
She was a global player standing on the world stage
And creating a web of financial deceit
Homeless devastation all across this great nation
Paupers of depression make their beds of cruel concrete
Encampments of sorrow in the cold Los Angeles night
America’s fruited plain has become a junkyard of pain
A red, white and blue stain of despair
In the bowels of her once prosperous cities
Scarecrows once men no longer defend dignity
America you who could of done so much
Fell far short of your democratic potential
Was it not essential to stretch yourself for the greater good
Postlude:
Cool winds blow in from the land of the red dragon
Bringing in a virus to topple capitalism
Lilac vines spread their sweet scent despite the scourge
Freedom wavers quarantined and waiting for vaccines
Ronald G. Carrillo is a native Lincoln Hts Angelino, living in Eagle Rock and a retired LAUSD educator and influencer. He writes of his passion and rebirth into the golden age of living. He has been writing since high school and was initially influenced from the songwriters, Keith Reid, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Neil Young.
Janet Grey states- This work is from a writing group session. We were told to create a Saint with a certain ability that we determined ourselves.
SAINT GENEVIEVE
by Janet Grey
From her earliest years, Saint Genevieve was different. Blind to the world despite her eyes’ absolute ability to see, she was consumed by shadows — not only in her perception, but her thoughts and dreams were shadowy, muted, foggy and depressed, and it was as though a giant cloud had invaded her world and was refusing to finally rain and wither away. No one could understand how this could be, with her beautiful clear blue eyes that reflected all the rainbow of colors that surrounded her and her loved ones, Those giant crystal eyes… Every healer for miles around had deemed them to be perfectly healthy and able to see better than most others’ might. Yet ask her to describe something in front of her, and she could not. She could “see" but she just could or would not see. And so it was that her family learned of her inner world, a bright and shiny place where colors were infinite, and stretched in every direction in hues unknown to the others, rendering her descriptions impossible for anyone in her entourage to comprehend. The imaginary places she’d describe were so beautiful that she would cry with joy in her meditations, but dreams brought about quite a different experience.
We were then told to choose from the “7 Deadly Sins” and write a first person narrative about the created saint from that standpoint.
LUST
Being a patron saint of sight and perception had its down sides. As she grew older, Genevieve became accustomed to her extrasensory abilities and accepted the fact that not only could she experience beauty she could not really “see”, but she could actually see the probable, the possible and she could see passion. And so it was that one sunny summer day, a young man passed her by and she felt a strange sensation all over her body — a throbbing that started behind her eyeballs and spread out and up and through her sockets in a way that should have burned or ached or disturbed her in some other way. Yet, on the contrary, this feeling was warm and delicious and something she’d never known before yet something she wanted so desperately to know more, much more of, and suddenly the possibility and probability that she could, at that moment, actually see, was that of a passionate entanglement with this seemingly inconsequential young man. And so she found herself sitting for hours on end “seeing” and "seeing” and (hear Heavy Breathing here) “seeing” again — the passionate embrace that very well could be and “seeing” some more, so that the sensations she experienced were so intense that her cries and sighs and moans of ecstasy could be heard for miles around her palace, with its infinite acoustic halls, so that the echoes were further emphasized and emanated freely throughout the land. Her patrons gathered, surrounding her home and gazing up at the windows with wonder, attempting to make sense of it all, lamenting and loathing the lusty laughter that penetrated their otherwise peaceful and silent existence. And as time went on, and the moans and groans, rather than subside, instead became louder and longer, more emphatic and intense, and her lust became legendary and her special sight the stuff of wrath and ridicule, her canonization was called into question and her cacophony of catcalls took over whatever else one might have thought about her before that fateful day when the path of a young man changed the course of her life, and that of so many others, so destroyed were they at the thought of having lost their beloved Saint to the languid lusty world into which she had fallen.
And the young man, the object of this Legendary Lust, having passively pushed a domino effect into actions so catastrophic in his wake as to alter the course of history itself, continued, oblivious, on his merry way through life, never the wiser.
Janet Grey is an avid traveler, photographer (www.greymattersphotos.com), and the Founder of TravelDrivers.com, a one-stop stop for exceptional private driver-guides worldwide.
Janet stays sane in the time of Covid-19 by walking the charming neighborhoods that are scattered throughout LA, and sharing shots of her discoveries on her @walkingwithjanet facebook page. She is also the creator of the Pretty Postcard Project, inspiring others to spread love and appreciation in these trying times, while supporting our ailing postal service.
Janet lives in Silverlake, California, USA.
In The Belly
By The Poetess Reigns aka JackieRay Phillips
In the Belly of the Loveland
Does innocent souls meet
Dancing above the sheets
Seductive, exotic and free
It’s that Belly of the Loveland
Souls that are so deep
So deep & primitive
Certain glands must secrete
In that Belly of the Loveland
Let it take you there
Without a worry
Without a care
Dancing in the pale moonlight
In the Belly of the Loveland
Will she be free?
Exotic & Sultry?
Will she be free?
In the Belly of the Loveland
That is she
It is free!
The Belly
The Loveland
And...
Me!
The Poetess Reigns Again!
The Poetess Reigns aka JackieRay Phillips is Creator of The Poetry of Justice Show, Where Social Consciousness Meets The Arts. The Show is designed to spark the interest and awareness of social diversity ranging from arts, entertainment and social justice at large. Catch The Poetry of Justice Show Saturday nights 6:00-8:00pm PST Live @Yikesradio.com and @AcceleratedRadio.net in addition to all other podcast streaming platforms. You may also view and subscribe to the Show’s YouTube channel @The POJ Show With JackieRay. Follow us on IG @The POJ Show With JackieRay and FB @ The Poetry of Justice Show and JackieRay Phillips.
Thanks for joining us! Let me know how we’re doing here and PLEASE, more than ever, continue to support the arts!!
With great hope for our future
Love,
Linda Kaye
Please submit your written work to:lindakayepoetry@icloud.com and include a short bio.
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