POETS PLACE
JUNE 2023
Thank goodness the sun shines again!!! I was getting worried that we were doomed to be in the gloom. We’ve been taking this journey together now for quite some time. I’m just thinking about what we all have endured since the election of 2016, and it has been a pretty herculean journey. Politics has never been my jam. Just the thought of what goes on in their kingdoms frightens the bejesus out of me. I don’t have the stamina, nor the psyche to wade through the muck that politics brings to the surface. Plus, you have to be ultra positive (there’s no guarantee, lol) that what you/they concoct is something that can actually be manifested in the realm of reality. But isn’t that just magical thinking at it’s best??!! For me poetry has all that I need to continue on this path towards enlightenment. Poetry is a state of mind that reveals your personal truth. They’re not all gems to share with the world, but they are our notes to self. I have always had a desire to share myself with anyone who will listen and I believe, hopefully, that I have something thoughtful to say.
POETS PLACE is here for you! Join in and share your words to the world!! Or best to whomever reads this column!!! LOL XXXX
Enjoy!!!!
Love, Linda :0)
The Smile of the Deeply Moved
By Linda Kaye
The smile of the deeply moved
Is contagious exhilarates and tickles the spine.
Your face responds with a curious glimmer that shines through the deep creases baked by years of defeat.
It cracks with enjoyment a recognition of heartfelt joy.
Overlaps with the forgiveness of self.
Then Again
By Winfred Taylor
Difficulty would be easy now.
Downhill a slide to stumble up
then down again to crumble.
All pieces of a whole.
To what avail, this story
Circling life never entering.
Once bound to determine
what is sure to fail.
Sidestep the truth
to battle enraged blessings
Then curse the fate.
Now would be fine not to start again.
This moment just as before survives.
Winfred Taylor, says, “I have and still equate creativity to healing and expressive language”. Born in Dayton Ohio, raised in the suburbs. Both parents had southern roots with a Christian foundation. “I believe some of what I do is both interpret and reconcile feelings and situations both old and new. I have done creative writing and poetry from an early age. I found that I could not immerse myself enough in life and the arts. Studying piano, joining choirs, doing athletics, crocheting, making jewelry, sewing, theater, ceramics, cooking, photography, weaving, gardening, and more. Schooling was with an Ohio business school then art school at the University of Washington, Seattle. Only recently making the move to California, I continue to follow inspiration and gain many new insights to life”.
Daniel Schack
Right way or Wrong way. Wrong is wrong! Absolutely! No Matter who is doing the wrong! Period! Absolutely!
The poet ,daniel schack can be seen on poetrysoup.com and his art on tumblr adanthemanworld.daniel schack is 57 and is a high school grad. With 3.5 years of college. peace.
MY AIR PUMP PELLET GUN
4-30-23
12:55 a.m.
I shot a rat in the head,
With my "Tempest", made in England air pellet gun dead.
So why don't I feel so bad?
To take a life, I should be sad.
Just to put him out of his misery
As he kick and jerked whilst in the jaws of the "Guardians " rat trap.
Yeah I heard the "snap"
And I jumped up to see.
Your brown little body
Kicking to try and get free.
So rather than see you suffer and linger for more.
I loaded that suckered with a steel tipped pellet and leveled it at your core.
But I had to look away cuz.
I couldn't handle it anymore.
You still had a life that was worthy.
I just couldn't take all of the rat droppings,
all over my floor.
And the last time my late night craving had me walking down the long hall.
You streaked by my feet and scared the shit out of me and more.
So little buddy, sorry to have done it.
But I couldn't take it any more.
And now my handy air pump pellet gun slumbers by my bed side....
Ready to take on your family,
I'm ready to wage war.
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”.
Nu-Pike
By Michael Meloan
I was nine when my family arrived in Los Angeles. We moved into a sprawling stucco apartment building in Gardena so my father could begin a teaching job at USC.
He was a compulsive doer. Every weekend was blocked-out with activities. On the first available Saturday, he informed my mother, brother, and me that we were going to an amusement park in Long Beach called Nu-Pike.
“Why can’t we go to Disneyland?” I asked.
“That’s for wimps. This is the real thing. Like Coney Island in New York,” he said with a grin.
We all piled into the Mercury and headed for Long Beach.
Nu-Pike was adjacent to the beach, partially built on piers. A gigantic dilapidated wooden roller coaster encircled the property. Above the entrance, an animatronic man with a pudgy cartoon face rocked back-and-forth laughing ghoulishly through tinny speakers. There were buzzers and bells, shooting galleries, fortune tellers, bumper cars, a double Ferris wheel slathered in neon. Wet wood, salt wind, and creosote.
But most of all, I remember a new kind of human. Tattooed drunken sailors carried bottles of whiskey with their arms around women wearing short skirts, black fishnet stockings, plunging necklines and overflowing breasts. Blazing red lips with cigarettes dangling.
And there was lust--in the eyes of the women and the men. I had never seen it before, but I understood it immediately. These people lived with abandon, without a thought for tomorrow.
I found it both repulsive and somehow irresistible. Faint screams wafted in-and-out of the wind from the ancient roller coaster amid the constant clanging and cackling.
Michael Meloan's fiction has appeared in Wired, Huffington Post, Buzz, LA Weekly and in many anthologies. He was an interview subject in the documentaries Bukowski: Born Into This and Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There. With Joe Frank, he co-wrote a number of radio shows that aired across the NPR syndicate. His Wired short story "The Cutting Edge" was optioned for film. And he co-authored the novel The Shroud with his brother Steven. This fall, RUP press in Germany will release his memoir/novella PINBALL WIZARD.
California Dreamin'
© 2020 Terrance M. Whitten
Would I be placing a pretty safe bet if I guessed that you, dear reader, have taken a leap of faith at some point in your life? Truth be told, sometimes getting out of bed in the morning can feel like a leap of faith. But can any of you say that you have taken not just a leap, but a blind leap of faith?
I can. I have taken that blind leap of faith, and I've done so more than once. But the leap I now want to recall took place in the spring of 1996. I had been living in Seattle for nearly five years and had been unable to pull a stable life together. The city was gorgeous, but gorgeous does not mean secure.
In February of 1996, I answered a newspaper ad seeking an English instructor for a position at a private academy in South Korea. I was a man of little property, save for my thick artist's portfolio, and I had no significant emotional attachments that bound me to the city, or to the United States for that matter.
What did I know about South Korea? I knew where it was, but little more. With my meager possessions put into storage, I settled into an 18-hour flight that took me to the other side of the world. Save for this native-Detroit boy's occasional visits to our Canadian neighbor and a week spent in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, I was not an international traveler. Now I was really going international, but not as a tourist.
Signing that year-long contract with Han Saem Academy in Seoul's southwestern suburb of Pu'chon was definitely a blind leap of faith, because I had no idea what was waiting for me once the plane landed at Kimpo Airport. I could not even speak a word of the language, though my new Lonely Planet dictionary was poised to become one of my best friends over the coming year.
I was met at the airport by an official of the academy, the hogwan. Mr. Sun knew sufficient English for basic communication. He and Mr. Chung, the more adept head English teacher, and two other less-proficient teachers at the hogwan would be the only people I could communicate with for quite some time.
Once my serious jet lag had passed, to say that the ensuing two week's severe culture shock was surreal would be polite. I truly felt like I had stepped off a cliff into an alien Asian world that, even though I recognized most of my urban environment, still made so little sense at the same time. My complete lack of control over my own life only added to the painful disorientation. I could give you stories, but best said that I always seemed to feel angry and there was not a moment when I did not think that I had made a huge mistake.
Yet once I got over expecting from my host environment and started accepting, I was able to allow myself to experience willingly the interesting, though often challenging world around me. After a few weeks, the poorly-performing hogwan subcontracted my services out to three different public middle-schools in Pu'chon. At first I objected, as the American concept of a solid, unbreakable contract bumped heads with the
Koreans' more flexible concept, a chronic problem in Korean-American business affairs.
But, by my second day in those public school classrooms, my objections had melted away. Over the following year, I taught Conversational English to four classes of preteens in three different middle-schools. I
can say today, these many years later, that all the hours shared with those South Korean boys and girls were among the very brightest of highlights in my life, a gift that I would not have had, had I not made that big, blind leap of faith in the spring of 1996.
Now, when I speak of things being surreal, I must not always put my story into a negative light, because it serves me to recall a pleasant Sunday that May, on my first solo weekend excursion by train into Seoul. I was walking through the crowded new Myong Dong shopping district and I heard the 1965 song, California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas playing loudly from shops out into the crowded lanes. I heard the song at least three times. Why that one American song, and from so many different shops? Hearing the song did have its nostalgia for me, as John Phillips and his group were a big deal during my adolescence. But, on that Sunday afternoon, the song's unexpected presence only added to Korea's big bag of surprises.
I came to learn that the recording had been used in a film that was a hit in South Korea that past winter - a dark 1994 film from Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. Its Chinese title translates into “Chungking Jungle” and it is a Godard-like tale of loneliness amid the sterile concrete and steel of an impersonal urban jungle. The character of a dreamy snack bar waitress, played by the famed Chinese diva, Faye Wong, uses the song's plaintive lyrics to express the longing felt by everyone in the film, and as a song of hope amid that bleak world.
The odd film had been such a hit in South Korea that The Mamas & The Papas' vintage California Dreamin' began being played on the radio and had been all that season. The song had been embraced as a symbol of the longing of many South Koreans, if not of Asians from all over the continent, a longing to join their numerous fellow countrymen in America, preferably in sunny Los Angeles.
California dreamin'.
Just ask any of the people in the long, long line of South Koreans seeking various visas every weekday at the U.S. Embassy in downtown Seoul, so many of them eager to find a new life in a new land, each one of them ready to make that big leap of faith. At the end of my year's contract in South Korea, I returned to the Pacific Northwest and its familiar frustrations. Amid the instability, in 1998 I managed to write my first screenplay, which led to another big, blind leap of faith - my move to Los Angeles in the spring of 1999 with my script in hand. A rather earthy acquaintance in Seattle had been blunt enough to say that “you can't go fishin' at the fishin' hole if you're stuck out in the desert.” That was enough to motivate me to move once again to a place I'd never been to before, another place where I knew not a soul.
I can say with delight that my first neighborhood in Los Angeles was Venice Beach. Any talk about John Phillips' California Dreamin' always leads me to Brian Wilson, with all my '60s boyhood Beach Boy fantasies taking on their own kind of surreal life in that colorful community. And Jim Morrison's provocative voice was calling out to me just as strong.
Come 2007 and my Korean teaching experience helped land me a position as an ESL instructor at a Koreatown academy. That is, English as a Second Language, and to Asian students primarily, the majority of them South Korean, with many from Japan, Thailand and Mongolia. Nearly all of them had taken that same leap of faith in their lives, most having left the security of everything they knew and traveling to a far-off city, to a place that most of them knew only as a fantasy from movies or a song. And most sat before me experiencing the same kind of disorientation and culture shock that I experienced back in 1996.
One day in 2010, my academy director informed me that I had a new student in the Level Two class. She was from North Korea. That was a first for me. You surely are aware that a continued state of war exists between the South and the North that is being kept at bay by a U.N.-monitored truce. When I was in Korea, the situation was never spoken of. In 1996, I never felt the evil specter of the North's Kim Jeong-Il looming from just across the mountains. The English-language Korea Times would cite incidents on occasion, but life seemed to go on as if a dramatically different, and possibly dangerous world did not exist only miles to the north, with families continuing to be separated on both sides all these years later.
So, when I was told that we were having a North Korean woman joining our classes, I pictured a malnourished creature with a bad haircut and even worse clothes. But talk about a Korean bag of surprises, in walks a woman who could have taught Marilyn Monroe how to walk in heels. Gorgeous from head to foot - perfect hair and skin, manicured nails, a body straight off a fashion photo shoot, great clothes, and, man, could she walk in those heels. And she could speak decent English for someone without the middle school and high school English education that her South Korean cousins received.
Kim Yoon-Hui was her name. She must have been the daughter of some North Korean bigwig, because this woman had either been born into relative affluence in a country that had so little, or she had been chosen and groomed by the elite. Yoon-Hui turned out to be very reticent about sharing details of her life. I do know that she got out of North Korea through China, found her way to Seoul and connected with a Christian group that helped her find her way to Los Angeles.
Here was a woman who turned her back on what likely was a privileged life and made a blind leap of faith into the unknown. Once, privately, I asked her why she had left behind her life in North Korea. It seemed at first as if she was not going to answer me. Her brow creased as she looked off, out the window to the bright purple bougainvillea lining the walls of the parking lot.
A smile then came to her lips and she turned back to me with a warm,
“California Dreamin'.”
I knew instantly what she meant by those words and why she said them. I guess that among the privileges Kim Yoon-Hui had enjoyed in North Korea was access to DVDs and, most certainly, Chungking Express. It turns out that Yoon-Hui also was a big fan of that Chinese diva, Faye Wong. We even hummed a bit of John Phillips' song together.
Yoon-Hui has gone on to make an American life for herself. Then, almost three years later, my academy welcomed another liberated North Korean as a new Level One student. Kim Ji Seong made his way out of North Korea to China in 2003. Ji Seong also found a home in South Korea, in my old neighborhood of Pu'chon, where he came to marry and had an eight- and a four-year-old daughter. They were all new residents of Los Angeles, at least for the duration of daddy's visa.
In class one day, in front of the other dozen students, most of them South Korean, I asked Ji Seong why he had come to Los Angeles. This man also had not benefited from the English education that his southern cousins had received, and it definitely was not likely that he enjoyed the kind of privileges that Yoon-Hui had seen. But, just like his beautiful North Korean comrade, sitting there in my classroom, Ji Seong looked away, out the window towards the colorful bougainvillea, his lips moving as he tried to put some barely-understood words together to describe the dramatic, blind leap of faith he made in 2003, especially as he had just made a big leap once again, this time to the other side of the world and with his family at his side.
Just like Yoon-Hui, I thought that Ji Seong was not going to be able to give me an answer. But then his eyes lit up with a memory and a smile came to his lips. Ji Seong then said with pride,
“California Dreamin'.”
I could only smile, there were no words to say, save that Ji Seong also must have had access to a particular DVD. I should have been surprised at the coincidence, but no, his words only went to reinforce the notion that art can transcend any man-made border. Several of the South Korean students nodded in recognition of the song's title. They would have been only adolescents at the time of its popularity in their homeland, but the song's seed message still remains in all their memories. We were sitting there together, the teacher with his students, all of us intimate with not only the joys and the rewards, but also the fears and the hazards of taking daring leaps of faith in our lives. And there we were, only an hour away from the sunny beaches of our fantasies.
All of us, California dreamin'.
Kamsa Hamnida.
(Thank you.)
Terrance M. Whitten is a visual artist and writer, a Detroit native who found his way to Los Angeles in 1999 via New York City, Seattle and a stint in South Korea.
He currently resides in the Glassell Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The Grand Old Party
By S.A. Griffin
the Star Spangled Banner is playing so loudly
that nobody at the party can hear Lady Liberty's muffled screams
coming from inside the Lincoln Bedroom
flat on her back Liberty is doing all that she can to fend off
an unsteady Trump Daddy drunk with power
he has an executive hand over her mouth
while his other fat fingers climb up her garments
desperately attempting to find their way past her port of entry
into her sunset gates, "C'mon, Liberty baby –
lemme smack that sweet huddled ass of yours
yearning to breathe free. You know you want it!"
the Donald's aerodynamic pomp quacks and achieves liftoff
cutting manic shadows into the bedroom walls as he
smashes his tiny Trump thing into Liberty's weakening flesh
Uncle Sam is catching all the action standing sentry
behind home plate in front of the locked door
the old wizened white beard waving his hot dog wildly about
shouting, "Uncle Sam wants you to play ball!"
outside in the Rose Garden
Congress is making hay with the gerrymandered vote
holding hands kumbaya like for the cameras
singing Citizens United and it feels so good
Emma Lazarus rises from the grave on the shoulders of
uncountable millions upon millions of wounded women roaring
ME TOO across the crowded centuries
President Great Again deaf to their declaration
continues ripping away at Lady Liberty's tattered gown
the ghost of Emma Lazarus
breaks down the door of the Lincoln Bedroom
shattering the supreme darkness
as the colossus of angry women comes rushing in behind her
they will not be denied
it's the Donald's Waterloo
not even Putin can save him
S.A. Griffin lives, loves and works in Los Angeles. He drives too fast, sleeps too little and thinks too much. A universe in sleep's clothing, his heart is a spinning wheel that breaks for cubist impulse. Most recently the author of Pandemic Soul Music (Punk Hostage Press) and Good Madness is Hard to Come By with Michael Lane Bruner (Rose of Sharon Press), he is also the co-editor of Beat Not Beat (Moon Tide Press) and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Basic Books).
Operation Trust and Believe
By Dietmar Kohl
I Love to Live and I Live to Love
Love and Live
Live and Love
Trust and Believe!
Be Excited and very Delighted!
Dietmar Kohl, Born and raised in Vienna, Austria, enjoyed an eclectic
life full of art steeped in a deep-rooted culture. “My father gave me my first
camera when I was a teenager and we often enjoyed photography
together. As a young man, I began my lifelong work as a commercial
fashion photographer”.
On the Fringe
By Ronald G. Carrillo
On the fringe never a win
Watching from the sidelines
Don’t want to infringe
Stay in the shadows
Maintain the status quo
Even though you know you don’t belong
Fighting on two fronts
Not white but brown
Not quite American enough
But I try to bluff my way
My eyes open but in disguise
Hoping for a bigger slice of the American pie
No more lies hear our cries
We endure never sure
Held back sometimes sabotage
Self-loathing but still we endure
Judged bullied maimed
A challenge to be my essential self
Injustice barriers blocking my potential
Survival mode keeping a secret code
On the fringe
A negative binge that ruins my balance
Seeking passions that maligned my youth
Unable to speak my truth
Love denied for being on the wrong side
My fringe is blue tinged with blood
I see the stars from the gutter
My heart is homeless
But my soul is strong
My feet tread the coals of indifference
But my mind can fly and reach the sky
The weak are targeted
The fringe must appease
The seats of power that speak for the majority
An extreme right becomes unjust
Defending an us versus them
Status quo inquisitors maintain the line
Do not cross at your peril
At what cost America the great
Stunting the potential of so many men and women
Who dare to be their authentic selves
But unable to contribute their full capacity
Haters become unhinged around people who are different
They pollute the mainstream like bad apples
Turn the other cheek
Go underground
Develop kindness
Understand your enemy
Grow a thick skin
Survival instincts sink in
Fanatics are the psychotic fringe
Extremists are terrorists
Creating a predator prey mentality
Those hunted go underground
Pretend, defend, try to mend
Often must bend
In group out group infighting feeds disease
Stop the insanity
No more fringe
No more going backwards
Heartlessness injures our soul life
We must turn toward a new Paradise
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.
BEAUTIFUL PARTS
by
Peter Yates
©2023
Her most beautiful parts
are the ones
she’d most like to change.
Her legs?
She’d love to have be longer.
Nothing much – an inch or two.
Touchingly, her liftup heels
just give that game away,
drawing my attention up
to where it loves to go.
I linger there on muscled thighs
whose rubbings charm
far more than any gap.
Her breasts?
Should sag a little less,
she feels.
And I?
I take her fondly,
as she comes.
‘Too thick, these brows!’
So tisk the tweezers in her hand.
Glad am I
that Nature does so readily return
to vacant land.
Down there?
Amid the jungle of her mons,
she experiments with buzzing apparatus.
Intrigued, I spy,
but sadly find her occupied
with something other than
her pleasure.
To her blade, a silken forest falls!
leaving me, for my caresses,
only stubble.
Peter Yates In venues ranging from Lincoln Center and Italian State Radio to the art clubs of Salzburg and the wilds of Los Angeles, Peter Yates has produced over a thousand events as a composer, guitarist, writer and multimedia artist. His interest in things not done has led to a puppet opera about the Watts Towers, a DVD ghost-town opera, and several books of satire and philosophy. His activated teaching includes years on the music faculties of UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona.
father/time
By Charla M. DelaCuadra
so passes
the golden autumn
of this world
into a dark/light place
made of lengthening shadows
and warm tender moments alike.
poignant relief marks the passing
of each second and season,
pearls on a string slipping away
through fingers
roughened by time,
all the more cherished
for that which has gnarled them.
fear not,
though a shadow passes over your eyes
at the thought
of things unknown.
in the end,
you are loved.
Charla is a musician, writer, archivist, blogger, creative, thinker, planner, reader, feminist, lover, and student of life. She lives in Southern California with her patient husband, rescue pups, and a cat who thinks she rules the roost.
Thanks for joining us! We will continue to host writers and poets of all genres.
Please submit your written work to: lindakayepoetry@icloud.com and include a short bio.
Linda Kaye writes poetry, curates poetry, produces films, produces spoken word and art events and produces a poetry column POETS PLACE for the online publication LAARTNEWS throughout the Los Angeles area.
Linda’s poetry events have included several summer poetry salons, and shows at the Align Gallery, 50/50 Gallery, Gold Haus Gallery, Ave 50 Gallery and Rock Rose Gallery in Highland Park .The Manifesto Café in Hermon, Pilates and Arts studio in Echo Park, and Native Boutique, Zweet Café in Eagle Rock, The Makery in Little Tokyo. And at the Neutra Institute Gallery and Museum in Silverlake. Her first short documentary film “BORDER POETS” was a socially and politically inspired event with poets and musicians filmed at the border wall near Tecate, Mexico on the Jacumba, Ca. side of the US. The film co-produced by MUD productions is available for viewing on her website and on youtube. https://youtu.be/5Te4-dlhxco
Her rap music video project in collaboration with Mary Cheung, “ERACE-ISM” can also be seen on youtube. https://youtu.be/NfrbveNUBgg This video was accepted into the Ontario Museum of History & Art show “We the People” Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. February 2- April 16, 2023. So honored!!
And… February 19, 2022, she debuted her staged poetry production of “20 Years Left” at the historic Ebell Club in Highland Park! Two sold out shows with 2 standing ovations!! Check out the links to reviews and the video!
https://thehollywoodtimes.today/20-years-left-new-show-performance-poetry-music/
20 Years Left youtube live stream 2/19/22
Linda Kaye is a native Angeleno who grew up in the San Fernando Valley. She claims to be both a first-generation Valley Girl, and The Original Hipster. Educated at Antioch University and Cal State Long Beach in psychology and social work. Linda, now retired from medical social work, was working for the last seven years as a psychotherapist and licensed clinical supervisor for an out patient mental health clinic. She was a licensed medical social worker for 30+ years working on the front line of healthcare, a private consultant for Physicians Aid Association and for skilled nursing facilities throughout California and Arizona. She was also an adjunct assistant professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Oh yeah.
Twitter/Instagram: lindakayepoetry
http://voyagela.com/interview/daily-inspiration-meet-linda-kaye/https://
shoutoutla.com/meet-linda-kaye-poet-poetry-and-theatrical-producer-filmmaker/