Sunday, August 13, 2006



Derailed in the Spook House
and Waiting

poems by Peter Joseph Swanson

Over the months there will be a wide variety of lengths, subjects, and styles, including Italian sonnets, villanelles, haikus, and even a canzona villanella - about Isis, Jesus, witches, Free Masons, group homes for the mentally retarded, being gay, drag queens, bad food, war, Israel, the birth of universes, disease, literalism, my growing up on a goat farm, film school, celebrity, liberals, right wing radio, punks, goths, darksiders, nerds, Jericho, Megiddo, Sodom, a very big earthquake at Disneyland, the city bus, and a rinky-dink spook house.

To see more derailed pictures - http://200poems.wordpress.com

To see my Joan Crawford art - http://petersjoanart.spaces.msn.com


part one - go all the way back to most intimate confessions of Isis.

1

ISIS AS CHILD AT RIVER

My star has fallen from the sky
the star that I'd chosen to pray to.
Has it done this just to terrify
and leave me wanting to die, too.
The sky is high and far away
the road is empty and long
will epoch help me to clarify
why life is dumb ditty dingdong.

Why care at all why flowers close
or why water is malevolence by night
when crocodiles eat the feathered piles
is flight only out of fright?

My thoughts have fallen from my head
I'm empty and barren and frigid.
I'd stand up but the wind is back
and its song is rather insipid.
A hope for a friend is far away.
The way back to the fort is too much.
I'll sleep on the banks next to such sharp teeth
just to see what fate says, no reason, inasmuch.

2

THE WEDDING PAGEANT OF ISIS AND OSIRIS

The Festival of Beer
is here and so we sup a tall cool cup
of golden golden light
elixir of the Gods
Golden light
Ra delight
drink enough to
take bender flight

The Festival of Love
is here and so we sup a tall cool cup
of leg spread
berry berry flame
elixir of the Gods
lurid flesh, lurid flame
drink to have no
mortal shame
Ra delight

The Festival of Ra
is here
stand up and glean
monotheism
opened his eye and gave us light
grow beer

The pageant spreads far
If you're sick by now
some things will come up
but your head will be lofty
your mind will want order
send all of your army
to block the federal border

If you grow sick of all the carnage
that's the way of war and plans
if you grow tired in midstream, too bad
a bird can sleep only after it lands

3

MOTHER OF RELIGION

In Egypt where the country is green at the banks of the cool
serene water
there was a time when wisdom was gleamed from an act of
messy manslaughter.
His arms and wrists, his knees and legs, all chopped to
separate portions.
His wife sewed them tight in a cohesive kite and flew him to
extraordinary fortunes.

Their city grew magic but churched-up to evil. So it all washed away in mundane upheaval. Prayers continue on to this present age, albeit, a cold statue is now your woman as sage.

4

IN THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

book-to-book a poem says simple
to read at all you can talk serpent nimble
politician you need to be O' Mother O' Religion
make citizens do things in up-and-down unison
where the city is better than the cannibals out west
to have a cold grain brew and helpless animal is best
all sinewy labor until the axe makes convulse
in the sand you can watch the river flood in blue pulse
divide the whole kingdom into manageable thirds
but it won't give you big or small ideas or words.

Poem-to-poem it makes a hot book crimple
and knot into angst and bad manners not simple
off the harbor there's sailors from distant north dots
the adriatic sea is too far for such soddy sots
and their languages may have been half written down
so we'll search every hull every chest into town
and hoard words as if they'll last us to forever
walled from battle and taxes and partisan weather.

5

VENICE, WITH BONES

sack me gobs of lilacs the next time you float down
Venice
the glass lasts longer but is it as musical and
rife
all beauty bleeds so fast you have to run mad to
replenish
or leave the steps bare of anything and let them be
stones
under wiggling reflections are gondola bones without
life
infection is there where the gloss kisses and slams
foam
prows swath the green film in slow circles to your
address
the apartments and inns are stacked like relocated
headstones

6

ROT STOPS

You're too fabulous, with all that you are, to merely rot.
The human animal lives in a fake world of it's own making.
Your life was too earnest to tell your story beyond earshot.
Do you sometimes wonder why everything looks heartbreaking?
Bricks, power lines, mercury and lead from chimneys are okay.
Breathe drink and eat some thick stuff, without too much pay.
It can only kill you and death is okay in religion.
Fly off to Pamperland like a quiet dove or crass pigeon.
You'll go on in glory, you're too self absorbed to just rot.
You're fabulous, until your heart stops, and then you forgot.

7

MADRIGAL FOR SUMMERLAND AND SCIENCE

tis the first day of summer the air's bright and clear
the dale's dotted with shoes, socks and trousers
but don't run to the edge, you'll see it's a box
at the school of hard knocks for all hours

you're dead, you died, off to the beyond
you went to the Summerland patch of black grasses
and there's no merry-go-round spinning in the field
for reincarnation passes

stand and wait, stand and wait, your turn
is over - kick out of your old shoes

The trees and dirt and grass you feel
is all you get with no appeal
as carbon shot you'll join the place
helping the smirk on Darwin's face
helping the mouse to grow like cat
redeem your life as aristocrat
while the sun bloats to fall apart
to fill space like a congested heart
it'll fry the earth as an afterthought
matter will sequester - ne'r again to be caught
the end of all time will come, you can wait
you've already left its arrow too straight
back through a baffling black hole conundrum
made sterile if reborn in bland equilibrium
grow cold! grow cold! like cosmic absolute nothing
no more fire and stones and dead bird stuffing
no more merry-go-round in the grass by the tree
it's a desolate cataract where all matter can flee

tis the first day of summer our heart's filled with mirth
the bovine lick babies in sunshine
that's the vista from Summerland looking to the west
don't look back, don't think thoughts saturnine

sit on the crabgrass and remember your manners
you have to smile at passing cars, and wave
there's only one coming by, only one by the hour
in the retention of things you'll have memories to save

8

OLIVE TREE CURSE

you bulldozed my fence, but my goat has legs so ran
and I can buy a new goat when you're out of my hair
you bulldozed my furniture, sentimental chests and bed
I watched them crunch under the house stones that day
the house was old, too, passed from father to father
the farmland has no papers, it's so old in time
you paid for a drawn-up deed anyway to be grabby
you bulldozed my olive trees, that was the last straw
a tree is our fruit that'll feed us tomorrow
the tree is the whole family in a thousand years time
olive trees grow for so long, they aren't just some crop
I now live in the compressing city cramming in a crunch
I share great stories of hate from others like me
we share to vow you dead with violence and terror
you will not take our oil and blood and be God blessed

9

RIBBONS

The two ribbons of light
came up out of the crack
in the nuclear plant,
lights in the thick dust
that were not self aware
but tried to mate.
Light is important.
Light is impotent.

The sky is like pink ribbons in yellow hair to set the spinning ride on fire - it isn't even there. In Summerland there are no portals back. Our reincarnation is all within our one disjoined life. Only one. And only for bipeds - begetting envy.

The feedlots tremble with lost greed. Their black lagoons fill with bones. The empty hulls of bugs will soon follow. The next ancestors of what is now tiny fungus will ask what is this scripture, these protracted ribbons of pictures left behind in tedious sequences showing monsters of the past on an odd brittle celluloid. The old era must have had inordinately patient creatures skilled in the most repetitive miniature illustration.

Paper clips were left on stairs. Ribbons spill out of small drawers. Many things were left in their boxes. Everything suddenly seemed so dropped. The eastern horizon is as lonely as the bottom of the arctic sea. Envy kills. They won't become extinct alone.

It's all disjointed and the story of my own life is many reincarnations that'll never meet. This isn't to be understood like only one book. Time is sideways in this house - ribbons up walls and across ceilings and floors. My story is mostly fallen bookshelves. That’s okay by me - the pieces were never meant to be read in one passing. They've fallen off their branches. The fingers fell apart. It's incoherent. It's disjointed. But this is common for my world, so I'm not sad. I'm just let down. Again.

What if there is no portal out of Summerland, only dirt, grass and trees, and we're all those things at the very same time? A ride spinning around would boldly imply reincarnation and that's only for this one disjointed life. I'll have to wait and see. In a few minutes. When I feel like I'm floating out of my body it's only a part of my oxygen starved brain misfiring. Being told different doesn't change that. Religion is belligerent. Hope is impotent. Reason only knows what it sees. Poetry is powerless against math. Poetry can only speak to like-minded deliberators. Math speaks to all ages and we were always so very bad at it.

10

ARTHURIAN LEGENDS

Merlin got Arthur high on a toadstool
Arthur flapped his druid words
and thought it was so vital.
Out of time in a war of new larger horses
he kissed the pool and the Lady of the Lake
kissed back, full of aspiration.
Hooray the witches and Goddesses that
woke up and caused dreaming.
Beltaine blossoms replace
yellow barley stalks and confusion.
Tulips and lilies are pagan
gossips of reincarnation.
Beltaine proves it when
everything grows again.
It has proof.