OK, OK, This is for fun. My first video. A silly video of me reciting my poem Unconsummated Guitar. Hate my voice. It’s a South Philly nasal whine (South Philadelphia, a neighborhood in Pennsylvania, USA). Can’t believe I forgot to take off my glasses. Never take pictures with my regular glasses. Oh, well, it’s New Year’s Eve so this is for a laugh 🙂 Wishing us all fun and good health and happiness for 2017!
Linear calendar
Creates nice little squares
Of days and years
This follows that
Circularity makes more sense
Yet even astrology
Has Aries as the first sign
So the days and years
Seem to differently appear
But they might as well be
Lined up in nice little squares too
What can we do
To avoid the inexorable tolling
Of time
Yearly seasons keep count
As we move around the sun
The moon phases rigidly
Orbit the Earth
Drum beats of time
Calculated in sidereal months
Would there be true chaos
If we banned time?
How would we know
The time to go
To school, work, or that all-encompassing word:
Appointments
We are too wired to wait
For doctors, hair dressers, massage therapists
Without an appointment
Time is wasted
I don’t like time
Just another way
To legislate lives
I want us to live laid back
I want night people to work in the night
Dawn people to do their thing
Before birds are on the wing
Poets to write celestially in the dark
I don’t like time
But the calendar says
I must wish you all
Happy New Year
But I swear
And resolve
No more calendars for me
Anyone agree?
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: duna.budapest.hu
When I reach the horizon
Scatter my ashes
In the beloved swamp
Let me nourish the birds’ trees
Wood transforming into ukuleles
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Concert ukulele on the swamp edge
Call it bagging day
Returning gifts to Walmart
Received yesterday
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Walmart return line
HEALTH & HAPPINESS TO FRIENDS & FAMILY!
Christmas is a time of birth
New traditions from the Earth
Capsicum annum from Mexico
A green pepper named Poblano
Cicer arietinum from the Middle East
Garbanzo or chick pea, what a feast
Allium cepa from Bronze Age digs
Onions growing under dirt and twigs
Glycine max from China and Japan
Crumbly bean curd extends the life span
Solanum lycopersicum from the Southern Hemisphere
Tomatoes cooked make a saucier new year
Blending magical ingredients is so much fun
My Romani gulash in a stove-top cauldron!
,
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: My Poblano-Garbanzo Gulash
Forcing me to look into your eyes
Knew something not quite right
Swimming in your ominous pools
Feeling the pulse of a song
You, you said you love me
In love, you said
Whispered in a star-tossed bed
Me, refusing to give away my anemic power
But worn down (“Do you, do you love me???”)
Admitted the truth
I do
What a night
Me and you
Swimming in dark pools of
Unbearable delight
Only to drown in reluctant dawn
You took your pools
I felt a fool
Gone, gone your hypnotic eyes
Leaving me floundering
In your lies
No one to hear my wounded cries
Now in pools
Dead as jet mourning jewels
Barricading the last image
Of one about to be a ghost
Pools deep as the sloping sands
Of a continental shelf
Pools hiding hazards unknown
To a naïve but desperate woman
Who took the chance of diving
Into the frigid waters of possibility
Despite swirling in blood-red
Whirlpools
I want to die from the lie
Knowing, now,
That I’d been so wrong
About you…
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: DARK WATER, RGBstock.com
So many meanings for gris-gris
Little cloth bag of thirteen charms
Used as an amulet or for a curse or
As a method of birth control
Vodoun the religion
Voodoo-Hoodoo stereotypes
Black magic or good luck
Zombies, chicken bones
Dolls with pins
What is the truth, the head spins
I think of it as the original French word: gray*
I see it as a swirl of black and white
I see it as day and night
I see it as yang and yin
I see it as the divine curtain
Separating hell and heaven
Gray, like the Grateful Dead say
Everything has a touch of gray
Including magic
My gris-gris bag was too powerful
Syncretized with my own Gypsy culture
It now sits at the bottom of my closet
In my backpack of cremation clothes
To my sons:
Tie it around my neck
As I go into the flames
This is a last request
In sound mind I proclaim…
https://youtu.be/wOaXTg3nAuY touch of grey, grateful dead, youtube
The “a” in “gray” is US English and the “e” in “grey” is British although the GDead used the British spelling (just a bit of boring trivia)
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
Image: flickriver textures creative commons
Elegant customs adopted by most world cultures for a fortuitous Biteder Rat:
*
Vibrant clothes and lustrous boots
Honey dripping from fried melija corn
Candles glittering to light our way
After meditating in Neolithic darkness
A tranquil universe is born.
*
Chants and poems echoing
With a new moon making visible
Stars and planets joining Orion
In his nightly romp up high
Through the speckled night sky
Venus, Mars, Pleiades
(Those seven sisters smiling upon us).
*
Sacred herbs and evergreen
Red berries and dandelion wine
Crystals clear, crystals colorful
To remind us of the coming year.
*
Shortest day, longest night
A rebirth for the Earth
Reversal of the sun’s ebbing
The flow of life, a solar delight
A time to celebrate the Solstice
A word that means “Stand Still.”
*
Shuffle the Drom Ek Romani
My Way of One Gypsy cards
For guidance in the pristine year
Earth, Water, Air and Fire
Nothing new yet nothing to fear.
*
The meaning of this celebration?
Above all, love and peace
Cease all war and hatred
Send out only the kindest thoughts
Into the winter aethers
May they permeate the unity
Of the circle that is Earth…
*
© 2014 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja) Parallel Universe Cafe and Other Poems
IMAGE: December 21, 2016 Winter & Summer Solstices 10:44 UT earthsky.com
Raindrops in a discarded walmart mug
Tinkling like the finest crystal
Winter sun glittering through humid silence
Bouncing off a tin shed roof housing abandoned treasures
Cobwebs decorating half-gnawed boxes of once-important IRS receipts
Do not be fooled
Nature allows us the illusion of civilization
And the poisonous tinkering of her gifts
But it is merely misdirection
As we pay attention
To our minor defecation on today’s interests
Nature is reclaiming, unnoticed, in other parts
Performing her illusions
Like making the Statue of Liberty disappear
While we gape like the apes we are
While our children die from chemicals
While our wildlife fades into history
Nature waves her vengeful wand…
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Gaia, Anselm Feuerbach 1875
Moving away from the city that day
No longer able to tolerate cement suffocating the earth
Never seeing the universe’s nightly planetarium
Hiding out in the country
Ostriching my head
As the daily news counted the dead
Telling myself, I’m safe
But I know now it is the absolute end
Glass face of the moral compass
Shattered
If there was still a molecule of belief
In love and peace
It has been sucked into a
Bottomless vacuum
And nothing
Not a speck
Not an iota
Can ever be seen
No matter how strong the
Scanning electron microscope
Zaps
Seeking an image
Gone, all gone…
© 2016 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: pollen molecules under scanning electron microscope
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