MERRY MONTH OF MAY

Month of May
Pouring rain
Six inches
Looked at last May’s
Poetry
One about the drought
Starkey Park on fire
Mere miles from my house
Now tropical storms
Daily pourings
With an electric light show
Burning the weeping sky
My dogs wet
Doing bladder runs
Between the drops
Poured coffee but no chance to drink
Poured cold coffee back in the pot
Poured back into the cup, hot
Dried the fur of three
Changed my wet clothes
Wondering if I’ll ever get to see
May deluges bringing May flowers
Maybe June will bring some sanity
Calming the mutability
Of elemental water…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: 3 wet dogs

 

 

CROSSROADIN’

scroll down for a YouTube video

Ah, so wanted to play
Performance-quality
Guitar
Right next door’s the swamp
Don’t have to walk far
Flooded this week
Put on rubber boots
Satellite picture guiding me
But tripped over some roots
Looking for the crossroads
Pictured on GPS
Swamps tend to change
When it storms in excess
My mind screamed “Anomaly!”
Because it wasn’t a perfect X
Still, I heard guitar playing
Saw Robert Johnson on his knees
Inconsistency
Two realms touched
Causing a liminality
Yet half-heartedly
I cried, “What the hell?
My soul to sell?
No, no way!”
And I looked around
Thinking
Get me out of here
Snake City
Don’t want a gator committee
On my way
Wish me home
In pre-dawn dark
Heard Papa Legba laugh
Closed my eyes
Willed me safe
Woke up in bed
Grabbed my guitar and played
Sounded like dead lead
But that’s ok
It’s fun
Turns the rain into sun
I’m done
Crossroadin’
I think, while I strum…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGES: Santee swamp over my fence/Me on edge of swamp

YouTube video Robert Johnson, Crossroads https://youtu.be/Yd60nI4sa9A

 

THE BLOGETRESSA

Who influenced me
To write?
Anne Frank
Her diary!
Begged for one
And then, on my tenth birthday
There it was
Waiting for me
To add to the history
Of young women writers
But somehow
In the post second world war atmosphere
And the beginnings of the madness
Called a police action
Soon to take place
In a place
Not yet in our history books
Vietnam
My diary fell short
Of Anne’s writing
So I switched to mystery novels
And wrote my first
At age ten
But then
Never got past descriptions of
The heroine’s food
And although I was in love with Sherlock
It came as a shock
How difficult to write a novel could be
So then the sixties
Writing poetry shadows of Ginsberg
And then Dylan-ish songs
Didn’t pick up my pen
For another two decades
But told I was too old to be published
By some, um, poetry journal “editor”
And now, thanks to social media sites
I’m a poet! Self-proclaimed, I know
And to some of you who sneer at me
The Blogetressa
Nonetheless a
Poet I be…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Tools of the trade

TECH SPELL

Is there a spell for technology?
When digging a well
I use a water spell
When working with electricity
There’s a fine one for domesticity
When planting food
Mother Earth shows gratitude
In a windy storm
Words protect and reform
But how to appeal to technology
Working on a mysterious mythology
Hidden inside a magic box
Symbols coded in a paradox
While waving my magic stylus?

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Technology awaiting a spell

 

ETERNAL CIRCLE

(scroll down for a YouTube video)

I play the songs of
Too many dead people
Keeping them alive
As their guitars and faces
Fill my eyes
Words and music
Soothing my soul
Thanks, all, for the
Gift that gives eternally
This month’s practice is Let It Be*
Over and over
Doesn’t sound like
The naked version 2003
Paul redid by stripping the
Background strings, drums, keys and voices
My version is ugly-nude
As ugly as this ol’ lady
Stripped to her black underwear
Strumming the chords
Singing the words
But there is beauty in ugliness
Timeless music
Echoing along the continuum
Surely it reaches back into 1970
And soon-to-be-dead John
And unknowingly-blessed-with-a-long-life Paul
Hear a tune
On their linear line
And pick up guitars
Sit at pianos
Singing so fine
A new song
Somehow, they think,
Popped into their already-crowded heads
But time is truly a circle
And they hear a reverberation
Of some crazy ol’ lady
Playing in 2018
Their song
Because life goes on
A circle of time
Of legacy
Of the future
Telling the past what to create
Even though it was composed in
A linear past
That really never existed
Except in our sorry minds
That cannot grasp
Cannot unclasp
The idea of time not being part of
A straight line…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Ibanez Acoustic Tenor Guitar echoing down the decades

*Written by Paul McCartney, attributed to Lennon-McCartney Partnership

YouTube Video, 1970 original Let It Be https://youtu.be/2xDzVZcqtYI

THREAD OF HOPE REVIEW

A heroic treat by fellow-blogger, poet and artist Denise Fletcher who “demonstrates the healing power of creativity and spirituality in the life of the psychiatrized.”

 

NEURODIVERSE ROMP

(WITH YANG HUI, PASCAL & DURER)

ONE

Feel like I wandered into
Pascal’s Triangle
Me, a rogue number
In my Neurodiverse way
Destroying binomial coefficients
While other numbers roll their
Equivalent to human eyes
They boot me out
And I fall into Yang Hui’s Triangle
Discovered centuries before Pascal’s
The coefficients here
Are more polite
Maybe they’re rolling their eyes
But the number beside me
Suggests I’d be happier
Checking out Yang Hui’s
Magic Square or Circles

TWO

I was so awful at Geometry
Although loving numbers and
The math magic of number 9
But here I am
Welcomed by the Magical All
And I wonder
If we on the Spectrum stepped out of Math
And into the reality of Neurotypicals
If our tribe would find
A benign but blind group
Who never roll their disdainful eyes
But do try
To accept
Our contact
How would that be…?

THREE

Then I sigh
Remembering Albrecht Durer’s
Melencolia I
His woodcut always stuck with me
Because could swear he used my mother’s face
As model for his sad winged woman
(My artist crush never displaced)
And I look at the Magic Square on the wall
Adding up to thirty-four
Yang Hui’s centuries before
And the hopelessness
Of fitting the wrong number
Into a perfect Magic Square
And know we’ll never really fit into
The Society we crave
The friends whose
Open or secret condescension
Surfaces when we try to behave
Exactly like them…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: 1514 A. Durer’s Melencolia I / Magic Square / Mission Galactic Freedom

 

skein

brain doing some interesting
slip-slide-glides anymore
not very sure
but may be related to aging
time-travel in my mind
and you are there
whether past, present or future
a quantum entanglement
yeah, i know
not meant to describe love
but it’s more a twinning
positive i’ve known you forever
and now
like einstein’s spooky action
i almost see you
because X marks the spot
oh, look, the shadow’s fading
forming a crystal-clear definition
and the cogwheels of my mind
creak to the music of time
while reaching out
across the light years of space
to see, and touch, your face…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: today’s skytrail over the swamp

 

SEASONAL CONVERGENCE

Picking my way through the swamp
Stomping in useless suede cloth boots
Sand spurs sticking to tights
Shouting to warn unbrumating snakes
All for the picture
And the metaphor
Of seeing the palm tree
Juxtaposed with the Queen Anne’s Lace
But by the time I hike into the
Out of control greens and browns
Hang up my guitar for the arty effect
The photo just isn’t there
At least not by phone camera
That I swear has no zoom-in
The sun hovers between East and South
Washing out the white flowers
If I move forward
The deep swamp will suck me down
It’s not really evil
Just has a sense of humor
And I seem to be the only one fascinated
With its loveliness
So I make it two photos
But the poem in my mind
Is gone
The metaphor was
The convergence of seasons
Palm tree
That never lost its greenery
Because of the warm winter
Queen Anne’s Lace
So Philly and Jersey summer
From my youth
The only flowers
Besides the Sunflower
That I’d occasionally see
In the concrete city
North meets South
Spring meets Summer
No, better go
Before the Water Moccasins
Slither over
And in May
The gators walk all day
Looking to mate
Bad enough a Blue Jay
Almost crashed into me
On my elliptical
This morning, outside
Pedaling to
Of all tunes
“Florida”

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGES: My guitar on the swamp palm tree and quasi-invisible Queen Anne’s Lace

 

“TOUCH NO ONE”

black rosary beads curtain
disguising world wormhole
sitting in a capsule
bed, computer, guitar
closed off from the lights
stretching so far
revealing desires
not ready
not
cannot
part the beads
and look out the window

*Paul Simon “I Am A Rock”

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Beaded Curtain, Creation of Ami Wolf and Jin-Yo Mok