First year you appeared
Blooming along clinging vines
Deceptive beauty
Disguising your aggression
Strangling the kindness of trees
(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Ipomoea Pandurata, Wild Potato Vine Blossoms
A POEM ABOUT THE ACTUAL AIR POTATO VINE:
https://poeturja.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/dioscorea-bulbifera-air-potatoes/
Perpendicular grid
Reminds me of that
Old Geometry mnemonic:
X to the left, Y to the sky
Yes, you’ve zoomed up the matrix
Not reacting to the psi
While I struggle along
Fire-in-a-trench route
Round and round
We intersected, briefly
At the point of origin
Held my breath
Hoping you’d want to try
Being a coordinate pair
Before you floated into the air
But you never acknowledged me
We continued on
Relentless geometric graph
Never to say hello
Though I whispered goodbye…
(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE:AMULETS: Math, Travel & Music
Women!
Don’t toss your bras
At musical concerts
Fling those books
Of poetry
You spent time writing
Revealing your agony
Of love and life and fantasy
That rarely, if ever, comes true
Toss that lacy, black book
Of rhythmic suffering
Or cast that hard-living
Denim tome
Of your broken heart and home
Aim those pages
Potential songs
Maybe they’ll like your words
Maybe they’ll use their
Talented fingers
To set your soul to
Music seducing you
But be strong
I’ve done it before
And I’m quite sure
Those men up there
Prefer bras flung
Because the words they sung
Were never mine…
(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: My bra, books & guitar
Haunted by youthful dreams
Too late to reinvent myself
Island metaphor strongest
Easier to be alone
There was Java
Circumscribing a mineral world
Of left-over lava
Decorating via fatal eruptions
Merapi volcano cosmology
Of fire-breathing dragons
Would I exist on a moon-like world
There was Fiji
Divided by time
Could stand there with one foot in today
And one in tomorrow
Or is it yesterday
Where the international dateline
Bisects the 180th meridian
Pieces of land
Floating in oceans
A fish net
A water purification kit
A lifetime supply of Vitamin C
It could have been easy
Sand or dirt a magic slate
Whatever written washed away
By tidal spray
There were other islands
Of song and book
But now that I look back
It is clear that the island experience
Was lived as I moved through droves of
Endless people
Smiled. laughed, talked
But they all must have been
Particles of colorful matter
Because I, the deportee
Now see
That the island is me…
(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: posted on YouTube by Placers, Merapi Volcano
Surprise treasure from the Earth
Pushing up shattered pieces of art
Like volcanoes forming islands
Over the millennia
Broken, delicate
A message brought
By flooding rain
Pounding the dirt
That once absorbed
The free mulch
Mountains of mulch
At the city recycling center
Shoveled into garbage bags
Brought home to be dumped
On a ten by twelve garden spot
Productive for years
In healthier days
Now evolved into a
Radio Control car track
And later, a robot walkway
Yesterday, I tripped and saw
A piece of cement etched with
A trinity of painted leaves
Once someone’s garden step-stone
To me, a message from the trees
Leaves!
Fighting its way
Via granular convection
To the surface of my flooded
Back yard
To remind me
Rain, heat and humidity
While uncomfortable
Bring much-needed growth…
(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Track with prize of leaves & mulch
