Disappearing Think

A plain old rambly run-on of a poem.

Rapunzel was happy in her sexless tower.
Untouchable, and looking down on everything.
The birds that visited her gave her just enough to chew on.
Just enough news, just enough beauty.
Any extra was an annoyance, and besides,
Good food still grew in the fields.  Sunsets still came
And went away in darkness.  Life was working 
Just as it always had, even with her not in it.
No colony needs every single ant.  Ants die.
The hive thrives.  Still, some days did feel a little hollow.
A whisper you remembered overhearing, but
Still can’t quite make out--all those lousy vowels.
The sill below the window was thick with dust,
Velveting her idle finger.  The mirror never surprised her anymore,
And the books talked like strangers amongst themselves.
Still, all this went on for years and years in just the same way
Until there was no more shuffling back and forth, room to room.
The birds found another friend to talk to, and did.
Still, people pointed to the empty tower for years and years,
Turned to one another and told her story for her.

Gregg Glory

2/07/2009

The Conscious Mind is Free

Ran this off last night. I have to admit, I haven't been writing much, but with four kids running around it doesn't leave much time. Nevertheless, the times kind of dictate more writing. If no one else is going to speak, it is the poets who are called on to give voice to the woes of the people. And the woes, regretably, are many. I hope not to browbeat with depression and doom (my perceived forte), but rather to instill a pride in ones being, a recognition of ones unfettered will, no matter what else may seem to be happening around us. That's what inspired this poem, my first in ages. I hope you enjoy it.-- Chuck Moon

The conscious mind is free,
Breathing dustcloud,  I-beam symphonies,
Straight talk walking with HD digital,
Dolling out expense in excess of compensation,

The conscious mind is free,
To grasp at expert desk analisis,
Reason billion dollar bailout heists,
Midst billion dollar energy hijacks,

The conscious mind is free,
Scrambling hi-tech eavesdrop monitoring,
Deleting temporary browsing histories,
Unloading the cell phone GPS tracking technology,

The conscious mind is free,
Recalling Jefferson, King, Lewis, and Neitze,
Hearing Nader, Guthrie, Guevara, and Ron Paul,
Reading Smith, Sandburg, Spengler, and St. Paul,

The conscious mind is free,
Discerning the corkscrew tongues and liars eyes,
Dividing debate between light and darkness,
Checking the balance, receipt versus outlay,

The conscious mind is free,
Never abandoning it's righteous humanity,
Always in reasoned circumspect obeying,
Not losing that sense of collective mortality,
Free in rational contemplation,
Mind on eventual alleviation of,
Consciousness kidnapped by pirate overlords,
The conscious mind is free.

Chuck Moon

12/28/2008

Blips

I am desperate to love you, to know you,
Like a bride who burns off her wedding dress,
Like lips waiting, misshapen, to kiss.

Kisses fell out of of us like water falls,
Bursting to earth and deafening the onlookers!
When we kissed, we could hear the sea crashing around us.

But where are they now, those slippery kisses?
What's left of their vast wetness?
No child has grown between us.

Even a puddle leaves its residue of mud,
Some softening of the way
Despite whatever volume of traffic.

Stirring the syrup of your sweet sweet life,
Letting the licks insist their way into me, inside me,
Surely my lips remain sticky?

How many feet have been here before us?  Every foot.
Every pace of the path is hard with old passages, old passions.
Every route is known;  no star blinks undiscovered--

Except by us, two blips on the periphery,
Elliptical with longing, our lips chapped by the long wintering over,
Too stiff and dry to even whistle!

Our veined and florid maps are still tucked in our backpacks.
Our tents are not yet ready to unroll with sleep.
My eyes keep blinking, keep looking, no matter how dark the way.

There's still so much to see, I think,
When your hand brushes mine under the pine trees,
And the sound of our walking fades into the background,

And I close my eyes to breathe.
If love is, then love is what happens
When you forget where you're going.

Gregg Glory

11/25/2008

Burial at Sea

What sound does a soul make when it goes down the hole? Is this a rhetorical question?

This keeps happening:

In the field outside
Mist gathers in little clutters
Unswept.  It glitters and sags.

Nothing in my life is very tidy.
The stamp collection from when I was 12
Blows off the shelf in a windstorm
Of colorful, cancelled leaves.

        I am older than I was yesterday.
When Lisa calls on the phone, casually blank,
I don't care.  It hurts.

Shaving, I cut someone else's face.
The watery blear of blood flows away from him,
Down the well-formed hole in the porcelain
Made for the purpose.

Gregg Glory

11/22/2008

Heading North

A minute's meandering with a wily quill.

Taking the Garden State Parkway north
To a dentist appointment in Brooklyn,
I notice the cauldron of fogs at Cheesequake
Is all colors.

The mist makes my glasses cry.
I curse stubbornly,
Wiping them clean at the filling station
On the ratty, untucked hem of my shirt.

The ugly gears in my car
Wail and whine
Like rabbis at a smoky wall.
Somehow today, every day is too long to endure.

It's only later I remember, falling asleep
Under the pink floodlights of my apartment,
How this awkward swan,
Beating slowly, rose from the marsh
Out of the soft fogs, his dawn wings

Flashing sharply.

Gregg Glory

10/16/2008

Humiliation in a Green Meadow

This is what the sky keeps saying to me.

The sky crowds my shoulders
As I kick the stubborn tufts of grass in the field.
It's too blue, or something.  I don't like
Living inside an eyeball.

It's going to take a very great person
To just stand there and love me.

Across the grass,
A gray squirrell emits it's chuk-chuk challenge
At a dog, head down on the ash trunk
Darkened by night rains.

The unmolested grass is long and wet.

I consider how the horses
Will come stand here all day,
And all night
And just take it.

Gregg Glory

10/16/2008

Cut Once

Fine advice from a doodler and witless whittler.

If you want to live in a civilization,
You have to put the pieces together yourself.
Every day.

If the steeple leans, don't blame the wind.

Hey, getting your hands dirty isn't the only part.
Afterward, there's singing.

Gregg Glory

10/16/2008

The Falcon Waiting

Spent the last four days in the company of poets at the Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival. A falcon showed up unexpectedly behind the huddled porta-johns in the misty weather. Somehow, I feel like like I'm always shaking Jim Haba's hand.

My friend Dan's a ghost now since Christmas.
In this mist 

There's only a green line of fence
Last night's rain did not dissolve.

Then the falcon is there,
Snowy in the humid morning warmth.
He lets his silken shoulders shake.
His compact head moves like a ball
Rolling in your palm.

His face is all severe eye,
And one closed hook.  
When he stares my way, I can't guess what he sees.

There is no time in him,
Only flight that has not yet risen to his wingtips.

When he goes from the wet fence
To the barn's peak,

Its like watching an old man shuffle
All his belongings in one gunny sack.

Looking back in paler air, I have
No memory of what we carry with us.

No weight keeps me on the ground.
There's almost nobody here.

Gregg Glory

09/29/2008

Snails

Racing lazily around Round Hill Reservoir with my long-legged pals.

Slowly the shore path
	unwound to rocks,
the vapid wap-wap of the tinted water
same as the mini-van's sun visor
as we walked observing
	another summer come
	to its fructifying finish

passing knocked-down cairns
or astounded butterflies
	apple blossom ghostly
over the trodden mud that glistens
under the long green lashes
	of the pine trees.

As we sit in shade and write,
turning the purring cars
of our consciousnesses inward
	I think of you
flapping in your matted tangle of sheets,
breath rum-rich, your smoky eyes
	opening on no vivid wet
or sunken stones, now bereft
	of their giving skip.

Here, we sink in sunlight
and lightest windsurfers stand
	astride the waters--
same as Jesus--live and looking
forward into the void
	and windy nothing
	of the wind.

Gregg Glory

07/20/2008

Butcher's Lane

Done on a dare during this summer's walking tour of Nether Stowey and the coombs. Penned on the back of some Google Maps directions at The Ancient Mariner Inn.

Strong with hungry step I begin my way
Up butcher's lane, whose [dark] hole of wild briars
The public mower cut, sparing more buds with speed
Than careful industry, plucking 
Each by each, would reap.  For singly still above
Overlooms a rangy rose fully lit,
And tranquil as if never threatened--
A capable keystone for the small lane's
Unarachwayed gate.  It holds no leaning stones
Together, nor other green weavery
Of country aspect husbanded and led to twine--
No, nor any part of the downward things of Earth
Whence all archways rise but to return
--Not that it holds, this dew-soft frailest flag
Inattention's left aloft--it holds instead
All the mighty arch of blue Heaven up
By the self-enfolded hope that tops
Its thorny stalk above the closing shadows
Of the lane.  Pale star!  I too shall survive
The cuts of Life!  I too shall rise on ridgy stalk
To blossom on--I pledge it now, to thee,
Pink guardian!  And so, with sprung step upwards
I go through the hole of dampened green;
The hot sun's shut out by warden stems
And among the spotted flowers idly left
Woozy bees zumm through the fresh-threshed leaves.

Gregg Glory

06/20/2008

Easter 2008

Spring's inevitable insistence.

What was here
Is gone.

But now it is back
With a sudden

sweetness!

Gregg Glory

03/23/2008

P.S.

Lord Dermond is gone to eternity, with a diamond on his brow.

Oh I was young and once
All the world was once

My own golden rose.

No dawn lifted up
But my eyes lifted too:

To see the smallest waterdrop
Dot the most minor leaf

Was heaven in my reach--

No zigzag bird could sing
Of widened skies untried

But sang the very note of me.

And then... but then...
The small difference of a day

Unmade me.

Gregg Glory

01/26/2008

Ghosts and Princes

The Ghosts and Princes manifesto is back! An original Defense of Poesy by Lord Dermond and Gregg Glory! Can you handle the truth?

Ghosts and Princes *revised edition 2003

Poetry database

This is a set of links to stripped-down presentations of all the poems I've got in my central database so far. Poetry database.