OTI:sixteen poems and notes:7/23/16

Open To Interpretation

Lost Song From A Dream

I cried beat beat
I tried beat beat
Our love was so complete
Beat beat

Da da beat beat
Da da beat beat
Dada da da da da da
Beat beat


And a kind of woodblock telegraph key tapping for drum beats

Oh it's gone,
I had the whole song...

Oh, No Doubt

Oh, no doubt
Your redoubt
Is impervious
To all my flirts
And so obvious
If one succeeds
It will be genius.

Rehearsal

Oh,
That computer rehearsed
Its chess move how many billion times?
Nothing, nothing at all
To the stars' reiterations
That brought you here.
No wonder I fear
From some stupid impulse
I'm repulsed
And wander another eternity.

Flowers

Flowers are in attendance
At funerals and weddings,
And more attentive than I,
So easily I drift off subject
Unless it's mine.

Beauty And Proportion

So, you too love
Beauty and Proportion,
Even your own.
My flatteries never meet
Your humble look,
Rather your questing look,
"Tis so?"
"Yes, you're beautiful."  I say,
Grateful to speak what most pleases you,
Truly,
And greet your embrace.

Tease

Tease my ass
Oh you do you do
An expression of affection
They say
That
Pleases me too.

Would

Would that I would
Have you don sackcloth with me?
Like Francis his Claire?
Just getting naked together
Would be a start,
From there
We can go anywhere.

Rich And Poor

Oh, we could be really really rich
Or really really poor
From fickle Fortune's door.
Most likely some middle niche
Our own efforts marry...
Anyway, those shopping carts
Look really really heavy.

Your Castle

Oh, your castle from the outside
Seems spacious
But inside it's kind of tiny
And nightly crowded with unknightly knights.
Weapons aside, we'd hardly make a phalanx against the kittens.
But we pay the rent,
And may as well be heaven sent.

What Am I Saying?

I can look dour,
I can look serious,
What am I saying?
I am.
I could be your bodyguard,
I could be your
Knight in shining armor.
What am I saying?
I've got no armor,
Or much polish.

Musings

Oh.
My musings for you
Are now everywhere
Under the leaf litter
Of this new forest.
Reach down,
And brush any leaf aside,
You may find one,
But more likely
Some pesky insects
I with must needs share this floor.

The Cacophony

Too muted my musings?
Blame the cacophony.
I'd need sirens to drive through all that,
And even still they won't pull over.
Maybe in the dead of night
When traffic's light
While awaiting sleep
You'll hear my tunes
With the Mockingbird's.

A Second Stanza For The Lost Song

You sighed,
Replied,
"My heart doesn't yours entreat."

Mine, like a metronome
Set to double time,
Went still.

Perverse

Oh, I am perverse,
But it's just too hot
To do much else
Than layabout
And write verses for you.

Never

Some anticipation this,
I have no idea what to expect
Ever,
So always prepare
For never.

Conversation

You're my conversation now...
When I left the mountains
I lost my conversation...
Conversations actually.
Now, there's you.
It can be fatal not to have someone
To talk to, they say.
What do they know,
It can be Death himself
Waiting behind your Black Glass Doors.

DolphinWords

Notes:  Lost Song...I tried to retrieve it from my dream, where it was playing perfectly...and I could still hear it as I key padded, but it faded, and faded, and was gone...the second Lost Song is an effort to make a verse from the fragment...one night I had a whole lot of poems dreamed...all I had to do was awake and transcribe, but couldn't manage even one word, so illusive they were!...Oh, No Doubt...flirts are always a fail, and silly, until one works!...Rehearsal...reference the final episode of Person of Interest...a goof...Flowers...another goof...Beauty and Proportion...maybe lose 'proportion', but it was part of the conversation...a memento...Tease...if people tease you, I've heard, it's actually a sign of affection...that's a stretch, I guess, but I've gone with it...Would...reference St. Francis and St. Claire...'I and You' between different classes is the stuff of fairytales...Rich And Poor...a kind of generic sentiment...but I really wanted the 'shopping carts' pun...Your Castle...this started off grand...imagining Arthur and his Knights with the Green Knight barging in...less grand, it's truer...fond of 'phalanx against the kittens'...What Am I Saying?...a self deprecating carry over from 'unknightly knights'...Musings...at some point all these postings may bite one in the butt...old paper authors are full of such tales...and the clutter on their forest floor the same...The Cacophony...a revisit of the longing for quiet just to talk...my often refrain!...A Second Stanza...trying to make another stanza to the lost song...the sound of a metronome came to me as being similar to the woodblock like rhythm beats in the dream song...double time as it was a quick beat...and that to heart beats, and a poem!...Perverse...last night's Milton study uncovered that he had a long stretch of leisure through wealthy patronage...there isn't much to be said for writing, exertion wise, though Hemingway said it took an athletes strength...it does take quiet...sitting on top of Cuyamaca Peak alone silence quiet, with just that one conversation in your head...Never...I haven't got enough of contemplating 'never' yet...likely never will!...Conversation...it's true, I think, not talking to anyone days on end, weeks, months, is against our natures...and not having a Muse, a conversation...how'd Picasso put it?...'without a girl, I'm not Picasso!'...Muses seem to reside in scary inaccessible places...

quote

It was a virtue not to stay,
To go our headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano's head,
Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers

 

from The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

 

unquote

 

:)

 

DavidDavid

OTI:one poem and notes:7/22/16

Open To Interpretation

Milton

'O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth. '
That's some thought, Milton, for your
Sister friend, Lycidas nicknamed,
But what lament could you fashion
For a beheaded Syrian boy
And a rubble field with shredded children?
I hold my cup under the soda machine's ice dispenser,
And one cube falls apart,
And rests between my thumb and forefinger's grip,
That webbed platform of skin there.
A dull pain a sudden,
Out of proportion to one ice cube,
But it hurts, and I switch my grip and shake my hand.
Warmth gently returns,
'Wafted' another term.

DolphinWords


Notes: I don't know how I got to reading Milton, not Milton, but Poetry's biography take...oh, I did see a bit in passing where he goes on about Narcissus in a couple of his poems, in one, Eve replaces Narcissus...now they hold up mirrors to Dolphins and the Dolphins recognize themselves...dilemma is when we look into one another's eyes, we don't see, recognize, ourselves...might say humanity is in a state of pre-recognition of our own humanity...an odd thought, but if you can't see yourself in others...Milton distinguished between Shakespeare and Ben Johnson as two different sorts of playwrights...one with a scholarly education, Johnson, and Shakespeare had a self taught, limited schooling one...and Shakespeare the better for his, as he was unhindered by scholarship...something Milton recognized himself as being hampered by...but Milton soldiered on, and wrote up a lot, poems and prose, to the delight of scholars, who write about him only second to Shakespeare!...or so I have it from Poetry's take...I can't sit on a bench in a Cathedral...seems a massive diversion...Milton is another of my poems about other's 'I and You'...'Sister friend'...I have it that in gay community parlance, a 'sister' is a lover who is chaste...a gay couple not engaged in sex are called 'sisters'...a civilization not engaged in sex?...seems a few going on about that, which is likely why Gauguin fled to Tahiti!...reference Milton's poem Lycidas, the only one I read in school about...I really envy how these old poets go on about flowers, and grottoes, and brooks, and such...they wanted much to capture the feel of the old Greeks and Romans, and I suspect they'd all been a happier lot just chucking the Black Book and its heaven sent gloom...

:)

DavidDavid

OTI:two poems and notes:7/21/16

Open To Interpretation

Coleridge

Geraldine undressed,
And Christabel
Saw Christina,
And caught her breath.

Gauguin

Ah, you thought to escape
But took a few things with.
I thought I'd seen that
In your 'Nevemore'.
Her pose is classic
And fantastic,
A language to supplant
All that went before.

DolphinWords

Notes: Well, I suppose my 'I and You' poems can include observing others' 'I's and You's"...I've done a few such already, here's a couple more...Coleridge...reference Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his fragmentary poem Christabel...I was thinking of putting Christabel and Geraldine aboard the Black Ship, as co captains, or one or the other as captain, while Dulcinea is away in the clutches of the Black Dragon...Coleridge really throws a screw ball with Geraldine...one really doesn't know what affliction affects her side and bosom that so shocks Christabel, and one's imagination takes off...likely a ploy by Coleridge!...he could be very calculating...considering, I thought of Christina, the famous painting by Andrew Wyeth (the viewer does a double take when noticing Christina is crippled)...Gauguin...I was checking Nevermore references...Nevermore being the refrain in Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven...and now the far away destination of the Black Dragon with Dulicinea in its claws!...and I happened on Gauguin's painting O Taiti, which has Nevemore painted in the upper left corner...Gauguin had just heard a recital of The Raven...the Raven being recited, in English I imagine, before Gauguin with his entourage, in Tahiti, another screwball!...(a screwball is a baseball pitch that is very slow and has no spin whatsoever, and so air pressure pushes it any old way on the way to the plate--a dancing pitch)...Gauguin in wiki's take is said to have said that it is not a Raven standing near the top of the painting...Gauguin could be even more calculating...but he had his own method of printing that introduced randomness into the final print--screwiness!...oh, the bird is Gauguin...that beak, his nose...lol...update: I have screwball wrong...a screwball goes the opposite of a curve ball...which I think is like for a right handed pitcher a curve ball curves from the pitcher's right to left, and a screwball would be very hard to throw, as one would have to torque one's forearm and hand to left and down to impart the backward sort of spin to make the ball go left to right from pitcher's perspective...brb...sort of got it...what I was thinking of, above, was the knuckleball...one sort of suspends the ball on one's knuckles, just your fingernails grab it, and it releases with no spin...'no spin' is the pun I'm trying to sustain!...knuckleballs often are uncontrollable, missing everything and going to the screen, or hitting the batter...

:)

DavidDavid

OTI:one poem and notes:7/19/16

Open To Interpretation

Lenore

"Lenore" said Poe, Edgar Allen,
Aside the Black Ship's railing beside Ishmael,
Looking out over the black waves.
"Dulcinea to us." said Ishmael.
Poe gave Ishmael a wry look,
And listened to the Raven on his shoulder croaking in his ear.
The Ravens and Gulls were back in the rigging,
And the crew returned to their knees
Cleaning and polishing the Black Deck.
"The one Black Dragon captured Lenore...
From Nemo and the Nautilus..." said Poe.
"Nemo!?"  What of Ichi and his craft?" asked Ishmael.
Poe lent his ear to the Raven.
"Ichi traded Lenore to Nemo for treasure, and a new crew for his craft. 
They rode the waves westward, with Lenore's Dolphins, and blessings."
"And where to the Black Dragon with Dulcinea?" asked Ishmael
Poe paused to listen to the Raven.
"To the South, to the Land of Lost Loves, Nevermore... 
Wait...there's more..." Poe continued,
"Ravens Huginn and Muninn have eyes on the Dragon, and pursue..."
"And so we have, and so we will!" Ishmael called to the gathered crew.

DolphinWords

Notes: Huginn and Muninn are Odin's mythological Ravens, noted for their spy craft!..."Lenore" references The Raven poem by Edgar Allen Poe...as a kid I had a complete works of Edgar Allen Poe, a squat book with tiny tiny print and thin paper pages...read of course the famous stories Vincent Price made famous in the movies!

OTI:one poem and notes:7/17/16

Open To Interpretation

Hamlet

So, Narcissus, were you surprised
When Ophelia floated by,
Echo of a future time?

DolphinWords

Notes:  Hamlet is Narcissus, and Ophelia, Echo...a wonder if the scholar critics picked this up...brb...lots see the connection...it jumps out when Ophelia is looking into the river...having myself been considering Ovid's tale of Narcissus and Echo, it just makes sense...instead of being fixated on his own beauty, like Narcissus, Hamlet becomes fixated on revenge for the murder of his father, King Hamlet...and Ophelia's lament is the same as Echo's...they express their love, but are rebuffed by Narcissus' and Hamlet's preoccupations!...the whole tragic play of Hamlet tumbles out from this 'deafness'...ral...I just returned from watching Hamlet performed in the little out door theater in the old town park next to the old Gem theater...the old part of Garden Grove, the main street, has been kept as it was when I knew it as a kid...oddly, it's not very popular, as many town's old restored centers are, probably because there are no swinging night spots...anyway, I'd  been back and forth to Home Depot getting materials and parts, fixing up the porch for Maya, my dog, and me!...I always pass Main Street when I return, and this evening took note of folk filing into the outdoor theater...oh!, my thought, Hamlet is about to start!...so I parked by the Gem, and went over to buy a ticket...I was hardly dressed for the occasion, t-shirt and levis, all dusty from working about the house, but I had my long sleeve plaid shirt in Silver, my jeep, so went back for that, and my Valley hoodie, which I didn't need, evening very warm...theater is really cool...big old time pine trees above the stage's ceiling with its lighting fixtures, and a three quarter moon...and, and I was much bemused by the stage set...maybe I can find pic...brb...okay, here's link to Summerfest Orange County facebook Hamlet...scroll down a bit and there's a pic of the stage set...in the very center it was a double deck stage...a kind of small balcony...when the ghost appears, he comes out of the lower part, and above on the balcony patio part King Claudius and Queen Gertrude were carrying on in pantomime...it was just like I imagined in my Two Hamlets poem!...ral...and there's more!...to either side there were dark doorways, and stairs going up to second level doorways, everything black, of course...but to indicate snow having fallen, I guess, the upper edges of the walls and such...it's supposed to be a castle interior and exterior...were splattered with white wash...and it actually looked like 'white wash', poop from birds...from Ravens and Gulls!...the whole dammed set up looked like the Black Ship!...and with morose Hamlet sitting stage, my left, by a simulated grave, his father's, later to be Ophelia's, dressed all in black, of course, it was perfect!...below Decks too!...at the end of the performance, I stood right up, giving my standing ovation!...and after a bit, sat down, chagrined...I was the only one standing...what can I say, I had a beer at intermission...I was so sleepy from old house tasks that I needed something to stay awake!...it was all very nicely down, I thought...the players within the play did a Vietnamese dance number, which was touching, as Town now has many Vietnamese...didn't see any in audience, which had that wine and cheese old hippies ambience!...hmmph...anyway...I haven't seen a live stage play in decades...next play in the summer series is the Pirates of Penzance!...I might go to each one to hark back to when I was a stage hand for that play at Melodyland, 1966 or so!...oh, when Hamlet sends a falsified letter to the King of England in secret, disparaging R&G as traitors, insuring their execution, that's right out of Bellerophon...Shakespeare knew his old Greek tales, and his audience too!

:)

DavidDavid

MidnightMovies: High Noon

MidnightMovies: High Noon

There's no getting around it, I'm a movie 'toon'...in World of Warcraft when one makes a game character to play, it's nicknamed a 'toon'...brb...well, I googled 'world of war craft toon' and a forum discussion came up...it's one's character, or characters (I think one can have up to fifty!), and there's a related nickname, 'alt' for alternates...one has a main character, 'my main', and then the other characters are alternates, or alts, and they usually aren't as high a level as a main, or have some subsidiary tasks to perform, or were made just to explore a different character's attributes...it gets very complicated quickly!...now, where was I...oh, I'm a movie toon...which is to say, movies have made me, the way I make toons in wow...I come to this because of how I've been thinking about Dr. Zhivago, how poetry and being a poet is depicted in the movie...(recall reading the book, but that was much later)...I picked up on that...and became a poet toon character!...did the same thing after seeing Titanic...always wanted to draw and paint, and seeing DiCaprio draw Winslet (was that a body double?), pushed me back to community college where I took all the classes I could, 'gearing' my art toon!...this happened in Yosemite too, where I was double wammied by John Muir and Ansel Adams...not Adams so much, but I used to get teased walking about with my tripod on my shoulder, 'Hey Ansel!'...but for those ten years in the Valley I did a 'grind' gearing up my Muir toon, and Adams toon...I might have a multiple personality disorder!...I noted that I'm a mimic...at the basketball camp the instructors were impressed how quickly I picked up on three ref mechanics...I'm a good mimic!...I'd be a good ref toon, but my age is handicap...anyway, recognizing I have these characters, these alts, these toons,  maybe fifty!, I was curious, casting back on all the movies I've seen, what might be my ur toon, ur being the archeological term referring to the earliest town level in a tell, a hill of piled up eras of towns...and it came real quick...now, I just came away from a discussion of how I look...we were video recorded at the camp, self recognition being a big part of things...like actors we need to know what we look like when we ref!...well, needless to say, after seeing my video, how I look isn't how I seem to me inside...it's a rare person I suspect that has an interior vision of themselves that is matched up with how they look in a mirror, or to others...I just studied out the myth of Narcissus, trying to get a take on this...Ovid's version being the most well known...a poem is in the works about how Narcissus looks in the pool, and how that is a side by side with how we all are looking 'in' the web...how we look, and how we look...oh, there, I got a start!...will save that...needs to gestate some more!...anyway, so I came quick to my ur  movie toon, the movie character I'm most inside, my 'main'...I went to see this particular movie with my grandmother when I was four years old or so, and town has a little theater called The Gem, which still stands, and occasionally now does stage plays...it's a classic little town theater...no balcony...Santa Ana's had a balcony, and a kids' Saturday matinee...much noise!...anyway, anyway, I'm Gary Cooper in High Noon...that was the first movie I ever saw, and my mimicry latched onto it, big time!...of late, I've noted my fondness for the Ichi Samurai movies that I discovered on youtube...thought to watch one tonight, but was disappointed to see them gone because of copyright problems!...but there was a segment still up, and, ral, it's a replica of High Noon!...many of the stories in the Samurai movies are borrowed from our Westerns, and visa versa...Ichi is beset by the arrival of bad guys, and all the town folk are hold up behind closed doors...his girl, Ichi always has a girl!, told to stay inside by him, runs about while he's fighting and tries to rouse the town folk to help Ichi...this is the motif in High Noon...Cooper tries to get the town folk to help, but they all stay indoors, and at the end, after his girl saves him by shooting one of the bad guys, he walks off with his girl, and throws his sheriff's badge down on the dusty street, disgusted with the whole town...it was a controversial western to make, and as I've mentioned before, I have this precociousness when it comes to movies...I understood it perfectly, and now, after reading wiki's take, understand why John Wayne hated it and made Rio Bravo as a counter weight!...High Noon is old enough that it might be on youtube, no copyright problem...it's, it's been a life of consternation...trying to face down bad guys, while the town folk are oblivious!...next MidnightMovie, I'll go on about the second movie I saw, two actually, a double bill, and the toons they made of me!...toon might be from Roger Rabbit and Toon Town...toon of course coming from cartoon characters...I have a whole bunch of those!

Forget it, Jake, it's Toon Town...

 

 

Oh, it was Winslet, not a body double...and still a talkshow talkabout!...and it's another poem in the works...oh!...it ties in with Narcissus!


and, and, to add emphasis to being tooned by High Noon, our family vacations thenabout were to my Great Uncle's ten acres in Stockton...cows, chickens, and such, and visits to the old west towns, fish along the American River coming from the Sierra, the Calaveras Big Trees and such...Great Uncle Harold was great...I have photo of him sitting on haystack with a bag of manure beside him that he is pointedly pointing too!...some of High Noon was filmed at Jamestown, nearby Stockton... 

 

 

:)

 

 

DavidDavid

OTI:one poem and notes:7/12/16

Open To Interpretation

Liz

The Homeridae were gathered
Under the Dodona Oak,
A motley crew,
Some blind,
Some cripples,
Some weaklings,
Some runaways from wars,
And so possessing acuities
Suiting them to tell the tales
And be singing troubadours.
It was Winter, and rain and snow
Had paused their itineraries,
Going from town to town
Trading storied lore
For their livelihoods.
And trading stories now they were about,
Competing, challenging,
Exercising their imaginations,
Just as they would practice tunes on their lyres.
"Does the Black Ship have a name?"
Asked Melville.
"Pastiche!" suggested Poe.
"That's a description, not a name!"
Countered Dana.
"I'll lend you Argo."
Offered Rhodius.
"Oh, Argonauts goes well with my Aquanauts."
Commented Verne.
Silence, as they considered.
"Emily, what do you think a suitable name
For Pirate Queen Dulcinea's Black Ship?"
Asked Twain.
"Elizabeth," said Emily simply.
And a gust of wind blew snow
In all their faces beneath the Oak.

DolphinWords

Notes: Artistic types usually have a handicap of some sort, and they gravitate to being the guardians of lore and performers of the arts...childhood friend was absolutely desperate to be a professional baseball player...failed at that, he became an excellent sports journalist...little is known about the ancient Greek Homeridae...at least, I can't find much googling!, and so have embellished...and here a study site of Ancient Greek lore...Elizabeth is Emily Dickinson's middle name...oh..I had Homer where Rhodius is, having mistaken that Homer wrote the story of Jason and the Argonauts...uncertain just who did it first, but Apollonius of Rhodes, had the best...and what a good fit!...see link to wiki's take...

:)

DavidDavid