Hey All,
On February 5th, I’ll be sharing the stage at Livewords with a fantastic ensemble of poets. Hope you all can be there.
Rocco
For more info about the series, please click here
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January’s Poetry Installment
FLOW
As your pink toes touch
the scalding water
you discover that your voice
is a veneer cast on stone;
your sight, a dilation of age
upon age; unhurried – sinking
in the languid furnace to your knees,
your chest – the roots and vines
have crept only to the dead banks,
as if what escapes from the deep
livid pocket (neck and jugular)
is untranslatable: the wooden pillars
of the summer dock grow scales,
a corrupted reptilian green; you are
immovably articulate by now,
your skin, loosened and wrinkled,
as the forgotten ichor in your blood
uncoils; your capillaries widen
to a sleepy gaze inwards and
sky, blood-warm and buried
under so many years of cold.
(c)2006 Rocco de Giacomo
Other People’s Poetry
A Maker of Infernos
to Martin Cerda
Religion class, room three; there Father Gregorio
Will explain to us, forty rascals, the mechanisms
of eternity:
“Consider (he says) the passing of time in hell:
Once every century a blue ant completes one trip
Around a bronze sphere as big as the Earth. Slowly,
Step by step, it wears away that gleaming metal star.
Ten thousand myriads of footsteps fall, repeating themselves,
And when it’s done…only one second has passed
In God’s inferno of torments.”
He’d stop there, and we:
Chattering with stupor and fright, we’d beat our heads against
the windows.
Don Gregorio Martinez, Jesuit professor of rhetoric,
Is dead: the worms, as though they were ants, drag him away.
Thank heaven that each of us rascals is now free
To choose his own inferno.
by Ludwig Zeller, as translated by A.F. Moritz in Rules of The Game, 2012, Quattro Books.
Embarrassing Poetry from My Youth
Existence
or Embarrassing Poetry From My Youth
Existence turns and twists and plays with your mind
as you play with your hair;
sighing,
straining to understand what someone is trying to convey,
while the problems of life buzz like cicadas,
in the tumult of an August afternoon,
on a brick and asphalt day.
The mind reaches out to create,
and images are freed from black letters
and your eyes sink and set and slowly realize
cool, wet grass kissing your feet,
as your soul, unchained to free
floats along a breeze upon an open endless field
shining green.
You dance and run as the yellow sun basks in the blue feather sky.
You laugh and cry a secret escape amongst the glittering tears
of some sunny day.
And as
the sprinkle of glittering rain washes away dirt and pain;
as the caress of breeze feathers the joy being;
as this wind-flowered field unfolds within,
it curls under and around and loves and accepts;
embracing you wonderful you embracing it.
Drink up this world as it melts into your veins,
carry the sunny place living in these black letters:
these words you try to understand,
as you play with your hair,
aware again of the buzzing cicadas
turning your inner existence out.