Darla Whitehead Tells All

Besides Carmen, there is an associated blog that contains some offbeat work. That blog is known as Darla Whitehead Tells All (I'll place a link in the comments). Darla Whitehead is a nom de plume based on having been a Darling (of my poetry mentor) and my godparents, Burt and Ruth Whitehead. Now there is no better name than Whitehead in terms of nom de plumes and whatnots. No better name. I'll bet they knew exactly where the Bays lived all those years ago...on Park Ave (how I enjoy this guy's posts to Bisbee Community...). Anyhows...I was over there killing some time at Darla's place and found a poem that might be ready for human eyes to see..other than mine of course. I'm actually very protective of some pieces...because they are way way too deep to be understood...sometimes even by me. I'll tell you a secret about writing poetry.....the really weird stuff (never throw it away unless it's just plain horrid to begin with)....the really weird stuff is sometimes laden with premonition. Yes. There have been times in life when...in a fit of sadness or extreme trauma...I've reviewed some old stuff and discovered lo! I was predicting the future. There it is...in plain view...whatever I am currently experiencing is described in an old poem...I know it's crazy but I tell you true. I just don't know when I go into what is more or less a 'trance' as I write, what some poems mean. As I get older, there are fewer of those types of poems and most of the poems I write now are quite deliberate and almost all involve to some degree, trance states. Yes, I will confess....when I write I can go into a trance. My kids will tell you this and they used to laugh as they would catch me there and I would turn to them....still typing and staring at them with trance eyes hahaha. I have to say, keyboards really do facilitate trance states. Big time. Anyway.....this poem was written nearly ten years ago when I was really suffering some writer's block (of some type) so I just did what some call "automatic" writing. Not really the same thing as the trance state. Trance states are organic....you insert an idea (like a seed) into a certain slot in the brain and off you go into a trance. Automatic (at least for me) involves just allowing a pile of random thoughts and words to fill pages without any concern for their actual thoughtful cohesion and they are not based on a seed thought. Here's one of those automatic poems which I have not adjusted in any way (edited):

A Day After

A frozen not yet suspension
of objects - their objects
some objects of their things
their things in merge
between practice - the public
pantomime ultra habitual
of their lives
in their own words
coupled with observations
undercycling a continuum
of events, theoretic social
metabolism and the history
both symbolic and non -
enormous tracts of people
organized by color, size
effort, delinquency, car
offspring and times
to data base per week -
these are the items of
the universe - the shape
a redemption manifesto
in Divine Love
as part of forever.
Here is where taken apart
it is all examined
for a nation of gimmicks
in quota and realm,
here the clock
fixes and ticks.

To Whom It May Concern Again it is coming of age, blown open blossom, turn key operators and survivors, coming up for air twice. Yet forty or fifty are burned alive, forty or fifty are buried, forty or fifty become lost scrambling up the hill to check. When the machines start to stop at zero, replacing the hums with great silence filled and fitted by one huge conversation between nature and her guests: promises and facts, big success stories, all of it gravity gravity gravity.

The Mummeries Not sure where the sound comes from although it is very early to hear such motors and moving. Might be out back, further away like a fighter jet at noon in the parking lot of the group home where disabled adults act like babies. Perhaps that is the answer, yet poems are just formulas.

Tallow Who cares about the Gods anymore in brown fires between us, latent fat quick to learn temperature. A birthing begins and ends in Julian, in the quiet there. Here is where the sadness began, here is the corpse of happiness or at least the memory, a sweet aftertaste of mix-matched wax and bones.

Here is where to keep
a white sky between six and seven.
Here is the place to store
the special parts and quiet pieces.

Crossing

For a week the blood
smear as deer had
dragged herself
on broken legs to a side
of the road and lay there
like a hand swipes
a frozen window.

There she watched the last cars
and shooting stars, took a final hit
off the moon where no Injuns
ever stood either and she promised.


Praiseworthy Appearance

On Friday night
the fox speeds up
to make it -
away from the town
full of light and actions.
The way he smooths on by -
a little train of feet, film
made of fur and tail
in one brilliant line.
Left to right as if
a switch lifted and the chute
opened through which
he aimed and shot.

Not My Share

We slip into the parody
of nations, ball parks in back
streets easy to the strip
tease, all blank tomorrows
between the river Jordan's
shoulder and fake smile
strangled in the birth
canal with umbilical cord.
The stick bugs of Pharaoh
in vast directions of flight
become a pre-emption
of parable in haute
twisting, haute history,
haute foreign policy -
all so haute in a beautiful
dying, a better wicked
and unhinged, stewards
of linearity. A voice
erupts into the norm psychosis,
a blatant not so obvious
flow of pingpong glamour -
a steadfast parade of boredom.