Liz’s Poetry Series: Under Siege

April 27, 2014 in Montana

by lizard

Information insurgent is not a term I’d choose for myself, but that is what it sometimes feels like. The crush of newspeak can lead to one feeling under siege.

Twitter is a goddamn curse. It’s like taking a cold shower under Niagara Falls. If I feel under siege, I’m the idiot who opened wide the door, to mix metaphors. Just getting close to the feed you get the spray of headlines and sometimes genuine wit from the deluge of chatter that pours and pours.

I have an extensive library of poetry I barely visit anymore. I’m always with screens, not books. I literally un-velcro my phone holster sometimes when the phone isn’t there and shake my head. Hashtag first world problems.

I finally went to the shelves tonight and summoned Spicer. On first crack of the spine, this:

Jim-almost-James tells me he likes Tolkien
“He doesn’t water down good and evil,” they say. “He sees them.”
Everything that is in the pawnshop is for sale. Truth
Is a drinking fountain.
I can’t describe good
But once tried to in a poem about a starfish
Or your watery eyes
Seeing nothing but what they told you. Mordor
Is so black that eye can’t fathom
The fact of it.
The carefulness of believing in my words, your watery eyes, my
Truth.

I love Jack Spicer. He’s one of those poets I feel compelled to tell other poets about if they haven’t heard of him.

Another poet I love: William Carlos Williams, and not for his most well known poem, which is actually an excerpt from the long poem Spring and All and goes like this:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

In addition to this anthologized gem, Williams also wrote stuff like this:

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Despite the constant distraction of goddamn Twitter, I have had some chances to write things down. Lately that’s been song lyrics, not poems.

Below the fold are some lyrics I’m currently working on. For what it’s worth.

*

blood moon up in the sky
heartbleed in their code
flood is how they advertise
so just do what you’re told

real soon the song will stop
and the sun will disappear
no tune will tell the plot
of the loss that led us here

heartstrings have easy pull
unless your heart is dead
blood moon up on the sky
listen what Fiver said

let’s leave the warren behind
before the tractors come
heartbleed got them in
and they won’t stop till it’s done