Online Poetry Professor with Dr. Christopher Bursk
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2012 -- Speaking of Beauty

How to provide comments and feedback

In offering responses to the poems submitted for the gallery, please make them positive and helpful, identifying what lines you are pulled to and, if need be, maybe what lines might need a little more work. Perhaps talk about what moves or intrigues you in the poem or what it triggers in you. Maybe even consider writing a poem in response to the posted poem. Let's make this an on-line workshop that respects the poet's ambitions for the poem.

~ CB

Called To Pause
by MB Rizzo
comments

"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own," Naomi Shihab Nye

How else does the red
smeared dawning sky,
lay down track.

I noticed the eastern sky today.
In the random red dawning of it,
I called my son to pause.

Hurrying to the garage
and the waiting car, geometry and
jazz band rehearsals, splitting time

with the middle school music,
an unsettled baritone voice
in "The Music Man's" barbershop quartet.

He half ignores, me, barrels ahead to the car,
to the school day stretching out.
I tell him to wait. "You can see so much if you pause."

Taste the wonder of a single moment,
the tantalizing surprise of sugar or heat on the tongue,
before it slips past you, and away.


Erotic Market Value: the website
by Lynn Hoffman
comments

You knew this all along:
love is not a jungle, it's a market.
In high school, it was really clear
which boys had the erotobucks
to get which girls and vice-versa.

We all cheered when someone
got more than their honey-money's worth.
We laughed at the people who were so
blind that they thought
they could snag and shag
someone who was way above them
and we cried for the ones so insecure they picked
someone below them (unless they knew
how to spend the change.)

Calculate Your Erotic Market Value using our exclusive online real-life Erotometer!
               Know exactly with whom you might have a chance to dance your pants
               and who's likely to want to take a chance with you.
               Learn the rules of seduction and even learn how to raise your score
               so you can score some more.

Here's how it works:
You describe yourself answering a dozen simple questions.
Then you do it again, this time you tell the truth.
You match your looks to a scale of photos.
We correct your data for age and location and give you your
EMV or Erotic Market Value.
You can compare your score with celebrities
or with scores submitted
for other people in your home town.

Save yourself the humiliation of being put-down or
               booty-called by your betters.
Do away with the uncertainty of
the market with no price tags.
Sell your self,
but make sure you get your body's worth.

To begin, click here.


benny d goes hawaiian
by Lynn Hoffman
comments

benny d is sitting outside gleaner's coffee shop on ninth street.
he's got a book of poems and a braid of fresh mozzarella.
the mozz cost seven bucks at talluto's, the book was a deuce at gilmore's

it's a big book, but benny's stuck on one line
e consarlo dell'umano stato
'and console him for being human'
the poet's saying what parents should do for kids
and benny d's thinking that he could use
a cupla spoonfuls of consolation right now
to go with the thick smoky coffee he's drinking
and this certain memory that makes his world
sad and yellow and jaundiced in the eye.
then this guy stops beside his table.
the guy's not too steady on his feet,
swaying in wind that blows off his personal ice cap
he points at benny d and make a prophecy.
"you" he says "should wear hawaiian shirts, that way you won't look freaky."

now benny d lifts weights, reads a lot of poetry
and sometimes he wears big floppy hats to keep the sun
from bouncing off his bald head and blinding the
pigeons who-he fears-might hurt themselves
by flying blind in a dangerous neighborhood.
but he ain't freaky, no way
at least not how we measure things down
here, south of washington ave.

but benny's a reasonable man and so
as the prophet is blown uptown, benny is moved.
he feels the weight of his being human
he wants it lifted, he wants to be consoled
for the freakishness of this whole human business.
so he leaves his coffee, walks home and puts on
the one hawaiian shirt he owns: yellow with faded red
orchids and suddenly things don't feel so bad.

the next morning, benny's at the thrift shop and he's
got three more hawaiian shirts. he practices standing
next to the fruit stands on ninth street,
sometimes with the grapes, sometimes with papayas.

benny's not a man you laugh at so people don't
but they smile and three or four times an hour
someone compliments his shirt-
the green one with the parrot or the pale blue
shirt with the surfers or even the one that's all pineapples.
usually it's a woman doing the complimenting
and if you ask benny d these days how it's going
he's likely to tell you that it's great, just freakin' great.


Obsidian Eyes
by Carol Ann
comments

I think of you nude lying under the leaves with rose petals on your eyes,
An arm stretched out like Michelangelo's angel on the Sistine Chapel.
I think of the click of your shoes like cruel castanets
In the red rooms of my heart.
I think of you nude,
Like a Romanesque angel.
Your skin like the dying rays of the sun.
I think of your hard, purple jewel
in the white, innocent smoothness of my hand
Mostly I think of your dark eyes like pitted olives,
Glowing like liquid obsidian in the dark moistness of the night.
I know you hate me and love me, and want the same from me.
You like arsenic and sugar,
and, I, poor simple beast only like the sugar.
You are a savage who rends and tears the ones you love.
Can I ever show you how simple is love.
How true. How deep. How honest.
You, vicious beast, who cannot learn.
Obsidian eyes.


First Kiss
by Joanne Leva
comments

Complex laundry
room lint face.

Six of us sit on
washers and dryers.

An empty Budweiser
bottle spins

on the grey
cement floor.

Stops at me-
open lips cocked.


The Rose
by Barbara Shisler
comments

To understand a rose,
he took a blade,
dissected it
and named
each particle,
then laid it out,
shredded and exposed.

A thing of beauty is a rose,
he said, the joy of truth forever,
then offered me the broken parts
to bond our souls together.


Hidden One Derived From the Flower
by Joanne Leva
comments

Hidden one derived from the flower
meaning "victory-secret."


The cure for insomnia
by Steve Smith
comments

My favorite cat is dying
She's lying right under my bed
I can almost feel her withering away

I just turned sixty five
and I need another root canal
its as though each one is like a birthday
just a warm up for the next one

Its four thirty am, and I cant sleep again
lying side by side with my woman
who snores so contently
and life seems like a conspiracy
I might be responsible for

The ceiling is a dark and reliable partner and
my thoughts are like windblown sleet
hurling through the dark winter streets
of my memory
howling with the loss of
my late wife, the vacations, dinners, and lovemaking
we would never have again.

Of the paintings I didn't paint
to keep myself safe from failure
as if I could.

Of my younger brothers recent heart attack
sending another fragment of mortalities denial
galloping away

Lost friends and relatives, walk in and out of the
endless night
until the snorer rolls over
warm and fresh as oven baked bread
naked and sexy
as I need her to be.


The Squirrel
by Steve Smith
comments

Driving to my sixty fourth birthday party on auto pilot
reminiscing about my childhood
my late wife and long gone parents
when suddenly I flinched, a squirrel
quick as electric
spurted underneath the car in front of me
the squirrel scurried back and forth under the car
Houdini like
until it disappeared under the back tire
then reappeared
arching up hopefully, and gently rolling back onto the asphalt as though to sleep
then in a frenzy of motor neuron speed
started to convulse, kicking sideways, tail whipping, undulating
as though plugged in
and I watched, held hostage
hypnotized by the terrible mechanics of its dying
until my car skirted over the still body
I refused to look back
soon enough the crows would come
and conduct a wake
So I drove on to my birthday party
where I licked icing off my fingers
and once again took in a deep breath of wishes
and blew out the candles.


Lover's Totem
by Joanne Leva
comments

Identical
cadence
with a certain
sequence
of pausing
and tensing
makes me
stare hard.

All this
silent
comm
unica
tion.
Intim
ate con
versa
tion a
mostly
word
less
ride.

Mind
ful of
my vow.


The Ledge: Beauty in Madness
by Mary Gulivindala
comments

I walk up to the edge of the ledge and as I stand there I look into a great abyss…
I am solid in my stance but my heart beats at a frantic pace. I must slow it down and breathe or I might slip into a trip that was not intended for me.

As I stand at the edge of the ledge I question many things, I ponder what lies ahead of me and what brought me to the question of what's next? I want to fly and to soar like an eagle in flight but my mind want to argue and start with the fight of me do I have the right of flight?

As I stand at the edge of the ledge do I feel peace? Will I plunge into victory or land in defeat crashing down to the ground at a death of complete over? Or will I be caught by the one I know called Jehovah? Did He bring me to the edge of the ledge to see if I would leap into an unknown plan and bow down at His feet or will I continue my way which brought me to weep at the edge of this ledge do I choose to compete or defeat?

As I stand at the ledge I feel stuck paralyzed. Do I turn back to comfortable and crawl back inside to the façade of functional, productive and responsible when really I'm so lost I can't stand to be punctual anymore.

As I stand at the edge of the ledge I ponder how did I get here? I thought, so I thought I was moving in the "right" direction. Don't get me wrong, I've always been a rebel but to some degree in me I wanted to seem level headed. So I tried to do it by "whoever" wrote the book and it blew up in my face and makes me take a look at why and where and who I am now going to grow into. I stand at the ledge as I look into infinite and dismal.

As I stand at the edge of the ledge I am grateful to stand at the edge of the ledge because baby, so many people don't or won't but I did and do. The pretty the ugly and the true is what I do. At the edge of the ledge will I stand, leap, fly or fall? One step out and I will know it all for that one quick moment in time.

Have you been to the edge of the ledge even for a minute?



 

Online Poetry Professor is presented by The Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program (MCPL) www.MontcoPoet.com