Hello, From the Other Side

I've got another blog, but I'll never forget the good times we've had. Hopefully I can keep it up with you.

Still in grad school. Working on my thesis. Yeah, maybe it's sooner than most, but it fell in my lap last semester and I want to do something with it before it dries up.

I take it back

The link below, is not necessarily an "absurdist" blog. Disregard that. I don't know what type of blog it is... all I know is it's got a bunch of my new poems and it's the one I use most often now. Okay. Toodle-oo!

Absurdist Blog

http://drawerfullofjetplanes.blogspot.com/

Moonshine and Haiku's

Here's a little word play mixed with the poetic form of the Haiku. I took "nicknames" of moonshine (who shot sally, white lightnin', and brown mule... another is painter's piss, but I didn't include it) and added them to the haiku's. For some reason, mixing moonshine and this Asian form of poetry seemed a taboo, but also strangely relevant. In some aspects, Appalachia is quite like rural Japan and other East Asia countries... at least I think so. The title comes from the name of a moonshine maker by the name of "Popcorn." He's an old, codgery man with a big, unkempt white beard and overalls... pretty stereotypical of what you would think someone from the back hills of Appalachia would look like. But I found him endearing and these Haiku's are for him.

Popcorn’s Haikus

who shot sally and
seven brown mules daily named
father white lightnin’?

there was a brown mule
who shot sally with a gun
known as white lightnin’.

white lightnin’ struck down
a man high on his brown mule,
who shot sally once.

Deep Image/ Surrealist

I'm currently in a class labeled "Writing Deep Image Poetry." It's a fascinating class and something that has eluded me as I think most of my poetry to date tends to be cerebral. It's been wonderful to delve into this style, though I may not be anywhere close to fitting into that category. I know I have entertained myself and re-awakened a love of poetry in me.

Vive

He draws the hills in meditation
with the lead on his tires.

They are thin, not unlike
the pencils used in
standardized tests.

The hills come smooth,
and rugged, with animal skin.

Leaves pass in a blur,
his morning and afternoon:
squirrel’s tail.

In his calf muscle
are deer with full racks
and frost.

E.E. Cummings

Please note that the structure of the poem has drastically been changed due to some wacky thing with this Posting program on this blog.

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Upset

I would like to point out that I think what this dumb blogger does to the form of my poems is disgusting.

I think every one of these poems I've published on here have been altered in some way (if not grossly).

Just take that into consideration as you read.

Francis Bacon's painting Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

This was the subject of my latest poem.

Brick (white)
Matthew London

I know you sat on a chair
and that you had a face
quite like all the rest of us.
An arm, a leg
they keep on
moving.

Most men on a Sunday morning
are less than you.
So, what are these God-lines I draw?
Stroke with this brush,
thistles
could have been made from horses
horse hair,
that is how
it once was.

Know this,
I can’t make you like God did.
I will allow you the purple
and a grey-matter throne
to rest on
for me
though.

Despite a triumph with
gold stamped coins
and
an ornate dome for your
Basilica,
you’ll lose your eyes one day
flesh as well.
Still
I won’t be able to see you
as plush velvet on the inside of you r coffin,
but who you speak for
will
without a doubt
notice a change, back to what you are.

Muse and Stone (part 2)

Number 3 of the 3 poems in this year's issue of Muse and Stone. (Some line spacing has been altered during the copy/paste process to this post)

Tours at 4

Museum of Farm Art:

Come to my right.
Now,
Now you will be able
to properly appreciate
this old washbasin.

It is one of eleven
red models crafted
at the hay-day of Hanley’s
Oasis Mart on Plumb Ave.

Note the purple celery stalk
on the underside of the basin.
The creator, Garrison Hanley,
intended the celery to be
a metaphor of his wife’s
stigmata
some nine years prior.

No, there will be no questions
at this time.

Museum space is limited
so please disregard
the photographs of the winking
crayfish and continue down the hall
to your left.

Muse and Stone

This poem, along with the previously posted "Steamed Bathroom Mirror" has been published in this year's Muse and Stone literary magazine based out of Waynesburg College (where I attend). I have a third poem appearing in this issue as well (which I will post separately in a moment).

Lunch Appointment

We met on a rainy Sunday at four o’clock.
She was a masochistic narcissist
eating at a Starbucks, across the street
from this old jalopy of a factory
instenched with the smell of stale
pepperoni calzones.

In our personality montage, mirrored
by derelict signs championing Rosie the Riveter
and obscure, usurped cigarettes – we sat
close to the railing of the café,
her bobbing toe… dustily painted
with an off turquoise color borrowed from Neptune.

I could tell she knew how to twirl spaghetti
by the Freudian antics of her thumb
wrapping around the little plastic sword
triumphantly implanted in her club sandwich.
Oh you calico kitten of Excalibur.

I’d like to love the thought of a dinner,
in a quiet, colder room, away from calzones
and a rainy sidewalk-street conglomerate.
But she left, and forgot to throw away her crusts.

Steamed Bathroom Mirror

This is a poem I wrote as a variation on a poetic form called the Ghazal (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5781). See that website for more information on the form of ghazal poetry. Basically, these are independant images who's job is to create an overall mood in the reader. This is my favorite piece of writing to date. It's dedicated to my dad.

Steamed Bathroom Mirror

Choke me with the hands of a potter
bitten fingernails, remnants of Tennessee dirt:
color of blood.

Calloused palms, life-line clogged
with white, flaky skin – dry skin from myths like
guns blazing, pulpit thumping.

White Christ, blond, Aryan, blue eyes
painted with Pollock’s brush over a pewter cuspidor –
chalice of stone masons.

Shoulder holsters of brown leather, chafe
black leather Bibles handed out by men in gray suits
made from burlap aftershave.

Pruned toes and yellow toenails
bent where a machine crushed the purple cuticle
while a swimmer was video-taped.

Title

This might be coming a little bit late, but I think... THINK the title "AA/PanzerPoet" stands for "Appalachian Artist" which is because I am an artist born and raised and living in Appalachia (West Virginia!) and "Panzer Poet" because that is like a German tank I believe and a poet, which I am as well (I'm German and I wish for my poetry to be as powerful as a panzer tank).

That's all for now.

Perhaps I'll change the meaning of "AA" later on in life...

How He Is Often Right

Often I think that his idea of what we should do is wrong, and my idea is right. Yet I know that he has often been right before, when I was wrong. And so I let him make his wrong decision, telling myself, though I can't believe it, that his wrong decision may actually be right. And then later it turns out, as it often has before, that his decision was the right one, after all. Or, rather, his decision was still wrong, but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while it was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.
--Almost No Memory, Lydia Davis

Berryman Photo

The formidable poet: Berryman.

Life as interesting as his words: arresting.

What is it about famous artists and smoking?

First Day

First words here, my words...

My first post is one of my favorite poems: Dream Song 1 by John Berryman.
It has only been recently that I have started to find favorite poems, favorite writings and quotes, seriously, at least.

This is my first few hours with this blog, and I hope to continue updating it and expanding this web page as well as discover things about myself I suppose.

I call this "Rooster Rukus" because it's the first noise I've made today on here (like a Rooster's "cock-a-doodle-doo" in the morning) and "rukus" because my thoughts and syntax seem, to me, crazily scattered and even unimportant.

We'll see where this goes.

Till then, I'd like to post a question:
What's the point?

Dream Song 1

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,--a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

-- The Dream Songs, John Berryman