AMERICAN POLYPHEMUS
7/14/66, Chicago
Corazon Amurao watched, under the bed,
as her eight friends were butchered, by Richard Speck,
this summer night- don't say lambs led to slaughter!
It was here she discovered Odysseus,
again, and the wool of her clothing, which was
no protection. Then, she heard Richard's laughter,
as he strapped on Gloria, no bed of doubts
rocked, above her, underneath it all, the last
first acceptance of the war, she will surmise,
deep with senescence, the fractured undertow,
subserved by silence, hers, and what has increased,
which waits through the neaptide, long after she's ceased,
to measure quiet, the quick of tomorrows.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
One's heart is a jackal that preys and lunges.
One's eyes two diamonds defining a laser.
This green is where they navigate between us,
who watch, in a time when the country plunges
into what it's becoming. Going faster
is their speed. Here is where "WHAT MIGHT'VE BEEN" is,
when the elders recall men like Satchel Paige,
and "King" Carl Hubbell, alone in their defeats,
and victories, unable to tete-a-tete
against each other, or different men with bats.
Outside, they're beating the Negroes in the streets,
and giving The Jew three numbers from Hell, yet
here two men dominate boys with wood. With rage,
they swing and miss. The past is forever that.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
That unfractured fastness suddenly seeps:
the wings without flapped, they bruited pain,
as if voguing were a talent it lacked,
for a maximum forum of disdain.
The face of the slight hides the chase within:
deific proteins surged, recombinant,
as no lips dripped over unfeathered skin,
and the crush of the cross-link was not sweet
as the broken
woman gathers her mind
about the cygnet forming, monstrous breed,
borne of fleet action. Will the child feed,
in vivo, her need to fuck herself blind?
Or will it forget the once-disturbed pool?
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
SIAMESE REFLECTION
5/11/1811-1/17/1874
CHANG BUNKER
1844
I feel the love you make, unto your wife, I thought I was loved, then I dreamt you died,
like some passage deep through a planet's core, and pulled me through the collisions of love,
as my eyes go white, as you go inside, the familiar hues of tragedy, come
and the hillock of you shakes hard beside, to these ruins of the future, I dream,
this quiet earth that has become new life, as you sleep more soundly, within its tides,
the conundra of which grow more replete,
as I close my eyes, and an odor climbs, ENG BUNKER
within my mind, and your feet meet my feet, 1874
with a coldness, that I cannot define.
Then I do. It is you!- Or is it me?- For you are not all things, my brother dead, I float, as if in a gray soup of isness,
growing into death, yet seeking out more, merely all that was good. You stood above, and dream of the suddenly mortal world,
as her breath finds its way over my form, the dizzling waver of restlessness and its humid skin, we shared as children,
as there comes the beast, unknown to the norm, that gawked through, the years of the circuses when we knew everything would just begin,
who do not know the other side of me. and shows. I wake alone within one head. and that death was just the future’s business.
A blood clot, I felt, was what rendered you,
done to all touch, as I touch your fingers,
and dream of the foundering hulk of blue,
bound for my body, content to linger,
unifying the quarters of my heart, as it spoils, the younger, nicer dream,
which connect with yours, now devoid of love, the one from which our bodies have spilled,
and life, sunk low in your still auricles, into this world, one hand grabs another,
where nothing of me is, and nothing feels, as this thought abounds, my silent brother:
as if I am, less than your death's last part. The dead do not realize. They only seem.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
*Addendum: This is a poem that journalist Bill Moyers refused to read &/or acknowledge as great.
THE BANG OF THE PAPER ON A SCREEN DOOR'S MORNING
Something once owned avoided the morning,
and took to the trees, and opened them full,
to the emptiness of the grown-up world,
where something was filling, something induced,
by a place, a face, a far-off image,
which struck like a gesture [what is softness?],
and hurt like a mirror [what is therein?],
resolved to the light, its ruthless rising,
which stuck to the patterns of everyday
slanting, among those who beamed, among those
who shivered in the nowhere, which quivered
to the astrophysics of eyes and touch,
warming the waking of Truan Ngoc Linh,
who thinks, Don't worry, I only had hope.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
THE MEASURING
*off the Oregon coast
The dark and rising chemistries of blood and salt water and blubber
floats high on the remains of the sperm whale pod,
devastated by the swift and brutal machinations of the killer whale
pack; minutes ago
a rosette of thirteen sperms studded the grayness of the sea and sky
with their hard skins, as familial love
huddled them about each other, as the filling swell of the orcas'
presence and persistence furied the ignorant sun
above them all, to a ruthless attrition of heat, overhead by star, below
surface by blood, the bellows for oxygen
sprayed twenty, or more, feet over the ocean, the sperm whales' tails
aroused and bashing eddy and swell, flailing impassioned
nothingness, until one dislocates an orca's jaw- at least the suffering
will not be all one-sided!-
as the unmercied mavens of malice heave one of the larger beasts to
its side, intestines bloom and flutter in the forty-five degree tide,
above the madding, and the waste reaches tonnage, serves as
practice for the callow orca calves,
brine-worn end for a dying, helpless mother as its pod breaks hope,
the brief flower of a soon-to-be-forgotten war,
as the unpitying black scan of millions of gathering terns and gulls
abides above the din, the cliff rocks bleachers to an unfolding feast,
as that which survives all but death, is the beautiful torment of nature
feeding their keenness as the sperm whales dive,
and the killers leave a wild communion of intent and opportunity for
the hunger of the reserved and impartial airborne circlers,
augurs of the coming; far to the horizon a more greedy and histrionic
band of flesh dead reckons the taint of ending.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
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