When Ma Rainey
Comes to town,
Folks from anyplace
Miles aroun’,
From Cape Girardeau,
Poplar Bluff,
Flocks in to hear
Ma do her stuff;
Comes flivverin’ in,
Or ridin’ mules,
Or packed in trains,
Picknickin’ fools. . . .
That’s what it’s like,
Fo’ miles on down,
To New Orleans delta
An’ Mobile town,
When Ma hits
Anywheres aroun’.
II
Dey comes to hear Ma Rainey from de little river settlements,
From blackbottorn cornrows and from lumber camps;
Dey stumble in de hall, jes a-laughin’ an’ a-cacklin’,
Cheerin’ lak roarin’ water, lak wind in river swamps.
An’ some jokers keeps deir laughs a-goin’ in de crowded aisles,
An’ some folks sits dere waitin’ wid deir aches an’ miseries,
Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin’ gold-toofed smiles
An’ Long Boy ripples minors on de black an’ yellow keys.
III
O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo’ song;
Now you’s back
Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong. . . .
O Ma Rainey,
Li’l an’ low;
Sing us ’bout de hard luck
Roun’ our do’;
Sing us ’bout de lonesome road
We mus’ go. . . .
IV
I talked to a fellow, an’ the fellow say,
“She jes’ catch hold of us, somekindaway.
She sang Backwater Blues one day:
‘It rained fo’ days an’ de skies was dark as night,
Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
‘Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begin to roll
Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.
‘Den I went an’ stood upon some high ol’ lonesome hill,
An’ looked down on the place where I used to live.’
An’ den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an’ cried,
An’ Ma lef’ de stage, an’ followed some de folks outside.”
Dere wasn’t much more de fellow say:
She jes’ gits hold of us dataway
Old Lem by Sterling A. Brown
I talked to old Lem
and old Lem said:
“They weigh the cotton
They store the corn
We only good enough
To work the rows;
They run the commissary
They keep the books
We gotta be grateful
For being cheated;
Whippersnapper clerks
Call us out of our name
We got to say mister
To spindling boys
They make our figgers
Turn somersets
We buck in the middle
Say, “Thankyuh, sah.”
They don’t come by ones
They don’t come by twos
But they come by tens.
“They got the judges
They got the lawyers
They got the jury-rolls
They got the law
They don’t come by ones
They got the sheriffs
They got the deputies
They don’t come by twos
They got the shotguns
They got the rope
We git the justice
In the end
And they come by tens.
“Their fists stay closed
Their eyes look straight
Our hands stay open
Our eyes must fall
They don’t come by ones
They got the manhood
They got the courage
They don’t come by twos
We got to slink around
Hangtailed hounds.
They burn us when we dogs
They burn us when we men
They come by tens . . .
“I had a buddy
Six foot of man
Muscled up perfect
Game to the heart
They don’t come by ones
Outworked and outfought
Any man or two men
They don’t come by twos
He spoke out of turn
At the commissary
They gave him a day
To git out the county
He didn’t take it.
He said ‘Come and get me.’
They came and got him
And they came by tens.
He stayed in the county—
He lays there dead.
They don’t come by ones
They don’t come by twos
But they come by tens.
They say the ice will hold
so there I go,
forced to believe them by my act of trusting people,
stepping out on the ice,
and naturally it gaps open
and I, forced to carry on cooly
by my act of being imperturbable,
slide erectly into the water wearing my captain's helmet,
waving to the shore with a sad smile
"Goodbye, my darlings, goodbye dear one"
as the ice meets again over my head with a click.
Brother to the night(a blues for Nina)
by Regie Gibson
Say baby, can I be your slave
I've got to admit girl, you're the shit girl
And I'm diggin' you like a grave
Now do they call you daughter to the spinnin post, or
Or maybe Queen of 2,000 moons
Sister to the distant, yet risin' star
Is your name Yimmy-Ya
Oh hell nah, it's got to be Oshun
Ooo, is that a smile me put on your face child
Wide as a field of Jasmine and Glover
Talk that talk honey, walk that walk money
Hound legs that'll spank Jehovah
Shit, who am I?
It's not important
But they call me Brother to the Night
And right now
I'm the blues in your left thigh
Tryin to become the funk in your right
Who am I?
I'll be whoever you say
But right now, I'm the sight raped hunter
Blindly pursuing you as my prey
And I just wanna give you injections, of sublime erections
And get you to dance to my rhythm
Make you dream archaetypes, of black angels in flight
Upon wings, of distorted, contorted, metaphoric jism
Come on slim
Fuck yo' man, I ain't worried about him
It's you who I wanna step to my scene
Cause rather than deal with the fallacy
Of this dry ass reality
I rather dance and romance your sweet ass, in a wet dream
Who am I?
Well they all call me Brother to the Night
And right now, I'm the blues in your left thigh
Trying to become the funk in your right
Is that alright
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.
And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
billy wrote:welcome to the site. make it your own, wear it like a well loved slipper and wear it out. ella pleads:please click forum titles for posting guidelines, important threads. New poet? Try Poetic DevicesandWard's Tips
(02-06-2015, 09:55 PM)bena Wrote: really, really enjoyed that one ray.
My wife taped a copy of my mom's handwritten copy of "History of the night" next to
our bedroom light switch. I've read it many times and it's always different.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
Just a geological second ago
all of us were deep dark skinned,
including even Mr. D. Duke’s ancestry.
We knew yams and hunting the savannah
afraid of lions – and in the darkness – demons.
We loved the nurturing green so much.
Of body parts protruding let me mention
only asses and eyes and needy lips.
That’s, what we started with, and a song
like a sad howl and a weapon from wood.
When in a moment sunken in deep,
known as meditation, I revive our
archetypes and watch them dance and sing
the joy of being, I catch hazy glimpses
of Mitochondrial Eve waving her
laughing brown eyes at me.
Out of Africa and into the dark
we moved under the brilliant immensity
of solemnly mute and eternally cryptic skies.
We raised our heads for a single singeing kiss of the sun
and just another geological second later we’re gone.
Serge Gurkski
Some people may remember Serge from this site. He was sometimes a bit crazy, always brilliant, a good soul and an excellent poet. He died a year ago this week, I'm sure that he would be delighted to know that he managed to get another poem onto this site.
Good poem. A geological second isn't very long, from Mitochondrial Eve to Apocalypse I guess. Wonder what will happen next time around? I didn't know Serge, just his name on threads. I think I missed a good man, as well as poet.
(04-08-2015, 03:34 PM)ambrosial revelation Wrote: An African Out of the Blue
Just a geological second ago
all of us were deep dark skinned,
including even Mr. D. Duke’s ancestry.
We knew yams and hunting the savannah
afraid of lions – and in the darkness – demons.
We loved the nurturing green so much.
Of body parts protruding let me mention
only asses and eyes and needy lips.
That’s, what we started with, and a song
like a sad howl and a weapon from wood.
When in a moment sunken in deep,
known as meditation, I revive our
archetypes and watch them dance and sing
the joy of being, I catch hazy glimpses
of Mitochondrial Eve waving her
laughing brown eyes at me.
Out of Africa and into the dark
we moved under the brilliant immensity
of solemnly mute and eternally cryptic skies.
We raised our heads for a single singeing kiss of the sun
and just another geological second later we’re gone.
Serge Gurkski
Some people may remember Serge from this site. He was sometimes a bit crazy, always brilliant, a good soul and an excellent poet. He died a year ago this week, I'm sure that he would be delighted to know that he managed to get another poem onto this site.
Yes. Truthful. Poets should always die in spring. [tears]
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
A great crime: she has
plunged a dagger into the heart
of her mother.
Strange.
The strangest thing: a mocking little pride with
a sinister click as of a fitting together of bad
pieces.
Beyond knowing. The mesmerist’s only
child. A certain indication of anemia, too much
candy, and her charming eyes.
A privilege to be near her. My
inspiriation. I risk an approach, what I call “the light of
day.” Movements, with perfect indifference, turn
place and shrink. One
might have seen less: the glimmer of
nothing. I caught no full-blown
flower of theory. And yet such visions pale in
flight.
Gorgeous, the domestic manufacture
of sausages.
Swallow and “so calligraphic a bird.”
Somebody in Dickens. Attaching
diminutive eggs.
A glamour of memory.
Assurance of intimacy on the
summer air.
Nothing to explain. We
needed breathing time. Enough to
laugh. Odd what a difference. Only to
whistle to her. Delighted to come.
I know. Prepared to reply and turning a think skein of
sewing silk sus-
pended in
entanglement. Shown “the faintest far-off
chords,” I ask myself.
Our doom complete.
The difference, so simple: she had
folded up her manner. Great advantages now, my
dear, if he will show you. Dis-
appointment and its train might enter.
The wedding day, the fever season. But
they’re dying. Kindred circle of the
tipsy, come to call. Lurid memory
remained with me, was indeed our sense of
“dissipation.” (Horses. A high aesthetic revel.) Rome
made him invest unconscionable sums in postage. He
received answers in a delicate hand or tried to think.
Sublime snythesis. A bridge
over—liable to rear up. You just had to
wait for it, curiosity worked up with
a hard-boiled egg and a doughnut.
(Very ugly, but
I LIKE UGLY. Just the
sort of ugliness to
be like looking.)
Happy, he entered the streetcar’s
nocturnal “exercise,” the platform it evidently
was to be. Bad lecture-blood her enthusiasm. Catchpenny
monsters. The ideal day with that sense of resorting.
In imagination, we mean to do well. No faith in girlhood, her antediluvian
theories not much better. Well, she should get
rid of him. The logical hero.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
they say that
hell is crowded yet
when you’re in hell
you always seem to be
alone
and you can’t tell
anyone when
you are in hell
or they’ll think
you’re
crazy.
and being crazy is
being in hell
and being sane is hellish
too.
those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after that.
I mean, things like
missing a meal,
going to jail,
wrecking your car
or
even
the idea of
death
itself.
when you ask them,
“how are things?”
they’ll always answer, “fine,
just fine…”
once you’ve been to hell
and back,
that’s enough, it’s the
greatest satisfaction
known to man.
once you’ve been to hell
and back,
you don’t look behind you
when the floor
creaks and
the sun is always up at midnight
and things like
the eyes of mice
or an abandoned tire
in a vacant lot make you smile
05-07-2015, 10:08 AM (This post was last modified: 05-07-2015, 10:09 AM by Todd.)
YolaSM, that was a nice one from Bukowski especially how he closed it. Here's my favorite from him. It was one of the ones that starting me reading and writing more poems.
Dreamlessly
Old, grey-haired waitresses
in cafes at night
have given it up,
and as I walk down sidewalks of
light and look into windows
of nursing homes
I can see that it is no longer
with them.
I see people sitting on park benches
and I can see by the way they
sit and look
that it is gone.
I see people driving cars
and I see by the way
they drive their cars
that they neither love nor are
loved -
nor do they consider
sex. It is all forgotten
like an old movie.
I see people in department stores and
supermarkets
walking down aisles
buying things
and I can see by the way their clothing
fits them and by the way they walk
and by their faces and their eyes
that they care for nothing
and that nothing cares
for them.
I see a hundred people a day
who have given up
entirely.
If I go to the racetrack
or a sporting event
I can see thousands
that feel for nothing or
no one
and get no feeling
back.
Everywhere I see those who
crave nothing but
food, shelter, and
clothing; they concentrate
on that,
dreamlessly
I do not understand why these people do not
vanish
I do not understand why these people do not
expire
why the clouds
do not murder them
or why the dogs
do not murder them
or why the flowers and the children
do not murder them,
I do not understand.
I suppose they are murdered
yet I can’t adjust to the
fact of them
because they are so many.
Each day,
each night,
there are more of them
in the subways and
in the buildings and
in the parks
they feel no terror
at not loving
or at not
being loved
While I DO like Bukowski, one of my original faves; I can also understand the people
who hate his hubris, his ego the size of Mars. "Dreamlessly" is an excellent example
of that; it's pretty much just him and God up there on the mountain looking down at
the might-as-well-be-dead rest of us. Bukowski was an artist whose best works were
self-portrature; all those people he was describing in "Dreamlessly" were him.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
I love this one as well Todd! Bukowski writes a lot about the absence of 'spark', passion and soul in people and he does it in a very clever way but it is true that he sometimes comes across as arrogant and judgmental.
@rayheinrich I believe that most of his work is indeed a reflection of himself and perhaps through his writing he inculpates people who are like him in a try to convince himself or the world of his dissociation from them. I've read somewhere that the people who really knew him described him as a completely different man from the man that he comes across to be from his writing.
I can't deny though that I love Charles and I also can't deny that when I read his work I feel as if, as you put it, I am a God myself, up on that mountain, looking down at the pathetic people who are just like me. I acknowledge that they are like me and I am like them but when I am up that mountain, far away from them I can pretend I am not one of them and get rid of the guild that surrounds me when I am not up there and that is cathartic! Of course though it's very hypocritical pretending to be superior and I can understand why some people hate him but I personally love him!
Here's another Poem of Bukowski I love:
"Lifedance"
The area dividing the brain and the soul
is affected in many ways by
experience —
some lose all mind and become soul:
insane.
some lose all soul and become mind:
intellectual.
some lose both and become:
accepted.
I came off a bit down on the guy, but he's one of my faves.
It's just that I didn't like "Dreamlessly".
Story about Bukowski and Michael Mcneilley (a poet friend of mine):
Story:
Michael, making ends meet, was working as a projectionist in a small porno movie house.
Bukowski came in every so often. One night Michael was very drunk. He forgot to rewind the film
and put the take-up reel where the feed reel should go. He started the film without looking at it,
slumped down against the wall, and fell asleep. A film, projected this way, runs upside down and backwards.
Bukowski was in the audience that night, but instead of booing and stomping his feet liked the rest
of the audience, he walked back to the projection booth, ignored Michael completely,
stopped the projector, picked up another film that had been rewound properly, mounted it on the projector,
started it, and walked back to his seat. (Since this story is too long already, I'll leave out the rest of the
details.) What resulted was: Nobody noticed, Michael kept his job, Bukowski got in for free from then on,
and Bukowski, likely as not, would end up in the projection room drinking with Michael.
My favorite Bukowski done by Russell - always fucking thrills me:
Tom Russell (masterful lyricist and singer) does Bukowski's "Crucifix In A Deathhand"
(followed by the first stanza of Warren Zevon's "Carmelita")
yes, they begin out in a willow, I think
the starch mountains begin out in the willow
and keep right on going without regard for
pumas and nectarines
somehow these mountains are like
an old woman with a bad memory and
a shopping basket.
we are in a basin. that is the
idea. down in the sand and the alleys,
this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided,
held like a crucifix in a deathhand,
this land bought, resold, bought again and
sold again, the wars long over,
the Spaniards all the way back in Spain
down in the thimble again, and now
real estaters, subdividers, landlords, freeway
engineers arguing. this is their land and
I walk on it, live on it a little while
near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms
listening to glazed recordings
and I think too of old men sick of music
sick of everything, and death like suicide
I think is sometimes voluntary, and to get your
hold on the land here it is best to return to the
Grand Central Market, see the old Mexican women,
the poor . . . I am sure you have seen these same women
many years before
arguing
with the same young Japanese clerks
witty, knowledgeable and golden
among their soaring store of oranges, apples
avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers -
and you know how these look, they do look good
as if you could eat them all
light a cigar and smoke away the bad world.
then it's best to go back to the bars, the same bars
wooden, stale, merciless, green
with the young policeman walking through
scared and looking for trouble,
and the beer is still bad
it has an edge that already mixes with vomit and
decay, and you've got to be strong in the shadows
to ignore it, to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself
and the shopping bag between your legs
down there feeling good with its avocados and
oranges and fresh fish and wine bottles, who needs
a Fort Lauderdale winter?
25 years ago there used to be a whore there
with a film over one eye, who was too fat
and made little silver bells out of cigarette
tinfoil. the sun seemed warmer then
although this was probably not
true, and you take your shopping bag
outside and walk along the street
and the green beer hangs there
just above your stomach like
a short and shameful shawl, and
you look around and no longer
see any
old men.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
^^^Loaded, that one, piles it on, he does. I wonder which were his faves, the pared down or the big rushes.
The Russell vid is delicious, thanks.
billy wrote:welcome to the site. make it your own, wear it like a well loved slipper and wear it out. ella pleads:please click forum titles for posting guidelines, important threads. New poet? Try Poetic DevicesandWard's Tips
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .
Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.
No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--
Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.
wae aye man ye radgie
