Poetry & Prose by Jo VonBargen

in the depths of
a poet’s despair
somehow for a moment we are
saved by a windfall
of memory: the juiciness
of a fruit, the cold taste of
water, a long ago face
given back to us by a dream,
a rose still blooming
in November, finding
something we thought was
lost, the smell of a library,
a map beautifully
colored, a clock chime,
a sudden pain

there are muses, spirits
that move softly through
the earth, find those that
need touching–touch us,
and move on

we know this because
we are poets, yet like
a river flowing…we pass
but remain, mirror
one another, yet are
as endlessly changing
as the sea

we convert the outrage
of our lives into
sounds and rhymes and music
and verse and in the
end it is a golden
sadness, an eternity of
it, that we reveal

we gaze at this river,
this river of sadness, but
see only our dreams and in
all the days of our lives
run after them madly
though they mostly
vanish, water through sand,
but still we reach
and wonder after them
not imagining they will
always be just
beyond and not ours

there is a limit
to it all and a measure
but we are blessed
with forgetfulness
and there will always be
that one more book
we will never
get to read
and that last farewell
left unspoken

–Jo 2008

we were young, out on shore
in the starry silence, my
beloved parchment moon hanging
like a sigh, and we
watched the sea whip and sing
the whole night filled
with silvery leaps
from the waves and buoys like
sentinels weeping

little conch shells in
the sand guarded the gypsies
of the water, keeping
their pleasure erect, and we
almost heard bells or
so we thought

on the tall sea wall
the virile wind pursued us with
his breathing, burning
sword, and then the sea
darkened and roared, bells
gone now, and we turned
pale in the night
at how fast he came, this
wind satyr of low-born
stars with his sharp
and glistening tongue, laughing
at our alarm

we found a stone shelter
and knelt down inside, pulling
J Daniels from our bag
for a calming swig
and listened to
the furious wind gnashing
the slate roof tiles, shivered,
drew our coats tight around us
and breathed in
the life-giving scare,
made terrorized love
till dawn

–Jo 2008

why do they fret about
dying?

how little they are
in universe terms; in the vast
sea of humanity nothing
but cells and sinews
and one single song a mere
soundless throbbing on
the waves

what distances love
can reach in that vast sphere
how can their single visions
outsoar that flight?

to judge themselves by their
failures is to cast blame upon
Spring for its randomness

it is in the vastness of humanity
that they are beyond human
and can lift to the skies
and are deathless

the mountains are their
stepping stones
and on the spirited wind
are no graves

–Jo 2008

we were the Beats
we were the cool poets
we were way, way cool, man
dressed in black
hip to everything
gathered nightly downtown
at a little coffee house
called The Grave
front door painted black
with a white skull

cross legged
on the floor, we sat around
reading our poetry
drinking Turkish coffee
listening to Eastern music
smokin’ our Newport Menthols

we were cool, man
we were way, way cool

of course the REAL cool stuff
was happening out in San Francisco
at City Lights Books

the avant garde poets
the advance guard
of our generation:
Allen Ginsberg, out there Howling
Jack Kerouac, who went On The Road
William Burroughs, his Naked Lunch
and scores of others
the Romantics
of the twentieth century
 
oh, here were the new troubador
poets, and I fantasized,
conjectured, bled in heart to be
on the road also, to be
on the move, to run away, to see
differently, to experience

these were the BEAT poets
now BEAT didn’t mean a music beat
but the Heart beat
the beaten down
the beaten up
the beatific, the holy blissful
the sympathetic
the Path
the path OFF the beaten path
the heartbeat of the downtrodden
the beat, man
the beat of life

we believed
(and not without reason)
that rigid literary forms reflected oppression:
political, social, racial,
sexual, psychic and spiritual
oppression

beat writing was our altar call
come to the altar
brothers and sisters
kneel to a freer,
more passionate,
more intuitive life of letters
and heal your
world

they called us radical for that
but we weren’t radical!
we were just aware
aware of the ridiculous
standards in society

the beat revolution was:
the beat of humanity
the beat of the inner state of feeling
the beat of heart
the beat of the real

the beat of Truth

and Truth is cool, man
Truth is still way, way cool
yeah

–Jo 2008

Texas Chick. Poet.

Thank you for visiting the blog! We hope you found something of interest, something to think about, something to take away. Please visit often!  Best wishes always…Jo

one day I will leave you

I spoke but you never listened
though I listened endlessly to you

there is a ship that will take me
and standing on the deck
I will face you and raise
my voice finally
the wind bids me leave

I must seek a lonelier way
and new sunsets

I am the seed of a tenacious plant
and in the ripeness and
fullness of heart
I must go on the wind
and scatter

My days with you brief,
briefer still the love you gave

My voice will fade in your
ears and my love vanish
in your memory

Next time I will have a richer
heart,  lips more yielding
to the spirit and I will not
seek in vain

I will not go down into
emptiness again,  this I can
promise

the mist at dawn leaves dew
and it will rise in
a cloud and make rain

not unlike the mist
I have been

–Jo 2008
 

this, this thing
of you and me, whatever it is,
expands and contracts like
the universe itself, gone
to a nebulae so far it can’t
be imagined, called home
to crush against each other
in harbor, then exploding
again, nothing can hold us,
all of this fierce roaring
into flame, fragments
rushing away from each other
at high velocity into
the black breast of night,
invading the emptiness
beyond, returning for
another howling
fireblast, diastolic,
systolic, the beating heart,
back and forth, live
and die, ever pumping
terrible life into this
burn and be damned
love, this tragic promise,
bond of the blind in
darkness, this torment,
beautiful blood agony
in which not one atom
will survive because it is
heaven-born but not of God,
power and glory,the sum
of our energies,
demon spawn of faceless
violence, the root of
all things

–Jo 2008

don’t you always paint life
as rosy, you powers that be
high up on the hill, don’t
you cover the graves
with cream gravy and the slums
with softening mist
and proclaim high above
the gutters how they run with
melted butter and oh see
your lovely families in
their well-balanced lives
with their healthy glasses of
milk and perpetual summers
and clean pajamas
at bedtime and warm houses
and gleaming cars

I stand on the rain-stained
streets and look with
imperfect eyes that stare beyond
these lies at the newly
washed clean, their
dark-cornered pubs and men
puking in the alley
and kids running wild
and the pensioner spending his
rent and dying from cigs
and the pure coldness of
it all moving toward old age

your deep, comfy armchairs
and tennis clothes
hardly wash with us, the newly
clear, the old poor,
the dying, the hopeless,
who all smile
as we recognize the latrine
of life and how you’ve
blocked the ends of our streets
to prevent us entering
yours

–Jo 2008

I suppose they’ve likened you
to a satyr, for the miraculous
loping of your stride, your
soaring step that binds and
divides, kicks up gravel from
beneath my body all moist
and conquered, or maybe
they simply witnessed
the darkly wavering light
spilling from your eyes as
you gazed into mine, or saw
the wiliness of of your
easy amazement or the havoc
of my feathers mangled
by a single clutch of your
faux-cherubic hand

you’re a fucking carnivore,
faithless genie of the
briar patch, and you didn’t
care that I was blind, nor
did you see the wings gracing
my shoulders or the sign on
my brow, this bloody cross,
chrism, incantation,
vow of damnation, disaster
and salvation, and as for
me, I couldn’t see whether
you were weasel or wonder
and still have no clue,
so with whom will I share
my discovery, where will I
bury the gold I carry inside
me, that ember hissing
within, if, leaving me,
you turn away and never
look back

–Jo 2008

dense and soul-heavy,
this sense that joyful love
will never be found, walking
the wet pavements trying
to free the heart, your mind
a whirling, dizzy Milky Way,
a Hell-bound night bug
swirling crazily, crazily
in the feeble streetlights,
memories underfoot, always
underfoot and armed, like
water gnawing at your muddy
banks, gentle killers of
your dreams, in your blood,
so shuttered in your blood
that no one’s guiltless, not
even God, anymore

Waiting for the days of
feasting on your corpse
you wish that healing snows
would soon cover this death
you hold your breath for, and
looking up at the stars
you see your slated fate and
wonder through tears why this
boundless, unchanging love could
never find another like it; was
it because the sunlight you
bore attracts only the Dark,
the Other, your fiery rays
hiding a black hole sucking
in all the broken hallelujahs
that you are for God,
for Jesus, for all men

emerging from your dreams, on
the horizon, another bold,
promising lover, his eventual
long goodbyes patiently
awaiting their turn, ritualed
as any christening, and you,
sullen, listen hard
for the hordes, the demons
that will ruin it all
eventually, the loathesome
hubbub of shattered dreams
they leave, ghosts in
the wet mud, and there you’ll
stand in the end, draped
in your crosses, sobbing,
left killed to the bone
yet again, waiting for
the angels to carry you
at last to the caves,
behind the stone they’ll
one day roll away

–Jo 2008