Nonsongs and Neopsalms: a compendium of poems by Margaret Gunning (Part 1)

Herein, some poems I wrote during various times in my life, pretty much as they went down, unedited. A few of them even got published in the likes of Prism International and Room of One's Own, but my book-length manuscript (Nonsongs and Neopsalms) didn't fly because my style was all over the map. As are these, but I'd still like to share them. For the sake of flow, I won't break these up with my customary images. This ran so long I had to divide it in two parts.

What Happens in September

all the acorns of my brain rioting

           out of a little hole in the top of a tree

I can hear them rumbling

(like Frost’s apples) from long away –

Squirrels whiz in a double helix

         around the black tree/each

                                  tail-frisk

bright as a fizzing synapse

The smell of English walnuts

       and an old old box made of dusky wood

                just opened after fifty years in

                                                         the attic

Chestnuts on the ground like the

eyes of fractious horses

that gallop through

                   a seethe of

                                surf

I am six, scuffy-kneed, collecting

chestnuts to string or sell on the street

or Sixty, dimmed but simmering still,

hair gone to milkweed,

skin with the smell of dried apricots

and used aprons/still on the

wheel of Four, the wheeling and

reeling,

rocketing year.

Bite the plum

Naked is as naked

does:  as clear as

Your eyes are,

your clothing is

that much

       /clearer,

dearer still the scent

             all man,

of you,/inestimable.

I should never

Take you out of that box,

Never sample those

 dark

/chocolates,

      too

for / dear you are,

the Arabian horse

of my childhood

(standing still only to be

petted).

Notice me!  I am more

than a

Brain on a stick, but

an  (all-breathing

       (Non-fiction       /woman.   To break

this cellophane

  (that heatshrinks your

legend),

would it be a rupture,

an insertion, an

arrogance of the ovaries,

Or a sweet inevitable,

        angel driven  (deep)

my  /                                 into

the moist cake of your heart

   

              as
You are  /  removed as

an engraving of a dybbuk,

I can stroke your image

only,  Never get your

smell/or feel your hair

Never grab it –

                 up  in

Let it dry/to a soft

Black wrinkled fruit –

The juice that never

had a chance to

run down my

                          chin

will gleam in those

glacial blue

eyes:

Will spark on your

skin –

Spring-loaded

April’s where I live,

         the place my heart opens

                   rose-burgeoning, shinyleaf-new

a smell of bursting peonies,

           bumble-dizzy bees bumping

                       butter-and-eggs

swollen buds thrusting

          in the lovesick air.

Leaden, laden, leavened, lavendered, loaded,

one big quivering nose, a moist surprise

hatched out in the nest of my body

April Pegasus-leaps

        in my pulse,

sun-shot                    Pan-piped

       heady, relentlessly

tender,

recklessly

sweet.

Three haiku

                                              

I.      Gift

         Snow, just one slow flake, settles

         subtle as a breath

         Lighting on

         my tongue.

II.     Trail

        

         Beside the still railroad tracks,

         A hot sun.  Song of

         Cicadas. 

         We ride.

III.    Back road

         

          The way unspools, retreating

          from a back window:

          Unreeling

          vision.

bridges (a Vancouver haiku)

                                    

latecity nightsky –

spill of black/Silk skirt:dancing

spritesparks/arcs of pearls

Fall

The antique

smell of

autumn

it charges me it

startles my nose:

leaves all turned

foxy,

shuddering into a

crumble of old

iron at my feet

in a great sustained

hallelujah of praise         /ancient trees are

praying up:  their frail arms

worshipping wide

                                               (some are

redheaded, some

blonde, a few

undecided, as if they

might make a change

at any time) The wind

shifts around like a

salesman,

                yellow of denture

full of rude/surprising charm

The antique smell of

autumn it changes me it

(startles my nose.    then all at once

an old old woman grundles

by/do I know her?

She is me   do I fear her?    A study in

black/clad with

a scent

the

lush whiff of

life-in-death

Violin

Falling into amber,
a buzzing blur of
honey and blonde,

strings as veins, a coursing, rush of taut

bliss, stretched across a

hollow core

of yearning:    Heart-bulb

                           lush

will vibrate as  /  hips of wood

shine like patient still eyes

and ochre sounds tease, tug

at hunger, reach, reach.

Fingers and strings kiss and

come apart, kiss and come apart,

The frail box eems in a subtle

pullulation, shy as a girl, lush as a

wild                           and

   /      whiff of mink:/                                all in a stillness

the bow sighs, sighs like a deep

diver, soughing the life in

this creature of tree, this female

fleshed of the organs of nature –

and all nature, all in a murmur

of intimate pain,

                           hewn

draws from this/heart of nothing

(this wood-held dusk, this

stirred scent of stored petals

this great warm handful of love)

a shining:  a chiming, a brining,

a pool of dark wine

spilled from the lustre of flowing eyes,

a seeing, a speaking, this songswept

woman of wood.

shiatsu

               

playing down the roots of my spine

like fleshly xylophone:    each vertebra

                            oceanic

humming with dim  /  secrets

                                                   ever

                     Every snake I have  /  handled

entwisted along the cord.    I am

awake now,

chorded by blunt fingers

strummed in the blood

which courses deep vermilion

in the sub-tectonic plates of my pelvis

The gut-song heaving upward

like a straining lifter, triumphant –

Selah, she is new!  (set loose

                                                 pure

in a slippery arcing dolphin of  /  prana)

splashed

in amniotic

baptism:

Behold, her crown.

Yes; or The Chagall Bride

    

                                     (i)                                         

i pray myself

Awake:   the smudge and

drudge of day

bleared by the bliss

of existence

a leaping fish of Be/the singing

blood that cries

 I am

                                          (ii)                                         

(i insist on you

the way I insist on

Yes:

an E. M. Forster yes

close beside the

everlasting “why”

                     (like man

and wife

why answers

Yes in an endless

                 “I do”

             

Poem on my fortieth (for my secondborn)

  

and bliss flicked

through, too, (quick)

like the flip of an

eyelid,

         /just

when did it pass over,

an infant surging to

      burstingly              woman?

a  /                beautiful  

when lost it I,             gone

                         these/

days, these days, when

               violet

did the  /  plum become a

           dead-

(small/sweet)

driedthing

She went by, my dayspring my

firehorse of a girl, life fiercing in

       glace-blue

her/          eyes:

        fleetingly                    this Astarte,

too/danced, Fred Astaired/                     toddle

turned to whirl as (slowly

my age

pulled ripe skin down

like the rind of old

fruit).

              Love fresh and juiceful

 when?/

       passed  into a darker

hymn, quiescence. 

The juice of jigs, all

         hard

that/ sex, gone by

too.  Ova will

        soon

dry/to peach pits

dessicated as hair.

                                   mainspring/

(She, my spring, my/

offspring, spurts still

                                   with

    that warm

juice,/sucked hard out

                 howling

of  my      /      heart)

                                                        

                                                      Guitar (for Keith)

  

How could I tell the way, tender as a lute,

his voice plays me,

especially over the wires, in the place

Without faces, a coiled, blue

Secrecy?  Sound strums off

 the tips of my fingers.

Some chords are stiff,

Almost hard; slick and shining,

stretched in iridescence

over my ringing ears.

My smile bars the strings.

The warm seal

Breaks; the peal

(spreading like a fugue

inside my chest) makes an

Easy, reaching harmony.

There are worlds beneath the words,

This overarching pattern, high

as a cat’s back; caught by the spreading

Nest of my hair.

  

                                               Bird in the hand

My bird in the

hand,

My bright dollar,

 blonde head

 Hard as a dime,

there in your

trench coat streaming

with spring, wet

as new robins

           or

Downy as stamens,

                          all

I would suck up/the

merry contempt in

your sleigh-bell

eyes,

Pepper my salt

with the wit of your

wounds,

Dive into the

iced-over pool

 of your

 voluptuous

 disdain.

Unbegun

I sense a tightly curled potential in an

alternate self/I have never met:  is it me or

thee?

What do you call the sound before the wind blows?

(and)

How many wolves precisely hide behind

the icebound pre-flood of your

unmelted eyes?  How would they bound,

unbound?  How does a glacier

feel when it groans and cracks like a

cannon, all its

                       sluicy sperm released?

How to judge the fertility of what has

not yet happened,

an approaching train rocketing backwards

into the sucked-back pre-time of imagination?

Would you smell like shredded wheat,

like gunfire, like an impending

surprise?  Would I be able to touch

you, at least with my mind,

or would all my juices, sunparched, bleached with shock,

frizzle away to the nothing in which it all began?

      

blue popsicle (for J. G.)

I live in your throat, curled

with a cat

 sleeping in sounds

 that drift daily/supple man-

music

What flavor?  I cannot

fathom/Yet shaking my head at you

(underwater) with surprise.

Joyborne, my heart smiles

(chiming) in sleepytime

                                          tune – is it

magic yet?/Dark out

now, I palm the

 chocolate

of your voice.  Dandle me:  cat

in a basket

 breathing our lonely, our smilenest in larksilent

candlesmoke - 

                                                 pomegranate wine

I sip at

your smile;

fire        light

 dances on your teeth

cat 

               

 on a hearthrug oh; comfort.

  

Close with you, on the sofa

(tight) breathing

in unison

                                                Succulent

rubies.   Heavy

with spice; promise

(of bursting kernels

shared on a back step

I’d stain my shirt)

                     
                   

                                                           Tryptich

  

I.                   Lover

    What is the song of you?

               Electric; blue

               A spurt of brimstone in the dark.

               I snatched your eyes

               from the fire,

               They lit the coals

               of my desire

 

               You’re

               sharks,

               you’ve turned my being

               to steam and sparks.

 I.            Tin man

              

                He walks through

                robot days,

                listening to the echo in his chest.

                Quicksilver tears

                spill from his liquid eyebeams

                to fuse his jaws in place

                And then one night it rains.

                Waiting

                for the tender mercy of an oilcan,

                he holds his rusted axe aloft

               

                Frozen in mid-chop.

 I.                    Skater’s Waltz

    We slice in new ice

               Keen figures with bright, honed blades

               carve in the virgin white

               Harsh cuts that cannot be erased.

               I let you go.  I trust you

               to move gently on my twinkling plane,

               You loose my hand

               to let me spin across your space.

               We slice in new ice

               Keen figures that cannot be erased.

                                                 I would say

  

I would say that you are springtime,

That lambs

could not be lovelier: laughing bells

Of eyes bright with seeing,

the shining, shone of you.

I would say that you are a

Renaissance painting

of a beautiful woman:

So restored

that the paint gleams; its sheen

Fresh from the brush; its wetness

smelling new.

I would say that you are living

Water:  I see tiny

perfect selves, suspended

upside-down in the silver

Merriment of your eyes.

If true, then I would say that you are

Not my brother; but some other; some

me not yet thought of; next year’s

Reflection

cast lightly (God’s amusement)

over waters

rendered still.

                                                              

                                                     

                                                           Gina

 sweet shy

dark girl          I’ve seen her

here before

  she always wore the best clothes

(silvery things/bangles

feathered skirts

necklace made

from the teeth of a wolf)

now I see Gina in the ward

kitchen.        Still beautiful

big-eyed

part Cree          her hair tied back

she shows me the tracings of

partly-healed               gashes

sewn back together in

a gridwork

                                                                 hands/

on her arms,                                                 wrists.

She must be twenty or so

No one comes to visit

Once she had a boyfriend

but he got sick too

                                           

                                                                    

  fantasy

I dreamed of a petting zoo 
with live men in it

all naked in their splendor

some

fuzzy, some smooth

all smelling good

of dark leather/gull feather

spanish heather

eating their golden chest hair

like shredded wheat

and leaving whenever we feel like it

could we name them?  No,

that would be getting involved.

But we’d remember their

sad eyes at noon

(feeding time – go feed the bulls)

some luscious sea-blue, some rich as

melted chocolate.

Retro Commercial - Radio Shack Cell Phones - 1990

My husband is now saying, "You need a new phone."  "Why?" "Because I need a new phone." We have gone by the pass-it-down rule for a very long time now, as I am a dinosaur and don't care two figs for phones, never use them except to MAKE A PHONE CALL. So when Bill craves a new toy which he doesn't need (he claims he "needs a better camera" when he never takes pictures, and when asked about it says, "I WILL take pictures if I have a better camera" - this man is a scientist, can you believe it?), I end up getting his leftovers, which is fine with me. I will receive a slightly older phone from him which runs out of charge even when it is almost never used. That's "new" enough for me.
 

I note from my grandkids that old technology is coming back in a very big way: little cameras that spit out tiny printed photos which are then plastered all over the bedroom wall (shades of the 1950s!), and even record players requiring the vinyl recordings that immediately warp, crack, and develop scratches, skips and indelible dirt and grit that can't be removed, not even by the bizarre "white glue" method I've seen online. 

Records are those "things" we got rid of in the '80s. Bulky, dirt-attracting, the only really good thing about them were the covers. CD art suddenly shrank, and now it's just gone forever and everything is "streaming". But all this has happened at light speed, and it's interesting to see how far we've come in a few short decades, from the technological miracle of a suitcase you lugged around with you to an advanced computer you can hold in the palm of your hand. 

On the other hand. . . some people now collect obsolete technology just as zealously as I collect dolls and trolls. One must have an absorbing hobby in these frightening times, and as with the gadgets, old ideas like the drive-in movie and restaurant car-hop service are coming back into their own.

Though this has never been proven, there are rumours the nerdy high-tech boy at the end of this ad is actually Bill Gates. If not, he should have been. No one dreamed in those innocent times that things were about to get dangerously out of control, and that technology would swallow us all and put the entire world population under constant surveillance. George Orwell would have felt vindicated.

One advantage of the old technology was that it couldn't be hacked, because no one even knew what that term meant back then. Computers were these big slabs of quivering cardboard with multicolored flashing lights on them, sometimes talking to us in a robotic female voice ("working. . . " - always dubbed by Majel Barrett, Gene Roddenberry's wife and Nurse Chapell on the original series. You know the one I mean.) 

 

But the price! I could not find a cost for this particular "phone", but some early computers ran in the thousands, and people cheerfully paid it, if for no other reason than as a sort of status symbol. I even heard of a dummy called a "cellular phony" which people slung around and "answered" to show how important they were, like the pagers of old. People don't change, even if the technology accelerates past their ability to understand or cope with it. 

AND NOW, (just for fun). . . some artsy-fartsy takes on my screen grabs from the Radio Shack ad!

 

 

 

Tone-deaf, hypocritical, narcissistic, deluded, whiny brats: must be Harry and Meghan!

(PLEASE NOTE! I did not write this, nor do I own the rights to it, but wanted to share it by copy and paste rather than the usual  link, since I believe it is so important. I’ll take it down if there is ANY problem with it! But he says it better than any of the rest of us can.)

PIERS MORGAN: Meghan and Harry's new book only confirms they're the world's most tone-deaf, hypocritical, narcissistic, deluded, whiny brats - AND that most of the stories the 'lying' press wrote about them were 100 percent true!

By Piers Morgan for MailOnline

 

Published: 06:50 EDT, 27 July 2020 | Updated: 07:16 EDT, 27 July 2020

 

'Where’s the positivity,’ moans Prince Harry,' why is everyone so miserable and angry?’

I regret to say I laughed out loud when I read that line from the new book “Finding Freedom” which claims to be the REAL story about why Harry and his wife Meghan quit the Royals and Britain.

It’s hard to think of anyone in public life right now more relentlessly miserable, angry and negative than the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Barely a week goes by without them whining about something or suing people. They’ve become serial victims, intent on painting themselves as the most hard-done-by people on God’s earth.

Yet the more they complain, as the rest of the world struggles with the very real hell of the worst pandemic for 100 years, the more they expose themselves as a pair of appallingly bitter, staggeringly self-obsessed, utterly deluded, and woefully tone-deaf laughing stocks.

The title of the book alone has made me shake my head ever since it was announced. It is obviously derived from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography ‘Long Walk To Freedom’ which is one of the most powerful books ever written about regaining liberty.

But any comparison between Mandela and the Sussexes is frankly a sick joke.

For 18 of his 27 years behind bars, South Africa’s most iconic leader was housed in an 8ft-by-7ft concrete cell on Robben Island with only a straw mat to sleep on. He had an iron bucket for a toilet, thin blankets for his bed, and allowed one visitor a year. He couldn’t even attend the funerals of his mother and son.

Finding Freedom: Harry, Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, has been written by royal watchers Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, described as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's 'cheerleaders'.

Every day, Mandela would work in a lime quarry, breaking stones as armed guards watched over him. So, the freedom he experienced when he finally got out of prison was a very real and visceral one.

Harry and Meghan’s experience in captivity has been slightly less oppressive.

After a sumptuous wedding that was rapturously received around the world, they lived in a palatial taxpayer-funded royal home, were waited on by teams of servants, flew around in private jets, and attended glitzy movie premieres where they were cheered by screaming fans.

But it wasn’t enough.

Stung by a series of perceived slights by other members of the royal family and palace courtiers, and repeated media criticism of hypocrisy based on their undeniably hypocritical behavior, they began to see this gilded life of unimaginable luxury and privilege as a ‘prison’.

In their eyes, they had become Nelson Mandela, the victims of a terrible miscarriage of justice now trapped in a world of unending misery. So, they broke ‘free’, dramatically announcing in early January that they were quitting the royals, and Britain, and heading off for a new life in America where they could be the people they wanted to be and lead the lives they wanted to lead.

There was just one problem. Unlike Mandela, who emerged from his very real prison with extraordinary positivity, an astonishing lack of bitterness, and an intense desire to unify not divide, the Sussexes seem even more unhappy now than they were before and intent on causing as much division as possible.

This new book, clearly written with their approval and with enough private details to establish that a lot of it came directly from the horses’ mouths, was supposed to ‘set the record straight’. We would all apparently read it, understand how badly treated they were, and sympathize enormously.

In fact, the opposite has happened.

The extracts published in various newspapers have only shown us just how pathetically self-pitying Harry and Meghan have become.

This was a couple who had it all - but threw it away in a massive fit of ego-driven pique. The sheer scale of their narcissism is astonishing, and at the heart of it lies one stunning fact: they genuinely couldn’t understand why William and Kate, the future King and Queen, got preferential treatment to them.

Time after time in the book, this seething resentment re-emerges and it explains everything. For a couple so low down the Throne Succession cab rank, the Sussexes have delusions of grandeur and importance on a breath-taking scale.

They also have no sense of self-awareness.

In the book, Harry and Meghan, always so angry at media intrusion into their family’s life, have stuck the knife into his family in spectacular fashion.

Harry whacks his brother Prince William for being a snob and his father Prince Charles for being thoughtless, while Meghan whacks her sister-in-law Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, for being cold and insensitive towards her.

They repeatedly accuse the whole Royal family, presumably including the Queen, of ignoring their desperate plight, despite, as they laughably claim, them single-handedly leading the royals to supposedly unprecedented heights of global popularity.

The fact this garbage is being spewed after the Queen, Charles, William and Kate have spent months comforting the British people in remarkably empathetic and impressive fashion during the crisis, is even more grating.

The deeply intrusive revelations go on, page after page. Of course, the comical irony of the approved publication of all this ‘setting the record straight’ private information is that most of it confirms myriad newspaper stories that we were previously assured were ‘media lies’. 

There are other little snippets in the book that blast off the page like bombs.

Meghan, we’re told, used to tip off the paparazzi about her movements in Toronto where she filmed her TV show Suits. One of them even had her phone number.

Oh, and she would leak stories to the press to promote herself.

When I read this, I thought immediately of the way she has so heartlessly disowned her father Thomas for naively colluding with the paparazzi to promote himself in the run-up to her wedding. 

An extract from the book told how Meghan, sitting on FaceTime to her friend in a bathtub, confessed she sent her father one last text on the night before her wedding in May 2018. And for her furiously worded lawsuit against unknown paparazzi last week for their alleged intrusion into their Hollywood life.

It’s clearly one rule for Meghan when it comes to such media-appeasing behavior, another for even her dad.

As with so much that surrounds the Duchess’s conduct, the hypocrisy is stunning.

But what’s even more repellent is her totally delusional victimhood. ‘I gave up my entire life for this family,’ whines Meghan in the book. No luv, you gave up precisely three years for this family, then stole away Britain’s favorite Prince to Hollywood where you’re now complaining even more than you were before.

As for ‘hostage’ Harry, he’s becoming a tragic figure. It’s getting to the stage where his former army mates may want to fly over to Los Angeles to carry out an extraction operation and save him from himself. If this book is supposed to be the pro Meghan and Harry one, I’d hate to see a hatchet job.

They come out of it as the world’s most self-centered couple, bleating away about their ghastly lives living in TV star Tyler Perry’s $20 million Hollywood mansion, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have died from the coronavirus and tens of millions more have lost their jobs.

The struggle for much of the planet right now is very, very real. Just as it was for Nelson Mandela for 27 years. Meghan and Harry’s only struggle is to work out each day which of their latest borrowed lavish home’s twelve bathrooms they want to luxuriate in before they bravely appear on those creepy videos to lecture us all about equality and hardship.  

I think what most of us would like now is to find freedom from this ridiculous pair’s incessantly negative, miserably, angry whining.

The real mushroom