Friday, July 31, 2020

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.


Wednesday, July 29, 2020

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!





 


Monday, July 27, 2020

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!

 
'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