Ragas for Sleepy Bee

for Krishna, both of them, god, man

And so we began
the cooking lessons
the first demur approaches
the blushing papayas then
the fires the chilies harvested
curtains drawn

1

Dawn.

Slow him down.

He speaks
his accent thickly
richly Tamil

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poem by Warren Falcon
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What Bells & Sex Have To Do With Each Other, A Mythic Rendering From Ancient Texts & Dreams, circa 1981

'The bells, I say, the bells outbreak their towers...
- Hart Crane, from 'The Broken Tower'

For Marianne Annur

...I will tell you of Fatima.

She is the bell,
The tintinabulum,
The veil and the will.

Then take me to her.
You can have the tapestry of streets,
The bowls of tint.

Shade the surface black
And she will emerge
The river,

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Instead Of You Today One Black Mouse

Instead of you today
one black mouse.

It arrives the first
day of your departure.
It catches the corner
of my eye, my blood eye,
as you call it, and I
think at first that this
is only sunlight reflecting
from a window being closed
across the street but
my beating heart, faster,
holding my breath, tells
me it is a mouse that
precedes its smell in
the house, that is, if
it takes up residence,
and the curtains remain
permanently closed.

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poem by Warren Falcon
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The LoRuhamah Poems - Her Death Discordant

for Judy Asher, killed at age 21

These meditations/laments are set in
Appalachian mountains and towns of
North American Southern states, circa mid1960's

[The name, LoRuhamah, means 'not loved']

Hosea 1: 6 - 'And she conceived again, and bare a daughter.
And God said unto him, Call her name LoRuhamah' for I will
no more have mercy on the house of Israel, but will utterly take
them away.'

Part One

1

O rue rue LaRue among the ginkgoes
cloven leaves all fallen whose burnished berries

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Some Ways Of Looking At A Black Mouse

[to the reader:
This is part of a series poem...this one
follows 'Instead of You Today One Black Mouse'
which should be read before this one for greater
context. There is a playing going on in both
poems which is not only about love had and lost,
a black mouse that shows up, as well as a dove,
the day before the lover returns permanently
to live in native country of India. There is
a Wallace Stevens' playing with notions of
poetry, meaning, and more, and a playing with
language and signs which shall hopefully lend
some jarring but enjoyable takes/slants/songs/
glyphs.

When you see the 'x's
in the poem, read
'times' as in the
math sign for multi-
plication. & of course

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Now, Heart' - Some Of What I Remember When I Listen

A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts.
—Willard Van Orman Quine

From early poems,1970s, youthful indiscretions/attempts to vocally/poetically arrive at/derive a worthwhile writer's voice. Some explication might serve or enhance these under serving, undeserving though 'striving-after' poems hidden in old journals understandably unpublished but now so with apologies which are these expiatory explanations. Recently rediscovering these early arrivals, derivative yet aspiring I recognized and reembraced an enduring self maturing, arriving into late middle age:

Obsessed newly by jazz, mad about the many miraculous lady singers, entranced all too easily as youth are wont to be by sorrows and sexual infatuations which feel, emphasis on 'feel', like love, here are two of many 'songs' as tributes and life markers to jazz singers who provided soundtrack and felt expression to my angst and easily inflated/deflated sense of self, of beloved others, and of that new territory, independent life away from parental home and childhood community discovering, blundering into the fray of separate hearts and minds, irresponsible genitals and insouciant jouissance ('juiciness', in French) , discovering then and again and again that like Walt Whitman I 'contain worlds' and many disparate selves poorly formed, most of them collective projections and expectations of who or what I wanted to be, what others wanted and expected me to be, resulting in much confusion, tumult and multitudes of momentary throw-away selves. Thus singers like Bessie Smith and Dinah Washington became anchors, warm contexts and containers, for my daily fragmentation and re-formation.

I lived on 3rd street in downtown Chattanooga, a refugee from zealous, politically conservative white evangelicals and the vestigial yet still viral Southern Confederacy. Just a block or two from where Bessie Smith was born, I used to watch from my upstairs porch the steep hilly street's comings and goings with a glimpse of the Tennessee River between tenements across the street, its persistent rich aroma heavy in the air. I imagined Bessie Smith as a little girl playing up and down the street like the kids I saw then - once, two of them gleefully chasing a frighteningly large and confused looking rat.

William—he insisted on 'Willie'—an old man down the street who knew Bessie as a little girl, used to come up to my porch after one day hearing Bessie from my phonograph singing blues onto the always busy but attentive street. One of the first and permanent things I learned from my porch is that a city street has keen, observant eyes, acute ears, omnivorously seeing/hearing everything, indifferently, perhaps, but nothing escapes it, a roving, all-knowing urban Eye of God.

Extremely green and eager as green always is though stutteringly, and without apology, I enjoyed Willie's many stories and back pocket bottles of Old Mr. Boston Apricot Brandy, both of which—story and spirits/spirited story —dissolved or appeared to, age, racial, cultural, and sociological differences, along with those catalysts/cata-lusts, the forever alchemical Bessie and other jazz singers, Billie! Dinah! Ella! Sassy! Lil Ester Phillips! Nina Simone! to name only a few of the sensuous solutio chanteuses resolving sexual confoundaries by Miss-ambiguating sins' plethera with loose lilt and will- o-the-lisp whisper tongues.

One night Willie, much 'in the pocket'—an expression for being well onto tipsy which I've never heard from anyone but him—wanted to dance to a Bessie tune playing, 'Back Water Blues', him recalling nights as a young man in rural Tennessee where he'd worked hard days in oppressive vegetable fields then hit the after hours juke joints for 'colored, twas segregation days, ' he explained, where he would go to drink, dance then dive/delve, as it were, into the sensual mysteries of moist skin, hot breath, mutually open mouths with their commodious moans and mumbles, venial hands, always vital parts, private hearts mutually pounding ancient known rhythms, odors and tastes of gin and those slender, forbidden, now greedily stolen bites in those all too short nights with their damned intrusive dawns.

'Dawnus interuptus, ' I quipped, us both slapping knees, passing the narrative bottle fore and aft hefting moments re-grasped between us, offerings to the equally narrative river, the all-knowing hungry street.

Jumping to his feet, Willie described 'powder dancin'' (pronounced marvelously, 'powdah') which I had never heard of. Talcum powder would be copiously scattered onto the dance floor where couples in stocking or bare feet would ecstatically dance, gliding and sliding sweetly scented, muskily bent toward later glides and slides in the slippery joy of momentary allure and amour on dimmed porches or surrounding woods often enough and gratis upon delicate slabs of moonlight gratuitously dewy providing cushion for Passion's out and in, honoring and dignifying deities of skin wanting more making more skin, headlong Nature's frictional algo-rhythms indelibly scored in every/each his/her yawing yen.

Willie shouted, 'YOU GOT ANY TALC POWDER? ! '

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Four Snortets, A Parody With Fondness For Thomas Stearns Eliot

'Now we come to discover that the moments of agony...are likewise permanent with such permanence as time has...Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination-We had the experience but missed the meaning.' - from 'The Dry Salvages' by T.S. Eliot

1

Burnt Snortin'

Mister, or Sir, rather, Thomas Sterns Eliot left his evening door,
late middle age, having lived into the postmodern 'new' millennium,
having again reiterated his propounded new diet whereupon
wandering on a deserted shore near mumbling twilight one might
meet a most inarticulate soft peach or unutterable yet edible Christ,
or a close match, a little kidding, upon which we may, if we dare,
reiterative quartet playing plaintive though palliatively, dine four
squarely in Piccadilly sempiternal before getting sodden after
sundown, preferably on Friday, which is a good time to do it, to eat
and drink again, remembering that it is end of the week, out of the tube

finally unethered, trousers unrolled at last, the mission to get plastered,

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Magpie, My Keeper, Is Flying - Upon Freeing the Gift of Creativity Turned Inward

.
for Elaine Bellezza, Beloved Anima-as-Fate

'There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most...The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.' - May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

This afternoon while still somewhat hungover from last night's rich meal and several glasses of strong red wine, I stumbled as one does when hungover, only today without feet but with eyes, upon the above quote by May Sarton. I had awakened this morning with fragments of a dream, repetitive of other dreams the past few months, where I am carrying something precious and just cannot put it down in any old place or upon just any available surface. I cannot put it down until I find the right surface and location.

These dreams are full of torrential flood waters, or backed up, stagnant water, toilets full of filth and pungent bright orange dark urine days old and fermenting. I cannot unhand the burden even though the urge to pee or flee or drive a car away or into flood waters is strong. I must not put down the burden odd as it is; it is my laptop carrying case made of canvas. It is large enough to carry not only my laptop but also many books with which I cannot, will not be parted from as they are the must-have-with-me-always 'bread', my staple and stability in a given to me world out of balance.

I have understood the dreams only a little - something within the psyche is flooding up, over-spilling or has already, has not been adequately canalized, channeled, streamed and guided, shaped and formed. Or flushed. I knew that eventually, as dreams do when one sits consciously, patiently, persistently with them, they would yield their messages to me, and upon revelation these must be obeyed, brought out into the world, Carl Jung having said that one has a moral responsibility to dreams once they are kenned and must be conscientiously acted upon in the outer world. Just dreaming is not enough. Everyone dreams but not very many know to dream them out into the world, to let their messages unfurl, flood and flow to bring forth new consciousness, to reshape old forms no longer adequate to self, place and time into symbol and their sense, usually not literal.

And thus, only just now, upon opening up haphazardly in a book about Dostoevsky and his struggle with addictions which mirror the profound compulsion to create at any cost perhaps beyond one's capacities to renew oneself, I find May Sarton's quote and suddenly the dreams clarify and sharpen into focus; I understand them as the burden of creativity too long turned inward, the burden of writing, the burden of poetry which I have carried heavily for most of my life since middle school when I was 11 or 12 years old when books became my lifeline, my link to existence that I could live on in spite of not wanting to do so. Written words, books, kept me from disappearing though I was and remain a mostly invisible word.

And thus the floods. One cannot ignore them. Alphabets tumble and roil. One dare not ignore them. One must see them without a choice to not see them. In them I am suddenly made visible, bright orange p*ss pots and all. I am both appalled and pleased. My burden is upon my knees.

The backed up water, the urine, is creativity. A somewhat odd symbol of creativity, there is more than enough evidence that urination is symbolic of self expression which is creativity. In ancient Rome the highly valued dirt from the urinals of boys' schools was collected to be used as a cosmetic in order to restore youthful energy and looks. A young boy, or puer in Latin, is an archetypal symbol of ongoing creativity and inspiration, the puer aeternas, the eternal youth, well springs of ongoing creativity still imaged in solid fountains of the world where eternal waters flow from the peni of cherubic youth.

I have struggled my entire life with a strong urge to create, to write, to express in words that creative daemon within which torments no matter the completion of a poem or essay, a lecture, a psalm. And now my dreams have had me consciously, urgently seeking a place to put the burden down, to perhaps come to it anew. I imagine that landing the burden means bringing it down to earth, manifesting creativity all the more by bringing my efforts to others for the strongest part of the compulsive urge in my creativity has been to contribute one good thing, one good poem or piece of writing which in some way might further the culture even if only by a flea's leg length.

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poem by Warren Falcon
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The Abject Ones, Six Falling—Nightingale Confesses Into Straighter Teeth

The term Abjection literally means 'the state of being cast off.' In usage it has connotations of degradation, baseness and abasement of spirit.

'...descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God.' - from 'To Brooklyn Bridge'

The boys, six falling: Tyler Clementi, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg

'What does a man come to with his virility gone? ' - Walt Whitman

'He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood
Do not ask me to see it! ' - Federico Garcia Lorca*

My Dearest Valdosta,

Even the pigeons on my stoop are silent now.

One mourning dove coos tenderly for these who have taken their own lives publicly on our behalf, for untold scores gone before them with broken hearts enraged, no more to engage the unpersuaded world which, one of them, one of the public ones, in spite of murmuring wharves, in spite of amorous dark alleys bitter in the pitch in the hateful American Twentieth Century, Hart Crane, wrote before his leap from the ship beside the phallic curve where Cuba meets the lisping sea, took his tongue away which sang to us of chill dawns breaking upon bridges whose spans still freely splinter light returning hungover from night wharves' grottoes and denim grasps, World Wars' industrial embraces crushing every man, and now another one abandons his fingers and fiddling, o scattering light, takes flight from ledges to edge close to an embrace no longer forbidden—

And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love... - Hart Crane

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Sleepy Bee, He Is Rising Beneath Me, The Hidden God Is Pleased

Sleepy Bee, He Is Rising Beneath Me, The Hidden God Is Pleased

for Karthik

Somniculosus Apis, Sleepy Bee
Ascendit infra me, He rises beneath me
Deus absconditus placet, The hidden God is pleased

'...descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God.' - Hart Crane

The boys, seven falling: Jamey Rodemayer, Tyler Clementi,
Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg

Oh Valdosta,

He is busy preparing a repast for many paying guests who will watch him cook sacred chilies of his Mother's garden born, who will hear him sing their praises...Krishna was over yesterday more radiant than when we first met beside the cardamom and the ghee in the intoxicating basement of the Indian spice and food shop not easily hidden below the sidewalk, such aromas cannot to be tucked away like the shop is beside and below the avenue.

Which flower should I adorn my table with? I ask, approaching shyly beside the spice bins. I buzz inside, a bee for the nectar.

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poem by Warren Falcon
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