Saturday, January 23, 2016

PAUL CORMAN-ROBERTS


POEM FOR DIEGO


“Old man, take a look at my life
I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through”

-       Neil Young


Most of the Earth
that has lived
has done so
in oceans
or tree tops

there has been more
than one fall from Grace.

All of this stopped being Eden
when we received the invitation.

Is there any beauty more terrible
and awesome to behold
than Democracy…

and I mean REAL Democracy
                     TRUE Democracy
real and true
majority rule?

Nothing upends the status quo faster
and that’s why the one percent
of the one percent
can never allow it.

Oh and the anger over all this,
Oh yes how the schools lied to us
and yes perhaps civilization
is an oversized delusion
to keep us docile
to keep us alive and soft and

so what?

You will still need to get over it.
You will still need to fall in love.
You will still need to be held.
You will still be a mammal,
baby.



WARM NOVEMBER RAIN


You know the drought is bad
by everyone’s fetishization of rain
from whiny rock stars
to the silent praying on the corner
for the mistress who abandoned
our bivouac Eden

Let all hypocrisy
from all quarters
convene in the hologram
of a tropical harbor
replete with an “out of this world”
feasting for the indigenous.

The sea will always claim us
if we flirt with him too much
because he cannot claim back
the moon his distant lover
lost so long ago
the surf his raging grief
the rhythmic lap lap lapping
a mournful sigh.

The world he created
was designed to lure her back
his lover now a satellite
but there is no harder mistress
than gravity.

The ocean is now the open wound
where the lovers were forced to part
as much by her own hand
as that of her other lover

stellar bodies passing in the light
everything after a vast
gorgeous limbo of broken mind soup.

This is the dream still prompting
you and I after all:
this is where it came from

and sure the dream is worthy and sturdy
but it takes hard work
to experiment it visceral.

Young people on psycho-actives
have their libidos exposed
jealousies unmasked
naked agendas spelled out
in sand drifts
around the ghost show bonfire.

We need a natural disaster
to make us relax a little
grow more comfortable
find emotional maturity
in each other’s orbit

but I promise you
someone in this circle
is a whispering traitor
and the length of the coastline
was doomed long before we got here
and will remain so long after we are gone.


                   ---Paul Corman-Roberts



Paul Corman-Roberts is an original core-founder of Oakland's Beast Crawl Literary Festival. His latest collection of poems is We Shoot Typewriters (Nomadic Press, 2015.)  He spent the night of the Rodney King riots barricaded inside a Circle K convenience store.



1 comment: