seas and ripple sands…
a coral island with ponies,
two loony pirate boys
deep in their sleepy tent.
warm is the nightingale,
tee shirts and bed roll;
lizards in heaven,
whisper crescendos.
sweet rips the hurricane,
softly, the tide pulls.
fly to the weathercocks,
twirling like tadpoles;
see that sweet shadow…
boys in the wind rows,
danny and michael.
feathers in a floating sky,
point to the stars below;
drawn to infinity,
they’ll go where the wind goes.
poetryandpoet 
still working on this one.
image by will mcbride, 1970’s.
1959, me and danny in a tent in his back yard. i was 13 and too young to understand what 14 year old danny wanted to do. it didn’t matter, of course, because he was my best friend. so, we didn’t do nuth’n. so, this is to re-event that time and let myself not be afraid.
i wanted to write a roundy poem that used vocabulary to break out of habitual language. typically, we use innovative combinations to show imagination. “the marshmallow hills of south dakota in winter” is still ordinary lit english. but, ‘the marshmallow ponds of south troy’ is disconcerting. it’s stupid to want to make people ‘think’, but it’s what intellectuals and poets and artists do. we think that by presenting the new by clothing the concept in ‘new’ automatically does something, makes something happen in the reader’s mind. like the appearance of translucent apple in a story is going to cause ‘translucency’ to awaken in the mind.
so, i roundy poem is easy. it’s a song thing, where the words are very happy with each others sounds and shapes. maybe it’s nothing but just to give something nice to the world. so, i go back in the time machine, recreate the time moment and see the characters as clearly as i can, so i can see what they actually did and said beyond the little out-take i remember — the most significant thing in the event — as the event. my memory of what happened at any time is not going to be the whole story.
and, besides, maybe i was supposed to be in one place at some one time to cause something unrelated to my event to happen. in the stupidity, maybe it was just a fly i pushed aside which in turn caused the vietnam war. somehow. that’s a short story.